Friday 18 July 2008

Book art piece for Insight

Since early 2008, including the amazing Blood On Paper at the V&A, there's been a really pleasing growth in that whole book art thing. In June 2008 we decided to cover its impact in Brighton.

A new generation of book artists have been quietly redefining everything you know about the tied and bound for over a decade – and judging many a book by its cover. With an international event on our doorstep in July, Charlie Jones has a pressing engagement.
A new global generation of artists are basing work on the printed and bound – remaking novels, rescuing pulped fiction, printing on potato and fur and creating fine art from £5 paperbacks. For these artists, the printed page is a way of creating art itself, rather than a means of reproducing existing work. It’s a broad church, ranging from Dieter Roths early experiments stuffing crap lit into sausage skins, to David Shrigely’s horror-drawings to Denise Hawrysio’s bound Union Jacks to Sam Winston’s word remodeling. It’s subversive, quaint and literate art in the midst of a renaissance that recalls the installationist’s rise in the early seventies. Most exciting of all, many leading lights are coming to Brighton this month for a one-day symposium.
“Eight years ago, no-one had heard of book art, but now almost every art school will offer a course in it. It’s a very exciting time,” says Sarah Bodman, editor of Artists Books Yearbook, the definitive international journal on the form. Sarah, who was introduced to book art when she happened across a handwritten stream of consciousness inside a novel in her university library nearly twenty years ago, is speaking at the Books That Fly event this month at the University of Brighton, a conference and two-week summer school bringing together typographers, artists, academics and writers from around the world. This exhibition comes hot on the tails of last months Phoenix gallery collection, Press and Release, a show of independent and small scale publishing, including many Book Artists, and one of the country’s leading Book Art shop is on Bedford place – Permanent, a group who specialize in small run art books. Lee Shearman of the shop: “It’s been huge recently! It’s exploded, just in the last year. Every month we hear of more event, more artists, more places. I really don’t know what has created this, but that’s the way with inspiration, isn’t it? Someone does something amazing, that makes people go ‘wow, I could do that’ and so these scenes happen.”
Brighton is one of countless hubs worldwide. Sarah Bodman:“Is it a global movement? Very much so! There are practitioners based on every continent, with incredible regional variation. With the new possibilities of internet publishing, it’s easier than ever to get works made – twenty years ago it would cost £100 to make a book, but today you can make one for a fiver, meaning that the person on the street can take home an piece of art.”
permanentbookshop.com
bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Brighton bound – our list of local bookies

John Dilnot
Through his beautiful re-renderings of milk packaging designs, bad-apple guides and the like, John Dilnot’s work is both weightily political and playfully subtle, and that's all for the better.

Illustrator's Elbow
A newly formed group of 20-odd artists currently studying at the University of Brighton, working in drawing, printing, painting, photography and book-making.

Borbonesa Publishing
A collective of writers and artists who design and make conceptual occasional papers, currently working with filmmaker Jeff Keen to republish RAYDAY, a private broadsheet from the 1960s.

Advertising piece for BlowBack



This little wonder featured first in BlowBack, a sadly missed street-style publication.


Late in 2005, everyone’s favourite monobrowed monkey Noel Gallagher was spitting blood at Jack White for writing a song for Coca-Cola. "What the f**k is he playing at? He dresses like f***ing Zorro on doughnuts! What the f**k is that about? He ceases to be in the club. He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking… I'm not having that, it's f***ing wrong.” A song! For Coca-Cola! Cue a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from the indie fraternity. “Sell out” was thrown about on blogs and broadsheets the world over. Principles not price, man! So far, so standard, just another easy tirade. The weird world of music licensing – when a track is allowed (licensed) to be broadcast – was made a little weirder a few weeks later. When all the dust had settled and Oasis made a quiet announcement. Their All Around The World had been sold for a AT&T ad.

There is an imagined time, somewhere before that Phat Planet Guiness ad, even before Kurt was horrified to find out Teen Spirit was a deodorant brand, when advertising was a filthy word. When no cool, alternative musician would consider letting a dirty ad man at his or her songs. When Babylon Zoo or Stiltskin could be laughed out of town for jumping on a Levis TV spot. A lot of this must be hazy nostalgia for a vaguely “realer” time, but a quick look over who’s been licensing what so far this year raises a few eyebrows. Bands on ads in 2007? They’re cool. Commercialbreaksandbeats.co.uk - an online database of music used on UK ad spots – reads like a Dazed and Confused contents page, with turns by Devandra Banhart, Black Keys, Fujia & Miyage, New Young Pony Club, Colder and Roxy Music all listed this year alone. Artists that were once spoken of in hushed, reverent tones by musos, like Vashti Bunyan or Arthur Russell, now feature on phone adverts. Most surprisingly of all, hardly anyone calls them a sell out.

Not to say that every licensed band out there are willing to drop their trousers for the next adman that calls. Far from it, these bands are reacting to – and acting in – a world that’s incredibly brand savvy. For Ayla Owen, Director of Music at Leap, the music licensing and publishing house behind Levis’ and KFC’s legendary soundtracks, “these bands are very aware of how their music is presented. Some brands are more attractive than others, but they don’t just want to know about the brand itself, they want to know about the director and the script.” This is one of the reasons that bands are happy to be used in commercials - their sheer quality. We all know that Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer and Michel Gondry started out directing adverts and we’ve all cooed over Sony’s coloured balls and paint splashes. Advertising is an established step on the trail for almost any ‘creative type,’ whether you’re a writer, a director, a musician - or indeed a music exec. This removes both the stigma of the dreaded corporate dollar and the fear that the ad might turn out a bit, well, shoddy. Abla El-Sharnouby, head of publishing at Five Missions More, a music publishing and licensing consultancy with MTV and The Beeb in their portfolio had a few words to say on the subject. “Creatives [at advertising agencies] speak the same language as musicians: they’ll want to make a cutting-edge ad with the best underground music. Even if that’s not exactly what the clients themselves want,” she laughs. Music selection is an incredible creative process in itself. Sam Reid from Hear No Evil, a Soho music consultancy could be talking about DJing when he says “it’s a very fun but subjective job. You really can’t put your finger on what makes an ideal track – some songs just fit.” Needless to say, most bands don’t have an issue with “fitting in.”



Bands aren’t selling out: they’re buying in, and are very clued up about how they’re doing this. This is the "myspace generation", after all: image is everything for a new band, and its kissing cousin self-promotion needs a tight control over how images are used. Fine for The Clash to finally reach number one on the heels of a Levis ad, with Should I Stay..., but when Joe Strummer’s image was used for a Doc Martins ad, heads rolled. Using images from photo library Corbis, ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi showed the icon in heaven wearing DMs underneath a toga – a clanger so bad it lost Saatchi the contract, and the person responsible for distributing the picture had their employment “considered.” Promotion and control are the key, but it’s got to be the right situation, the right ad and the right product. “Association with a ‘cool’ brand is great for a band, and it’s not seen as working for ‘the man’ in the same way as it might have been. Look at how many kids there are wearing Puma or Nike T-Shirts – they are essentially happily wearing an advert,” says Ayla. “It’s brand association.”

Punting your track out to an agency is more than locking onto a ‘cool’ brand – for an even vaguely alternative artist, it’s a way of contacting and connecting with a far, far wider audience than an independent or below-radar label could hope for. Abla: “a prime-time ad reaches literally millions of people, millions of people that might never come into contact with that artist. Just look at Nina Simone: thirty seconds on a Muller advert and a new Best Of is released” Whatever misgivings a listener might have about an artist’s five decade-long career being crammed into a thirty second yogurt ad, it didn’t lose her estate anything: 2006’s Very Best Of Nina Simone’s first track was Ain’t Got No, I Got A Life, and was one the year’s best sellers. While bands selling huge quantities by being “that band off that advert” is nothing new – just ask Babylon Zoo – the need for publicity is far bigger today than it ever has been, simply because it is harder to make a the same splash in the far bigger ocean. The price of launching a band in 2007 is astronomical – The Guardian set it at a cool £594,000, with each TV ad weighing in at £10,000. Abla: “we really try to promote music that wouldn’t be heard otherwise, that would be pitched otherwise. More independent, alternative, underground, whatever, artists are being featured on ads. It’s now far cheaper to feature a song by an up-and-coming artist than it was even two or three years ago, because of increased demand and there are also just so many bands out there.”

