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.

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY LIKES A GOOD STONE CIRCLE...

...and fortunately Orkney is festooned with them! Plus Maes Howe, which is a Neolithic burial chamber rather than a stone circle, but impressive all the same. No villagers chanting "Happy Day" were present at time of visit...

As ever, full set on 500px.

TOTAL IMMERSION: LIGETI (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Barbican, London, Sat 2nd March

The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti… you’ve probably heard his music even if you don’t know the daunting-sounding name. For Stanley Kubrick was wont to use it in his films, principally ‘2001’. And his influence remains strong enough for the Barbican to stage a day-long series of concerts, of which I was only able to catch the evening.

Though he was composing earlier, the Sixties saw him hit on his mature style. He’s quoted in the programme as saying “I have always been looking for an alternative to the 12-note temperament”. And he became interested in what we’d now call World music, not to imitate or incorporate it but to find life outside the conventions of Western harmony. Imagine if visual art had not been confined just to subject matter but to colour, with three agreed shades or green and purple unheard of.

Instead, in the pioneering ’Atmospheres’ (1961), he used ‘sound masses’ where instruments cluster together rather than contribute individual lines, producing ‘adjacent’ sounds to one another which need to be heard in combination. Imagine the difference between ballet, where figures dance in synchronisation but stay separate, to circus acrobats climbing and jumping all over each other. And the piece is exhilarating to listen to to this day, particularly to witness regular classical instruments emitting such unearthly sounds.

His mention of “12-note” refers to then fashionable Serialism. And it’s notable that, quite unlike Serialism, the piece has great dynamics. It just achieves them without the normal standards of musical progression. It’s been described by Harold Kaufman as "a magma of evolving sound”.

The next piece, at least chronologically, was ’Clocks and Clouds’ (1972/3). In a nice anecdote, the programme explains the title comes from a Karl Popper lecture he attended. The then-standard notion of physics was that the sub-atomic world, with its quirky quarks and other weirdly behaving particles, was one thing and the clockwork order of the stars and the planets another. Whereas Popper insisted on a continuity between order and chaos, between clocks and clouds.

I’ve often compared contemporary music of this era to experiencing a weather front. And by extension of Popper’s metaphor, much of the appeal comes from perceiving an order to the music which you can’t quite discern. It’s like receiving an alien radio signal which is compelling for hovering on the periphery of decipherability. The voices in ’Clocks and Clouds’ particularly suggest this. And, possibly by co-incidence, as Ligeti grew up in the Eastern block, he first heard contemporary music by illegally tuning into German radio stations.

The programme also included ’San Francisco Polyphony’ (1973/4) and two much later pieces, after Ligeti had returned from a break from composing. In the intervening time his sonic cosmonaut adventures had fallen more into earth’s orbit. As suggested by the tiles of both ’Piano Concerto’ (1985/8) and ’Violin Concerto’ (1989/93) their return to convention even extends to having a lead instrument. There’s quotes from the man to suggest that, once the unexpected is expected from you, the thing to do becomes the expected.

It’s true that ’Atmospheres’ packs more in it’s nine dense minutes than ’Violin Concerto’ does in twenty-eight. And the concertos might have worked better programmed alongside one another, despite their greater length. But their most interesting feature was their lack of interest in, to use a current political term, ‘centrism’. Instead of making their prridge meh they span the dial all the way from the most regular clocks to the most ungraspable clouds. The programme describes ’Violin Concerto’ as “a labyrinth in which some paths were familiar, some weirdly unfamiliar, and one could never guess when the music might flip from one to another.”

And ’Violin Concerto’ in particular is interesting for a return to folk influences of his younger years. At times the lead violin seems to be echoed in a distorting mirror of the ensemble, where they’d mangle his melodies and hand them back to him. Yet at others they’d provide melodies of their own.

Though Liegti knew Stockhausen, one of the other great contemporary composers of the era, he only very briefly dallied with electronic sounds. In fact, though the music’s quite different, there’s more of a parallel in approach to the American Minimalists. Both saw World music as an escape from an impasse Western composition had mired itself in, and so stuck to ‘standard’ instruments. Both eschewed a hierarchy of instruments and musical progression. Both later decided that their own rules now risked becoming restrictions, and tried to reconcile themselves with the Western tradition.

