'BASQUIAT: BOOM FOR REAL'

Barbican Gallery, London

”He ate up every image, every word, every bit of data that appeared in front of him and he processed it all into a bebop cubist pop art cartoon gospel that synthesised the whole overload we lived under.”
-Glenn O’Brien

Samo (The Words on the Street)

Most people reading this will know how young New Yorker Jean-Michel Basquiat not only went from graffiti artist to acclaimed painter, but in the shortest of times. Previously unknown, at least to me, is that he began as a graffiti writer.

In 1978, then teamed up with Al Diaz, he started plastering Manhattan with ‘Samo’ graffiti (short for ‘same old shit’, example below). Though described by the show as “poetic”, with its appended copyright sign the pithy phrases are more Dadaist, acerbic nihilist messages served up with playfulness. “Anti-art”, the arch-Dada term was sometimes employed.

Many pieces run variants on the phrases “an alternative” or “an end to”, such as ”an alternative 2 playing art with the radical chic sect on Daddy’s $ funds.” Others, despite being sprayed on public walls, absurdly gave space for a multi-choice response. Samo seems to have ended with their friendship, Basquiat even embarking on a ‘Samo is Dead’ campaign. (Though he kept the name a while longer.)

His breakthrough moment was the 1981 ’New York/New Wave’ show. Designed to capture the downtown scene, it’s been described as “the Armoury Show of the Eighties”. Despite exhibiting with better-known artists, and being the only prominent painter, his work got noticed.

Two notable things about his art here - how city-based it is, and how iconic his style, using symbols above depictions. The untitled piece below (1981) could even (semi) approximate for a street scene in pictorial space, though windows are grids, the sun a red circle and a red car is drawn the way a child would. The pictorial space would soon disappear, but the iconic style would remain throughout. It makes his images ‘quick’ and active, rather than contemplative.

Indeed, the more fulsomely titled ’Untitled (Black)’ (1981, below) is already turning the rigid city grid into a more generalised lattice. While introducing what would become a recurrent motif - the skull-like head.

Basquiat’s art is often associated with music, with him even playing in a short-lived band (Gray). Yet there’s an odd incongruence here. The dominant downtown music scene of the time, reflected in that show’s title, was No Wave. Which might best be described as an attempt to out-punk Punk. If a Punk single was, to coin the phrase, a 33rpm scream played at 45, No Wave was the same scream played at 78. And, at least since Romantic times, this was the response art had to the city. It was either a den of depravity or the place where alienation happened, possibly both at the same time.

Whereas, rather than dark, alienated or nihilistic, Basquiat’s art is exuberant. It’s child-like in tone as well as form, channelling a child’s sheer love of drawing. In an early TV interview with Glenn O’Brien, featured in the show, he sports a spiky punkish haircut yet smiles beautifically throughout.

”Extra Large”

And as the those references to pictorial space dropped away the size of his canvases increased. Asked “what’s your medium?”, his quipped response was “extra large.” For example ’Jawbone of an Ass’ the next year (above) is nearly double the width of those earlier works. Yet his art didn’t become any more detailed. Instead his canvases used the extra real estate to expand, become fuller. There’s simply more to see, elements jockeying for our attention on crowded but seemingly casual compositions.

And why should that be? The BBC4 documentary ’Basquiat: Rags to Riches’ recounts how, recuperating from being knocked down by a car as a child, he was given a copy of ’Grey’s Anatomy’, sparking an interest in the breakdown of the human body. A video in the show tells another story, of him seeing a photo of someone holding up a skull. I have a different theory to both.

It may be best displayed by the (somewhat ironically titled) ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’s Greatest Hits’ (1982, above). Invoking the great Renaissance artist of course turns anatomical accuracy into an aesthetic, the first time such a thing was comprehensively attempted. And the images here are tagged with terms such as ‘heel’, ’studies of the human leg’ or ‘study of feet’, as you’d expect from ’Grey’s Anatomy’ or one fo Leonardo’s notebooks.

Some of which correspond to the expected images, ‘study of foot’ (lower right) being next to a reasonably convincing foreshortened leg. But, while ‘heel’ (upper left) has a surfeit of red and black lines, they’re useless as maps of muscle or vein. While ‘torso’ (lower centre) could be found scrawled on a toilet wall. Yet a lattice of ladders draws these disparate images together. Such references are used to playfully underline how iconic Basquiat’s art is.

Similarly, in a method reminiscent of Pop Art, in his imagery he wilfully mixes wildly varying cultural streams. ’Untitled (Titian)’ (1982), for example, references Titian and Leonardo, but also Miles Davis. Batman and Biblical references are both prone to show up.

There’s also the writing, kept from the Samo days. This is initially individual letters which in the fuller canvases spread into phrases. Just like the images, they spill across the canvas in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. Just as his images stem from wildly different sources these often mix up different languages, perhaps reflecting the cosmopolitan environment of New York. Indeed, so iconic is his art there seems (in the first illo) little difference between the grid windows and the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ to their left. To him, writing and drawing were not separate realms.

When writing about Robert Rauschenberg, I appropriated David Anfam’s phrase “colliding sign systems”. There’s the same combination of objects and splashes of colour here. Except with Basquiat it’s never clear how much they’re colliding and how much they’re combined. Text, iconic drawings and abstract marks, they can juxtapose but as often blend into one another. It’s like a child playing with letter bricks, lego and plasticine, just because they’re all to hand, not caring to distinguish between them overmuch. Your reaction is less a perplexed “what is all this stuff doing stuck together?” and more an awestruck “there’s so much stuff here stuck together!” Marc Meyer described his art as “a tumult of unrelated information” applied with “direct and theatrically ham-fisted brushwork” (from Brooklyn Museum’s ’Basquiat’, 2005).

And this information overload, this feeling of your senses being stimulated in fifty different ways at once, of text and image overlaid, still duplicates the effect of the busy urban environment on you – just in a less literal way than earlier. The central panel of ’Five Fish Species’ (1983, below) not only namechecks Times Square, but reproduces the forest of signs you’d find there. The black nodes and lines seems semi-analogous to a city street plan. Of all the New York artists, he may be the most New York of them all.

In this way he sees the city, for all its noise and clamour, as both his muse and playground. An approach which makes him the successor to Laurie Anderson and artists of the Seventies Downtown scene, as seen in an earlier Barbican show.

”Nothing To Be Gained Here”

The show often wades into these flurries and tries to make order of them. Sometimes it even seems willing to show lesser works, just because they better fit their agenda. Which is misconceived. His paintings aren’t cryptic crosswords to be decoded and ‘solved’ by literate readers. This is more down to curators and critics trying to establish their interpretive role, doing that vital job they do regardless of anything going on in the work. They’re there to answer that guy who insists on asking “yes, but what does it mean?” Often before he’s even asked.

One they busily attempt to interpret is ’Jawbone Of an Ass’. But look at it again. Does it look like it’s asking to be made sense of? Despite being so iconic Basquiat is quite unlike the bold, clean style of Keith Haring. (Even if both came out of New York street art and became friends.) He’s more similar to the rough, raw expressionism of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Like de Kooning he “looks messy, convulsive, less unfinished than inherently unstable.” Like Rauschenberg he often painted on discarded items, such as doors or wood panels.

