Earworms

source: wedgeradiowordpress

It’s a pop CD! Pop songs of all stripes, ricocheting from one style to another as Lisa Mezzacappa and songwriting/vocalist partners Katy Stephan and Michelle Amador present music inspired by individual words.
Beyond the CD, Earworms is an interesting and often fun art-installation project by Deborah Aschheim. She’s created sculptures, like the one above, using favorite words as inspiration — “node” for the piece pictured above, for instance.
The pieces are multimedia in nature, with video or music as part of the installment, and of course that’s where the CD comes in. Earworms‘ 18 songs relate to 16 different words in Aschheim’s ongoing project, and Mezzacappa & Co. clearly had a great time matching moods to the titles.
“Swoon” appropriately gets played to moonlit Parisian cafe jazz. “Pout” becomes a smoky jazz stroll. “Node” is stretched and abstract; “Crazy” piles spoken voices together to get into your head. “Like” is hysterical — ’60s beach music with, like, this girl’s voice and all?
Other songs treat the words as objects of their own. “Tarmac” gets picked because it was Aschheim’s first-ever computer password; it opens the album as a breezy pop song (a really good one) exploring the concept of literal social networks (the links among people we know). “Obviously” is a funny operatic song about how insulting the word “obviously” can be.
“Palimpsest,” one of my own favorite words, comes out surprisingly pretty and thoughtful. The inclusion of “Ice Knife” is perplexing until you read the book excerpt that makes up the lyrics — it’s about literal ice knives as assassins’ weapons, and it’s kind of cool.
Don’t forget, too, that Mezzacappa traces her musical roots back to metal; she didn’t leave that out. Little surprises like that add to what’s already a delightful package of songs. You’ll find it on CD Baby or at some of Mezzacappa’s shows.
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source: urbanartcommissionorg

Deborah Aschheim makes installations based on invisible networks of memory and perception. For the past five years, she has been trying to understand and visualize memory, a subject that has led her to collaborate with musicians and neuroscientists. Her most recent work considers the interrelationship of memory and place. Aschheim has had solo and group exhibitions at across the United States, including Suyama Space in Seattle, WA; San Diego State University Art Gallery; the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA; the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MO; the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, PA; Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA; Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA. She has completed permanent commissions for Amazon.com, the City of Sacramento and the LAPD. She was a 2011-2012 California Community Foundation Fellow, and from 2009-11 she was the Hellman Visiting Artist at the Memory and Aging Center in the Neurology Department at the University of California, San Francisco medical school. She lives in Pasadena, CA.