Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/24995
.... • .... · .... Q) -C C ftS C +- \i&iႀ +-' C ,,� a.. I Q) ••• I 1 •• :: '-' ..... Iexplains diplomatically. "Just that the left hand is reserved for something else. " 's just awkward, like stomping into Japanese restaurants in sneakers, other times it's a ore consequential affront-as in, You weren't really looking at that cal iph's wife, were �:0: u7 How serious a matter is David Byrne's left-handedness} "It's not that big a deal," he very country has its strange rituals. For Byrne, discovering the ways these mundanities warp percep on is one of the great rewards of travel. Both his fi rst book of photographs and a song on his I Ibum share ju st that title-"Strange Ritual"-and like much of David Byrn e's work, they go to great, col rfu l lengths to show that one man's global kitsch is another's sacred endeavor. "There's this effect 0 eeing stuff that you're rea lly fa miliar with, with all the meanings switched around," he says. Everything you see means something slightly different. " been twenty years si nce the nascency of the Talking Heads-yes, the "Psycho Kil ler" guy has hit his _ .. II: arly forties. Through the intervening colla borations with sound sculptor Brian Eno, a five-album-strong 010 career, accomplishments in film, theater and photography, and as record label CEO, reinvention has een Byrne's hallmark. Befo re IBM's Buddhist monks were debating hard drives, Byrne's songs, stories nd fi lms have been populated by a peasan.try dreaming of cable TV in the jung les, of cinematic love irs between the salt of the earth and the dross of the Fi rst World. Travel-the images it reflects and he sounds it makes-has long fed his cu riosity and defined his art. How did it begin? Where is it going? A dramatic reco nstruction follows ... A man in a Parisian recora store-he is a singer in an avant-garde rock band. He is surrounded by LPs, awash in an aural onslaught of fo rhythms. His hands move from one shrink-wrapped square to another, sea ing for something, perhaps something as fleeting as an image ... �::::::�� ;�:�:: ::::���::::�:�::� :� �� :�:: ::��:�::: E e t e t e i t E t as e a huge record store in Paris called Fnac. It had a pretty big international on with loads of African stuff. There was nothing in this country that having no idea what they sounded like until I got home. Sometimes the best place to find African records may not be in Lagos, or whatever. It may be in Paris, which isn't nearly as exotic. WHAT KINDS OF MUSIC WOULD YOU LOOK FOR, SWAMPED BY ALL THESE ARTISTS UNKNOWN TO YOU? -. .... - I > ca -C r me it was the pop stuff-African pop, Japanese pop, Middle Eastern-if it ad familiar instruments. If I saw an African LP with guys with guitars on it, 'd check that out. It's like holding up a mirror: you see an element of you culture reflected and twisted and refracted-it looks completely different. ng at your own culture in another way can inspire you to dismantle your musical structures, your own musical preconceptions, and reconsider hat music is for, how to represent it, how it should be structured. course, there are some situations where the musical style is so completely rated into the lives of the people that you can't substitute the experi nce ... you can't capture that on record ... records just whet your appetite. S �laces I e India, where food is eaten mainly with the right hand. " The first things any trav- �ler notices abroad are these little nudges of cultures bumping into one another. Sometimes trave ers ux pas,