But Basquiat took it further, splashing paint like no-one else. His was the most spontaneous, free-flowing style of the lot. Text is often written only to be struck out, often then replaced by itself again. It’s almost impossible to conceive of him making preparatory sketches. It’s like his art appeared without any intermediary stages. (Which partly explains how he could be so prolific within his short life.)

Many works are composites, originally different pieces cut up and recombined. Canvases could be covered with xerox paper then painted over again. ’Piscine Versus the Best Hotels’ (1982, above) does both of these, assembled from four original panels. It’s one of many works which look less like an individual piece of graffiti art transplanted to a gallery than a much-tagged wall, covered in archaeological layers of spray-can, scrawl and flyposting.

Yet these ‘explanations’ often take no interest in any of this, and simply disregard the form of his work. In particular they leap on the text, seeking out connections, while treating the images as a kind of honorary text, something to be ‘read’. Responding to visual art as if it isn’t visual art must surely be a clear case of a category error. To use one of his repeat phrases, “nothing to be gained here”. While his most common tactic in interviews was to derail probing questions with a dissembling smile. He once complained “it’s like asking Miles how does your horn sound?”

Moreover, it’s well documented that he worked on several pieces at once, moving from one to the other as the impulse took him. Consequently you can spot phrases and motifs springing from one work to another. Hardly the method for a man with a focused plan for each work.

Art As X-Ray

There’s another New York City connection. He’d often paint to music, and while there was no discernible No Wave connection, his art has the free-flowing collage style of early Hip-hop. As the scene was then New York based, Basquiat knew many of the artists, appeared in Blondie’s ’Rapture’ video (stepping in after Grandmaster Flash failed to show up) and even produced a Hip-hop single, (Beat Bop’ in 1983, described by Franklin Sirmans as a “deep, moody, industrial soundscape of brooding rhythms and disjointed melodies”. (’In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture’, also from ’Basquiat’.

We should remember this was before Hip-hop became Rap, when its basis was DJ turntabling. It had a wild, polyglot, collage style, at odds with pop structure, almost wilfully anti-canonical where anything from music history was fair game. Franklin Sirmans also says “Basquiat’s art - like the best Hip-hop - takes apart and reassembles the work that came before it.” He then himself quotes Brewster and Broughton’s ’Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’: “Quite simply DJing is all about mixing things together… lifting forms and ideas that are already around and combing them creatively.”

Made to be played to live audiences, with no hope of ever reaching the radio, tracks could stretch out as much as his canvases. ’Beat Bop’ lasts over ten minutes. At that point the nearest musical genre to it, in construction if not sound, may well have been Jazz. (Of which Basquiat was also a fan, even swapping works for rare albums. ’Beat Bop’ is of course a pun on Bebop.)

But that’s still to approach his art via influences and analogies, rather than discussing what it does. Possibly of all the great artists, Basquiat was the one who most looked like he threw up his works without much conscious thought. To me it maps the human mind in flight, as it leaps from one free-association thought to another. (In one, a “first drawing of moon” is next to a tennis ball. Other times its words: “Jesus Christ - Jerusalem - Jews - Jot - Josephus”.) The endless excisions and repetitions are the equivalent of “yeah but no but yeah”.

On top of the stimulation of a vibrant city, Basquiat was something of a prodigious dope smoker - a substance known to speed up those mental leaps. It can also have the effect of aestheticising language, making everyday phrases suddenly seem defamiliarised and humorous, just as he repeats terms such as “regular processed cheese” in his work. Something like “keys tuned” seems chosen more for its musicality than its meaning.

’Glenn’ (1984, above) is dominated by a giant free-floating head, emitting rays from its crown and spewing lines of force from its mouth. It sits above an overlaid photocopy collage, some of which include variants of the same head. (Such as in the lower left corner.)

People talk about an ‘x-ray’ effect with Basquiat, similar to Paolozzi’s, though in both cases anatomical diagrams are probably a better analogy. And we’re all used to that effect used in art for symbolic maps. For example, a cartoon of a man with a bottle of beer drawn where his brain should be is instantly explicable. Here the effect is inverted, it’s everything around the head which demonstrates what’s on his mind. But the effect’s the same - art as an x-ray into the mind of the artist. (And while this one’s of Glenn O’Brien, many were actual self-portraits.)

’Black (Titled)’

Yet, having said there’s no point looking to Basquiat expecting him to make sense, when viewed at a broader level than individual works themes do recur and accumulate. In particular there’s repeated references to black history and institutionalised racism. This is unmissable in titles such as ‘Irony of the Negro Policeman’ (1981) or ‘Hollywood Africans’ (1983). Even a seemingly innocuous word such as “sugar” becomes in context a tag for slavery. And, tonally, this creates an undertaste of anger in his work which counterbalances the playfulness.

Which can be hard to reconcile this with Basquiat’s bright-eyed and playful personality. Perhaps by him as much as us. At one point he described his work as “80% anger”. Yet see him asked about “anger in your work” here. It seems most likely he was not innately political, but born black in America, racial politics was a subject likely to find him. To misquote the title of an earlier work, Basquiat was ’Black (Titled)’.

Racism of course affected Basquiat personally, as he went through daily life. But it also influenced how his art was framed. His story soon became the black street-kid graffiti artist who hit the big time. A paradox of his work is that it’s so raw, so concerned to getting back to art as mark-making, and yet at the same time highly citational. (One effect of which is that it can’t be easily labelled, either as Modernist or Post-Modernist.) The temptation is to rid your brain of one of these seemingly contradictory facts. Today, judging by this show, the tendency is to forget the first. Whereas in Basquiat’s day it was to downgrade the second.

Marc Mayer writes of primitivism in art: “A pose, an attitude, primitivism served a strategic purpose at either end of the century. For Matisse, it was an anti-academic posture, an antidote to the impressively skilfull aloofness of the hopelessly conservative Ecoles and academies… For both Matisse and Basquiat, it was time for an artist to make believe that he knew nothing at all but raw feeling. It was time to reconnect the primary sensations of colour, shape, texture and line to the primal fetish for plain handiwork and scary faces.”

Though it’s true he had no formal art training he was privately (and well) educated and took advantage of a Brooklyn birth to attend art galleries and museums. We’ve already seen how past art masters are included in his stew of references. He was more multi-cultured Renaissance man than instinctive savage. In short, his primitivism was as affected as Matisse’s. But people noticed those affectations more when a white man did them. Basquiat was himself aware of this framing, made by a white art scene, and criticial of it.

The Sharp-Pointed Crown

This is of course unsurprising. There’s a romantic appeal to portraying him as some visionary outlaw, happily throwing up graffiti in the street until some passing gallery owner tapped him on the shoulder to tell him about canvases and offer him fame. The truth is that, no Banksy, he actively chased success and basked in the lavish lifestyle it gave him. Picasso famously said he wanted to live not like a rich person but as a poor person with money. And, despite his comfortable childhood, Basquiat had for some years lived the life of an impoverished artist - so, when given the chance, did much the same. When you’re poor, you are effectively money’s bitch. It’s not surprising that people reverse that power relation when they can, scattering the stuff like they’ve no respect for it.

In this sense, the early gag of appending Samo with a copyright symbol should be seen as double-edged. The anti-advertising worked as advertising, spreading his name, getting him interviewed by Glenn O’Brien. Similarly, three-pointed crowns became a motif of his from early on. They often float above heads, for example on the helmet he wears in the poster image, or are used in place of a signature - the way Malevich used a black square.