The digital revolution has provided a multitude of different places for advertisers to associate themselves with ‘cool’ bands, from viral marketing to podcasts. “There are so many avenues you could go down for entertainment,” says Abla. “Which means that people are very sophisticated about what entertainment they consume.” Ayla of Leap agrees. “I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a purely digital superstar – someone who side-stepped traditional record companies and was marketed entirely online.” The story’s subtext is the much publicised death of the record industry. June saw the closure of the country’s biggest “independent” store, Fopp, and the release of Prince’s new album, given away with every Mail on Sunday, and the ongoing nosedive of album sales. The industry is in dire straits. Advertising might just be part of the solution. Before music is declared D.O.A., let’s raise a glass for the ambulance chasers. Sell out? No sell out!

Foals FACT 7 of the year



In which I get very excited about Hummer, Foals' unmistakably brilliant single, and interview the singer Yannis, for FACT magazine

Hummer dropped in April, and – to be frank – it wiped the bleedin’ walls with us. Eight months on, it still leaves us gasping. Despite being an attempt to transcribe minimal techno’s precision and rigour to fuck-up the peculiar mixture of try-hard laziness that infects today’s dull-as-dishwater indie scene, Hummer is as sonically breathtaking a call-to-arms as rock’n’roll ever has heard. Yes, it is precise and unnervingly accurate from conception to execution, but it’s also a breathless, sweaty affirmation of youthful destruction, snotty arrogance and rhythmic raw power. Rather than the measured, perfection it was aping, there is the furious, vainglorious tumult of ideas – its drums alone bring to mind Don Cabellero, Topper Heddon, The Field, Neu, Timbaland and Fela Kuti – that only the most thrilling singles have. Just ten seconds are allowed to pass before the tugging hook snares you – this song is so desperately full of fresh ideas, impertinent diffidence and ruthless unwillingness to conform that seizes this hour, this minute, this second by the jugular before it skids, grazed, to a halt. Hummer is an obnoxious, snotty record, a song which head-butts every tepid, lazy stylistic cliché that surrounds modern indie; and that, ironically, is the most perfect an argument for independent guitar music I can think of.

FOALS INTERVIEW:

Foals have had a pretty damn good year. In summer 2006, they were a twinkle in the eyes of a set of Oxford mathrock and techno-loving student students. Eighteen months later, they’ve wowed crowds at stadiums to squats from here to Texas, dropped Kompakt mixes and had their choons played on Skins – all this at just two Transgressive singles (there’s the third, Balloons, out on 10th December) and a live EP old. To top it all, they’re received the coveted (and entirely imaginary) FACT 7” Of The Year gong for their April single Hummer. With a new, Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio-produced album in the bag, we chatted to their tea-sipping vocalist Yannis.

So, you’ve won the 7” of the year…
Yeah, we’re really surprised. We really like FACT, you’re quite discerning. We haven’t quite accepted it.

2007 went pretty well, eh?
Yeah, it was pretty wild, I guess. A year ago we weren’t yet signed, and yeah, we’ve come a long way I suppose. The thing is that it doesn’t really register when you’re in the middle of it, but it does feel like we’re getting more reactions at shows, which is weird because we only started this band to irritate our friends by trying to write pop songs and be banal. You know, show that music is about communication, not just displays of virtuosity. We just wanted to make fresh and authentic pop music.

Do you feel like you’ve done that?
We don’t know – we’re a small family and we stick together, it’s hard to see outside of that. The angst, self-doubt and criticism are still there. We’re quite agitated, so we have to keep moving.

How was the recording of Hummer, and how do you feel it matches up?
We wanted it to sound very clinical, like we were trying to be tight, not slapdash, drawing influence from every single note and piece of sound, so the overall big “sound” was constructed out of lots of little sounds working against each other. When we were recording it, we were shacked up and getting drunk, playing horseshit and making pop songs. The irony is that I don’t ever listen to it know – it’s not my favourite song. I must have listened to it 700 times when we were mastering it, so by the time we heard it finally we couldn’t tell if was good or not. We just wanted to get it out before we split up.

What music have you enjoyed this year?
Cornelious’ record was amazing, such sumptuous production. Yeasayer are so fucking tribal it’s unbelievable. Fuckbuttons are awesome, so are Metronomy and Cut Off Yr Hands. I know it’s a bit old, but the whole Dubstep thing is awesome, especially Burial. There’s a really cool noise thing happening in Oxford – it’s like a reaction against all these really technical bands, just like punk reacting against prog. There’s lots of bands who just don’t give a fuck and just want to make loads of noise. Timbaland is breathtaking, still. It’s like, with all these amazing things happening, why fucking bother making music that sounds like it is ten years old?

What have been the highlights of your year?
Doing an album with Dave Sitek in New York – just incredible, he’s a fucking genius, so playing and getting high all day in New York… and playing on Jules Holland was great. Generally though, it’s been playing and touring which has been amazing and not having to work a shitty job. This music is like knives; we’re making knives to cut things with, and people reactions seem good. We still love playing house parties.

What are the reactions like?
It gets very energetic. Jimmy broke his tooth one time… There’s also something that comes out when we play – people rip down and kick though walls. It’s like this weird, primal urge that comes out when we play. You see someone fucking up their house because they’re so wild, which is always odd. You’re like “Why are you hanging off your light?”

What are the lowlights?
Never having enough time to read.

Nancy elizabeth review for Fact


Nancy Elizabeth
Battle and Victory
Leaf

Nancy Elizabeth sounds like the most extraordinary hit-your-head-off-your-desk, whimpering-like–a-demented-man-child minimal folk that comes out of nowhere, like ghosts from the battle of Hastings playing samurai harps made from widow’s hair, and it’s awesome, till you realize she’s on Leaf. When you’re share a label with Murcof, Colleen, Susuma Yakota and Efterklang, that’s kind of taken as given. Still, it’s a damn good album, with the kind of imaginative folk that is giving the north-west (she’s a Wigan las) such a good name at the moment.

What strikes you about Nancy’s music is how spectacularly poised and still it sounds – unlike Seth Lakeman, to whom she is oft compared, nothing is rushed. ‘Hey Son’s’ swirling harps are played almost Satie-slow, with her voice – a soft yet throaty howl not a million miles away from Beth Orton or Joni Mitchell – ripping the fuck out of the chorus with the supreme, practiced gravitas. ‘Coriander’ is another revelation – though the key instrument is hand-plucked Thai Khim, and other instruments on Battle and Victory have similarly alien tones, from Appalachian dulcimers to Celtic harps, her music is refreshingly grounded in the music of our Scepter’d Isle. This album was recorded entirely in a stone cottage in Wales, and Christ does it show – if, like me, you occasionally like to pretend to be a medieval Welsh freedom-fighter escaping with your ragged band through the valleys while running for the tube, this is the album for you.

Arthur Russell doc piece for Dazed




A news piece in Dazed and Confused’s October 2007 issue


“Another Thought: The Arthur Russell Revival Peaks With New Documentary”

Arthur Russell has always cried out for a biography. An obscenely gifted classical cellist, singer and disco producer, he was a student of north Indian music in Buddhist communes who moved East to NY when disco was bubbling under and collaborated with everyone from Phillip Glass to Larry Levan In eighties New York, he perfected his mix of outsider pop and spectral, mutant disco until his tragic, AIDs related death in 1992. While Soul Jazz and Rough Trade’s superb compilations, and Jens Lekman’s recent EP of Russell covers have brought him out of the cold, much of the man behind the music remains obscured by myth. A new film is set to change all that with a documentary about his life and times. “I wanted to take a fairly experimental approach to Arthur’s music. What I ended up doing is closer to a documentary with a full story told by Arthur’s friends and family, one that’s saturated with lots of visual material and archival clips,” says director Matt Wolf. “Arthur’s story is about more than just his experience as an individual—it’s about a particularly fertile period in downtown New York’s cultural history, it’s about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it’s about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—but I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch.”

www.arthurrussellmovie.com/
The film will be released in early 2008.

