Bunt

Plan B talks to Miranda Sawyer

2011-07-01T12:39:00.000+01:00

Just read this interview by Miranda Sawyer with Plan B, done just before his appearance at Glastonbury. What powerful, brutal empathy.
""I'd never call myself that [a role model], that's for other people to say," he says. "Anyway, if you're a kid with a good life, I'm the worst role model in the world. I drink. I don't have a problem with drugs, apart from hard drugs. I'm no good for you, if you're from a good background. But for kids with bad lives, from bad homes, the fucked-up kids whose parents are alcoholics, who are abused, whose lives are shit, then yeah, I'll bring you up. I'll understand. Listen to my music – I'll help you through. You can rely on me."

Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan

2011-06-20T15:43:00.002+01:00

In 1999 I taught languages at a rich kids' summer camp in the woods in French Belgium, and made an everlasting friend called Dave who gave me a bunch of things to listen to that I treasure to this day: Bedhead, Latin Playboys, some Hawaiian guitar tracks, and Yo La Tengo. Return to Hot Chicken burned itself into my brain and despite ten thousand listens – far too many to count – a few notes of that album, and that titular song in particular, and everything is ok. For 26 years, Ira, Georgia and more recently James have been doing their thing with a singular lightness of touch, and intensity of focus. They are broad and generous in their sound, capable of building a song – like one might a ship – to take you away forever. I think their music is what I want the inside of my mind to sound like – the space I need, or the air I long for. Nightfalls on Hoboken, Last Days of Disco, Tiny Birds, Green Arrow, Big Day Coming, Decora, Sugarcube, Living in the Country, Pablo and Andrea, And the Glitter Is Gone, their covers of Gentle Hour, of By the Time it Gets Dark, of Nuclear War … as many songs that I sink into and long for them never to end. They hit a groove, they ride a particular beat with an organ or a guitar and it's mesmerising, magical, a sound for sore ears of which you wouldn't want to lose the slightest fragment. And then they throw a curveball, some Kramer-style madness or a witty little video about names and that bursts the bubble and reminds you you're listening to pop music, this is the real world, they are just musicians going about their day. And that is the beauty of it. When I first heard And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out I was so overwhelmed by it, I wrote to thank them. I'm not sure quite why but the best way I could think of at the time to describe how perfectly the album had filled me with joy was to refer to CS Lewis. Ira wrote back on the back of a Slinky postcard – he noted the irony and that made me smile. I spoke with him for The Quietus last month, ahead of their Meltdown session, which to my greatest annoyance I couldn't go to. He said not to worry, they'd make sure to do a second-rate show so I wouldn't miss much.

Oh how I love this band.

You can read the interview here. And you can listen to all my favourite YLT tracks here:

Gil Scott Heron, rest in peace

2011-05-28T11:27:00.001+01:00

Gil Scott Heron, the man with the voice to break your heart, died yesterday afternoon in New York. What a beautiful, mesmerising figure. I'm watching I'm New Here and fighting back the tears. There's gravel and ancient pain and a world of things witnessed woven through his voice, etched on to his face. And any recording you listen to is one you don't want to hear come to an end. But it has and that is wretched. His music moved me so deeply. I wish I could thank him for it.

Conflict, 2003

2011-05-23T20:11:00.001+01:00

I just don't know where I've been.

I'm watching Conflict parts 1-4 on YouTube for the second time in a row wondering where the hell I've been and why I've not paid better attention. I've had Wiley's Zipfiles – almost 100 tracks – on my phone for ages now, but this is making me realise quite how much I've missed by not listening to them all and a gazillion other tracks since 2003. This early grime is incredible. The energy of these MCs – Wiley, D Double E, Dizzee Rascal, Crazy T, Lady Fury … – the sheer onslaught of their flow, is mesmerising. It sounds like what watching Ed Colver's artwork for Black Flag's Damaged being made would have looked like, if Rollins had literally put his fist through the mirror instead of faking it. You can't touch me, I'm untouchable, you can't touch me, I'm untouchable, you can't hug/hold (?) me, I'm unhuggable, you can't stop me, I'm unstoppable. Fearless, clenched-fist and coiled-spring creativity. Makes you want to jump from one building top to another like a true traceur and run until you collapse, your lungs emptied of all breath. Makes you want to make things and give them away because there's no time to be worried or shy or self-obsessed or protective. The urgency of it all, damn. It's beautiful.

Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto

2011-05-12T16:23:00.000+01:00

The interview I did for The Quietus with Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto ahead of tonight's gig at the Roundhouse is up here. They were wonderful to talk to, and seeing them tonight will be really special. Uoon I on Vrioon is still one of my favourite tracks …

Summvs, the fifth collaborative album by Alva Noto, aka Carsten
Nicolai, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, starts with Microon I, a minimalist,
quasi-monotone sliding around in suspended notes, between majors and
minors, with a central drone of thickened, molten notes that bring to
mind Zadik Zechariah’s Kurdish zorna melodies and the opaque patterns
a piano tuner follows to righten the slippages of time-worn keys. The
tracks that follow, like the Microon trilogy, which serves as crucial
punctuation to the album, lend it a sombre abstraction, with deep
pulses, great expanses of filtered white noise and parsimonious,
fragmentary piano and digital interference. Other tracks, such as By
This River and its counterpart By This River – Phantom, introduce
something lighter, albeit as ever slowed down and deconstructed, a pair of erudite studies on the melodious, beat-driven strand of
electronica. This last track unravels until it is returned, in its final stretches, to the radical, pared down landscape of the duo’s first outing – Vrioon. A barely perceptible yet unmistakable beat, single chords played with capacious reverb and impeccable precision – a simplicity of form that slows your very heartbeat as you listen, drawing you in as if into deepest slumber. This economy of means – though by now a familiar trademark of what happens when these two inimitable musicians join hands – remains astonishing and undiluted in its potency.