And while the image is most commonly a symbol of power, I suspect for Basquiat it represented the modern form of power - fame. They’re sometimes replaced by halos, in his 1983 sketch of Keith Haring even writing “Famous” on it. The halos sometimes had radiating lines emitting from them, as if capturing a glow. Yet other times they make the halos appear barbed.

’Famous’ (1982), a double-sided work, has two jet-black heads. One, highly misshapen, has a red eye and a row of bared teeth. In the production line of photo-collages beneath it the phrase “face gets blacker and blacker” is repeated, but never shown complete. The phrase “Hall of Fame” is next to the less highfalutin’ “regular processed cheese.” The wide-eyed head on the reverse looks less angry, but lies below a rough black bar, the symbol of censorship, which drips paint like rain from a black cloud. All of which sounds like a conflicted relationship with the fame he sought.

And perhaps a source of this conflict was that the whole ‘untutored graffiti artist’ narrative. A story strong enough to sell, at least in part, it propelled him into fame. As Rene Ricard said of him: “One must become the iconic representation of oneself in this town.” And if his success was part due to racist notions of blackness which he then used his art to criticise, that would inevitably barb his crown. The show displays his notebooks, one stating “I feel like a citizen its time to go and come back a drifter”. Basquiat had been homeless for a spell, sleeping in Tompkins Park, and in that note seems almost yearning for those days.

I often end up doing a double take on the dates of Basquiat’s work, like it’s information I can’t actually take in. Perhaps partly because the Eighties is a decade I remember well, so never really seems of the past to me. But beyond that, let’s recall that, born in 1960, he would not even be Sixty today. This all happened after painting lost its cutting edge role to other media, mostly to music. It might make him seem a throwback.

Yet he seems to belong both to his decade and his medium, successfully channelling influences from both Rauschenberg and Hip-hop. As so often with him, it’s tempting to take up one side of a paradox and drop the other. which can make him appear the token visual artist in a predominantly musical scene. Even the age of his death, twenty-seven, places him squarely in that stupid club. But we need to go back to an earlier point. The central thing to Basquiat is that he can’t be reduced to sense.

MONO/ KING OF GHOSTS/ GLASS'S BOWIE SYMPHONIES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MONO
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 4th April

Mono’s monicker may be intended ironically, as they go in for expansive instrumentals ofter described as “post-rock”. (Though the band themselves have responded “music is communicating the incommunicable; that means a term like post-rock doesn't mean much to us”.) Based in Japan, they’re now celebrating their twentieth anniversary and tenth album. Wikipedia notes “the band's live performances are noted for their intensity” (without anyone adding ‘citation required’).

They’re as uninterested in rock’n’roll theatrics as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, playing backlit so as to be become virtual silhouettes, heads bowed in classic shoegaze pose. There’s precisely one track with vocals, possibly the only one of their career, which is sung (I kid not) from behind a pillar. And they speak precisely once, on coming back for the encore to remind us of that twentieth anniversary. Maybe they won’t speak again till the next one.

There may be musical similarities to Godspeed, such as the shimmering guitar sound. But they’re probably best described by Mark Radcliffe’s classic comment about Television, “the nearest rock record to a string quartet”. Though they’re more like this description than they are like Television. In fact they may be more like the description than Television are! Perhaps notably, tracks on the most recent release feature both strings and wind players.

There is perhaps a formula of sorts. Several tracks start off with a slow, measured melody line. Counter-melodies them get added gradually, until the whole thing hits a crescendo. (Often underlined by an abrupt change in lighting.) It’s like watching an abstract painting being composed, first a coloured line being drawn across the canvas, then different shapes forming, before the colours all finally run together.

But if it’s a formula it’s a good formula! Each section seems the thing when you’re inside it, the melody lines involving in their own right, nothing just a bridge to move the track along. In fact it was the track least bound to this, the one with the vocals (‘Breathe’) which seemed the weakest. Mono’s life performances are, it seems, to be noted for their intensity.

From Belgrade…



'KING OF GHOSTS' (SOUMIK DATTA + THE CITY OF LONDON SINFONIETTA)
The Dome, Brighton, Wed 8th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

In which Soumik Datta provided live soundtracks to two Indian films on the sarod, a kind of cousin to the sitar which I am now going to pretend I previously knew existed.

For the first half he played in a trio to ’Around India With a Movie Camera’, an assemblage of imperial-era footage. The film provoked some titters at the crassness of Raj attitudes, not least a speech where the King harped on the virtues of being in a “free Empire”. (Yo wot, your majesty?) Alas the music wasn’t particularly effective, with the East-meets-West combination of instruments serving up a very mild curry indeed.

The problem may have been that the source material was by its nature snippets, like flipping through a book of postcards. And the music seemed to need longer stretches to work up a head of steam, so was always stalling.

Things picked up for the second half with ’King Of Ghosts’. This was a “reimagined” version of Satajit Ray’s ’Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ (1968) which, like no other Ray film I’ve ever seen, was a fantastical adventure featuring magic shoes, dancing demons, wizards in sunglasses and the King of the Ghosts. It seemed more ’Monkey’ than ’The Chess Players’. (And yes, I do know ’Monkey’ wasn’t Indian.)

For this Datta got his longer breaks to stretch out into. Plus he was joined by the City of London Sinfonia. Their contribution was often to create a musical mood for the scene, a task they took to with some alacrity and little regard for the conventions of musicality. For example, in an early scene the title character wanders into a wood. To which their rustling and whispering straight away evoked the sense this was something supernatural we were going into. In short, they made the film more like it was than it had been already.

From London...



PHILP GLASS: THE BOWIE SYMPHONIES
Royal Festival Hall, London, Thurs 9th May

The occasion was the European premiere of ’Lodger’, the final album of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and last to be made a symphony by Philip Glass. (Though nigh-on a quarter-century after its predecessor.) Tonight all three were performed in succession.

In a pre-concert talk Glass said that he’d gone furthest from the original in content as well as chronology, and in fact had only used Bowie’s words. Which was slightly strange to hear, for no-one has ever suggested the Berlin trilogy was primarily about the words. In fact Bowie may well have written them in rebellion against the notion of ‘meaningful’ lyrics.

Then again, the decision arguably exposes the essential arbitrariness of the “Berlin trilogy” concept, for ’Lodger’ has as much in common with the album after it as the album before. With ’Low’ Glass used the second all-instrumental side. (In the programme he mentally reversed the sides, imagining that came first.) And ’Heroes’,though it departs further from its source, only incorporates two vocal numbers. Whereas Lodger’ has not a single instrumental.

’Low’ is known as Bowie’s “blue’ album, and if it had a colour scheme it would be nocturnal blues, greys and blacks. While in Glass’s hands those colours become oranges and yellows. The programme compares it to Debussy and Raphael.

Only the final movement, ’Warzawa’, has anything that might conceivably be called low, and even there the deep, mournful notes yield to something bright. Driving through the winter to hear it in Bexhill seemed appropriate, like walking through the dark evenings to hit Christmas. As said at the time, the result is “pretty much win-win-win… as tuneful as pop music, as hypnotic as minimalism and as dynamic as classical music.”