[ends]

Radio review, ThreeWeeks


A theatre review, published in ThreeWeeks, Edinburgh, August 2006:

Radio - Kandinsky
When I was 6 my dad told me that the gold sheet around the lunar module that sent those to the moon in 1968 was thinner than the plastic film round his packet of B&H. For some reason I remembered that halfway through 'Radio': the idea that something so everday and simple could be trusted to perform that beautiful and dangerous action. 'Radio' does not walk that fine line between lightness and depth as fly ten thousand miles above it: it is a one-man play about radio, love, family, duty, space travel, dreams, youth, the 60's, America. A colossal talent has arrived in Al Smith: this is such an elegantly written, acted and directed piece of theatre that it transcends theatre itself. Remember this play: Radio defies gravity.
Smirnoff Underbelly, 3-27 Aug, 4.30pm (5.15pm), prices vary, fpp200
tw 5/5 [cj]

Taher Deghayes, Insight


Taher Deghayes’ brother Omar was illegally held in Guantánamo Bay for five years by the US military, and I drank tea with him on the day on after Omar's release, in his Saltdean living room while his brother slept upstairs in his bed for the first time in half a decade. One of the most surreal and, I'm almost ashamed to say, moving interview's I've ever done. Insight, March issue:


Community
For the last six years, our lives have been Omar. He has framed every family debate we have had. Our mother is the centre of the family and there has not been a night that she has not thought of Omar. However, it’s made us stronger as a family, because we have stuck together throughout all of this. The sense of community has been incredible – I never realised how many caring people there are around you, until this happened. I would always look at those people who handed out the Socialist Worker and I would think that they were nutters, but it’s these nutters who have been ensuring that our democracy is safeguarded that our basic values and human rights are observed. The sancity of human life and the appreciation of our fundamental rights and values is what makes us civilized in the so-called West. It’s the best system that I believe to exist, is this thing – above anything else – that makes me proud to be British.

Moral strength
As a family, we were always brought up to differ, to disagree, to hold different opinions. In Guantánamo Bay, it was the members of al-Qaeda who were released one year in, because they knew how to keep their head down and not anger the guards, they knew what to do in prison, but my brother, because of how he was raised, and because of the fact he was English and held a law degree, would not bow his head, he kept on criticizing the guards and pointing out abuse where he saw it. This is why they did not let him go. When I saw him, I was so worried that they would have broken his spirit – I mean, there were days when I thought that I could not cope with it – but when I saw him in court yesterday [we spoke to Taher the day after Omar was granted bail], and I saw that he standing proud with so much to say, I knew that they could not break him.

Faith
What has kept us going? Three things: our faith, our community and our belief in the rule of law. It is destiny. It is hard to explain, but if you believe in your destiny and accept it – not in a complacent way – then you can keep waking up in the morning. It is like when you have a bad day and nothing is going well, what keeps you going is the knowledge that one day things will be better. The community that the campaign has brought together, our friends, and the friends we never met [has been incredible]. I feel proud to have been a part of this.

Family celebration
We had a bottle of wine and a family meal last night. A bottle of champagne – non-alchoholic champagne!

The moment we saw him
Really, really good.

Cosmic architecture for insight



A quick chat with one of the most foremost architecture professors of his generation back in February 2008:

If you’re looking for insight into the world around you, you could do worse than speak to John McKean. After a lifetime teaching, practising and writing about architecture, the Brighton University professor was chosen for a once-in-a-generation job: to rewrite the architecture student’s bible, Banister Fletcher. He took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Charlie Jones about pyramids, the cosmos and why Brighton needs civic space.

What issues are shaping architecture in 2008?
Money. Money is incredibly important. That may have always been the case, but it is more obvious than it has ever been. The gap between rich and poor is massive and growing, but there is a huge quantity of money to be spent—this is a very affluent society, which means that the headline-grabbing buildings become more iconic, more extraordinary. But at the same time the cheap housing being built now is immeasurably sloppy. We really are building the slums of the future—there is no interest in the public realm.

So, what do you think of architecture in Brighton?
Brighton is a continually missed opportunity. It tries to be flash above being good. Places of value and quality get turned down, and shoddy, shoddy buildings are made in their place. There is a huge amount of attention paid to one-off “projects”, but the way that people actually interact with the space around them is made is largely oblivious to these set-pieces. The seafront, the traffic, the North Laine, The Level: these are the things that make up our environment and our experience of an urban space, and they are all handled very badly. The i360 is a perfect example of this—I don’t doubt that it will be quite fun if it ever gets built, but it stands right above a dreadfully dilapidated stretch of the seafront, and it is this—more than any single attraction—that makes up our experience of a city. Most cities develop from a very real geographic imperative—a harbour, a river and so on—but Brighton has none of this: we are a city largely by accident. We are now officially a city but we have no public space to enact public rituals, which is something that every city has. And needs. That isn’t to say that you can’t make big gestures—you should make no small plans, as Daniel Burnham said—but these have to be big, not hollow gestures.

At your lecture you spoke about the way that architecture’s purpose is to frame man in the cosmos. Could you expand on that idea?
Architecture was almost always seen as a setting for a ritual of human life, much the same as it is now the setting for our own social and secular rituals. What is important is that they serve as a setting for our required behaviours, which more often than not is concerned with locating us in the cosmos, understanding the world around us and negotiating what it means to be human. And it is architecture that can physically locate us in the cosmos—it’s common knowledge, but the pyramids were built in strict alignment to the stars, and the vast majority of Hindu churches are built with the door facing east, as are Christian churches, so morning light will flood into the space. This thirst for symbolism continues, albeit in a rather crude form.

Quick question to finish off: how can the ordinary person “read” a building, and can you explain the beauty of architecture?
How does one read a building? I suppose that looking around would be a start. Architecture is pleasurable and beautiful, but it has a communicative, historical and social element that no other art form has. A building will hopefully survive for many, many lifetimes, but at the same time it has to be viewed and used—the Victorian architect Pugin said that the history of architecture is the history of the world, and I believe that. It is how we communicate, with our ancestors, the people around us, and future generations. And that is beautiful.

Reviews: Crystal Castles, Sebastian Tellier, Big Dada Comp


Here's a few assorted reviews from the last year. All Fact Magazine, would you believe:

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
(Last Gang)

Though their 2007 credentials stand – Klaxons and Uffie remixes, a ne’er-more-oblique myspace yelling “murder, blank looks on girls, knives” as influences and are fond of saying “taxidermy” in interviews – Crystal Castles’ debut sounds so unashamedly electroclash it’s astounding there’s no DJ Hell hidden track. Which is lovely to be reminded of: grabbing the music of the last seven years, forgetting about the real shit and running for August 2001 like there’s no tomorrow is A-OK with us. Crystal Castles is tender, escapist ragtime for an economic downswing and a seven-year-old war on terror. What makes this LP special isn’t the “sonic invasion” they push, but its control and compassion. ‘Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs HEALTH)’ is a hard-edged song, but its graceful keyboard loop is malleable rather than mayhem-lead and ‘Vanished’s sparking hi-hats and reverb-laden construction owes as much to Suicide’s plaintive thuds as CC’s aesthetic owes to Vega and Rev. When the sonic destruction-as-creation their shows promise lets rip, as it does on ‘Xxzxcuzx Me’ and ‘Love and Caring’, it’s more of a refreshing hint than a full Glasgow kiss towards noise, and while their remixes and PRs press the “8-bit chaos” button, the tone general of this eponymous debut, with its concept-driven, sexually platonic tidy electro, is closer to Fisherspooner than Venetian Snares. And nicely done it is too: Ethin and Alice could easily slip into the undergrowth, but don’t brush over them – this is a don’t-sleep album for people who need more sleep.

Various
Well Deep: Ten Years Of Big Dada
Big Dada

Thankfully, for a hip-hop label based in the UK, this greatest hits and misses retrospective, is free from the mundane aggro that makes UKHH the sick man of music. Where the Low Life stable celebrate the parochial and the insular, Big Dada’s abstract eccentricity trots the globe – French farce-core jams from TTC, King Geodorah’s DC Comics raps and Diplo’s baile funk are represented here. Of course, the two discs are full of English national anthems – Roots Manuva's 'Witness (1 Hope)' still sounds as oh-my-days heavy as it did six years ago, and Wiley’s '50/50' makes you miss him about 500 times more than listening to Playtime Is Over in full did. It’s the humour, stupid: while Jehst’s peers look like they’ve never seen an episode of Allo Allo in their lives, Roots Manuva’s legendarily self-deprecating sports day video on the accompanying DVD is a joy.
A little more weight would be welcome, though. cLOUDDEAD – the band that launched a thousand blogs – sound far easier to explain than actually, you know, enjoy, though the magnificent Boards of Canada mix of Dead Dogs is a suitably majestic piece of the British pastoral. The astonishing thing about this collection is how bleeding edge almost every song on this record sounds – New Flesh’s 'Stick And Move' sounds as much like the future as it did five years ago, which can have a strangely merciless bent cumulatively. That quibble aside, Big Dada have spent a decade proving that anti-pop hip-hop doesn’t have to neglect the party principle – for most rappers here, MC means move the crowd. These are the anthems, so get your damn hands up.

