<![CDATA[The Big Ship]]>https://www.thebigship.org/archiveRSS for NodeWed, 13 Nov 2024 09:45:49 GMT<![CDATA[Sinning & Winning: The Best of the BFI London Film Festival 2024]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/lff2024671fd7659632a892a2c67d22Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:48:07 GMTThe Big ShipWe once again journeyed into the heart of The Big Smoke's biggest festival in search of glitz, glamour, saints, and sinners. This time though, both God and the Devil were on our side.


In the black of night, sweat turns chemical, like a whiff of ozone—something sharp, something dangerous, something that could poison you. Bar lights cut bright, electric against this darkness. It's no coincidence that "colour" shares its roots with "drug" and "intoxicant," flashing here in flushed, poisonous hues. Like Cassavetes before him (this is his Cinderella or Pretty Woman, a worn-out fairy tale filleted down to something desperate and sweat-soaked and where there is no fairy godmother to be found), Baker has an obsession with people clawing their way through messy, half-lit existences, where intimacy is transactional and sold off in instalments half-earned and half-owed, and where even "hello" can sound like an insult. Anora is all this, all urgency and itch. Baker's worlds spin on the axis of need, a jittery swan-dive through lives carved out of longing and bleak, glittered agitation. Because characters here don't have the polish or poise to love themselves, Baker steps in to adore their unpolished edges, their most graceless instincts. Maybe the dust never settles, just clears briefly from the wreckage of each failure, as prickled thoughts trashed as too risky in the daylight surge back like champagne foam, like corks under pressure, clutching at anything—money, affection, brief moments of rococo bravado—that might hold them above water just a bit longer, pulled forward by a strange, tragic charisma, and then drenches them in the harlequin-glow of reality's ugliest, sweetest lights. And, arguably, isn't that what Hollywood has always been for? The American Dream in the roll and grain of 4-perf, widescreen Kodachrome 35mm film.


There are spies in the Congo, played in on independence winds. There are spies in the Congo and glow worms beneath their feet. There are the world players too, President Lumumba on bass, Khrushchev on drums, Ike playing off-key, X throwing chairs, but Grimonprez's conspiracy, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, roots its faith in the insurgency of song, blurting a conic upstart of our next century. Desk drumming on le table ronde... Louie (Satchmo) Armstrong pearled in sweat yet grinning, President Dizzy Gillespie whose cheeks are a cityscape flotilla, Nina Simone bursting magenta love-me's, Abbey Lincoln's long petals on Roach's roiling thorns, The Duke. In 1960, when the Overton window was breezy enough to welcome apocalypse, African states won independence then formed a bloc in the UN against their colonial exes. Finding Congo to be a once "dark" heart now radioactively alight, and fearing the great (unprofitable) dreams of a United States of Africa, America sent "jazz emissaries" to try and squeeze red out of their nations with the blues. Considering, with full sincerity, what it means for a culture in which the director of the MoMA is also on the board of Lockheed and a CIA operative, the documentary rivets open a thousand tabs in your mind. Where Grimonprez excels is in his efforts to prove his point whilst making it, utilising the rhythms of improvised espionage to play a jazzpunk psyop on the viewer with filmmaking schizophrenic enough to requisite truth: an anti-agitprop for the cement-written age.


Revelation

With bass and treble,

A hand holds a horn

Like a gun in a knot

& 7

Buisine are blown.


In the age of testimony, what power does allegory still hold? The myth of the sacred fig tree, revealed in the title cards of Mohammad Rasoulof's house burner, is a violent one. This particular tree's seeds are dispersed by bird droppings that plant in the clouds, growing from the sky down in vines that strangle the surrounding canopy, leaving only the sacred tree standing in a desolate clearing. In one lucid metaphor for the structure of Iran's theocracy, the survival of the fig tree is guaranteed only via the obliteration of others, and its sanctity imbued by proxy of its isolation. Its shape is even hauntingly similar to the government's structure, in which elected bodies exist in the shade of the supreme leader's control, feigning democracy, whilst absorbing nutrients from thorny militias and morality police that are anything but independent. Crucially, the regime exists on behalf of the branching violence of others; like most oppressive architecture, the more power that one has the more distance they are afforded from the oppressed, as the evangelists splay uncannily clean hands. The Seed of the Sacred Fig grows its microcosm within the home. The older generation aspires to play the game and the younger generation refuses: as their father sacrifices nameless women to the revolutionary court, his daughters' online diet is a stream of filmed violence against their friends. Interjecting real social media footage of Iran's hijab protests and Mahsa Amini's murder swiftly depicts the threshold of dissonance all of us are required to cross to demand accountability for the atrocities we bare witness to in the palms of our hands. Only, in Rasoulof's film, the perpetrator is asleep on the couch,  and the atrocity is just outside the window. Consequence knocks on the door of artifice. In May, Rasoulof was sentenced by the Iranian government to eight years in prison and flogging, as if he knew it would take the same regime he was criticising to both reveal itself and prove that artifice can knock back.


The Seed of the Sacred Fig (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof)

"Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth but because of our own deeply held beliefs and the judgments that we make, they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate." Or so we are warned in episode one of Disclaimer*, a "psychological thriller told in seven chapters" (i.e. a TV show lol) from Alfonso Cuarón, whose seductive probing into the power of crafted, mutable realities—both for the storyteller's and the audience's sake—finds only a leaf-like fragility beneath every story we believe and every persona we adopt (and who better to stunt cast opposite Cate Blanchette than Sacha Baron Cohen whose confrontational plundering for validation in costume and out of it has brought both joy and misery to so many), the act of storytelling exposed as a double-edged ritual: fiction shields us from truth while simultaneously coaxing it into the light.


In Nickel Boys, a magic trick of a film based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the splintering of perspective is like two halves of the same story trying to find each other. First-time fiction filmmaker RaMell Ross stages a slow collision, a doubling that twists two voices into a single one; this isn't just two lives, but one story seen from both sides of a mirror, or two selves, each learning to wear the other's wounds. Each half of the story pushes against the other, testing its own reflection, interrogating itself—what is real, what is remembered, and who does the remembering. It's an exploration of identity by way of disassembly. Ross isn't handing us a clean narrative to dissect but forcing us to pick up these splinters and bleed a little.


-Are you annoyed with yourself?

-Yes.


In A Traveler's Needs, Isabelle Huppert plays a French language teacher. She asks her student how they feel. Her student first translates feeling into their language, Korean, and then Korean into English to tell her. Huppert translates their English into her French, and hands it back to the student on an index card. Yet, the destination of translation remain faint pawprints of a long voyage that locks horns with the inner inexpressible. In this way, like Jarmusch's Paterson restored Buddha to the bus route, and like the exchange between artist and audience, Huppert's flashcards become translated poems: cairns consecrating the ordinariness of our unfathomable life. Each word choice and cadence seems to ask, how many times can you divide the sea? This is her version, but even her student's version would be untrue. The cairn's lame insufficiency is precisely its beauty, as each delicately balanced stone tower miraculously infers the shapeless miles travelled to their lode.


-I am so annoyed with myself. I am so tired of myself. Always wanting to become someone else, who is this person in me who makes so tired?


A Traveler's Needs (dir. Hong Sang-soo)

Homesickness could be another name for Payal Kapadia's intimate epic, All We Imagine as Light, describing well the nostalgia besetting its three women who long to arrive in limerence with the self. It is also the name of the song that becomes its refrain by Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, that has long been my own personal Music for Airports. Watching the pearl lark ruffle in that blaring airport light - you know the one, one incidentally very much like the light in October, senescent yet wide awake - Guèbrou's piano accents each of a thousand stirring bodies with the soft burr of a soul. Kapadia employs her to the same effect. Gently, gently, her characters contain the ocean, watching the wind knock Mumbai's lights closer from the shore and longing for a hand to hold theirs and say "It is a pleasure to meet you", meaning "to know you", and mean it, longing all their life for that, learning only in the stations between people and things that it is a crime to long to be made whole. It halves you.


All We Imagine as Light (dir. Payal Kapadia)

The sun has gone, as the past stretches into night,

The Second Father's voice echoes,

God help the wolf when the dogs fall silent.


"It was really just very organic," Kurzel begins, telling me the story of how Ellis Park came to be, the creation story of a story about creation. The film itself is not so much a product as it is a process, less something earned through fists pummeling and building but a thing granted in the generous act of surrender. "Are those ideas you come up with," Kurzel wonders aloud, "or are they kind of given to you?" Here's the open hand at the centre of Ellis Park: does art grow from the soil of our being, or does it drift in on some old, familiar wind? So much of the story unfolds at this juncture, between creation and grief, between what's held and what's cast away. Kurzel observes Ellis in the early thrall of creation, "at these sort of wonderful beginnings of when an idea forms and comes out of the shadows," and in strange, sacred places, "volcanoes, churches, these giant canopies, these cathedrals of trees" of Ballarat to Sunatra.


Ellis' father Screamin’ Johnny Ellis, a Country musician himself, who insisted that "the older he got he felt as though he could hear voices, a tap on the shoulder guiding him towards those moments of those acts of creation," glimpsing a lineage, a kind of inherited reckoning that makes itself apparent in Ellis' own creation and his own self-destruction: Ellis does not, cannot, shy away from his flaws, the crags, and the hollows. But it's as though Kurzel himself has found in Ellis the "compassion and gentleness" that Kurzel says gave him a reprieve from his "heavy films about not-so-lovely people," perhaps even a certain forgiveness. And it's here that the film finds its purpose. In the "wonderful beginnings", where creation is a kind of grace—a chance to build something beautiful, even in fractured places.


The Australian phone books hold secrets,

Quiet pages whispering of exiled angels and small-town saints.

After a project like this, it's insulation to the outrageous.

Four columns, regardless of the thread we walk on,

You stare down the way ahead,

The brakes screech as you try to remember—

The whole thing, the hard-earned memories.


Stone doesn't forget. It holds the weight of hands that carved it, the eyes that gazed upon it, the stories it was meant to tell and those who silenced it. Statues are meant to endure, to stand taller than time, but they carry the weight of broken histories. There's something fragile in that endurance, though—an illusion of permanence. What was once worshipped becomes a relic, then a trophy, then a hollow symbol, passed through hands that claim it as their own. And yet, the past clings to these figures, a residue of lives lived, lands taken, voices erased.


I am the trance, and the trace. I'm torn… hisses the searching voice of one of the artefacts (namely, the Dahomean king Ghezo) at the centre of Dahomey, director Mati Diop's followup to her billowing, gothic romance, and though this is a return to documentary, it is one no less interested in the construction of reality. The artefacts, long housed in Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, a cavernous institution held up only by objects stained with the bastard legacies of France's colonial empire (objects stolen, haemorrhaged, torn) are returning to their homeland in Benin. More than three hundred thousand pieces still clutter that Parisian hall, ghosts leaching out against pristine glass. The few, just thirteen, that will journey back to Benin feels less like reparation than an afterthought, a ritual of return that hardly touches the wound still festering.


It's not clear who the voice is speaking for, or to, a loose thread between bodies and bloodlines, as ancestral memories brush against the edges of a modern life that can't quite absorb them. The film's score (a collaboration between Dean Blunt and Wally Badarou, a musician with heritage from Benin) thrums through these spaces, murmuring in deep undercurrents, like the hum of a land that remembers itself even if its people can't. Diop seems obsessed with this new tension, the digital hum of security lights, blinking LEDs, the harsh murmur of the present that never quite drowns out the past, ghosts brushing against your skin, tearing history away from its "roots" and unmooring moments from linearity like an invocation, calling forth what was buried, twisting memory into something raw and open, half-seen, half-sensed, never fully released, nor reclaimed; an orison that loosens history's grip, a burning bush inviting it to haunt the present anew.


Land extracts dyes from our skin when we taste it.

It takes its saffron sun from the glow of our cheeks when daubed with nettles, the innermost chalk of its stones from the innermost warmth of our veins after plunging into a lake, and the quicksilver of the tide from our hands threaded by sweet slug sap, discovered at dawn. This uneven exchange is the only promissory we are given that we will inherit the earth, and the horizon between our touch and its dew is a diadem of negative capability so quaint that names are the wash that might kill it. Harvest's stubbornly un-horror folk tale recounts this movement, re-enacting Seamus Heaney's slow extraction of turf into work & words with a main character named after the land's greatest elegiac Walt. But its own poetics of piss & pigs immerses in a muddy middle of history, astutely imagining a less hierarchical commons in which serfs are slaves to lords. Instead, here is one in which expropriation swings like the hands of a clock over a failed utopia, not unlike those still haunting Scotland and the rural NorthNorth where the irascible (race, gender, greed and sex) is invariably jostled by a bigger fish coming to eat the already quite big fish. Where the clime begets a green, gulping grand, landlords loved the hills as much as those that toiled them and each could lie, alone, where the bottom fell out of words, where the blade is the grass of a bone.


Harvest (dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari)

The 4K re-release by the BFI of Martin Rosen's Watership Down brings a new depth to its hand-rendered gardenscapes—painted as a site of both immense beauty and tragedy under a grey-throated sky, a bucolia that could only be Britain, with the soft shimmer of English mist and lush, rolling fields and hedgerows soaked in greens so deep it's almost painful, as if nature itself is willing to bleed and scar. In this England, nothing is ever truly still, and though the land flattens any tranquillity into a steady breath of damp, the ghosts of those who've tread this path, nameless now, those whose witnessed violence are still bedded in the loam, the thistle, the foxglove—England's green and pleasant land, as the hymn goes, that holds tight to every wound, that hungers not for rest but for the pull of another dawn, and thirsts not for peace but for a cycle of renewal fed by the sacrifices that came in ages before.


Watership Down (dir.  Martin Rosen)

Desire isn't a spark but a symptom, something to be scratched or endured rather than savoured. The title of Queer  alone seems to stammer with this self-loathing, a sneer of unrequited longing, like the sour and inward conquest of sex with someone you hate. It opens with a similar feverish plunge, the first sweat drop of which slides into a romance as dry as a prescription chart, where each line, each crease, is a bit of swilled prophecy about how little is left to feel, to hold—this is less about love and more about a defeat seared onto Daniel Craig's face, of something more elusive, brittle—glances that nearly touch but flinch, hands that reach only to recoil. "Be nice to me twice a week," he reasons as though rationing tenderness is the only way to dose it. There's no softness here, but there's a slickness to it all—like Challengers, that other hot-house of sweat and want, bodies entangled in the constant push-pull of same-self and same-sex—a grind, a dance of half-steps, as if romance itself is a joke too played out for William Lee to laugh at any longer, too weary of its own plotlines and so doubles back, finding in the slow leak of bodily erosion only dribble and discharge forcing him to forget what life he's built and whatever calloused futures his cracked palms might still yet map out.


Queer (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat; The Seed of the Sacred Fig; A Traveler's Needs; All We Imagine as Light; Harvest reviewed by Caleb Carter

Anora; Disclaimer*; Nickel Boys; Ellis Park; Dahomey; Watership Down; Queer reviewed by Bryson Edward Howe

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<![CDATA[Rehearsals for Retirement: Gestures and Alchemy in GTA]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/rehearsals-for-retirement-gestures-and-alchemy-in-gta665edc67cc8cd72a8ecca798Sat, 05 Oct 2024 13:36:15 GMT Harry BayleyMade "as a prayer, an offering, a get well soon card…" for a friend who was not expected to survive, Phil Solomon's found footage films look away from the violence of Grand Theft Auto to find stillness, melancholy, and grief.


phil solomon grand theft auto gta screencapture ICA exhibition rehearsals for retirement gesture alchemy art


“Leave it all on earth

I tell you this from across the blackened vine,

The night has no need for stars. Nowhere asks for you.”


Grief is a violent pause. I remember the anger I felt after losing my sister, and how my world was torn apart. I replayed the videogames we played as children, the vibrant world of Rayman now haunted by her memory. I retraced our steps through a world which was exactly as it was, and yet unsettled, its 32-bit display now cast forever in my wish for things to go back to how they were and my wish ungranted. I still can't play that game.


Playing games does that to me, the environment permeates my subconscious, I am unable to tell fact from fiction. I can feel Phil Solomon's Rehearsals for Retirement under my skin, his violent transmuting of Grand Theft Auto into a liminal space, fraying away the edges of its pixelated fabric into purgatory. Sucked into navy, Solomon's place of internal solitude is filled with the fragments of memory, hours spent behind my controller, eyes seeping into pixels and noise. I see myself onscreen, wandering through the landscape of grief in a familiar town.


Gaming is a profoundly lonely experience: time stands still, bringing with it comfort and escape. Alone, I can cast out my solitude to see more clearly its depths within me. I know this town, the tunnel, the farm, these rolling hills. I trace their surface before I am pulled back in. It is a neglected corner of the world, indiscernibly gazed upon by the shadow of a protagonist. Not looking at us but over there. A forest, shrouded in darkness, slowly crawls away. Endless tunnels. A hearse on the river Styx. I'm taunted by all this toying with the idea of death. I remember watching her hearse stretch off in front of me and living endlessly in that moment, recounting all the words unsaid. I could have gone on forever. Aimless, we float above the crescent motions of the virtual sea. Grief often comes in waves. That is what I was told, again and again.


The blades of grass come out of the screen, their sharp edges prick my skin and my hair stands up on the back of my neck. The camera shakes free from its shackles. I see inside the hearse travelling down the abandoned roads, fields and forests of San Andreas. I am alone here, in true isolation, like something out of a dream, running from something I don't fully understand. The memory is painful. I don't want to look back it hurts but I must make sure she is still there...


The world is burning, up in flames.


Yet here he stands with a bouquet, a gift never delivered a regret. The tunnel is Pluto's gate, the first circle encroaching my waiting place. My time is up. I am dumped into the crescent waves, my memory to be washed, my body left to float.

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<![CDATA[Poor Artists in the City of Lungs: A Conversation with The White Pube]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/poor-artists-in-the-city-of-lungs66f28d2a189d8d42910cf972Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:42:33 GMTLuisa De la Concha Montes


London is a city that’s very good at making itself feel like it's yours, its streets curling around you like it knows your name, like it knows where you're going. But it's a stranger wearing your clothes, pretending it belongs to you when it never really does. The city breathes in pulses. Early morning, a soft inhale of fog and buses, the low hum of shop shutters dragging open. By noon, it's already holding its breath, people packed into trains, their faces pressed to the glass, staring at a skyline that's never still. The city doesn't belong to anyone, least of all the ones trying to make it their own. Every corner presses against you, every new café you duck into raises a steeper price on your head, asking the question: do you even fit here anymore? I tell myself the art is alive too, breathing under its skin, bruisable. The best art, the real kind, has to be vulnerable, doesn't it? Like it's waiting to be hurt, or cracked open, that can wound if you look too closely. I try to write about art in this way, like it's a body in the room with me, something fragile, something with weight and heat, cautious as if I've stepped into a space that isn't really for me, but I'm still trying to make it my own, testing the edges, seeing where I can push before it pushes back. The art world, the city, all of it pressing against you, and you trying to find the gaps, the cracks where you can breathe. Because it doesn't belong to you, but you still want to live in it, to survive it, even when you know it's watching, waiting to see if you'll look too closely and fall through.


For the last two months, my neighbour has been leaving messages and drawings on our street. Late at night, she scatters photographs onto the pavement and pins little messages to the trees on the road. She only uses two Sharpies: red and green, and she signs every message with her name in all caps DONNA. I never see her in action; I can only imagine her. Other neighbours are annoyed, some have even complained to the Council. I don't mind it, in fact, every morning, as I make my way to work, I look forward to encountering her creations. It's unorthodox and unusual, but it has moved me more than any of the art I have seen inside museums this summer.

DONNA left me craving more, and unexpectedly, The White Pube's new book Poor Artists became a place to satiate my hunger. Co-written by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, the book is a strange amalgam of fiction and non-fiction, that invites us to explore art, not through the eyes of the gallery, the funder, or the curator but through the eyes of the artist. The story follows Quest Talukdar, a recent art school graduate, who slowly starts to unravel the peels of what ‘the art world’ really wants from them; and how that is in direct opposition to the reason why they became an artist in the first place: for the pure joy of painting.


Poor Artists is an educational journey that sources facts from real conversations with artists, invigilators, and Turner Prize winners, amongst many others. The story mixes anecdotes with strange, vividly descriptive scenarios, and examples of real-life art pieces and its style is fully eclectic: from Art Attack to Michelangelo, there is no stone left unturned, which makes the experience of reading it quite bizarre at times. Yet, the coherence of the ideas presented holds it all together in the form of a manifesto for hungry artists.


As the story progresses, and as Quest learns more and more about the precarious industry that they are trying to break into (no prospects, no financial security, no future, no success), they evolve into what I would classify as an ‘art world carer’. In the same way as a carer has to fulfil their tasks through the institution – with a deep reliance on the systems that enable stability – Quest develops a vision of the art industry that is self-aware, relentlessly critical and too invested in trying to fix a broken system from the inside. It's a survival strategy that I recognise in myself and other artists who are just trying to make something in a world that doesn't really care if you do.


“The fact is, most artists we know are just getting by,” Gabrielle told me. “They're scraping together work and barely paying rent, and all the art world wants from them is their identity to sell.”



Speaking to Gabrielle and Zarina, they relayed their approach to writing the book perfectly: “You know, there's only so many words in the English language to describe smells, so you have to get fun and funky with it. The lack of perfection when it comes to talking about art in language opens up new avenues for creative potential that we can exploit.” This book is an exploration of those avenues—new ways to talk about what is often locked up in systems too rigid for the messiness of creation.


But this isn't a neat book. It shouldn't be. As Gabrielle says, “We had to get weird with it to speak through that existentialism. And it wouldn't be true to art, I think, to have written it any other way.” Gabrielle and Zarina wrote Poor Artists for the people making art in between things, in between places. They wrote it for artists whose studios are on the bus, who scribble ideas on the backs of their hands or in notebooks stolen from Tesco, for artists who don't have studios, who don't have time, for whose art is squeezed out between shifts, between other lives.


I've made things on buses, too. Scribbled notes on the back of receipts during construction shifts, building the very city that now threatens to evict me. I left that job to write, to make art, only to find that writing doesn't pay rent, not in this city. Not in London. And now, I'm scraping by in the gaps between all the things London demands from me: rent, transport, food, space. I'm looking for a flat, waiting to be evicted from the one I have. I'm a freelancer now, which makes me a “liability” to landlords. I don't have savings. I'm not viable as a tenant. To sleep with a roof over my head, I am a liability. To have four walls around me, I am a liability. To live, I am a liability.


Gabrielle understands, telling me about the compromises she's had to make, too: “It's that thing, isn't it? How do you genuinely survive if you've made the decision to forgo a 9-to-5 stable income so that you can have more time and freedom to make art? The financial compromise to support my mental health only goes so far and then you get a toothache and the whole facade falls apart.” The White Pube doesn’t just comment on the struggle—they live it, and so does their protagonist Quest Talukdar in Poor Artists. Quest lies their way through the art world, padding their CV with exhibitions that never happened, residencies they never attended. And why not? The art world is built on illusions and pretence.


Poor Artists isn't a fairytale. There's no gallery representation, no cushy grant waiting for Quest at the end of the road. Quest moves back in with their mother, and leaves the city they love. They compromise because that's all they can do. Yet the book doesn't leave you hopeless. Gabrielle put it like this: “It's like Quest is constantly trying to figure out how much they can get away with. And that's something I think all artists should ask themselves.”


It would have been easier for The White Pube to present the thoughts and ideas they have been fermenting for nine years in essay form. Instead, they took a risk and decided to rely on surrealist scenarios to place the system into interrogation, thrusting a broken neoliberal Britain into the limelight, and making us bear witness to the unseen aspects of labour that hold the art world together. Muhammad and De la Puente have done so without shying away from a true representation of what this island has bred: precarity, inequality, exploitation and at times, even death. “We've been very publicly, loudly distasteful about authority,” Zarina explains, pointing to her cowboy tattoo. “That's a polite way of putting it. I feel like a cowboy interloper, in and out. Critics often hold power and authority, but our approach to criticism has been somewhat avoidant of that. It's strange to consider existing in the art world on our own terms while still engaging with institutions. There’s no happy way to calibrate a relationship with the art world. Even Quest's ending isn't a happy one; she makes several compromises. It's the least bleak way to conclude, but there's no positive relationship to be had with the art world from our position.”


While Poor Artists undeniably opens a new panorama for those who may not know the inside workings of art as a money-making industry, the book is so UK-centric that at times the value of the ideas presented may be lost in the specificity of Quest Talukdar's perception a British artist. Some of the assumptions made, such as the way in which artists need to sacrifice their own interests in order to get Arts Council money, or how the art scene in London is mostly made of people who care about art “as long as it's useful to their social standing”, are not universal.


It would be unfair to expect The White Pube, a critical outlet very much embedded in the British art scene, to also explore the international scene. Yet, when Quest attends a lecture delivered by an artist called Daisy inside a pool, all I could think of was the Mexican project La Albercada, which, from 2020 to 2022 repurposed abandoned empty pools in the city of Cuernavaca, Morelos as exhibition spaces.[1] One of the artworks presented by artist Juliana Alvarado showed a shovel pushed into a mound of dirt. The shovel reads: “Cuernavaca, segunda ciudad con más albercas en el mundo. Morelos, segundo lugar nacional en feminicidios”[2]


As Quest dipped their toes in the water, I thought of this example, and of how, in countries where there is less available funding for the arts, the institutional restrictions and precarity have not led to the extinction of art altogether, but instead, they have led to work that is intrinsically political not because it's been labelled as such, but by its mere act of existing. As I correlated Quest's pool to the pools in La Albercada, I wondered, what would happen if Quest left Britain? Would they even exist?

 

Despite this, it is a breath of fresh air to experience the art world through a non-white body; full of uncomfortable gaps and empty promises, Quest's character is used to showcase how profitable it is for museums to tap into identity politics. More importantly, Quest allows us to understand (physically and emotionally) how it feels to be ‘othered’ and tokenised for the sake of the institution and the collector. What is most refreshing is that despite unveiling the hard reality of life as an artist, Quest's journey does end with hope: hope for a world that acknowledges the need for community, with art as the tool that can breach the gaps that individualism has created, art as “the weeds that emerge through the cracks in the pavement.”


Because that's the lesson Poor Artists leaves you with: refuse to cooperate with the reality that's been handed to you. Rewrite the story. Gabrielle elaborates, saying, “I think that's what art is mostly—fiction. It's people creating and making things up in their heads. So why not lean into that? If we all did it enough, we could lie our way into a better world. I don't want coping mechanisms because I don't want to have anything to cope with.” Or, as Zarina said at the end of our conversation, “Fuck it. Let's just lie. Big mad lies.” Maybe Quest doesn't get their gallery show, and maybe I won't get the flat, but that's not the point. The point is to keep moving through the cracks, and keep making things in the gaps. DONNA knows this, too. It's why I keep looking for her messages pinned to the trees, why I keep showing up every morning, hoping to see what she's left behind. Poor Artists throws us back into the world with full awareness that there is precarity in the arts and with the hope that perhaps, armed with the knowledge of this reality, we may be able to revalue art as a tool for active resistance and transformation. And as a consequence, we might change the way in which we perceive ourselves, the so-called ‘poor artists’ as standalone individuals, but as a whole ecosystem.


“I think one of the points of Poor Artists is to remember that community can be as rich as wealth," Gabrielle tells me. "There are many people in life who have no savings but they've got the most amazing friendships and family and neighbours around them.”


I finished the book feeling consoled by the knowledge that my artistic practice does not have to become a career to be valuable; it is embedded into my way of being. I should buy a copy for DONNA. After all, she is a veteran, a stubborn artist, making art against all odds. Using the street as her canvas, freaking out our uptight neighbours and giving some of us something to look forward to each morning. As I walk down the road, and I slow down to really notice things around me, I embrace this newfound sense of rebellion. There is no doubt, art tastes better outside the walls of the institution.




[1] https://terremoto.mx/online/1ra-albercada/

[2] “Cuernavaca, the second city with most pools in the world. Morelos (the state where Cuernavaca is), the second place with most feminicides in Mexico”.