If the talk had focused on ’Lodger’s vocals, what hit immediately was another new element - the organ. The venue’s recently refurbished organ, with prodigious pipes, was played by James McVinnie. (Last seen playing solo Glass pieces in Falmer.) This quite literally added a new dynamic, making the music much more propulsive, turning like an elegant machine. The programme points out “here the orchestra is enormous and lush.”

Unfortunately, a few seconds into the first vocal starting your reaction was “uh-oh”. They seemed performed as if singer Angelique Kidjo had just been handed the lyrics, with no indication of style or melody, and so was just proclaiming them. Rather than sparking any kind of creative dissonance they just sounded double-booked with the music. In a completely inverse effect to the organ, they acted as a drag on everything. I found myself trying to tune them out, like a loud audience member who for some reason couldn’t be shushed.

The one time, the solo time, they seemed to work was at the end of ’African Night Flight’. A section which I’ve no idea is in a foreign language or simply scatting, but comes to the same thing - there the vocals weren’t about the words.

It seems clear enough that Glass wrote a symphony but then decided to shoehorn in his vaguely made promise to complete this trilogy. (Though, and before anyone asks, he had started composing before Bowie’s death.) I foresee much future debate, between purists of authorial intent who insist it must be played as written and the rest of us.

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE FESTIVAL

Various venues, Brighton, 26th-28th April

Just when you thought it was safe to take off those noise cancelling headphones… and two and a half years since the last outbreak of international experimental sound shenanigans in central Brighton… Colour Out Of Space is back! Now for the eighth time!

As said over the previous outing, the three days run the full range “from acts you willed to be over to those you never wanted to end.” And, having willed more than a few things to end this year (some played up quite highly in the programme), I won’t be reliving the memory here. With thirty-five acts in total (excluding talks, workshops, installations and a film show), covering the whole thing is hardly possible anyway. Mostly it’ll be stuff worth mentioning in dispatches which gets mentioned in dispatches.

Well, mostly…

Perhaps a minor gripe, but at times I confess I find this scene’s blanket audience approval a little indulgent. When so much that’s being created is highly experimental or entirely spontaneous, or highly experimental and entirely spontaneous, I can see a need for a supportive audience - one willing for things to work rather than fail. But default approval isn’t the same thing as blanket approval. Trying is good, but succeeding better.

Mostly this music doesn’t feature words, even when it involves vocals. And looking at a couple of misses might explain why that might be. The “I’m alienated me” vocals were the worst part of Wild Rani’s set, to the point you really wished she’d let the music do the talking. While Natalia Beylis’ vocals… well, more of a voiceover… felt kind of normalising, with their all-too-obvious swipes at the self-help-self-actualisation industry. Perhaps vocalisation risks banalisation, when we’re actually dealing with things too basic to be said. There’s a reason, after all, why Munch didn’t paint ‘The Speech’.

While conversely, with the Charles Mitchener duo (above), for one long section the vocals consisted of forcing a simple phrase from a reluctant throat, where the inability to articulate became not a barrier to overcome but the point of the thing. The result was a free jazz set which I actually liked! (If that sounds an odd title for a duo, it’s a team-up of Neil Charles and Elaine Mitchener.)

Then again, Glands of Eternal Secretion’s set didn’t get into gear until the second section. Where he gave up scraping tins with kitchen knives (an action which proved to have diminishing returns), to tell an absurdist narrative, no more reducible to sense than the music it accompanied.

Olivier Brisson didn’t just collage together sounds from a range of sources, including tapes, samples and live sounds. His set seemed to combine different ways of listening, from composite sounds to close listening to - like a movie ranging from cinemascope to microscopic view.

Whereas, though equally composed of samples, Red Brut seemed to smooth them together, blending them into something which always seemed to make some sort of sense. (If one you could never actually describe.) In the distinction between Dadaist collage (rough, juxtapositional, abrasive) and Surrealist (presenting the strangest of things as if somehow credible), she was definitely in the second group. Though apparently she also drums in a No Wave band, this set couldn’t have been any more sublime.

Laptop artists can sit so still on stage you find yourself believing they’re transmitting music by the power of thought alone. Then there’s others who, without touching anything as mainstream as an instrument, couldn’t be any more hands on. The show had the smarts to place Jérôme Noetinger’s (above) tape manipulations in the middle of the auditorium, and I got to sit fairly close.

I always get these details wrong but it appeared to me he was live-recording direct onto tape, while also manipulating its sound with magnets, found objects and so on. (I also watched him set up and, archetypically Gallic, his first action was to uncork, scrutinise the label and sip from a bottle of red before touching the first bit of equipment.)

Though where you’d place Af Ursin in that range I’m not sure. He played bowed strings against metal plates. At least as far as you could tell, as he stood behind the plates, blocking off any view of him above some very rock’n’roll-looking ankles. One hand many have been playing bass and the other treble, but that was about the only concession to standard musicality. The result was spectral if anything ever deserved the word. You’d tune in to the point where relatively small shifts seemed magnified. If was one of those sets which convinces you consensus reality was only ever a hoax, and is now breaking down all around you. At least for their duration.

As a gag, for their booklet photo, the Elks superimposed their heads over a group shot of Metallica (above). Knowing little of Metallica, and generally being happier that way, I knew not of this. (I also believe everything I read on social media.) So, spying slouched figures in ripped jeans, I assumed a noise band.

In fact they hovered at the limits of perceptibility as much as Af Ursin. Two wind players barely breathed down their instruments, accompanied by two electronic know twiddlers. The music happened not by outright statement but by the barest hints and whispers. My over-poetic analogy would be coming across an ancient tablet, the script upon it sand-blown and the strange characters barely discernible, but all the more compellingly mysterious for that.

The show had the smarts to programme two complementary opposite acts for the Saturday night finale. White Death’s set was almost as if broadcast by sonar - warm, fuzzy and resonant. It was the musical equivalent of being read a bedtime story, simultaneously comforting and bracingly adventurous. The performer was notably pregnant, which led to musing how that might have affected her set.

…shortly followed by Bill Nace and Twig Harper (above). Nace produced wave after wave or bowed, treated guitar, while Harper spoke in tongues over the top. Not music which immersed you in it but which struck you powerfully. If White Death took you below the waterline, they were all stormy surface.

As said after the third outing, it shouldn’t be assumed a festival such as this covers the ’edge’ of music, as if inhabiting a narrow margin where only one thing is on offer. It’s the very reverse, demonstrating how closed-up our conception of ‘music’ normally is. You generalise at your peril. But it was noticeable how many sets felt mediumistic, in one way or another. Inaudible voices were in regular supply, often in foreign languages. (Perhaps not to the performers. But we’re going with my subjective reaction here.)

Of course those who hear messages in short wave radio static from their dead Auntie Mable are being hubristic, assuming the universe must be full of decodable messages meant directly for them. But we can apply the principle more generally, where the purpose of tuning into the ether is not to receive some specific thing. but make us more reflective. I believe Huxley’s phrase about cleansing the doors of perception may have already been claimed by some band. But if it hadn’t, it would fit in well around here.

The three days finished with Tomutontto (back from the fourth outing), playing what could only be described as dance music for the faerie folk. To which people responded with yer actual dancing, not always a COOS staple! Yet in another way it was a fitting finale…

For COOS has a somewhat Brigadoon-like existence; vanishing from sight until you believe it will never visit our Earthly shores again, and you probably just imagined the whole thing anyway, then reappearing unexpectedly to circumvent all our common laws and customs. Will there be a ninth? It’s probably like one of those movies ending with the hushed line “will we ever see the like of this again?”

