tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69649583703931898492024-03-12T21:08:22.524-07:00Static DisposalCHECK THE RECORD CHECK THE RECORD CHECK THE GUY'S TRACK RECORDDanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.comBlogger69125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-58350755390998673092014-04-12T15:32:00.000-07:002014-04-12T15:32:54.074-07:0070. Alec Finlay<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Originally written last year for </i>Cadaverine <i>blogzine, previously unpublished.</i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Alec
Finlay<br /><i>Be My
Reader</i>82
pp., Shearsman, £8.95</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />How
much can you put into a poem without appearing to try? Yeats claimed,
in 'Adam's Curse', that the appearance of effortlessness required by
good poetry was always the result of vast effort (“I said, 'A line
will take us hours maybe'”), a claim whose apparently casual
expression itself belied its large implications, its deconstructive
effects on the poem and its explorations of nature and artifice. The
problematic reappears in connection with Alec Finlay's work. Finlay,
the son of poet and sculptor Iain Hamilton Finlay, works mostly as an
artist, but also produces pamphlets, mostly through his own Morning
Star Publications, that straddle poetry and artists' books. <i>Be
My Reader </i>collects
texts produced for commission with other lyrics. Many, particularly
those produced for fine art projects, were made by, or toy with,
process. Most are fairly short (only four poems are over two pages
long), sparse and seemingly very casual – the kind of thing that
could be jotted in an afternoon. Reading them, one has the sense that
a lot more is going on in each gesture of the text than there appears
to be. The question is, just how much?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Finlay
Snr. was interested, in his books and text-sculptures, with the model
of the haiku, in which perhaps a single image (literally: some haiku,
in the original Japanese, may consist of a single character) seems to
hold intense depths of feeling or philosophical significance. It also
expresses a relation to nature: the elements of the haiku relate to
each other as in nature's patterns of order. (One may wish to
contrast this with the popular anecdotal mode of contemporary poetry,
in which nature, fragmented into convenient images, is belaboured
with explanation and confession.) It has room for humour: haikus can
mention drinking and other pleasures of the flesh – there are a
fair number of poems about football, or “fitba”, in <i>Be
My Reader –</i>
and frequently involve visual puns, a device used in both Finlays'
artworks. Finlay places a similar trust in the finely turned image:
sections of the long poem 'The Wittgenstein House (Skjolden)' read
like renga; many of the shortest poems – including one, 'The
Scottish app', only one word long – posit themselves as a single
image; 'Cove (Kilcreggan)' is a succession of such images (“a
purple thistle without prickles / cloud shadows stroking the hills”),
a list poem of “[k]nown cures for melancholy”. This form, hiding
beneath the surface of the poems, also ensures that the short comedic
poems are, for the most part, actually funny, rather than fussily
contrived jokes (in which the title often sets up the punchline of
the poem's body). They aren't, though, necessarily funny a second or
third time.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />The
lyric poems thankfully don't take their subjects too seriously.
Rather they try to follow, in a process of simple mimesis, the weave
of movement or thought (or, more truthfully, both conjoined) in
language. 'The Wait' begins with motion and location – “I rock
the swing-seat to-and-fro / in the low sun / chatting with Christine”
– moving to another part of the house at the end of the third
tercet – “Upstairs // with the girls / kneeling on soft cushions
/ surrounded by scarves” – looping back round to the swing, the
narrator imagining “you” coming “down / the turning stairs /
from your painted room.” There's a guilelessness to this, to the
choice of incidents and the diction, which feels refreshingly
uncontrived (where so much contemporary poetry that deals in everyday
occurrences and language collapses immediately into whimsy), even
confrontational, as if daring the reader to force him to be more
ornate, more 'writerly'. It works most obviously in the tradition of
transparency of William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and James
Schuyler, but somehow feels more ordinary than them, an ordinariness
that the intelligent syntax and linebreaks belie. Their modesty and
provisionality at least feels more truthful, less burdened, than the
false universalising that plagues contemporary British poetry.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />There
is, then, something depthless about these poems: their play or
playfulness is an endless movement on the surface of things. Which
is, perhaps, appropriate to the nature poem in a period when human
subjugation of nature is reaching an almost total scale. Certainly
the 'found' or processual poems, in spite of their uneven quality,
feel this way. Those most allied to process don't necessarily wear so
well on repeated readings. 'R<i>C</i>A<i>E</i>N<i>L</i>G<i>T</i>E<i>I</i>R<i>C</i>S',
whose title is also the text of the poem, is a bit too
self-explanatory to do much more than, uh, explain itself.
'E-D-W-I-N-M-O-R-G-A-N', in which every word contains one letter from
the late Scots Makar's name (in sequence), is impressively virtuosic,
and contains some nice phrases – “anagraMs Of youR orGan And
hymeN, // sharEd iDeograms Within whIch Nothing / becoMes pOetry”–
but little more than that. By contrast, 'Hid in a Tale: a Folio of
Leaves', which uses the subtle device of embedding “leaf”,
usually spreading it between the first and last letters of
consecutive words, as a kind of golden thread weaving through the
poem, is direct,.transparent and sweet, a repeated return to the
consolations of a mute nature: “Clustered / azalea fills my eyes; /
the young heather // springs gentle, / affords me cover”. But it
returns also, perhaps more strangely, to the Romantic trope of
imploring nature for tenderness, an action whose belatedness
contributes to the awkwardness of the address, like listening to the
erstwhile Romeo of a Miranda July film:<br /> <br /> Tree,
hear my plea:<br /> forgive me; console<br /> a friend, so pale,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /> afraid;
allow me<br /> to amble afternoon &<br /> evening, seeking meaning</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /> in
the whole affair.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's
something faintly embarrassing about this, an affect ironised by the
wry turn of “the whole affair”. Notably, there's no answer to
this imprecation for the provision of meaning, the poem concluding
“Now I leave this // dark green wood”; the comedy of our
relationship with nature is in its inadequacy, not in any heartening
climactic marriage. It's further evidence that, even if the
experiments of <i>Be My
Reader </i>don't
always work, there's more than enough here to tempt anyone to join
in.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif;"> </span></div>
<br />
<div style="height: 0px;">
<br /></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-29500393600641617912013-06-11T03:44:00.000-07:002013-06-11T03:44:39.170-07:0069. Erewhon Calling<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.flyingnun.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/dust84.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://blog.flyingnun.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/dust84.jpg" height="320" width="227" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u>Picture via <a href="http://blog.flyingnun.co.nz/2012/03/27/bruce-russells-time-to-go/" target="_blank">Flying Nun Records</a></u></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u><br /></u></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u><br /></u></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><u><br /></u></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Alternate version of a review published in </i><a href="http://thewire.co.uk/archive/issues/348" target="_blank">The Wire</a><i><a href="http://thewire.co.uk/archive/issues/348" target="_blank"> #348</a> (February 2013).</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Erewhon
Calling: Experimental Sound In New Zealand</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bruce
Russell (editor)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Audio
Foundation Pbk 191pp</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
</div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Editor
Bruce Russell says in his introduction that the project of </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Erewhon
Calling </i></span><span style="font-size: small;">is “an
investigation, in some senses an 'ethnography'” of experimental
sound culture in New Zealand: sound art, improv, noise, experimental
composition, avant-garde song. It is interested in that culture's
self-experience or self-knowledge: “who they are, what </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>they
</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">think they are doing (and why
they think they're doing it), as well as how they got to where they