Interview and additional writing by Bryson Edward Howe

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<![CDATA[Little Prayers Gallery - September 7, 2024]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/little-prayers-gallery66d87d89854dad60ba557625Sun, 08 Sep 2024 17:39:08 GMTThe Big ShipWelcome to Little Prayers, the self-destructing gallery. Here for a good time not a long time. This week, we attend halo-headed parties.





Jonathan Richman - Int. Table Session in Orange and Blue



Birdsong falling, ash

leaves falling, the loudest sound

going round here: I am here,

hidden, what sweet,

narrow bend is summer,

an orb dancing through teal.

Imagine me

looking at you

looking at him

to lead you

through the night.


After the seatilt of punksweat on plaster and the basement has backdrafted the fire hydrant for pressure release and its steaming stars bobsled the night into a burr: glint shifting... the whole goddamn Aquarian armory plus a cone calcified in new skin on their skin and after they have tried at being more than friends and called it quits pan left-to-right


Lamplight: the futurist cross-section of sky.


across leaves into seclusion, the smokescreen a cross-section of that moon ruffled foliage, settle on a kitchen like a hanging garden that nobody knows, seventh wonder, seven friends (three convos) low commotion, push-in, curled notes, papers, arms, leaves, lips, moons, hours, the cool oak of perfect conversation, branches going nowhere, windows open and tinged with the iceglass erudition of love. 1am coffee why not, recital, pause, I'm happy for you. An inner-city Cypriot scuff, here? here. "This one is experimental" and hands over an espressomango(?) on ice all-burn remedy because we will solve the mind-body problem tonight, though what does "the skin is like a dotted line" even mean - like half hedgerow, half house? half a chord? drunkenness the cross-section of sleep + outrage, we the cross-section of body (child) + mind (man).


- Written by Caleb Carter



Anselm Kiefer - Epiphanies; or, How Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven



I don't know who I'd be if I was someone else. It would be apocalyptic. I'd miss the memory of coarse sand nesting into my pores, a chaffed blanket stitched from sepia that suffocated me in hot summers, binding us as we'd melt and fuck and our hard bodies would press against the supple, soft brick of your house. I'd miss the relief of clouds passing over without rain, but being wetter with sweat than if they did. I'd miss the trees that carved shadows for us when the light stung my eyes and I welled up in arrears of sadnesses I never boxed out, or the way laughter felt, sharp and unexpected, after too many words and not enough understanding. I'd miss seeing babies learn how to do things for the first time, like the time I saw a baby first learn how to howl in tunnels for the applause of unfamiliar faces. I'd still hope for your breath on the curve of my neck, hot and uneven. More, I'd crave the sharp sting on my tongue as I licked the copper coil of lightbulbs as I'd lap at their glow in a sweet hunger for something more iridescent than the memories that only half-heartedly stick themselves to me (they are like old velcro in wet hot rain) — and other sapidities like the soft crunch of maggots under molars (they taste like wheat bix) or fire ants stuck to the roof of mouths (they taste like fire) or the pebbled texture of nettles (they taste like nothing), and sometimes I'm sure I'd even miss the sour moss that's grown on the walls of my open mouth since we last bit into each other (you taste like the ice left in your cup after draining the gin and tonic) — memories wasted on me because wouldn't they be of more use to someone else who could learn from my mistakes before they make the same themselves rather than me just reliving them over and over? Memories like licking up the ceramic plate off the floor because the mess of guilt was too much to step over without slicing deep into my heel, instead I just licked my lips as the dervishes of white porcelain danced across the tiles. There was a point where I would've preferred to be anyone else. But now I'd miss the sound of statements I don't believe in kicking in the air, and again I'd sweat, and again I'd well, and again I'd lick up the mess, and again I'd sink teeth into whatever flesh was willing, always chasing hard against soft and always chasing the vice and always chasing the versa. I'd never call grocery shopping a harvest so why would we call what we had anything more severe than time spent together? Still yet, I'd miss the sound of silence after arguments, as I'd suck the rust off old keys that never quite fit the locks we needed to open. Instead, I'd cleave them open and find splinters of all this clawing at every one of these hollow words which confuses italics for bold and emphasises all the wrong words: you'd better seal the door back up behind me because I don't want to kill myself, I only want to kill you who is me who is who.


- Written by Bryson Edward Howe




Anselm Kiefer - Albatross



Stopping me is easy. I get big painting nirodha - the mystical time cessation that a meditator experiences, directly translating to "extinction"

in which the long wind closes the door

in which the distance between question and order is a kind of "wh-hushh"

in which the colour of words must be uniform with fire

in which monuments ask the guards to leave on the nightlight (fire exit)

in which the wingspan of the woods greys at its edge

in which i dream of a dove dreaming of running through woods

& not flying not even once

You'd think that when an angel falls - given it has so far to fall and we are so far away from its falling - that it would fall slowly and that we would be able to track it with our pointing finger, like a six-legged bug dozing or the sea tossing a tangerine (easypeel) or a mote of pollen coming home or thaw sign or sunbud - and that we would be able to say "look there's the cavitation of heaven" (google sonoluminescence) - and that given all of this, if we kept one eye winked on it and started jogging backwards then we could probably keep it in the same spot forever and ever.

in which im so busy dreaming i forget that even in fire-words green means go


- Written by Caleb Carter




Sara Winkler - silver jewelerry visionn



All these random little things happening, like, they're there, but they don't line up, you know? I can see them, but not, like, connected. Do they even connect? Like, are they even separate things? Or nah? Life's all just one long thing — this one big moment, right? But what I remember, are like, all these tiny moments, little moments, not one big thing. It's kind of weird. But also kinda nice? Like, this confusion, but also peace, somehow.


Mate, please, can I just--


All these beats, like music, right? They're separate, but they blend, and it's smooth, like, one thing. One big thing. And we're all in it. Like a crowd at a gig, all these people, these individuals, but together we make it, make this one big thing, flowing. And I guess, realising that? That's something holy, maybe?


I don't know, can I just have my lighter back?


It's all light, and fingers brushing, arms wide open, everything shining. But no words. Just faces and looks, you know?


Please.

- Written by Bryson Edward Howe




David Lynch - Twin Peaks: The Return, Episode 8



Recap: One murder, the book of revelations, no more telly tonight!! now this. The squinted tropic of vague lights, like lunchtime, cloudy, on my way, and remember…


In the scree-cloth ziggurat of a cold Los Alamos… Each soul is a meteorite of a distinctly mottled pause. In black cardiomegaly, these petrified hearts ached everything changes but the past. No surprises there: the most porous shapes in the museum were the most interesting, still radiating through certain cracks, in others dripping hot yellow goos of time, with ravines blown open in the shapes of how they had loved, and teething stalactites in the shapes of how they hated.


On the centre plinth, at the back - the shout to the pyroclastic spheres' whisper - an obsidian box. The stonecold holy ark, an outline of pentecostal fire, deathless soul. A television, whose dust had settled in its gills so long it was like its static had matted into a fur coat of electric dementia. Cooper pedalled the big square button and it wheezed to life, coating the room in a carmine sabbath. He disappeared into the TV. His final thoughts were that The Landslide was Evil and his Flashlight was Good but was at a loss as to where that left him, somewhere between a conduit for the search and the search itself, so used his hail Mary to shout "FIX YR HEARTS OR DIE!!" Seemed to just about cover it.


"Got a light?"

God-of-light?

You'll find him, David, keep searching.


- Written by Caleb Carter

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<![CDATA[What's Caught The Tiger's Eye?: A Conversation with Hannah Lim]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/whats-caught-the-tigers-eye-a-conversation-with-hannah-lim66c0a822ecfc0a6650b7415eSun, 18 Aug 2024 11:08:49 GMTBryson Edward HoweHannah Lim's sculptures collide myth and mysticism to reimagine the ornamental objects of history.


sculpture, art, artist, Hannah lim, art websites, fine art, new art, art shop, big art, gallery art, high end art, visual arts, art home, artist drawing


When elements of myth are appropriated, they are often stripped of their cultural context and significance, reducing hallowed stories to mere aesthetics or trendy artefacts of tradition. This not only dilutes the essence of these myths but also perpetuates underlying power imbalances as dominant cultures exploit and trivialise the more sacred elements of custom, skewing our perception of historical and cultural realities. This is just one way meaning can be embedded into objects, how histories can materialise, and how they can be destroyed.


The myth of the tiger's eye — a stone with a lustre of silky golden honey — was said to have begun in ancient Egypt, where craftsmen used the stone in their deity statues to represent divine vision and believed it protected the sun and earth; or perhaps it started in ancient Rome, whose soldiers wore engraved gems to protect them in battles; or from any number of various ancient cultures who believed the stone could ward off the evil eye and its curses, and keep the wearer safe from malefic urges that lurk on the edge of our understanding.


But maybe myth isn't the right word: it's more like superstition, imbued with the same wishful animism as the mottled fur of a rabbit's severed foot, or the soft, anxious raps of knuckles onto hard wood. We have to force our desires, our worries, our secret hopes and hope-nots into objects to stop them from crawling uninvited into our dreamspace or maybe worse mixing drunkenly with our waking life; like eye floaters, these visions are self-inflicted but no easier to just rub away. Write them in your tear-soaked diary, seal them into crystals and salts, or better yet find a lockbox and throw away the key: drop it in the ocean, into a volcano, down your open throat.

♊︎



Hannah Lim's work swims through these murky waters of myth, mysticism, and material culture; koi share ponds with seraphs and herons breathe the same talced air as chimera, reinterpreting stories and spaces where ancient motifs from both Medieval and Chinese bestiaries swim and slither under the same celadon skies, reclaiming agency for objects historically caught in the mercantile web of Western consciousness. Her work disrupts traditional narratives, turning the tables on the "sovereign Western consciousness" that once viewed Asia as an "image of the other," or worse, a surrogate self. These sculptures, frosted with an enchanted vibrancy, reimagine a medium that until now could only ever be merely ornamental.


"I suppose I came to sculpture almost by chance," Hannah tells me, reflecting on her journey. "I used to make small sculptures in my teenage years, but it wasn't until my foundation year that I truly committed to the medium." This shift from painting and drawing to sculpture was spurred by a tutor who saw something in her work, a latent potential that found its full bloom in three dimensions. It was as if the creatures and forms that had lived in her sketches needed to step out into the world, to inhabit space in a way that only sculpture could allow.


The multicultural confluence of her background inevitably informed this evolution of Lim's work. "My dad is Singaporean Chinese, and my mum's British, so I've always been fascinated by how these two cultures intersect," she explains. This mining of her own braided identity led her to explore chinoiserie, an 18th-century design trend steeped in both aesthetic beauty and colonial exploitation. "Chinoiserie is very Rococo in style, but also quite anthropomorphic with its arms and legs, flamboyant and extravagant. I was drawn to it for its playful elements, but also because of the colonial practices that allowed this design trend to flourish."


Yet, Lim is not content to simply recreate, but through a specific, hungry reclamation, she found a way to reconnect with the Chinese heritage she didn't fully experience growing up in the UK. It's a reclamation not just of aesthetic, material forms but of the stories and myths that those forms have long contained also deeply influenced by the concept of Ornamentalism, a feminist theory of East and Southeast Asian personhood laid out by scholar Anne Anlin Cheng. "I've been thinking a lot about how ornamental objects have historically reflected and defined women, particularly Asian women," Lim notes, "this comparison to porcelain and fragile objects," a reflection that led her to examine her own relationship with ornamental objects, seeing them as contiguous extensions of her racialised body often unresurrectable from the weight of their histories, fetishised and reduced to the voluble silence of mere surface.


Ornament and maximalism have, in recent history, been pushed to the peripheries of taste, dismissed by modernist critics as excessive, frivolous, even degenerate. But just to deride ornament as clutter, or an overindulgence, is to ignore its ability to speak in forgotten tongues on the undercurrents of culture and identity. Cheng writes, "Aesthetics is a language about the ineffable and the contradictory. It makes room for the historical, the imaginative, and the phantasmagoric. What people don’t realise is that race and gender are such complicated phenomena that straddle the material and immaterial, that we desperately need the realm of art and literature to help with a vocabulary." Ornament, for Lim (with work confected, adorned, and intricate), isn't just an embellishment in an austere industry that increasingly seeks to flatten and simplify the complex, but an assertion against the notion of ornament as something prosthetic and superfluous, to be erased or muted. It's unapologetic in that sense; in a culture that often devalues the decorative, Lim finds meaning in the loud, the layered.



As our conversation winds down, I ask Hannah about the fantastical worlds that her sculptures seem to inhabit. Does she envision these worlds as she creates, or do they form organically around her pieces? "It's a bit of both," she admits. "Sometimes I start with a specific story or motif, but the work often evolves as I go along. I'm fascinated by Chinese and medieval mythology, especially the way creatures and ideas from these vastly different cultures can intersect and inform each other." Her sculptures and watercolours do exist in this state of fluidity, smudging the lines between the known and the unknown. This ambiguity is intentional, a way for Lim to invite the viewer into their own reading of the work, without it being solely defined by colonial ties. "I like the idea that people can interpret my work in different ways," she says. "There's something exciting about creating forms that look familiar but aren't entirely distinguishable. It allows viewers to project their own meanings onto the work."


This playfulness, this intentional blurring of boundaries, extends to the way Lim interacts with the materials she uses. Her pieces are often adorned with vibrant glazes that give them a chatoyant otherworldly glow, like a cat's citrine eye catching the wet light of a dark room. They are objects that petition to be touched, to be handled with care, and yet they also possess an air of the untouchable, as if they might slither out of your grasp if you reach for them too quickly, or recoil like the wilt of a flower petal at night. In a way, it's this aspect of Lim's work that is most about reimagining the world itself — a world where the boundaries between East and West, past and present, real and imagined, are molten and ever-changing. It's an invented, mercurial world where mythologies fluently leak into bruisable realities, where ornamental objects are breathing, pulsing, fleshy, with feelings of their own, and where every piece of art is at once both familiar and strange, both a question and an answer.


A glimpse of silver thread on the river's skin. A shadow dancing just beyond the reach of claws. A secret buried in lightning's silent roar and fading with the last, heaving sigh of thunder.


What has caught the tiger's eye, I wonder?

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<![CDATA[The Dandy & Dionysus]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/dandy-dionysus66abef22f9b0e80893668707Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:16:42 GMTCaleb CarterOFF WITH THEIR HEADS.


Saltburn emerald fennell barry keoghan jacob elordi a24

Housekeeping


England is a savage rainforest, antiquity green. A surreal landscape of cacophonous fens hemmed by psilocybin groves, once pilgrims' rest and bard country, the sites of its pogroms are also its heritage. Its kings are paedophiles. Its politics are a farce. It can't escape the nightmare of class. And like a rot stuck in its rowan beard, there is an unshakable sense that something is very, very wrong and has been for a very, very long time. Invisible forces brutalise our capacity for wonder. We are told that the only way out is through but even the most gullible devotees reveal the system's defunction: to succeed means to escape, or at least to negotiate a closer retirement. Worst of all - Sorry, we are told, the system is unchangeable. Actually, we evolved to be this way. So keep calm, we are told, carry on: believe us.


Art is the Pagan snag on England’s tapestry. Pulling on its threads – even briefly – has been a dizzying experience. I have come away with belief in a psychic war and hooves instead of feet. In an effort to invoke belly-magic rather than head-magic on this site (to create rather than reflect) I am usually concerned with stylistic experimentation, but I truly believe this to be a diagram whose clarity is more important than my own affectations. Unless, in places, I found monsters to be slain by spells only they would recognise, I have tried to make it as accessible as possible. This piece is about belief: it is intended to unmake one reality so as to rebuild another.


Enjoy the ransacking of the house.


Hail Pan.


And was Jerusalem builded here

among those dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!”

- William Blake, Jerusalem


You gotta fight for your right to party.”

- Beastie Boys, Fight for Your Right


1.

The Dandy


Emerald Fennell - Roland Barthes - Alan Clarke

Ken Russell - Camille Paglia - Mary Shelley - Percy Shelley

Odilon Redon - Roman Casas - Oscar Wilde


Alan Clarke Pendas Fen BBC

"It is a very British thing", my bookshop colleague said, "for the rich to gatekeep radicalism." He was talking about the late lodestar of cultural theory, Mark Fisher, but primarily of Fisher's students at Goldsmiths University, where he lectured. Three months later, I found myself at a party overlooked by Goldsmiths and surrounded by its alumni. Debating an article I had recently written on rave nostalgia, my friend told me that “it might be dangerous to think bacchanalia can change anything.”


There is a long, British history of liberalism associated with its uppermost class. The radical love and populist insignias of rave culture and the hippie movements find their folklore in wild-dressing and free expression but these roots have their history in creative, sexual and gender experimentation performed by an affluent establishment. Wilde and the Bloomsbury Group came from generational wealth, Huxley’s Peyote trips were Eton educated, and the satanic, sexual surcharge of Aleister Crowley could fall back on its inheritance. Nepotism in the arts is an open secret - these days hardly worth mentioning - but sometimes a  wealthy artist's popular creation, lauded for its radical dress, is in direct conversation with this tradition - such is the case with Emerald Fennell. Saltburn, suspiciously designed in the architecture of both the art-house and the thirst-trap (see neon, kink, tall boys and 4:3 aspect ratio), stirs a recognisable symbolic brew: dress, decadence, estate; drink, drugs and classic myth invoking bacchanalia; Oxford invoking Dark Academia; a gross obsession with class like a stink. Its controversial twist, in which the protagonist’s working class background is revealed to be a charade, relegates the actual working class to “the primitive proletariat, still outside the Revolution”[1]: on the benches but, probably - Fennel seems to say - underfed and underread. But it also suggests that all of the English (regardless of station) are diseased with upwards aspiration, eyes blackened with a lust for king's blood. That at the end of the Puritan revolt a chord tight and dormant was snapped in the air between the axe bit and Charles' neck, and long since has this isle been haunted by its rend.


The elite has always been into treason and sacrilege - they’re expensive. Since the 17th-Century saw the translation of ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts, artists and designers have been fascinated with the geometry of ancient deities, and filigreed their clients with a marbled, muscled erudition transcending the hunched posture of the church and the state. However, like any story in which an antique moonstone is excavated and stolen from native soil, phantoms followed. For every Corinthian column erected in a bank, shadowy eroticism mimicked its trajectory, and in parlours laced with Opium, the well-dressed and well-read scored in the margins of the Iliad: “Pagans Abound”.


Odilon Redon The Cyclops

It will be hard to proceed without establishing this fact: the Greek pantheon is Pagan. As is the Attic, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Norse, the Saxon. Satanism is. So is Zoroastrianism, Scientology, and Astrology. “Pagan” once meant “villager”, whose rural horizon was an unscrupulous arcadia still writ in the pedagogies of storm: some things seemed to happen always (the sun rose and set, it snowed, it rained, it shone), and others (like locusts, harvest, plagues, floods and childbirth) seemed to happen at the whim of the fates. The ground never moved and the sky did but it seemed to these folk living hand-to-mouth a gross oversimplification to ascribe all of this to the big hot light arcing across it, especially when - at night - the universe uncurled. So, they built a whole cast of star-people, a pantheon, to bring more children and less fire. Like all language, the definition of “Pagan” directly correlates to the cradle of power. When Rome invaded Britain and they were charged back through the acid fog by Boudica, legions of tattooed women, white-eyed druids and moss-eaters, those ritualistic, howling people were Pagans, too. When Christianity became the richest religion in the world, anything non-Abrahamic was Pagan, and anything non-conformist was “heretic”. Persecution is at the heart of Paganism, and at the heart of persecution is power.


When Oxford and Cambridge made Greek and Latin compulsory entry requirements, this was the bloody history they welcomed onto their worn stone steps. Because only the rich could access it, heretic dreams in Victorian England were bought and sold with polite seduction, degrees, a seat in the cabinet, trebuchets were armed with a twinkle in the eye and blood drawn with a bite on the lip. The upper classes - for as much as they indulged in their luxuries like dangerous thought grew on a vine - were of the enlightened type whose fetish was revolt. At night they took laudanum and laid awake staring at their window, yearning to see an orange glow, lapping, and feel its heat in their loins.


In Ken Russell's Gothic, a parable of the night that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was created, these phantoms are made object. They haunt their creators like it is the authors who are the foreign body, the thorn in their dream-hip, and sleuth around wet moonlight like curious dogs. In a deluge of sex and opium, the writers declare "It is the age of dreams and nightmares!" But anybody who has been witness to the sublime knows that it always was, and always will be. Such stuff as dreams are made on. The sublime is "the experience of the infinite, which is terrifying and thrilling because it threatens to overpower the perceived importance of human enterprise in the universe."[2] The Gothic, with its infernal love, familial leashes and monstrous climb from the pit, reveals the capes of this strange and giant ecstasy to exist within us. Its admixture requires 1. internal infinity, 2. external awe, 3. bifurcation. A poet struck by lightning is a fantastic symbol for this experience in which all three become one and the veil of their separation (what we call reality) is momentarily destroyed. The poet becomes a forked conduit for a new world. Psychedelics are another, more accessible mediator than the spark of god. Trauma does the job too, though it is not recommended. Love works exceedingly well. Though total obliteration is impossible, the artist, during their fugue, leaves a suspended doorway ajar and night beasts free to roam. Like a muscle, like a book, something is torn - unleashed - then altered, permanently. Artists have always known that this world is clay, and that that it would take the most hypnagogic of us - it would take art, and artists, once called schizophrenics, and before that epileptics, hysterics, heretics, Pagans, then visionaries, shamans[3] - to mould a new one.


It should be unsurprising that creative, Pagan forces are feminine. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia calls it the "belly-magic" that the masculine "head-magic" built "sky cults" to supress. But for the guests of Villa Diodati, a wealthy circle of men who might never have otherwise come into contact with the humbler origins and radical politics of a Wollstonecraft like Mary, the feminine energy of Frankenstein was surely its most shocking aspect. Whilst her husband's most famous work, Ozymandias, is set in sand, Mary's work is bookended by an arctic desert. Sand is a cruel illusion. Seemingly refracting the stardust we are all the updraught of, its project is ultimately that of more sand. Conversely, the tundra feels like it is the bane of us - a wasteland of knives - yet locked in its ice is a more cyclical mode of oblivion, life's current in soft stasis. The middle of Frankenstein is the glacial pool into which its appendages thaw, the bifurcation that allows awe to flow into the sublime: Frankenstein's monster speaks. The structure of Shelley's book is that of an amniotic manger that recognises life as a continual wheel of birth and death and, in the name of this continuum's divinity, is furious at the burden of its master's "progress".


After the dance, decadent women, the yellow book, fin-de-siecle, decadence

It's 4am. The dance is over. The century is about to turn and the world with it. We got drunk in our funeral attire and then lazed on the cushions of England's verdant hills to pre-empt the death of the queen. "I reckon she's only got about three years left in her." Leafed through our hands: the manuscript for all our prophecies, The Yellow Book.


His eye fell on the yellow book Lord Henry had sent him […] It was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sounds of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray


That golden portal, whose colours were the insignia of wealth, Mithras crowns, idols, claws, and The Golden Dawn was the serial manual of spies for revelation. Its writers were a chaotic class of enfant terribles who knew that ploughing a new century could only ever be done over the bones of the old.


2.

Dionysus


Aubrey Beardsley - Arthur Machen - Donna Tartt

Peter Paul Rubens - Caravaggio - Nils Blommér

Friedrich Nietzsche - William Blake


Illustrated with Aubrey Beardsley's bawdily violent inkblot wraiths, The Yellow Book's contributors included, amongst others, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Machen. Machen was a clergyman from Gwent but he gave it up to become a Pagan. In his novelette, The Great God Pan, London is besieged by an emerald mania. Pan, the Greek satyr who instils pan-ic in those wandering astray, is in Machen's fragmented depiction transgender, and a shapeshifter, virgin girl and virile beast, nubile and pubic, silent, bucolic, reeling, ravenous, "the form of all things but devoid of all form [crying] 'let us go hence to the darkness of everlasting.'"


"That woman, if I can call her a woman, corrupted my soul", Herbert cries to his old university chum, Villiers. Once privately educated and coasting on his family's investments, Herbert has accidentally married the ancient daimon, Pan, in the shape of a beguiling woman. Now she has "corrupted" him, and he has willingly sacrificed his inheritance to her as a result. The intonation is clear. Herbert has been sodomised, and the experience has not only ransacked his marital status, but dwarfed the importance of his material world. He is ruined - he believes - by the true nature of evil. And yet, Dr. Raymond, bent on unleashing the beast and forcing its coarse, green goat hair up through city cobbles, considers the implacable phantom a prehistoric continent - the axiom of our origins - the "real world" behind the "dreams and shadows" of our waking life. The true evil of nature: chaos infinitely rebirthing itself. Fitting to Herbert's experience, whose previously unknown centre has been reached, this ruin is entwined with rapture.


It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing […] The river ran white […] Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no ‘I’ […] as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. It was like being a baby[…]”


“But these are fundamentally sex rituals, aren’t they?”

- Donna Tartt, The Secret History


Pan was a foremost member of the Thiasus, an ecstatic parade of satyrs, sileni, nymphs, and the frenzied human maenads (whose name means "to rave"), led by Dionysus, the Greek god of fertility and wine. His migration was, by varying degrees, a war charge, funeral march and birth fete. On reliefs found in the Vatican, the Louvre, and the British museum, he might be depicted as an old, wise, drunkard or as a beautiful, young man, and Pan as either a foul faun or a crowned ephebe tugging at his thigh. Like his esquire he is a shapeshifter. In Rome he was known as Bacchus, elsewhere as Zagreus, son of the underworld. He is the darkened hemisphere moments before tillage, a two sided coin whose dual kingdom occupies magic both of its sunder and its meld.



Actual Dionysia, like the mysterious worship ritual enacted in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, was immersed in fluctuating gender identity. Its rites were spread throughout the year. Oscophoria gave us costumes and food in October. During it, twenty young men and boys raced boughs of grapes from the temple to the harbour, and the fastest boy was rewarded with a goblet of (possibly psychoactive) honey wine. Once drunk, he wore a woman's dress and led a choir to a banquet and animal sacrifice. Expectation fell away. The freer you acted, the more fertility magic you freed. However, these festivals were exclusive, frequently to men and inheritors of vineyards and breweries, and state-sanctioned.


Unlike in Thrace, where they say they can hear orgies in the clouds, ricocheting against crag and crevice, savage moans riding down on the mist, and on Parnassus, they say to stay indoors when the women and girls perform their own fertility rites to usher in Spring. They dance through woods up to the mountains, crowned in ivy and snakes, screaming with wands brandished, drumming palms red-raw on hide. They slit the throat of a goat and then tear it apart with their bare hands and eat it, just as the Titans did to Zagreus. That is not wine on their lips. They don't play trick-or-treat on the doors of the gods, they consume the flesh of the satyr, its gore still steaming on their chins. These rites invoked Spring with the chthonic force of feminine libido, cyclically sprouting from the underworld on the reflux of lava, rather than a momentary bestowal of pyramidal - masculine - Olympian grace. Not crown shy, it is the faeries' connective praxis that harks a crushing daybend.



Dionysia, stuffed with secrets and drunk on their revelation, permitted its initiates to indulge in powerful luxuries and revel in the hallucinatory expanse of a boundaryless shore, the sublime. Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is primarily concerned with describing the artistic conflict between the Apollonian (illumination, form, prudence, purity, reason) and the Dionysian (instinct, impulse, music, passion, chaos), more abstractly for the seen to coil around the unseen, two faces Nietzsche respectively terms "dreams" and "drunkenness". Dionysus is a powerful god but, like drunkenness, an erratic one, twilit, a close heat streaked with seemingly random aurora borealis. Alexander owed much of his violent crusade to Dionysus. He is the lush power of the evening, the lantern, the grape, the orifice, all that is crimson spilled onto mud. To indulge in all at once is a violent kind of ecstasy. So closely wed, it's what Nietzsche described as “that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always seemed to [him] to be the genuine ‘witches brew’”.


In 183BC the Roman senate outlawed then violently prosecuted Bacchanalia. Not for its pantheon (though that would soon follow) but for its excess. Dionysia was the terrifying symbol of the people's bottomless demands - an insatiable, ungovernable want - and marked the beginning of a long history of social rituals being prohibited by the state and then privatised behind a mask.