I’ve been listening to your first album, Vrioon, since it came out, and it was only when I was preparing for this interview that I realised it’s almost 10 years old.
Alva Noto: We only just realised that too! The album was released nine years ago, but we started working on it more than a year before that, so it has in effect been 10 years.

How did you start working together?
AN: I of course knew Ryuichi’s work but I had never met him. And then he came to one of the first concerts I ever did in Japan. He is a naturally a very curious person, always looking for new things.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: When I first saw Carsten’s performance, I immediately thought “Something really great could come from collaborating with this guy”. At that time I wasn’t really aware of that kind of electronic music yet, but I could tell he had talent.

How do you approach collaboration?
AN: In my solo and visual work I am very strict and straight. And I find collaborations often grow out of a need for something different. When we started working together it was a big challenge for me to
break that image I had before. And I like that – countering the cliché, defying people’s expectations. I think that is one of the driving forces of my work – breaking the borders.
As a visual artist, you work alone, whereas in music there is this great ability to share things and to work together. People always have been working together. If you do a great album, you can be 100 percent
sure you will be invited to collaborate with someone else. At the moment I am working with Michael Nyman and that collaboration came about in exactly that way – he wanted to work with me, and I couldn’t resist going for it. It is wonderful to break the loneliness.

RS: I like collaborating with people who have something I don’t have – a skill, an idea ... I’m always looking for something surprising – like everyone else, I need inspiration and triggers. Listening to new
things, looking for new sounds has become part of my nature. And I think that’s why you collaborate – to stay open. Unexpected things happen and you must be very flexible. You can of course hide by yourself, digging into your inner depths – we all need that kind of space sometimes. But working with other people’s ideas and artistic presentation can be so enriching. A really memorable instance of collaboration happend when I was working on Beauty in 1989. I had asked Brian Wilson to sing on the album so I went to Los Angeles and we recorded with him. I had been informed that he had had a difficult time, some kind of mental illness, and I could sense that, even though he wasn’t that surprising in the studio. But then the following day, I flew from LA back to New York to continue recording and he showed up without telling me, with his whole family in tow. The schedule was already tightly planned, but I was so grateful he’d come, so we made some time to work with him. It was a beautiful moment – one I won’t forget for the rest of my life.

Do you collect sounds?
RS: I’ve been doing field recording for many years – I don’t use the recordings, I just keep collecting them. If I was a painter I would probably draw – recordings are something like that for me. Even if I’m writing a beautiful romantic melody, it will be always triggered by a particular sound. When I get good sound, I can write good music.

AN: I really love animal sounds. As a kid I was really into birds. I would go into the forest to make notes about what sounds I could hear. Recently I was invited to a project with a Japanese photographer. He
had images from the zoo. So I started downloading things from the Humboldt university here about monkeys. The sounds are really crazy. I loved that. I’ve been making monkey loops. I’m also really into
languages. Language has such great potential and complexity. It is both sound and system. There is a very big social component. You can deliver emotion, information – it’s fascinating.

Are there particular listening instants or spaces have made a big impression on you?
AN: When you work in music or sound, people always ask you what music you listen to and I actually really enjoy listening to nothing, to the silence. I love coming back to my apartment when it’s quiet. There is so much music around us when you go anywhere. That said, listening in an anachoic chamber or a dead room, where there is no sound at all – that’s a very scary experience. Not one I would easily put myself in, but a great experience all the same. I also like very large rooms with a lot of reverb, like expansive, empty industrial spaces. Maybe the attraction stems from the fact that I grew up in a city surrounded by huge old factories.

RS: When I was in the Arctic a few years ago, I chartered a boat, and recorded with the microphone under the sea. At one point I heard a big BAAAAAAM BOOOOM – a kind of explosion. I thought it was a huge whale near us and that probably he or she wanted to play with me. I was quite afraid. But then nothing happened. Maybe the sound was just the ice cracking. It was very scary and very exciting.

Le Consortium

2011-03-29T10:45:00.007+01:00

The new issue of Catalogue is now up, and there's a lot of interesting stuff there. Thomas Hirschorn, Simon Starling, a survey of contemporary artists working in Morocco... and an interview I did with Franck Gautherot from Le Consortium in Dijon.

Franck Gautherot

Dijon’s Le Consortium is a burning core of artistic experimentation and investigation – the list of international and French artists who have shown there in the last thirty years bears witness to the unflinching vision of its curatorial team, comprised of Franck Gautherot, Xavier Douroux and Eric Troncy. Cindy Sherman exhibited at Le Consortium in 1982, Hans Haacke in 1986, On Kawara in 1990 … Gautherot tells the story of a venue for which nothing is forbidden.

How did you meet Xavier Douroux?

In the 70s there were a number of us ex-students in Dijon with a growing interest in contemporary art. Serge Lemoine was teaching history of art at the university at the time, and he used to invite many artists and critics to give lectures. We started by filming interviews with these people. In 1977 we founded a non-profit organisation called Le Coin du Miroir and started putting on shows in a small space above an alternative bookshop. There was a lot of tension with the people who ran the bookshop, and with the public who thought that contemporary art was just a bourgeois hobby. We were just starting out, we didn’t know much about contemporary art ourselves and having to come up with arguments in support of what we were doing, as we were doing it, was really useful.

Which artists were most important to you at the time?

The 1920s, constructivism, concrete art, American minimalism and conceptual art – these radical, often foreign, schools of thought. At the same time, we were showing Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Urs Lüthi … We hated surrealism and Supports/Surfaces. And the French free figuration movement, which to us was an absolute disgrace. For a long time, we suffered for being this independent. People used to say that we were foreign agents … It took a long time before exhibiting international artists in France was accepted.

How did the Consortium itself come about?

