I love the 1979 film Rockers, which I first saw -- and watched on repeat loop -- in a wooden house in Hokkaido three years ago, buried under several feet of snow. It was the perfect antidote to the Japanese winter, and yet, at the same time, the perfect complement to it: in a weird style-swap, many of the sartorial modes you see in this movie are preserved in Japan much better than they are in today's Jamaica. Watching the movie, I kept seeing "Japanese" faces (look, there's Eye Yamataka!), and imagining the record shacks where Horsemouth flogs his dub plates were in Shimokitazawa or Koenji.



Under the cut I've put a big strip of freeze-frame pictures from Rockers, which shows more cool dandies -- Adidas-clad ectomorph gousters, many of them reggae musicians in real life -- than any other film I know. But you really have to see the film to get the full effect, because you need the music, and you need to watch the way these guys (and they are mostly guys) walk. Like wounded tom cats or swaggery, staggery lions of Judah with ludicrous, loose-limbed ganja gait. Oh, to walk -- and dress -- like that!

( Gallery )

I had a meeting last week at Sternberg, who'll publish my Book of Scotlands in 2009 (just in time to inject a little insanity into the lead-up to Scotland's likely 2010 independence referendum). Present were series editor Ingo Niermann, graphic designer Zak Kyes, and Caroline Schneider, the publisher. Zak was showing them designs for jackets and posters for the Solutions series.



What immediately struck me was the wrongness of Zak's designs. They were brutally stark, geometric, angular, functional, utilitarian. Looking at a dark poster of the floating eye pyramid from a dollar bill with an inverted triangle superimposed over it, I asked Ingo playfully "If this were a poster for a band playing tonight in Kreuzberg, what would the music sound like?" Ingo hesitated then said "I suppose it would be a Goth band of some sort. Or some kind of weird early 80s death metal."

Now, this is going to get us into all sorts of self-contradictory circles, but when I say Zak's designs looked wrong, I mean they really looked right. I'm not sure if his work is part of The New Ugly we've talked about here in the context of Mike Meiré, but I do think it's got the same kind of energy -- and I stress that word energy, because it's a dynamic quality, a sort of beauty-on-the-move rather than beauty-in-stasis.



Above all, Zak's work isn't coffeetable. The rough design I made when I pitched the book was a "coffeetable" design. It used a funky fat typeface, simple shapes and pretty colours to communicate the idea. Most good design is coffeetable design -- the other day, for instance, we looked at sleeves for records by The Chap (shown above), designed by Non Format. Immediately easy on the eye (another term for coffeetable might be "Easy Looking", a kind of visual version of Lounge), these sleeves, like my Scotlands jacket, aren't bad design -- they might even be good design -- but they don't go the extra length. They don't distinguish themselves. By failing to take a step ahead, they fall, inevitably, a step behind. By failing to risk wrongness they become, themselves, wrong.

This is where we have to talk about Distinction Strategies. A really good designer doesn't just want to work within established paradigms of accepted good taste. He wants to change those paradigms, making something truly distinctive-looking as well as distinguishing himself professionally. Now, you can't do this without plunging people, at least momentarily, into crisis and confusion. You can't do it without making work that looks, in some way, wrong. So my sense last week that Zak's work looked "wrong" was a sign, paradoxically, that he was doing something right. My rough sleeve instantly looked fey, dated, smooth.



Looking at the shelves at Sternberg, it was possible to see a corner being turned as Zak's work for them started to appear. Stuff which looked good in a coffeetable way suddenly started to be supplemented by stuff that looked noticeably different, odd, intriguing, wrong. I could see a battle of legitimation happening there on the shelves. The new look -- rather brutal and ugly, but full of the energy and strangeness of the new -- was starting to assert its wrongness as a new form of rightness. It was doing this by breaking the rules (which of course, in another paradox, is a rule in itself) and embracing the forbidden.