are now.” The result is a blur of ideas and perspectives that
suggests many potential patterns, never cohering into them. But then
in a music-writing market that too often demands cut-and-dry
conclusions, this may be a virtuous intention, and one that suits its
subject: the experience of investigating this and other music from NZ
is a slow, delirious tumble through sound that alternately smears and
crystallises patterns, slipping between constitutive categories:
melody and noise, intimacy and distance, liveness and mediation,
grotesquerie and pop </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>nous</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> In one
sense this book is welcome. There's a distinct lack of writing on
avant-garde music in New Zealand (even on the web information's hard
to come by), and this anthology contains a lot of interesting primary
materials, including memoirs and surveys by Peter Wright, Pin Group's Peter Stapleton, Dan Vallor (on lathe-cut records as a medium for
experimental musicians in NZ), Alastair Galbraith and Su Ballard (on
the minor but encouraging support for sound-art in public galleries),
as well as some lovely visual work by the likes of Michael Morley. By
contrast, what's become reified in retrospect as 'New Zealand indie',
the mainstream (centred around Flying Nun Records) against which this
book's subject is ostensibly set, is surrounded by gossipy memoir,
hagiography and archival repackaging, instruments of that
reification. Part of the problem is that <i>Erewhon Calling </i><span style="font-style: normal;">threatens
to do the same for its own subject.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> For the
music that developed in New Zealand after punk, mainstream and
underground existed less as separate realms than as resources to be
reimagined or eviscerated. Many of the first releases by Russell's
label Xpressway were from musicians originally on Flying Nun,
including The Dead C, Galbraith, Peter and Graeme Jefferies and The
Terminals. Even many of those that Flying Nun continued to support,
such as Chris Knox (on whom Byron Coley contributes an unusually good
piece), produced extremely odd, noisy homemade pop records throughout
the 80s and early 90s. Russell's recent and essential compilation of neo-psychedelic Flying Nun sides, <i>Time To Go</i>, in fact makes this very argument about the closeness of these strands of music. He doesn't help the book's case by
stating that “[i]t doesn't try to describe the sounds these people
make.” Divorced from aesthetics, subject to a narrow discursive
focus on the 'experimental', its program comes across as
crypto-sociological boundary-marking; what the best contributions
here add to previous writing, against the book's will, is a sense
both of the social dynamics of the scene and what escapes the social, into the enclosure and exposure of mediated sound
– the often intense privacy and strangeness of the music.</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
NZ underground, as channelled primarily through Xpressway (until its
closure in 1993) and </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Forced
Exposure</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">, enjoyed a certain
cachet in the 1980s, but even this was complicated by the cultural
politics of centre-and-periphery. Part of the appeal for both the
international mail-order crowd and native listeners, John Bywater
recalls, was “its geographical isolation and cultural difference”,
and “the pleasure... in liking things no one else knows”. Such an
enjoyment of the esoteric was frowned on in the scene – Bywater
cites a zine's “satirical portrait of Christchurch at some point in
the 90s, including a character Paul, listening to 'mail order records
from the USA'” – as, at the same time, those involved struggled
to make space for themselves in a country known for its relative
social conservatism, in which the idea of community is primarily a
stick with which to beat cultural nonconformists. Jon Dale's
marvellous piece on the still mostly unknown bands of Wellington,
includes this “droll summation” from Douglas Bagnall of Fever
Hospital: “we had a local context – three houses and a community
hall – with national and international links, but no regional
scene.” Auckland's 90s scene experienced the city as “just a
city, a glorified parking lot made specifically for commerce, leaving
no room for culture”, scored by the grey, anonymous noise of the
records of RST, Thela, Rosy Parlane and others. The portrait of the
same city's ongoing Improv collective, Vitamin S, suggests a climate
in which creativity is unacknowledged, everyday, intensely ordinary.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Such an
account is moving, not least because it mirrors the situation many of
us in the arts who don't live in metropolitan centres confront
day-to-day and almost never see portrayed in music writing. It also,
in theory, makes a fitting conclusion for the chaotic mass of
material gathered in this anthology: definition, solidity, product
don’t need to emerge from the companionship and entertainment of
creating music. But this is, it feels to me, insufficient. If the
attempt here is to provide a social portrait of NZ music as a total
aesthetic – and fans often agree that it does have a shared
atmosphere or tone, as well as a visual identity – then it's worth
noting that the best pieces in here aren't about social scenes, and
aren't academic analyses, but passionate writing about records,
experiences of sound that chafe vitally against expectation. They're
about 7”s, tapes and lathe-cuts issuing from sources that just as
quickly disappeared; about “broken, distressed, recalibrated and/or
malfunctioning equipment”, grime and distortion on the tape; about
troubled song, photocopied zines and fugitive performances. Such
writings give a stronger sense of what it is to produce sound “at
the end of the earth”, a place where ultimately, as Jon Dale puts
it, quoting William Burroughs, there's “nothing here now but the
recordings”.</span></span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-9921614516197926582013-06-10T13:37:00.002-07:002013-06-10T13:37:24.071-07:0068. Ben Rivers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.fact.co.uk/media/3364495/Two%20Years%20at%20Sea%203.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.fact.co.uk/media/3364495/Two%20Years%20at%20Sea%203.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Alternate version of a review that appeared in </i>The Wire #340 <i>(June 2012). </i></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Two
Years At Sea</i></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Ben
Rivers (director)</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Soda Films 2011, 80 mins</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Contemporary
culture dreams of disappearance. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Two
Years At Sea</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">,
Ben Rivers' first full-length film, shows us one version of that
dream, reconstituted as waking reverie. Jake Williams, this
portrait's subject, lives in remote Aberdonian woodland. He's seen
and heard working – wood-cutting, tidying, fixing – in between
other pottering activities: reading, walking, cooking, napping. No
other character, his cat aside, is seen. The film's title refers to
the period of work he undertook to make this isolation possible. The
result is not exactly bucolic, but does gift the film a certain
quality of unwavering, uncoercive attention. A great deal of its
rich, unhurried loveliness proceeds from all of this: a Cageian
bringing-out of the buried life in auditory and visual 'silence'.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Rivers
is, though, far from the nature-piety into which the Cage cult so
often degenerates. His cinema, like that of Patrick Keiller and
certain parts of Tarkovsky, makes clear that its attention to natural
appearance is possible only through film's mediation. Filming on
hand-processed black-and-white 16mm, Rivers lets the medium's
accidents and peculiarities – flicker and distortion, intense
contrast, light glare, graininess – play. Film is revealed as the
dark matter of the visible, just as sound – vividly captured wind
and birdsong, the distorted psych-rock tapes and raga tapes Williams
plays in his car, 40s crooners blasted over outside loudspeakers –
marks out the diffuse and dense contours of his oneiric space. Williams is also a singer and accompanist of folksongs for mandolin and guitar; though we never see him play, we do see him listen - giving ear to the sky and forest - and his listening seems to subtly shape the film.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Rivers
hints at the constructedness of the scenario,
undercutting the impression of an innocent rural idyll even as he
builds it up. Several fantastic sequences – such as that in which
Williams hoists a caravan into a tree, has an Keatsian
lie-down in a heather-bank, or the final shot's quotation of Richard Bennett's death scene in Orson Welles' <i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i> – emphasise the sense that the forest is
a theatre in which to play out his Grizzly Adams role. It's
interesting to note the ways in which the film coincides with Rivers'
portrait of 'island utopias', </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Slow
Action </i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">(2010).