The bookshop closed down in 1981 and in 1982 we rented out an old shop. There was a neon sign outside, and so we decided to keep it and the name it bore: ‘Le Consortium.’ One of the guys who had been working in the bookshop left for New York and came back a bit later with a punk group – they didn’t have a name, only a sign: a circle with an X. They stayed in Dijon for a while and we did a concert and an album with them. That guy went on to organise the first European tours for guys like Afrika Bambaataa. He then became a journalist and most recently took onLes Inrockuptibles – a French equivalent of Dazed and Confused. His name is Bernard Zekri and he was in that bookshop – he saw his first contemporary art shows with us! It was a fertile time in Dijon with a lot of cross-pollination. The Consortium became Xavier and I, and an artist called Eric Colliard. We carried on working together until 1995, when Eric was killed in a car crash. Eric Troncy then joined us in 1996 as co-director and Seungduk Kim followed in 2000 as associate curator and director for international projects.

I find it telling that you had such strong links with punk and rap – movements that are as fiercely independent as you are.

Music was really important to us and it’s true that we had that same DIY approach. At the beginning we had this stamp that read ‘THE ART GANG’ and we’d stamp everything with it. People thought we were kind of radical. It is a punk thing to say ‘We don’t give a shit and we’ll do whatever we want.’ And we come across this same idea all the time. When we met Yayoi Kusama, her credo was: ‘I have done and I will do what I please.’ Ignoring obstacles, just going straight ahead, regardless. You construct yourself in opposition to things.

How do you navigate the space between commercial galleries and public institutions?

From the outset we decided that we would allow ourselves to do whatever we needed to do. However the fact that we had a collection and that we sometimes sold works didn’t go down well, especially with commercial galleries. It wasn’t until we were invited to show our collection in the Dijon/Le Consortium.coll: Tout Contre l'Art Contemporainexhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 1998 that things began to change. For us, it was always about looking at and building things. When you do a show, you have to decide who you’re doing it for. One option is to work for the audience – to show the state of things as a journalist might. We weren’t interested in doing that – we were our own audience and if other people found what we were doing interesting, then great, but it didn’t change anything if they didn’t. Most art centres became public institutions, a kind of municipal service provider. And they were funded as such, whereas we had to fight for every last cent. This meant though that we were never dependent on anyone else. And we’ve always wanted this. Politicians like this, for obvious reasons, especially in an economic downturn when there’s no money around. And it keeps us free.

Has working as a small group been a strength for you?

Yes, it’s a strange kind of arrangement that’s been working for about thirty-three years. And no one really understands it. We don’t speak much – we bump into each other from time to time, but we don’t have meetings to make decisions. If one of us has an idea, they know the others will agree to it.

How do you build up lasting relationships with artists?

If someone comes to us with an idea, they can be sure we’ll listen to whatever they have to say, and artists have always understood this. They have led us to doing things we’d never really planned on doing, such as setting up the Presses du Réel publishing house in 1992, or the film production company Anna Sanders Films in 1997. When Eric Troncy joined the team in 1996, he brought a new generation of artists with him, including Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, who organised a group show entitled Moral Maze. Save for a few names, the roster of artists in that show reads as a list of today’s stars: Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, among others. A number of group shows served a similar purpose for us in forging our identity. Our first exhibitions, such asMise en Pièces, Mises en Place, Mise au Point in 1981 with, among others, Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Sol LeWitt, allowed us to figure out our relationship to conceptual minimalism – to come to grips with it in order to move on. The artists who came with Eric were younger than us and we needed to understand what they were about and where they were coming from. We discovered we had connections, a shared admiration for people like Michael Asher or Dan Graham.

Somehow you seem to be more like artists than like other art centres …

Well, we try, but it gets more difficult with age … Art gives you tools that allow you to understand, if not to appreciate, a whole raft of things. That said, there comes a time when being able to say whether something is any good is more difficult.

Didn’t you always find that difficult?

No, because things were – or at least seemed to us to be – set. With time, you become more attentive, whereas in the beginning you need to make hard and fast decisions. And then later on you realise that there were things you missed – Martin Kippenberger, for example. The Lynda Benglis exhibition we did in 2010 brought home to us once again quite how much the 70s had been rewritten by the white American male. Artists like Benglis were exhibited but somehow they weren’t seen, because they were more on the periphery. And it’s only now that we’re realising how important they were. If someone had told us, 15 or 20 years ago, that we’d be working with Kusama now, we’d have laughed in their face.

Your new building, the Usine, will open to the public in May 2011. Can you talk about that new space?

Architecture has always been a way for us to challenge ourselves. Shigeru Ban is the architect working on the refurbishment of this old factory, following plans drawn up by the Swiss architect Rémy Zaugg. Part of it is this ridiculously huge white cube. We needed something that we couldn’t quite handle, from the start. And it will be a challenge for the artists we invite to make work there too. There will be other spaces given over to Pierre Huyghe for his association des Temps Libérés, which he founded in 1995, after theMoral Maze show. We’re also going to host the Paris-based graphic designers M/M’s archives, as well as our own collection. We are donating the latter to the city of Dijon but will be able to carry on using it. For the opening, we’ll have a new work by Kusama, a piece by Richard Prince, a work by Cattelan will be reinstalled and other things. Making this space work is a big challenge – who knows, we might not be up to it. But as long as we’re having fun …

Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

2011-03-22T13:40:00.012Z

I did an interview with Overduin and Kite a while ago. It wasn't published, but here it is. I'm really looking forward to going to LA one of these days to meet them and see their space. Our exchange left me intrigued and curious.

