“Brian composed musical effects like the first viewing of a sunset to a once
blind person.”
Nik Venet
“During the recording of Pet Sounds I dreamt I had a halo over my head.”
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson wrote, arranged and produced most of the Beach Boys’ music from 1962-7, while the lyrics were usually written by others: Beach Boy and first cousin Mike Love, or else Roger Christian, Gary Usher, Tony Asher (Pet Sounds) and Van Dyke Parks (SMiLE). A question arises: do the lyrics equate to Brian’s own understanding of the songs? What else might the music be about?
In 1964, following a nervous breakdown on a plane while touring, Brian decided he would no longer tour with the band. Instead he would devote his energies to writing and producing the new music, not only for the Beach Boys but also for a host of other singers and groups. By the mid 1960s he had abandoned the formula that had made the Beach Boys an international sensation, exchanging simple rock arrangements for unprecedented syntheses of classical, jazz, folk, pop, exotica and avantgarde idioms. Besides a wealth of conventional instruments, he was incorporating diverse found sounds: water flowing, his dogs barking, materials burning, and so on (his eponymous “pet sounds” perhaps) - techniques that recall the Cubist and Dada legacies of collage and the readymade. The recording studio was where Wilson felt most comfortable and empowered; it held the same sense of possibility that the studio holds for many visual artists.
The more or less abstract work in this room may suggest the kaleidoscopic, almost synæsthetic qualities of the music. It functions as the exhibition’s instrumental. When asked in an interview in the mid-1960s if he was psychedelic, Wilson replied he was ‘psychedelicate’. Ironically, for an undisputed pop genius with perfect pitch, Wilson has been 90% deaf in one ear since an infant.
Notes:
‘Synæsthesia’ is a benign condition whereby one sense is confused with another: hearing with sight, for instance. Music has often been invoked in support of abstract art. Kandinsky, who titled many of his paintings Composition and Improvisation, is believed to have been synæsthetic. Bridget Riley has often written on the relationship between music and abstraction as it applies to her work and the work of others.
Sister Corita Kent was a pop artist, a political activist, an innovative educator and a Catholic nun who belonged to the Immaculate Heart Community in Los Angeles in the 1950s-60s. Her typographic style and education methods were admired by design luminaries Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. Her prints blend fragments from advertising slogans with religious and avant-garde poetry and pop song lyrics from the time.
Jennifer West’s ‘cameraless’ films are made by marinating film stock in a range of suggestive substances.
Jeremy Glogan’s Smile Shop Door and Smile Shop Smiles borrow elements from Frank Holmes’ original album art for Brian Wilson’s unfinished masterpiece SMiLE (1966-67). The cover depicts a shop selling smiles. The album was so near completion that Capitol Records printed 500,000 covers.