Sebastian Tellier
Sexuality
Lucky Number

There are many “one moment of genius, 60 minutes of mediocrity” musicians in the world, but few are eccentric French Christ look-alikes with Air, Mr Ozio, SebAstian, and Daft Punk on their facebook, fewer who theme albums around issues of the human heart and are studio wizards with doom-prog dads. Fewer still have penned a track as “whimper like a manchild” as ‘La Ritournelle’. If Sexuality were made up of twenty-second samples, this would be as much of an instant classic as La Rit. But while none of these 11 slabs of spacey Eurosoul is without its own “wow” moment, many simply disappear away into their own faultless shimmer. It’s not until ‘Sexual Sportswear’ arrives in all its galloping, cosmic glory that Tellier does anything more than announce his unbearable relevance of being—he actually proves exciting and exhilarating for the full sweat-drenched length of a track. Much of the remaining 10 songs disappear into a vodocoder’d cosmic disco haze — an immaculately filthy bassline here, graceful chord structure there, but too often something feels missing from too many songs. This said, there is understated yet stately presence at work here, and when it a songs blasts, it fucking blasts — like on ‘Elle’s shift from cheese stomp to elegant rubber soul or on album closer and masterpiece ‘L’Amor Et La Violence’. Its heartbreaking, whispered words ebb over a sobbing, tailored synth line that builds and breaks over 5 minutes and 22 seconds of sumptuous beauty — it’s so moving that you forget to care that Seb may well have his tongue firmly between his molars. Tellier is musician to love and follow — his Sessions and Universe collections, and the multitude of remixes kicking about prove his unerring genius for style, eccentricity and melody. One day, Tellier will drop the album he has been promising for te best part of a decade. It pains me to say so, but Sexuality doesn’t feel like it.

Monkey, Don’t!
Gubbins
Manna Records

Gubbins is about getting high in a seaside town. Though Mark Robson (the wistfully troubled mind behind Monkey, Don’t!) is now settled in London Town, you get the feeling he’ll never leave his sleepy Hampshire roots. Not that that’s anything to be ashamed of: some of best recent British oddball music of the last decade (Beta Band, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s, Field Music) has come out of toe-kicking suburban life. Coiled tedium, blissful mindlessness, stupid jokes – this’s Monkey, Don’t!’s territory. The songs drift into on another – this is an album of restless, parochial, eccentric invention. Street Of Sound has Acid House beat-throbs mixed into the Kinks’ guitars and Lalo Schriffin’s breaks – a combination that sound as natural as it would if they were all bought in a three for £12 bin at Woolies. The twee is never more than two steps away from this record, but its brilliantly clever arrangements provide enough to keep you from wanting to listen to Black Flag dead loud. Metaphor alert: like your home town, this is an album that is wonderful in its own, implacable way, and though you’ll be unbearably annoyed if you stay more than two hours, you’ll get strangely defensive should anyone take the mickey out of it.

Doing fine for Insight



An art feature on the growth of fine illustration in street art, printed in Insight under the title: Doing Fine: OContemporary favours finesse this month


If Olivia Connelly, gallery director at OContemporary is right, then what could loosely be described as urban art is the most globally significant movement since Pop. And, seeing as her new exhibition of delicate illustration and fine graphic art from three artists, a Brazilian, a Frenchman and a Brit, is set to sell out, we believe her. It’s this truly international aspect that gives art outside the academy its form – but this is often left off the walls: “Much of the fluff from the UK at the moment is loud, brash and big. Like any fluff, it will be forgotten. I’m concerned about curating works that will stand the test of time, and this is a quality all three artists this month have.”
It’s this timelessness and universality that marks the work on show out from the madding crowd. Banksy and his band of his imitators’ glory comes from their ability to point to one moment in time – when gay policemen became a badge of civic pride, when we started to feel uneasy about that CCTV camera on the corner, and so on. On the other hand though, Thais Beltrame’s work is quintessentially Brazilian, it can be enjoyed in any time or place. A trained illustrator who runs with the São Paulo art família Em Foco, she depicts child-like figures with intimate simplicity, and in one series of miniature pencil etchings she maps the childhoods of her friends, those day-to-day experiences that mark growing-up – from being scared of a dog leashed outside a shop, or loss felt when an ice cream scoop falls on the pavement. “I asked all my friends for things they remembered feeling when they were young,” she told us when she visited. “The interesting thing is that whenever anyone sees the pictures they instantly tell me that they have the same memories, that they remember the same things.”
A high level of technical skill unites the artists, though none of the three were formally educated in Fine Art – Thais studied illustration in Chicago, and San and John are trained graphic designers. John’s monotypes follows the master Goya as much as the urban artist Futura: “I worked on commission for years [for workwear brands like Carhartt] and it’s nice to have complete freedom, and to not be tied to a brief. I like ancient mythology, and when you look at people like Goya, you realise how little changes.”

Keeping the piece: Graff lockdown in Brighton for Insight



A piece from the Insight Art and Design issue:

While street art is increasingly presented as a vital part of our city's creative geography, the council are removing legal places for graffiti artists, young and old, to practice their craft. Charlie Jones writes some wrongs

"It's gonna be a rough summer, properly." David Samuel is smoking a cigarette outside his Trafalgar Street gallery, RareKind. The artist and gallery director, who has been painting since he was 13, is discussing the impact of the recent closures of tolerated graffiti zones. Most notable of these was Tarner Park, which was pulled by the council after nearly after nearly twenty years of legal writing at the end of January. The closure has met with no small controversy. Environment councilor Geoffrey Theobald said that "Managing graffiti in Tarner Park hasn't worked and some local people have told us that they avoid the area," as a result of which "[action was taken] to reclaim this park for local residents." However, the closures are appearing to have the opposite effect. "You can already see more tags on the streets around the centre, which is what [places like Tarner Park] kept down, and it's only be two or three weeks. And it's only going to get worse."
Brighton has always had a strange relationship with street art. With a large art student and hip-hop community, Brighton is a prime location for a flowering of urban art, and the existence of large, professional city-centre murals are examples of the council's active funding of the graffiti writing community, encouragement that has lead to worldwide acclaim and a surge in regional pride. At the same time as these developments were being sprayed, the legal parks where the crews learnt their craft were being closed. The legal – or at least tolerated – areas of Davingdor, Blackrock. The Level and Tarner Park have been shut down. "The public are in two minds about graffiti – they love the quirky, fun stuff, but can't stand certain images, or artists who aren't as strong or developed," argues Snub, a graphic designer and street artist. "Councilors wanted a Banksy-style mural, but you can't order something like that. There's this '100 broken windows' idea – as soon you allow a bit of mess into an area, it goes down the pan. But the opposite is true – they act as a pressure valve." DarkDaze, a prolific photograher, has something to say about the regenerative effect of graffit. “The Kensington Street walls have definitely opened up a street that people used to stay away from – it was grimey, stank of piss and had tags and throw ups all over it. Now it’s the most photographed street in Brighton and brings in more tourists, has been featured on calendars, talked about in magazines and has even made money for Brighton traders who sell prints and postcards of the walls.” Places like Tarner Park act a community base, he argues. “Every time I used to go up there kids would come up to the writers and ask questions and seemed to love what was going on. Writers used the park as much as anyone and were aware that it was also a kid’s playground. Many of the artists I know have kids of their own.”
David Samuel agrees. "The public have this idea about that any young person doing graffiti will take be taking drugs and robbing anyone who walks past. I'm not saying that every writer is a saint, and I don't like seeing tagging everywhere as much as the next person. Parks are training grounds, places where the older heads can show younger writers where not to paint – and how to paint well. The people who painted dubs outside of the parks were by and large from out of town and they didn't know the rules about where and how to paint. To take away all our parks because of a few tags outside is like giving the whole class detention when one kid acts up."
Five years trading graffiti goods to the writers (as graff artists call themselves) and art to the buyers of Brighton makes Samuel something of an authority on the state of graffiti art in our fair city. "With less paint being used, less people are buying it. I know two people who've had to close down because no one was buying their paint, and I can't afford for my takings to go down." I ask him what would have happened to him without such parks. "I learnt my craft there! When I was a kid I didn't give a fuck about myself," he says frankly. "But being able to go to these parks made me see what an incredible tool graff can be. 14 years later and I'm running this place and doing what I love. Something as simple as drawing in notebook and then creating something beautiful that's 14-foot-high – it makes you realise that anything in your life is possible."