Top: Installation view, Nick Relph solo show at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, 2010. Above: Lisa Overduin, Merlin Carpenter and Kristina Kite at the opening of Carpenter's show at Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami, 2010 (Courtesy of Overduin and Kite)
Cultivating a certain mystery, in keeping with many of their artists, Lisa Overduin and Kristina Kite have established themselves as one of the most noteworthy galleries in LA right now. They opened their Sunset Boulevard space, two contiguous converted storefronts off the beaten 10-stop-gallery track, in 2007: “We both studied at Berkeley and lived in San Francisco for a while. When we met through mutual friends in LA, we knew almost immediately we wanted to open a gallery together.” Their keen instinct and daring vision was evident from their very first move: a solo show by avant-garde film-maker and artist Tony Conrad. As inspirations, they cite unconventional models – Gordon Matta-Clark's 70s Soho restaurant, Food, and Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who introduced the US to Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter… The numerous shows, events and projects they’ve done since, with artists including Dan Graham, Guy de Cointet, Mike Kelley and Lee Lozano, have cemented this independent approach, while boldly asserting their position as dealers to be reckoned with. “We're definitely interested in experimentation in terms of our program but the gallery is a commercial space and we don't see a conflict there. We're happy to do everything we can to support our artists and help make it possible for them to continue to make their work.” Firmly embedded within the LA scene, they represent, among others, Barry Johnston, Stephen G Rhodes and Erika Vogt, alongside international figures including Merlin Carpenter, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Haim Steinbach. "We're just opening a show with British artist Merlin Carpenter which features 20 near-identical abstract paintings, evenly hung throughout the space alongside Technogym treadmills. At Art Basel this year, we'll be doing a solo presentation with an artist we've just started working with, Kaari Upson. Many of our friends had been telling us we had to meet Kaari. When we finally went to her studio, we were so impressed with the scope and depth of her project. " At the heart of all they do is a love entrenched for the art they present: “We just enjoy showing work in LA that we've always wanted to see here.”

Short #2: Radiohead, I Might Be Wrong (Amnesiac)

2011-03-21T17:14:00.005Z

While 'I Might Be Wrong' might have become a live favourite with a harder edge and a racing heart, the album version retains a grace that doesn't seem to translate to the stage. The scene opens with a slow-motion, booming arpeggio, up and back down, each successive note held to form a deep vibrating chord underpinning first the guitar, then the beat and finally Thom's voice as he wails the opening, titular line, his "wrong" sustained in resonant organum harmony, before the chord fades out. The whole thing is built on a looping modular structure, with Jonny's jagged blues riff and Phil's beat pulled taut and dry, together drawing the steady straight line the track unwaveringly adheres to. Layers are constantly added. Additional percussive loops shake, slide and pull at the edges of the central beat, threatening to unravel or smother it. Various keyboard motifs thicken the whole, mirroring the rhythmic pattern of the guitar riff while multiplying the harmonics. The bass line doubles its notes, long extended droning notes soar low, the tension mounts until at 3:48 it all just dissipates, leaving Jonny to tease out a tune so soulful, so unexpected - like John Frusciante in the agony of Niandra Lades - before the beat and the buzzing gristle return and Thom swoons, high and lonesome. It is a moment of suspension you never wish to end.

Short #1: Radiohead, Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Can (Amnesiac))

2011-03-21T17:12:00.003Z

So The Quietus asked me to write about two of my favourite Radiohead tracks for a piece they published today about the band beyond the hits. The piece is here, and this is the first song I wrote about.

An anxious clanging kicks this track off, propelling it forward as if in mid-stride. The sample - a metallic drumming, with the tonal ring and off-kilter pattern of metal wires involuntarily thrust against hollow masts in a weather-beaten harbour - is overlaid with a crisp drum machine beat, all snare and mid-range. A two-tone keyboard melody appears, hanging from a middle D played over and over as the bassline follows a downward progression. Thom starts singing from the same middle note, his lyrics building a sense of time counted yet unfathomable. "After years of waiting, nothing came". The keyboard and vocal parts weave in and out of each other as a soured, grizzly guitar curls in with extended harmonium-style notes, creating an almost medieval polyphony that is poked and flicked at by clicks and cuts, static rhythms and electronic interference. Playful breaks, created with EQ changes, flashes of reverb and staggered delay, open it all out, as sampled voices sneak into the undergrowth. One growls and purrs, stuttering, the panning shifting back and forth. Another intones "please don't stop" repeatedly, like Kubrick's HAL on the verge of hyperventilation. Thom chants "get off my case" again and again. The melody returns. And then it's done. A second of quiet before the falling depths of the 'Pyramid Song'. 'Packt Like Sardines' sets the tone for an album uneasy from start to finish, holding its breath with watery eyes and Thom's own spasmodic shaking of hand.

Hannah Barry

2011-03-07T11:16:00.011Z

Hannah Barry (courtesy mawi.co.uk)

I met with Hannah Barry in January for a short piece I was doing for this month's Nylon on interesting, young female gallerists. I'd met her once before at a Parasol Unit event, and found her a little intimidating. Though she comes across as somewhat austere and exacting, she is in fact incredibly warm, and generous of herself and her time. And listening to her talk about her artists, you can't escape the sheer love she has for them. It was a pleasure. The March issue of Nylon is out now – the final edit was really short, but Hannah said a lot of good things, so here below is the full interview.

When did you open the gallery?
We started in january 2008. I really fell into doing it, it wasn’t something I had ever intended to do. For about a year and a half prior to that, we made exhibitions in an old shared house. It was just a project – we converted some of the rooms into beautiful spaces where we could show works of art by single artists, one solo show per month for 10 months.

Who were the artists you were working with at the time?
The five artists with whom we began doing this programme are still with us – Shaun McDowell, Bobby Dowler, James Capper, Edward Wallace and Christopher Green. From then on, it just continued in a natural way. We’ve added other artists over time, and we’ve started working with a number of international names.

So it wasn’t your ambition to have a gallery, or even a curator – how did you come to art?
I had always looked at art, from a very early age. I felt it was a big privilege to work with artists – to spend your day-to-day with them, talking with them and trying to help and build opportunities for people who didn’t have them, because you believed that what you were seeing was some revelation.