In interviews Rivers has drawn analogues between Williams' life and
his film-making – solitary, labour-intensive – which rather
suggests film as a craft activity, with the latter's twee
associations, a deadly combination with </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Two
Years At Sea</i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">'s
rural seclusion</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
The L</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">évi-Straussian
innocence of his island societies is the result of apocalyptic loss
via a future rise in sea-levels, rather than any willed escape into cosy primitivism. A dream is a kind of ruin: the
dissolution of concrete life, vanished lifeworlds turned into active absences. Rivers has made, through technological dreamwork, an enchanting, becalmed ruin.</span></span></span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-87532528541724745892013-02-25T14:55:00.001-08:002013-02-25T14:55:40.069-08:0067. Raime<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://themusicfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Raime-Quarter-Turns-Over-a-Living-Line.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://themusicfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Raime-Quarter-Turns-Over-a-Living-Line.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Raime </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Quarter Turns Over A Living Line </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If
it feels difficult to praise Raime's debut album unreservedly, it's
partially due to a mistrust of the frankly adolescent impulse to
align Importance and Profundity with sombreness or outright despair.
It's also out of concern for readers' emotional equilibrium. In a
moment when electronic music's libidinal economy is one of exquisite
overload and frenetic sensuality (Rustie, HudMo, Flying Lotus, Night
Slugs' whole roster) it seems almost callous to recommend something
so sparse, so fatalistic, so blackly compelling. But then it's
difficult not to think that it forms the other side of the coin to
that aesthetic: it is, in that sense, just as necessary, sensually
and historically. Its pleasures are those of the violent
hollowing-out of dancefloor forms, of the exhaustion that waits at
the end of the night.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
album arrives loaded with both anticipation and context. One of the
attractive things about the first Raime 12”s and mixes was their
opacity: minimal sleeves, gnomic titles, no physical presence, a
return almost to the jungle records that, we would later learn, Joe
Andrews and Tom Halstead loved. Soon enough the fog around them, and
around Blackest Ever Black, the label that has put out all their
releases to date, cleared: they did interviews, gigs; we learned that
<i>FACT </i>editor Kiran Sande runs the label, and of its connection
to Downwards, Sandwell District and the more brutal end of British
Techno. It became clear, in fact, just how carefully 'curated' (that
dreaded term!) both act and label were – from mixes of
ultra-obscure European post-punk and a website dotted with <i>grand
guignol </i>graphics that clicked through to Industrial and rave
tunes, to an exquisitely-designed catalogue that combined all of
these with Noise and archival soundtrack releases.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
relevance of all this to <i>Quarter Turns Over A Living Line</i>
itself is questionable. It feels as fully-formed and autonomous as
those first records; far from the smug flaunting of taste that so
often takes itself for formal innovation now, it feels like the
ruination, the explosion, of a sonic language, its dissipation into
particles until all that's left is a choking, noxious cloud. Like the
shape of a Rorschach blot, any number of influences or resonances can
be traced out of it, but none convincingly names it; more than that,
any other music belongs to a comforting past that's out of reach to
the devastated present it inhabits. If any echo convinces at all,
it's with Shackleton's re-sculpting of dubstep as a thing of negative
space and primal dread. (They even share some tropes: quasi-tribal
hand percussion, vocal fragments blurred almost into non-existence.)
To listen is to confront it as sound that gives no signposts: opener
“Passed Over Trail” begins with a huge thrum of bass noise,
ghosted by mid-range ebbs, squalls and treble arcs like stifled
screams, less a track than an atmosphere that seems like it could go
on interminably. When the tripping percussion of “The Last
Foundry”, a version of “This Foundry” from their debut EP in
2010, enters, it feels like regaining solid ground momentarily; but
rather than being joined by the expected half-step snare, it's left
to sharp and melancholy pads and suppurating bass tones. When the
snare finally lands more than a minute in, it's huge and hollow as
any doom metal hit, as if the drummer had slumped on the kit; when it
repeats it seems uncanny, a motion suspended between life and a
dwindling into stillness.</span></div>
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The duo have a virtuosic sense of composition, of how to organise
both large elements (bass tremors, percussion hits) and spaces, and
micrological details, like negatives of darkside jungle tunes. The
tracks benefit immensely from high volume: they constitute themselves
as forcefields of tension between starkly delineated fragments.