3.

The Ritual


James Ensor - Stanley Kubrick - Frederic Jameson

Slavoj Žižek - Balthazar Nebot

Patricia Highsmith - Anthony Mingella


James Ensor, Grim Fandango painting modern art

The invitation is red with gold inscription that can only be discerned by candlelight. Above the flame it reads: ET DIABOLUS INCARNUS EST. ET HOMO FACUS EST. You choose the mask of a dog, presuming it would be fatal to wear the face of an ungulate. You are no lamb. No sacrifice. Upon arrival you are offered tea. When you drink it, reality unrobes. Wading through the shimmer, you make your way to the highest floor of the highest tower. God's assassins stand in dresses wearing the eyes and horns of goats. They undress. There are drums. They get on all fours.


Masks are theatrical and gnostic, of a material-spiritual accord, insinuating esoteric tuning to hidden truths. Of course, that truth may be nothing more than the ashamed identity of inherited wealth (this country is sick on class at both poles - the difference being that whilst one blushes, the other starves). But anonymity also more easily permits foreign entities - the radical, the poor, the migrant - to enter its previously consecrated arcane circle beneath the cover of ceremony.


In Stanley Kubrick's final, most mysterious film, Eyes Wide Shut, masks hide but they also contain and curtail. The elite license the id in secret, wassailing by moonlight in an exclusive libido ritual that keeps the world-movers' demons at bay. Like the state-sanctioned bacchanalia of Rome, one-orgy-per-bank-holiday keeps away that uncontrollable bastard, desire. Subsequently, polyamory and homosexuality become delicacies for those that can afford it whilst the peasants war with the concept and politics of heteronormative marriage, still mashing spheres into square holes. Meanwhile, the orgy's exclusive, Pagan coding, masques, cloaks, the baroque (notice ingredients for cabalist conspiracies; the Illuminati, the red shoe group, Black Rock's undisclosed investors, Freemasonry), terrifies in its suggestion of capitalist worship. With an undecipherable costume and ritual mode, it is not just a monotheism, but a many-tendrilled beast requiring devotion to a perverse pantheon, stirred, freakish, and immovable in its number amongst the pinprick hernias of the stars. Jameson and Žižek say that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism[4], but the same now goes for its beginning. The Party both predates and outlives its guests. Despite ostensibly being its arbiters, they believe in the system as one believes the skies will bring fields of gold. It is the prime mover.


balthazar nebot allegory of fortune painting

Like class, Saltburn from the beginning is about sex as a mask. Oliver weaponizes his own sexual fluidity to infiltrate the higher classes of the estate: the more rich people he sleeps with, the longer he is allowed to stay but, pointedly, he is refused Felix's body. Whilst he degrades himself in sexual sacrifice, drinks used bathwater, and kisses rainbows, intercourse with Felix is considered a higher transgression than murder. It is easy to assess why anyone would want to have sex with the rich, but taboo to wonder why the rich would want that too: to entertain their fetishization of the working class, maybe, but perhaps also because of a primal, erotic urge towards metamorphosis. If sex is, as Camille Paglia writes, “dream’s proving ground”, then penetrating the rich man is to enact a power reversal that transcends wealth. Impulse is the devil to tyranny. Once brought to orgasm its despotism goes soft.


The tacit understanding of Dionysian ritual - whether art or festivity - is that rebirth comes at the behest of oblivion. This process is what we might call revolution. The seduction of reversal's threat is that of sexual domination, and is laced through the homoeroticism played out in all of the art inspiring Saltburn. From Dorian Gray' through to Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, its archetypes dance the boyish hunger for male acknowledgement, answering that ancient adage, "I'm not sure if I want to be him or be on top of him", with "they are both the same thing." In Anthony Mingella's adaptation of Highsmith's novel, the moment hyphenating pretence and violence is most important here, the "Oh, God" and "Please no", the thin line between a moan and a groan and the seconds in which every lie - personal and societal - collapse. The consequences of refusing to participate in the game or simply naming it as such come to light, and the iron tang of truth emerges: the rules are predicated on violence.


Unwilling to break completely their bondage and draw blood, the uninvited guest (jagged novitiate, Zero, the fool) is not an anarchist to but a participant in the schema of The House. They want the crown of thorns on their master's head for themselves, the sceptre and robe, its signs and symbols and, ultimately, to fuck The House on its way down. Partly as gleeful revenge, partly because The House wants it, too. The equilibrium of capitalism is sadomasochistic. The bottom’s submission is pre-requisite to the top’s continual gain. The highest percentile is a leach, a vampiric power relying on its host for sexual mana. Its infertility unmasks both its weakness and its identity.


4.

The Witch


Alan Moore - Annie Besant - Silvia Federici


In The Great God Pan, men who are “rich, prosperous, and to all appearance in love with the world” are driven to suicide by a magical force. Less than ten years before its publication, women of London forced into prostitution were brutally murdered by a man. The hysteria besieging the aristocracy of Arthur Machen’s story is the direct and imaginary inverse to the Jack-the-Ripper murders. Suddenly, the subconscious, feminine power at the heart of Machen's tale takes on a vengeful quality.


In his deep, anarchist conspiracy, From Hell, Alan Moore uncoils from those murders an umbilical map of England on an ocean of blood. Chapter Four tours a satanic Albion beneath London, firmly locking a patriarchal evil in its street-names and corners. Moore traces Freemasonry to the dark elf Dionysus himself, a worship of phallic, sacrilegious sun-and-stone cemented across epochs of architects beginning with the craftsmen of Atlantis. Its acolytes choose chaos as the paternity of progress, worshipping his signs littered through vain crucibles: the hadron collider, medicine, war... Let's take stock: something here has shifted, hasn't it? Once the scourge of the powerful and threat to order's collapse, The Dionysian now seems the magic idol of tyrants.


Signs are precious. When we imagine the authors of society as a cult, wearing the peach-rot gore of a goat, we reinforce wealth as a gravitational force, its gain incandescently broiled like alchemical gold, and when we enchant them with Paganism we also apathetically sacrifice our own symbols of heretic rebuke. We lose our inner power to manipulate the very signs that write reality.


A lesson in witchcraft. The human mind is pliant and the human body is fragile. Signs are crucial to the survival of both. Usually spells need a material: dyes, ochre and charcoal, brews, herbs, entrails, whole bodies, foals, goats, new-borns. Or a spell might need the body itself, milk or blood or hand movements, dances, romps, fucking. But most important are signs, words, symbols. The soul is on the breath. The ground can rift if you name it right. It’s a survival mechanism as old as humankind: if you feel yourself losing a tether on something, or you’re cold in the wet cave and facing down the hot snout of some deep dark beast hitherto unknown, naming it might buy you some time. Signs, placed in correspondence, create order from chaos. Chaos - its pulsing, protean, ever-unfolding nebula - is what in Hebrew is called the Ein Sof, the “(there is) no end”, over which a fortress of nodes called Sefirot’s are placed to form the Kabballah. We might think of any system formed likewise, from class to capitalism to relationships. The more complex the web, the greater the strength of its chains.



I choose to find glory in the unexplained, as even when explained I find more glory still in consciousness. There is little to suggest that anything I have written above predates us and our imagination, but that only makes it more glorious to me. All the cosmos from our skulls. Trying on various garments of belief is, if we are to listen to the anecdotes, one of the most exhilarating experiences life can offer; perhaps the reason we are here. Nevertheless, it is worth decoding for a moment the systems of the elite as simple nodes of a map. A powerful one, but one whose total diagram is a misdirection, casting the illusion of an arch-lord presiding over what is in actuality a very real, tangible, walking, breathing, bleeding power. Their power is a global and spiritual defilement – founded upon crusades and enslavement, homogenising international “progression”, selling productivity at the cost of individual wants, pains, identity and communal property, then palming blame on to anyone uncategorisable (categories are the ammunition of hate). But you don't need to work as hard as their logic suggests. Get off the bus at the first stop. The people you think are to blame probably are to blame. Their motive probably is money. You can see their faces, say their names. Our minds are wired to acquiesce patterns which are of great comfort to us: like prejudice alleviates pain, ghost stories, conspiracies and mass hysteria are ways to band together and consciously illuminate the terror in the dark, but this can be weaponised to confuse and divide us. There is an even more terrifying story than Jack-the-Ripper. That there was no plan, no plot, no pattern: that a group of men with bile in their hearts, in isolation of one another, perhaps without ever even meeting, used his haunting as a mask to murder women.


Patterning hysteria is a classic patriarchal tactic to keep the lower classes divided and thus suppressed. In colonised states, they also give them a nationalist party to channel their anger through. But any form of suppression is a sign of what the suppressor fears. If sex and homosexuality are actively suppressed by a church or a government then it is only because they recognise it as a challenge to their reign of confining domesticity and caste. They rearrange the nodes on the map and turn sex into a symbol of shame, and its vast, unmitigated drunken ocean is compartmentalised into fetish, perversions and sin, meanwhile still profiting off other channels of desire. If women can derive pleasure from themselves and each other, then reproduction of a workforce suffers, and “promotion of life-forces turns out to be nothing more than the […] reproduction of labor-power.”[4] Gender as it pertains to capitalist gain is revealed as an illusion, and the participant is free to wonder what else is a lie. This is the power of Eros, and the Dionysiac state where categories fade. The moguls and technocrats behind the mask of Kubrick's orgy fear this sex magic. They want it exorcised from their kingdom. The witch trials of the inquisition were not a war against magic, but a systematic gender apartheid on the supply of labour, seizing the means of re-production through patterns of fear. Via this historic and ongoing femicide, the inviolable matrescent coil is clipped, neutering the very human (and very accurate) intuiting of the infinite. Dispossessed of its grace, but possessed by the (very accurate) fear of its spiritual survival, the patriarchy sought to lock it into the ruling religious symbols most close-to-hand. An incestual martyr who is sacrificed by his father to be reborn as the seed, the child and the womb in one. One only has to overlay the cipher of the holy trinity onto these facets of reproduction to deduce who has been murdered yet feared unkillable.


5.

The Migrant


Brian Welsh - Mark Fisher

Pier Paolo Pasolini - Vinca Petersen


Dionysus is a god of cycles. His power stems from fluidity and mobility. Taken prematurely from the womb of his mother, Zeus stitched the unborn babe in his groin until he was ripe. He is both woman and man. Once born he was an itinerant child, taken to the nymphs of Mount Nysa to be raised on the babble of nature. His position at the head of their procession is because these forces care for him. He was raised by their demon hamlet and it was born to move, a whole caravan of travellers mimicking the circadian rhythms of a universal continuum. Wake with the sunrise, walk so as to walk, commune, regale the day, sleep with the sunset. What else ought there be?



Drugs and music are the great cultural equalisers. Psychically flattening boundaries, in a room full of electrical conduits a synaptic truce is struck. Hallucinogens are a mask, exiling isolation and draping the veil of ignorance over its subjects like a no-face upon which the crows feet of the gods can perch. The closing rave of Brian Welsh's Beats is stormed by riot police, and yet even as they brutalise the dancers it is hard to tell if their presence isn't just another ecstatic zap in the rush. The conflict, bruising confinement and blind duty of British law feels present even without their batons, in the sweatiest of raves where something is exorcised and the hands thrust into the air are fists. When you dance at a rave and are joyfully communing beyond the demands of austerity, it feels like knocking on the beats there is an opposition. In the bullets shelling against concrete in the music of Burial, the hardcore northern subversion of Makina, and the warrior bardship of MC's like Mike Skinner who is "45th generation roman", the music sounds, in some distant sense, like war. Against the anonymous ideology[5] of our current state, we are lorded over by a mythology that is disembodied: sit, paralysed, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, spend to sit comfier. It might take returning to the body to destroy it. Paganism is so often seen as a resurrection of muddy, nonsensical, primitive traditions predating the spiritualism of church, but at its root is a radical cosmic wonder. In bodily action, categories lose their potency: to dance is to dance, undictated, and anything that transcends the polis has the power to dissect it.


Like the Roman senate outlawed bacchanalia, its no wonder that free parties in the UK are criminalised, being the invisible, psychic meetings of the creative and the liberal. Across the history of Britain, subcultures are perennially demonized by the government. In Mark Fisher's crucial essay, Baroque Sunbursts, he deems the "cultural exorcism" of 1994's Criminal Justice and Public Order Act that effectively outlawed publicly organised raves to also be one targeting the "unsettling and unsettled figure of the fair." The fair, a roving beast of storytelling that combines decadence with market was the unpinned butterfly to enclosure. Capitalists see its form not only in free parties but in football terraces and travelling communities (all of which were havens for the working class). Criminalizing one, buying out another and festering hate for a third allows governing bodies to privatise, survey and police modern Dionysia. Hypocritically, whilst a landlord can cry to court after suffering a restless night over the shrill sea-call of brat druids, an initiation of ritual sex with a pig's head at Oxford University is permitted beneath the regulations of wealth, tradition and boyhood.


pasolini theorem

"Through the love you gave me, I've become aware of my illness."

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teorema


If an extra-terrestrial visitor drew data from the way humans narrativize their lives, they would quickly conclude that the greatest gift they could offer someone who believes that they are complete is to remind them of their absences. The capitalist amphitheatre is an existential bubble, and social mobility a pin. In Teorema, a rich family is ruined by an unwanted guest, but unlike Saltburn there’s no real need for bacchanalia. The family desire the visitor but he doesn't need to seduce them. Like the working class to Fennell, he is an unimaginable class of people, stamped out by a faceless order, then resurrected like a fairy-tale who is lusted after simply because he does exist. The world hypothesised by the bourgeois is a desert and so, aware of this fact, when a note is delivered to their sepia fortress that proclaims the visitor is "arriving tomorrow", they think "Thank god! It was not all for naught! And even if it will be the end of us, we will finally have earned something beyond our control. Now we can laugh and make nonsense and drink nettle beer and our children will heal via illness which will leave space for miracles again."


The itinerant, the experimental and the uncategorisable are dangerous to the stagnant and the ordered. At the root of bog-standard, British hatred is this delusion, too: that they might lose all they have known, because they have never dared to imagine better. They will tell you to justify your existence through work, but simply by moving through The House and existing at the intersections of gender, of class, and of sexuality, you weaken the forces that seek to oppress you. Your power is immanent.


Dionysian magic is anarchic. Rather than the targeted, channelled divination of the other Olympians, Dionysus can choose to unleash his retinue upon his enemies, but beyond the opening of the floodgates he has no control. The bastille is stormed. In the many accounts of his excessive judgement, there is always the sense that it is his troupe who are the true, free agents of chaos. To their god, mutiny would be disaster.


6.

Pandemonium


Alison Rumfitt - Lars Von Trier - Peter Shaffer


Defeat is often swept beneath cause; big fish eaten by bigger fish. This is the same process as the Apollonian senate wearing the head of Pan. Moore suggests the new hope of the decadent 19th century were defeated by the crown, suffrage subsumed by empire; Fisher that rave was eaten by radio, glitch by surveillance. Those left wandering the striated wastes of centennial dawns are so often babes amongst rubble, just the dirt and ephemera of the sabbath. This is where we find ourselves, one quarter into the 21st, warbling a caged wail through hyperpop and memes. But in an eternal war staged in cycles, defeat is rarely defeat, and the goal now is to be loud, press the thumb on the screw in evil until the stars further dislocate and the planets are to play for, with foot on neck, with knife in side, with whisper in ear, in number, in body, in mind, in spirit. They've left the door unlocked. We are already raving through their house.


Pan is a daemon, not an Olympian. A god belonging to the turning land, his biography is not as laurelled as Dionysus. He is the Arcadian god of pastures, protector of flocks, herdsman and hunters, yet he freely passes into his tribe byway of his terrible arts, song and revelry, wandering up and down the retinue as he wishes. Similar to Dionysus, he was also born from Zeus and a nymph. His origins are the same and in the braided vortex of shape-shifting and legend, the two are frequently mistaken. By the time they got to Rome, they had merged entirely. If Pan the peasant is not the same man as Dionysus the god, then he could very easily take his place.


In Equus, Alan Strang, whose hoof-foot Pagan chorus are the only non-imaginary object on stage, is sick as the earth is sick. His condition is feeling the divine within nature, his depression is that it has been choked. His defence mechanism against the probing Dr. Drysart is to sing jingles from adverts on the television his father warned him would rot his brain. Strange for a boy whose god is a horse, rather than recite the Westerns his mother covertly let him watch, his sensitivity to advertisement in particular reveals the co-opting of poetry, light and symbology by consumerism. These brands, when transplanted onto a choir of old gods, disappear into a disturbing pantheon:


Gog Google Gomorrah Sodom Trident Tesla Tut


These are names of new titans wearing the masks of heroes whose tenebrous mythologies daily molest our minds. There is no free land left in England. Conservation is owned by royalty. Those destroying land for profit have an environmental department. Just as Hadrian built a wall to confine and exclude, England sinks deeper into its fear of what lies on the other side of what it has taught.


From Nietzsche’s rallying cry to Paglia’s redress, both outdated, treatises on the Dionysian are laced with omen. Early in the former, Nietzsche calls for transfiguration to be dosed intermittently, initiating a duality in which the inner spectator is – if pacified – still onboard. Alison Rumfitt’s generously transgressive firebrand, Tell Me I’m Worthless, leads the reader into the bloody chamber of England to surmise its relationship to nature: “inside the room is the pain you know, outside the room is the pain you do not know.” And in Antichrist, Von Trier brutally hypothesises woman-as-evil, as arch root rot, screaming “CHAOS REIGNS.” We are dealing here with the ascription of evil, and the subsequent drinking from its pool. Well, I propose that we have been too cautious. The scales are greatly uneven.


It is worth staying within the room only to investigate its obverse scar morass, its “NO TRESSPASS” signage, swastika tattoos and racist graffiti, and to trace the handwriting so as to recognise that even though in the dark, dark woods, no child can be promised safety, the cottage is no protector either. Its system's only power is fear, which is itself a belief in the system. Nature's unalienable continent is within. Anger must be directed in accordance with the correct signs. First unlearn. Disenchant their circle to reclaim the components you need, destroy those that you don't, create what's missing and rebuild anew. Woman is nature is the devil is the black pit that appends us, upends us, ends us, and waits, but only insofar as it is the agon to England’s patriarchal rubric. Naming abuse is power. Recognising also the abuser’s garb of Natural Order as camouflage - and a sin - sees that if his crown of roses weren’t rotten he would bleed. Once learnt, then harnessed, the signs within the room and without can be rearranged to Frankenstein a nation like Shelley’s own Caliban of light, who is native and reverent to the perpetual pale which gives them wonder, but was impinged upon by a crude thirst and is now entering an age of vengeance.


Belief is insinuated to be the programme of children. Children, beyond the veil of ignorance, must believe. Adults, gaining knowledge, lose the capacity to. I have mined through the symbols of England and told – like all English myths – an immigrant song of snoring, mongrel gods - half moss, half sea - and the fires of greed, attempting to define a more clear line behind the complex chords and draw out this Manichaean world of light and dark, good vs. evil. This land from tip to foot is an illuminated manuscript of hexed glyphs. Everything is a symbol when transposed within, and when believed in anything can be writ anew.


Belief is what I am calling for, in its most evil, splendid childlike form. As close to the dirt as possible, rolling in daisies with butterflies and the lambs. As a child, unfettered by the scorn of invented doctrine and indicators, truths present themselves in visions as lucid as the Spring, most slow and honourable. Like: art should be free. Wealth disparity is cruel. Our politicians knowingly kill. And when someone uses masks to try and place distance between you and these visions, simply see their own inner child and respond to them as such: shh.


No one is born bad, but most artists know that evil exists within all of us. When the right signs are arranged in the right order, it alights. There is an ancient war being waged on multiple fronts - not least of which is inside you right now - but one ritual at a time it can be unwound. For those of you reading this who, in your great hurried shame to mask your fear at being a living thing and wasting your finite time, are still loudly appealing for a state of lies, for hatred because it is the closest thing at hand, and against the true liquid world that exists within us, between us, and beneath this mossy scuff: we have heard you loud and clear. Don’t expect an invite to the party. At the very least, you'll have to get on your knees for one.


“Brace yourself, 'cause this goes deep

I'll show you the secrets, the sky and the birds

Actions speak louder than words

Stand by me, my apprentice

Be brave, clench fists.”

- Mike Skinner, Turn the Page



[1] Roland Barthes, Mythologies

[2] The Poetry Society, Sublime

[3] 'Alan Moore on Magic'

[4] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

[5] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body & Primitive Accumulation

[6] George Monbiot; Peter Hutchinson, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life)

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<![CDATA[Joan of Arc: Righteous Fury, Holy Suffering]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/joan-of-arc668bfd3b11f67835b1c17686Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:43:18 GMTSilvia JametArt about Joan of Arc allows us to recontextualise faith and find a new grammar for martyrdom and womanhood.


carl dreyer joan of arc passion of joan of arc marie falconetti

RIGHTEOUS FURY


Since her martyrdom in 1431, Patron Saint of France, Joan of Arc, has gripped the hearts of women and artists worldwide, immortalized by flames and the camera. Neatly divided by Jacques Rivette’s 1994 epic Joan the Maid I & II, her cinematic presence is always cut into two halves of one whole, her military campaigns and visions then her imprisonment and burning: her righteous fury and her holy suffering. Some, like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc or Bresson’s Trial of Joan of Arc focus solely on her imprisonment and execution, while others, like Rivette’s, Fleming’s, or Preminger’s sloppy Saint Joan seek to portray both sides. Rarely, however, do any adaptations seek to only portray the battles. Joan is her martyrdom, her mythology is hinged on her death, and built around her suffering.


It is hard to look at Joan’s fate and believe that she was delivered by God. Her righteous fury began at only sixteen. Following saintly visions and a crusade to re-establish French sovereignty, she was betrayed by her homeland. Imprisoned by the English, the Catholic church gave her a choice: renounce your visions, remove your men’s dress, or suffer execution. Any repentant abjuration was short-lived. In a moment violently portrayed in Rivette’s Joan the Maid II: The Prisons, she relapses after being nearly raped by her guards – an act that sought to control her and to rob her of her virginity. In an unjust ultimatum, she opted to protect herself from the cruelty of men by sacrificing herself at the stake. For her relapsed heresy she was burned, producing her mythology and countless depictions of her crucial moment, canonized by her pain.


vivre sa vie french new wave godard anna karina

Cinema’s most enigmatic problem child, Jean-Luc Godard, glimpsed Joan in the seat of France’s modern woman in Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Trading his usual satire for ennui, he excavates the role that class and gender have in propagating the oppressive structure of prostitution in contemporary Paris. Split into twelve vignettes, we follow Nana into the sacrificial void, then, at his most didactic, Godard points at the camera – the viewer – and screams “Evil has only mutated!” Joan of Arc died in 1431, and spent her final moments begging for a cross so that she could love her god till the end. Twenty years after her death, she finally completed her saintly task, freeing France at the cost of her life. She came as an angel of fire, sweeping through the land, igniting the hearts of the people, and burning out English colonization. She died a martyr on a stage, a warrior of Christ wielding a blade: a New New Testament of a holy revolt. However, Dreyer’s masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) paints a humanist Joan, 19, intelligent, strong in her convictions, who isn’t mythologized as a hero but suffers as a victim. Her suffering is the centrepiece of the work, monumentally enhanced by the performance of its lead actress, Marie Falconetti, whose soul intertwines with Joan’s to portray something soft – melancholic – yet horrifying. Joan’s titular passion, much like Jesus’ before her, is born from a suffering and anger thrust upon her by the men she loved; her god, her country. 30 years later, in Vivre Sa Vie, Nana goes to the cinema to watch Dreyer’s classic. Godard frames, composes and directs Anna Karina to become Falconetti, and Nana, Joan. She embodies the very suffering Joan experiences, internalizing the unholy fire and gendered torture Joan faced. Nana doesn’t so much watch The Passion of Joan of Arc as she does stare into her reflection, shedding the same restricted tears Falconetti gifted Joan in her depiction, because in all ways the four women are the same.


In 1981 Polish director Andrzej Żuławski released an unhinged metaphor for his own divorce, Possession. Over time, Żuławski’s film has garnered a ravenous and hyper-fixated audience, largely enamoured by lead star Isabelle Adjani’s performance as Anna. Whilst Mark – Anna’s husband – cultivates a Madonna/Whore complex and Żuławski projects a self-festered image of the hysterical woman, Adjani’s performance transcends their narratives. Anna’s behaviour is erratic, volatile, extreme, and glittered with an esoteric fervour; she is the caged fury let loose, representing a rage internalized by trauma. She kills and maims in a cleansing destruction whilst garnering devotion: chaos is her virtue, one that frees her and her followers from the marginalization of order. Even as Mark becomes slowly undone he is comparatively contained - she destroys whilst he attempts to save. Those who see through Mark’s eyes view him as patient and responsible, ordered, whilst those who see through Anna’s have lived and wished for her chaos. The subtlety of Mark’s abuse is his insistence of sexual possession, his obsession and control over who or what Anna has fucked, whilst simultaneously admitting and committing his own infidelity with their son’s teacher, the Madonna reflection of Anna’s Whore. Anna and Mark’s final consummation is a violent union drenched in blood and fire, welded by mutual destruction. The trauma - the merger - rampaging in holy anger, finally removes the leeches that bled her of her autonomy. Anna is an emotion seldom shown, so often repressed and reserved by the need to retain face, and her fury becomes righteous once ultimately unleashed.


Andrzej Żuławski possession isabelle adjani

HOLY SUFFERING


In 2018, Hunter Schafer posted (then subsequently deleted) a drawn diagram that dissected her perception of womanhood. She garnered backlash from TERFs for her claims in the diagram that her gender was influenced by the need to be used by men, as objectified by men. Yet, so frequently, it is this gendered perception that women internalize, be it through coquette hyper-femininity or through their relationship with Christianity, resonating with images of an organized structure hinged on the oppression of women and empowerment of men. To get to heaven one must suffer the burden of their decisions: salvation comes through pain and sacrifice.


In 2023, composer Kristin Hayter announced the retirement of her moniker 'Lingua Ignota' and the music made under it, stating that this part of her life was now over. It was a six year journey that began in 2017 with the release of her first EP, Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him, and an emotional exploration of grief, rage, suffering and enlightenment through religious and esoteric art. Her music oscillated over a phonic duality. Songs like Fragrant is My Many Flower’d Crown paint a woman who dons the softness of petals whilst swinging a hammer of wrath against all who’ve wronged her. She ends the album Caligula by repeating one line, “All I want is boundless love//All I know is violence.” On her fourth and final project as Lingua Ignota, Sinner Get Ready, she replaced her screams with whimpers and traded the bombastic, explosive sounds for softer harmonies carried by piano with blues/folk elements. Throughout Sinner Get Ready she makes reference to the abuse she faced from Daughters frontman, Alexis Marshall, whilst comparing him to God as an oppressive sadist. Her newest project under 'Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter', SAVED!, redeems Caligula’s famous lines; “The lord shall mend your broken heart//And hold your aching soul//His boundless love will make you whole.” She no longer only knows violence, and has found boundless love and the warmth of God, whatever that may mean to her.


lingua ignota kristin michael hayter sinner get ready caligula saved! reverend

Hayter’s journey is one that many women face, looking to the heavens for more than the violence they feel was divinely ordained: Joan, Hayter, Anna, Nana, Mother Jeanne of The Devils, Sister Cathleen from Novitiate, Mother Mary, all victims of a patriarchy that seeks to control them sexually. Mary, in particular, has become a symbol of this oppression, whose body was simultaneously divinely used and repressed. She is the ideal woman in the eyes of patriarchy – the virgin child bearer, womb without the taint of sex, the mother whose duty is solely motherhood, suffering to bare the death of her son. For her pain, she is rewarded nothing real – a place at the side of her abuser - and has only been granted personhood by those who look to her now in relation to their own oppression, permitting her her own suffering beyond the suffering of her son. Schafer’s perception of her agony was gender affirming in the same way Mary’s oppression is intrinsically linked to her womanhood. Her torment is the womanhood created by men. Suffering is a given identity, but also a community built on the warmth acquired from knowing misery doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are others who feel what they feel, and that feeling is given purpose via the augurs of their pain. Like Joan of Arc holding the broken sticks of her pyre in the shape of a cross as holy fire engulfs her, if all you ever feel is violence then violence begins to feel like boundless love.