Which writers, curators, events had been influential for you?
There were a number of people. I knew what Leo Castelli had done, how he had supported artists, the patience he had, over and over again he waited for artists to come into their own. I admired Becky Parsons, Karsten Schubert and the early days of White Cube; I read David Sylvester. I remember going to the New Museum in New York when I was about 18 for a William Kentridge show [in 2001] and really not being able to forget that experience. I also remember seeing a Botticelli show at the RA [Botticelli's Dante: The Drawings for the Divine Comedy, 2001] and thinking about how that complete presentation of an artist’s work was exciting. I didn’t see Sensation, but I did see Apocalypse, and all of that was exciting too. I think I was very interested in organisations – I knew what the Whitechapel had done and how Modern Art Oxford had been one of the leading European institutions. All sorts of things like that... a big melting pot of information.

Were you interested in the production of art from the outset?
I was interested in the experience of art, and how to make that available to people. I have just been reading a lot about the de Menils, and what they did – its all about helping people really. Of course, the nuances of what help you’re giving are quite varied. Helping raise a price, helping by introducing this or that person, helping organising an accountant...

And now that you’re in it, you’re learning as you go – if it wasn’t your ambition before I guess you’d never really imagined a structure before?
No I hadn’t. You can, of course, learn by being in a gallery and then going on to have your own. But I think there’s also a virtue to not knowing and to being quite ignorant– something that isn’t like anything else. I really feel like we’re just at the beginning of it. I feel that you have to be really patient, really patient. The artists that we’ve had the chance to work with have been able to make progress. I believe that a lot of the artworks that have passed through our hands in these two and a half years will be there in 50 or 100 years, people will go to see them again. I have that feeling about them – I can’t put it into words. If you know things really well, they stay in your mind. If they have any quality of aliveness, then they’re there, and just because somebody else can’t see what the meaning or value of that thing is right now doesn’t mean that in time they wont come to recognise it. At the same time, that artist making that thing is alive, living today – and a young artist breaking ground, or proving ground, needs all the help they can get.

You have said before that you strongly believe that not having any money shouldn’t prevent you from doing things. That seems to me such an important thing to say.
I do. I have never had any money. At the same time, I acknowledge the critical importance of having to pay the bills. You need money to be able to produce art – and so you have to make it. I’ve always felt that you don’t need huge financial backing. Of course it would be helpful to have a fund of money. But if you don’t have that you can either say “I can’t do it”, or you say “well, how can I do it without?” All the things we’ve done have been without funding. When we started the gallery a friend of mine loaned us £1,000 to help with the first costs. But since then we haven’t any additional money put in.

That makes you strong.
It does – it certainly makes you more courageous.

When you’re looking at artists, do you have a sense of what you’re looking for?
It is more to do with intuition. I know that there’s an awful lot out there that it would be a great privilege to work with and that other people do a magnificent job with. It’s very important to know that. I don’t look for anything in particular. I’m always trying to surrender. Ultimately the work of art is more powerful than you or me – it might still be here when we are both long gone. And the goal is to somehow do something that shows that work to people in such a way that they understand or see something new. Artists are like special messengers of information spoken in a very particular visual or aural language.

Looking through your roster of artists, you get a definite sense of a particular aesthetic, a strong vision.
Maybe it’s to do with stripping down. Things that almost seem spare, not bare but spare, calm, quiet. Things that are so quiet that they could maybe pass you by, and yet when you spend long enough with them they are very powerful. It requires a sort of meditation. Just a few weeks ago I learned the TM form of meditation which involves a constant stripping down and repetition. And I thought maybe this is what I’ve been doing. A constant repetition which leads to revelation. And maybe that’s why I’m so sure about the works, because they seem to be slowly revealing themselves. There might be something that instantly hits you and draws you back again and again – something there that you anchor yourself to. Or it might just be an overall feeling of mysteriousness. I’m very content to look at the same thing over and over again, to spend time with things. But this doesn’t only apply to the artists I work with – I do find that with lots of other artists too.

Is it the idea of something withstanding intense and repeated visiting or investigation?
Yeah, something that is still there when you come back. Why is it there? I don’t have any works of art around in my home – I have very little furniture, very few clothes, but I do have a box of drawings and I look at them over and over. I edit, move things out, swap things around... I think I go home to sleep and let things settle then I wake up and go out into the world again. I like that process. Going back into the world, taking its onslaught and then retreating again.

Do you internalise the art a lot?
With making exhibitions you want to make an experience that the visitor can take away with them. Someone once said to me the most important thing is when you turn your back on a work of art and you can still feel it’s there. I think it’s true.

Do you enjoy taking part in every aspect of setting up a show?
I believe that that’s how you get great shows. I work towards the best outcome, whether that means minimal input or intense input. I would never try to impose myself if it wasn’t needed. The artist is a good judge of that. I also rely heavily on the people I work with. I couldn’t manage without them. It’s a constant dialogue – are we doing this? Should we do that? Is this the right price? Is there a better quality? Can we get it a different way?

Do you have a clear idea of where you’re headed and what you want to do with the gallery?
I don’t think I have a plan as such. I just want to make really good programmes, and to continue to grow the artists that we look after. New people come in, opportunities come up and we decide whether we can take them on or not. I have much a clearer idea of what I want to do with the annual sculpture project, Bold Tendencies, than of what I want to do with the gallery. It is now separate from the gallery because it needed to be its own thing – it’s a big public project. So there is now a curatorial committee, of which I am not a part, which votes to select the artists we commission. At the moment we are finalising the shortlist of the artists for this year’s show which will open on June 30. The show lasts for 3 months. Last year we had just over 45,000 visitors. This year, in addition to Frank’s Cafe and Campari Bar, we’re building two new buildings up there – a lecture theatre and a kiosk, by the same architects, Practice Architecture's Lettice Drake and Paloma Gormley. It’s the beginning of making it into a more permanent institution. It will also have a proper education programme as well as a dynamic schedule of public lectures, to create a real community around the project, a way for people to engage with it. We’re also currently building a library in Peckham for contemporary art monographs. We have about 25,000 books - it’s a much longer project. It’ll probably be 3 or 4 years. But years go very fast...