Distinction strategies cannot work successfully (in other words, can't do anything more than make you look like an amateur, a madman or an eccentric) unless they go hand in hand with legitimation, and Zak has that in spades, which is another reason he's so interesting. He's visual director at London's Architectural Association, one of Britain's few institutions wholly committed to the idea of the avant garde ("avant garde institution" is, of course, yet another paradox). He's also curator of the touring critical design show Forms of Inquiry, an important and influential exhibition dedicated to shifting the graphic design paradigm.



Without critical design, without this restless process of legitimation-distinction (and I'm invoking Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu when I use those words), we'd be stuck in a wilting coffeetable world. It wouldn't really be such a bad world -- we'd have pretty colours and catchy shapes that we'd recognise instantly, the way we recognise the chords and arrangements in an Oasis song, the way it sounds familiar even on the first listen. But, like the creative world of Oasis, it would be a limited and lazy world.

I'm making a new album just now, and I'm making sure it sounds "wrong". In other words, that it has the energy of strangeness rather than the comfort of familiarity. I don't know if it's "progress" to keep ripping up rules and habits, but it's change, and that's good enough for me. Sure, we sometimes come full circle and re-invent Goth. Sure, we're brushing up against the 19th century Romantic idea of the artist as madman and the 20th century Modernist idea of the artist as scientist-innovator. And here we are in the 21st century, with the idea of the graphic designer as distinction-legitimation machine, forever teetering on the brink of the forbidden and the forgotten, forever struggling to recuperate, redeem and recontextualize. It's what makes the game, for me, worth playing.

I ain't blogging today because I'm recording very intensely for the "Joemus" album and writing my next New York Times piece.

Joe Howe is a fucking genius, man, he sits in Glasgow sending me, pretty much every day, completely amazing stuff that sounds like Guernica jamming with unicorns and colour television masts up on the moors. I then sing songs on top of it. I'm also working on my own stuff, and today made a song I really love.

The song's called Widow Twanky (seen here in a rather natty early 20th century version) and I sing it super-electro-falsetto. It's a 50s-style ballad about a man ditched by his girlfriend, who internalizes her in order not to lose her, and becomes a female impersonator. Anyway, back to work...

I first met artist Mika Tajima (Japanese roots, LA-born, New York resident) during the 2006 Whitney Biennial, when her band (with Howie Chen) New Humans put on the most visually-striking performance I think I've ever seen -- sheets of pure white noise lit from below by pure white strips of fluorescent light. Mika is in the current Whitney Biennial too, with relics of a 2007 performance called Disassociate which ended with Eames chairs being thrown into a wall of champagne glasses.



Last week Mika opened her new painting show at COMA in Berlin, and it's full of the same visual intelligence as her performances with collaborators like C. Spencer Yeh and Vito Acconci. Like Disassociate, her Berlin show sees the gallery space partitioned by a row of sound-baffles -- double-sided paintings on wheels. Mika has painted angular Modernist modular forms onto the baffles (which look like swing mirrors too -- in fact, some of them are mirrored on one side), their purples and oranges derived from the late-60s decor of a San Francisco subway station.



The baffle-forms partition the COMA gallery -- not far, itself, from the site of that infamous partition, the Berlin Wall -- but make other references too. A very interesting mesh of references, in fact.

1. Mika told me she was referencing the Iraq partition currently being built in Sadr City in Baghdad. This isn't just to protect the Green Zone from rocket attacks, but to control the upcoming vote and try to diffuse support for Moktada al-Sadr, who looks likely to triumph in the upcoming Iraqi elections.



The Sadr City Wall is a concrete barrier which rises to about 12 feet. It's being built along the main street dividing the southern part of Sadr City from the northern part, where al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters are concentrated. Taking a cue from the Berlin Wall, perhaps, Moktada al-Sadr has called for his followers "to draw magnificent tableaux that depict the ugliness and terrorist nature of the occupier, and the sedition, car bombings, blood and the like he has brought upon Iraqis" on the partition.



It hardly needs to be added that the Iraq wall resembles the Israeli security barrier rising on the West Bank, and that there's a real double standard in the way the Berlin Wall is depicted as an oppressive relic, but the walls we're currently building to cage Palestinians and Iraqis aren't.