TERRY + GYAN RILEY/ RAKTA + DEAF KIDS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

TERRY & GYAN RILEY
The Old Market, Hove, Sun 14th Apr

The man with a greater claim than any other to be called the Godfather of Minimalism now performs in a duo with his son, Gyan. While Gyan sticks to guitar, Terry shifts between different keyboards. The pieces are, I’d guess, semi-structured improvisations.

Though he’d often with instruments mid-piece, the best tracks for me were the one where Terry took to either the electric piano or melodica. Those seemed the moments where what you think of Riley came most to the fore, dervish chanting or some other form of eastern influence. At such moments Gyan’s regular usage of pedals and switches would become more abundant than the notes he was playing.

For the penultimate number, clearly unafraid of learning new tricks, he played some kind of iPad software. The results were quite different to everything else in the set - ambient, floating and free-form. And, to me, the highlight.

Unfortunately, at least for me, he mostly played the grand piano, And the traditional instruments seemed to rub off on the music. There was nothing wrong with it, it was just overly familiar. I found myself thinking more of Django Reinhardt than John Cale, Prandit Prau Nath or others from his actual list of collaborators. The result was a gig which, whenever it seemed to be taking off, would return to taxi-ing up and down the runway.

I’ve now seen Riley twice, and felt a little let down both times. I’d imagined part of the problem last time was the large ensemble, but was now little more impressed with a duo. Perhaps, after having transformed music at quite a fundamental level, we should leave him to doing whatever he wants in his later years. (He’s now eighty-three, let’s not forget.) But perhaps what he wants is not a thing for me.

From Paris, with melodica…



RAKTA/ DEAF KIDS

The Hope + Ruin, Brighton, Mon 22nd Apr

The name Rakta means passion or energy in Hindi. The group are a psyche band hailing from Sao Paolo in Brazil. Though a trio involving guitar and drums, it’s the keyboardist and singer who takes the lead. They can rely quite heavily on looping, but instead of layering sound they lay down a bass track to perform atop of. (I thought at the time the looping was effectively replacing the bass, though it seems they sometimes perform as a four-piece.) Vocals are distorted cries, chants and screams, past all intelligibility.

With the keyboards so dominant and the emphasis on full-on repetition there’s time where the sound borders on dance music. It takes the ceaseless insistency, but instead of evoking euphoria it instead goes for derangement. They seem ever-able to ramp tracks up midway, just when you though they’d reached peak psychosis they’ll surpass it. They run one track into the next, joining them together with more spacey interludes, which adds to the sense of urgency.

Perhaps the only drawback with them is, with everyone behind an instrument, there’s effectively no front-person. They smartly downplay any audience engagement, not speaking on stage and performing in semi-darkness. But it might gain an extra impact with an abstract filmshow, or similar.

Deaf Kids are also a trio from Sao Paolo, also run their set right through, also use distorted vocals and also marshall the power of repetition. Except where Rakta were spectral they got decidedly heavy,

They may have drawn the short straw going on second. When they couldn’t quite match Rakta it gave them a slight taint of ‘not as good as the support band’, though we should probably see this night as a double headliner. When, after a more archetypally average band, they’d have shone brighter.

They don’t just use riffs but the most pared down of riffs, as if broken fragments of longer musical pieces. The effect is similar to hearing just a few words from a sentence, you instinctively wait for the thing to be resolved, giving it a sense of anticipation.

And when not riffing, rather than retreat into something more conventionally ‘musical’, they’d assault their effects pedals directly - unleashing free noise. Like much modern music, the dispensing with conventional song structures is like getting to the birthday cake without having to chew your way through all the sandwiches. If Rakta were like some id-version of dance music, their clattering and echoey noise at times evoked industrial dub.

Both from Manchester, Rakta…



…and Deaf Kids…

‘TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001)’

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Munch-like Melancholia

Tove Jansson is of course known to one and all as the writer and illustrator of the Moomin books. But this show tells us something previously unknown, at least to me, she “always considered herself primarily as a painter”. And, though her illustrations form part of the show, it has enough courage in this conviction not just to start off with her paintings but run them for the first few rooms.

Two paintings might map the course of this double career. In ’Self-Portrait’, (1937, above) she sits bold upright and alert, her angular features akin to her work, every inch an ambitious young artist. Completed still lives and portraits sit behind her, another still-life to her side ready to be painted and added to the oeuvre.

’The Graphic Artist’ (1975, above) continues the conceit of an artist who resembles their own work. But in every other way it’s entirely different. She’s hunched not over an easel but a drawing board, pen in hand. This time she doesn’t look up at us, not the assertive genius but the commercial artist always working, with no time for visitors. There’s less space given over to the room, with no window at all. The colours are more dark and deep than bright, while the works we see are dominated by black and white. The figure is largely defined by a bold black outline.

Jansson was Finnish (though Swedish-speaking), and in contravention to her work for children your first response is to indulge in Nordic stereotypes about Munch-like melancholia. In for example ‘After Party’ (1941, above) any actual party probably happened weeks ago. Most of the figures are arranged in couples, though one only has a dog. But rather than see them as dancing or snogging, they seem to facelessly cling together in empty space. One just gazes listlessly out the window. 

The colour scheme, dominated by deep reds and sickly greens, certainly recalls Munch. And, though the colours are more muted it also seems reminiscent of Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Cafe’ (1888). Both seem to depict the spaces between things more than the things themselves.

As is well known, the Moomins were based on Jansson’s own family. Yet, though she was only shortly to begin the books, there’s little sign of that in ‘Family’ (1942, above). The figures are bunched closer together than in ‘After Party’, but no-one is dressed in a similar manner or even meets each others’ gaze. (Though she and her mother cast glances at each other.) Even the chairs the two brothers sit on differ, as if everyone’s in their own space despite the proximity to each other. Jansson depicts herself in funereal black.

’Mysterious Landscape’(1930) may be more presaging. In the words of Rebecca Sykes of the Arts Desk it “reveals an appetite for the fantastical that would come to fruition in the artist’s illustration work.” Admittedly it’s more interesting than successful. It’s evocative but, an early work, unaccomplished - even awkward. What might be most interesting about it is that the environment is liminal rather than outright fantastical. Despite the anti-naturalist colour scheme, with blood red trees and plants seemingly the size of trees, it borders a recognisably modern town.

The Graphic Artist

Erodingany easy distinctions between ‘grown up’ painting and ‘juvenile’ illustration Jansson’searly illustrations were political cartoons for the adult market. She drew for the satirical magazine ’Garm’ from 1929 (when she was still fifteen) to 1953. But it’s the war years which inevitably grab at the attention. As Finland was caught in an increasingly tightening pincer gripped jointly by Hitler and Stalin, Jansson somewhat fearlessly mocked them both. 

Two things are noticeable. There’s the degree to which political leaders were portrayed as tantrummy man-babies demanding more cake. (Good job things have progressed since then.) And her penchant for contrasting the base and worldly with the mythical and celestial. See the angel of peace in the searchlight, in the cover to the September 1943 cover (below.) In others, Father Christmas can merrily show up.