How did the Peckham Pavilion come about?
That was one of those crazy middle-of-the-night things. The idea was to do an exhibition in Venice. And the name just came to me, and that was that.

And as with all your other projects, you just went ahead and did it, without backing?
Yeah. And this is also going to morph into a much bigger project, which we’ll launch the project next summer. It’s very exciting. But also, as often with completely new things, people don’t always get it for quite a long time. Sometimes you end up feeling really lonely, you’re just there on your own with all this art. When night comes and it’s quiet, you feel a tremendous solitude.

Are there people who’ve really understood your work and supported you, as mentors?
I couldn’t even name any one person, there have been so many people who have been incredibly generous to us, old and young, across the board. People have really joined in and contributed and that’s been an amazing characteristic of everything we’ve undertaken. And that’s what art needs. People need to support each other. Of course projects like Bold Tendencies and the Venice project particularly bring this out. They couldn’t happen without a gang of people around them. But in general, in all the small, ongoing things, that support and community are vital.

Which young artists are you really excited about now?
Everything. You can’t be specific. There are so many people doing so many things. You can’t possibly compare or judge. You just have to watch and see how things develop.

Hiraki Sawa - Figment and O

2011-02-17T17:02:00.001Z

Today is the opening of Hiraki Sawa's second solo show at James Cohan, NY. He is showing O, an installation commissioned for the Asia Pacific Triennial 2009, Did I? – the first part of the Figment project, commissioned by Animate Projects, and a series of drawings entitled Wax 1-24.

This is the short text I wrote for Did I?

A boy closes his eyes for 25 minutes and wakes up with the world gone from behind his thoughts. His language slips and shifts, he tastes orange juice without knowing anymore to describe it as sour, he likes numbers but cannot put names to faces. His room is filled with a thousand records and many more. He sees the records, unable to listen. He can't see the floor, has never seen the floor beneath them, wouldn't recognise it if he met it in the street. He meets people in the street and his only option is to trust that they know him when they say they do. His records become opaque, circular slabs of the unknown and the unknowing. A fog of landscapes without contours, without borders, that can only be read by touching. To move forward he must step out, one foot then the other, and believe that he is indeed moving. His mind like an emptied lake, the sky welling upward and outward, unable to contain the depth of it all, the bottomless, fathomless wealth of the things he lost in his sleep.

O is a multi-channel video and sound installation. I composed the soundtrack for this work, along with John Chantler's Organ Octet. It has previously been shown at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and Art Tower Mito, Japan. Wendy Haslem, at the University of Melbourne, wrote a beautiful piece about this work for Senses of Cinema, issue 54.

Tom Waits and Laura Barton

2011-02-03T15:45:00.001Z

This is a beautiful piece by Laura Barton on Waits's song, Johnsburg, Illinois.

He once described [his wife, Kathleen] Brennan like so: "A remarkable collaborator, and she's a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She's outta this world. I don't know what to say. I'm a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that's the nation where I live. She's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you."
[...] He lets the song wind her around him – warmly, tenderly, with the delicate touch of a man who can't quite believe his luck. This isn't a giddy new love, rather there is a sense of relief, a calm to its simplicity; it has the same sigh of quiet delight as the weary wanderer finally arriving at his destination.[…] We overcomplicate love. We make it perform tricks and climb mountains, we dress it up and put it on parade. Our songs portray that complication: they are frills and fusses and curlicues. But Johnsburg, Illinois tells a simpler truth: when you love someone, they become the place where you belong.

The Conversation

2011-01-31T15:45:00.000Z

Just read this wonderful interview with Francis Ford Coppola by Ariston Anderson. It's funny, and inspiring, to think of someone like Coppola needing and actually having a day job. He's in the wine business. In an interview I saw with Erykah Badu ages ago, she was saying the same thing – never give up the day job. It's hard work, but it keeps you free. The kind of freedom they both demonstrate is as much in the mind as it is in reality. It's the freedom to keep doing what you do, and finding ways to do it, no matter what else happens. This morning we were talking about Guns 'n Roses's Chinese Democracy, an album which actually cost a fortune to produce – Geffen gave Rose $1m to finish the album, promising to double that if he did so within a certain time frame... $2m for a product that would then go on to sell millions. And then I read this quote from Coppola's interview on Kottke. I'm going to post it again, for its sheer force and relevance. And the only reason he can actually credibly say this is that it is one of his three rules for film-making to always self-finance his projects. He has figured it out, time and time again. And still now, after 45 years of figuring it out, says the single biggest hurdle to making art is self-confidence. Not a lack of resources, but a struggle with self – with the belief that your idea is valid and that your work is worth doing.

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

Animate Projects to shut down

2011-01-27T14:25:00.004Z

This is harsh. Animate Projects, whose roster of commissions and commitment to excellence is truly inspirational, will shut down in March due to Arts Council funding cuts. Jacqui Davies, Gary Thomas and Abigail Addison are doing such great work – being closely involved in one of their current projects, with Hiraki Sawa, has made me realise quite how deep and valuable their contribution is to experimental film right now in the UK.
Hiraki's film is to come out in February. It's very exciting - which makes the idea that it is probably one of the last things Animate does really gutting.

