What’s better: Music or Art? Rap or Rock? What’s faster: Jazz or Classical or Twista? Is less really more? Extreme Animals’ Musical Television dares to contemplate these questions and more. Part musical band, part video art collective, Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman) have been making frenetic, blazing work for over 20 years, creating culture-critiquing narratives out of original and found materials. Their latest release Musical Television includes two parts TOGETHER: a 10 minute diamond-cut DVD 960i/p (NTSC) and hi-def, bass-boosted Compact Disc clocking in at just under 12 minutes. The result is two sides of the same coin; a double sided sword which happens to manifest itself in this world as two plastic discs.
Musical Television is of course also a reference to the once immensely powerful broadcast network “MTV” that changed music forever by combining it with video, and in doing so also changed video forever by combining it with music. The network was no doubt a huge influence on the band, being our first exposure to experimental video and so many musics (T. Moore jamming with Beck and Mike D on 120 minutes anyone?). And like the odd phases and stages of Extreme Animals’ development, MTV has gone through its own equally weird and paradoxical growth: from it’s original music video format, to inventing reality television, to creating an entirely new network called “mtv2” just to show music videos again. What was music? What was television? The snake has eaten its own tail.
Time is running out. Songs are getting shorter and shorter by the minute.If a song is short enough, does it extend the longevity of your life expectancy? What is the purpose of a limited edition CD/DVD with foldout poster and custom stickers, that has been individually hand shrink-wrapped? God only knows, or as Miley Cyrus once said “Only God can judge us.” After 22 years as a band we’re grateful and alarmed to have watched every scene, style, genre, instrument, algorithm, format, context, platform, “life choice,” approach, venue, space, and technology thrive,, then die, then be reborn again, and then die again. What can we say… At the end of the day, it’s all about the music. As Anthony Kedis once rapped “Music, the great communicator.” -Publisher