Depending on your whereabouts and whenabouts, you may be able to hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer.

And you’ll know this…

“SOMETHING HAPPENED ON THE DAY HE DIED”: DAVID BOWIE’S ‘BLACKSTAR’

Bowie’s ’Blackstar’… okay, I’m coming a little late to this one. But its very existence is heartening to me. It may have taken someone who hailed from the days from when ‘LPs’ were ‘released’ (instead of ‘items’ being added to ‘feeds’) to rekindle the feeling of an LP being released, but let’s just focus on the fact we got there.

And for me it’s extra sweet. Before the end of the Eighties I’d finally got over my fervent youthful denunciations of his “selling out” and simply stopped thinking about him. Then, slowly and surely, it became the musical equivalent of people’s paths diverging only to come back together later in life. As if he’d become bored of attending award shows and glitzy parties, and decided he was really one of us outsider types after all. Culminating in an album that genuinely bears comparison to his Seventies stuff.

So it seems gloriously old-fashioned the way so many people devoted so much webspace to raking over every utterance and studying the cover for “clues”, even if there was little of quality analysis amid that width. They roved from Norwegian villages to computer code, hoping to overturn so many stones that surely something useful will be stumbled upon. But however absurd the exercise it does hearken back to the days when an album being released was an event, like a monolith being found on the moon, around which the rest of life would have to reorient itself.

And I wonder if, with the title track in particular, it wasn’t preloaded for that response, to both provoke and stymie it. With any piece of music, you’ll hear the sound of the voice before you take in any words, which will inevitably colour the lyrics. And there’s two distinct vocal lines in this song, even if both are provided by Bowie himself. The ceremonial voice which opens the track is like the musical equivalent of a Greek chorus, describing things, setting the scene.

The other voice, sounding more like a regular Bowie vocal, slips between first and second person. But both are concerned with the actions of a character. It behaves like a lead vocal, the ceremonial voice slipping into backing vocals when it’s around. In other words, the first vocal frames the second, both in form (the song being palindromic in structure) and in content. As if the track has its own inbuilt audience. In the video he ‘plays’ the two voices as different characters.

“At the centre of it all” is nothing that radiates but a blackstar, defined as a set of absences (“I’m not a filmstar… a popstar… a marvel star” and so on.) A corpse in a spacesuit. Bowie often demonstrated a Dylanish disdain for pinning songs to ‘meanings’, and here the compound word title brings together ‘centre of attention’ and ‘blank slate’. Maybe his last words to us all were “you try making some sense of this stuff if you want. Me, I have somewhere I need to be…” While at the same time saying, in Lennon’s teasing words, “here’s another clue for you all”. And, to quote him from another track on the same album, “ain’t that just like me?”

So why do that? Bowie had a wry sense of humour. But that’s not the whole of it. Scanning songs for ‘clues’, like they’re puzzle games or detective stories, is clearly not the right way to respond to them. It borders on category error. But in its klunking, gormless way it clutches at something important. Art is not a work email or a note left out for the milkman. It’s not a switchboard for conveying straightforward information. The artist only launches the artwork, lets it loose in the world. From thereon in, it’s up to you, the listener, to make your own sense of it.

‘CARNIVAL OF SOULS’

As I’m going to be cavalier with PLOT SPOILERS here I’m just going to assume this classic horror film doesn’t need much introduction from me. Besides, it’s become public domain so can be watched on-line by anyone who has a mind to. Here’s the edited highlights… 1962… American independent feature… produced not so much quickly as guerrilla style… no success even as a B feature… director, producer and co-writer Herk Harvey consequently never made another feature… later became cult classic… powerful cinematography… eerie and atmospheric… all of that.

Clearly this is not a film that’s about its plot or even its themes, they’re really just a means by which it might evoke its creepy atmosphere. Something that’s very often true of good films, which will create their own world rather than mimic an existing one, but more true of a film like this. Its mood haunts you as much as it does its chief character. However, as a holder for that mood it does create a mystery.