Joan lived two lives, Holy suffering is only one part of the whole, and her faith gave her a point at which she could direct her righteous fury. As a personification of oppression rather than a multi-faceted structure, God can be targeted as the progenitor of pain. Belief becomes iconoclastic, one in which where God exists, Christianity is acquiesced, but God and his followers are villains, perpetrators of suffering and so targets of vengeance. God is the face of man, embodied by a single entity – a sponge of deserved hate seeking to rip the rib of Adam from its abdomen by first admitting it is there. The nun, the martyr, the holy warrior: images of women who have suffered beneath the collective face of religious oppression. The worship of these images is not really a love for God but a love for those who suffer and a relation to their suffering, reflected in the self. Like Nana watching Joan on screen, religious iconography becomes a mirror to stare into and find past iterations of yourself, and a desire to comfort them. As Ethel Cain notoriously wrote on Sun Bleached Flies, “God loves you, but not enough to save you.” God does love you – the torment is how he shows it. God loved Joan and killing her is how he showed it.

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<![CDATA[Oneohtrix Point Never: Again, Again, Again...]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/oneohtrix-point-never-live-royal-festival-hall663bf336a7b53d91d0908c7dFri, 28 Jun 2024 08:23:11 GMTThe Big ShipExplore the looping, glitch-filled soundscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never's Again, with each cycle a step deeper into the digital sublime.


oneohtrix point never live southbank royal festival hall again electronic music chrome country glitch pop remix photography


0 Pe N

by Bryson Edward Howe


/////////////////////// mec h an i sm \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\


The mind tends to complete patterns: through inclusions, exclusions, and intersections of exegesis, the hardwire human mind is always constructing complex pyramids of sign-symbol association, a constant delimitation of communication and meta-language. It makes us, in many ways, the most advanced species to walk the earth. In many other ways, it makes us predictable, divinable, hijackable, and Oneohtrix Point Never's vibro-fetishism finds in the loop the perfect strata of the inevitability; finding in the loop both the lull and the momentum and exploiting the innate tendency of the human mind to seek completion in repetition. Again physically loops back to prior work; in part, it is what Lopatin calls “a speculative autobiography,” but in others a transmission, a spellbound backwash of digital languages and sonic paranoias, what’s remembered and what’s forgotten—what is yet still incomplete.


/////////////////////// org a nic ism \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\


The techtonic quake brushed against my skin like silk and filled my mouth with a lingua franca thick and viscous (I can still taste electric honey), but never liquid and somehow never synthetic, finding a talced spirituality in the madrigal offal of malware—with the few scholium lyrics that survive his scalpel vocoded into unparsable nullity ("the body trail, the body trail, the body trail"). Oneohtrix Point Never doesn't really build beats so much as mutate them, spinning disruptive shards of noise around the gooey onyx skeleton of repetition and expectation, cycling, blurring, echoing through creation and dissolution where he cessions to the ill-ectro and lowers the beats; yielding to and readying for; the spiral.


/////////////////////// vi tal i sm \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\


In an anti-matter universe, there are two original black holes: Gods and Atrocities. In this universe, there is now only the echo of both. What's left, the static dervishes of noise that fall like snow and bleed into the holographic insert zone, the space enclosing soft and shiny things in the seam of the present space—cradled between past and future—as feather-light trills soak into kaleidoscopic, maximalist electro caught in infinite playback. Hear the chimeric frequencies of a spectral data void, the temporal lattice of the electric wilderness, and aural spirals—a.k.a. the ever-returning wave. An acoustic palimpsest shudders into synthetic dreams of the overclocked mind. Heavenly music predicts new chapters, consequences of Old Testament characters, like Jacob finding purpose in God's motion. Choose your way in, through amp outlets or ear drums that don't yet know I'm old, and then resonate with the concrete (metal music isn't welded, but electronic music is wired): because once you're in, the echo never ends—


oneohtrix point never live southbank royal festival hall again electronic music chrome country glitch pop remix photography

1/0/TRX.NVR

by Caleb Carter


3. Rigpa

All staying clear, repetition will keep a good life accelerating in sibilant ecstasy. Note that in every iteration of the human race’s playback devices the signs of their corruption (buffer, glitch, scratch) renders the listener unable to move forwards. Again is an instructive title. On one listen it plays as an ambient album, a singular composition returning to its glitch motif so often our ears are pastured. But on the next, the listener is free to observe each reiteration as a singular blade of grass; the music turns from calm to chaos, and as the antecedent is torn in the mile winds, sink lower (down-loading) and look above to see a thousand green towers, dancing. Lopatin treats the enormity of human creation being uploaded into thin air (including his own) with such freakish reverence it is hard to tell if his Ctrl-V atlas maps suicide or glory. He makes - has always made - bellmetal monstrums fleeing from glitch-gospel rectories (on that particular Olympus, I think Memories of Music might actually top Chrome County). But Again sprints and gleefully knows it will have to return home uphill at nightfall. Briefly, down in the lead-acid moat it can play at deformity, half-corrupt on one CD, a cipher of the numinous on B.


2. SHODAN

For artists in the Age of Information, self-mythologizing is not only imperative for succeeding a market vampyrically harvesting human faces to disguise its algorithm, but impossible to avoid. Your art is your content is your data. Information is an unfathomable grimoire, and the more you know, the more you realise you don’t. In February, https://pointnever.com/ became a rhizomatic archive. Developed by VOID MAIN Studio with aid from OPN’s Discord (a web of harvester ant hives for dark-forest folklores), it maps the totality of Lopatin’s prolific output top-to-bottom, from singles and performances, to features, soundtracks and loops. The most intriguing facet of its cat’s cradle, however, are the green strands that illuminate his music’s internal ‘References’. One of these reveals that Love in the Time of Lexapro is “of the same world” as Age Of, retconning a hydromantic etude into an apocalyptic tale whose warbles are of the dying, but also of the artificial (electric) and of the sentient. Who, then, speaks from under the sea? You see how little we require for Atlantis to be built.


1. Ikon

Threshing the material of myth from its web of time is a dizzying exercise, one in which sinking to touch the subatomic requires submerging the periphery in its soup, so one can’t tell up from down, space from the dust of space, instrument from sound, shellac from basalt cliffs, or, when turned loud enough through headphones, cannon-fire from the peal of a bell.

---Vantage//Volume//Viscosity---

BONDAGE//Of the USSR we have only skeletons and stories, abandoned factories and obsolete agricultural tools//EXCESS//Wreathed in the pipes beneath the chimneys and the gaskets inside machines, you’re likely to find alloy emblazoned in the melted bell memory of Stalin’s pogrom of sound//HARVEST//Those bells, sacramental tulips of the Orthodox church, were sanctioned to play only one prime tone, loud, without harmony, so as to accurately encode the voice of god//ECCO//-ing: record, play, s, s, s, s, All stay

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<![CDATA["Act Accordingly": A Conversation with Jean Dawson]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/act-accordingly-a-conversation-with-jean-dawson665e2920279553a075941d09Fri, 14 Jun 2024 09:56:09 GMTBryson Edward HoweSitting down for a full-length conversation with the LA-based artist, we talk about the stench of public perception, his creative indecisiveness, and the romance of spirituality.



"I don't know nothing, shadow of sympathy," Jean Dawson sings on "Tastes Like Metal", the closing track of his new EP Boohoo. "Break lights, too bright / Now I'm gon' crash / They hope I crash / What if I crash?" he asks, against the kind of sound that can only be woven through air thick with desire, through clenched fists, tear-streaked cheeks, bitten lips, and the raw edge of longing, through (where all great art comes from) things untamed. Like watching a crystal chandelier tremble in tempest, the piano's gentle swelling rashes into deep, billowing synth, like saults teetering on the edge of stillness and eruption. The feelings Jean wrestles with on this newest project are tender, seductive and, as the cover art suggests, there’s an intoxicating, ruinous release in the headlong plunge that shatters and remakes, tracing an arc in the erotic velocity of the fall.


I catch Jean while he's in London, touring with Lil Yachty as his Field Trip Tour makes its way across Europe, where the Tijuana-born/California-raised artist tells me off-mic about his newfound love for Nando's (the Extra Hot sauce reminds is the closest thing he can find here to Mexican Buffalo Wings), Tottenham F.C., and, most importantly, what he's been listening to: confessing that he considers Dijon and Mk.gee to be his only contemporaries and about his early love for XL Recordings, especially, most recently, for Overmono. It's always interesting to hear about a musician's inspirations, especially when they are as culturally eclectic as his.


His recent track "NO SZNS" featuring SZA, punctuates this study with a new depth we've not seen from Jean: gentle folk guitar and synth stings layer under some of Jean's most refined, lucid lyrics. Playing with silence, the production slashes at the air of negative space around it, yanking the track forward, and reimagining the rich palette of his past projects as something more textured and dramatic. Always evolving, he tells me, the future for Jean is sown without promises or predictability.


Jean Dawson: I made it past 27, so we're good now. We're good. It's not going to be a sad story. The ending might be weird because I'm going to turn into a delusional old man. That's what I hope. I just want to slowly descend into madness as I get old. But in a very artful way where it's like, "Yeah, dude doesn't do anything except scream at paintings and hope that something comes out of it."


The Big Ship: Allowing yourself to slip into madness? Is that better than going out like Cobain?


I'd rather go out like a loony than go out just, “Uh, it was fun, or peaceful.” I'd rather it be like, “No, this dude is working on ceramics now, for no reason. And he just works on them and then breaks them. That's it." And the title of all my works would be like, “Where it started, it finished.” Something like that.


That's like Yoko Ono. She had a whole exhibition of broken ceramics in London last year.


See? They all have similar fucking stories, or I'll just fade away into oblivion where when people ask what I'm doing, it’s like, dude, I work at Home Depot. Do you guys have Home Depot? It's just a department store that sells wood and building materials to build houses and shit. Very, very, very, very important job in America. People who work there are super important.


Tell me a little bit about the Lil Yachty: Field Trip Tour?


They just asked me and I was honoured to be considered to do it because I'm a big fan of Lil Yachty. I don't know what the perception of me is from the outside, and I'm glad that it doesn't just stop at alternative. I mean, Yachty is alternative. So whatever that means, whatever the perception of him is, I just felt like being asked to be on the tour was a badge of honour. It's bigger than just the local kids that want you to play the local thing. There's nothing wrong with that, but something that I've taken to, I guess, with grace, is the the fact that people like my music. And that people like my music all over the world. It's hard for me to accept that because I'm smack in the middle of it. So, whenever I'm asked to do anything, I'm just like, oh, me? Sure. Alright, I'll come and do it.


Is that something you’re worried about – how you’re perceived?


No, I don't care. And not, I don't care in a cool way. Perception is a one-way street. And it's not one that you can travel backwards on. Perception is a porta-potty. It's one person's shit that I definitely don't have to smell if I don't want to. Even if it smells good. I think I learned that from being a chubby kid my whole life. And it took a long time to just be like, it's okay. We're all good. We're all gonna die. What I think about another person is never gonna change who that person is. I would hope not. I don't know what people think about me. Sometimes they're like, oh, you're mysterious and you have mystique and blah, blah, blah. I was like, no, I just wear big clothes and cover my face because I've had insecurities, but I don't think it's anything deeper than that. It's not like I have a ton of secrets in my head. Matter of fact, most of the time I have nothing going on in my head. I'm just walking around existing in perpetualness.


I've been very fortunate to have a loving mother, to tell me I'm okay, everything's fine, don't worry about it. And I think if I didn't have that, then the outside, everything, except for making music would have broken me already. Bleeding yourself for an art form that people can have an opinion on. It's a public forum thing. So if I don't have a loving mum, I think I would have for sure done myself in, because it's pretty hard sometimes, but for the most part I just think, who really cares, man? We just make music. We have a fun job. It's all good.


I wondered about that because, in a lot of your music, I get the sense that there are characters that you're developing within it. I wonder if that's a conscious thing, if that's just to guard yourself, or if that's just a fun thing, or if it comes down to code-switching, which you mentioned before?


I think I create characters to highlight and mask certain things in a moment. It's like when you go out with your friends, and you're having a pretty shit day, but you don't want to tell them. You put on this other guy and you step outside and then you become that other guy for four hours, and you get to come home and then you shed that and you're like, all right, fuck I'm back in this thing. Not in a depressive, negative way, but just in a way where it's like code-switching your entire existence. When I do it in music, it just gives me a different perspective. As hokey or as magical as I want it to sound, it's not. Sometimes I just feel like this other guy. And I think part of being a musician is fractalising yourself into what this version of me wants to say right now. I think some people have a very, very intuitive way of communicating a singular identity. I have a very hard time doing that, not because I'm any more special or anything like that, but I have a hard time communicating a single identity because I'm perpetually finding an identity. But the thing is, I'm not looking for it at the same time. Sometimes it finds me and sometimes it's beyond me.


So, with Boohoo and Phoenix, the reason why I even give them names is something I learned in therapy. To identify the things that are troubling you and then label them rather than to just suppress them. So my anxiety is my little friend that comes to visit that I don't want to come to visit. It's like that annoying ass man that calls you and you're like, fuck, I got to stay on the phone with this guy. So the same way that I perceive that is the same way I perceive pretty much anything in my life. Phoenix is a character post-coming off of Chaos Now. That whole project, essentially, I didn't know if I was going to make any more music after it. I knew that I was always going to do some format of music, whether it be for film or for something else, but after Chaos Now, I was like, I don't know if I'm going to die, you know? I feel like I'm going to die soon. And I always have those crises where shit feels really right in a bad way. So I have to fuck something up to make everything feel even. So I was making music with crayons, figuratively. That project was me perceiving myself in a way, but it was me writing songs in run-on sentences. And I was very aware of it, and I was like, I want to do it all before I go. As morbid as it sounds, it wasn't morbid when I was thinking of it. It was just like, I don't want to leave anything on the table if this is the last album I'm ever going to get to do.



Because the things that I'm chasing aren't necessarily the things that everybody else in music is chasing. There's nothing wrong with the things that they're chasing, but the thing that I'm chasing in music is a resolve of myself. Trying to find that resolve as I go. It's quite difficult. So, I think the reason why I build characters for the music, is it just allows me to be expressive in a way where one part of myself isn't insecure about that specific thing. Boohoo isn't afraid to sing. And Boohoo is kind of the overture of what Jean Dawson is becoming, in a sense. Phoenix would never sing. This is talking to myself, the third person, but it's just like, oh, nah, you have a horrible voice, but it's okay, you're fun and you're funny. Boohoo was, it's all good. You don't have to be fun or funny. You could just sing. Then I get to sit back and be quote-unquote Jean Dawson and be like, you guys both sound dumb. I'm just gonna do this other thing. So, besides sounding like I have a personality disorder, which I don't, it allows me to draw with my left hand rather than my dominant right.


Do you think you exploring these different parts of your personality, especially through these different characters, plays into you being quite genreless, for lack of a better word, like code-switching musically as well?


Maybe. I think definitely it's a way to I.D. it. But it's so funny because I don't find that I do much differently from the people that I like, and not in terms of skill or capability. This is gonna sound crazy coming out of my mouth and I'm very aware this is gonna sound crazy. Prince is my favourite artist of all time. No way am I comparing myself to Prince, let me put that in print. Prince did whatever Prince wanted. Whether it was dance music, love songs, albums, pop records. It was never like, "Prince is genreless". Prince is Prince. It's my favourite I.D. of any artist of all time. Who's going to tell Prince what to do? That guy has the idea. If those are the people that I look up to in music, or if that's the person I look up to in music, it feels only right that the inhale and exhale that I do when I'm doing any other song, or one song to the other song, is the same breath, instead of it being a conscious, I'm gonna do rock music, then I'm gonna do prog rock, then I'm gonna do hip hop. I’m in the studio with my friends, and I'm like, everybody shut up for a second. This is what I think. Do I sound crazy? And they'll tell me yes and/or no. Or sometimes it's like, yeah, it sounds crazy, but let's do it.


I think maybe having multiple characters and personalities, or perceived personalities, goes into how the music is made, but the genre and categorisation has always been ill-important to me. Because if it sounds good, it sounds good, regardless of what it is. On the way over here we were listening to Muslim prayer chants in the taxi. The guy turned it off when we got in the car and I was like, no, keep playing it, please. He was like, are you sure? And I'm like, no, please, it sounds beautiful. I don't know what the fuck they're saying, but I just knew that that man was singing it while he was driving and he's doing his day-to-day job. For me, that's the importance of the shit. More than anything else, it's that. It's being that supplement to somebody's already vibrant life. If I can turn the saturation up just a little bit, cool. If I can't, that's fine too. And I think the only way that I can valiantly do that is never being afraid to just inhale and exhale.


Is your music-making process, an indecisive process?


No, it's super decisive. It's like, this is exactly what it needs to be, this is exactly how it works. Anybody that's been in the studio with me for long enough realises that my biggest attribute is that I'm a great conductor. I'm a great arranger, but I also like to cheer people on to do the best thing that they're able to do. I think the part that I'm competitive about in music, period, is how good of a team player can I be. As long as I can max that stat out, the music will always be great. But I have to make sure that I'm looking at it from every angle. One of my favourite things that I've told one of my best friends [Austin Corona], is play like you're going to get hit by a car when you leave the studio, you're never going to play again. You're going to die right now. This is the last guitar lick you're ever going to do. And he sits there and he's like, man, fuck you. And I'm like, try it. And It's the greatest guitar lick or solo I've ever heard in my life. I'm like, dude, you did that. He's like, yeah, it was the pressure. I was like, it wasn't the pressure. It was you telling yourself, if this is the last thing I'm going to do, let me do something that means something to myself. It's not about Jean Dawson, the artist. It's not about this song, even. It's about giving yourself resolve. And I think as long as we can keep searching for that resolve, we'll make great music.



Are you constantly putting those constraints or creative strategies in place to try and shake things up? It reminds me of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.


Man. I wish that I think I was as cognisant of it as Brian, but there's only one rule I had on my last album [Chaos Now], which is no 16th note hi-hats. I don't want that. I hate that. And now it's so funny because I'm like, let's see what it feels like. Let's try 16th note hi-hats. But I do require a certain amount of study before we go in and work on something. When we're producing our work, it's like, okay, here's a list of music that we should all listen to over and over and over and over again. I think I always try to bring things back to being a student and also falling in love with that again.


Boohoo was very different from a lot of my work because the constraints were writing from a different place. Writing from a place that can make you cry and I don't like doing that shit. I know a lot of artists like to revel in their sorrow. I hate that shit. I don't want anything to do with my sorrow. I don't want anything to do with the negative thoughts in my head, but when I need them, when I need to fixate on them, I would imagine it's like an actor method acting where, that scene where you need to cry, you're gonna have to think about something that's gonna make you want to cry. I hate crying and I don't want to do it but if I sit back and I think about the moment of me looking my mom in the eye and telling her I want to kill myself today and doing that for six weeks straight, every single day, I can make a song that means something more to me than just words. And that's where I can talk about "New Age Crisis" or "Tastes Like Metal". That's where I can pull out some of the words that come for that. When I have to look at that moment, and seeing my mom seeing her baby just tell her that he doesn't want to exist anymore, in a very serious way.


But I can't do that for a Grammy. I can't do that for anybody except myself. And that's where I have to be selfish. I think, in a certain way, that version of method is super important. I can't do that for streams. I can't do that for a million monthly listeners. I can't do that for a better slot at Coachella. It has to be for my own resolve. It has to be for the reason I make music. And anything less than that is just a disservice to the memory of that. So, amen.


I feel like when you're creating something like that, it is so easy to lose the love for it, for what made you want to do it in the first place. Especially when you're singing your own songs, which I imagine feels a lot more real than other people's music. What was the study for Boohoo?


Funny enough, it was just classical music. Classical and then theatre, in a broad, general scope. It's pretty much the study of the next album. The next album's coming out this year. And it's that. It's like Homer's Odyssey. It's nearing my opus, but it isn't the opus. I'm aware of what my opus is gonna be and it's not that. But it's me seeing what the opus is looking like or what it feels like. It's like, Woah, shit, that's a lot, that's a big hill to climb, dude. It's the study of what is very, very real to you, of what is very tangible to you. It's also the study of letting go of my own interpretation of myself. There's gonna be a weird transition that happens that people see in me during that time. Weird as in just unfamiliar. But it's part of what the thing is and it's part of the theatre. It's part of listening to Max Richter. It's part of listening to a lot of Aphex Twin, part of listening to Mozart and Bach and all the old heads. But it's also a part of listening to a dude from Texas who rides really high rims and that's his chariot. It's Romeo and Juliet, it's Shakespeare, it's very long, flowery sentences that mean something very, very dull. It's like, me and you should die together. We'll live together, love each other, and die together. Instead of saying that, you have Romeo and Juliet beckoning to one another from the top of a fucking castle. Instead of saying, I'm gonna die with my bitch, I'm turning that language into imma die with my bitch. Imma die for my bitch.


Unfamiliar to us or unfamiliar to you?


Everybody else. I've done it before, but the change is weird. I've changed a lot over my life, like fluctuating weight. I fluctuate in the way I look. I fluctuate in the way that I see myself. I fluctuate in the way that I talk. I fluctuate in the way that I communicate with the outside world. I'm very cognisant of it. This is a point in my life where I'm on the precipice of something. And I know that it's coming and I'm just aware of it. And not a pseudo 'big shit on the horizon. Real G's don't move in silence' or whatever. No, I just know what's about to happen. It's like I'm pregnant with my own idea.


I wanted to ask about the spirituality in your lyrics. There are a lot of biblical references, what do those mean to you?


Yeah, it's funny. I don't want to make Christian music. I'm not saying anything wrong with Christian music, I'm just not Christian. I'm non-denominational. I believe in God, I believe in Allah, I believe in All of it. I was raised Catholic, so that's my default setting, but all religion for me is valid because it's just a belief, right? It's the belief of something beyond this, that brings people comfortability or perceived morality. It's so big, it's so romantic. Religion in and of itself is one of the most beautiful things that humans have concocted, and it's just the rule of thumb. And that's the coolest shit ever. I don't agree with what the church does. I don't agree with a lot of shit. But I do agree with needing something that's going to supplement you through your life. Because you need something to hold on to that is intangible sometimes. I learned that when I was going through the deepest depression I've ever gone through in my life. My mum used to say, agárrate de Dios, which means in Spanish, 'hold on to God'. I felt like I was falling in a hole and I couldn't grab on to anything. No matter how hard I tried, there was nothing. And I start praying every day. Start saying thank you. Thank you. The easiest thing is to say thank you. Whether I'm saying it to myself or I'm saying it to what I believe God to be. It changed my entire perspective on everything. Everything in my life. It's where I think the idea of myself disappeared, where the idea of my impermanence became very real to me, and with that also came, what do I wanna do?


There's some artists that compare themselves to higher powers and shit, I won't say names, but, I wouldn't want that responsibility. I would rather say thank you to it and then live my life accordingly to be the most decent human being. It comes out in the lyrics because it is so romantic and it's so basic and not in a bad way. It's like wearing a really nice white T-shirt, like, wow this fits so good I don't need anything else. This, some blue jeans, and some fucking shoes, and I'm out. I feel like sometimes, when I'm talking in the scope of angels, or God, it's like a white T-shirt. It supplements exactly what I needed to say, without me needing to say much. It's Frank Ocean’s Godspeed. I reference Frank a lot, just because the way he writes music is like my modern-day Bob Dylan. Looking at Bob, or Frank, sometimes they say something very, very, very, very, very, straightforward, and you're like, woah, that's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life. "There's a bull and a matador duelling in the sky." What? Craziest line I've ever heard in my life. I think I was just grabbing onto nothingness in that void. I always end up grabbing onto a figure of God, because it's easy for my brain to translate that to be what I need to be. It's like Play-Doh.


It's funny you say "Live accordingly". The best advice I ever got from anyone, was from a friend who said to me once, "Act accordingly." That's it. He was saying, you know it already, you just have to act accordingly.


Woah. Act accordingly. Yeah. I've had something similar. One of my friends, well, he's not my friend. He's more like one of the richest niggas in music. Put it that way. He said, "act like you know how good you are." Same thing as 'act accordingly'. I was being humble about something and he didn't like it. 'Why are you doing that?' Because I was raised not to perceive myself like that. He's like, fuck that. You know what you're doing. Act that way. And I didn't know what the fuck that meant. I was like, am I supposed to be an asshole or something? Then I realised it was like, nah, just move like you know that you already did the thing.



Can you talk a little bit about your visuals?


The visual language has always been just as much as important as the sonic description of what I do. It's as basic as why do something in two dimensions when you have three or four? One of the reasons I started fixating just on visuals was because during COVID, I was watching a bunch of music videos, and I was like, this shit sucks. And not in a generic way, I'm sure the people who worked on it tried their best and did awesome, in my irrelevant-ass opinion. But nobody cares about this anymore. And I wondered why. Is it because people aren't doing good? Is it because there's no Hype Williams? Is it because X, Y, and Z directors aren't doing things anymore and the bill isn't there? But it wasn't that. I think it's just the way that we process music is different now. MTV is probably still important to people in certain countries. So is YouTube. And YouTube's important everywhere, but I'm saying in the scope of music videos. It's a really, really expensive process that's only meant for promotion. It's like a billboard. And I thought it felt so gross. Because music videos specifically were so important to me in identifying what I wasn't. Not necessarily what I was, but like, Oh, I'm not that. I'm not that either. That's cool, I’m not that.


I never wanted to be on camera. And it's not because I fucking hate myself so much, or I don't want to see myself. But there's a whole story to be told that isn't about me. And it's one of the hardest things that I still struggle with as a songwriter. I don't want to write about myself because life isn't about me. I am just a small piece of the whole thing. I want to write about the whole thing. I want to paint the whole thing. But the only way to do that is to start from my perspective. So, it goes back to writing about myself and it's something I've been trying to break forever. And it's just insanity. It's like trying to figure out how to make a car move with a magnet attached to the front of the hood. You can't do that. Physics won't allow it. That's bullshit.


Film in itself, cinema, has always been very important to me. I spent a lot of time by myself as a child. My mum worked a lot, and my older siblings went off to school. I sat in front of the TV a lot. We didn't have cable, satellite or anything like that. We just had basic antennas with foil on the top and I watched every single movie on public access television basically. I would just sit and fucking disappear into a void of me being alone. TV was always company. TV was my best friend because I had nobody to communicate with. That's why I started writing music, because I didn't have anybody to communicate with. I fell in love with whatever that meant. One of my aspirations is to be a director and, to not only score a film, but fully direct. I'm writing a film right now. It's cool. It's like a Donnie Darko, but funnier. If I could do that art form well, I'd love to respect the medium and do it. I'm just taking my time with it.


Can you talk a little about your collaborators? The only word I can think of is picky.


Yeah, it's super picky. I'm very picky about my collaborators. I've been asked to collaborate with a lot of people. Fortunately enough. I say no a lot. But that's not just to collaborate. I say no a lot to everything. Some advice that I was given was to know your no’s and be very comfortable with your no’s, because they're going to stop you from being successful faster, but the things you say yes to are going to be more important. Same thing goes with the people that collaborate with me, like Earl Sweatshirt. That was a childhood dream of mine. He's so enigmatic. I was like, oh, I get to work with Earl? This is crazy. Me wanting to work with Earl is the same as me wanting to work with Björk. I want the thing that is visceral, right? But also, there have been a lot of times where I'm maybe getting in my own way, maybe I'm perceiving myself and maybe I need to stop. I'm pretty picky, but the people that I look up to are also picky. I guess I'm a product of them. It's their fault, not mine. I'm not going to take responsibility.


