A question for Karl Hyde..

[MikeyC]

i know hyde has answered questions occasionally from the forums so i just thought id take a stab at asking him something since it has been on my mind for a while.

its clear that you have an interest in photography. you shoot all the time and you have posted several links to photography/photographers on underworldlive. how much of a correlation do you see between your photographs and your writing? i am a photographer myself and every time i listen to underworld i can not help but think how photographic all of the text seems.

i know you have listed moriyama as an inspiration for you. he is without question THE photographer who i feel connected to the most. so many of underworlds lyrics seem to share some of the themes of his work, an outsider taking it all in and trying to somehow make sense and relate to it. this is especially true on some of the tracks from the riverrun project.


and just as a side note, cell phone shooter myself. so its fantastic to see others who do it with consistency.

[patrick]

MikeyC you better check underworldlive.com today as you have a 2 page response from karl. Not cryptic and has a full story and explanation of where he comes from.

I loved it... you can see the saner side of karl, which is nice to see sometimes! hahhaha

[ndrwrld]

and they say rock stars don't love their fans....
well done Rick.
Congrats Mikey.

ps - Underworld, please come to Toronto.

[crank]

Yes, Agreed with all the above. It's nice to read the coherent thoughts re: photography.

I didn't see a name as an inspiration there, but rather, an artistic framework to build in and upon.

Thanks Karl.
c. rank.
photographer

[TheBang]

Wow, a fantastic answer from Karl, and a fascinating insight. Has anyone ever seen Van Halen Van Halen Rock Guitar Band or M25?

[crazysugarboy]

Just gr8 to read Karl's thoughts on his photography. I'm also drawn towards early photography (I produce prints using original hand-coated receipes) and pin-hole - although I agree with Karl re the slow nature of the process (several minutes exposure rather than fractions of a second!)

[MikeyC]

mr. hyde,

i really appreciate the reply. its always feels good when a stranger takes a moment for you out on the street. so to have someone put the time aside to actually write something in reply to you is a few steps beyond.

i had been wanting to hear about that for a while and decided to ask when you posted (i believe back to back) links to "farewell photography" and then the book "setting sun: writings by japanese photographers." farewell photography was literally like a bomb going off the first time i saw that. it changed how i felt and viewed photography, and even just work in any medium in general. and setting sun has been a constant companion for over a year at least and it never fails to teach something new with each read. it was nice to see someone whos body of work i admire pulling inspiration from some of the same places that i am.

i particularly was interested in the bit you were mentioning with the flash on the camera and its relation with the drinking. the flash certainly shares the brutality that drinking, or any sort of addiction/abuse, can often possess. i will have to dig deeper into the tomato books (having only skyscraper and process.) id love to see the images that arose around that time. it sounds like it would hit close to home for me. mmm... skyscraper, the book, seems like it shares the same feeling that you were perhaps going for when you were working on those drunken alley shots. again, it has a ferocity which could be connected back with flash photographs. i found it interesting, and a bit amusing, that you seemed to jump from the one end of the spectrum with that work to using the pinholes.

never directly assosciated the cellphone with pinholes but i certainly see many similarities. both blatantly reference the medium itself, not letting you forget that the photograph you are looking at is in fact... a photograph. its something you do not see enough of these days with everything becoming cleaner and sharper and brighter and faster... "more true" "truer colors" "more vivid color" "sharper scans". im certainly not speaking down on these things, theyre just tools to be used, but to see the cell phones knocking out these over pixelated vga sized images with the most god aweful color was incredible i thought. and of course they are much more convienient. and quite frankly cause fewer altercations on the street. but then, those "being yelled ats" and "almost fights" are all just part of the fun arent they?

again thank you for the reply. thanks for posting a link for pinholes as well. feels good to get nerdy and "talk shop" (even if only over the web) with someone whos work, across several mediums, has been a huge inspiration for the past ten years of your life.

mike c


and an edit several hours later at 4.30 in the morning. the "wayposts" page you put up is fantastic.

[kowalski__]

strange. i spent too many hours at moriyama exhibition in amsterdam listening ansum, riverrun. it was last winter.

[joethelion]

weird... I can't seem to find karl's response...

but about the Van Halen deal - years ago (like - I want to say this was around '99... definitely no later than '01), when yannick ran what, I guess you could call the "UW Fan Page", RTSR (it had a full discography, gigography, etc) - which later basically just melded into what we have now

there was a streaming audio recording of Van Halen Van Halen Rock Guitar Band (it was a realplayer file). It was Karl doing a spoken word performance with some really cool ambient / sound design stuff (from what I remember, it included what was later called "the Girl" off that one dirtyradio show)

a portion of it also had this sort of narrative about Karl bumping into a photographer, who was trying to sell him a picture of a beautiful woman laying across a beautiful car... but with a dead rat (or maybe it was a bird?) rotting on the actual photograph, b/c it was 'too beautiful of an image'

there was also a bit about doing an interview with urb magazine, and something about a madman/criminal/something of the like being on the loose (this portion was also used on the tomato2 cd-rom)

unfortunately, a save-able copy was never given, and I never got around to just recording the streaming file

There - supposedly - is also a video recording of it

and it seems that I wasn't the only one who didn't record the streaming file... as I've never been able to score a copy of it again