Individual gestures nag like scraps from faltering memory, links to a
physical reality now wholly alienated – the scrape of
guitar-strings on “Your Cast Will Tire”, the thump of toms on
“Exist In The Repeat of Practice”. “The Walker In Blast And
Bottle” takes the venerable video-game bleep from “Planet Rock”
and turns it into a brittle siren, the barely-holding centre of a
construct of muffled drums, juddering noise that substitutes for bass
and a choir of synths that call to mind nothing but the end of
Godspeed You Black Emperor's “Antennas To Heaven”. “Your Cast
Will Tire” shows how subtle their construction is, its astute uses
of reverb, syncopation and space – echoing fretscrapes and
bass-drum punctured by dry hits like the “fell sergeant, death”
knocking – establishing a beautiful webbed architecture of
resonances<span style="color: #eeeeee;">. The rhythm is frequently close to a
flatline,</span> every heave of percussion effortful, its logic one
of resignation, as each pulse, its rise and fall, pulls you further
down a path with no end.
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Where
a lot of what Ryan Diduck, in a recent piece for <i>The Quietus, </i>has
tagged as “the new bleak” is in certain ways quite soothing –
blurred, drugged-out, bleakly soporific – Raime's work, alternately
crystalline and amorphous, provides, if any, a very cold comfort. The
raw strings that gird “The Dimming Of Road And Rights” – hard
not to connect that title with the entropic loss of all good things
most of Europe is currently experiencing under the rubric of
'austerity' – indicate the cold, almost cosmic depths and spaces of
this music, the only thing to get lost in beside the hurt, cathartic
joy beside a percussion track that feels like nothing less than the
death-drive, frustrated. Having come this far, it's difficult not to
feel that it's a brilliant dead-end for the project: what, after all,
could they do from here, but refine the formula, go further out into
the ruins? In this, it seems, <i>Quarter Turns... </i>dramatises a
more general situation. Raime are now identifiable <i>auteurs</i>,
tagged with identifiable influences. The sheltering shadows of
obscurity in which their work gestated are rare in an economy
demanding the constant turnover of novelty. In zeroing in on the
darkness at the heart of that frenzy of languages, the intimation of
last things in a crisis-ridden culture, they've made something deeply
necessary.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-44688854508426328822013-01-28T09:50:00.000-08:002013-01-28T09:50:18.546-08:0066. Mark van Hoen<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Director's cut of a review published in </i>The Wire <i>#335 (January 2012)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark
van Hoen </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Revenant Diary </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Editions
Mego CD/LP</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Time
is the alarming issue, the element most subject to the shearing
pressure of social contradiction today. As average working weeks
increase, we're enjoined ever more to indulge in colour-supplement
leisure activities (“get making those memories”, as a recent
advertising slogan had it). In the face of systemic crisis, we're
haunted by the vague sense that time's running out; simultaneously,
we seem to have more of it than ever – in abundant archives, in
multiplying ephemeral media of memory-inscription (Twitter, Facebook,
blogs). Like <i>Blade Runner</i>'s
Roy, our memories press maddeningly on the present, bursting into the
body of music, blurring or sharpening their significances, at the
moment they threaten to disappear “like tears in the rain”. As
the archivists carry on their pursuits (witness the hauntological
barrel-scraping of the Found Objects blog and the continuing vogue
for 'austerity chic'), the quality of that time seems to matter
increasingly little, just so long as it's past.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
latest solo album by former Seefeel member Mark van Hoen (who
previously worked under the name Locust) seems to come with the same
set of conceptual baggage as all the nostalgia-swollen albums of the
past few years. But there is immediately a disturbing spark. The
story goes: listening through his archive, van Hoen came across a
track made in 1982 by his adolescent self, setting off a recall of
even earlier recordings; in turn he was encouraged to try a more
primitive recording set-up, of the kind he started out with: 4-track
tape, minimal equipment. The potential dangers present themselves
immediately: soft-focus recreation of simpler times, the sonic
equivalent of the mid-life crisis car. From the first, though, he
avoids them: the beats are rough, cutting hi-hats and a loping kick
like distant depth-charges, frayed at the edges, synth-strings and
female vocal as if imported from from a horror film. Nowhere, in
fact, does the percussion become very sophisticated – as with his
often somewhat portentous 90s work, van Hoen seems defiantly to
occupy the only corner of electronica untouched by Techno and House's
seductions. There's something queasy and out-of-joint about the
mixing; it's as if van Hoen were adopting a deliberately broken
language, feeling out the possibilities in stuttering, cracked
versions of familiar gestures, of the slick, brooding digital
productions that have dominated his catalogue to date. (Notably,
where van Hoen sang on last year's <i>Where Is The Truth</i>, here
the voices are borrowed, though whether from vocalist Georgia Belmont
or sampled is hard to tell.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> This
lure of primitivism seems to lie behind much of the last few years'
fetishisation of analogue – think of the often clunky beats of
Ekoplekz's catalogue, or the laborious, semi-aleatoric methods of
Keith Fullerton Whitman's synth records. This partly evokes the
relationship one has with sound-making technology when just starting
out: the directness and simplicity with which one plays with sound,
but also the physical particularity of analogue – tape recorders
with their buttons that clunk, synths, drum-machines, guitars with
their knobs for settings and tone, turntables and the motion of
needles and record surfaces, all this that filled the adolescence of
musicians of a certain age. It's unsurprising that van Hoen seems
fascinated on this record by certain granular qualities of noise, the
kind of roughened grain (usually applied by him to the voice) often
arrived at by happy accident. The sonic account of adolescence in <i>The
Revenant Diary </i>is far more interesting than the simplified
version that lies at the core of, say, chillwave – and far truer to
the difficulty of adult being. The perspective on the narrowness, the
hateful, humiliating, unnecessary agonies of adolescence that
hindsight purchases does so at the expense of its sense of
possibility, of a meaning that saturates every second (and that
spills out into overfilled diaries), from which it is in reality
inextricable; van Hoen maintains this desire, this danger –
adolescence as a wager, a roll of the dice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Van
Hoen's position is complicated by one of the narratives hiding behind
<i>The Revenant Diary</i>: he was adopted as a child, a fact that
became the sort-of subject matter of <i>Where Is The Truth</i>. To be
suddenly dispossessed of a past, to have what lies at the centre of
self-image disturbed: this, in fact, is our condition today. “Don't
look back” warns the voice at the centre of the eponymous track –
not because the past is somewhere to get stuck, preventing the
subject from constructing the future (the traditional argument
against nostalgia) but because its truth-content is put under
question, if not hollowed-out. Van Hoen, notably, although working
with an earlier set-up and methodology, doesn't use particular
textural or pop-idiomatic signifiers (as hypnagogic pop does). In
this respect (as in most others) the beatless tracks are most
interesting: “37/3d” is a minimal construction of static burbles,
pointillist synth and backward, overlapping voice; “No Distance”
is the kind of haunted sequencer architecture explored on Oneohtrix
Point Never's early releases; “Holy Me” is 9 and a half minutes
of solo multi-tracked voice, <i>I Am Sitting In A Room</i> as remixed
by Oval. There's a sense of suspension in these tracks: a glittering
sadness, but a refusal of the particularising pathos of meaning,
which pins sound to a particular time.