”Wild Things Threaten To Pounce”

Though of course I’m a fan of Jansson’s illustrations for her own Moomin series, ironically my favourite works were for other and even-better-known books. Beyond both being popular children’s books, ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Alice’, might seem to have one thing in common - and it’s not promising for a budding illustrator. They’re both strong associated with illustrators already, in Tolkien’s case his own.

True, Tolkien always regarded himself as an amateur artist. And his own illustrations are surprisingly uninterested in delineating his characters, as if he doesn’t want to completely give them away. In fact his drawings don’t even look that much like environments, they’re more like stage sets. While in Carrol’s case John Tenniel’s illustrations accompanied the first edition (in 1865), and are so considered part of the book it’s virtually a graphic novel. For example Carroll doesn’t describe the Hatter, or even call him Mad. But our memories inevitably fuse together his words and Tenniel’s art.

But there’s a more important point of comparison between the two books. Both ‘Alice’ and ‘The Hobbit’ pass, they look reassuringly twee and so can appear as child-appropriate when once-overed by concerned adults. And then when they reach children’s hands they’re seen more for the uncanny artefacts they are. Perhaps they needed that disguise element in order to become so disseminated. But they managed to put the folk tales back into reassuring children’s stories. Significantly Jansson zeroes straight in on this uncanniness, in fact more so than when illustrating her own work. See for her example her depiction of Bilbo encountering Gollum (1962, below).

Fans of the film may well be perplexed at this. The ring-obsessed, treacherous, spiteful creature we now think of was a retcon to match the plot lines Tolkien was developing in ‘Lord of the Rings’.His being a ‘fallen Hobbit’, the sort of twist everyone know knows too well, isn’t revealed until the later book. The original was something of a threshold guardian, even his size originally going unspecified until he became a “small slimy creature”.

Jansson’s illustrations date from 1962, well after ‘Lord of the Rings’ was published. But she was most likely working from the original version of ‘The Hobbit’, as the powerful elemental creature she depicts is much more the original. However it arose, it’s this Gollum which best suits her art style. The impassive, mask-like face is archetypical of her work.

Further, with his pointed head and gradated figure, Gollum looks remarkably like one of the stalagmites behind him has come to life. And, in another illustration from the same book (below), the explorers again stand dwarfed in the lower right corner. And again the landscape itself seems alive, with plumes of smoke and fire issuing from the raised cave mouth.

With Tolkien there’s no obvious authorial voice, which would intrude between the reader and what he’s describing. (In contrast to Lewis, however often the two are compared.) Which makes his writing immersive. It becomes a kind of prose equivalent to landscape painting, which suggests grand immensity partly by suggesting those mountains and forests extend off past the edges of the known story. Jansson’s eerie illustrations capture this expansiveness, but at the same time have something claustrophobic about them. The figures aren’t just diminished, they seem reduced to ciphers.

’Comet in Moominland’ (1946, above), from one of her own books, pushes things along from fantastical into fully fledged Surreal. A ship seems to have been wrecked among mountains, while the stilt-walking figures recall Dali. The heavy stippling and dense blacks makes the whites, including the blaze of the comet, vivid. But they also make her landscapes look contoured and ‘real’, undeniably present even as the imagery is so hallucinogenic.

On one level this would seem a bizarre thing to give a child for bedtime reading. On another, its evocation of figures adrift in overwhelming strangeness captures the way a child can feel about the existing world. You’re alternately a small thing, lost in the seemingly incomprehensible, and an intrepid explorer. 

A description of ’The Dangerous Journey’ (1977) captures this: “A little girl is transported… from the tedium of a summer afternoon into an exciting world of mangrove swamps, spluttering volcanoes and sea, where birds fly upside down and wild things threaten to pounce.” And see the poster image (up top), of a Moomin on the threshold of a dark doorway and another adventure.

Comics, Posters, Paintings

It’s often unappreciated how illustrations and comic strips are two different media. Comic strips, in the main, stand or fall on their ability to create narrative flow. The images pull the eye along, just as a good piece of writing does to the brain. Marry good comic art to an involving storyline, and you get a double whammy. Whereas Jansson’s illustrations tend to be tableaus, which hold the eye in place. Her landscapes look, if anything, untraversable.

So I remain unsmitten by her Moomin newspaper strips. It’s true they were wildly popular in their day. But with the figures filling frames with bold clear outlines, with their sense of motion rather than monumentality, they seem not to be playing to Jansson’s strengths. (See ’Moomin on the Riviera’, above.) Indeed, though she continued the strips for six years (1954 to 59) she passed them on to her brother Lars, suggesting for her they weren’t a priority.

The show’s defence of them is the general one for newspaper strips, that the platform allowed them to be written for both a child and adult audience. It mentions “a satirical streak”. And, true enough in one example, Moomintroll asks innocently “who owns everything here?” to be told “people with money, of course”.

Yet Jansson also excelled at bold, graphic images with vivid blocks of colour. The covers to the Moomin books are all memorable, and see below her striking Seventies poster ’Keep Sweden Clean’.

She continued to paint through all this, though her style could be quite different to earlier. The show suggests that her later work was a response to the criticism they were too illustrational, and so became more (in it’s words) “painterly”. ’Abstract Sea’ (1963, below), for example is quite well served by its title. It is what it’s of, never quite seeming to settle before your eyes. The ever-shifting sea may well be, in that sense of the term, the most “painterly” subject of all. And if you’re going to paint a painting, why not do something which could only be a painting?

It may be that her success in illustration allowed her to channel her different creative energies. If ’Mysterious Landscape’ was midway between painting and drawing, now she could achieve both separately. Which makes perfect sense. The painting and poster above differ wildly, but have one thing in common – they gain their effect through being true to their own form.

If Jansson had been granted her wish to become a full-time painter she’d have become an accomplished artist, but there wouldn’t be solo exhibitions of her today. It was in the illustrations where she excelled. Yet critics often indulge in an unspoken hierarchy of the arts. Painting is held to be innately superior to illustration, which itself gets to look down on comic art.

Though they never say so, and most likely never think it, their precious rarified values are actually driven by brute commerce. If art is not made for reproduction that throws a higher value on the original, which raises its preciousness. The point is to expose these loaded assumptions. Whereas the temptation, easier but mistaken, is to simply reverse them.

Jansson may well have genuinely preferred her painting to her other work, not just sought the greater cultural approval they might have brought. After all, accounts suggest she was a strong-willed individual. But even if she did that, it doesn’t mean we have to go along with her.

Though the twist in that tale is that her paintings occupy a separate category to her illustration work, and when she tries to blend the two the result is often something of a mish-mash. This would of course have fuelled the prejudices of critics, who could portray her painting as infected by her more vulgar illustrations. But that view works only from taking a very selective sample.

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY VISITS KIRKWALL...

...capital of Orkney, taking in Cathedrals, harbours and groatie houses along the way. Not long after I posted the last set I heard that the Ring of Brodgar had unfortunately been vandalised. Hope I'm not jinxing Kirkwall by posting these! Full set over on 500px.

MICHAEL ROTHER

Under The Bridge Club, London, Fri 5th Apr



Let’s try to sneak up on on the significance of Michael Rother a little obliquely…

Too much Seventies music took the rhythm section as a basic staple, the meat and potatoes of music. To give it taste meant smothering it in all sorts of sauces. Which makes about as much sense as physicists realising atoms were the building blocks of everything so deciding they could be taken for granted. But, like some parable where one brother’s folly was met by another’s wisdom, others focused in on that rhythm section.

