JOE SENT ME | Windy City Times review

"Electronica, smooth jazz, drum-and-bass. Poet, chanteuse, painter. Vanessa Daou is one artist who thrives on not being pigeonholed. The New Yorker returns with the self-produced Joe Sent Me, her first album since 2001's Make You Love. The absinthe-inspired trance of Daou's vocals is married to the rhythmic typewriter on "Hurricanes," where she steps forth as the sultriest person at a beat café. "Black & White" has a constant nightclub piano tinkering in the background that suits her breathless singing in a higher pitch. On the title track, Daou seizes listeners with her chiming "strange days" over the interlacing of jazz and electronica. Continuing to morph her artistic approach with minimalism and spoken word, Joe Sent Me is a comeback for Daou that ought to be celebrated. Daou's sixth solo album is currently available on www.daourecords.com before its wide release" David Byrne @ Windy City Times

'Joe Sent M.D.E.'

In May '09, The Mercer Dance Ensemble (M.D.E.) will present Joe Sent M.D.E., a series of dance cycles set to the music of JOE SENT ME, which will premier at Kelsey Theatre on the Mercer County Community College campus in Trenton, New Jersey. Dance Program faculty Janell Byrne will choreograph and direct, with guest choreography by Elixir Productions co-founder Jody P. Person and others. [ Kelsey Theatre ]

Read more about JOE SENT ME

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem: Reflections on the Purpose of Poetry

Reflecting on Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem provided by The New York Times via CQ Transcriptions:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

---

What strikes me the most about this poem are its many references to music and song - its use of repetition to accomplish a rhythm which is inherently musical:

All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din.

The various words that evoke sound:

speak, speaking, noise, din, tongues, drum, cello, boom box, harmonica, voice

The importance of words to conjure and command:

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

As the poem moves along, repetition of the word 'We' that unites us in our experience of the world:

We encounter each other in words ... We cross dirt roads and highways ... We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk....

Alexander asks us to do more than use our words, but to lift our words as occurs with praise and song:

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here...

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign...

As the poem winds down, Alexander brings us to the place where Poetry makes its purpose known. Poetry resides on the edges of experience, in those perilous places where there is a crystal clarity:

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Praise song, poem, a kind of atonement, declaration, proclamation, invitation. Poetry is movement, history, hope, enlightenment, a glimpse, perhaps, of eternity...

"BSOTS 077 - certified no doze..."

"...there are a number of cuts here that scored high on the rewind factor for me, namely joints by longshot, declaime, moka only, chandliers, and the primeridian. also keep tabs on outasight - that kid is going places. expect big things from him in the oh-nine. never pass up a chance to play vanessa daou - i've been in love with her voice since 1993. we're gettin' down with some jazz this time around, too. and don't front on the latin boogaloo classic from alfredo linares - HOT, HOT, HOT." bsots

'Lovechild' {itunes | rhapsody} from Make You Love

Anji Bee's Chillcast #142: Make Out Music

Hear 'Heart of Wax' from upcoming JOE SENT ME on luscious voiced Anji Bee's 'Make Out Music' Chillcast #142






If you don't already know, check out her ever transcendent work with Lovespirals

Link to Anji Bee chillcasts tagged Vanessa Daou

Link to Anji Bee

The Personal is Musical

Reading Typing in Stereo's header tagline "Life is music is personal is political", I am reminded of the the phrase "the personal is political", the mantra that became synonymous with Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1970's. In this new era, where our protests are logged in the form of Blips & Tweats, it can be said that "the personal is virtual." And while our personal lives intersect with the virtual, one Google search of the Battle of Fallujah, and we can see that so much of the world is still perilously out of reach of our words, becoming distant and diminished.

One of the casualties of the new virtual frontier has been the destruction of the Monolith that was once known as the "Recording Industry"; there stands in its place a crumpled and collapsed edifice. The demise of the Music Business has been a gradual process, like a slow buildup of lava in the dome of a volcano, where after the eruption, the landscape is one that is no longer recognized.

The way we listen to music has also changed, as has the language we use to describe it - songs are downloads, mp3s, wav files, mash-ups - and while there has been a general negation of the physical format of the 'record', there has been no eradication of the listeners' actual need for the physical reality of music, evidenced in the nationwide upsurge in vinyl sales. This fact is not just a reflection of music purchasing preferences, but a silent subversion of the Music Industry.

The quiet vinyl revolution taking place in indie stores nationwide reflects a need to re-affirm Reality and re-connect with History. Although the protests and political fires that inflamed our mothers' generation no longer burn in the same way they used to, the new radicalism can be found in oblique corners, wherever vinyl records are being sold.

But some revolutions are so silent that only advanced sound techniques over time are able to capture. In this new millennium where music, philosophy and art co-mingle in the flummoxes of commercialism, consumerism, marketing and paraphernalia, where "the personal is virtual", it can also be said that it can also be said that "the personal is musical." While our play lists become public along with our Tweats and Blips, the universal mirror that reflects our private lives is still, as it has been since the invention of the gramophone, the vinyl records that we unsheath, rub clean, hold up to the light, play with reverence, and take with us, everywhere.

