I [heart] Beck

Finding a personal duplicity in musical tastes. On one side the quest for the headwaters of my distinct cultural conditioning are leading to areas of country, folk, bluegrass, blues, 60’s rock and 70’s country rock. No lack of excellent music there. On the other side, some strange need to immerse myself in nothing but machine-based, beat driven, science fiction orientated, mellow-jazzy-trippy-lounge-turntablism, has got me collecting some pretty obscure but wonderful discs. The only (perhaps not only, only unfound) balancing genre seems to pivot somewhere around the artist Beck.

Further introspection reveals a similar dichotomy in the visual realm. One side steeped in the traditionalism of typography, serifs and copperplate script fashioned with the utmost integrity, illustrative elements inked with brush and pen. Fueled by an immense passion-driven knowledge of Art Nouveou, the Arts & Crafts Movement, -history, theory and practice. It is a rich and sublimely interesting field of study. Then Jekyll’s Hyde: a digital, cyborg vision where nothing exists only in pixel, vector and code. It is sterile, clean, organized and controllable. I like it.

Organic vs. artificial? Soul/spirit warring against logic? Left vs. right brain? Maybe it aint no thing and I should just let it flow, be like Beck.