rarekind.co.uk
snub23.com
darkdaze.com

BOX OUTS:

Graff glossary
Graffiti – for purists, graff means spraypainting outside areas, (often in contravention of the law) not stickers, stencils or gallery works.
Writers – Those who paint graffiti
Produtions – Large-scale murals. Also called "pieces", short for masterpieces
Tags – Small, basic stylised signatures, often in permanent marker
Dubs – Simplistic two-colour paintings
Halls of Fame – Places with many pieces, usually from several different writers or crews
Jams – A one or two-day event that brings many writers together to paint, often from around the country or world

Places to see graffiti art in Brighton
RareKind – The country's only commercial gallery dedicated to graffiti. Check out the wall above the two story shop as well.
Kensington Street – Some stunning murals from Paul Barlow, Alex Young and the Heavy Artillery crew, amongst others.
New England Quarter – Over 500m long, this is the longest single piece of graffiti in country
AliCats – Snub, Mishfit and Bringa got on the case and revamped the inside of this Brighton institution
Prince Regents Swimming Pool – Some great hoardings from the RareKind boys

Tim Westwood for Insight (honestly)


Honestly, I actually think that Tim Westwood is an alright bloke. As Pharrell Williams said, “the people who don’t know him don’t know nothing. F*** them: everyone else get your shit together”. For Insight.

As well as coining phrases like “that rust game is intense!” on his Pimp My Ride UK show, Tim is one of this country’s finest, most passionate, experienced, committed and respected DJs in Britain. Radio 1’s longest-standing DJ, he has been Hip Hop’s most passionate propagandist since he was DJing at the Gossip club in the early 80s and helping to launch Kiss FM in its days as a pirate radio station, a time when Hip Hop was written off as fad. Tim has never just stood at the sidelines of the culture, though: he organized early Def Jam stars like Beastie Boys’ UK tours, sold over 2m albums and has teaches young offenders at Feltham prison how to control the ones and twos. That’s something you don’t see Steve Lamacq doing.

It is this, and his infectious, school-boy enthusiasm for rap music in all its forms that has earned him the praise of the rap community – Hip Hop Connection Magazine (who know a thing or two about this) have voted him Best Radio DJ every year since 1992, and everyone from 50 Cent to Pharrell Williams, who once said “The people who don’t know him don’t know nothing. Fuck them: everyone else get your shit together,” to Pete Rock, who called Tim “A Hip Hop brother,” count him as a mate. You ever laughed at him for “talking like a rapper”? He talks like that because he’s been hanging about with rappers for 25 years. He’s in town for the Brighton City Festival, and as Snoop Dogg recently pointed out “you can can’t come to the kingdom and not see the prince.” Yet again, we couldn’t agree more with the Doggfather, so Insight chatted to a surprisingly humble and mild mannered Tim Westwood the other week. Big Things!

So you’re coming to Brighton in October? Yeah man, I’ve been down Brighton a lot. Used to play at – what was that spot called? – the Zap Club. People are really good there, they wanna party, people love the magazine they know what time.

You were with Hip Hop since the early days, weren’t you? Yeah, man! I got into it when I heard Rapper’s Delight by Sugarhill in ’79. Back then, man, it was just fun music, party music you know. I was working a club called Gossip back then, the time of Spoony Rap, Cold Crush and all that. You could really identify with the records – you could just see the power of the music then. It was street music, party music. Dancing, breakdancing was real big then. A lot of people really knew about it – it was big.

How has Hip Hop changed since then? It’s the most dominant youth culture on the planet now. It has its own sneakers, fashion lines, culture, everything. When it becomes “the voice of youth” you know that it has its own responsibilities as well.

Is this where your work with the young offenders comes in? Yeah… I mean that’s no big thing at all; everyone does something like that. [pause] I mean, it’s such a phenomenal blessing to work in the game that – I’ve been blessed, you know? – you’ve got to pass some of what you’ve learned along. Hip hop has that duty built into it though – everyone is involved with community projects, rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. It’s community music, so the players are community aware.

Your father was Bishop of Peterborough, and you’ve previously talked about how proud you both (as self-made men) are of each other; and you seem to hold very strict morals. Isn’t it ironic that you work with what is seen as a very amoral or immoral music, yet you don’t drink or take drugs, and you don’t allow profanity on the air? I hope there is a moral obligation there – my father’s a very good man. But many players in the game don’t drink or blaze either. Funkmaster Flex was something of a mentor to me, and he doesn’t touch that: he is that focused. A lot of artists don’t party though. Time was when you’d be able to do all that, smoke weed, drink, you know, but now the work is so crazy hard that if you were out late you just couldn’t handle it.

What’s on the horizon for Hip Hop? Hip Hop right now is very creative, but records just ain’t selling. Time was when, with all the Kanye / 50 thing going down, [Kanye West and 50 Cent recently went head-head, both releasing their albums on the same day. Kanye West “won”] their records would have done millions but now the struggle to sell a tenth of that. Still the creative energy is there. At the most we’re in a real party Hip Hop phase – it’s all very Dirrty South at the moment. It is always moving forward this culture.

Tim Westwood plays the Brighton City Festival on the 25th October. The Festival will be held at various venues around town. Tickets £15. brightoncityfestival.com

Christopher D Ashley interview for FACT


CDR for Fact, Spring 2008

Unlike many music teachers, Christopher D Ashley has spent the last year putting out crafted electro pop on Sunday Best rather than banging on about Moody Blues and awkwardly smoking a joint with the kids after band practice. Growing up in a 70s household, Chris, the youngest son of an English father and a Belizean mother, started learning music before most of us stopped eating crayons, picking up classical piano at the age of five.
“I was seriously, like, 11 when I realised that other kids weren’t musically trained! That was how old I was when I realised that it wasn’t normal to go home and practice for two hours a night,” he laughs. “I mean having a ‘diverse household’ was great because I got to hear different music, but what was far more important was the fact that the house was full of music. I’d be hearing my dad’s classical records in one room and my mum’s Caribbean music in another.” Like any teenager in the late eighties, he soon discovered that fourth horseman of thrash Megadeth and Street Sounds-style electro hip-hop. Still, he couldn’t just persuade his folks to pony up for a second hand guitar and discard it guiltily after a week because it didn’t transform him into Dave Mustaine over night like the rest of us: “My dad didn’t let me have an electric till I taught myself acoustic guitar. So I did… and formed some bands with terrible names!”
After a few years building his rep on the Reading electronica scene, along side folk like Nathan Fake and Dan Le Sac, Ashley’s lucky break came when le Sac himself passed a tape to Rob at Sunday Best. “We negotiated during the summer, and I was recording the album around people’s front rooms during at nights. I ended up recording much at the house of a friend that we met looking for a party. They’d get up for work and I’d be sleeping on their couch. Much tea was drunk!” He also took the show on the road, playing with heroes like Luke Vibert and Keith Tenniswood – who was so blown away by young Chris that he asked to come on, and now forms his live band. Something of the sofa-surfer has stuck on the album – though influences from Reich to Cage are kicking around in the dynamics of songs like “When We Shining”, there is also much in the way of fuzzy-headed funk and bleary-eyed elegant electro on “Sugar Coated Lies”. His Album Cruel Romantics is an omnivorous treat that ranges from acid house tremors to Prince-like white soul to soca to tweecore indie, “When I work with people like Keith, it’s great because they don’t see a boundary between styles. It’s all exciting. It’s a reason to get passionate, isn’t it?”

Low Motion Disco for RA



A review and scene shot for Resident Advisor


What a lovely surprise this two-part single is. It’s both a lovely release in itself, and an affirmation of two basic truths: the new disco scene, at least three years old now, has a load of interesting things left to throw up, and remixes can reach parts edits never can. Eskimo are unsurprisingly behind this, and for a label whose rep was based on outsourcing routinely superlative zero-gravity disco mixes, it’s endearing that part one is an entirely inhouse affair, with the remixing duties handled by SLB and Aeroplane. While much of Low Motion – two anonymous and competent producers based “nowhere and everywhere” – slips a little too-anonymously into the background, ‘Love Love Love’ is a steadily growing gem of not-quite danceable melancholia. Music for fast cars and slow trains rather than spaceships, its dignified, tugging piano loop and syrupy bassline carry a controlled climb. While it never really goes anywhere, the journey is the experience.

