Thursday 22 November 2012

57. RCA Black














Review of a show at the Royal College of Art, written for the New Statesman's Cultural Capital blog last year. (Image above is Paul Jones' Brixton Hill SW2 7SC.)

RCA Black, Royal College of Art Henry Moore Gallery, 31 Aug-6 Sept 2011

The clue’s in the title. Unlike Tate Liverpool’s Afro Modern exhibition last year, this group exhibition at the Royal College of Art doesn’t make any conceptual claims about their constellation of artists. They had to be students or graduates of the RCA, and be of African or Afro-Caribbean descent; simple. Given that, as co-curator Ekua McMorris told the Guardian, “There have only been 85 black students at the RCA in the last five years. That's out of a body of over 800 per year”, that already narrows down the field substantially. The chronological range of the exhibition goes back to Althea McNish, designer for Liberty among others, who graduated in July 1957, up to current student Kevin Bickham (whose readymade of a bicycle frame was a nicely deadpan, if not especially impressive, gesture). Given the simplicity of the curatorial concept, a show like this stands or falls on the quality of the work and the arrangement in the gallery.

On those criteria, the results are somewhat mixed. The variety of periods, styles and media make it difficult to form a coherent picture of the exhibition. When I went, ahead of the press viewing, a few things were missing – in particular, there was nothing from Chris Ofili, one of the College’s more famous graduates of the last few decades, and one of McMorris’ two photos in the show was off somewhere (a particular disappointment, as McMorris’ work is one of the highlights in the show’s photography). The remaining photo from McMorris was brilliantly odd and resonant: Mother and Child depicts a black woman (presumably McMorris herself) in the bath, facing away from the camera, a viscous flow of black ooze tumbling from a jar in her hand into her mouth, although it looks equally as if it were being extruded from her body. The image has the slight ghoulishness of Matthew Barney's olfactorily seeping creatures in the Cremaster Cycle, but it's deepened when you catch the caption that mentions that the substance is molasses. Seemingly the least pleasant by-product of the processing of sugar cane, it lacks the sparkle of, say, golden syrup; it seems to carry the process of pulverisation and boiling, the history of violence required to extract it – and hence invades the picture with the memory of generations of slave labour that filled cane plantations in the West Indies.

These little techniques of displacement, of re-framing, of producing puncta that call up whole histories, characterise the best work in the show. Paul Jones' charcoal drawings of storms are based on camcorder stills taken by American stormchasers; the titles give locations near where Jones lives in Brixton. The images themselves are fantastic swirls and billows of wind that resemble mushroom clouds or particularly distorted cumulonimbi – in that sense, they aren't implausible as views over London, especially if taken from a hill; they participate, obliquely, in the great tradition of clouds in landscape painting – Constable's sensitively rendered expanses of chiarscuro, but also John Martin's glowering, fire-and-brimstone thunderstorms and the roiling black roof of Turner's Hannibal Crossing the Alps. But to take them as London scenes requires some odd imaginative shifts. The drawings are done on tracing paper, which amplifies the grainy, hazey quality of images, turning them into documentary fictions. Darren Norman's deceptively simple How To Draw A Palm Tree – a demonstration, printed on vinyl, of the eponymous tree reduced to a succession of simple additions of shape and colour – is remarkably smart and funny; it reminds one of nothing so much as the stylised signifiers of exoticism on cigarette cards and food packets (I think, particularly, of Um Bongo, with its approving catchphrase of “They drink it in the Congo!”) Norman has, in a sense, to learn how to represent his own heritage – exactly the kind of thing an Afro-Caribbean artist is supposed to know how to draw – through the mediation of the 'exotic', and in doing so problematises ideas of 'authenticity', of art as a testament to one's roots. These sorts of strategies are, perhaps, testament to another history of displacement, of scrambled memory; in what Paul Gilroy called the “inverted continent” of the black Atlantic a disconnection from origins that persist as troubling images is the norm.

Alongside the missing Ofili works among the exhibition's celebrity turns was a small cluster of works by Frank Bowling RA (born in Guyana, he moved to London at the age of 16 in 1950, and graduated from the RCA in 1962). They were, unfortunately, from his early period: decentred, impressively visceral interior scenes in the post-Francis Bacon, post-Graham Sutherland fashion, they now appear rather gauche in comparison to the brilliant, easily referential abstraction of his later work; in spite of all their virtuosic distortion of figure – the great swirls of red and flame on the woman’s dress in The Abortion – once the eye adjusts and sees what’s what, they have some of the flatness of Victorian narrative paintings. The body-horror flashes of Two Figures on a Bed, with its conventional furniture disrupted by the two reclining nudes, both of whom seem have misplaced their arms, its centre occupied by a black mass (with its white edges, it may be an oddly distorted piece of clothing), are coherent but puzzling; the expressiveness of the brushwork suggests a turbulent affect for which there seems no ready origin. Altogether it seems a missed opportunity. Likewise, a photograph from fashionable graduate Harold Offeh, who makes much play with wigs, lippy and bared teeth, seems flimsy and one-dimensional in its gestures. By contrast, the presence of several suits by Charlie Allen – now designer for the England strip – was surprisingly impressive, whilst not especially provoking (I have to admit to not really caring for craft articles at art exhibitions).