And there’s a predominant theory for deciphering it. The majority of the film is a dream sequence that, in a pre-echo of ’Inception’, plays outside of clock time, between the crashing car hurtling off the bridge and hitting the water. Which is why we return to the bodies in the car at the end, after the character Mary had initially seemed to somehow escape.

Seen this way the menacing Man who Mary keeps seeing (above) is Death. Self-described as “a person of strong will”, she attempts to impose her own death-defying narrative where she not only defies the crash but starts a new life in a new town. Death, inevitably enough, catches up with her. While, already touched by death, she can’t make any real contact with the living.

And there’s certainly arguments for this. She’s horrified by and runs from him. Yet at the same time she’s drawn to the liminal space of the lakeside Pavilion. At one point at a bus station she can hear nothing save for a distorted tannoy announcement that a bus is leaving. She boards it, to find it full of ghouls welcoming her aboard. In the well-known climactic ballroom scene, the ghouls dance in couples while the Man stretches out his hand to her - as if this is the company in which she belongs. Even as she runs from Death she’s drawn to him, in a sublimated death drive.

There’s also the recurrence of both water and the spectral, swirling organ music. In fact the film seems to associate the two - we first hear that music as the camera moves into close-ups of the river. In Freudian psychology, often beloved of horror films, both bridges and water occupy a liminal space between life and death.

And if there’s two hallucinatory scenes within the main film they’re normally regarded as, in a further pre-echo of ’Inception’, a dream within a dream. (At least one isn’t actually a dream, but that’s how they’re commonly referred to.)

All of which is laid out with rather witless literalism by the poster tagline “she was a stranger among the living” (above). Later reissues came complete with “is there death after life?” and “she escaped death, now it wants her back.” Though all this telegraphing may well not be Harvey’s intent. Distribution rights soon fell outside his control. And with at least one poster which went for the absurdly salacious (below), it seems reasonable not to take them as authorial statements.

But…

‘Invaders From Mars’ (1953) is another American independent production built around a film-long dream sequence. But it’s noted for the “dreamlike Surrealism” of its design. While the majority of ’Carnival Of Souls’ is set in an ostensibly ‘real world’. (Filmed on location in Lawrence, Kansas and Salt Late City.)

For example, the petrol pump attendant who describes the Pavilion to her is assigned the horror movie role of the Harbinger. But his description is simply informative. (And remarkably close to the actual history of the place.)

If the film’s conceit is that this is all a dream or hallucination Mary’s having, which we get to experience, then to include scenes she’s not present in is a strange decision. Admittedly there aren’t many of these, but they occur. In one, almost at the finale, her final footprints are traced by a cop. The ghouls pursuing her, being spectral things, have left no marks - while hers just end, as she’s taken. Which ‘makes sense’, within the narrative logic of horror films, of what’s just happened. Which would be a peculiar scene to insert if Mary was imagining the whole thing, Pavilion setting and all, from inside a car currently striking a lake.

And more importantly, if the main part of the film is a dream sequence, why are the dreams-within-a-dream so distinct from it? They’re as ‘dreamy’, as disruptive of narrative rules, as it is naturalised.

In a famous quote Mary says “I don't belong in the world - that's what it is. Something separates me from other people.” And she’s often shown literally shutting people out, from her room in the boarding house or locking her car doors. You could picture a scenario where she seemingly escapes the crash, yet is heartbreakingly invisible to her friends and family. But that’s not the film we see.

The “something” that separates seems there from the beginning. The film starts with another girl driving the car she’s in, eagerly accepting the boys’ challenge to a race. Yet when we cut to Mary she looks at first detached and then apprehensive.

Her work as a church organist is partly devised to mark her out as alongside but not part of the congregation, turning down a social invitation to meet them. Yet she seems to have the job lined up before the accident, and travels off to it very shortly afterwards. And another character confirms: “She’s always kept pretty much to herself.”

And if it’s not death that prevents her from belonging, that would seem to work better the other way around - it’s this detachment from life which pushes her towards death.

