| Sound and Vision a revamped page featuring photography created by musicians
to get us started: Cassis
 Cassis, (Born in Germany, lives in Brooklyn) is a renaissance woman for the modern century. She is a singer/songwriter/alternative pop performer, a film producer, and a photographer.Here she talks about two Polaroids taken from her site
 I have started to really enjoy taking photos with my phones. And I have become a bit more specific in what I like and don't like. I am really fond of polaroids and that's the aspect I celebrate while doing this. I call them cellaroids. I love it, when the phone does weird / poetic things to the image - makes it grainy - alters the colors. The phone becomes the co-creator. I am not interested in apps and gadgets to make cell phone photos look like as if they have been made with 35 mm cameras.... The Berlin Homeland photo just happened to pop up on a walk back to my apartment in Berlin where I am currently writing the music for a feature - late at night. It still makes me feel uncomfortable to see a German flag. Not all flags. Just very specifically a German flag. I heard all different things in what kind of flag this one actually is . I still don't know which part of Germany it represents. I find it weird to put up a German flag. Period. I guess the past still creeps in. Americans don't have a problem with that. What do YOU think? I'd love to spark a discussion....
The 'placed in bushes' photo was taken in the little village where I grew up, Bad Boll, in the South of Germany. It is a kind of sophisticated village with only 4000 inhabitants, but it hosts a spa going back to the 1700reds and an academy that attracts people from all different corners of the world. And it gathers Rudolf Steiner followers. I couldn't believe how villagy this was - this letter and naked breasts in a bush. The white of the paper of course draws attention. The note asks for a female to come and meet a guy at the close by public outdoor swimming pool. A New Yorker gallery in Chelsea has expressed interest in running a worldwide cellaroid competition with me and I want to ask fellow film music composers to be on the jury to judge them. Because we have to deal with images all day long. They evoke feeling in us that we respond with music to.... It'll happen in a year. I hope YOU all participate. You can hear her music on the NBT podcast and on her own website
Home Sweet Home
 These group shots show Matthias Glasner and the band HomeSweetHome in 1985. I managed them for a while when I lived in Hamburg. I was their number one fan and was comparable to the number one fan, Mel, of Flight Of The Conchords. I would walk into local newspaper offices and put headphones onto editors ears to force them to listen to Matthias’ songs. HomeSweetHome’s biggest success was playing on one bill with ‘Psychic TV’ and being featured on ‘TV5’, Germany’s version of MTV.
Today the head of the band, Matthias Glasner, is widely known as the film director of ‘Der Freie Wille’, ‘This is Love’, ‘Sexy Sadie’ and ‘Die Mediocren’. I produced his early films: ‘Requiem’, ‘Schicksal and Zufall’ and also some of his video pieces. In addition I directed the first part of ‘Schicksal und Zufall’ which had a small art house theater run in Germany.
Matthias daring me to talk to Jim Jarmusch actually led me to getting a job with the famous American indie film director. Matthias had the idea that I should just enter the bar ‘439’ in Hamburg--where Jim Jarmusch stood and drank his beer being cool, surrounded by cool Hamburgers, after a press screening of Mystery Train–open the glass doors as if they were wooden squeaky doors in a Western, go straight to Jim Jarmusch and say ‘I want to work for you’. I did this half laughing more to proof to Matthias that I could do this rather than believing in my mission and –boom- I had a production job and started it a few months later in NYC.
Still a composer, Matthias Glasner has in recent years, written the music for ‘Cover’ and Lars Kraume’s Film ‘Kismet – Wuerfel Dein Leben’.
When I met Matthias in the early 80’s, I was studying music at the Hamburg Music University. Because of his obsession with film and enthusiasm for visuals, he was actually my first photography teacher. My generous thanks for this education was to leave Matthias’ camera gear, which he entrusted to me, in a NYC taxi cab. Sadly, there it went. Gone for good!
 Daydream
 A few years ago I had a DJ project with my former DJ partner, “Swiss-Miss” Serena Jost called DJ Scratch ‘N Sniff. The idea came during a brunch on New Years Day. I had just come back from touring Italy with my band and on a day off had witnessed Bretzel from Stereo Total DJing in Rome. It was so inspiring! He would take different color albums, punch a whole somewhere off the center and play the vinyl which would sound beautifully OFF. His partner then played keys to it and it was hilarious. It gave me the permission to re-invent myself as a DJ.
Serena and I would tour through Europe with a couple of ironing boards and load them up with a few electronic gadgets. Part of the set up was a toaster oven. Baking beats and mixing sweets meant we would bake live chocolate chip cookies while presenting ambient electronic lo-fi soundscapes. When Serena finished her first demo of her CD I wanted to capture her spirit with a photo shoot. In case you are technically interested: It’s shot with a 35 mm reversal film processed as a negative. This gives the intensity of the colors. In addition I would consciously move the camera on a long exposure to get the blur and atmosphere.
Since my rural childhood I had a fascination with inhabiting trees and have addressed this a few times in my life. Recently I made this the theme of my own soon-to-be-finished music video for the song ‘Be There’ on the new CD ‘ANALOG LOVE”. The lyrics in it ‘living in trees is my habit’ also sparked the cover photo for ANALOG LOVE.
God
(see the full size version of this here )
 I have met Tom Waits on the set of Coffee and Cigarettes (somewhere in California). Lucky me, I was one of the producers of this short film and was even more lucky that it won the ‘Palm d’or’ in Cannes and helped me to get my greencard. In one day the director, Jim Jarmusch, filmed a music video for Tom Waits and the next day he shot the short film ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ – using for both films the same set and bringing Tom Waits and Iggy Pop together. Maybe because I was a big fan of Tom Waits meeting him was not as intense as I had wished. He turned out to be a more introverted person than I had thought and I realized that he needed utmost privacy to play his role. Therefore I tried to spend as little time as possible on set and made sure that only the people absolutely necessary for the shoot were present. All was staged not far from San Francisco in Tom Waits’ chicken farm that he had converted to a recording studio. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop both hadn’t smoked cigarettes in a long time. Through shooting the film they started smoking again. Overall working on this film has been one of the highlights of my life.
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