2. Mika is also referencing the studio sound baffles in Jean-Luc Godard's film about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968).



This is a more positive, creative take on partitioning. In a recording studio, baffles allow the clean recording of sounds, free of reverberation and separated from ambient sounds.



Studio baffles symbolize creative collaboration, but also give each musician a semi-private space to work in, so there's a balance between teamwork and autonomy. And these screens are structures on wheels, designed to change the open layout of a studio's big live room quickly and easily. Partition can make things possible, as well as make things intolerable. Which brings us to the final reference Mika is making.

3. Mika could have referenced Japanese screens (also about quick, light room transformations) or hospital screens (about giving privacy to moments of agony or embarrassment in open hospital wards) in this work, but instead she's decorated the screens with photocopies of utopian articles about the Herman Miller Action Office, pioneered by systems designer Robert Probst in the 1960s.

In a project started in 1964 and brought -- with massive success -- to market in 1968, Probst devised the world's first open-plan office system of reconfigurable components. "Today's office is a wasteland," he said. "It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort."



"The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves," reported Fortune. "Partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion."



But, as Time reported, rationalization and economic greed transformed the Action Office utopia, over the years, into a dystopia. "Today 70% of U.S. office workers sit in cubicles... A typical workstation in the 1970s measured 12 ft. by 12 ft., according to the American Society of Interior Designers. By 1995 it had shrunk to 10 ft. by 10 ft. Today's cubicles average 6 ft. by 8 ft."

Some people feel the Action Office is, by now, more devil than sympathy.

Spatial definition doesn't have to be malign, though. When I got home from Mika Tajima's opening I noticed that she's defined my own space: her imagery (you can see it on the left side of this photo) has been a part of my living room ever since I moved into my Neukolln apartment.

There's this arty London band called The Chap, see. Four of them, a German called Johannes Van Weizsacker, a Greek called Panos who plays keyboards, a girl called Claire and a bloke called Keith. They live in Manor House and they're actually very good, in a Wire and XTC and Talking Heads and Krautrock way. There might even be a touch of Renaldo and the Loaf in their sound. And if you read New York magazine, "the music has identity problems in the best way, sounding like Momus mixed with Morricone".



That comparison might just be related to the title of the lead track from their new album Mega Breakfast. It's called "Carlos Walter Wendy Stanley". It's just some first names, don't get excited. I'm not going to talk about the associations you personally bring to the title. I can't. But you can hear the song on the Pitchfork site, anyway.



It's amazing to me that I hadn't heard of this band until now. And it's amazing to me that they sound so English despite being so European. And I like the poised, proggy, measured, middle class way they sing. And the pointilliste, subtle way they arrange their pieces. There's a lightness of touch there.



They've been around for about five years; here's an older track, I Got Flattened by a Pig Farmer. Which is a funny title. This is them performing a song called Woop Woop live. This is where I really started to get interested:



Here's The Chap's discography, and it's important to note that their sleeves are well designed. Here's a rather extraordinary epic called BITSS!!!:



I like to listen to good music when I'm recording, music that gives me a sense of new formal possibilities, and The Chap make that kind of stuff. Since you asked, I'm right in the middle of recording the Joemus album, there's about six tracks so far, and the latest is called The Jah Wise Hammer of the Babylon King. Anyway, I'll leave you with The Chap's tidily, daintily deranged song Auto Where To:

I was haunted on my trip to Denmark. Not by the ghost of a murdered king on the ramparts of Elsinore, but by some of the most mournful air conditioning systems I've ever heard. The bathroom in my room at the Cabin Hotel in Aarhus was filled with spine-tinglingly creepy sighing, as if a spirit were trapped under the shower drain. Later, the same spook seemed to follow me on the train to Fredericia.