But I don't think everybody should work together. I think it's bad. I don't need to see IKEA furniture with Keith Haring print on it. I don't need it. I like the IKEA furniture, I like Keith Haring. I don't need to see them together. The last collaboration I did was with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I was super blessed to be in the room with those guys, and Hudson Mohawk. It was beautiful. I was like, this is fucking crazy. I'm just this kid. The inner kid is screaming. I even told him, you guys are gonna have to give me two seconds to geek out. And once I got that over with, I was cool. But I don't know if I want to collaborate anymore. I think part of my brain, maybe a few years ago, was just like, oh, I live in such a beautiful time of so many different musicians existing, like being able to do something with SZA, which was special, just to work with somebody so beyond the measure of life. I think a lot of this shit is qualifying. It's like, look at the little trophies that you got along the way. I don't think I care about trophies anymore. At least not those trophies. So, I'm very picky about collaborations, and that might evaporate into me not collaborating with anybody. But I might be chatting shit, cause if Archy Marshall calls me tomorrow, I'm definitely doing that.


I want to hear the King Krule and Jean Dawson track. Or the Björk and Jean Dawson track.  


If Björk calls me tomorrow, which is not gonna happen, we might. I would love that. She's one of the reasons that I make music the way that I make music, kind of like a Prince. She's enigmatic. Again, was Björk genre-bending? No, Björk was just being Björk. You know what I mean? But now there's a playlist on whatever streaming platform that's 'genre-less'. Come on, bro. What's Bauhaus? What are all these things? Are they all genre-less? No, they were just of themselves. Categorisation is a product of utility. We utilise knowing where the screws and bolts are, so we can build this thing.


I've been schmoozed by almost every label. One of the things is we just can't put our thumb on you. And basically, what they're telling me is, we're afraid that you're gonna flip a switch and start doing some shit that we can't sell. Which is a very good fear for them to have, but also super irrational. Why would I want to do that? It’s dumb. But, that's what they feel because when they see articles about me, like, Jean Dawson, you can't figure him out. He's such a mystery. Nah, dawg, I'm just a black kid with some ideas, man. I don't know how much of a mystery that is. Are we so afraid to just do something? Bowie was never afraid to do something. I mean, at least from the outside. My government name is David. Act accordingly.


Do you think it ever does get in the way of progress, musically?


No, musically it doesn't get in the way. It gets in the way of me being super famous if that's what the idea was. Because it's like, do "Power Freaks" a hundred times, over and over and over again. And then tour it, over and over and over again. And then turn 32 and hang yourself in your bathroom. No, thank you. I'd rather not hang myself in my bathroom. I'd rather be 34 with my children, that I am speaking into existence of me having, and starting them on fencing practice. And being like, yo, we can go do this? Or, you wanna play field hockey? Or, you wanna paint? Cool. Let's do that. Instead of being 34 years old, being an alcoholic and being strung out on drugs because I hate myself. I feel like that's how I would feel about myself. So maybe that's an easier way of saying I've chosen not to be a fucking megastar. I've chosen to just impress myself first. And if people catch on to that, that's cool, but if they don't, it's also fine.


In an ideal world, how would people come to your music?


A friend just tells them about it. Just a friend of a friend. I don't mind if they put me in a playlist or category or anything like that. Especially not at the top of New Music Friday. Top three, I love that position. That position is great. Thank you, Spotify.  Maybe because I find music differently, I don't use platforms for music discovery. I just let it happen. Somebody up in the studio will be like, have you heard this? And I'm like, what the fuck is this? This is amazing. Then I obsess over it for two weeks. And then I'm a fan for life, but it's not forced down my throat because I like this other artist.


Algorithms are tight. They're just not always right. if you want to get slick, and dicey with it, make a trap playlist. Make a Southern trap playlist. Make a New York drill playlist. Make a UK drill playlist. Those all exist. Okay, get even deeper. Make a South London drill playlist. And you can get deeper and deeper and deeper. And maybe it makes it hard for people to find things. Or just put them all under an umbrella and everybody have a good time and don't think about it. And that's what 95 percent of people are doing, which is totally fine. I'm just the 5 percent of people. As much as you try and tell me that Katy Perry should go next to Olivia Rodrigo? I don't think so.


Someone is like, Jean, I love you, and then they'll name three other artists that I sound nothing like. You guys are all black and do weird things. It's like, do we? Cool. I don't agree. I don't think we sound anything the same. It's like, oh Jean Dawson makes bedroom pop. How? That's a live organ. There's a live organ in my bedroom? That's crazy. Jean Dawson makes trap music. How? Well, look at your skin. You're black. You make trap music, right? Jean Dawson is punk rock. How? I've never called myself punk rock. I know punk rock. I know people that are punk rock. I like cleaning under my fingernails, man.


Do you think that leaves you underrated?


Nah, man, I don't care. I think I'm wherever God wants me to be. And I think I should be perceived however people want to. If people listen to my music, that's awesome. If they don't, that's also awesome. I also think that I take the same heaviness or weight of shit that they probably do in their day, in terms of how much they defecate, and what it looks like when they wipe, it's the same. So, whether I'm popular, not popular, doesn't fucking matter. I'm going to lie in a grave, just like everybody else. And until that time, I'm going to fucking make some music. If people dig it, awesome. If they don't dig it, more awesome. Go listen to fucking somebody that cares more than I do.

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<![CDATA[Field Report: Project 6 Festival 2024]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/field-report-project-6-festival-20246654b50f0c231673aa922f05Fri, 31 May 2024 12:48:12 GMTBryson Edward HowePusha T. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib. DjRUM. AJ Tracey. Nines. Guilia Tess. Manni Dee b2b Manuka Honey.


pusha t project 6 festival rap runaway london music


It's rare that a festival such as this gives you a set that feels a part of musical history: Performing the album in full for its 10th anniversary, Piñata, the first collaborative album by Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, opens with a bongo instrumental, before "Scarface", hits you square in the jaw with its relentless, silky coloratura and Gibbs' whetted prickly delivery. Gibbs' peppered self-reflective tales ("Maybe you's a stank ho, maybe that's a bit mean \ Maybe you grew up and I'm still living like I'm sixteen \ Like a child running wild in these city streets") of hustling, survival, and redemption were created while he was "still in the streets" and finds a perfect match in Madlib's funk-fusion, obscuro soul-steeped production, which blends bouncy southern boom-bap beats with dusty jazz samples and psychedelic breaks. Piñata is an album that, for many of my generation along with Pusha T and Danny Brown's gnomic acerbity solidified a certain admixture of pithy trill-rap in our consciousness, flexing a wintry, italicised flow, that feels nostalgic and yet still pristine watching it play out live.


Pusha T, "Cocaine's Dr. Seuss", from his early days as one half of Clipse, as the president of G.O.O.D. Music, and now to his solo career, deserves to be in the conversation of being chiselled into modern rap's Mount Rushmore. His contribution, in my opinion, to hip-hop cannot be underplayed. Lacing his songs with an indelible style, a C.E.O. swagger, and a cadence that is somehow always menacing yet playful and entertaining, Pusha is simply one of the most formidable lyricists of his generation. He's made a career of making punchy, attention-grabbing, music, and someone at Pusha's level could easily have a fuck you attitude and just play his solo work, but his set is the definition of a crowd pleaser: after running through his hits, he drops a Clipse track, a "Mercy" flip, and finally when you hear the opening notes of "Runaway", Pusha insists the one thing he won't do on the stage is sing, we fill in the blanks. After toasting to the douchebags, and to the assholes: "Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, pussy stays on my mind".


As the beating heart of underground music was now underway in Brockwell Park this all-encompassing showcase of cutting-edge music, brought together by Rinse FM, continued amplifying sounds from the echo-soaked dubstep of Deep Medi Musik's founder Mala, the wobbly leftfield electronic of Giulia Tess, and the harsh but deep grime sound of special guest AJ Tracey (who brought out Aitch to perform their joint-hit "Rain").



But as sun gave way to stars and moon, the sweat of sex and dance rushed in and out of pores, while the unsettled trap step of Manni Dee b2b Manuke Honey, whose main sonic influences are the eternal sex and non-linear Aymaran time concepts, lets the people sprawl with yearning aimless eyes, lets their tongues be broken, lashing against auratic landscapes of prophecy, ecstasy and a new electric eschatology born from astrological studies, and lets them descend into the luscious pathetic of desire. The entire history of erotic magic is one of possession of fear through holding it. Water-treading in isolation confession becomes a way to transmute that into an infatuable offline utopia. Manuke's hefty, industrial Latine club rhythms grind against lithe tech-flecked basslines embedded into darting dembow-flushed shakers and kicks, where the clubbing's "sacred conjuring" buckles four-to-the-floor rhythms into honeyed litanies while any distinction between guaracha, dancehall and shatta blushes into hyper-dilated presence. Ending the night with quite possibly the best live DJ I've seen, mixing exclusively white label vinyl, everytime you see Djrum, it's span-new. His selections tran-s-cend genres and eras, from the deepest dub to the most frenetic jungle rhythms, an alchemy that creates an atmosphere that's palpable — the kind that makes sweat trickle down your temples and leaves you in awe, still feeling the echoes of the previous night. There are moments of melancholy in his sound, where you find yourself looking around at your companions, soaking in the atmosphere, immersed in the present.


☾ ☾ ♊︎ ☽ ☽

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<![CDATA[Field Report: Wide Awake Festival 2024 ]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/field-report-wide-awake-festival-20246654b461aefee29e144dbcc6Thu, 30 May 2024 17:53:54 GMTThe Big ShipYoung Fathers. Eartheater. Hannah Diamond. Squid. Fat Dog. Byrne's Night. Ben UFO.


king gizzard and the lizard wizard wide awake south london music festival stage


PC Music, the pioneering label of which Hannah Diamond is a founding member, has always embodied the nightmarish realisation of promises made to a generation raised on the idea that “forever” was an option. This generation witnessed the advent of the internet and social media in our childhood homes and heard pop songs that echoed the euphoria of the 90s’ ecstasy boom. Yet, our own ecstasy boom never materialised, our musical epiphanies instead mediated through pre-roll ads on YouTube and weaponised by a culture that exists only abstractly.  Diamond’s music, more so than anyone on the PC Music roster, is pinned to the notion of “forever”, forging a yearning for the unattainable or intangible into bubblegum-flecked pop anthems. In the narrow confines of pop, duration becomes a conceptual space where the personal is continuously performed until the end; pop music demands an investment in each fleeting moment and is a big part of why Diamond and co.’s retro-futurist experiments are so culturally heretical.


Blurring the line between reality and performance, Diamond gave us a more grounded and less airbrushed set than what I'm used to, suiting Wide Awake Festival's distinct, but idiosyncratic identity. The super-shiny sound of this early, manic hyperpop wass layered with saturated, ultra-cute femininity and suddenly the world melted into a symphony of purple: sound vibrating in hues of violet, indigo, and lavender, appearing as glimpses of an unseen order (or conspiracy) as if the universe itself were whispering secrets through every breath, every beat, every amethyst burst, ripe and cute, searing a path back to the primordial lava lake from which we first emerged, where I find Eartheater, her voice suspended in air, following rhythm and inflection rather than logic, conceiving the expression of [ego-] death and resurrection, round and round, and mapping the New York post-club utopia comparison to whatever post-punk crust has been cut off over here in South London.

There was a time that Fat Dog, the virulent harum-scarum South London noise group, irresponsibly threw their feral sampled sounds around venues like Peckham Audio (with just the right amount of problematic attitude on stage to be a very interesting post-punk band), now post an ascent that has them playing large stages sounding more and more like the ska-scented tincture of Suggs and Madness. This was followed by Squid, the skittish, ambitiously palatable prog-punk-band, who unstitched a set woven from disparate threads, free-falling into abstract new structures (intros and outros, fuck the middle, which feels in its own way modern and revolutionary), with bouncy melodies that seem to spring from a fervent crease of defiant, breathless noise to exultation rolling just out of reach, like the condensation of catharsis — see-sawing between the mundane and life-changing, finding that cynicism has pop-corned into an anachronistic reverence that seems to exist in the same way I as a child consecrated my sea monkeys and cried when they died, arguing with my father that they did indeed have a soul (just add water!) — to distinguish what parts of the set most resembled any tracks from their first two albums, you would have needed to excavate it from within the overwhelm. Granted, this was when my mescaline really kicked in.


The best way I can describe mescaline is that it feels like you're constantly looking at two strangers making out for just a little bit too long. It's intrusive, compulsive, unrepentant, and as I watched the world dancing (eyes closed with tongues licking at crumbly air searching for soft throats) through my dark shades, I felt the rupturous helix of music as Ben UFO seemed to pull sound from within me and reshape it before feeding it back to us. How can you not move when the sound being played is your own jagged, thrumming palpitations? When your blood is pumping at the same BPM as the sound-system and you're sweating at even faster R(ivulets)PM, how can you not sway and swoon and shake and shiver--



"Are we sure they know what they're doing?" my friend asked me. No, I'm not. I could give him no reassurance, as Young Fathers, made up of Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings, shred through the epitome of hard, new wave, industrial, concrete Glasgow electronic sound blended, at their will, with soul, hip-hop, rock, noise, pop, and rap and referencing the sounds of Ethiopia and Ghana. It was ten things all at once, all of the time — yet always stopped short of becoming too brittle to break. Like much of what I saw at Wide Awake, it always felt only moments away from completely falling apart. It's hard to describe a group which are doing so much simultaneously, self-generating an identity and purposefully remaining enigmatic in doing so. Language is a lie, but it is important, and it is my job, so I must try to translate it with what semblance of synapses are still firing. Their sound and their performance are ferocious, and suspenseful (think of an elastic band always threatening to snap back at you) spinning a Catherine Wheel of concentric music (I could count the heavens, there were seven), spun by a propulsive energy that dared to offend, to spill over, to become too much.


Scottland's other great act, David Byrne, ascribed as “Scotland’s second greatest poet”, was plastered in full technicolour by the greatest cover band in the world. Founded by Dancing Barefoot's Maddy O’Keefe and Lola Stephen, this special edition of Byrne's Night, hosted by Ash Kenzai (true to name, huffing a bottle of Rush on stage), opened with a thundering bagpipe solo and Scottish poem and featured an endlessly rotating set of musicians — a sugary selection of instrumentalists from bands such as Black Country, New Road and Squid, syrupy, wyrd-folk quartet The New Eves, and London's absurdist post-punk jesters Human Resources, as well as guest singers such as sexy noise-renaissance frontman Cole Haden of Model/Actriz who performed while both voguing and smoking, club provocateurs Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul grinding on the standing lamp, and the unabated thrash of Alli Logout from Special Interest, among others — who squirmed about in oversized suits ejecting all of the monotonic manic drama and panting heat-stroked gestures that David Byrne himself feverishly seared into our collective memories in Stop Making Sense.


Talking Head’s music has always been described as “timeless”, sonically situated in the future-already-here and the past-still-around, both somehow still progressive even while drenched in nostalgia’s diaphora (as a case in point, David Byrne's "Heaven" envisions a world where you can endlessly smoke eternal cigarettes, kiss infinitely, and listen to your favourite music on repeat). Even scratching at the funky, addictive, paranoid rhythms of Byrne and Talking Heads is bound to wind up being as narcotised and euphoric as a night of live music can be, and one that, keeping on theme, counteracts an audience increasingly obsessed with the false promise of forever. 

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<![CDATA[Yasunari Kawabata: I'm Never Going to Snow Country!]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/yasunari-kawabata-snow-country663bf337a7b53d91d0908cc5Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:32:13 GMTAlana CleggThe sparse and shadowy work of author Yasunari Kawabata becomes clear through a modern tea ceremony.


Yasunari Kawabata Timeline


11 June 1899, Kawabata is born.

1935-1937, Snow Country serialized.

1949-1951, Thousand Cranes serialized.

16 October 1968, Kawabata becomes the first Japanese person to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1972, Kawabata dies. Cause contested, though it is assumed self-poisoning with noxious gas.



Thousand Cranes


Thousand Cranes: when the single tit so hairy we all have to have the most elaborate tea ceremony over it. As one should. Unimportant side note: if you’re going to advertise there being a thousand cranes you better fucking deliver. This book did not, it was just a scarf with a lot but who knows if really a thousand cranes printed on, not a single real-life crane. I want my money back, even though I only loaned the book from the library for free.


I keep on laughing to my own thoughts! Surely a true sign of madness? No one can be this funny all the time. The old man with the large beard always replies, “Gosh, you’re a worry!” whenever I go to speak to him. Have I gone too feral? Is there any coming back from this? I hope not. I like it here; I rather like where I’m at. The things I see inside my head mean I should make other plans instead. Our tea ceremonies are more à la The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō, striving for life to become a harmonious art form and failing at a rate deemed miserable and inharmonious. But we drinking VB (Victorian Bitter to you untrained unpetticoated uncouths), and we take this shit very seriously, ceremoniously even.


It’s because where I’m at I can fully encapsulate within my mind whole of the unsweetened dramas of whatever the fuck is going on in Thousand Cranes. Like yooooooo guys you need to settle down!!!! Nothing is that serious. But you know what is serious? Your father’s mistress having one hairy boob. I knew a guy who had one of those hairy birth marks. It was on his leg. He was Vietnamese and I love him very much, like a brother, to this day… so I can understand all the fuss being made over the hairy birthmark. Me n Anh used to live together while studying at university, our rooms across from oneanothers, go to Sunnybank too often or eat KFC while watching Anthony Bourdain chow down on something only a lil bit better (that’s how much we love our fried chicken). That’s a modern-day tea ceremony. Anh never replied to my texts when I got back to Australia, and I’m not sure why. That’s my breaking of the bowl. Lips stained and sealed, no Nobel prize floating on the precipice of a hairy birthmark. Thinking about matcha lattes and suicides covered up are my next preoccupations: my family will tell them I’m on a permanent vacation to the Australian outback. Everyone in Thousand Cranes is in a restrained prosaic haiku trying to pretend that they aren’t horny in strange ways and that that doesn’t make them want to kill themselves till their family feels they have to lie about you, and I felt that ☹.



Snow Country


If I’m being honest with myself, I haven’t been being honest with myself. Emptying out slowly in gradients of greys till my insides are pure transparent nothings, nothing feels, nothing searches, eyes dim, sleep is a release. When awake I dream longingly for the unconscious, not death. I will never dream of death again, not even in the fires that ignite melancholies to madnesses. I used to dream of death, but now I dream of much much more. Constellations swirl and scream and I’m opening up to their happenings lock jaw. Nature can’t help but mirror shifting, squirming insides, with both yours and mine at cross-purposes, we saturate the changing landscapes in feeling’s shifting terrains. How else can what begins inside come to be known by the outwardly propelled senses? Inaccurate bodily radars and beacons are collecting and sifting through dead leaves and pet silkworms, frostbitten, silent in the stark snow, or staring at the moon hoping to miss its pale creators to catch a glimpse of ourselves reflected back instead. If the moths desiccate and turn to dust; if unripe fruit knows it will be wasted and so bruises before its time; if sake cups fill and tipple over and over again left hollow and empty; what is the analogous feeling? Sensing the leaves change and dissipate under snow, I write here about a ballet I’ve never seen much less danced. An easier way out for the selves that I do not want to know, and do not want to feel, and will never dance out. To find beauty in sadness is that very sadness’s comforting elegy, and all mournings come to an end don’t they? Kawabata eat your heart out! Gas yourself in the study for all I care! I’m never going to snow country ever again!

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<![CDATA[The Exhibition Match: Rivalry for Unity]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/the-exhibition-match-rivalry-for-unity663bf337a7b53d91d0908cc2Wed, 21 Feb 2024 11:02:40 GMTMisha KrynauwThe game itself hasn’t had much traction to my attention, but every now and then an aspect of it will reach me through a fashion collaboration or an artwork, and I’ll remember that I share this life with 3.5 billion fans of the most watched sport in the world.



To be clear, the last time I ‘played’ football, I had a Siemens A52 and I wouldn’t say that there was anything concrete about the rules for kids in primary school,  passing the time at aftercare. Way more my speed, obviously, but, it turns out that I would do almost anything to get my hands on something designed by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi. Including taking a soccer ball to the stomach, as my luck (or, the winning team) would have it.

 

The 16th FNB Art Joburg gave the co-founders of the Exhibition Match, Phokeng Setai and Alexander Richards, their second opportunity in 2023 to expand on their ‘experimental, artistic project and social intervention’. When Alex had sent over an idea of what the Nkosi kit would look like, I couldn’t even resist asking if all the teams had filled up. “You wanna play?” Obviously, no, I did not want to be seen running after a ball that I didn’t know how to kick, but I could also get my birthday number on my jersey, so … fast-forward to me watching warily as a few of the players started warming up inside of what could also be considered a caged stage, but is, in fact, a small field, grumbling about their hangovers and who might be in the crowd that day. A trickle of apprehension threatened to fill me with regret as the feeling of being well beyond my comfort zone reminded me that I’m in fact corporeal, visible, and ready to be judged for something I’ve never done before. I take in the sight of my teammates Penina Chalumbira, Joseph Gaylard, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Chris Soal and Mikhael Subotzky and will my nerves away. Penina had won before, and only Joseph and I were green, so the odds weren’t exactly low.


“Okay team,” Mikhael Subotzky rallied us together after we watched Nolan Oswald Dennis take another hit to the face, fed up with being goalkeeper against James Sey and Maps and the rest of FC Portrait who were playing like real money was on the line, saying something like, “let’s just do our best and keep it clean.” I heard someone mutter something about WWE, but I didn’t think it was wise to waste my breath on anything other than following my team’s instructions, whom, in the long run, could actually turn me into something of an actual player, I’m sure. I give thanks to the kilometres I’ve run.


 

There’s the familiar feeling of being watched, multiplied by the culture of spectatorship that has its own presence in the game. The theatrics are essential. The commentary is seamless, and the energy is easy to rise up and react to. Coupled with the adrenaline, the dynamics of performance and physicality fall into place, but I still didn’t have any idea about what the actual rules of the game are other than don’t use your hands and fucking run.

 

So, we Relational Athleticslost to FC Portrait, but beat Super Easels, finishing third overall. I remember Super Easels scoring an own goal and Setai still having something to say about my admittedly shocking (lack of) technique. So, it was gratifying when we won that match, I will admit. While Setai, Subotzy and Richards referee the surrounding games, I get to enjoy being in the crowd for a while and the thrill doesn’t abate from the other side. There’s music, film cameras, and everyone from the founder of the Fair to Thenjiwe herself. Off-pitch there are choruses of well-dones, and great-job-babes. Everyone’s convinced I’ve fallen ill because my voice is a couple of notches lower than usual since the spectacularly dry air had made a show of wringing me out. I enjoy the show of the social climate amongst the arts professionals (and their overarching, designated institutions) that the project gathered to congregate around friendly competition.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many of us together in the daytime outside of the white cube. I’d made more eye contact that afternoon than the last few show openings I’d attended in Cape Town combined. There is great value in play, and the injection of soccer into what can be a templated, or prescribed experience feels challenging and necessary now that I’m gauging an idea of a new variation of our usual experience. I see a window opening somewhere to something more comfortable, more communal than platitudes and passive conversation, and that alone is a breath of life.



“What I’ve learnt is that we have so much more to do,” Phokeng Setai reflects. “The project is much larger than we think it is. What comes to mind is that there is a necessity for projects that show a different facet to our art world. Which is a bubble. But [also], a really important social and cultural space, because it caters for people like ourselves. Like your artists, your curators, your creatives, your thinkers. Not many spaces out there accommodate people like us. Especially with the world turning more and more corporate. There is a need for spaces where the soft matter is respected, and appreciated by soft matter I mean aesthetics, I mean sensibilities, I mean play, notions such as play which are not just notional, but they are also practical, they are healing and therapeutic where there’s a sense of community.”

 

It seems obvious, in listening to him, that the issues I’d felt isolated by within our industry were also isolating him, and others. This softness, truly, was the last thing I expected to find in the middle of a conversation about football. It is clarifying. This is the beauty of play, with its freedom to stitch notions, people and concepts together for the sake of the possibility of doing so. What becomes juxtaposed in proximity, or harmonious, or clear in its function against the fold of another? What becomes precious and worth emphasising? What springs up, new and daring? What do we discover, what do we learn? How quickly can we adapt? Through doing so, can we win? And what does that mean outside of what we already know?

 

“[We’re] bringing people together in an industry which creates and feeds on these modes of exclusion to produce access elsewhere. Access which materialises or manifests financially, usually, to the exclusion of others. So, it’s creating communities in ways that see the individual beyond what they’re able to produce aesthetically, which then becomes a commodity. I think that there’s huge potential in what The Exhibition Match could contribute to that conversation alone … and play is important, to be seen playing is important,” Setai adds.


The Exhibition Match booth at the 16th FNB Art Joburg became the grounds for a revival of Kendell Geers’ 2002 presentation, “Masked Ball”, inviting visitors to play inside a space ‘more suitably’ designed for collector’s appraisal or well-lit selfies for proof-of-attendance. “I prefer to activate the exhibition space, to make it fun and dangerous, a place to contest rather than a place to consume. I wanted people to kick [the] balls and laugh or scream, to run about and do something that feels more like being alive than the living dead gentry of art for art’s ache … There is a football inside each of the latex masks and the viewer gets to kick the presidents in the face. It’s a very liberating experience being able to kick a politician in the face like an ancient Mayan ritual,” Geers said in an interview with the co-founders.


“The idea of the match was very much in the spirit of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of ‘Relational Aesthetics’,” Kendall Geers replied, when asked by the curators if some of the 1995 match’s participating artists had been involved in similar, performance-based projects before, “[Our game] was laughed at and not taken seriously as a work of art. I was known at the time as the ‘enfant terrible’ of art and everything I made was mocked and ridiculed.” Geers added that “the [preemptive] conversation [with the eventual players] evolved around football and art, about foreigners and locals, about the Biennale and the name badges that said they were all South African. Suddenly we all loved the idea of organising a football match!”


“I want to go back to that notion of play and community,” Setai says, “I want to emphasise that I’m not saying community is something we should take lightly because when you put community and play next to each other, you could think that, yey, community is a playful thing. But, when we bring these things to each other and think about what they mean when we work in a world where play is so important play and process in the production of the things that make our work relevant. It makes me think about how community, as the thing that is the object of The Exhibition Match, is important. Especially how we create this community, and I think that play is a modality that is key for us, in the kind of community we will create. So, I think [that] there’s a necessity for more community, which lies outside of just the art world, and the people in the art world. I think we can broaden the scope of this project to include people who are just interested in art, in culture and just create a space for everyone.”


“Initially we didn’t set out to build a community,” Alex adds. “[Our community] grew from being a byproduct of having fun and exploring the two things that we both love. What this project has taught me is that great things can develop outside of your areas of focus. I think we’re constantly learning. Every iteration seems easier, but at the same time, we push [our] limits, trying to be non-repetitive or novel. My favourite thing is how each iteration varies, and [how] the results [of] each form of evidence or takeaway is different from the previous one. Whether it’s a video, a written article, or a personal experience that is relayed to us.”

 

In reaction to an environment that is oftentimes intensely competitive and limiting, the project quickly turned into a vessel for more than a point of convergence between sport and visual artpurposefully and playfully amorphous, is the perfect holding space for the new perspectives of a community of people building their own culture despite. Perhaps the idea of learning from my competition was a little more obvious than an epiphany, but it’s a metaphor for past experiences of mine that rings true, too. I’ve never been interested in competing with my industry colleagues, (being far more invested in what they could teach me, or, what we could achieve together) until now.



Curated by Alexander Richards and Phokeng Setai, 2023’s Exhibition Match for arts workers took place at Discovery Soccer Park in Sandton. A special shout-out to my teammates for making third place feel like first: Penina Chalumbira, Joseph Gaylard, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Chris Soal, and Mikhael Subotzky.

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<![CDATA[Marina Abramovic: A Ritual in Six Steps]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/marina-abramovic-ritual-in-six-steps663bf336a7b53d91d0908c6bTue, 06 Feb 2024 16:01:27 GMTLuisa De la Concha MontesHAVE YOU NOTICED THAT EXPERIENCES TASTE BETTER WHEN THEY ARE TOLD BY A BODY THAT IS NOT YOURS?


Marina Abramovic



My first experience of cinema was verbal. My grandparents used to go to the cinema every Monday and on Tuesday mornings, while driving me to school, my grandma would describe the movie she had seen the night before in extreme detail. Most of the time, these were movies that I could not see myself, as I was only ten years old, but by seeing these films through my grandmother’s eyes, I could still enjoy their beauty, whilst being protected from their rawness.


