BANDS
The musical palette of the masked groups platform includes in its database the standards of pop, rock and rap music, right through to the oddities seen or heard in the noisy, experimental scenes. A single common denominator: these artists' attraction to mystery, and more specifically to the mask as an object. In these scenes, the mask is treated as an accessory of occultation, an element that covers the artist's face or even body in order to erase the artist's physical characteristics, or more precisely to defer the artist of all or part of his or her emotional bearings. To the accumulations of images proposed in this database, the mask in today's music presents several functions:
● concealment, voluntarily hiding the artist's identity (the mask/nose mask or balaclava found predominantly among rappers),
● protection, it's the artist's duty to protect his or her identity.● protection, it helps certain musicians, particularly soloists to overcome stage fright, the stress of performing, becoming the being who inhabits the mask without impacting the performer's image,
● the homogenization of a collective, erasing the physical singularities of band members to form just one uniform musical block (This Is Serious Mum, Asian Woman On The Telephone, Ghost, The Locust, Bonnacons Of Doom, WE...)
● cross-dressing, the mask makes it possible to embody a character (Attic Ted, Frank Sidebottom, Blowfly...), tell a story (Faxed Head, Extra Tourist, Guess What...)
to inscribe the group in another situated space-time, or a multi-cultural one (Ak'Chamel, Fulu Miziki, Heilung, Portal...), or even sometimes a totally surreal one (Melted Men, Asian Woman On The Telephone, Otay:onii, Oboretaebi!, Caroliner...)
The mask can check off any or all of these functions. In all these configurations, it is above all a continuity of the referenced artists' musicality. In the same way that lyrics can give meaning or conceptual direction to a piece, the mask can become a language, an aesthetic marker that defines a musical context, a writing structure. By erasing the face, the main channel of human expression, it can help the artist's body to become musical.
Aside from the likely or opportunely dissident positioning evoked by the simple balaclava, other forms of camouflage borrow from history numerous frameworks for the use of the mask to set the narrative framework for a performance or album unfolding. Whether liturgical auxiliary or apotropaic instrument, the mask as canvas can inherit its use in funeral rites, religious ceremonies, sacraments, shamanic rituals, pagan cults, carnivals... any tradition is good to exploit to lay the groundwork for a concept, even if it means provoking amalgams. The Heilung collective, for example, in their music as in their costumes, borrows as much from Scandinavian folklore as from Eurasian spiritual traditions to transform their atmospheric folk concert into an imaginary ceremonial.
.These processes of stage effects via metamorphosis can be grandiloquent, but also more authentic, most notably in the rock, noise or experimental scene (Computer Jesus Refregirator, Asian Woman On The Telephone, Melted Men, Faxed Head, Mimi Kawouin, Paddy Steer, Infecticide, Extra Tourist, Why the Eye? ) This fringe scene, like the outsider artists and surrealists of the early 20th century, doesn't hesitate to combine the various plastic forms of traditional masks with figures from contemporary popular culture, using, what's more, DIY methods (recycling, hacking)
.In all these cases, we can note an important return to the spiritual, or rather to the use of recreational esotericism as a scenic catalyst. Discovering the cartography offered by this platform, it's astonishing to see that the main groups referenced, mostly extreme music bands from the West, tend rather to hide behind an object with mysterious, tormented forms, unlike the rest of the world, which tends rather to reveal itself, and whose music of the same nature is just as important and dynamic.
The non-exhaustive database is built up over time, with images and texts borrowed from artists' promotional pages gleaned from the web, audio streaming sites and forums.
Enjoy your reading. Keyvane, faceboobs.org (this website is nice because I use the Safiro font)