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Diaries
sought to organise life: month after month, year after year,
experience is recorded. The present nostalgia for analogue media
(tapes, vinyl records, chemical photography) and all its – as often
as not trashy – content is also a longing for a moment when time
could be experienced this way: coherent, slowly accumulative, humanly
meaningful, experienced in the “pseudo-cyclical” (the phrase is
from Guy Debord) passage of seasons and festivals. What is swiftly
becoming clear is how useless nostalgia is to getting a grip on our
own sense of time in the ongoing crisis – not least because it
leaves us with the alienated figments of time, emptied of
historicity, of what might be meaningful to our present. <i>The
Revenant Diary</i>, spooking us in its best moments with the
unremembered fragments of van Hoen's self, confounds all of that.
It's a very good start.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-43568219837250892872013-01-13T16:09:00.002-08:002013-01-14T05:28:30.434-08:0065. Godspeed You! Black Emperor<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghRiwU6zjgFzo4i3YV3AnOsBopchgDpeBY4DBfmKzKTyDaAUaw9RxmBEIz4gRPkbvIpMby3hhpWejkfBQKppBm3v5rxCV1PkX7PMNunKZZJr8y4eU2PpQWtVOc35QfsVlsRsAlibWePa0/s1600/63ce0528.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghRiwU6zjgFzo4i3YV3AnOsBopchgDpeBY4DBfmKzKTyDaAUaw9RxmBEIz4gRPkbvIpMby3hhpWejkfBQKppBm3v5rxCV1PkX7PMNunKZZJr8y4eU2PpQWtVOc35QfsVlsRsAlibWePa0/s320/63ce0528.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: white;"><br /></span></i><br />
<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: white;">Alternate version of a review published at </span></i><a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/10637-godspeed-you-black-emperor-allelujah-don-t-bend-ascend-review" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">The Quietus</a><span style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in November 2012.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Godspeed
You! Black Emperor</span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Allelujah!
Don't Bend! Ascend!</span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Constellation</span></div>
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
were always going to be any number of ways to approach this record,
that the the writer rushes through serially or all at once: slowly,
feeling out its subtleties and flaws, living with it as sound, as he
once did with all the records that preceded it, or quick, in
gut-level affirmation or negation, assigning it to its ready
pigeonhole, freeing himself from the obligation to think about it
further; as the reappearance of one of the most politically vital
bands of the last 20 years, or as an intervention into a changed
historical landscape that renders their critiques obsolete; as the
pretext for autobiographical riot or faux-disinterested critical
appraisal; as reaffirmation of the dignity of indie, so degraded
since <i>F# A# Infinity </i>came out
in 1997 or as experimental (whatever that means now) miasma;
as a fractional addition to a monolithic body of work, or the best
thing they've ever done.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
depths of ambivalence or contradiction that <i>Allelujah! Don't Bend!
Ascend! </i>provokes is justified
enough by the album's substance to conclude that isn't simply the
projection of this writer, already overfond of ambiguity. That title,
with its almost parodically positivist screamers, is nicely
misleading regarding the content. It would have been easy enough on
re-emerging in 2010, especially given the somewhat lukewarm work that
their sister act A Silver Mount Zion have been doing in the last few
years, for Godspeed to play to the assumed image of what 'Godspeed'
are: the big, parabolic structures, the soaring climaxes, the earnest
<i>altermondialiste</i>
politics that made sense in Seattle circa 1999. This would be to
ignore the contradictions and ironies and aporias present in the band
from the beginning. The apparently total purity of intent expressed
in fleeting interviews and lo-fi sleeve artwork (not to mention the
infamously mordant monologue at the start of 'The Dead Flag Blues',
the first track on the first album: “The car is on fire and there's
no driver at the wheel...”) was always altered in its charge by its
presentation – the jokes (who didn't think the dedication to “the
Reverend Gary Davis” was at least slightly funny?), the collision
of different materials in the inner sleeve collages, the conflicting
energies and textures of the songs, sliding and grinding from rage to
placidity to uninvited noise to lullabies. The albums were, as the
band suggested in a recent <i>Guardian </i>interview,
“a joyous difficult noise”: their aesthetics bear the closest
relation to punk, detonating their conflicting materials through
negation, antagonism, to produce works of strange and searing energy.
(The distance from <i>Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts</i>'
council estate branded “Land Of Milk And Honey” to “Fuck la loi
78” on the sleeve of <i>Allelujah!... </i>is
shorter than we might choose to think.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">All
of this is a slightly roundabout way of saying two things. One: it
turns out that the things about the band that enthralled the first
time around – the sincerity, the leftism, the obscurity, the
extremes of sound – were as much pop hook and manifesto as, say,
anything in the early canon of Adam and the Ants (</span><a href="http://oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/tagged/adam_and_the_ants/chrono" target="_blank">as masterfullyanalysed last week by Mark Sinker</a><span style="color: #f3f3f3;">)
– and that this is <i>precisely</i>
where their politics, and their brilliance, reside. (Certainly when,
on the last few Silver Mount Zion albums, Efrim Menuck's vocals have
been unimpededly front-and-centre, the desperation seething within
the collective's songs has been written in ten-foot-high slogans,
untouched by context or irony, the results have been either comical
or too painful to keep up.) Two: a decade's hiatus has given them the
chance to sound more like themselves, as a collective entity, an
idea, a mass of interacting forces, a project and intervention
operating according to what they call their own “particular
stubborn calculus”; more like Godspeed than 'Godspeed'. The two
long tracks, 'Mladic' and 'We Drift Like Worried Fire', apportioned
to a side each, press together all of their seemingly incompatible
elements, and do so in a stronger, more boldly articulated way than
the somewhat episodic progress of their last major statement, 2000's
<i>Lift Yr Skinny Fists
Like Antennas To Heaven</i>.