Production still from Hiraki Sawa, Did I?, part of his project commissioned by Animate Projects – Figment, 2011

Martin John Callanan

2011-01-26T17:05:00.005Z

Photograph: Martin John Callanan

Martin John Callanan is currently showing a new piece entitled The International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers in Extimacy, at the Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani, Palma.
With rigourous visual austerity the piece consists of a book of telephone numbers lying open on a nondescript table, next to an equally neutral telephone. The phone automatically dials numbers, with the key notes, the dialling tones and subsequent automated messages played out on the handset's speaker.
Callanan describes the content of the book as follows:
The International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers is a collection of telephone numbers that are designated never to function. Their purpose is to be reserved indefinitely for use within drama or film productions so that unsuspecting people aren't disturbed by inquisitive viewers. Nation states organise telephone systems with 'numbering plans', identifying geographical areas or service operators with number prefixes and corresponding number ranges. Some plans hold – forever-reserved – ranges of numbers varying from one hundred (some states of the USA) though to one hundred thousand consecutively ordered (Ireland). Explicitly for use in film and television programmes, producers pick from the designated ranges. The chosen digits appear fleetingly in films, or frequently over years of a serial. Enquires were made to the telecommunication regulators of each nation state. All possible numbers for each country with such reserved ranges are ordered and listed in The International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers.

The International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers. That's a title that brings about an instant vortex of images I can't quite see – their speed and variety and the worlds they cause to collide are more numerous than I can count. Borges is there, with his garden of forking paths, as is Auster's country of last things and Kobo Abe's man with a box over his head, the panels of which are covered in scribbles and notes and intractable drawings. At the same time, the fact that these numbers are ringfenced for TV and film use instantly fills every inch of the piece with a thousand filmed moments and the conjured worlds they occurred in – everything from Hawai Five-O and Le Miel et les Abeilles to psychological thrillers, Del Boy and a great part of Christian Marclay's early output. There's always a missed call, an unknown number, the stalker breathing down the line. This mental rush meets a clinical dead-end in the physical appearance of the piece, in its utterly and purposefully emptied aesthetic and the repetition of numbers upon numbers, key notes after key notes, ringtones that cannot waver from their reduced synthetic voice/oscillator palette.

Watch and listen a little bit here:

Rise above

2011-01-25T11:45:00.018Z

"Learn to say the same thing / Let us hold fast to saying the same thing
Hope all is well with you / I wish the best for you
Never give up/No never give up"

Patti Smith, in an interview with Aida Edemariam in the Guardian last Saturday, said: "If somebody said I'll give you a million dollars, but you have to go against your own grain, you just have to do what I say – it would take me one second. I've never been tortured by something like that. Tormented more about what line to use in a poem, or the right word to use in a sentence. All I've ever wanted, since I was a child, was to do something wonderful."
Edemariam continues: "This is, in part, what gives her her singular presence. Her appearance, of course – the strong, masculine face and honey hair, all crags and straw, the dark toque and oversize coat somewhat incongruous in a boutique hotel in central Paris – but more her sense of wonder, her openness to the possibility of wonder in herself and others. It underlines in her an unexpected warmth and delicacy. The openness has always been a kind of survival strategy too: for all its fierceness – and after she recorded her debut album, Horses, in 1975 and found herself on the path to being a rock star, defiance – her career has been one of reverences, of chasing and collecting icons and relics and friends from whom she could learn the things she needed to proceed. It's a pleasingly unironic predeliction: 'I'm not an ironic person,' she once said. 'I'm not always articulate, and sometimes I'm just crap, but I'm never ironic.'"
I met Hannah Barry yesterday, and was taken aback by her warmth and generosity. Spending endless time with artworks and artists, and helping, are absolutely central to what she does. That was quite a beautiful discovery.

Three Beards

2011-01-19T12:10:00.006Z

With the beauty and madness of a bat stuck in a big head of hair, the self-labelled East-Anglian experimental folk ensemble, Three Beards, crafts compelling tunes reminiscent of Kusturica soundtracks and John Zorn's take on klezmer. The nine members of the band play a mixture of instruments including banjo, double bass, guitar, violin and drums but also accordeon, toy piano, saw and broom. They shout, growl and warble lyrics in made-up languages, wear green face paint, sparkles and space-men outfits and fill out any stage with unravelling, pulsating energy. Their compositions are tight and chaotic. Their sound is roughly textured, tense and sharp. They'll take you to faraway places – Mediterranean wildernesses, east-European highlands, Greece and Crown Heights – with irony, punkish irreverence and soaring, welling emotion.
You can listen to them here and here.

Otomo Yoshihide

2011-01-18T14:17:00.012Z

Following on from my last post, this is the interview I did with Otomo, after the Filament set on December 8, 2010. He was gracious, gentle and immensely inspiring. I am constantly amazed at how many artists/curators/even historians seem to close down, shut themselves off from new things and challenges, or else find themselves at a loss, after a certain while, unable to process new things. A while ago I read an interview with Rosalind Krauss, who admitted to sometimes not knowing what to do with contemporary practices. Krauss, whose critical writing on the minimal, conceptual and other experimental movements in art in the 60s and 70s has been so crucial. I found it hard to understand, and I say this without judgement. Staying open seems to be one of the hardest things in the world. Even the most remarkable thinkers can come to a standstill, an impasse. And even the most daring artists can find themselves dragging their feet through paralysing mud. I went to see Anne Thérèse de Keersmaeker + Rosas perform at Sadlers Wells a couple years ago. Early works of hers, like Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, have been hugely influential for me – the rigour and simplicity and strict aesthetic were profound. And yet the new works she showed – after a long lifetime of artistic endeavour – were really flat, floppy, boring.
How do you keep moving forward? How do you maintain that initial strength of purpose and vision and challenge that drives you when you're young and unknown? Talking with someone like Otomo, who has somehow managed this very feat, is like ice-cold water and a blast of arctic air. It both shakes you and pushes you onwards. Someone who, at his age and with his CV, can say that some of the most influential artists in his life are people 2 or 3 times younger than him. An improviser who has played with practically everyone in contemporary improv but has no problem with suddenly singing a folk song and is constantly looking to first surprise himself, going beyond any established vocabulary or boundary. It's not easy to do and he does it with such simple humility and self-effacement. A great artist.

Photograph: Shoko Ishikawa

When did you and Sachiko M start performing as Filament?
In about 1997, 1998.

