CONCEPT? WHAT CONCEPT?

You might be wondering why I don’t write about Swiss music much considering the fact that I’m a music journalist living and working in Switzerland. I think this blind spot has something to do with the fact that although I appreciate the high level of musicianship abundant in the scene, I miss the grand ideas behind the hard graft: Only very rarely do I sense the bands’ artistic, political or absurdist reasons for doing what they do. The glaring exception to the rule is The Bianca Story from Basel, a self-proclaimed art collective in best Roxy Music/Pulp/Franz Ferdinand tradition that not only plays angular pop songs but also directs and produces its own videos and installations. My beef with the band is that I think The Bianca Story should put more time and effort into the music and less into the extra- curricular activities and generally show more conceptual consistency. Consider the following: After having been assigned to write a concert preview I ordered the new mini-album “Unique copy” from the band’s agent. Only after reading the relevant press release did I realise that the album could not in fact be ordered as the unique copy of the title would be mounted in a multi-media artefact that weighed half a ton an was due to be auctioned off with a starting price of 10 000 francs. Apparently, the idea was to raise the question of the value of music in a time of digital over-availability – a little like Radiohead with their name-your-own-price download album “In Rainbows” back in 2007. I then wrote an embarrassed e-mail to the agent apologizing for demanding the conceptually impossible. A day later I received a call from The Bianca Story’s publicist, asking whether I needed any additional information about the project, pointing out that all five tracks off the album were available via the band’s Myspace page. He also offered to send me the music on CD if I liked – which to my mind defeated the object of the enterprise. The album arrived the very next day and since then I’ve been wondering how many other people have unique copies of “Unique Copy” sitting on their shelves.