It was a ritual that I still carry with me, a ritual I invoke every time I ask someone to tell me what they saw, and how it made them feel. It is a ritual I hope to invoke in this text.


ONE: EYES


You walk into the first room. The walls to your left and right are full of screens. The screens on the right show the faces of many individuals, with varying expressions. The screens on the left show the face of Marina Abramović multiple times. This is a documentation of The Artist is Present (New York, 2010), a performance piece that invited people to make eye contact with Marina for as long as they wanted. Over 1,500 people took part.


Your eyes move back and forth between Marina and them. You try to connect with each expression, but the only face you manage to hold in your memory is the one of the man sweating profusely. You see a couple of children and wonder whether their parents forced them to take part. Your eyes become a third individual in this interaction; you are forcing yourself upon them without them knowing. You are breaking the intimacy between Marina and them.


You suddenly remember that YouTube video you once watched called How to Make Eye Contact. The video, which was ten minutes long, depicted a woman, looking straight at the camera (at you). Her gaze held you hostage against the screen. You did not watch the whole thing through; her friendliness spooked you. This level of intimacy does not work if the person is not in the room.


TWO: SKIN


“I have been having lots of intrusive thoughts lately. When I was abroad, these thoughts stopped, but when I came back to London, they returned. I love my friends frantically, but I cannot hold a knife in front of them without imagining that I stab them. Should I get help?”


Rhythm 0 (1974) Marina Abramovic

I came across this on a Reddit forum at 2AM. I imagined a third person in the room, looking at my expression while I read. The third person in the room thinks that there is a sort of lonesome beauty in my gaze, but they are not sure if it’s true or imagined, they are not sure if the lonesome beauty is always there when one reads a Reddit forum at 2AM alone in a big city.


It is ironic really, how Rhythm 0 was performed in 1974. Marina stood in a room with a table. The table had 72 objects in it, including knives, a gun with bullets, candles, toilet paper, flowers, a whip, chains, and more. The instructions were simple: I am the object. During this period, I take full responsibility. You don’t need me to tell you what happened in 1974. You already know.


I want to make sense of the cruelty enacted in Marina’s body, but I cannot do so by looking at a table full of objects. Instead, I ask her to help me resuscitate Edward Hopper. We take a red-eye flight to New York on a whim and we build a pyre in Oak Hill Cemetery. Once Edward awakens, Marina hands him an easel and oil paint. She asks him to draw Morning Sun again, but she says, “Do a night version of it, with the woman’s phone illuminating her face, instead of the sun.” Marina does not need to tell Edward what the woman is reading on her phone. He already knows.


THREE: BLOOD


You walk into the third room, which is red, and visceral. There is a pile of bones to the right, belonging to Balkan Baroque (1997). In the original performance piece, Marina washed each bone by hand, while singing folk songs from her childhood, directly responding to the horrors of the Bosnian War. Years later, she said: “After a few days, worms started coming out of the bones. And the smell was unbearable.”


The documentation of the horror is there, but the horror is not. There is no smell and the floors are polished. To put it bluntly: While you walk around the exhibition space, two wars are happening outside these walls. However, no one here is washing those bones.


FOUR: SALIVA


The same room is home to a photograph of Lips of Thomas (1975), which depicts the pentagram Marina carved into her stomach. As you look at the photograph, you imagine the scar that currently exists on Marina’s skin. Sensually, you imagine what it would feel like to touch it lightly with your fingertips.


To injure the body to make a statement is not a novel concept. In the 14th century, Catherine of Siena practised rigorous fasting. At the end of her life, the only thing she ate was the Eucharist. The commonality between Marina and Catherine is the use of their female bodies as tools. They both ask: Can freedom be attained if one chooses the conditions in which pain is inflicted? A third question floats around the room: If one is able to choose between inflicting pain and living painlessly, what drove them to choose the latter?


This question haunts you, following you to the next room. Sometimes she looks like Catherine of Siena, other times she takes the shape of Marina. The question dissipates when a fourth figure enters the room: Ulay.


He shared a birthday with Marina. Like many love stories, theirs included sex, saliva and pain. Unlike many love stories, these moments of intimacy were often enacted in front of an audience. As you walk around the exhibition space, you overhear a five-year-old child asking her mother why Ulay is slapping Marina and why Marina is slapping Ulay. With no hesitation, the mother responds: “They are just playing a silly game”, and you laugh because, after years of asking many grown-ups what love is, you finally got an answer in the most unlikely place.


FIVE: WEIGHT


Marina’s work feels different when Ulay enters the picture. You want to be happy for her, but you also selfishly preferred her work when she was alone. In a strange way, even though she still enacts violence with Ulay, the stakes do not feel as high as they did when she was on her own. She is still fainting and drawing blood, but now there is someone to wake her up and check her pulse. Perhaps that in itself is the message, but you still yearn for the risks taken in her earlier work.


Imponderabilia (1977) Marina Abramovic and Ulay

When Imponderabilia was first performed in 1977, visitors to the exhibition had no option but to walk between Marina and Ulay naked bodies. Because of this, it was shut down by the police after a few hours. What does discomfort look like in 2023? As you walk between the two slim bodies, you feel warm and cared for. The woman next to you says: “It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” You agree, but you are unsure if beauty is what you were looking for.


As the exhibition progresses, your disconnectedness with the work grows. These pieces are not as visceral as her early work, or as intimate as her work with Ulay. Instead, they are subdued, involving the viewer more directly. One room has many furniture-like sculptures made of crystals and minerals in which you are allowed to sit or stand against.


You try on the Shoes for Departure (1991), which are heavy and made of crystal. The instructions read: Take off your shoes, put on the two crystal shoes, close your eyes, and make your departure. You do what the label tells you to do but you struggle. There are people behind you, waiting to also try the shoes on. You feel their eyes on your back. You wonder if this is what Marina felt. The eyes on her back, piercing the work. You leave the Royal Academy and you run to catch the bus, realising a bit too late that you left your body behind.


SIX: SPIRIT


“The work of mourning is never complete, never clear, never solid.”


For the next few weeks, Marina haunts my dreams. I kneel in an empty room, wearing nothing but ashes. There are candles around me, forming a circle. Using a long stick, I slowly turn them on, one by one. Religious chants play in the background and Marina watches from a corner. In the dream, this performance changes the world.


Some nights I dream of Ulay, other nights, Edward’s ghost waits by my bed, drinking a cup of tea and asking me what he should paint next. Catherine appears one night and gives me a box of antidepressants, saying it tastes better than the Eucharist. They are all trying to help because they know I cannot bring myself to let go of Marina.


In the real world, I am on the bus to work, writing stories on my phone. In the real world, this is what I have to do to find redemption. Eventually, I succeed: I am a ten-year-old child again, sitting in the backseat of my grandmother’s car, seeing films through her eyes.


Balkan Baroque (1997) Marina Abramovic


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<![CDATA[Negating the Canvas: A Conversation with Mark Leckey]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/negating-the-canvas-a-conversation-with-mark-leckey663bf336a7b53d91d0908c92Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:36:33 GMTBryson Edward Howe"It's like you deny the existence of God in order to affirm God, right? And that's kind of what I practice. I deny the existence of art in order to make art."


Mark Leckey. Photo: Jeremy Liebman


My first encounter with Mark's work was his 2019 Tate Britain exhibition, O' Magic Power of Bleakness, where a full-scale replica of a section of the M53, a motorway flyover close to his childhood home was installed in the bowels of Tate's stone fortress, standing on the former site of Millbank prison, in which Leckey unleashed a shadow-play of memory, technology, and nightmare around the space – always traversing a coil of sonic landscapes and virtual realms – I sat wide-eyed and let this pixelated Plato's cave nestle itself into my vibrating organs.


For me, nostalgia has always been quite abstract. I was born in 1999, and so I've often been afflicted by nostalgia for times and places I've not been. The same year I was born, Mark released his pioneering work, Fiorucci made me Hardcore, a digital palimpsest made up of images that would permeate every open crevice of subculture that came after it. Those images are remnants now ghosted into afterimages that feel like they belong to my childhood, my own coming of age – as much as to the people in the actual footage – and of an England I never knew, moving to the country when I was 14, where I was present in an eery Northern limbo, not there for its worst days, or its great.


My nostalgia had been hijacked, and my worldview derailed, the same way that our own memories are now pixelated and stored in a cloud, brains rewired so that dopamine is as necessary as air. Feeling all of this, I got the opportunity to sit down with Mark in the hopes of finding the end of the rabbit hole I was tumbling down; along the way, discussing art, the internet, and Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer.


✹✹✹✹✹



The Big Ship: There's a lot of talk around you and your work post-1999 about always looking forward and sort of tracking the effect it had on culture, but I first want to start with what happened before because so much of your work taps into some vibrations of nostalgia. I am wondering what it was that led you to start creating in the first place. I know first-hand that doesn't always feel very possible, growing up in the north of England, especially.


Mark Leckey: Every artist of my generation and, maybe a generation or two after, basically talks about how there were the affordances that were there to enable you to follow a kind of creative path. I left school when I was fifteen, I left really young... I was just lost. There was no opportunities for me where I was from. I grew up in Ellesmere Port, so I wasn't in Liverpool where maybe I'd have found my feet more in some kind of alternative culture, but I was just a scally from the burbs. It was hard to imagine some kind of horizon beyond that. I mean, I could through music. I was into music, and I knew that it was a kind of crucible of interest in music. And that's why I wanted to go really more than anything else. I tried to have a band and that, but that never got off the ground. So I thought I'd go to art school and I'd meet people who I could be in a band with.


And that was in Newcastle?


That's in Newcastle, so that's 1987, I think I go- '86 or '87.


And that was when you decided that you would be an artist, or try and be an artist beyond that?


Even when I went to art school, I was still very suspicious about art school and in fact, suspicious about university life altogether. Being a little scall, one of your favourite occupations was baiting students, you know what I mean? I hated students. And then suddenly there, I was in the midst of them, so I was very suspicious in my first year and I thought which is a classic fallacy to go in and think that you're going to make political art. I wanted to be a muralist in the style of Diego Rivera. I was looking at artists at that time, like Peter Housen, very kind of muscular [art], I guess in some way kind of coming out of sort of union politics. I was trying to think of making monumental figuration like that, or doing caricatures in the same vein. I remember that what got me into Newcastle was I did a grotesque sort of Otto Dix caricature of the Orange March, the Orange Men.


That's the kind of thing I was making. And I got to art school and realised I could isolate myself and carry on making that work, but if I wanted to be part of the wider curriculum, I'd have to change my ways, which I did. And just opened myself up basically. And stopped hating students, and became a student. I went over to the other side. It did feel very like that. Which has since come back to slightly haunt me because I think you have to go through this process of giving things up in order to become this 'other', to become something else that's more comfortable in that environment. Because otherwise, you're just walking around with a huge chip and a sneer on your shoulder. Well, I was at least. Other students from my background are much more balanced. But for me, it was always one or the other. I couldn't be both.


Yeah, I think I get what you mean. I'm from Newcastle and then made the jump to going to art school down here in London and I definitely felt that sometimes there is quite a disconnect there.


Yeah, I think it's very common. There was much more people from working-class backgrounds doing art when I went there. But not that many, so you did feel slightly cut off from everyone else. Everyone else seemed much more comfortable with it. If they come from a background where they knew about art, they knew about literature, they didn't have to make any real transition in that sense, or it didn't seem that they did. But for me, I didn't have books at home. It's like suddenly you're plunged into this entirely different worldview, you know?


I was going to ask if you had like a cultural childhood, because it feels like you're filtering a lot of your big ideas in your work through your childhood, and I'm curious as to why you're constantly pulled back to that part of your life.


I think mostly because of what I'm saying, really. I think it's a sort of unresolved or a slightly unresolved conflict within myself. No, I don't like that phrase. Unresolved parts of myself, I guess. It becomes a resistance to a sort of discourse that I found in art that felt very remote and distant, so this led to a sort of return to something that I knew I'd experienced as a way of disengaging with that. I didn't want to make work and, to be honest, I couldn't make work that required any kind of distance or analysis or critical rigour. I could only make work out of some kind of spoiled romanticism. I don't know why I used that word. Like marred, not a true romanticism, but one that's gone to kind of waste.


I've heard you talk about nostalgia like it's almost some kind of demon, something to be exorcised. I don't know if you still feel that way or if it's something you're trying to purge or recapture because it teeters sometimes on anxiety-like.


I'm kind of out of my nostalgic phase. I mean, I still carry it. I was reading something about nostalgia the other day, and they were talking about the mark of nostalgia is disappearance. And so going back to your first question, when I left school, all the kind of structure, which was basically the industry of that area had gone. Really rapidly. So, you come of age with this sense of things just recently disappeared and it induces this very nostalgic culture. At the age of sixteen, I understood nostalgia, because it was all around me, because the great days had gone. Or, not even necessarily the great days, but just the possibilities had gone, and any kind of chance of making a life for yourself are pretty much gone as well. It was very depressed. And melancholic. So it was in me, nostalgia. It was inculcated in me from then. And then, when I made Fiorucci [made me Hardcore], I thought, well that's where that's coming from. It's just coming from a kind of Merseyside nostalgia. But then I started to realise, or started to believe that the nostalgia is kind of algorithmic, and is what has been algorithmically produced. It becomes kind of engineered. Because it's useful, profit, it's useful to think of the future. It's a kind of barrier to thinking optimistically about the future. It's like Trump weaponised nostalgia, right? Brexit, even closer to home is basically like the politics of nostalgia, it's like you can't not be nostalgic now. It's been systematised, especially in the UK, because that disappearance that I was talking about also then applies to the rest of the country. That we're no longer what we once were, which is a common refrain. That kind of nostalgia is now sort of baked in. Oh, I hate that phrase. I can't believe I used that phrase. [laughs]. So, when I'm making work about nostalgia, it's not that I'm making work because I feel nostalgic. That's the structure of feelings that I feel embedded in. It's not my fault. [laughs].


I'm not trying to accuse anyone of anything.


No, but I do get accused of nostalgia. There's a friend of mine who does accuse me of having a very kind of white nostalgia. That nostalgia is in itself a kind of whiteness, right? Which I understand completely. So, you're not the first to bring it up. It’s definitely there in the work. I think if I just made work in a kind of expressive way, that would probably be the ground of what I'd make. I slip into it very easily, partly because of everything I've said, but also I think it's very easy to make nostalgic work. There's lots of devices you can use that nostalgia works very well. It's very manipulative.


It's very seductive.


That's the word I was looking for. Thank you. Exactly.


Okay, so talking a little bit more about recent work, Carry Me into The Wilderness


Yeah, that's not nostalgic.


No, but sees enlightenment, to me, quite overwhelmingly and almost destructively.


Yes.


So are you generally drawn more to the dark or the light, especially, as you said, moving into a new phase of your work?


I would say I'm probably more drawn to the light, but I am full of anxiety. I have friends who I would definitely describe as drawn to the dark, and I feel I can differentiate myself from them. I found later in life, there's a kind of for want of a better word  a sort of spiritualism that I'm seeking. And that work is very much about that. The initial recording is me having this moment where I feel the spirit or the divine. I'm hesitant around these words, but let's call it a divine spirit, a sort of imminence, an imminent spirit gorblimey where everything becomes just alive and everything becomes profound and it's like an ecstatic moment. I'm both there and not there. I'm taken out of myself, in that sense of being unconscious of yourself. Which is very different from my normal state where I'm overly conscious of what I say and what I do and what I think. So just to be taken out of yourself in that moment is wonderful. So, I tried to make a work about that. Just to see where it led me and I think as I was making the work, I tried to maintain that.


I think there's a real interesting mix of occult and magic, real ancient transcendental ideas, but also new technologies. And, I guess, that you're exploring that there's the potential for one to spring to the other?


I think the technology kind of brings that about. Carry Me is about being in your body, experiencing this state of grace in nature, even though it's in Alexandra Park in London in the city, I'm out in the greenery and the sun peeks through the trees and I feel, like I say, ecstatic and it pervades, it's coming both in my mind and pervades my whole body. Me as a being is feeling that, in a kind of material sense, but then it's when I try to make the work about it, you're trying to understand what this kind of spiritual dimension would be, the analogy becomes more about the sort of immaterial realm of online existence or inhabiting this online space, and that work is about moving back and forth between that.


I guess what I'm trying to get at is I'm trying to understand where I am, where my existence is. I guess there's a sense at that moment when we're transitioning into this other kind of immaterial realm in Carry Me into The Wilderness, it's both blissful and terrifying, which is how I feel kind of in both states. This ecstatic moment is also kind of terrifying. It's overwhelming because it's too great. And that seems transferable to me with how I feel online. That too is kind of overwhelming, too great, and full of potential, but also full of darkness and danger, and it’s destructive. I tried to make something where I'm not thinking. It wasn't like, 'Oh, this, this is the idea. This is what I'm going to make,' I'd just recorded myself at the moment of having this kind of experience and then I tried to make a kind of song from that. And then it was the music more that led me to the visuals.


And I'd been reading a lot about iconography at that time, and looking at icons. I love iconography, and I particularly like the historical moment where it transitions into representational painting, just before the Renaissance. So, Giotto, Fra Angelico, where it's still quite flat, but it's not Gothic, and it's not entirely Byzantine. And I was very taken by some of what I'd read, which said that when you look at these icons, you're not looking at a picture, you're not looking at an image. Because images at that time were still suspect. In the way that Islam still refuses images, the early Christian church believed that all images were graven images. So, any kind of realistic depiction is idolatry. And they kind of got around that by not being realistic, but also by saying that these icons weren't pictures in themselves, they weren't images, they were windows onto heaven. It's a direct channel to heaven, you're looking through. So, you're kind of peering into heaven through these frames. I was just really excited about that. Trying to make a work where you're not thinking about representation. You're not thinking about, in any real way, the meaning of what you're trying to do, but just trying to access something, access a kind of a state. That's what I was trying to do in that video.


Do you have any anticipations of how that's going to play out for future generations? There's a continuing blurring of the real and the digital and, I mean, you've used Snapchats in your videos, like In this lingering Twilight Sparkle. That's a Snapchat video from a guy running through a bus stop in Cardiff, which I remember being shared around years ago, and then seeing that remixed and transformed into this quite spiritual video, I wonder if Snapchat, or social media, is art?


That's all I do think about. There was some conversation the other day on Twitter, where it started off with someone talking about a film with Adam Sandler, The Wedding Singer. Do you remember the film?


Yeah.


And saying that The Wedding Singer is set in the 1980s, although it's made at the end of the '90s, right? And in The Wedding Singer, everyone's got like big '80s shoulder pads and big hair. It's almost a caricature of the eighties, but it's very recognisably the eighties. And they were basically saying, how would you make a film like that, in 2020, set in, with the equivalent distance of time, 2005? 2005 to 2023, the differences aren't that great. That was the point. This idea that culture is kind of slightly stagnated. It's a sort of Mark Fisher idea. That is, how Mark Fisher has been received anyway, I don't think it is his fault, but this kind of idea that nothing new has happened in the 21st century. And then someone wrote back and said, you know, yeah, but the differences between 2008 and now are enormous. As great as the Industrial Revolution in some sense. Just in terms of 2008 being the introduction of the iPhone and the difference in our reality, between then and now, because of that device is phenomenal. So, forget about The Wedding Singer and those differences.


But from there I started thinking there's a different sense of time that's developed. I remember, as we transitioned into the 21st century, thinking, oh, you know, what's going to happen next? What kind of musical form, what kind of art form, where's culture going to go? And then it didn't seem to respond in the same way that it had previously, back from the 50s to the 60s, to the 70s, 80s, 90s. But then I've realised, we're in a different century. Time moves differently now. I think that kind of idea of progression through decades was very particular to the end of the 20th century anyway. I think it was some kind of weird psychic countdown or something. And since then, with the internet, things aren't just moving forward. They're moving sideways or horizontally as well. It's like everything's sort of distributed, which again, lends itself to nostalgia. Because things from the past are there in the same sense that things from now. Everything's available in that way. So, time moves differently. I like this idea. I haven't come up with this, I don't know where I got this from, but that time has been converted into space. So, it's more, spatial now than it's some kind of telos, some kind of linear progression. So that puts us in a very different space. Me, still as an artist, I'm trying to make something that feels new. Is that the right response anymore? Is that what's needed? Is that what's demanded? I don't know.


Whenever I have strong feelings, or strong desires, about anything, I've learned to become much more suspicious of them. And this kind of spiritualism I'm talking about, one of my suspicions of that is that, is a kind of spirituality an effect of being online? Does it bring about an idea of thinking in this kind of immaterial way? One of the reasons to make Carry Me, as well, is that I feel that works from the Middle Ages seem, in some ways more useful now than works from the 20th century, from the modern age. There's some kind of equivalence there. Or sympathy. They seem more sympathetic now. I was first taken by those images because they seem so strange and so almost non-human. They seem so unrelatable. But now I look at them and think, oh, yeah, that seems, that seems a way you could describe the world now. Looking at a 12th-century icon painting.



I wanted to ask about music specifically, and how you think your art and music work relate to each other or feed into your practice. You mentioned a band earlier. I'm a big fan of your NTS show. You know I've seen you DJ and your work with Hyperdub, so I'm wondering how those two feed into each other?


So, I made the bus stop piece, [In this lingering Twilight Sparkle.], at the end of the pandemic. And during the pandemic, all I was doing creatively was the NTS show. I really kind of lent into that. That was my only outlet. And at the same time, art just seemed really hopeless. It just felt hopeless in terms of its response or its inability to respond. And then just institutionally it felt hopeless. The more I thought about art, the more it just depressed me. So, I'd do the NTS show to kind of chase away the blues.


And then I got asked to make something for Art Night by Helen Nisbet. And I was like, I don't want to make art. It's not what I feel like doing at all at the moment. But I like making video. Can I just not think of it as art then? Can I just think of it as more like a music video, or music and video? And I'd already used soundtrack from that bus stop TikTok. I just put the video back to it and then just started playing with that. And it just gave me license to make something, because I wasn't thinking about what it particularly meant and how it would be received and where it was positioned. I guess I am because, in a lot of ways it's like I need some sort of dialectical tension. Like I talked earlier, about the kind of class conflict being at art school and by extension art that's been useful to me. It's like trying to resolve that produces a kind of energy. And the same with music and art. There's an irresolvable tension between the two, for me. There's things that music can do that art only ever fails to disappoint me on, just in terms of the amount of people that can reach, the diversity of people who make it, the kind of freedoms it has. One of the big things I always think about is that music can be both local, it could be grassroots, and it can be experimental and esoteric. It can do both of those at the same time. Which art really flounders on. You can only have local or experimental art. The two kind of cancel each other out. They certainly can't share a space, but music can. Things that seem exclusively in the art world can sit side by side with each other or even be contained within the same person in music.


I've been obsessed with this guy called Axxturel, that I've played on NTS before. It's mind-boggling just in terms of its experimentation, sonics and meaning. That's some 20-year-old kid, he's part of the local hip hop scene but he's able to do that through music in a way that is as experimental and as difficult as anything you'd hear by paying attention to The Wire's top 10 LPs, you know, right? That's not to snub The Wire. But if you apply that to the art world, that's very, very, very rare, if at all, to find that. I love music. I've always loved music. I first came to culture through music, and I'm kind of self-taught through music. I'm reading this book [No Machos Or Pop Stars by Gavin Butt] at the moment, which is about the period of art schools in the seventies and eighties, and it focuses on Leeds University. It allows you to understand that art students at that period are learning about art history, they're learning about contemporary art history, so they're learning about Dada, Duchamp, Viennese Actionists, extreme transgressive performance, and all the rest of it. And they are then channelling that back into music. And that's when I received it. So, they'd be a generation before me, but I'd be going into a record shop when I was 14, or 15 and picking up record sleeves that have been influenced by that history. And then, in turn, that's how I learned about it. I learned about Viennese Actionists in a roundabout way through Throbbing Gristle. So, music basically schooled me.


And then, getting back to this kind of class antagonism. I came to music because music was everywhere when I was growing up. You start going to discos when you're 11 and I'd heard Kraftwerk when I was like 13 in a disco, right? You are experiencing that at a very young age. And it was part of the culture, along with the humour. And then, like I say, you come to art school, and you have to renegotiate that or dismiss a lot of it or, or kind of become forgetful about it. So, one of the ways of kind of returning it is through music. I just feel more comfortable with music. When I first came to it, art excited me. I was very excited about art for a long time. And I dove deep into it. I read as much as I could and tried to understand as much as I could about the field of art and it just got to a point where I was like, I'm not sure if I actually did. It's like when I first entered into it, and I was quite doubtful and suspicious, and then I found myself in this loop where at the end I'd return to pretty much the same doubts and suspicions I had when I was in my twenties, you know what I mean? I think art says a lot, but it doesn't do. That's the other thing that always slightly irritates me, is that art still carries this idea that it's in advance of the rest of culture and it's like, no, it's not. I don't feel like that at all. Music is in advance of the rest of culture, but I don't feel like that with art at all. I got a bit disgruntled with it, but every time I get to the point where I get too disgruntled, I'll see something that reminds me why I do like it. There'll be a good show or something.


Are you still seeing a lot of art then?


I don't see a lot. I have gone off it quite a lot. It's weird, to be honest, I go out and see shows and they look very much like what people were doing when I went to art school. It's like art's caught up now in this kind of retro-mania. I remember that from 30 years ago. I remember people doing exactly the same. Especially with painting, I find it really retrogressive. I had a great appetite for it at one stage. I'd go and see anything, but now I don't. Maybe that's just getting older.


I was thinking this the other day, talking about this book set in Leeds University, at that time difficult art was always talked of as being challenging, right? And that's what you set out to do. That's what a lot of artists set out to do was to challenge, challenge the establishment, challenge notions of art. And now I find it's like art's challenging itself. That's the challenge. I mean, in some ways. No, that doesn't make sense, because art has always challenged itself.


You mean in a way that's become really insular, that it's not really talking about anything outside of its own existence?


I just think it's very difficult. I think the politics of it are necessary and correct, but it's not actually that conducive to making work. I think the political arguments within it have to go on beyond or outside making work. It's like you can't concurrently make the two. Although that for me was always the kind of tradition. You could make institutional critique, but now the idea of institutional critique just seems kind of impossible, in any real sense, because the politics are just there at the forefront, and get resolved more efficiently that way anyway. By demands and institutions being forced into political actions. By other means, not through arts questioning or critique. Maybe these two things are kind of like go hand in hand. Maybe this is like just a new form of art, but it feels like it's quite difficult to make art at the moment. Maybe for some people it's not, maybe it's just difficult for me to make art at the moment and I'm universalising it and I should stop. [laughs].


When I think a lot of your work from the '90s that was dealing with music, and especially electronic music, like Fiorucci, I find it really prophetic. It feels like it's like mined from internet archives before that ever existed. And so now watching that on YouTube, it's not institutionalised. It doesn't feel like I'm watching anything except an extension of just this music loop that I've got going on already on my laptop. And that has seeped into musicians working now. An immediate example is Slauson Malone. I've seen you perform and interact with Slauson, and I think Slauson Malone is one of the best artists, not musicians, working right now. But there's also a lineage.


You know, and Slauson also paints. But I think he can express himself more through music. This is one of the conversations I have with other people. Is art the best place to be creative now? Is it the best environment to make art: the art world? I don't know if it is anymore. Everything just feels very tight and fraught. And if I try and break them down, I think, well, yeah, all of those things are necessary. This is not an accusation in any way. I think changes need to happen. But also I'm talking economically  not just politically but about economics, and politics with a smaller p and a larger P.


What does that look like for you moving forward? Are you focusing more on music, making music, more art, more video?


