I am sad

The video I am sad is part of a series of works on "digital translations of reality" (D. Bruckmayr). Fuckhead - one of the band projects of cultural workers Bruckmayr/Strohmann - is one of these translation projects. The masculinity-charged raging of brachial heavy metal music runs - analogue to the technical processes of sound mixing - through the filter of another cultural form of expression: the opera and its melodramatic employment of voices, as well as the distant, cool, electronic creation of sound. The result is a bastard, a science-fiction being whose existence grows increasingly precarious.

Fuckhead possibly tells - in image and sound and data - of human sensibilities at the edge, of that which the author J.G. Ballard calls "psychopathologies of the future" (in his epochal novel Crash). The expression quite aptly represents this video. Its "clinical picture"
is that of the love sick, intense sorrow at the loss of love: "I am sad, because you do not understand me / melancholy steals my sleep at night." Siemar Aigner´s pathetic bass drowns out the scratchy surface of electronic accompaniment. The antagonism between the Spartan electronics, which tend to refuse to lead the melody, and the presence of a human voice is mirrored in the visual translation of the number: the image of a human face (created in a computer by means of 3-D software) is horizontally deformed to the rhythm of the verse, disheveled along the lines of the acoustic information from the computer. When the song stops, black takes over the picture and narrows the narrative space down to music. The absence of the human element is heavier (textually, as well as visually) than its presence.

(Michael Loebenstein)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt