THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Thursday, November 14, 2019 |A
trap, while “Beauty, Power, Motion, Life,
Work, Chaos, Law” is Mr. Davis at his jazzi-
est, sounding like a lost classic from the fu-
sion era. “Firestorm,” featuring piano,
woodwinds and strings, has the clean tones
and creepy bearing of Mike Oldfield’s 1970s
album “Tubular Bells” and seems designed
to score a reboot of “The Exorcist.” Hang-
ing together sonically and thematically, the
instrumental section of “Our Pathetic Age”
is Mr. Davis’s best stretch of music in two
decades.
On the second half of the record, Mr. Da-
vis zigzags between styles to match the
character of the vocalists. So on “Rain on
Snow,” featuring Inspectah Deck, Ghostface
Killah and Raekwon from the Wu-Tang Clan,Mr. Davis has closely studied the drum-
focused hip-hop productions of DJ Premier,
half of the duo Gang Starr, and the Bomb
Squad, Public Enemy’s frequent collabora-
tors. In this school, the idea is to pull funky
beats from wherever they can be found,
whether it’s old R&B, funk or progressive
rock. But Mr. Davis is also inspired by film
composers and synth-driven electronic mu-
sic, and on the first half of this record he
brings that side of his creative personality
to the fore.
Each track during this run has its own
character, but they’re connected by a dark
atmosphere and underlying tension. The
bass-heavy and woozy “Weightless” has the
skittering drum programming of currentJOAN CROS GARCIA/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
Josh Davis aka DJ Shadow in 2017; the producer’s new album is ‘Our Pathetic Age.’ART REVIEW
Monuments to an Art Movement
A pair of recently opened museums offer penetrating insight into the Bauhaus on the occasion of its centenary
JOSH DAVIS,the producer who makes mu-
sic as DJ Shadow, works slowly, typically
taking several years between albums. His
pace owes something to his methodology—
he composes in part by sampling sounds
from his vast collection of vinyl records and
meticulously arranging the fragments into
new tracks. Mr. Davis has always identified
with hip-hop, and re-contextualization has
been part of that genre since its inception,
but he has taken the art to a particularly
high level, creating lengthy, progressive in-
strumental suites that are dramatic enough
to soundtrack films.
Since hip-hop and electronic music move
fast and Mr. Davis does not, his new albums
rarely sound connected to their surrounding
musical context. His masterful debut LP,
1996’s “Endtroducing..... (Mo’ Wax), was the
only time his music was at the center of the
zeitgeist and it’s often cited as one of the
best records of its decade. But to Mr. Davis’s
credit, he’s never tried to re-create the pre-
cise style of his first album, choosing in-
stead to experiment and try his hand with
genres both narrow (the San Francisco Bay
Area rap style hyphy) and broad (alternative
rock). The results have been uneven but you
still have to admire the spirit of a creative
mind who wants to push his work into fresh
territory, even at the risk of failure.
On “Our Pathetic Age,” out Friday on
Mass Appeal, Mr. Davis finds a winning
structural framework for his explorations.
It’s a long record with a loose theme about
how society has lost its way in the time of
media saturation and the collapse of truth,
and Mr. Davis wisely splits the record in two,
putting the instrumentals in the first half,
and the tracks featuring singers and rappers
on the second. This division makes the al-
bum more coherent but also puts much of
the best music in the first 30 minutes.
the producer offers his version of a thunder-
ing syncopated beat that mimics the sound
pioneered by that project’s producer, RZA.
On “Kings & Queens,” Mr. Davis builds the
track around a soul sample, capturing the
lush, string-drenched style of the Southern
rap on a track that features Run the Jewels,
the duo of Killer Mike and El-P (the former
is from Atlanta, and has rapped over beats
like this one before).
Mr. Davis’s more obvious homages are
impressively rendered but a few tracks in
the album’s latter half, especially those that
strain to fit the theme of society run amok,
are weak. “Drone Warfare,” featuring New
York rappers Nas and Pharoahe Monch, is a
dense and hectic production with rapid-fire
rhymes that end up saying very little. “Ur-
gent, Important, Please Read,” featuring St.
Louis rappers Rockwell Knuckles, Tef Poe
and Daemon, begins with the words “So
there’s this thing, it’s called the theory of
planned behavior...” and from there it basi-
cally turns into an information-dense Twit-
ter thread set to a bombastic beat.
Better is “Small Colleges (Stay With Me),”
a showcase for New York rapper Wiki,
whose vocal turn is weird, slippery and
filled with personality—even a bland chorus
vocal from Paul Banks of Interpol can’t ruin
it. And the closing disco number, “Our Pa-
thetic Age,” with Sam Herring of the elec-
tro-pop group Future Islands sounding like a
mix of Barry White and Nick Cave, ends the
album on a high note. There’s a lot of good
music here, and the sequencing allows you
to listen to much of it in an uninterrupted
stretch. The tracks with guests are a bit like
pulling cards from a shuffled deck, but when
they work they’re a reminder of how much
ground Mr. Davis’s has covered and why it
makes sense to move outside of your com-
fort zone.MUSIC REVIEW| MARK RICHARDSON
A Case for Pushing Boundaries
Weimar and Dessau, Germany‘D
oes the Bauhaus
belong in a mu-
seum?” queries a
wall display in
the Bauhaus Mu-
seum Weimar, one of two new ma-
jor German institutions devoted to
the revolutionary art and design
school on the occasion of its cen-
tenary.