I don't know. For example, I've got a gallery show next year. And I honestly don't know what to do in a gallery anymore. In some ways, it seems like a very inhospitable space to make art. It just seems quite cold now to me. Whatever warmth I thought a gallery once had, it's sort of evaporated. Now it just feels quite frigid. And so, what do I do then? How do I make art if that's how I feel about the spaces I'm meant to exhibit in? But like I say, if I didn't think like that, then that's when I know it'd be over. If I didn't care, you know? I need some kind of antagonism within myself, some kind of mistrust. That's always what's kind of allowed me to make work, like you talked before about Fiorucci and it not being institutional, that was because I went to art school, and then I left saying I'm not going to be an artist. I was like, I can't make art. I didn't make anything when I was there. I came out of it and I felt like I was incapable of being an artist, intellectually. Just not up to par, not up to scratch. So, I didn't make any work for 10 years. And then someone commissioned me to make Fiorucci, but they commissioned me in a very loose way to make something with video. And it went through all these different iterations to get there. It came about because I understood that the only way I could make anything is if I made it from my own experience, and not through thinking about making art. And that just gave me the freedom to do what I wanted. It didn't have to be critical in any way, it didn't have to be analytical. It was just like I could make something that was just much more emotionally responsive, or just trying to understand my own psyche as I processed all these images. It's always been useful for me to like, not make art, even though I make art. It's like some kind of, what do they call it? Apophatic theology? It's like you deny the existence of God in order to affirm God, right? And that's kind of what I practice. I deny the existence of art in order to make art. It seems the only way to do it.


If you just accept it, then art takes you. It's like people coming into college or into university, they don't really know what to do, and then it's like art within the institutions  is a virus and it's looking for these bodies to host it. They make art with a capital A. Do you know what I mean? They make gallery-ready art because that's what's in the atmosphere. You can easily make art like that without really having to think that hard about it because art will make itself once it finds a body. It's self-replicating. This is what's kind of funny to me about when people talk about AI stuff. They're going, yeah, but it's just going to scrape what's already out there, but it's like, that's what it does anyway. Most of the time it's just scraping away and you're just there to kind of pay the bills or whatever. And that includes me as well. I have to resist that.


It's hard to know if you mean that positively as if like the artist is the medium between something bigger or if it's like the artist is the host body for art, like a parasite?


It's more like a parasite. [laughs]. I just think it's quite parasitical. Because art's overwhelming. You go to art school, and it induces so much anxiety in everyone. And so, if you allow yourself to be the host, then you're in this kind of state, but at least you're making work, at least you're doing what you're supposed to be doing while you're on the course. So, you kind of welcome the parasite. It's like you allow it to do the work. It's obviously not all people, but I think most people go through something like that and then a lot of people find a way to resist it. But it's just something you have to watch out for.


How did you resist it?


I think it was easier for me to resist it because I was always suspicious of it. so that allowed me to be more resistant to it. I'd built up immunity. [laughs]. I always looked at it like a Scouse. And sometimes I think, oh, maybe too much, I was maybe too sceptical in some ways. I went to see the Lutz Bacher show at Raven Row, that was an incredible show that I couldn't make because of these kind of inherent suspicions. That's how I feel when I look at it. So, I couldn't allow myself to make that. But then my response to it is like, wow, that's, that's great. That's doing something that I just can't even get near achieving.


Which is what you hope for. That's the point, isn't it?


Yes, that is the point. But I don't know if maybe I've kind of blocked that in some way.


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<![CDATA[Faces & Fear: The Best of the BFI London Film Festival 2023]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/faces-and-fear-bfi-lff-2023663bf334a7b53d91d0908c25Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:33:16 GMTThe Big ShipRepression's shadow dances in the frame, while complicity unveils the hidden truths of empathy. Cinema's back, baby.


Apt for a city famous for its temples of stolen bounty, London Film Festival's programme has swam - sheepishly between genre inflection - from Scorsese's sincere mea culpa, to Red Rooms' atrocity exhibition, and onto Steve McQueen's enquiry of testimonial disconnect, a spectatorial complicity that The Zone of Interest windlessly cements. As the human toll of Auschwitz is pitched into the mechanics of genocide (screaming wheels and people), its meticulous sound-design is kept howling beyond the windowpane, and observed - as if through glass - by inconspicuous cameras around a harrowing idyll. Glazer's film is, most prominently, this diegetic expression of the banality of evil, revising Arendt's theory of disengagement only with the guiltier one of abject repression. Arguably, like an eye (or house) bordered by four impenetrable walls, the camera's only mode is to repress truth, or, as described by Michael Haneke, to project "24 lies per second in [...] an attempt to find truth." What in one instance can be weaponised for fetish (the act of focussing so close on a subject that it alters) can, in another, double as a distancing device, armoured in the aegis of negation. Glazer eventually perforates this armour, roping in the viewers in a final act that remorselessly increases the camera's distance from the abhorrence that, as its title readopts, plays on our innate desire for horror: a slow turn prophesied by the screen burning totally white and silent illuminating only the audience. Like the sickness of living beside a mass crematorium slowly infects its occupants - revealing that it does, actually, and has always, reeked - these techniques double as both a prostration of shame and an accusatory glare. The transcendental gambit, in which one must hold (believe) one truth in the mind's eye, either fed or combatted by another on film, then effectively redirects the question "Why make this film?" into "Why watch it?" I have never wanted to leave a room quicker than once the credits rolled, as Mica Levi's postlude taunts a wailing Shepard Scale with the denied consummation of possible harmony, and young critics shuffled out toting rote banalities like "towering filmmaking." I too will claim pacifism to keep my hands dry, describe the smell of the flowers to ignore the colour of compost and transcribe theory like the smoke of fire.


And although nature, generally, is always in flux, there is a sense of the people who live by its stoic laws that they have achieved a stasis, a plateau, some kind of zen in the habitual mandala of life found in abiding by its cycles. Modern slow cinema, especially that chasing the same spiritual asceticism that Paul Schrader outlined in his Transcendental Style in Film, writing that "movies should be about symptoms rather than about causes," an idea which Sontag was simultaneously mulling in its extreme, writing, "art is not about something, it is something." If there is such a way for a film to earn its pace, especially one as starving as Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist, then framing modern boredom as a crisis of meaning leaves us only to read this film as a test of our willingness to go beyond what we are given. Seeking to maximise the mystery of existence, eschewing all conventional interpretations of rationalism in lew of gradually replacing empathy with awareness, Hamaguchi finds little separation between Zen’s calm attentiveness and a state of undisturbed insularity, that once disrupted finds "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."


People observe, caught in mirrors and two-shots, observed by Todd Hayne's own camera in May December, a film that is about only ever being able to dig inches below the surface of another person and yet revels in the comedy that all we do is try. Julianne Moore's Gracie finds in the attentive face of Natlie Portman's Elizabeth her own identical smile communicating back to her with enigmatic gestures, instantly responding without her needing to make any movements first. Pre-empted or predetermined, the two become entwined in psychoanalytically rich ways. Though the characters are not going to have the answers, with a confliction of stories and pretence that leaves any narrative threads untied and frayed. It’s a genius marring of the form, using the artifice and language of camp, melodrama, and daytime soap opera as a vehicle for some sort of “truth”, the characters using acts of self-creation as acts of self-protection; finding freedom in their ability to narrow and frame themselves one way or another.


In William Oldroyd's Eileen, a film that wallows in the idea that you never really know people like you think you do, a blurred gaze that once focused, sharpens into a disappointing mirror and the realisation that the present is always also only a consequence. Thawing under the titular Eileen’s hot, naïve desire, one both as restrictive and liberating as the want that sets the estate on the northern moors to ruin in his debut Lady Macbeth, Oldroyd’s narrative is revealed, slowly, creakily, like the billowing choke of smoke or mist clearing away with a blue dawn. In the full ripeness of these intrusions—flush pink visions of not just what you want but being wanted—a hunger for passion that can only, eventually, erupt, either bodily or bloodily, logically seeking sin as salvation.


There is another candy-coated treatise of want, but one much less compelled by the glitzy possibilities of seduction but magnetised towards, as narrated in The Virgin Suicides, “Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” My relationship with Lurhman’s Elvis starts and ends with the Doja Cat song from the soundtrack, and though the inevitable discourse of how Coppola has filled in the gaps with the more private moments of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, the vulnerable side, of Elvis should serve to actually take away the importance of who this film is about, Coppola has always defined her lead characters by the space around them. Desire, no matter how infantilised, is hard enough to reckon with. Misplaced desire can rewrite your entire relationship with who you thought you were. It seems like Lurhman needed to keep this side of Elvis at a distance, to keep these question marks, in order for Elvis to remain sacred. By shading these parts in, Coppola finds beneath the lace and gingham something maybe even more interesting. Something human, and even more question marks.


“I am a phoenix rising from the ashes,” teases Georgie in May December, Gracie’s now-fully-grown son to her first husband, whom she left for a thirteen-year-old childhood friend of Georgie, Joe, two decades prior. It was a tabloid sensation, and in that, Gracie had to balance telling her story and having her story told on a knife’s edge. Along comes Elizabeth wanting to study Gracie in order to play her in a film; but Joe, uxorious and tranquil, is awakened to the cuckoo in the song of spring, heralding the spectre of cuckoldry in the season’s erotic frenzy, and learning about the Janus-faced nature of self-curation: are we connecting or am I creating a bad memory for you? Cut. Reset. Clean the slate. Get ready to go again.


Transformative shimmers beckon us to nightly bask in their glow. In Red Rooms, Pascal Plante's zeitgeisty fable of access and obsession/watched and watching - a smorgasbord of gleefully topical offerings from Johnny Depp thirst-trapping to Web3's lying licenses - its Luciferian illuminations are the hypnosis of false homecoming. Giallo pomp revels in an eerily familiar descent of the irrevocably transgressed: one YouTube video too deep, one porn page too far, one identity overworn; torch scorching retinal data - found also in the glitch tracing of The Beast, Bertrand Bornello's net gain portraiture of a new objectivity, manifesting in the digital mosh of incels, doll factories, and a film that "follows a small group of elderly 'Peeping Toms' through the shadows and margins of an unfamiliar world."


What Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers has to do with a film whose Geiger counter measures the pulse of two lovers’ heartbeats stretched thin across three lifetimes, is likely little more than a meta-joke rather than the key to unlocking its fairy-tale logic, but it does feel more valuable when you understand the synchronicity of Korine’s idea that his EDGLRD experiments are “just a very kind of also based cinema” and Bornello’s osmosis of a “red-pilled” audience (signposted by a beautifully timed Dasha Nekrasova cameo). Working through the stratum of the past, at the ragged edge of its existence, Bornello discovers what is material will disintegrate. It’s a novel cannibalisation of new constructs, but paradigms that are so pervasive it feels like they've always been here. Angela Carter once wrote “Ours is an orgiastic, not an ecstatic culture”, one that is siloed within itself and always in perpetual motion (birthlovedeathbirthlovedeathbirthlovedeath; shoot a gun and feel the wet seed of your own mortality in your pants). Desire breeds an anxiety of rejection, and one that isn’t desensitised by technology, but amplified. In the film’s opening shot, Léa Seydoux wanders through a seemingly infinite greenscreen, stalked by a beast in the form of a shadow. Her scream gets lodged in a crunch of pixels, as the screen compresses and the shot sucks itself into the glitch, into its own digital corruption. Korine's relationship with the digital has become a new playground for an artist who has always seen cinema as we know it to be in its infancy. I'm not suggesting Bornello has predicted a 'new type of cinema' in what is ultimately a fable about presence and emotion, but in its vertiginous and exultant circularity which twists into a corrosive narrative, there is some psychic beauty to how its spiral echoes what is yet to come.


There’s something about dealing with bodies at their end for a living that is inherently clinical, surgical, where making a science of extremity actually breeds an excessive normality. There is a point when it is explained that for the action that sets off David FIncher's The Killer—Fassbender’s titular killer missing his target—the consequences are “automatic”. That’s all there is to this film, a complete stripping away of any malevolence, of any sense of justice, or morality (even in a relative sense), into something automatic, and giving us not the barebones of a revenge film in the sense that John Wick or even Oldboy builds something muscular from the most rudimentary skeleton, instead Fincher finding more tension in watching vultures tweezer out the marrow from its bones. Matched in the strictness of Fincher’s own OCD-coded directing style, The Killer is almost rote in its Sisyphean skit of a man who is neither as mechanical nor as detached as he thinks he is, and whose journey is ultimately unrewarding. Automatic. His voiceover repeats, mantra-like, “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight. Trust no one,” even as he proves that trying to follow your own advice is like going to the devil for answers. These hushed, private rules are a glimpse inside a mind you’d rather not be inside, but once you’re in the darkness, your eyes adjust.


But while Fincher’s vision of a professional contract killer is a deliberate, incisive fantasy built on the mechanical oscillations of a man whose self-awareness lies only in the lacuna of his physical body, Richard Linklater’s vision in Hit Man is of one who creates the fantasy to fill that painful cavity. “I’m pretty sure movies invented hitmen, they aren’t real,” says Linklater, more interested in the cinema’s obsession with hitmen than a fine-grained realism, landing on some endpoint of culture’s Chinese whispers about the men who kill people for money and spinning it into a comedy of the anxiety of conscious mortality. Linklater and Powell’s commedia dell'arte of cops and criminals (the ego and the id) is likely only vaguely interested in the individual’s faint influence as a minuscule actor in a boundless stage, but it’s a testament to Linklater that he may have unknowingly done exactly that.


Its embarrassed violence is smeared across time, echoing the orphaned technicolour child of The Archer’s Michael Powell (an aberrative miss after an uncompromising string of bullseyes), Peeping Tom lenses fear as an object of and reason for obsession; abstractly, it might make sense why a proto-slasher-satire would unnerve a 1960 British council of critics, but in reality, this perversion of artistic creation (and destruction) killing Powell’s career feels like a mean joke; martyring himself in a gothic mew to your own creature, Frankensteinian in both form and content, manifesting Shelley’s perennial, Oedipal prophecy: “what you make will haunt you”. As a function of storytelling, satire forces you to sit with something reprehensible that is constantly shifting between entertainment and confrontation, and is defanged by the idea that depiction of something constitutes tacit glorification (perhaps why both Powell’s widow, the great Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, who oversaw the recent mass restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s films, find themselves reflected in this, having been scarred by this polemical misunderstanding, from Goodfellas all the way to The Wolf of Wall Street); satire is cruel, and in one where film’s own violent cutting, splicing, bleeding celluloid razor-wire, and blinding projector lights turn on their wielder, feels especially worthless yet potent, to unintentionally film a self-portrait of your own career suicide. Art imitates life imitates art. We watch the watcher. We create the creator. We resurrect the dead.


Unlike the wonder-beasts of Hayao Miyazaki's earlier works, The Boy and the Heron's Heron quickly loses its majesty. In Spirited Away, No-Face maintains a wolfish terror despite the truth of its rabid robe. The Gray Heron simply derobes, climbing out of its beak an impotent wizard without the stoicism of our tortured protagonist, Mahito, or the crackling elegance of the sorcerers that sail his pelagic fantasy, as if those that straddle the countries of dreams and reality are, after all, the most ugly of us - unable to keep homestead in the latter, unable to dissolve utterly into the first. Alongside a structure that abruptly unravels from Miyazaki's heretofore most granular film his heretofore most translucent, the heron's reveal is appropriately conflicted for the artist who seems to resent his own dutiful carving of imagination, and for a man who looks on the earth mournfully: wistfully awe-struck by an effervescence he knows he is complicit in slaughtering. Like a trap-door, reviewing The Boy and the Heron's haunted tower, taunts one to derive a craftsman's epitaph, and then there's the film's original title, How Do You Live? Through a world intuiting tempo beyond sense, how do we? Miyazaki's repeat retirements ('Mononoke was once declared his final film, 26 years and 6 features ago) don't seem to be an attempt at mystique: Ghibli documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness reveals someone plagued by melancholy and indecision, who makes films for children but thinks it is cruel to bring children into the world. Who chain smokes but loves trees. Who hates filmmaking but handdraws every frame. It's that, then, if I had to guess: reverence despite doubt, for even the cruel and the small. In my favourite scene, Mahito equips himself with a bow-and-arrow to confront a dreamworld he knows is a lure for his grief. Patiently, curiously. The scene goes like this for five, maybe ten minutes, brimming with Miyazaki's respect for the ephemera of good work: sparks beneath the hammer, ripples on water, shavings of wood. Whilst a camera creating fiction must excavate a reality already before it, the animator faces the most daunting proposition of a blank page. Anything dreamt can be exhumed from its surface, yet Miyazaki has never wielded this responsibility wildly. He has worked diligently, across thousands of frames, to refine a dream, and revering the dream's ephemera of doubt like the dust of a pencil's granite.


What you believe runs beneath the hills also flows through your veins. The soul of Osage, as Lily Gladstone narrates early in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, is as plain as day: the land, fire, the moon, and the flowers it scatters "like candy" on the steppe. But the turning of the soil happens only in the dark; extinction: that is done in secret, conspired beyond focus in wool suits, turning family to strangers and painting them white. Settler colonialism fingers out the wound of violence, bloating the word, and now there are many different ways to kill someone. With slow devotion, for example, in marriage like a bounty, with sickness disguised as medicine and curse disguised as child. With a corpse in the river source creek. As a malady so ailing the hills that murdered women can be traded for "white law", liturgy and courthouses and formaldehyde. Their grief comes on the wind first as a whistle but it is enough. More than enough to fill the silence of men who cannot cry, who cannot be taken by a storm in silence to God because in absence of a human din they believe the drums have dropped out. The rhythms of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker's montage is illusion, the beat of forgetting a dream. Earlier in their collaboration, it was because of this editing's cardiac high that Goodfellas could arrest, its blood cooling into the realisation of dawn. Now, Scorsese is interested in bloods of a slower ilk, slitting the skin of his scenes to haemorrhage across the run time - one into the next - as crimson paints devils on sheets: the you in their prayer, the price of forgiveness, the ire of the land. A cruel timekeeping that announces itself - like the FBI arriving to a blood-soaked crime scene impossible to placate - as a funeral procession, too late. The truth was as plain as day: the film's first scene sees the Osage burying their language in the augured soil.

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<![CDATA[Mark Leckey: All That Glitters is Gold]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/mark-leckey-all-that-glitters-is-gold663bf333a7b53d91d0908c1eWed, 20 Sep 2023 14:42:38 GMTThe Big ShipMade in Albion.



I. Everything I Am


The year is 1999 and I am forced out of the womb at such a velocity that I haven’t yet stopped moving, propelled forward towards a stop that one day will come.

The year is 4073 and the Earth has decided to cease orbiting the sun. The air gets colder and the world becomes bitter and, one by one, we are engulfed by a never-ending eclipse.

The year is 2019 and I stand under a bridge in northern England, somewhere along the M53, inhabiting the space between formerly discrete dimensions, staring wide-eyed into a past I never knew.

And suddenly I am in 1973 and under the same bridge, and there are p-p-p-pixies and g-g-g-goblins and m-m-m-mark leckey is sitting with a bottle of some magic potion, filming me on his phone and live streaming my slow entropy to millions across the time-stream.

I reach out to him, but he disappears. And I follow him across history, surging into the glorious future, and chasing a perpetually fugitive present

existing somewhere on the ambit between flesh and pixel, where dualism stutters in the unstable, porous boundary between the ritual theatre of collectivism and a retreat into separate, digital spheres. Acosmism is only a few clicks away, and immanence has been replaced by doomscrolling. Following mainstream news stories into hyperlinked labyrinths of conspiracy as if the truth was really out there, the perverted cult of individuality is made impotent against a gnashing desire to melt into dance, music, and the flow of images (the debris of an anthropological matrix turned haunted house). I placed my faith into the image, shadows cast against the sickly orange of sodium streetlights, appearing as profane illuminations from an acid horizon, relics mined deep from within the internet's own internal archive of cursed images, the Proustian madeleines of the .com generation. But the light of day is the space of thought.

"When the light goes, and I stare out into the trees, there’s always pairs of eyes out there in the dark, watching..."


https://youtu.be/fEsPdNEKYAE?si=zs2v6VNcfHFrQWqK


...where there is nothing which an obsession to lay bare the reverse side of thought does not consume. It is through unproductive necessities (dancing, drunkenness, luxury, mourning, cults, aesthetics, games, war, monuments, debauchery) that we are shaken loose and which open us to the possibility of rapport with a radical otherness: the sacred. There is nothing concrete about Leckey's bridges, rites of passage that sing Gregorian chants of baroque sunbursts and diseased eyeballs. Leckey's bodysong makes a pattern of time's passing, remixing memory into a threshold between past and present, fact and fiction, inside and outside, the familiar and unfamiliar, tangling them all within the rigid tulle of something at once sacrificial and erotic (remember being fourteen?). Reliving your childhood must come at a price: loitering in the underpasses of anamnesis, the digital world has made what was once fluid and impermanent a fixture of your identity. Blacked-out moments no longer darken like the night, but are now the diurnal tortures of your own fevered amusement where the past continually loops into the present. What is in the depths of your camera roll? Some funny, forgotten video from a drunken night out? Or the key to transcendence? Maybe, if you're lucky, they're one and the same.


✹✹✹✹✹



II. Flashing Lights ...


YouTube's protective nimbus, its camera lucida's bloodoath to the strata shriek of elder ponies and drunkards seems, when considering the totality of Leckey's craft, less like the appropriation of a neo-paganist aesthetic and more comfortably belonging to a wide cosmogony of light, thresholds and the deep that their doors heel. It is a system orphic in essence (that our realm merely maps the route to infinite black waters), but the sheer size of the invitation to his mediae bacchanal verges, in practice, on the massively suicidal: the cataclysmic. Leckey ravenously immolates the world as all projections - imaginative or otherwise - are harnessed into a kabbalah of transgression; collected seeds of time that permanently shape its participants into conduits for novel possession. Transportation, as depicted above, or enlightenment, as in Carry Me Into the Wilderness, is always both painful and ecstatic. For the sun's rays a sacrifice of equal mass must be proffered. As personal experiences of breakage, in which all that is considered to be attached is barbarically severed from the seat of the self, always inevitably results in base catharsis, when something or someone is irrevocably altered, the ancient - therefore, objectless; therefore, true - voice is enabled to speak through the fissures, however briefly. In these states whose intermittent (suspended, lingering) intensity is close to blankness, identifiers cease, the granular rolls into luminated totality and harmony is most easily granted. Some artefacts are more powerful than others by way of their enchanted inventiveness or destructive capability, like a Cardiff University student diving through the gossamer passing place of a bus shelter or a cartoon javelining the aether, and only exponentially electrify when surjectively combined in the crucible of art. But, fortunately for Leckey, anything temporally linear and illuminated that must emerge from stasis to activity is a potential transgressive device. The human world is a leptic chapel beneath which one remains

([en{trance}]d)

and its overwhelming seizure is rooted in the transistor (that art can be used in place of). When the device is switched ON, a portal into a new reality is illuminated: Snapchat streaks are set ablaze, the doors to communion are ajar, the details of a room (whose colours' radiance is completely reliant on the providence of light) are dialled to their utmost gauge of transmission. Particularly, in video's ritual séance of absence into presence, this can also be necromantic magic or, at the very least, a mystery religion that harbours darkness unreal to our mortal prescriptions. The costs at which this spell is cast vary depending on your disposition towards our current ways of being. Leckey's prayer to consumerism and social media that seems to disregard its schizophrenic grip around its disciples' throats verges on the cabbalistic, certainly the irresponsible, whilst the cavernous depths to his maw of material that is most frequently addled with threnodies of lightning also suggests that we are all, at all points, unwillingly bellowing through the garden of earthly delights. His cannibalism would let it all singe into the red muck beneath the fern: the O! where good ponies go to play.


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<![CDATA[Kode9 & The Spaceape: Dread Engineering the Dub(step) Virus]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/kode-9-the-spaceape-sine-of-the-times663bf336a7b53d91d0908c31Wed, 06 Sep 2023 20:07:27 GMTJoey HollisSO ALIEN SO VIRAL



"If a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected OR THAT IT WOULD NECESSARILY BE RECOGNIZED AS A VIRUS. I suggest that the [dub] is just such a virus." — William S Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution, 1970


"Rhythm is a biotechnology. You are the newest mutants incubated in womb-speakers. Your mother, your first sound, the bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves." — Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 1998


The promise of all technology, accurately understood, is not as a means of raising the dead, but rather razing the living: the man-machine, who is already undead, tells you to kill yourself. Nothing human makes it out of the near future. You’ve heard this story before. A mutant strain of a viral technology renders your cell walls gaping and insecure. Subbass emerges through the open floor. A ten-tonne doomsayer croak begins spitting on top. Eyes dilate, humidity rises, pores expand. The dub virus enters you. You become infected. You yearn only to deepen your leprosy. You make your body the ideal site for its mutation. You are part of a counter-biology, a cultural experiment, that not only discusses cultural viruses but understands itself as a viral contagion. The dread beating of the afflicted bass continues into the breaking of a false dawn. The 21st century heralds the advent of the post-human era. The billboard reads: no more solidarity with corpses.


The darkside sound of the dub drop brings with it a form of reckoning, a vision not of the apocalypse but of extinction: nothing human is left in its wake. The dub virus is naturally epidemic in its ambitions. The remains of the new flesh beat on in sly mimicry of their own destructive agent. Just say no to disembodiment! Stand fast around womb speakers. Embrace the hyper-viral! Attempt new states of hyperembodiment… extinction must not be understood as a sense of an ending, but as the ending of all sense.


Searching for the dub virus with one eye closed, you might, at first, confuse the microscope with the telescope. You see Starchild ascend in the Black Ark past the outer rims of World 4 in a revisionist space fantasy. However, the dub virus reveals a secondary sonic vector to you; A movement not outward into the cosmos but inside and in between representations of the body; a microcosmology of haptic experience and cultural infection that underscores the interstellar aesthetics of Jazz, Funk, Dub and Techno. These fictions of mutant beings and audio viruses represent a counter-biology that could be thought of as an Afrofuturist-interior. The dub virus raises the dread spectre of the MC as an “alien incarnation summoned from within”.


In summoning this ‘alien incarnation’ we must first trace a genealogy of afrofuturist cosmologies: Developing on what Sun Ra called ‘MythScience’, a “term for the ideological truth/strategy of how myth informs reality and fiction builds fact”, Kodwo Eshun coined the term ‘Sonic Fiction’ to “magnify [the] hitherto ignored intersections of sound and science fiction”. An intersection occupied at the time by Detroit Techno artists Underground Resistance who conceived of themselves as “digital Ebola guerrilla operatives with reinforced rhythm awareness capabilities… carrying sonic parasites to hijack your nervous system.” In the mouth of the SpaceApe, what was once MythScience and then Sonic Fiction becomes ‘Bass Fiction’: the artist’s own coinage for cultural practice similarly involved in the intersections of myth, science fiction and diasporic music. Bass Fiction draws its cultural influences from Detroit Techno artists and its sonic origins from the processes of Jamaican dub.


Central to both the genres of dub and dubstep is a movement inside the body; a revisionist cosmology of the somatic interior; a sinewave that pulsates through skin and sinew to vibrate your bone marrow. As genre pioneer Lee Perry suggests, “some people call it dub. I call it Xray music”. SpaceApe suggests similarly that dubstep is “the skeletal remains of de new flesh”, a partial revelation of a degraded interiority. Like the shadow of Lee Perry’s abstract corpse, Kode9 and The SpaceApe’s Bass Fiction reveal a similar inside; an X-ray of a 21st-century cadaver where exterior perception is erased and the image of a new inside remains.



Kode9 & the SpaceApe released their first single on the hyperdub label in 2004, a “dub style remake of Prince’s ‘Sign o’ The Times’’’. Previous to this, Hyperdub had existed as an online publication reporting mutant developments within London’s underground dance music scene as if they were strains of “an ‘info virus’ that replicates in both humans and machines”. This original release sees the term itself ‘Hyperdub’ mutate from a journalistic theory-fiction to an active incubation chamber for the nascent audio-viruses that would come to define the sound of dubstep.


The track reimagines Prince’s original within a “glowering, slow motion narration”, with the lyrics rendered into dread talk accompanied by a diseased rhythmic bass pulse. It was originally issued as ‘Sign of the Dub’, but reissued in 2006 as ‘Sine of the Dub’, and when included in their debut album, Memories of the Future, just ‘Sine’. This movement from the semiotics “O’ the time” present in the original “Sign”, to the low-end bass frequencies signified by ‘Sine’, is key to understanding the significance of this dub style re-versioning. What happens when “the imaginal and memorial realm of the sign meets the material vibratory force of the sine?”