But just as the best conversations begin with the most prosaic introductions, it’ s what the remixers do with ‘Love Love Love’ that provides the real thrills. LSB’s version recalls some of Walter Gibbons’ most interesting disco and hip hop edits, with the duo employing dub’s divine dimensions, cloaking high, picked guitars in reverb and wobbling the low end to a laidback and fulfilling climax. It’s the Aeroplane remix that really takes the breath away, though: Stephen and Vito’s unashamedly massive disco suits this track down to the ground. Beginning pregnant with Kommische horror strings, the track smoothly mutates with Acid half-steps into gleaming Balearic disco: disembodied, urgent and epic. If this set of triggers sound by the numbers, my apologies – this is the kind of epic disco that that no one does better. Listen at home and dance.

Part II is where the Eskimo BlackBerry gets a look in, with Soft Rocks (with Kathy Diamond) and DFA’s Still Going having a go. For the very small proportion of the world’s population for whom a Kathy Diamond guest spot on a Soft Rocks Low Motion remix is reason to explode, the track is likely to surprise. Her work on Aeroplane’s ‘Whispers’ saw her full-throated and dominant,: a positioning miles from the disembodied yearning of the Shapiro-Chromatics camp. Rather than play against type, then, Soft Rocks have played their sought-after guest down: the swelling, lush synths, nagging hand-drums and stripped kicks wrap her weightless Love… All we need is love. Stunning and stirring.

Still Going begin with the kind of pounding so strangely absent from much of disco’s revenge, give in to the primal urge and create a Choice-esque work of gleaming, retro-futuristic house. Now the loop sounds like a cold shower, and the undancable enters the sublime. Not even the wholly out-of-place AMO1/Studio guitar solo can remind tastemaking, contextualizing nodes to get in the way for longer than a minute – it’s a pounding gem, at once ancestral and ultramodern. It’s music for sweat and dark rooms and alien landscapes, and – with so much attention paid to edits on the disco scene – it’s a wonderful reminder of the power and the glory of a great rip-it-up-and-start-again remix. This is a very, very good release, showcasing four different takes on one rather unispiring original. Proof – were any needed – that this disco thing is still growing.

Italo Disco for Arena Online




A piece for Arena's July 2007 issue on Cosmic/Italo Disco.


Given the confusingly longstanding influence of the 1980s on everything from music to fashion to global power relations, it was only time before Italo Disco was going to get a relook-in. And about time too; for anyone who found last week's Mercury Prize nominations less than inspiring there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Just as noises like handclaps and piano loops looked like they were resigned to the dustbin of history, a new generation of producers is starting to channel the spirit of a set of European producers who made their own versions of US disco in the early 80s.
Pioneers like Giorgio Moroder began making electronic versions of American funk and disco records, rumour has it, because of a dearth of musicians who were able to play Moroder’s galloping basslines, but the music exploded because of an economic crisis – unable to import the increasingly rare dance records, many ventured into the studio to fabricate the tracks on a shoestring budget, resulting in minimal mixes of drum-machine percussion and melodic keyboard hooks. This post-disco, pre-Acid House electronic dance music is widely known as Italo Disco, but its reach went far beyond its Mediterranean heartland, influencing legendary early house DJs like Larry Leven and Frankie Knuckles, as well as a slew of Mitteleuropean disco producers.

This blissed out cosmic disco arguably fathered the Acid House boom: a certain small post-party club called Amnesia in Ibiza played Italo Disco and House as the sun rose to whoever was still awake. In 1987 Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling got mashed there – then decided to invent modern clubbing. Italo Disco was largely written out of the history books, though. Until now, that is.
Blame that 'Over And Over" tune: it all kicked off with Hot Chip totally understandable but astounding rise to ubiquity last year. Hot on their heels are a slew of ball-achingly cool acts, all taking their cue from the soft, slow, serotonin-rushed disco of the mid 80s. Take Noze, Parisians who are releasing the most sunkissed, airbrushed grooves this side of 1986, Still Going, the latest signing to LCD Soundsystem's label DFA, or the works of labels like Italians Do It Better. No that this cosmic disco revival is only the stuff of vinyl beards: hugely popular parties like And Did We Mention Our Disco and Adventures Close To Home have been sending ripples through clubland for months, and new nights Horsemeat Disco and Cocadisco are leading us four by four back to the millanarian gooves of the mid eighties.


Unlike most dance music, it can sound just as good at home as in a barely industrial building. Like most dance music, however, it was almost exclusively distributed on vinyl, meaning that most original records are now either warping in the Balearic sun, covered in 25-year-old beer or changing hands for hundreds of pounds on eBay. You're far better off tracking down recent reissues or releases on CD:

Greg Wilson – Credit To The Edit
(Tirk)
This is a collection of Mancunian 80's soul boy legend Wilson's best re-edits. Taking his favourite US disco tracks into his grimy mitts, he'd chop and twist reel-to-reel tapes into shape with a razorblade and ruler. In other words, dude would literally cut the tape up until it sounded like he wanted it to. Christ. Though not strictly Italo Disco, its glittering yet organic texture (and Chaka Khan’s yelping) make it a great introduction to the genre.
www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kjfixqqsld6e

Morgan Geist – Unclassics
(Environ)
Great collection of Italo Disco underground classics from 1978 to1985, full of requisite sleeker-than-sleek synths and churning beats. Compiled Morgan Geist of Metro Area. Fantastic it is too.
www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:39fwxqqsldhe
myspace.com/morgangeist

Confuzed Disco – Italian Records Retrospective
(Irma)
This is it – the best collection of the best tracks from the record label that gave the genre its name. If this doesn't make you want to don cut-off shorts and snort anonymous white powder as the sun rises over the White Isle in 1985, I doubt much will.
www.myspace.com/confuzeddisco

Lindstrom – It's A Feedelity Affair
(Feedelity)
Let's start the resurrection: it's onto the new guard. This Norwegian fella occasionally takes time out from chopping wood, hunting whales and stuff (p'raps) to release some of the most blessed, blissed out, slowed down disco on Planet Earth. Dignifies himself as one of the few musicians you can see at Fabric and listen to over the Sunday Papers.
www.myspace.com/feedelity

Studio – West Coast
(Information)
Glorious, elegant, daft, cowbell, slurred dance music, reinvented by a pair of Swedes. First pressing sold out. Second pressing sold out. Now it's on the third, finally, and it DESTROYS.
www.myspace.com/sstudio

Henry Rollins interview for Insight

Hipster HC, whatever: interviewing your hero and him turning out to be an incredibly cool guy is one of the real joys of the game. Seriously people, if you haven't read Get In The Van, you totally should. Here's Hank making my week in July '08:

Henry Rollins is culture’s Kurtz, our Hemingway and your favourite uncle. A DIY punk with guts of steel, he’s also written one of the most moving memoirs about music (or anything) that I’ve ever read, Get In The Van, the exhilarating and gutwrenching story of his own private 1980s. He cut his teeth as lead singer of early eighties Californian punk crew Black Flag, the band that inked a thousand tattoos, sold a million six-packs and sent trillions of kids down the road to Do It Themselves. Aside from fronting the greatest hardcore punk band of all time, he’s also a renowned author, publisher, comedian, broadcaster and human rights advocate. The guy’s led what you could call an interesting life, and for one so famed for his no-guts-no-glory mindset, he came across articulate, sensitive and really, really fun. Basically, if there’s one person to spend an hour and a half listening to, it’s Hank. We called him up in Bangkok, and you really should go and see him this month.

Hi Henry!
Hi Charlie, how’s it going? I’m sorry this is late – I had an interview earlier and it overran, but thank you for ringing back and holding on. I admire your tenacity.

OK, no problem. Do you want me to call back later, or…
Let’s do this now: where I’m going this afternoon is ultra remote – no phones, no email, no electricity. So it has to be now. Let’s go for it now, and step on the other guy’s toes. Is that good with you?

Oh cool, yeah. So what are you doing out there anyway?
I’m going on a mission this afternoon that’s classified. I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the people with me, and I can’t tell a soul about where I’m going until afterwards. But believe me, you’ll hear in time!

