A Slightly Too Retro Album
In 1997, my sister, singer Paula Seling, was offered a small recording contract at a German studio, working with a team of German and Australian songwriters and arrangers. The album, produced by a Romanian NGO called the Phoenix Foundation, was titled Only Love and featured several lovely love songs. One that stood out to me was Nothing but the Blues, a track I loved for its simple, airy arrangement.
Engulfed in Bad Taste
I created a video for this song, aiming to illustrate the harsh realities local musicians often face—the postmodern era in which precarious modernist architecture from the former communist regime began to merge with ugly extensions and various illegal constructions. Romania was engulfed for 15-20 years by a “transition” marked by a celebration of bad taste permeating nearly all aspects of social life.
The video also sought to represent, in a minimal and aesthetic way, the effects this avalanche of poor taste and the social conflict between new “classes/norms/representations,” “past versus future,” “East versus West,” etc., could have on the unsuspecting mind.
Amorphous Reality, Even in Creative Outcomes
The background footage was shot with a small handheld camera and then vectorized frame-by-frame in Inkscape, only to be reassembled into an endless “epic chain” of absurdity. These clips are mixed randomly to highlight the lack of real meaning behind this amorphous reality. The visual chaos is so obvious that the irony lies in how easily these clips can be remixed in any order.
The Message
My intention was to prove that a message can be conveyed through:
- An informal, non-affiliated “construction.”
- A language that does not actually exist and cannot be copied, duplicated, or replied to in the same terms (in this case, hand-drawn simple lines).
- A complex and complete connection between rhythm and texture/appearance in language and expression, where the two cannot be separated when communicating.
- The idea that inventing something “on the spot” doesn’t necessarily mean it will be illogical or pointless.
Through the rough depictions of both the landscape and the drawings, I also wanted to suggest that isolation and information deprivation can damage your skills beyond repair.
Further Critique Sent Out
I addressed the following points to those skeptical of this experimental work:
- Containment and minimalism can express powerful emotions.
- Using only copies of “stuff” can still produce something new and original (copying the actual landscape isn’t really copying, but the idea stands).
- The hand-drafting style can be altered and still remain truthful to certain principles (a critique of purists).
Questions Left Open by This Experimental Movie
- Does the repetition of an absurd, irregular, and brutal urban space—across all dimensions, even time—leave a lasting mark on human communication, the harmony of interactions, and the perception of natural beauty in irreparable ways?
- Does the incoherence of urban living spaces alter our perception of color, well-being, and collective visions of the future?
- Is the architect responsible for creating an urban “cultural mass grave” that ultimately consumes creative energy across the post-communist society’s development?
I dare say the answer to all these questions is “yes.” Moreover, the entire phenomenon is self-contained, with the urban landscape acting as a perpetual reminder of a society’s many inconsistencies. This insidious symbolism—often overlooked by those who grow up in such environments—turns the “mass grave” into a collective, physical projection of societal malaise.
The Video as an Experimental Movie
This video became a brief, four-minute experimental film illustrating some of these issues. I also dared to suggest that the “local” musician is merely another element in an absurd order—an emissary who traditionally celebrates freedom of expression in all its forms, but here is “employed” to participate in a frenzy of bizarre reinterpretations or reenactments of societal idiosyncrasies, or as a catalyst for a certain anesthesia.
* more on these issues, here : https://cashidelucs.wordpress.com/
( rewritten with ChatGpt )
PAUL SELING 
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