Following the heartbeat of the dread bass, SpaceApe, (then Daddi Gee,) made his first sonic appearance, “in France a skinny man / die of a big disease / with a little name”. Whilst the epidemiological context defines both the bleakness of the original and the dread weight of its re-versioning, it is the use of euphemism, the “big disease with a little name”, which conceals the actuality of AIDs, that is of deeper concern as to how both versions approach signification of the virus. This suppression of the word creates an ambiguity where the unit of signification, language itself, is understood as viral. For Prince, this small viral unit, this “sign”, becomes a ‘Sign o’ the Times’, a temporal infection, that not only affects the diseased body but spreads outward to define the era itself. Within Kode9 and the SpaceApe’s original title, this might be extended to an understanding of the viral transmission of the sonic processes of dub. Toby Heys suggests we might understand a ‘viracoustic’ commonality between the operation of the virus and the sine wave:


Viruses like waveforms are difficult to control, map, and direct. As such, both have the capacity to move imperceptibly, to infiltrate and unlock, and to enter without permission, creating networks of affect and unidentifiable bodies of evidence.


As the “big disease with a little name”, passes between actual bodies, the rhythmic bass pulse of the sine wave spreads outwards from the beating heart of the “body of sound” entering the haptic consciousness of all other bodies within audible range: you are infected by transmissions from the soundsystem. Through this process, the signification of sickness and its transverse propagation via sine waves comes to define the time in which the epidemic takes place, allowing for a new approach to semiotics that deliberately confuses ‘sign’ with ‘sine’ and ‘definition’ with ‘infection.’


This elaborate fiction of disease is linked to an understanding of addiction as the lyrics continue, “by chance his girlfriend find a needle / she end up the same way.” The symbol of the needle conjures a further penetration into both the fictional sonic body and the actual diseased body. Symbolically united at the tip of the infected needle; what is the common logic between viruses and addiction? “The human organism has a marked tendency to seek out and identify itself with parasites that debilitate but never quite destroy it.” SpaceApe’s identity as both agent of “audio addiction” and as “alien virus” displays this tendency for identification, this fraught symbiosis, resurfacing to the level of conscious expression.


Description of these intersectional epidemics moves to a depiction of the more modern sense of ‘virality’ as “Turn on the TV / And all you hear 'bout…” The symbol of disaster, here of “Hurricane Annie'', fits naturally within a system of hyper-accelerated viral culture. The transverse propagation, or spread, of an event as an info virus, facilitated locally by sine waves, is enabled globally through the electronic signals of telecommunication technology. The ubiquity here suggested by “all you hear about” prefigures the post-1990s sense of something going viral. Virality appears as a cybernetic conceit for positive feedback loops within the dissemination of information. As with addiction and AIDs, the spectre of disaster has a parasitic grip on the host population that can neither look away nor stop listening.


Beyond the representation of disease, addiction, and disaster, many of Kode9 and the SpaceApe’s early releases present a habit for re-versioning; creating mutant strains of pre-existing Afrofutrist audio viruses - be it seedy mutations of Public Enemy songs or Junior Boys tracks. The sound of dubstep should be understood as a viral experiment in mutating genre forms: both genre and performer realise themselves through this experimentation.



Kode9 and the SpaceApe’s other release at the inception of the label, ‘Bacteria in Dub’, draws on a similarly abject, although more scientific field of imagery as ‘Sine of the Dub.’ The two released together were labelled “death disco for deviant dub fiends.” Language of the ‘deviant’ and the ‘mutant’, more generally a sense of the evolving other, reoccurs frequently as an aesthetic tag within the early dubstep scene. The track is comprised of index-like extractions from Luciana Parisi’s book, Abstract Sex, which was co-launched with the release of ‘Sine of the Dub’ at the infamous Plastic People club on Curtain Road in March of that year.


The song is a dub-style version of Parisi’s academic text, lacking elaborate lyrics and instead replaying key expressions from the book pitched down, drenched in reverb and accompanied by another low and slow infectious bass pulse. The SpaceApe provides a rhythmic and laconic delivery of the book's contents, “21st century / present futurity / machinic desire / viral propagation”. Part menacing incantation, part cybernetic glossary, the song, as with the reversioning of ‘Sign o the Times’, marries speculative abstraction and an understanding of the infected present: now a 21st century that continues to be defined by “bacterial sex” and “viral propagation.” The brevity of the SpaceApe’s expression delivers each phrase as a self-contained viral unit. Parisi argues, “sex is transductive it works through bodies of all sorts”, and so too are ideas, spreading outwards from the soundsystem, wrapped in the protein coat of bass frequencies, passing between membranes, entering new host bodies. The theoretical imagery of the track from, “sexual reproduction”, to “recombinant desire”, to “miosis / transduction / symbiotic mutation”, is in constant reference to the manner in which cells, organisms and bodies come together and exchange information: a cybernetic glossary for charting the spread of the dub virus.


Parisi’s book, Abstract Sex, theorises a “networked coexistence” within “the virtual body” as emergent forms of digital sexual relations are used to “expose the wider layers of organization of a body that include the non-linear relations between the micro level of bacterial cells and viruses and the macro levels of socio-cultural and economic systems.” Similar to an audio virological approach, Parisi’s understanding puts us in a space beyond humanist ‘ethics’; otherwise stated, Parisi provides a “reorientation [of interaction] onto an immanent plane of specific encounters (which can be both constructive and destructive) between bodies”. Parisi launches us away from a ‘transcendent’ understanding of human ‘ethics’ towards a base/bass biological consciousness which considers human operation through a cybernetic lens; one that looks both beneath and above perception through analysing the combinatory influence of micro-biological and macro-cultural structures.


Stephen Gordon’s Bass Fiction of the sonic body, of the super-simian SpaceApe, should be thought of not as a persona, but as a process of becoming: a mutating body continually elaborated through Sonic Fiction. This poetic act of becoming, in tandem with dubstep’s move from emergent to established sound, achieves stunningly dense articulation by 2006 with SpaceApe’s verse that appears both on an eponymous track on Burial’s first LP and on Kode9 and the SpaceApe’s debut LP, entitled ‘Victims’:


Victims themselves of a close encounter

Desperate abducters, constructers become infected, vexed

By an alien virus, so alien, so viral

Living spaceapes, creatures, covered, smothered in writhing tentacles

Stimulating the audio nerve directly

You wanna come flex with me?


“So alien, so viral”, the SpaceApe seamlessly doubles both the Afrofutirist gesture out towards the extra-terrestrial with the secondary movement, into the infected body. “Victims themselves of a close encounter”, can be understood within the dominant narrative of Afrofuturist cultural practice, as an “enigmatic return to the constitutive trauma of slavery”; real abduction reimagined as alien. But it is worth thinking of “close encounter” not only as suggesting an alien advent, but also an idea of proximity, of being within the zone of affect; a potential victim of contagion.

The verse presents multiple points of entry into the sonic body. “Covered, smothered”, made claustrophobic via a series of internal rhymes, “writhing tentacles” suffocate and surround you. You become aware of an abject tactility, a penetration into the sonic body, entering all the way to the “audio nerve.” The fear of penetration, central to the instinct of abjection, is here first rendered in the physical terms of the ‘tentacle’ before the flow continues making it clear that this penetration has already been staged on the sonic level: your very cognition of this lyric means the tentacle is writhing inside; wreaking havoc with your nervous system. Whilst the tentacled imagery of this “Lovecraftian horrordub” might at first seem incongruous with the language of extra terrestriality and super-simians, it flows from The SpaceApe’s own revisionist mytho-poetic conception:


SpaceApe: That’s the Space Ape innit, really. That’s this thing—the alien beneath the sea, it comes up, it’s a hostile alien.

Kode9: So it’s beneath the sea and not outer space?

SpaceApe: Yeah. Beneath the sea.


As with the revisionist biological mythos of Dub-Techno Duo Drexciya, launching an “aquatic invasion” out of the “black sea”, SpaceApe’s origin is from the depths, not from the cosmos. Erik Davis, a self-described theorist of “acoustic cyberspace”, has written about the “distinctly aquatic surroundings” of dub as “a kind of ‘outer’ inner space, a liminal womb.” Opposed to more masculinist space fantasies, these subaquatic sonic fictions appear closely linked with submergence within the female; another movement back inside the body.



This language of submergence might also be used to approach the cross-contaminative linguistic exchange that has occurred across the colonial and post-colonial Atlantic. In the Caribbean linguist and poet Edward Braithwaite’s study of voice, in the chapter where he coins the idea of ‘Nation Language’, he writes:


English was, nonetheless, still being influenced by the underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had brought… It was moving from a purely African form to a form which was African but which was adapted to the new environment and adapted to the cultural imperative of the European languages. And it was influencing the way in which the English, French, Dutch, and Spaniards spoke their own language. So there was a very complex process taking place, which is now beginning to surface in our own language.


There is a complex play of ‘infection’ and ‘vexation’, or more aquatically, of “submergence” and “surfacing.” Languages submerged deep in the bodies of the colonized begin to reemerge and contaminate the colonial tongue. In accordance with Braithwaite’s assessment, SpaceApe spits on another track from the album ‘Quantum’, “The threat to you / You always knew was contact and impurity.” A confrontational dramatisation of linguistic exchange as mutual infection.


SpaceApe’s bass-fiction, or biological counter-narrative, of the ‘alien’ and ‘viral’ sonic body must be thought of as a poetic act of becoming, in line with Fred Moten’s observation of “The reproduction of blackness in and as [the] reproduction of black performance. An ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of a birth and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis.” In Moten’s writing the metaphor of the sonic processes of dub is intertwined not only with a re-versioning of history into science fictional counter-narratives (‘anti-origins’), but also with an explicitly evolutionary experimentation, a counter-biology, that not only re-imagines the “constitutive trauma” of diasporisation, but also re-imagines the present tense interior of the Afro-diasporic body within these terms.


Kodwo Eshun has warned similarly of how music writing, “still insists on a solid state known as ‘blackness’”, a fiction which he equates to “solidarity with a corpse”; a mortified conception of racial identity. However, it is through taking this morbid solidarity to the extreme, through identification not with a black corpse, but with a Black Atlantic virus, that the SpaceApe effectively “dissolves” this “corpse into a fluidarity maintained and exacerbated” by sonic machines. These practices reveal blackness to be a historic fiction that is perpetually torn apart and reassembled by viral waveforms and mutant becomings. A conception of blackness as elaborated by black performers; where myth informs reality; sonic fiction vibrates against solid reality; affective culture makes itself real.


Audio virology can be understood via two specular motions: firstly that Afrofuturism is understood not only in terms of a movement out toward the extraterrestrial but also a movement in and between sonic bodies; secondly that identification with the audio virus not only facilitates the future tense of an emergent form of post-human subjectivity, but that it also facilitates a historical understanding of the diasporic experience of contagious aurality across the colonial and post-colonial Atlantic.

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<![CDATA[The Variations by Patrick Langley: Between Noise and Silence]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/the-variations-noise-and-silence663bf336a7b53d91d0908c7cWed, 23 Aug 2023 19:23:49 GMTBryson Edward HoweMercury is in retrograde, and in Patrick Langley’s second novel, the past stalks the present in search of a soothsayer.


Sound is ephemeral, gone as soon as it arrives. Sound is tiny, too. A typical sound wave makes air molecules vibrate by only about a micrometre, the size of the smallest smoke particle. Yet, despite its fugitive and insubstantial nature, sound is a great connector and revealer. Sound passes through obstacles. It links vibrating beings even in the dark or in dense foliage. This resonance is how the theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg justified his visionary universe of divine order in a pidgin of vibrant sonority. In the context of music, euphony proves the divine, but in the context of language, Swedenborg found in its parsimony a possibility to explore something much messier, punctuating his search for Shangri-La with small, equally utopian moments of reverie, and envisioning a cosmos in which everything, including seemingly solid objects, vibrates, according to the ninth and final rule of his doctrine:


In tremulations there are millions of variations.


Swedenborg imagines one of those millions of variations, writing that, “During a dream, for instance, we often carry on long conversations with imaginary persons, or we may hear whole melodies or other sounds which affect us exactly as those which enter by the external way. In fantastic imaginations, also, persons are able to hear various sounds and connected conversations, so that they sometimes persuade themselves that a spirit is speaking with them […] a woman, who every day continually heard the singing of hymns within her, from the first to the last verses; these hymns were often such as she herself had never heard or sung; she diligently sought help and cure from clergymen and others, but in vain, for the melodies and songs continued in the brain as if she were perpetually attending a great concert.” This passage echoes in the guts of The Variations, Patrick Langley’s second novel, which tells the story of Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, who is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes's Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in “the gift” - an ancestral bequest of tuning into the voices and songs of the past. When she dies, Selda's gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newfound symphony of voices in his head.


Life and death, like music, is just tension and release. In the moment of death, the blood tries to rush back to the heart in an instant. It fills up the greater veins, withdraws from the finer arteries, and completely exhausts the most minute vessels. Your membranes become exsanguious as they quickly lose their tension. The eye loses its acumen, followed by your ear and your other organs. The thought and the imagination become indistinct. Sometimes the life is extinguished before the blood has even been able to force its way to the collapsed vessels. Sometimes there is a final tremor, a quivering, or a convulsion throughout the body, but by now the greater part of life is lost as soon as tremulations can no longer flow over a stiff expanse, like once-taut strings stretched over the porous wood of on even the most ancient instruments. Following this connective tissue through Swedenborg’s theories, it seems only fitting that a blizzard would kill Selda. Like a loss of spirit, stopped by the cold, life consists in motion, but death in the rest of the particles. Langley’s description of her final ascent makes you shake and shiver, but these are nothing but coarse contremiscences: the music of the body. Upon entering an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, John Cage heard two sounds, one high and one low. When he described them to the engineer, he informed Cage that the high one was his nervous system in operation, the low one his blood in circulation. If what really makes us living is the cause of motion, we will inevitably find that stillness can never have any part in that which is called life; that stillness and life are two contrary things. Life is a state of tension, death slack and unstrung.


§


Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion. Johannes Kepler, the man who discovered planetary retrograde, once wrote, "The heavenly motions are a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect; a figured music, which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time." Music is often spoken about in “movements”, originally referring to its actual tempo or relative speed but became a way to differentiate between different sections of a symphony, whether it was the brisk, swift movement or a slower, more torpid movement. Langley uses the language of music, and of movement, to wrap around something much more propulsive: the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past (the past being things that are now gone), of grieving it, or anticipating it. One description of Selda’s ancestor’s experience with the gift soaks in this mystery without a solution, a signifier without a signified. He writes with the placidity of still life, effortlessly disclosing a sonic cadence that is both precise and enigmatic that percolates and prefigures the symbiotic relationship between the two that comes to light eventually: "She sings of lights in the sky, angels in basements, snow-storms moving across the moors..." placed against thick textures of floating dust, dense shadow, and sudden bars of blinding sun, it lingers in his mind. He doesn’t believe that the gift is an ability to listen to death, to understand the presence of it, the immanence of it. It all sounds, to him, too sparky and alive. Too musical.


How do we symbolise noise? Why and how do we associate letters with noises? Can a new noise form a new letter?


I’ve heard it said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", but whoever originated and perpetuated that idea forgets that a city and style, object and evocation quickly take on aspects of one another as the urban environment shapes an aesthetic movement, which in turn produces a new form and vision of the city. That is the basis for ekphrasis, and much the same as how I imagine Langley forged his own ideas and style, finding in nebulously anthological fragments a quiet romanticism for beauty and softness amid the chaos of grief. As someone who has personally chosen to spend quite a lot of my professional time trying to translate music into prose, I also struggle against the poverty of language. Where music is a sort of crystallised form of human history, written in beautiful notational marks, I am not afflicted by a divine inheritance like some archaic beings in whom words of whispered languages sound with such force and seductive power that the temptation to write them down becomes irresistible.


On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gunshot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn't out of the ordinary, since the Curtis family lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the question the boy turned to ask his mother: "What is that big, black noise?" Edgar would go on to be the first subject of scientific studies of synesthesia and give me a name for my own edifice of writing about art. When I hear music, I see not just colours, but shapes, textures, and landscapes. The best way I can describe it is not a confusion of sensations, but an openness, as if these different senses have not formed into individually walled-off areas. Two pieces of music I had an extreme reaction to are Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s "Ghosteen" which to me lingers in a rainbow of iridescent light that shifts on often unimaginably large scales, and Ravel’s "Pavane pour une infante défunte" which falls like a nervous tunic of snow.


§


There is a place I’ve been to that I think about more than any other, when I find myself deep in meditation or in a rare bout of deep sleep, one where the water is like silk, like pewter, like blood, like a leopard’s skin, and occasionally merely like water. Sometimes it dances with flakes of fire, sometimes it is blank and anonymous with fog, sometimes it shouts as joyously as a mirror. It’s known that the tympanic membrane – the eardrum – responds to the sounds in our dreams. This membrane also responds to imagined sounds and remembered sounds, just as in Langley’s world memories are stored in the strange alloys of iron bells, of copper, ash and ice, when I dive into these dreams, they are often plagued with the sonic residue of past nights haunting music venues, marionetted into movement both rhythmically and bodily. The symptoms of tinnitus can vary significantly from person to person. You may hear phantom sounds in one ear, in both ears, or in your head. The phantom sound may ring, buzz, roar, whistle, hum, click, hiss, or squeal. If the topology of what I hear in dreams is any indication of what I might experience later in life, mine manifests as something rotary, like an alarm. It doesn’t pulse but rather dizzies itself in search of direction. Langley briefly mentions musical phantoms, like “echo condemned to her cave; Paul Wittgenstein's right arm; Clara Schumann's account of her composer husband driven mad by shapeshifting spirits and dictating his last piece of music,” though I don’t feel cursed by any of my phantom sirens or visions but see them as a gift.


But what if you are dreaming of silence? What inter-dimensional rhythm have you severed? My sister, since we were both very, very young, has been deaf in one ear. For her, a symmetry of sound exists in the low rumbles of an aeroplane, or the pierce of a dog barking. Music only exists in the mono, so the topology of listening, of where she’ll place herself in a room, or how she judges the depth of a sound, is entirely perceptive. Where my body fills silences with sensation, my sister's provides silence where there is none. Swedenborg wrote of his ninth rule about how many sounds are not produced by a well-tuned piano, about how many are still lacking within an octave. He writes of a music that exists only via negativa, but that still, definitely, exists.


'I was a chime child,' Selda tells Ellen. 'Do you know what that means?' ' Let me guess,' Ellen says, not looking up from her book, 'you can talk to ghosts.'


What would it sound like to write music for ghosts? When a composer writes a piece that is of its time and moment, is it a commentary on the world around them, or does it extend beyond immediacy? Does it reflect our thoughts and emotions, or something more algorithmic? Do we want our audience to feel what we’re feeling, or to help them see how we’re seeing things? I think this is the real confluence of music and writing, or any art form. That whether you are feeling angry and frustrated about an injustice in the world or if you’re feeling loved by the tiny cat curled up next to you, do all these things, then start the creative cycle again. Be in the present moment, write in the present moment, breathe,


watch the bells' edges blur


as the sound rings out


and fades to silence.

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<![CDATA[SOPHIE: Immaterial]]>https://www.thebigship.org/post/sophie-immaterial66461fb45a8fdae7e45e7ed0Sat, 05 Aug 2023 15:26:20 GMTCaleb CarterA SEARING VOYAGE BEYOND THE UNKNOWN.


Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides (2018) - SOPHIE


Those that read music’s paradigm shifts as culture’s doomsday clock might find themselves offended by hyperpop’s name. “Hyper”, inferring a childish rampage ending in tears, an attention deficit, a cocaine toothache, warp speed and the sharpened pin, augmenting “Pop”, as in the easily accessible, the populist, the popular but not the cool, in fact, the derivative, the capital, the bubble ready to burst. Pop’s course is downright unsteering, and its crop yield means that it is programmed by nobody you could imagine, not even those cruel, faceless 0.0001% arbiters still paranoid about the other decimals. Pop runs itself on a mass default mode network made of its own antibodies. Anything dangerous or off-key that rises to the scum of its soup should be considered a ploy, or an alarm bell, because everything that the vanguards foresaw in their mirror has turned true. And yet the paradox remains crystal: SOPHIE steered pop, and she still sounds dangerous.


We might be even more stumped at where the genre’s register of eurodance and emoscreamo aesthetic on the mainstream collider has left listeners’ anticipation of societal collapse, somewhere between a disdain for the drowns of modernity and a celebration of its most noxious qualities. Somewhere between a cyber bath and the burning of the world. Escaping residual, breathless and in bad taste from its lysergic insurgency is some bimbo Barrabas praying for plastic. The homogenization of total culture is quite the party and because discordances come faster and harder, they feel like fireworks. Hyperpop was always on the horizon - it’s pink, and it’s made of twilight. It’s your middle-school disco, sugar-crushed and blush late. At its forefront is a reappreciation of mid-noughties cringe that you may have hastily cast off in the skinshed of joy to labour coolness. This same rosy maximialism can be found in Gecs’ Linkin Park tribute, the recent readmission of Skrillex into the popular consciousness, and Jenny Alien’s earnest rendition of Nickelback’s "Rockstar" that dreams for hedonism without hangovers. If the lyrics of SOPHIE’s statement piece, "Immaterial", aim to hold the lonely girl she once knew in impossible rhapsodies through the lens of the pop music she would instantly recognise, then it is clear that in this land the inner child is the most divine. In the sticky floor saturnalia of the school disco, twirling too is the night. The stirred star shellac of fission. In this glitz it still rumbles with oceanic possibility.


Though nowadays we cynically recognise in each purchase the signs of the systems in which we find ourselves ensnared, as our inner child – still moonwalking a fresh planet – these symbols were not so tired. With wide eyes, neoliberalism doesn’t even need to be reappropriated, it can be utilised as plasma to barrel beyond it. The body and the ascription of gendered space are condensed also into this propane, like rushing two opposing forces to decompress a gnarled differentiator and becoming the beating raven crystal of breakage. Acknowledging that collapse occurs when two forces cause one or the other to break into smaller versions of itself, in on itself, and so leaving a vacuum, SOPHIE pioneered the formative geists of a genre built inexorably on the unsteadiness of contradiction, on filling up those gaps so as to still make a dance out of the demise. The contradictions of her music don’t arise only from being a trans person, only from the transhumanist project, but from a ravenous, capacious manifesto to initiate collapse by any name to joyfully emancipate the categorical, and to survive in the very calm and clear event horizon of it all, raving on and on.


“My face is the front of shop

My face is the real shop front

My shop is the face I front

I’m real when I shop my face.”


In "Faceshopping’s" symbiosis of consumerism and transhumanism, plastic becomes the simultaneous item of permanence and of ruin, worn like a denigrated amulet (like a brand or a slur). Plastic polymers the ancient anxieties of extinction which insinuates the new, the blended, the mixed, the sampled, the palimpsest, the rhyming, the broken beats of mashups, corrosions, restructures, revamps and remixes. All that exploits the binary to become the else. Like hyper pulverises pop, the possessed can be welded onto the possessor and the "real" phase into the made halcyon. In gaming, the blossoming of personality and identifiable narratives of self often directly correlate to a system of objects: earn items, master them, become suprahuman. Charms won, guns that communicate, emeralds that emboss, masks that transform. Often a player will go to lengths, in real life, to preserve a digital item, and the fruits of Baudrillard’s nightmares have spawned entire real-world economies, gambling and debts, from only the gossamer suggestion of tactility atop rolling code. In suit, like impoverished countries are sure to still have Facebook, it will only take a few decades before everyone can be strapped to a headset and some heat receptors and a drip for eternity. You will have the choice, as you do now, whether or whether not to assimilate, but choosing not to will mean abandoning family, friends, and careers to the nebula of “progress”. So, what if we adopted SOPHIE’s mantra and joined them? What possibilities might lie in the next world? From the wasteland Majora’s mask raises glittering from the chest. One only needs to wear it (update it, calibrate it) to become all selves. And what if we tried to break it? In episode 7 of the ever-unguided Euphoria, Jules talks about the acquisition of feminine objects like items in her quest to “levelling up”, suggesting that the ultimate frontier, the complete “obliteration” of femininity, and patriarchal figures demonic or desired, is just the final boss on her escalator to legend. The undefined. SOPHIE glitch-pitches her voice to show how an identity can be acquired, built, and enchanted. The glitch becomes a tool to transmogrify the normative; the hallmarks of the once taboo can be more readily utilised and left like singed and no-clipped gates in the wake of a rebellion tattooed “uncontainable”.


Sophie Xeon

Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is these layered contradictions, engaged in the gouging of impossible innards and then gorging on their still sweating improbability. The lilac skies of its world position Sophie on the rocks somewhere between Ariel and the more godlike abdication of the biological curve, but as much as corporeality is easily abused and contained, so too can mythic ideals be condemned to archetype. The plastic gown she wears on the cover art might suggest a somewhat pollutive texture to the world in which she heralds, and yet the waters seem as still as Mars. It is worth searching within for new ontologies. Might we call everything here the same as we did back on earth? Is water still cold? Myth is just a small waste product in the process of disembodiment whose huge, glittering, blasphemic opportunities should never be ignored.


For a future envisioned by the straight and the white, the cosmic and astrological have become standins for the frontiers that are normatively incomprehensible. But online, in clubs, and in worlds that remain preciously undisclosed, these parameters are described less haphazardly and, often, the music that SOPHIE and her contemporaries make is the gerund architecting of these utopic rotundas where the alien can become un-alienable. Whilst the solidifying of presence in the irl sphere is too abject, and the notion of home is too capricious or just plain unaffordable, the real estate of the internet, at least in origin, is so vast, and unregulated, and malleable. Hyperpop remains the only genre officiated by a Spotify playlist title, a history appropriately kneedeep in the bastard wrestle between late capitalism and the exploration of cyberspace. Of course, the splintering of these digital “rooms” that billions of people roost in mean that you can go your whole online life without ever experiencing this space, so we should be grateful to those bards, like SOPHIE, who sound their swinging doors. During "It’s Okay to Cry", its assurance that “your inside is your best side”, its sonic arpeggiation and rocket blast-off are the celebratory sutures of abrasion, working behind the scenes to introduce a psychic, transformative surgery in realtime. Only music has that power to operate at the transmolecular and the vibrational. The logic of noise and analog memoria is skirmished in the digital plane, propelling SOPHIE's desire to forge new sounds out of giant alloys, sunblanched and serrated against whetmoon, like a “piano that’s mountain-sized.”


Thrillingly, on the precipice, everything is doubled. The piano strings are haptic: giant, but felt. Your body can be phase-shifted just as your soul can become a new garment; the effervescent fount spritzed onto the palm. "Infatuation" treatises love as understanding, the pre-requisite learning before regeneration. The truth is that most people get off scot-free. Most people get to make it through life without ever having to consider their own whereabouts, without ever attempting to quantify their single synaptic rush in the ever-wavering winds. And although ignorance is a numb bliss, a life unexamined will only leave a watermark login in the quantum code. It might just be worth the vile cold to get your hands into the bowl and touch the meat.


Through love, there is not only the opportunity to begin the hard process of knowing again by discovering another, but also of knowing yourself anew in the other and then once more, finally, together, joining forces to dive to deeper matrices of possible belief and rulemaking. Only in relation, in two forces acting upon another, in collapse, can a new world be concocted. One that is pansexual, genderless, limitless and uncounted. Childbirth is just one operation of this madcap science, but the fruits in and of themselves are yielded within the labours of loving. If that is true, then the flesh can also become the womb. And alone? Perhaps only with the strange love bestowed by an alien with a saturn harp can we understand how we are multiple. Faced with so many mirrors, digital or otherwise, could be a glass stargate to a prismatic freedom, in which the surveyed is finally upturned into a kaleidoscope, colours scream overhead like northern lights, everything becomes synonymous with nothing and we dance the dance of certainty on the vistas of unknowing, un-inside, where nothing is named and everything is heard.


“I wanna know.

Who are you deep down?”



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