Right! So tell me about the spoken word tour.
I’ve been on tour since September last year, and it’s a record of where I’ve been and what I’m doing and what I saw. Because of how it develops, the first 20 shows are never like the last 20 shows, because so much shit has happened in between. It’s been nearly a year, and I’ve done some pretty interesting stuff in that time, like going to Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan. Like when I was in Islamabad last year when Bhutto was assassinated, I saw a huge smoke cloud from my hotel, burning tires, and I was That’s where I’ve gotta be! That’s where it’s happening! Not in some vampiric, voyeuristic way, just in the sense that I want to learn the lessons. It’s one of the few ways that a man of 50 who is long of teeth and grey of hair can stick it to The Man! By going to Tehran, talking with prostitutes and waiters and bus drivers and then telling people You know what? Those “evildoers”, they’re really cool, and really normal as a matter of fact. How do you like them apples? And a lot of people don’t like those apples, believe it or not. You’d be amazed at how much shit telling people that other people are normal and cool gets you into, because The Man – whether he’s a some oil-hungry Neocon pussy or an Islamofascist asshole – doesn’t want you to know that.

What’s it like doing a show in Syria or Islamabad or Lebanon compared with a show in, say, Brighton?
Oh, I wasn’t doing a show; I was just visiting.

OK…
I always just drop in places I’m curious about, and see what up there. If I wanna know about somewhere I just go.

Do you think you’re a brave man?
Absolutely not, no way! I’m not a tough guy in any way whatsoever, man: if someone pulls a gun, I’m running away as fast as I can. I just want more from life than sitting around watching The Sopranos on DVD.

I heard you slept in Uday Hussein’s bed. What was that like?
It was a bed. Just like any other, but it was in the son of Saddam Hussein’s torture camp, with the hooks in the wall where he hung women up. When I was doing the USO stuff [Henry regularly visits troops in warzones and military hospitals], we were in the compound in Baghdad, and Uday’s palace was where some soldiers go for R+R – a place you can get air conditioning, a cold beer and a chance to watch Lethal Weapon or whatever on DVD and feel like you’re not in the middle of a war. So the guy was like on our first day in the Green Zone [adopts drill sergeant voice] One of you will now have the dubious honour of sleeping in the bed of Uday Hussein! And I was like Wow! What’s that going to be like? That’s MINE!

I though it was really cool how you once said that your way of protesting the war was visiting the troops.
I hate this war that Bush and his evil, evil gang of corrupt pondwellers have embarked on, but I have maximum respect for the troops who are fighting and living it every single day. So when USO [the organization that provides entertainment and support to US troops] said some of the guys out there like my stuff and they asked me if I wanted to meet some troops, I – of course – said yes. And it’s tough, man. These are guys who have seen and done more than anyone can imagine. I’ve talked to guys in hospital with pins stuck through their arm, amputees, people with their face blown off – things that no-one can ever imagine. The saddest thing is that these guys, their whole life has instantly changed. Whatever their plans were, however they thought their lives would pan out, those plans have to change, and so do the plans of his wife and his whole family. And there are no words for the rage that that gives you. Seeing that shit, it reminds you how much work is to be done.

What’s the toughest thing you’ve ever had to do?
What, you mean personally, in my life?

Yeah.
Grow up, I think. Having to realise that life is a lot tougher than you ever thought, and how hard you have to work at it. Realise that you have to use more than aggression in life, and that there are other people besides your whiny pissy little self. Yeah, that’s a tough lesson to learn, and it took a long time to penetrate my thick cranium, longer than most people. I had to have it kicked into me.

Are you an artist?
I’m not an artist, no. A bullshit artist, maybe… Musicians are allowed to have a long 18th year, if you know what I mean, a life with no responsibilities to speak of. But then you meet people who are like 21 with two kids, and that’s real, you know – having a human being that depends on you making money to stay alive. And you have to hustle hard then. A lot harder than strapping on a guitar and being like This is my office. You can't be surrounded by booze and drugs and girls and be like This is my nine-to-five and still connect on meaningful level to the guy driving the bus who is buying your record. Luckily, I make rent though, but I've gotta hustle. That’s why I do what I do, you know, the films and so on, the 300-day tours – I still have that minimum wage, how-am-I-gonna-make-rent mindset.

Why do people love Black Flag?
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, I had nothing to do with the band – all the stuff that is remembered as classic Black Flag was written before I joined, mainly by Greg Ginn. I was like the fourth singer, so when someone says they love the band, I say, Yeah, me too, I’m a big fan.

Really? Because for me, you kind of are Black Flag: I can’t imagine the band without you. Even if you didn’t write the songs, you kind of do symbolize the band.
I was in the version that recorded the album Damaged and I was in the version that toured it internationally. So yeah, people around the world do think of them and me, which is cool, because they’re a really good band. But in terms of their appeal… Stuff like 'Six Pack', which is such a cool song, it’s absolutely awesome, was before my time. I had really nothing to do with that.

It’s about twenty past 10 here. What should I do with the rest of my day?
How much time do you have? If you get time, read some stuff on the internet. Get informed and inform others. And when the sun goes down, I’d think about getting laid and making dinner.

What should I do in August?
Oh man… Apart from see my show? You could go to North Africa. You’re like nine hours away from Marrakech, go and see what it’s like over there. Or book a flight to Phnom Penh in Cambodia and see the Killing Fields – it’s the rainy season over there, so all the bones and teeth will be exposed.

Cool! Cheers for this Henry.
No problem man. See you on the road sometime.

Nathan Coley interview for Insight


Nathan Coley makes beautiful, Turner prize-listed art from Western sets, Scottish islands, Belgrade housing blocks and cardboard churches, and I got a chance to speak to him in June 2008. House is a feeling:

You should pop down to the De La Warr Pavilion in July to see Nathan Coley’s show. Photographer, sculptor and installation artist Nathan has exhibited at some of Europe’s strongest houses, including the hyper-next Haunch of Venison, the CCB in Lisbon and the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, where he made knee-high cardboard models of every place of worship in the area. Of course, the thing that got him the most column inches was his Turner-Prize shortlisting, which he picked up last year for, among other pieces, beautiful scale miniature show homes and terraced houses. We love him because he wrestles with the hugest of issues – faith, country, art, nature, you name it – with heartfelt wit and rare humility.

Hello Nathan! What’s the work you’re showing at De La Warr Pavilion?
Hello… It’s a new commission from the DLWP and Haunch, and it takes as its starting point a Western stage set. Westerns are about decline, at least in part, and from it hangs five words; BELIEF, LAND, WEALTH, MIND and FAITH, which are the five rights granted under Islam, but also are appropriate for the frontier mind. Also, the idea of a stage set is very interesting to me as a sculptor. You can’t go for a whiskey in the salon, but that’s what people around the world think of when they think of “a salon”.

It’s really cool.
Cheers.

I really like how your work is totally political – in the sense of being about, y’know, “stuff” – but it doesn’t order you about.
Yeah! That’s what draws me to buildings – it’s the way that people build their environment and community around these things. You know, I don't think of art in that modernist sense of something which you stand before and "experience" – I think of it as something that builds up in your mind. It’s as simple as “This is what I think, what do you think?” Art should provoke discourse and make you see the world around you… Well not differently, but at least make you look around you and give you something nice to talk about when you’re having your tea.

Is the place something you give real consideration?
I think where a work is changes its meaning and effect, definitely. With There Will Be No Miracles Here [a huge carnival light display carrying the words of the title on bare scaffolding], it was originally erected on the Scottish island Bute, where it said something about what we want out of nature. When it was placed in front of a Belgrade communist-era housing block, where it might say something about the dream of socialism. Of course, where it is now [in the Tate] might mean something else entirely.

Thursday 3 July 2008

Simian Mobile Disco for Disorder Magazine


SMD interview for Disorder magazine, from February 2007:

After the Eno-produced electronic folk rock band Simian burned out in 2005, SMD rose from the ashes his year, with their new record, Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release and its brain-crushingly good lead single It’s A Beat. With set-ups at The End and Bugged Out! mixes under their belts, as well as a load of remix workouts for Klaxons and yep, Justice, they seem to be pretty well-born, combining the three key dance moods that are shaping up to dominate 2007 (Ed Recs-esque "filthy" electro, the trancey stuff coming out of Berlin and, yes, nu-rave) and post-rave acts like LFO and KLF. "Whoooooosh" is the overall effect and there's a bit on track seven that starts off really minimal, but caves into a Euphoria-heavy beat as if the song itself can't stop grinning for gurning. It's really, really fun, and – generalization alert! – kind of sums up dance music in this country in 2007.