Review: Vanessa Daou, “Joe Sent Me”

"Joe Sent Me" is the first Vanessa Daou album since 2001's "Make You Love"; it is also her first record not to be produced by Peter Daou. It sounds both familiar and very, very different to her previous work. The voice is different; less sweet, less processed, more raw and with a slightly rough edge. The sound is very different too, and that’s a good thing.

...

“Joe Sent Me” is dramatically different. There is jazz, and there is electronica, and there is Vanessa’s voice, but that’s about all that connects those records. “Hurricanes” reminds me of Air’s “Virgin Suicides”. “True” is Vanessa’s voice and acoustic guitar — SHOCKING!!1! “Black And White” sounds like some strange collaboration between Goldfrapp and a jazz band. “Life Force”, incredibly intrinsic sonically (this is very much a headphones record) and “Manifesto” wouldn’t fit on any previous Daou record — and I suspect that’s why it opens the album, a true manifesto of a new sound. “Love Lives In The Dark” sounds like Massive Attack (and oh my, the thought of Vanessa working with Massive Attack makes me ecstatic). This is very much a new record by an artist who hasn’t said her final word.

The sexiness and sensuality, always present in Vanessa’s records, take a new dimension here; she isn't the androgynous girl who sung “Sunday Afternoons" anymore — she is, very much, a very grown up woman. The girl is still present in the songs like "Heart Of Wax"; but it is a very different person who wrote "Joe Sent Me". "And don’t be thinking/you're the only one/who knows” she warns, and shivers go down my spine. "Here’s the pen you gave me/to write my poetry/I said I’d give it back to you the day you stop inspiring me/Here’s the glass, it’s empty" begins “Black And White” and, again, the thrill is almost physical. Those lyrics were worth waiting seven years for." Typing in Stereo

read also: "Love, Vanessa" at Typing in Stereo

Adventures in Daou

"Vanessa’s hotly-anticipated new album, Joe Sent Me, is about to hit the virtual shelves over at Daou Records, and the Mercer Dance Ensemble (M.D.E.) will be celebrating by presenting an evening of dances set to selected cuts and remixes.

The concert, Joe Sent M.D.E., will premier at Kelsey Theatre on the Mercer County Community College campus this May. Dance Program faculty Janell Byrne will choreograph and direct, with guest choreography by Elixir co-founder Jody P. Person and others." Elixer Productions

Bettie Page, leaving Radiance

Vanessa Daou, Bettie Page, 1996, acrylic & pencil on paper, 7 X 9 "

"After light enters the ocean, it interacts with the phytoplankton, dissolved organic matter, particles, and water molecules. Some of it is eventually scattered back up through the surface. This light is called the water-leaving radiance, and it can be detected from space." link

When I began writing my album 'Slow to Burn', based on the life of 11 female artists, I made a long list of the women artists who had in one way or another made a powerful impression on me. On my list was Bettie Page. Though not an Artist in the traditional sense of the word, with her body and through the projection of a complex inner essence and purpose, a combination of girlish innocence and churlish experience, she tapped into & expressed a mode of being which had until then been hidden. Some argue that she played into the gaze of a man's prurient desires and in so doing degraded her gender, but it could be argued just as convincingly that Bettie Page liberated even that gaze and made it OK for a man, or a woman, to desire a woman with her proclivities. I wrote 'Evening' with these thoughts in mind.

Bettie Page changed not only our perception of women, but our conception of them. Neither right nor wrong, like her infamous bikinis which she designed and sewed, they are her own, they are based on profound and deep penetration into the nature of women who preceded her and who would come after. Sometimes with an elegant pose, sometimes with a brutal one, sometimes with a tossed off smile, sometimes with one that is fully thought, Bettie Page is a an inspiration not only for tattoo artists, but for all artists who want to learn from example how to navigate a world that makes its rules which the heart, mind & muse cannot obey.

Bettie Page leaves us not only a legacy of her images, but also with an undying philosophy of sexuality that continues to leave its radiance around on the world. In this profound gesture there is beauty which is more than the picture perfect image that she presented, it was her ability to take an idea about humanity, an idea of her own design and making, about the nature of sexuality, photography & pornography, and in the end, to reshape history.

To be an artist is to make a mark: a brush stroke that says something about the hybridity of experience like Iona Rozeal Brown, poetry that renegotiates our relationship to the past like Czeslaw Milosz, prose that reshapes the way we Love like Erica Jong, even a fragment can fill our imaginations the way Sappho does. Finished or incomplete, visible or ineffable, virtual or tangible, we leave our impressions on the world.

..........................................................................................


Evening (from Vanessa Daou - 'Slow to Burn', MCA/Krasnow Entertainment, 1996)
inspired by the life of Bettie Page

Evening slips into my room
Echoes in the corridor
Street lamps turn a shade of blue
Lovers whisper in the dark

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

Evening knows my every move
Your fingers running through my hair
Crimson lips a crimson kiss
In the strange electric air...

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

Evening (I miss you most of all)
Evening (A silent raindrop falls)
Evening...evening...