There were two sets of photographs which did, however, impress the elements of quality to the show. Dribbled down the central division of the gallery were several works from the Nation series of Eileen Perrier, taken on the Paris Metro. People – a dark-haired white woman carrying shopping bags, black handbag slung across her knee; a black housewife in purple coat – sit back on the garish red seats, and carry the wary expression we all do on public transport, caught in a space that, even if familiar from daily commutes, isn't domestic. The 'nation' consists of people who are all, no doubt like their ancestors, on their way to somewhere else. Faisal Abdu'allah's photogravure portraits from the Goldfinger series hang on the back wall of the gallery, the faces huge, seeming to press out of the images at the viewer. The caption doesn't mention that the faces are all those of prominent British gangsters (although I do wonder whether I'm in the minority in not recognising them): there's no violence to them, no sense of intimidation, just a neutral, battered quality as if they were features of the landscape; the massive, blocky Anglo-Saxon lineaments are re-coloured by the copper they're printed on, estranged, deracinated. It's a fine example of the cunning and strangeness that fills the scattered highlights of this show.

56. Dirty Projectors




















Alternate version of a review published in The Wire #341 (July 2012)

Dirty Projectors
Swing Lo Magellan
Domino CD/LP/DL

Dirty Projectors look, in retrospect, like the vanguard case of a development equally promising and problematic – the imposition on the structures of rock songwriting of cursor-dragging collage. The sudden transitions, disparate materials and what-the-heck conceptualism of their songs appeared to have internalised both the jostling data of the web-page and the production gloss and space of the 80s pop-rock and 90s R&B records beloved of guitarist and principal songwriter Dave Longstreth. (Their punchy vocal and instrumental gestures seemed to have gating already built into them.) Most of the criticisms levelled at the band came from pot-bellied rock-hacks who considered them too clever by 'alf. The day-glo novelty and invention of their work was palpable; the question remained as to how far down their syntheses really went, and what truth there was to the songs.

Longstreth's collaboration with vocalist/guitarists Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian yielded brilliant results on Rise Above (2007) and, to a lesser extent, Bitte Orca (2009), giving a more thoroughgoing and satisfying shape to his collisions of ideas, voicing the desperation, joy, erotic yearning, deadpan oddness that had been latent in previous efforts. With their help, it was clear, Longstreth had the songwriting chops to make the whole hybrid thing work. The hectic script of their vocal lines – swoops, coos, hums, whispered asides, – is, to some extent, present and correct on Swing Lo Magellan: the simple vocal crescendo on the chorus of “Gun Has No Trigger”, the sweet call-and-response yelps of “See What She Seeing”. There are a lot of initially-impressive moments – the huge explosion of drums and fuzz-guitar on the chorus of opener “Offspring Are Blank”, the lovely, fiddly mbira-pop opening to “The Socialites”, the tension-and-release dynamic of “Gun Has No Trigger”. But more often than not the band sound like they're going through the motions, constructing Dirty Projectors-by-numbers compositions – cryptic lyric, shuffling drums (drummer Brian McOmber's considerable talents are far from exploited here), acoustic bridge, if we're lucky a riff that might once have been sprightly. The digital dreamwork of their juxtapositions, structures effortlessly coming into existence from delicious melodies, has turned leaden, as if burdened by the need for capital-S significance from their conglomerations of materials; where once the proggily spiralling forms of their work had suggested an infinite capacity for invention, it now seems like a dismal scramble for shortened-span attentions, cut-and-paste ideas outrunning the band's need or will to make them live. More than that: they seem to belong to a moment that's past. Their work's profusion held a more-than-subterranean alliance with the shadow economy of the web, and the virtual bubble of financialisation that was its not-so-secret partner; theirs was the era of easy money, and they articulated the desires and strangenesses that the dream-bubble of late neoliberalism gave rise to and repressed. In its aftermath their language seems to have crumbled, to have become shallow, inadequate.

Perhaps the only moment of true greatness here comes on closer “Irresponsible Tune”, when Longstreth, over a single acoustic guitar, calls up the ghost of The Orioles' “It's Too Soon To Know”. An air of simple tragedy – “and life is pointless, harsh and long” – is focused through exhausted doo-wop harmonies: “there's a bird singin'/out in the wood/and it's singin' an irresponsible tune”. Its forlorn loveliness returns to the pure language the band have occasionally revived. In doing so, they make their first steps back towards the real pressures of our conjuncture.