What question do you always wish you were asked?
What would you like to drink?

Could you tell me about your new album, what's the story behind it?
We have been writing tunes for ages just for a laugh and we suddenly realised that we had loads of tunes. We want the album to be a good listening experience, not just loads of bangers thrown together.

What was the recording and writing process like?
We generally work really quickly. Rather than laboring over a few tracks we like to do loads of them and then choose our favourites. We plug the machines in and guide them while they make music for us.

It's an old story, but I'd like to hear it again. What happened with Simian the band and how were SMD formed?
Simian split in at the end of a long tour of the states but we are all still mates and help each other out with our new projects. SMD started with me and James djing in clubs after Simian gigs. We started doing remixes and when the band finished we just kept on djing and making music. Now we are an act in our own right.

Mr. Ford, you've just produced the Arctic Monkey's new record. Can you tell us something about them that we'd never know?
Jamie ate a phal for a bet. I had to pay for his curry.

There's a song on there called Tits and Acid, and I've been reliably informed that acid makes you visualise music. How would you describe your music in a visual sense?
Strobe. strobe. strobe. one of those old oil lamps. strobe. strobe. strobe.

What do you have in common with our primate cousins as musicians?
We like drums, and fire. We work on instinct.

These New Puritans: Complete Control for Dummy Magazine


I'm an absolute sucker for both high-camp and any band that recalls Marxist-Dadaists who battle brownshirts on the streets of Berlin. Dummy, September 2007:

These New Puritans – the band that brought you Heidi Slimane-approved numerology-obsessed no wave and blogs about boiling water and Jacobian tragedies – are playing around the country on the Blyk-backed Unitaur with Crystal Castles, The Teenagers and DJ Mehdi. Their debut album, Beat Pyramid, is out in January.

What was it like recording the album? You did it with Gareth Jones [who produced Wire, Einsturzende Neubauten and Liars], didn’t you?
Yeah, he’s a genius; he’s like a professor. A load of this record is made out of sampled bits and pieces, and he really brought that out: things like recording underwater or in a park, or sampling knives cutting. We were having a cigarette on the roof of the studio and we started messing about with these barbecue tongs.

What kind of stuff were you listening to when you were recording it?
We were watching a lot of movies, unrelated to music, I suppose. We were listening to a lot of dancehall, dubstep and ragga and 20th century classical music.

There’s something quite elusive about your “online presence.
Yeah, we started off as an internet-only band, just doing webcasts and podcasts and stuff. We do like to keep it quite elusive. I really like the aesthetics of terrorist videos – how grainy and far-off yet immediate they seem – there’s something about the fuzzy screen which lets you add layers of meaning. So it was weird when we first started playing around and about. Playing live still feels weird – I don’t really know how to react when someone talks to me afterwards.

What’s the reaction been like so far?
It’s going alright, interesting to see people responding to our music – and playing it to people who might be into different groups. It’s weird, though. People either seem to really like us or be, like, visibly disgusted. People often seem insulted by us.

For Dummy: Dan Deacon's top ten ways to make the world a better place


You know what I love about Dan Deacon? That his myspace lists his music as Americana. I really like that. Here's the first top ten for Dummy, from Dan in November 2007:

Dan Deacon has been setting Baltimore basement parties on fire since the days of his MA in Musical Composition with his Venetian Snares-meets-Playmobil piano electronica. His new album, Spiderman of the Rings sounds like a Shostakovich record that makes you want to eat jelly till you feel sick and need to lie down and to celebrate his awesome seventh LP, Deacon came by to drop some science on us fools. Here are the Deacon commandments:

1. Get a loop/delay pedal. If as many people who played guitar played loop/delay pedals then music would really evolve at a much more interesting rate.

2. Stop using money. All it does is fuck you over.

3. Book shows in your house. Music, art, dance and theater shows in homes are vital. It creates an atmosphere that no other space can achieve and everyone can do it! There are endless touring artists that are just starting out and would be willing to play anywhere. If you live in a big, dirty house where it can get loud, have big, dirty, loud shows. If you live in a nice, clean place that has to stay quiet, have art shows or quiet shows. Put on plays in your basement. Just about any space is suitable for some sort of awesome shit.

4. Don't be lazy.

5. If you feel there an unbalance, then balance it.

6. Stop having children. We are building our species up to an extinction point. Soon disease and bacteria will re-balance the earth and it will be awesome. So I guess have tons of kids and quicken the process.

7. Listen to Raymond Scott and Conlon Nancarrow everyday.

8. Watch the movies The Apple and Zeitgeist. Make children watch these movies.

9. Stop renting and do all that you can to end the concept of land ownership.

10. Realize that the world is already the nicest place to live, forever.

Yeasayer's top ten crap bands for Dummy


Yeasayer's rise to rule is another happy happy happy this year, and in March I tied them down to slag off some bands for the semi-regular Dummy feature:

Brooklyn's unfaultably earnest Yeasayer – who are rereleasing their awesome album All Hour Cymbals from last year, probably because nowhere near enough people realised it was out already – took a few minutes out to cuss some bands for us. Can't really fuck with any of their irony-busting choices. They're on mini-tour at the moment, so if you didn't get round to seeing them last year, get down to the ICA on Wednesday. Or see them in Glasgow or Manchester later in the week, if you live there. The 'Wait For The Summer' single is out on 17th March, and the pretty cool video is above. Yes! Yes! It is! On with the hate:

1. Van Halen / KISS
Let them duke it out. To the death.

2. Bare Naked Ladies
They should be number one, but Van Halen really deserve it.

3. Lenny Kravitz
Apart from the fact that Lenny is terrible on his own, he also taints other artists, like Jay-Z.

4. Black Crowes
Why are these guys famous? Their career was made off of crappy covers. Plus they just seem like assholes.

5. Eric Clapton
What a loser.

6. George Thoroughgood
One whiskey, one bourbon, one shoot-me-in-the-head-right-now.

7. AC/DC
Little Australian men in little shorts singing the same song over and over again.

8. Pearl Jam
Eddie Vedder influenced every bad singer from 1992 on.

9. Santana
Santana seems like a really cool guy, but he's had far too many collaborations with Rob Thomas.

10. Sublime
Snowboarders have really bad taste in music.

Dan Hillier for Dazed and Confused


An art piece for Dazed from way back in February 2007, about a Max Ernst-biting modern engraver. Last I heard he was on Neil Gaiman's thing, which is great news:

If there is a movement in art toward the dark, weird and down-right odd in art at the moment (see those Chapman boys, Sebastian Gogel and any given grub street gallery) then Dan Hillier is definitely a part of it. Hillier creates intricate, dark, surreal, graceful and iconoclastic engravings, sourced from ephemera such as Victorian medical encyclopaedias, religious imagery and found photographs. “I like using found pictures and drawing out new narratives from them by bringing previously unrelated images together. I particularly enjoy the results when they're dark and a bit weird,” he says. The results are like postcards by Beardsley from a Victorian inventor’s mansion. If the mansion was populated by circus freaks and Werner Herzog, that is. No surprise that he lists his influences as wine, Max Ernst and mushrooms, then.
He grew up in between the dreamy towers and rough-as-guts estates of Oxford, and studied art Cambridge fifteen years ago. Whilst working as a henna tattooist, he was drawn to doctoring images in his work and, as a hobby, collected fragments of Victoriana. Recently, he started combining the two and realised that new, twisted stories could be told from the most banal of materials. After sifting through car-boot sales and back-street charity chops, fitting images were found. Quite simply, he trawls though “old anatomy and science books, vintage wallpaper, old advertisements for ludicrous Victorian quackery and labour-saving devices” so we don’t have to. The images, once found are combined and doctored on Photoshop or illustrated with vintage Indian dipping ink.
The works depends on the use of forgotten images and discarded memories to re-write a gorgeously dark period of our history, full of elephant men and taxidermy, death and medicine. There’s rich vein to be tapped, and Hillier is only too happy to oblige. With a wink, he calls his work “the quiet dedications of a slightly idiotic man with a fledgling perception of the universe's mysterious charms and a joy in the pleasures of communicating a love of strangeness, darkness, nature, beauty and human people.” He pauses and laughs. “Or just lines of ink on paper and wood.”