Danish TV is already creepy enough, filled with the subtitled ghosts of old 80s American TV shows. I sought something more specifically Danish at the reconstructed village called Den Gamle By (The Old Town) and in the Aarhus art gallery, where I found the windswept 1930s canvases of Jens Sondergaard and Nils Lergaard satisfying, in a harrowing, windswept way. But the spookiest, most fascinating thing was the song that accompanied a 1970 Super 8 film of a horse being sacrificed out on the pack ice. I got obsessed with the mourning song about the horse, returning time and again to try and record bits of its strange open chords, its mournful shamanic singing, part Nico, part Bjork. And of course the wind, keening in the background.

Fluxus seems to have had tentacles everywhere -- the Danish wing was represented by people like Bjorn Norgaard, Lene Adler Petersen -- who made the horse film -- and the composer Henning Christiansen (right) who made the song that accompanies it. They came to Scotland with Joseph Beuys in the early 70s, invited by Richard Demarco, and you can hear the results (someone -- possibly Beuys himself -- tuning a piano in the courtyard of the Edinburgh Art College, for instance) on the Henning Christiansen page at Ubu.com. There's nothing quite like the Horse Song there, though perhaps Abschiedssymphonie comes closest; field recordings and vocal gestures mixed with piano composition and primitive scratching noises.



The Fluxus Danes killed a horse out on the ice partly as a protest against the pointless human sacrifice then going on in Vietnam, partly to "comment on the way in which museums accumulated our common heritage". You can actually see clips of the Super 8 film "Hesteofringen" -- warning: it's rather disturbing -- here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I've made an mp3 of the song so that it can haunt you as it now haunts me:

The Horse Sacrifice, Henning Christiansen (stereo mp3 file)



I'd never heard of Henning Christiansen before, but you can read about him on this page -- how he attended the Darmstadt summer school in 1962, then hooked up with George Maciunas' crew in Wiesbaden and joined Fluxus, "embracing a multitude of disciplines verging on the political, including performance, painting and making music with stones, buckets of water, glass bowls, sheep, birds and tape delay". And here's a glimpse of a 2007 show he mounted. He's an old troll now with green ears, but still making music more haunting than the Danish air conditioning.

As for the horse, its spirit lives on; we don't need to look far to find new pointless wars for the poor beast to symbolize.

I'm in Denmark playing a concert today and tomorrow, so here's a picture of a groovy Tobias Putrih shelf installation I saw at MUDAM last week and made the lead item in my latest New York Times dispatch, which will be up later today.



More recent snaps here, including this image of the graphic designer Zak Kyes, who's designing my Book of Scotlands jacket.

I'm always a bit last minute with these announcements, but today I want to tell you that I'm scheduled to folk the fuck out of Denmark tomorrow night in the form of an appearance at Pop Revo 08, a music festival in Århus.

Or should I say "rock the land of Hamlet in the manner of Led Zep"? Nikolaj Thorenfeldt, one of the festival organisers, raved on his blog:

"Of course Efterklang, El Perro Del Mar and Xiu Xiu are fantastic bands who enjoy great recognition in almost every part of the world. Still, in terms of the Pop Revo spirit, this year's absolute headliner is without a doubt a Scottish man named Momus. You still have 2 weeks to get into his music, there's more than 20 records to choose from. I'm not gonna tell an awful long story about the man's genius, you'll experience that yourself very soon. To cut the story short, even if we get Led Zeppelin next year, you'll still see those overlooked musicians who we believe have played an equal part in the music history."

Gosh, on a par with Plant! I have no complaint, except that it looks like I'll miss Xiu Xiu, a band I find very interesting, because I'm leaving early on Saturday. Maybe I can change my train.

Pop Revo 08: a two-day music festival in Aarhus, Denmark.

Friday night line-up:
Speaker Bite Me
Momus
El Perro del Mar
Frightened Rabbit
Cola Freaks

Saturday night line-up:
The Brunettes
Efterklang
18th Dye
Xiu Xiu
Larsen & Furious Jane

Tickets are 150 Danish crowns for one day, 250 for two. Doors open 8pm, with the first band going on around 8.30. Location is Pakhuset, Studenterhuset, Nordhavnsgade 1, 8000 Århus, Denmark (map). More details here.