The band sound here more like a collective sound generator than, as
they did sometimes on previous records, a big band in which every
section has to have its turn, as it were. Rather, field
recordings, lambent drones, melody, concatenations of guitar noise,
strings that veer into shredding atonality and back again, are all
folded into structures whose thematic successions or juxtapositions
feel dreamlike or counterintuitive. (The short tracks – 'Their
Helicopters Sing' and 'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable' –
do something different, but more of that anon.) In this it reconnects
with the distant, seemingly halcyon days when post-rock meant
feverish drift through rock's debris – Disco Inferno, Gastr Del
Sol, Bark Psychosis, Pram – rather than white guys playing rock
slowly whilst looking sad. (Ten years of listening to other stuff has
also allowed us to notice things like this.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's
tempting at this point to zoom in on significant details – whether
to draw a curtain over what opposition there might be to our
preceding argument, or to highlight the strange political freight the
record carries, or just because they sound so lovely: the jumping
clatter of the Montreal <i>casseroles
</i>at
the end of 'Mladic'; the strafing slide guitar that starts about 2
minutes into that track; the scything
treble guitar noise that cuts through the middle of 'We Drift...';
the wonky ebb to which the crackling noise of 'Strung Like Lights...'
dwindles, as if heard on tape. But the tracks deserve to be taken in
their entirety: 'Mladic' as a slow, groaning build to a thundering
foment that breaks off, reiterates parts of itself – guitars
strangled into noise as the drums – and slides into drawn-out
breakdown, flaring up and burning out over and over; 'We Drift...'
as a low, gathering drone that reaches a peak of treble noise
simultaneously light as air and crushingly static, before a long,
intricate patchwork of musical gestures leads into the repeated,
ecstatic thrash of the ending. <span style="font-size: small;"><i>Pitchfork</i></span>'s
Mark Richardson sees in 'Mladic' “the
pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal”, and
certainly there's something of the latter-day Swans of 'Eden Prison'
to it: harsh, pounding, with heavy mid-range and bass frequencies,
but never locked into a temporally bound, teleological form, ready to
stray into side-roads of atonal noise, its peeling apart from the
central groove and remaking itself become the unfolding of its drama.
(Notably there are moments when the drumming recalls a heavier
version of Steve Shelley circa <span style="font-size: small;"><i>Daydream
Nation, </i></span>supporting
and puncturing the song in equal measure.)
The long tracks here are, nonetheless, hard to experience or hold in
memory as entireties – too big, too detailed, too multiple. (We
should put a word in here for the production of both Howard Bilerman,
who recorded the long tracks, and the four members of Godspeed who
recorded the short ones: there's a remarkable clarity and
depth-of-field, the clashes or layerings of instruments satisfyingly
dense without being mushy or congealed.) Gone is the guilty thought
prompted by <span style="font-size: small;"><i>Yanqui
U.X.O. </i></span>that
every next move was, if not predictable,
at least intuitable; for the moment, it's all a surprise.
</span></div>
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
more than all that, there's a palpable fierceness, a disciplined
savagery, to the playing here – no doubt honed over a long period
(both long tunes have been in the band's live repertoire, more or
less, since before their hiatus in 2003), but not polished. Which
makes what comes afterwards more genuine: the two shorter tracks
(relegated to a dropped-in 7” on the vinyl version) each explore a
moment that would have formed part of the succession of the longer
tracks, probing atmospheres of breakdown, exhaustion and drift as if
opening up the microcosmic heart of their work. 'Their Helicopters
Sing' layers an almost improvisatory clash of circling, scraping
string phrases over tape-drone and guitar that moves from hesitant to
looming, as if choking back the fury that animated the violins on
'Mladic'. At this point, wearing my contrarian hat, I'll say that
'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable' is the best thing on
the album: bleeding in from the cut-off quiet at the end of 'We
Drift...', it presents a rich, troubled drone, treble noise, heavy
with the sound of instruments' resistant materiality – mistreated
strings and e-bowed guitar – gathering and breaking over deeper,
woozy pulses that come from nowhere and disappear just as
mysteriously. It condenses and suggests the flicker, flash and clash
of their collective elements, off to one side.
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<span style="color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's
as much of a palpable freight to these obscured moments, these
negatives of the fullness and presence of rock – and, as is always
also the case, rock as a carrier of political discourse – as where
they left off a decade ago: the brilliant first ten minutes of
'Motherfucker=Redeemer',
the following cut-up of George W. Bush that, as Anwyn Crawford has
pointed out, his “sound
like – morph into – gunfire.” The most poignant moment in the
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Guardian
</i></span>interview
comes when they talk about “the dull fact” of being a band: “we
spend most of our time engaged with the task at hand – rehearsing,
writing, booking tours. We do our best to get along, to stay engaged
with each other and with the shared labour.... Nothing special,
nothing interesting.” The press has talked almost incessantly about
the timing of this release, its relevance to the current moment –
or irrelevance, in the case of those who've complained about the
attention being given to it. That remark by the band prompts a
slightly different reflection, concerning what's changed politically
since the dour days of the first Bush regime's mid-term – what
possibilities have appeared, in Cairo, Tunis, Wisconsin, New York,
London – and what continuities, what lack of progress, what causes
for despair, still exist. It seems apposite to note how strange it
is, this hard-won document of anger and lovely stasis and ghostly
drift, just as popular struggle, at least in Britain and the
post-Occupy US, seems to be undergoing its own moment of hiatus, when
that arduous thought, of the “shared labour” of ordinary
collectivity, of the contradiction and difficulty out of which
cultural politics grows, seems the most counterfactual, and the most
important. The album's meanings begin but don't end here, any more
than the struggle itself does. But we can start by saying: listen;
it's worth it.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-58809052982851926382013-01-13T15:49:00.002-08:002013-01-13T15:49:42.705-08:0064. Adam CurtisMe on <i>All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace </i>at <i><a href="http://theboar.org/tv/2011/jun/26/all-watched-over-adam-curtis/" target="_blank">The Boar</a></i> back in June 2011.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-62494331480594627512013-01-13T15:46:00.001-08:002013-01-13T15:46:11.434-08:0063. Jim CraceMe on Jim Crace's <i>All That Follows </i>at <i><a href="http://www.thecadaverine.com/?p=3868" target="_blank">The Cadaverine</a></i>.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-24174773926503765152013-01-13T15:32:00.001-08:002013-01-13T15:32:22.604-08:0062. Hamlet<a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/constellations/the_kings_two_bodies" target="_blank">An essay by me</a> at <i>Constellations</i>, the journal of undergraduate research, on <i>Hamlet</i>, haunting, political crisis & the birth-pangs of capitalism.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-8450602023922485422013-01-13T15:10:00.000-08:002013-01-13T15:10:07.597-08:0061. Geoff DyerMe on Geoff Dyer's <i>Zona</i>, at <i><a href="http://review31.co.uk/article/view/48/the-last-word" target="_blank">Review 31</a></i>.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-44866390308622287592013-01-13T15:00:00.000-08:002013-01-13T15:00:03.262-08:0060. Gig RyanMe on Gig Ryan's <i>Selected Poems </i>at <a href="http://www.thecadaverine.com/?p=5281" target="_blank">The Cadaverine</a>.