After a brief stint in Kraftwerk, Michael Rother worked in two classic Krautrock outfts who did just that - Neu! And Harmonia. The rhythms are insistent and captivating without being assertive, drawing you in rather than bludgeoning you. (One reason why I think the dance music comparisons can be overdone.)

Though the bulk of this gig’s given over to his second solo album, ’Sterntaler’. He asked mid-set whether people knew this and seemed pleasantly surprised that they did. So he may figure it’s the solo years which need the signal boost.

I confess to only having listened to it after buying my ticket, and to not being massively taken. It’s a little one-note, and strays just the wrong side of the nebulous but all-important divide between serene and placid.

However, played live it seems to gain some oomph. On the album, though the great Jaki Liebezeit stepped in on drums, Rother played all the other instruments. So perhaps it lives and breathes more in the interplay of live players. I found I liked most the opening tracks, discovering only later they stemmed from the next release, ’Katzenmusik, which may be the point to start with the solo output.

However, the highpoint was still the finale, where Thurston Moore (who’d provided support) stepped in on guitar for some of the classic tracks, and things got truly sense-shredding.

Now sixty-eight, Rother is looking good on his years of serene music. He has one of those preternaturally youthful faces where the lines which cross it seem an irrelevance. Let’s hope regular listening can do the same for us.

Right act, right venue, but this clip’s from two-and-a-half years back. How to choose? The version I saw of the classic ’Negativland’ with Moore’s guitar, or this with double drummers?

“I WANTED A LANGUAGE OF MY OWN”: FUGAZI’S ‘13 SONGS’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

The grunge band Pearl Jam were once commended by a Guardian interviewer for their right-minded, if unsuccessful, attempts to challenge corporate price gougers Ticketmaster. But they brushed off the idea. "Bands like Fugazi,” they commented, “make us look like Mariah Carey."

Fugazi’s credo of punk as self-responsibility is effectively summed up on ‘Bad Mouth’: “Time is now, it's running out… /So you better start living the life that you're talking about.” The band formed in ‘87, after the first wave of hardcore punk, when many scene-setting bands had come and gone, and soon became the figureheads for DIY culture. (Own-label releases, no-overheads self-booked tours, lowest prices possible and so on.)

Yet what may have been exemplary also become an encumbrance. Too many responded either with shoulder-shrugging devotion-as-evasion (“if only we could all be like Fugazi”) or nit-pickingly, trying to catch them out over some trivial detail. Which misses the point twice over. First, isn’t that lyric addressed to us? Isn’t the question how we live our lives? Second, and more importantly, none of this would matter… in fact, most likely we wouldn’t even know of it… if Fugazi hadn’t been a great band.

As Andy Kellman of All Music Guide says: “if history is kind to Fugazi, their records won't be overshadowed by their reputation and methods of operation... they will instead be known for their intelligent songwriting and undeniably proficient musicianship.”

In ye olde days there was an endless slew of badly photocopied punk fanzines, full of interviews in five-point type where no-hope bands of interchangeable names. Each one would insist by rote they wouldn’t sell out for a million dollars. To which you always thought “of course you won’t, your band’s shit, mate.” Whereas Fugazi really were offered million-dollar deals by majors. Offers they turned down flat.

Fugazi were formed by Ian MacKaye, already a pioneer of the Washington DC hardcore scene. His previous outfits had been short-lived and beset by differences, with Minor Threat breaking up after band members wanted to - yes, really - sound more like U2. So he resolved to not launch into his next groupuntil everything, musically and ethically, seemed solid. (‘Waiting Room’, the opening track of the first album, is thought to concern this: “I won't make the same mistakes/ Because I know how much time that wastes/ Function is the key”.) Yet if it led to a band with a solid line-up for its sixteen-year history, perhaps it’s most important element came more by chance. Which was Gui Picciotto becoming second frontman.

Picciotto’s original outfit Rites of Spring released a total of one album and one EP, and performed a mere fifteen shows, all bar two in their native DC area. But they were the classic case of the small stone who produced huge ripples.

Simultaneously widening and personalising the subject matter of punk songs, they soon gained the tag ‘emo’. (Not at that point associated with tweeny angst-pop, though Picciotto was even then disdainful of the term. And MacKaye didn’t like it much either.) Introspective while fulsomely expressive, they seemed to recognise no distinction between personal transformation and social change. As their Stravinski-derived name might suggest, they reunited punk energy with the Romantic spirit, perhaps best captured in the lyric “the world is my fuse”

Picciotto later remembered: “The shows were always ‘events’ for us. Back then, a bad show was really crippling. Every show had to be momentous. We put everything into them. We treated them almost like religious occasions. The reaction we got was incredible.”

Whereas before Fugazi MacKaye’s main band,Minor Threat, were not just an originating but perhaps the default hardcore band. Notably theirs is the photo adorning Wikipedia’s entry on hardcore punk. Yet he became a keen fan of Rites of Spring,attending all their gigs and producing both their releases. And his next band, the short-lived Embrace, demonstrated their influence.To be frank, I suspect it was Rites of Spring who pushed MacKaye from a decent punk artist to a great one.

Yet Picciotto was not just the last member to join, the band were originally planned as a trio. His involvement slowly grew, from roadying to on-stage dancing, to backing vocals, finally to full member. (He’s later cheerfully admitted that had been his plan all along.)

Significantly, the original plan was for him to be MacKaye’s “foil”. (As Flava Flav had been for Chuck D, or Hanin Elias for Alec Empire.) Beginning with Lennon and McCartney, bands have often thrived off having two distinct but complementary songwriters to spark off one another. MacKaye’s songs were typically driving and relentless, developing an argument, pressing home a point. He retained from his Minor Threat days a love of punchy choruses, and the audience singalongs theyoften promoted. His key ability was to combine measuredness with frenzy. 

While Picciotto’s songs were torrentially emotive and allusive, romantic in the Rousseauian sense of the word. (A typical lyric of his: “He's alone/ His mind is his own town/ Where his thoughts run aground/ They fall all over and down”.)

As Michael Azarrad put it: “MacKaye’s sober athleticism found its polar opposite in Picciotto’s almost hammy sensuality, a formidable yin and yang that powered the band’s galvanic performances.”MacKaye jocularly compared their approaches to the drill sergeant and the mealy mouthed guy.

Azerrad’s also described Picciotto’s performance as “scenery-chewing”, and there is a sense in which he’s a Method actor’s idea of what a punk singer would do. Check out this version of ’Burning’,with his Marlon-Brando-as-dockworker vest and intensity, almost completely disregarding the audience. (The song also gives us our header, “I wanted a language of my own”.)



...now compare to Ian MacKaye on the afore-mentioned ’Bad Mouth’

The band commonly played all-ages shows at non-conventional venues, here the Sacred Heart Church in their native DC. The gig feels like a communalising experience, not just with the absence of a still figure in the house (well at least not anyone not wearing a yellow cap) but the lack of rigid dividing line between band and audience.



MacKaye’s Minor Threat songs had been quite narrow in content as well as style, a magnifying glass held over himself or the hardcore scene he inhabited. A scene that was male dominated, if not actively testosterone laden. So ’Suggestion’, (from the same gig) marked quite a major broadening of his interests. Written (controversially for some) from a women’s perspective, live it was often sung by a female guest vocalist. Here the duties are picked up by DC scene stalwart Amy Pickering.