You make me ache
By the way you bow your head
In the neon glow
Flashing open through the window
On the unmade bed
On the unmade bed...

Evening brings the hunter home
And the sailor from the sea
One by one each breath we take
Slips into eternity

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

Evening when I miss you most of all
My heaven in this world
A silent raindrop falls
To the earth...

© 1996

"Vanessa Sent Me"

"Ca fait presque dix ans maintenant que j'écoute Vanessa, j'ai même la fierté de voir mes mots à son sujet en bonne place sur sa page de news. Cet album est une petite merveille et je ne regrette vraiment pas de l'avoir attendu huit ans. Mieux même, il tombe à pic pour m'accompagner dans l'écriture d'Améthyste tellement il correspond à ce que je ressens en écrivant cette nouvelle histoire." ohmydahlia.com

Desire Lines

"In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as tramped down paths in the snow. I love that these paths are never perfectly straight. Instead, like a river, they meander this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn't linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward." Wordspy


"A desire path, or desire line, is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his book 'The Poetics of Space'." wikipedia



It's called 'social networking', but I like to think of it as 'social communicating', or 'social inter-connecting', a giant, growing, interlocking, orgiastic, infinite conversation.

To be a recording artist means being involved & entwined in this ever expanding exchange, in the lives of those who are drawn to our songs and voices, who play it on their stereos, listen in their headphones, who hear it, interpret it, ingest it, digest it. That is why I make music, sing songs, write poems; why I use words to get my 'message' across, as a means of communication.

A few years ago, I typed the word "desire" into google and saved this snippet from a long thread:

Google group (May 11, 2002)

K: The mind interprets relentlessly. Desire will never be quenched, desire being the very thing that keeps us alive.
M: Yes, and this is exactly the point. To be without desire is to die, and then there is no self.
K: And this desire is the movement of becoming, the grasping at "what should be" (the object of desire) which is entirely conceptual, arising from the present condition of "what is as it is."
M: Desire is always dissatisfied with the present, hence it will never find any satisfaction in any imaginary future.

This 'search for desire' runs through every thread of every online communication - it drives it, propels it, whether it's on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, or Blip. Wherever there's a conversation, there is something exchanged, something given and taken, and in the creases and the folds of this fabric, there is something shared, and in this sharing, there is meaning.

I thank everyone for their postings, comments, messages, kudos, pokes, 'hottie votes' ;) twitters, blips, and virtual gifts.

With Love,

Vanessa

Tom’s Essay by Suzanne Vega

"I was imagining it as a kind of French film soundtrack, something vaudevillian on piano, like a background to a Truffaut film. But I didn’t play piano and didn’t know anybody who did. So I kept it a cappella, and began to sing it this way in my live show. This detail, singing the song alone with no accompaniment, affected everything to come." Link

Pop Making Sense by David Byrne with Tony Peregrin

"Sultry New York siren Vanessa Daou has too many numbers that suit the atmosphere for a romantic night. Whether it is something with a smooth jazz vibe from Two to Tango; the works of Erica Jong set to a groove on her solo debut, Zipless; or the poetic temptation from her most recent outing Make You Love, this woman puts sexiness into everything she sings. Daou uses her cooing voice to buoy on the rhythm on numbers like Dear Anne Sexton and Cross That Bridge. A much-awaited new album is expected later this year per Daou's MySpace page." Link

Eastvillageradio Interview with Brion Vytlacil's Future Music

Anji Bee: Chillcast #127: Sensual Ladies

Anji Bee: Chillcast #127: Sensual Ladies

Artist's Statement

There are sounds, words, objects, subjects , gestures, and expressions that have a certain and intangible resonance. I find this quality in manifold things: in anything slow motion, a flickering bulb, in a Cracker Jack wrapper, the color chartreuse, in smoke rising. I suppose I am attracted to the notion of time, how it passes, how ideas are changed, interpreted, corrupted, when and which things go from from trash to artifact.

I'm interested in the aspects of desire which give urgency to the act of creation. I sometimes search for words in Google in order to find patterns and explore the poetics of similar and shared experiences. The word 'desire', for instance, yields phrases that reflect this unified experience: the Desire of Ages, the garden of Desire, crippled with desire, uncertain objects of desire, A Streetcar Named Desire, the new objects of our desire, the exploration of desire. I often compose poems with words from other languages known or unknown to me, or languages on the fringes of experience like Esperanto. I agree with Michael Gottleib here, "The old tools don't work anymore, at least for the time being."

Detachment from the physical aspects of reality is a consequence of technology, yet, remote and intangible uploads jar and jostle with the real lives of strangers. This juxtaposition, of public and private space, personal and universal, distant and up-close, resides at the heart of every web page. Despite its public accessibility, the internet provides the viewer with, at its core, true intimacy and immediacy of experience.

Before I write a song, it is often one word or thought that drives me: that thought might then become a drawing or a painting or a poem before it becomes a song. The mixing of media on the web says something to me about the clash or meeting between fields or layers of thought, creating alliances between things or making them acrimonious. My desire is to express something that engenders a feeling which is new, unfamiliar, untrodden, transcendent, sublime, unruly, private, passionate, fragile, exquisite.