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-68008373826170935192013-01-13T14:57:00.003-08:002013-01-13T14:57:43.536-08:0059. 'We Are Poets'Me on Daniel Lucchesi & Alex Ramseyer-Bache's film <i>We Are Poets</i>, at <a href="http://reelingthereal.com/2012/07/31/review-we-are-poets-2012/" target="_blank">Reeling The Real</a>.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-17967184849527032142013-01-13T14:41:00.002-08:002013-01-13T14:41:29.370-08:0058. Luke FowlerMe on Luke Fowler's latest film, <i>The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott</i>, at <a href="http://reelingthereal.com/2012/12/11/lukefowler/" target="_blank">Reeling The Real</a>.Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-56337617481701885762012-11-22T12:07:00.000-08:002012-11-22T12:07:36.039-08:0057. RCA Black<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtOdoX0Kh2MptkD89o-VzW8kSOmrltAehRtusq14id5Yzp4b4jBl5fN8O0TWr_8vHWo4FAv7kAHEnw8Sun0iaInEx49Oyf4XGPiqw51dtWFtnjnMPvrlt-FCd53jeAKqlY8XTg1m96CfgQ/s1600/BrixtonHill_SW2_7SC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtOdoX0Kh2MptkD89o-VzW8kSOmrltAehRtusq14id5Yzp4b4jBl5fN8O0TWr_8vHWo4FAv7kAHEnw8Sun0iaInEx49Oyf4XGPiqw51dtWFtnjnMPvrlt-FCd53jeAKqlY8XTg1m96CfgQ/s1600/BrixtonHill_SW2_7SC.jpg" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Review of a show at the Royal College of Art, written for the </i>New Statesman<i>'s <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital" target="_blank">Cultural Capital blog</a> last year. (Image above is Paul Jones' </i><a href="http://popcornaut.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/brixton-hill-sw2-sc-series.html" target="_blank">Brixton Hill SW2 7SC</a>.<i>)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>RCA
Black</i>, Royal College of Art
Henry Moore Gallery, 31 Aug-6 Sept 2011</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
clue’s in the title. Unlike Tate Liverpool’s <i>Afro
Modern </i>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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: <i>Mother
and Child </i>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 <i>Cremaster
Cycle</i>,
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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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 <i>Hannibal
Crossing the Alps</i>. 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 <i>How
To Draw A Palm Tree –</i>
a demonstration, printed on vinyl, of the eponymous tree reduced to a
succession of simple additions of shape and colour –<i>
</i>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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 <i>The
Abortion</i> – once the eye
adjusts and sees what’s what, they have some of the flatness of
Victorian narrative paintings. The body-horror flashes of <i>Two
Figures on a Bed</i>, 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).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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 <i>Nation
</i>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 <i>Goldfinger</i>
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.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-69272189674327072482012-11-22T06:31:00.001-08:002012-11-22T06:31:54.536-08:0056. Dirty Projectors<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Alternate version of a review published in </i>The Wire <i>#341 (July 2012)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dirty
Projectors</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Swing
Lo Magellan</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Domino
CD/LP/DL</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Longstreth's
collaboration with vocalist/guitarists Amber Coffman and Angel
Deradoorian yielded brilliant results on <i>Rise Above </i>(2007)
and, to a lesser extent, <i>Bitte Orca </i>(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
<i>Swing Lo Magellan</i>: 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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-75623769088934847022012-11-12T08:55:00.003-08:002012-11-12T09:00:25.131-08:0055. 100% Silk<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Director's cut version of a review published in </i>The Wire<i> #339 (May 2012)</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bobby
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Strategy</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Boxy
Music EP</span></i></div>
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Acid</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Peaking
Lights</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">936
Remixed</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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
<i>Confectioner Beats EP</i>);
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.
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
remix 12” of Peaking Lights' <i>936 </i>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.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-81235211012941170682012-11-12T05:38:00.000-08:002012-11-12T05:38:12.282-08:0054. Laurel Halo<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Director's cut version of a review published in </i>The Wire<i> #340, June 2012</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laurel
Halo – <i>Quarantine </i>(Hyperdub)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
songs of Laurel Halo's first full album commute the unease that
lurked behind the rhythmic psychedelia of last year's <i>Hour Logic
</i>and <i>Antenna </i>to a level both more prominent and more
subtle. A generalised <i>wrongness </i>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 <i>King Felix, </i>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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.</span></div>
Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-91691288338535850442011-04-16T05:14:00.000-07:002011-04-16T05:33:13.503-07:0053. A Soar Bottom<span class="Apple-style-span" ><a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/06073-a-plague-of-soars-warps-in-the-fabric-of-pop">Me on recent pop music & the 'soar' at The Quietus</a></span>.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" ><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/14/balearics-ibiza-pop">With a response from Simon Reynolds at <i>The Guardian</i> Music blo</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/14/balearics-ibiza-pop">g</a>.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" >Other prominent 'soar' candidates that went unmentioned: Rihanna - '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa14VNsdSYM">Only Girl in the World</a>', Alexis Jordan - '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKsClqcgDQ">Good Girl</a>', Taio Cruz - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUjdiDeJ0xg">'Dynamite'</a>, Black Eyed Peas - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwQZQygg3Lk">'The Time (Dirty Bit)'</a>. Relistening to Gaga's first album & <i>The Fame Monster </i>'Telephone', 'Poker Face' and 'Bad Romance', at the very least, are pretty Ibiza-fied, but strangely they never struck me at the time as in the same boat as the Black Eyed Peas and David Guettas of this world, and still don't. Unsure as to why though...</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" >Bit more to add on this, will do so at the other blog when I've got the time.</span></div>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-22919626443774318182011-04-06T16:09:00.000-07:002011-04-06T16:16:09.456-07:0052. Iain Sinclair<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><i>Originally published in </i><a href="http://theboar.org/books/">The Boar.</a></span></p><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><span class="Apple-style-span" >I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" >ain Sinclair – <i>Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report </i><span style="font-style: normal; ">(Penguin)</span></span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >If the hard-boiled, hyperactive, heteroglossic Sinclair of <i>Downriver </i>is now gone, as he settles into retirement as a 'media hack' (as Owen Hatherley has waspishly termed him), <i>Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire </i>comes into its own, distinct virtues: it is, in that awful euphemistic term, his most 'mature' and generous book. And rightly so: in Sinclair's usual twisted way, it's his tribute to the borough that's nurtured him and his writing since moving there in the mid-60s as an amateurishly bohemian film student. The story (or stories) of his 'hood is therefore his own story too, and the passages of memoir here make up perhaps the finest and most poignant writing he's done since <i>Edge of the Orison.