Jim Avignon wanders through life on adventurous paths. A painter in techno clubs, a party animal in Berlin, a festival organiser in Moscow and, again and again, on the road with his one-man-band Neoangin – no doubt, the global player of the under ground prefers life to be diverse. Jim Avignon has long been a trademark , myth and legend as a painter of cartoonish big city panoramas, while as Neoangin he delivers playful songs with multi-layered structures that derive from any genre.
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Jim Avignon wanders through life on adventurous paths. A painter in techno clubs, a party animal in Berlin, a festival organiser in Moscow and, again and again, on the road with his one-man-band Neoangin – no doubt, the global player of the under ground prefers life to be diverse. Jim Avignon has long been a trademark , myth and legend as a painter of cartoonish big city panoramas, while as Neoangin he delivers playful songs with multi-layered structures that derive from any genre. Both his gaudy pictures and his one-and-a half-minute long pop gems, contribute to his particular appeal but above all it is his unique talent to make serious issues consumable as catchy art. Now, one year after Unhappy House a new album by the romantic individualist called Scratchbook makes it to the shops. The CD comes with an opulent booklet: 100 pages of Avignons most beautiful sketches over the last five years. Now at last, with Scratchbook, art und music converge to an integrated single entity. His music is as sketchy as his life. Songs like snapshots recorded on the backseat of a car or in a friends garage. A laptop, a microphone and a whimsical melody - the one-man-big-band doesn’t need more to produce the magic balance between melancholy and high spirits. In 26 songs over 48 minutes, Avignon sketches a musical panoramic overview over the sky of the pop underground. Contentwise Scratchbook is about And The Establishment, about the possibility of manipulating feelings (conspiracy of mind), about the throw-away mentality of the media (lame comeback) and about the ongoing tension between adaptation and rebellion (Return Of The Soft Rebel / Falsche Versöhnung).With a rattling voice Avignon balances his singing between an unstable cheerfulness and an exhilarated gloom, half Jonathan Richman, half Mark E. Smith, stories about good luck and misfortune and all that lies between. Just as he, with his art, has created an unique visual with a high potential for recognition, he is in the process of creating a musical parallel universe, in which more or less everything seems possible. Astute he consistently rejects the established mechanisms of application in the cultural industry and prefers to try out new ways. Scratchbook is probably the first CD on the market where a pirated copy would cost more than the original. It is obvious - on the level of pop subculture, he is the king of the cartoon animals.