Seen this way, the Man isn’t death so much as… well, man. There’s times he just appears, at the car window or in the boarding house hallway. But he will also displace, and be displaced by, other male characters. This includes, in a bit of a cheesy shock, the Psychiatrist in his office. But she also imagines the Man’s hands grabbing hers over the organ, which then transform into the priest’s. (A moment captured on the film poster.)

Look again at the opening. Boy racing is a staple of films from this era. But they will almost always involve girls as passengers, choruses to the action. Here a car of boys races a car of girls, which more accurately sums up the teen years when the two sexes start to take a sideways interest in one another.

Which seems to conflate the near-universal wish for a place in the world with the desire for a man. Mary claims to have no such desires, and with her work as a musician seems set on financial independence.

This was a time when ‘nice girls’ were supposed to have no sexual yearnings of their own. Yet at the same time a rejection of male desire was medicalised as ‘frigidity’. Which seems something of a Catch 22.

The film would make an interesting compare and contrast to Polanski’s ’Repulsion’ (1965). Which creates a paradox. We watch a woman succumbing to hysteria, where the more she cracks the more thrilling the film becomes, her hysteria equalling our enjoyment. Yet in both films we don’t just take on the protagonist’s perspective, we see the world quite literally through her eyes. (Apart from Mary, it’s only us who see the Man.) So both films are structured in such a way as to invite sympathy for her.

Take for example Mr. Linden (above), who literally sticks his foot in her door and continually tries to ply her with drink, is clearly presented as a louche, predatory creep. It’s not our seeing him that way with hindsight. Yet, rather than responding like a smalltown innocent, Mary’s immediate response is to keep trouble at bay. This is shown less as ‘frigidity’ and more as levelheadedness. She does consent to go out somewhere with him, but that’s an indication that she’s so desperate for human company that even he’ll do. Any louse in a storm.

So despite the archetypal hysterics perhaps we could see her as a pre-feminist heroine. The impossibility of her situation becomes a microcosm of a woman’s place in this era. Alone in a man’s world, effectively deprived of solidarity from other women, she inevitably cracks under the pressure. Yet, a person of strong will, she goes down fighting. Which would be a tempting line to take. It would mean that, while the film may trade in sexist tropes, it also challenges them.

However, there’s multiple problems with this. First, Mr. Linden seems more a detail of the film than a component. It would be relatively easy to edit him out without leaving much of a hole. (One reason he may loom larger in the film than he might is that Sidney Berger’s smarmy, hyperactive portrayal is so effective in a film where wooden acting’s the norm.)

More interestingly, he’s very much the exception to a rule. While almost all the other men in the film are presented as reiterations of a type - someone older and not just unthreatening but relatively kindly. The Man therefore becomes something like their id figures. In short, the Man’s not just the Man, he’s the anti-Father.

There’s one passing suggestion she sees “her folks” before she leaves for the city, to which she gives the evasive reply “No, I can't. I.. I must hurry. I've got to leave.” Partially of course this refers to the classic fool’s errand of trying to outrun death. But why bring her folks into it at all?

That evasion, what if it hints at child abuse? This may sound like a lot of narrative weight to load onto what’s essentially an ellipse, but given the censorship rules at the time its something which could only be referred to obliquely.

Young victims can sometimes form a bifurcated view in which the providing parent and malevolent abuser are conceived as two separate people. Which would perfectly fit the succession of kindly father figures and their recurring ghoul-like shadow. Though, rather than retreat into ‘frigidity’, the abuse victim will more typically fall to the other extreme, failing to maintain non-sexual relationships. However, ‘frigidity’ does more match movie psychology - it takes well to the screen, doesn’t risk censorship and seems more sympathetic.

So is the film really about a woman’s mind trying, and inevitably failing, to rationalise child abuse? Has the real horror happened before the film starts, and Mary’s hallucinations manifest as some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?

Perhaps. But when rival interpretations of an artwork prove persuasive our first question should be whether they really need to be seen as rivals, whether we have to choose between them. Is the Man Death, Man or Anti-Father? Maybe the best answer there is yes.