For their part drummer Brendan Canty (who’d also been in Rites of Spring) and bassist Joe Lally made for an impressive and powerful rhythm section. But, unarguable as that is, it fails to capture their contribution. At the very start, it does seem MacKaye was writing songs then bringing them to the band to learn. But fairly soon compositions went through a group process, often assembled fromkit-partelements all four band members had come up with. (Tracks were always credited to the whole band.)

Which leads onto something else, associated but still more important. In rock music playing well is of marginal importance compared to playing together. Robert Fripp once said “It has nothing to do with self-expression, it has to do with a group mind.” A great band, who achieves that, will move and act as one. Fugazi, as anyone who caught them live could confirm, were a perfect case in point. You’d watch them thinking “I swear these guys must be telepathic or something”.

The art (not just music) that’s most impactful is often the art which achieves seamless integration of form and content, until it’s almost impossible to see the two as separate things. And Fugazi’s style perfectly blended with their stance, self-motivation combined with collective action.

And if any of that sounds like hyperbole, check out the band workout in this version of ’Glue Man’. The final track of the original EP was often used as a set closer as… well, this clip probably gives that away. Someone once sent me this link with the Andre Breton quote “beauty must be convulsive or not at all”. He wasn’t wrong.

The band’s first album ’13 Songs’, (officially a compilation of two earlier EPs), came out in 1989. All the songs linked or referred to above stem from it. Over seven albums the band’s style stretched, with an overall shift away from hardcore towards more of an ‘art rock’ sound. I read a review of one later album (in small type in some badly photocopied fanzine) which wouldn’t even give its title, so outraged were they by it not sounding “punk” any more. As should be needless to say, the most punk thing about Fugazi was that they never bothered about sounding ‘punk’. More importantly, the roots of their developments can already be heard in their first album. They took up a genre already thought standardised if not moribund, and breathed life into it.

MacKaye once said “How about at the end of Fugazi it said, 'they fucking did it their way'? And let's let that be the end.” And by the end the band had played over a thousand gigs around the world, normally all ages, normally for low door prices, always challenging crowd violence when it arose. “Better start living just like you’re talking about”? Pretty damn close.

Quotes and much of the info above from Michael Azerrad’s history of the Eighties American underground ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’(which has chapters on both Fugazi and Minor Threat) and ‘The Dance of Days’ by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins (a history of the Washington DC punk scene, through which the various members of Fugazi thread). Both books recommended. While for essential viewing - ‘Instrument’ is a documentary portrait by Jem Cohen, who used his close relations with the band, to assemble five years’ worth of footage. (‘Glue Man’ above is from the film.)

JAMES CHANCE + THE CONTORTIONS/ LOST PROPERTY ARTS COLLECTIVE (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

JAMES CHANCE + THE CONTORTIONS
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 16th March

None less than Simon Reynolds claimed that by “combining [James] Brown with Iggy [Pop], [James] Chance invented punk funk.” Legend has it that as the Eighties New York punk scene hated disco with a passion, finding it wishy-washy and platitudinous, his primary motive was simply to wind them up.

Though his take was unique. Talking Heads smartly espoused the very image every other dance outfit tried to suppress, the uptight white salary worker trying to loosen his tie for the weekend. Conversely, Chance took funk’s raw punch and married it to punk’s swift upper cut. Against David Byrne’s bespectacled nerd image, Chance collided punk with showbiz - with slicked back hair and Fifties suits. Band names varied, but tended to the classic Person and the Band formulation. But Chance and Byrne did something in common, both were white folks taking on a black influence their own way, without trying to merely imitate it.

Commercially, of course, one of these worked better than the other. The last time David Byrne played Brighton it was the Dome, I couldn’t afford a ticket and was told afterwards he was rubbish. Chance doesn’t even fill the smaller Haunt. His name seems a little more legendary than known. In fact, it was only spying him honking his horn in a recent BBC documentary on Basquiat, that I realised he was still around.

Truth to tell, it’s an oddly uneven set. I found the frequent cover versions just derailed momentum. Even when they were tracks I liked, such as Gil Scott Heron’s ’Home Is Where The Hated Is’. Chance’s voice doesn’t seem up to them, less in terms of singing ability than diction and phrasing. They seemed the sort of maketime venture you’d embark on if you didn’t have enough of your own material to fill a set. Hardly the case with Chance, which made their inclusion all the more puzzling. At such times I was reminded of seeing Ed Sanders playing with the next generation Fugs, an older star relying on a younger backing band to carry him through.

And yet what was especially odd was that when things worked they really worked. It had the involving dance-floor readiness of funk at the very same time it sounded askew and discombobulated. Though Chance is a free jazz fan, there’s only one total wig-out - right near the end. The sound may well be best summed up by the lyrics to his best-known track, ’Contort Yourself’, “Now is the time to lose all control/ Distort your body, twist your soul.”

The guitarist seemed especially gifted, able to come up with inventive breaks and flourishes, at one point just tapping the neck to shake the strings, while always keeping the beat.

Listen, for example, to ‘Do The Splurge’ and try to tell me this is not a fine thing…



James Chance & The Contortions - "Do the splurge" from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.


LOST PROPERTY ARTS COLLECTIVE
Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, Fri 15th March

Lost Property, the folk who put on the famed Fort Process festival, explain this event thusly: “In the spirit of the creative happenings of the Sixties, Brighton Arts Lab is a new bi-monthly event, serving up performances, spoken word, workshops, film and exhibitions. Each event is themed around different aspects of creativity.”

Jobina Tinnemas’ set seemed more effective than the earlier one at the Radio Three Exposure festival. An engaging character, she worked better in the smaller venue. She’d cheerily explain the workings of her kit and sources of her samples, as if we’d all been invited back to hers. I was less keen on her final piece, however, which brought in overly familiar regular dance beats

Unsoundproofed central venues often suffer from street noise. Yet Anti-Pattern (aka Al Strachan) smartly summoned and incorporated it, by placing a microphone outside the window. Playing in the main corridor, essentially one long window, the street outside became effectively one giant visual to his work. You had to keep telling yourself the sounds weren’t inbuilt.

Ed Briggs started out with some fairly regular organ sounds, which could have passed as a stab at Bach, only to then take off into realms unknown. Two players worked one organ. At one point, as one worked keys and the other pedals, it sounded in no way like a single instrument. The set was only marred by an outbreak mid-way of Industrial Satanist vocals, which seemed straight out of Eighties cliche-dom. (You know the sort of thing. “I will tar your very soul. I will scratch your car door up and down, and not even say I’m sorry.”)

Fettucini Spicer improvised while facing off against one another, rival sonic arsenals set before them, like Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in some Surreal duel.

Stone Cornelius’ miked-up-knitting piece seemed mere gimmickry to me. But overall, the success rate was high and the night had a good feeling to it. The Phoenix Gallery works well, not only taking it away from regular rock venues but, multi-roomed, able to keep the action going. More seems promised, which we can only hope for.

Jobina Tinnemans…



Jobina Tinnemans - "Varesotto" from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.


…Ed Briggs, though here called Black Tiger…



Black Tiger from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.


…and last, but not least, Antipattern with cameo street sounds…



Antipattern from Agata Urbaniak on Vimeo.