</i></span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal"><span ><i> </i>The book luxuriates in its own fractal sprawl, but rarely seems self-indulgent; Hackney becomes a microcosm for the vast matter not only of London but of the whole world, that seems to drift or have drifted through: Sinclair tracks rumour and historic apparition like an addict, reporting on Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles' visits to the borough, Julie Christie leading tours of Abney Park Cemetery, the infamous Hackney Mole Man. Unlike his other non-fiction books on London, he gives a lot of room to other voices of the district, in a series of fascinating interviews: with those involved in filming Godard's notorious <i>British Sounds</i>, with former Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Proll, acquaintances of the mysterious East End novelist Alexander Baron, residents of the crumbling estates.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal"><span > It takes the non-linearity, the twisting routes of his London masterpiece <i>Lights Out for the Territory </i>and expands it into an enormous trawl of the side-streets of place and history: we're left with the image of Sinclair aimlessly skirting the catastrophe zone of the Olympics site, running into his son – a strange confrontation that closes this loamy build-up of voices and history, this nose-against-the-brick testament to the particularity of place.</span></p>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-22682388178914023282011-03-25T13:30:00.000-07:002011-03-25T13:31:26.415-07:0051. Kyle Bobby Dunn<a href="http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2011/03/kyle-bobby-dunn-ways-of-meaning/"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Me on Kyle Bobby Dunn's new album, <i>Ways of Meaning</i>, at The Liminal.</span></a>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-66179938661270711872011-03-15T16:30:00.000-07:002011-03-15T16:31:41.722-07:0050. Sunjeev Sahota<span class="Apple-style-span" ><a href="http://www.thecadaverine.com/?p=2629">Me on Sunjeev Sahota's debut novel at <i>The Cadaverine.</i></a></span>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-10807250908922976072011-02-12T01:45:00.000-08:002011-02-12T01:46:16.101-08:0049. Four Poems<a href="http://www.thecadaverine.com/?p=2307"><span class="Apple-style-span" >... by me at <i>The Cadaverine</i>.</span></a>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-37421495170336899012011-01-30T07:35:00.000-08:002011-01-30T07:37:25.300-08:0048. Richard Youngs<span class="Apple-style-span" ><a href="http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2011/01/richard-youngs-%E2%80%93-atlas-of-hearts/">Me on Richard Youngs' new album, <i>Atlas of Hearts</i>, at The Liminal</a></span>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-50894908054831351882011-01-03T12:39:00.000-08:002011-01-03T12:53:55.931-08:0047. Occupations/"call in question"<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><i>Director's cut of a comment piece I wrote for <a href="http://theboar.org/comment/">The Boar</a> the day after Day X and the occupation of Warwick Arts Centre.</i></span></p><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><span class="Apple-style-span" >"The proletariat today is everyone who has no control over their own lives, and knows it." --Situationist International</span></p><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><span class="Apple-style-span" >The occupation of Warwick Arts Centre's conference room, which ended this morning under pressure from Warwick Security and police, came almost as an anomaly. As news of occupations and walkouts filtered through from around the country over the last couple of days – Birmingham, Leeds, SOAS, Oxford, London South Bank, Manchester, UCL, UEL – I could hardly imagine even the energy that I had seen at the NUS London demonstration earlier in the month bursting into something like this. During my time here, the university has seemed too settled, too sedate to give rise to that kind of thing: Warwick is a place where any classroom discussion gone political – in my case, of English Literature – would be swiftly punctured by the needle of capitalist realism – “Well that's not how it works in <i>real life</i><span style="font-style: normal; ">, is it?”</span>; where the swagger of Business School students provides a permanent reminder of the economic ideology on whose sufferance you're still in education.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><span class="Apple-style-span" > Warwick was one of the UK's major hotspots of student activism in what Alain Badiou has called the 'Interregnum' of the late 60s to the mid-70s, but has since become defined by its status as one of the pioneers of the monetisation of the academy, a mission that in Richard Lambert and Nigel Thrift has found its latest and least shakeable champions. It was appropriate that the tactic of the university occupation, following the model of factory occupations, should arrive at the point, at the end of the 60s, when higher education was first being reoriented towards a role of serving the market – a process that the radical historian E.P. Thompson recorded in <i>Warwick University Ltd</i><span style="font-style: normal">, written after the 1971 University House sit-in, and that has found its logical conclusion in the Browne Report's proposals: to almost completely axe the teaching block grant, and allow universities to charge triple the current top fees.</span></span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" > One of the significances of the recent student protests has been their showing how much the media has gotten the wrong end of the stick on the Browne Report: as Stefan Collini <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/stefan-collini/brownes-gamble">has pointed out</a>, the coalition's moves are not simply 'cuts' and 'fees rises', but represent an attempt to wholly change the way we conceive of higher education – not as a public good, one of the crucial spheres of civil society, but solely as “a motor of the economy”, a means of improving the value of one's labour-power for sale at a later date. The media misrepresentation of student activists – as “vandals”, as solely and selfishly defending their own interests – are necessary to naturalise the government's own ideological violence, to distract from the possibility that there might be another conception of education – not, in that awful phrase, “learning for its own sake”, but for the sake of a value not posited in terms of the endless accumulation of cash; the notion, difficult to imagine after 30 years of neo-liberalism, that the society we owe to ourselves might be one that doesn't exclude the majority from the fruits of its wealth and knowledge.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" > The resurgence of student activism at Warwick and elsewhere is testament to a renewal of our political imagination. Against the monotone of 'There is no alternative', the new generation of student and anti-cuts activists are helping, as their predecessors did, to posit the idea that we might one day have some control over our own lives. They've shown the “confidence, courage, humor, cunning and fortitude” that Walter Benjamin called the “refined and spiritual things” to be won in political and historical struggles. We are 'all in it together' now, but not in the way the coalition wants to think.</span></p>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6964958370393189849.post-61226976751996857122010-12-24T15:24:00.000-08:002010-12-24T15:27:43.922-08:0046. Roberto Bolano (redux)<span class="Apple-style-span" ><a href="http://www.thecadaverine.com/?p=1978">Me on Roberto Bolaño's <i>The Skating Rink </i>at <i>The Cadaverine</i>.</a> (Note: the covers of the new Picador editions of Bolaño's works are pretty repulsive.)</span>Danhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09760224430063710811noreply@blogger.com0