The Bauhaus, like the politically
turbulent, artistically vibrant Wei-
mar Republic—Germany’s first,
fragile democracy, proclaimed in
this small city famous as the cen-
ter of the German classicism of
Goethe and Schiller—existed from
1919 to 1933, a mere 14 years. Yet
its achievements and influence
make it one of European modern-
ism’s most significant movements.
The Bauhaus was as culturally
omnivorous as it was utopian. Re-
sponding to the great social up-
heavals and technological develop-
ments of the period immediately
following World War I, it enlisted
some of the greatest artistic
minds in Europe as teachers. From
architecture to theater, with ce-
ramics, textiles and photography
in between, the movement sought
to erase hierarchies within the
arts and to design a radically new
and improved society.
The architect Walter Gropius,
the academy’s founding director,
understood he was part of some-
thing both historic and precarious.
Starting in 1921, he commissioned
photographers to document the
school’s activities and achieve-
ments. In 1925, the year the Bau-
haus was forced out of Weimar, he
donated 168 workshop objects to
the city’s art collection. Some
works were confiscated by the Na-
zis but recovered after the war.
Others were hidden away in
sealed crates that were opened
and cataloged in the 1950s. Today,
the 1925 donation forms the core
of the Weimar museum’s collec-
tion of 13,000 items.
Spread across three levels of
Heike Hanada’s sleek new building
(that opened in April), a concrete
cube with a monolithic, bunker-
like exterior and a refreshingly
light, uncluttered interior, theWeimar museum takes you ele-
gantly through the school’s inno-
vative and often turbulent lifespan
in thematically arranged displays.
Famous objects and iconic de-
signs, such as Breuer chairs and
Margarete Schütte-Lihostzky’s
Frankfurt Kitchen (1926-27)—also
prominently displayed in the rede-
signed Museum of Modern Art in
New York—are on view, but
lesser-known perspectives on the
movement are also offered.
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, whose
sophisticated toys were designed
to fire up children’s imaginations,
is given a sensitive display. Her
small Shipbuilding Game (1923)
consisted of 22 wooden blocks of
varying shapes and colors thatIt’s difficult to get your bear-
ings in this Bauhaus bunker, and
harder still to keep them about
you as you wander the roughly
16,000 square feet of exhibition
space, spread over the length of a
football field.
Smaller items like books,
prints, photographs and docu-
ments are jumbled together in a
variety of wall and table displays,
while furniture, lamps and textile
modules hug an ugly orange room
divider. That central display is
oddly reminiscent of an IKEA
showroom. Excellent items
abound, but the presentation is so
all-over-the-place that it’s easy to
get frustrated and exhausted. The
contrast with the Weimar mu-
seum could hardly be more strik-
ing, despite the fact that both
permanent collections show about
1,000 objects; in Dessau, one gets
little feeling for the exuberance of
the movement. Cramped and pe-
dantic, this archive-like presenta-
tion winds up feeling like a mau-
soleum for the Bauhaus.
“The spirit,” wrote Gropius, “is
like a parachute. It only works
when open.” The Bauhaus was the
20th century’s most ambitious
laboratory for unlocking the hu-
man spirit and attuning it artisti-
cally. The Bauhaus centennial
should remind us how dynamic,
exuberant, daring and unpredict-
able an artistic vortex the move-
ment was and remains.Mr. Goldmann writes about
international arts and culture.could also be combined to build a
bridge, house or tunnel. Her
Spielschrank, a modular chil-
dren’s closet from 1925 that could
be converted into a puppet the-
ater or a toy train, won high
praise from Bauhaus master
László Moholy-Nagy. Another rel-
ative unknown is Julia Feininger,
wife of the Bauhaus master Ly-
onel Feininger, whose “Arabian
Nights” puppets (1925) feature in
the display about the Bauhaus’s
dynamic theater workshop led by
Oskar Schlemmer.
The school relocated to Dessau
in 1926. That city has long been a
pilgrimage site for Bauhaus devo-
tees, thanks to its reconstructed
Bauhaus buildings, including the
Meisterhäuser (master houses)—
where leading teachers, including
Schlemmer, Paul Klee and Vasily
Kandinsky, lived—and the acad-
emy designed by Gropius. The
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, which
opened in September as a show-
case for the Bauhaus Dessau Foun-
dation, seeks to complete the
city’s Bauhaus circuit.
Designed by the Barcelona-
based architecture firm addenda,
the building is an imposing con-
crete block encased in a glass fa-
çade. The sleek, atrium-like lobby
makes a favorable first impres-
sion. But when you mount the
stairs to the exhibition, an oblong
chamber hovering directly above
the lobby, you are plunged into
the dark and oppressive main gal-
lery, nicknamed the “Black Box”
for obvious reasons.BYA.J.GOLDMANN
KLASSIK STIFTUNG WEIMAR (2)The Bauhaus Museum Weimar, designed by Heike Hanada, top; Alma Siedhoff-
Buscher’s small Shipbuilding Game (1923), aboveLIFE & ARTS