Monday 12 November 2012

55. 100% Silk














Director's cut version of a review published in The Wire #339 (May 2012)

Bobby Browser
Just Browsing
100% Silk 12”

Strategy
Boxy Music EP
100% Silk 12”

SFV Acid
Grown
100% Silk 12”

Peaking Lights
936 Remixed
100% Silk 12”

The dancefloor, we're told, is static. The accusations of derivativeness aimed at the musicians around 100% Silk – alleged outsiders fetishising and repeating earlier stages in dance music's evolution – are repetitions of a general fear of slowdown in musical innovation – a fear that perhaps mistakes these records' relationship with the language of a sonic past held in the fluid medium of digital archives. It may be better to ask what these materials are doing, what needs they answer and articulate – what structure of feeling shows through their flickers of synthetics and amyl nitrate haze. One thing evident from the four most recent 100% Silk releases is that the records are far from being Xeroxes of the heroic age of dance music: their backward glances are crucial, but they aren't dependent on them; their generically unplaceable variations on the models of Acid, Electro and Italo return us to the genesis of those conventions themselves, crystallising the pressures of their time through technological accident and the liberated contingency of the club.

Bobby Browser's “Smooth Cruise” starts with incongruous splashy drums that give way to a spacious disco strut pierced by keening synths and Acid bleeps; “Airbody” summons the rhythms of early piano House and the sumptuous, gliding motion of late electro singles like Klein & MBO's “Dirty Talk”. SFV Acid's faded, lo-fi take on the form also favours the lower tempos, pads and softened 303 basslines, with each motion being given its own space, cultivating a dreamy atmosphere apart from the blunt, driving mania of vintage Acid (though there's nothing as deliriously damaged here as on Cuticle's Confectioner Beats EP); in “Knights”, fragile synths pinched from a Terry Riley record are swamped by multiple 808 lines, peeking occasionally out of the weft. Whilst the records hold their own as prompts to dance, there's something withheld and private about their atmospheres, their gestures warped by a lack at their heart; they focus intense yearning through the language of disco and House's own never-staunched desires, a language of erotic plenitude whose pastness adds its own inflection of regret.

The remix 12” of Peaking Lights' 936 is something of a blip in the catalogue. The only refix that makes a real improvement on its original is Xander Harris' version of “Birds Of Paradise”, which integrates a slow-motion Italo bounce underneath the vocals and emphasises the excellent bassline, really lifting off in the last minute; but it does reinforce just how strong, and how strange, the other takes on the period are. On Strategy's “Bolly Valve Reduction”, the jumping, shrieking 303 line of “Bolly Valve 2000” – itself a strange refiguring of Acid into almost pure texture – is filter-tweaked into a scream, the track becoming a rhythmic plateau in which sound seems constantly on the brink of disappearing, becoming a ghost of itself. This is where dance meets the nostalgic repetition-compulsion of the likes of The Caretaker: disappearing into its own reverie over its distant, opaque materials; the records resound with the utopian spaces that birthed their sources, historical moments experienced only through the medium of records, the transient moment of audition – hence their strangely disembodied sensuality. Even the sleeve and label designs, with a calm female face coalescing out of what looks like a visualisation of modem hiss, take on the mass-produced language of a modernist pop – all those Strictly Rhythm and West End 12”s you collected – shadowed by loss, taking on, in the midst of an economic crisis still shadowed by semiotic overproduction, a seductive charge.

54. Laurel Halo















Director's cut version of a review published in The Wire #340, June 2012

Laurel Halo – Quarantine (Hyperdub)

The songs of Laurel Halo's first full album commute the unease that lurked behind the rhythmic psychedelia of last year's Hour Logic and Antenna to a level both more prominent and more subtle. A generalised wrongness fills and warps their bodies, as if the very resonant air that carries these sounds was toxic to breathe. Bass pulses and synthesizer flux seem to suggest structures that, on closer inspection, melt away. Time seems to telescope in parts and expand in others, so that the chorus of the opening “Airsick” seems to emerge at varying durations. “Joy”, which starts out with what sounds like the vocal intro to one of the more synth-pop numbers from King Felix, turns into a shifting, wailing field of analogue noise. Vocals, high in the mix, seem to go off-key, although, the next second, the idea of a stable key appears illusory; she chomps syllables into awkward shapes, such that it may take you a few listens to grasp the line “you'll make love to cold bodies” in “MK Ultra”. 'Songs' is both too enclosing and too sloppy a term: they're smears of technological colour that spill across the canvas, but far from abstract, or just abstract enough – a heavy smudging of outlines – to be perturbing.

In spite of the third track's title, there's little joy on this record, a real contrast to Halo's previous work; the sampled pop exclamations on “Holoday” – “Just wanna be with you” – are deployed as an ironic counterpoint to the vocal's dark, fractured moans; closer “Light + Space” summons a sliver of rapture with its xeroxed synths and plumes of major-key vocals. From the intimations of aerial death on “Airsick” to the cries of “nothing was in my heart, there is no-one here” on “Tumor”, it's pervaded by numbness, claustrophobia, pain intensified to the point of dissociation. But it's hard to shift the sense that this is linked to the sheer contemporaneity of her work (Giorgio Agamben: “the contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time”). The strangeness of her work, the difficulty in adjusting to its time-space, is perhaps really a function of the backward state of present music culture. These songs are anamorphic sound-paintings, that, from the right angle, turn out to be leering skulls. Such a perspective casts the entire surrounding musical landscape as a blur.