That’s a long time to be doing one project.
Yeah, but we only perform a few times in a year.

Do you prepare the performances a lot?
No there’s not much preparation - the events themselves are what we do.

You work on so many different projects and participate in so many different bands... What is the idea behind Filament?
Most of the ideas are from Sachiko. Basically I just follow her. We talked a lot about what we wanted to do with Filament, particularly at the beginning. I really wanted to create a big distance from my past work. So that’s why I tried to forget my musical skills. For me that was fundamental. And then things changed – I can find a lot of things within these tight parametres. For me, what we do isn’t minimal music. There is so much there.

You’ve given yourself a very small set of tools to really explore or dig at.
Yes, it’s something very different than when I play guitar. But at the same time, there’s something very similar too between Filament and typical music.

What do you think is similar?
If you were to look at what Filament does through a microscope, it would probably look the same as typical music would. But of course it’s also really different. It’s difficult to find the words to explain what makes it similar. I find explaining my work really difficult, even in Japanese. If I play jazz or rock or pop music, I have to think about vocabulary or some kind of music language. In Filament I don’t need to think about vocabulary or musical identity. And that is the biggest difference. For me Filament is more open, and really difficult, because I really have to escape from any kind of music vocabulary. Playing with Filament has been and still is the most difficult point, the biggest challenge. Even though we’ve been playing for over 10 years now, it’s still challenging, because it’s very easy to develop a vocabulary when you play something. After a few minutes, a vocabulary comes up. So I always have to try to escape.

How do you escape? Do you use different tools?
No tools are not so important. I could probably now play guitar with Filament. It’s not about escaping from typical instruments anymore. It’s more about focusing on time and space and mapping out sound in my brain with real space. Trying not to think of the timeline, even though, of course, we cannot escape from the timeline, but it’s about really always trying to forget it. I don’t know if it works or not, but I try to not decide with words. It is a physical experience. If I find some kind of word that explains the sound, that immediately brings meaning and that is a problem. I’m always looking to escape from words.

How does this kind of work modify how you work on songs or composition?
It really affects me. It makes me more open when I play typical music. It makes it easier to both stay with melody and at the same time escape from it in other layers. Filament is really fun, and makes working on other music really fun too. I would say Filament is the most extreme side, most influential work in everything I have done.

That’s saying a lot – you’ve done so many different things! Can you talk to me about your recent exhibition at Art Tower Mito: Ensembles?
That is very different but there is also something very similar to the way Filament works. In Ensembles I invite lots of different people to participate, but I don’t try to control them. Rather, I set up a working space for them and then they do their own thing. That’s the basic idea. And this is a bit simliar to the way we work in Filament.

You set up a system and step back.
Yeah. In Ensembles I also try to escape from vocabulary too – music and art vocabulary. Sometimes I really don’t like the art world or its manners.

Yesterday you were telling me how influential Horio Kanta, Umeda Tetsuya and other young artists like them had been for you. You mentioned Kanta’s machines for making a really badly played drum sound…
Yeah, I love that sound. Kanta, Mori Yuko, Umeda Tetsuya – those artists have the same kind of idea as Filament. So for me it’s easy to understand what they do. Their work really pushed me to start doing installations and working in space.

Watching you perform, I’m struck by how much you wait and listen, in much the same way as those artists do. Expectation plays a vital role in your practice.
When I play with Filament, working with Sachiko, I don’t need a response system, like in free jazz. I can do anything and she can do anything and we can join together. There is no need for a back and forth – it’s not a conversation. And yet, we can still work together. In Ensembles it’s the same idea. We don’t need any kind of typical question and answer. We work in the same place, at the same time and we let things happen. If you do something, if they do something, then something happens. We wait, we don’t need to control. And that’s a lot of fun.

Who are the most influential artists in your life?
Masayuki Takayanagi, the Japanese free jazz musican. And British improviser Derek Bailey. And lots of other artists too of course. Improvisation has been the most influential idea for me. Not only in music: in life, as a means of surviving.

Do you find you are able to listen and take a lot in or do you sometimes have to close yourself?
Yes of course, sometimes I need to shut everything out. It depends on my physical condition. But most of the time, I find it really easy to open my eyes and ears. Especially in the last 5 years – maybe I’m getting old. I have been working with handicapped children, which has completely changed my ideas. I can’t control them very much, it is chaos, and I just watch and listen to them. I can find a lot of music there. So this has really changed me – maybe even more than Derek Bailey!

Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, Anne Thérèse de Keersmaeker

Maher Shalal Hash Baz

2011-01-18T10:37:00.009Z

When Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Filament (Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M) came to Cafe Oto last month I spoke with them each about sound, what performance means and being expectant – attentive – to the world. The three-day residency was captivating, as any live performances with these artists tends to be. The interview with Maher's Reiko and Tori Kudo is now up on The Quietus – it was a wonderful thing to talk with them. This is what they said …

Photograph: Shoko Ishikawa

Reiko and Tori Kudo from Maher Shalal Hash Baz recently did a joint three-day residency with Yoshihide Otomo and Sachiko M, who play together as Filament, at Cafe Oto in Dalston, London. With a mixture of solo sets and collaborations, this was a rare opportunity to see four giants of the Japanese underground scene in an intimate, almost private, setting. Sitting on the floor in a candle-lit room, so quiet between songs or sounds that you could hear yourself breathe, it felt like an immense and all-too-fleeting privilege.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz on stage is a disconcerting act – intense and as opaque as a foreign language, and yet candid, open and inclusive at the same time. There are 10 people on stage – Tori on guitar and vocals, Reiko on mouth piano and vocals, then drums, trumpet, second guitar, bass, piano, clarinet and bongos. The songs are composed yet played with such looseness as to leave you wondering whether such music is at all practiceable – rehearsable.... Each musician takes their cue from Tori while staying in their own world. The tuning is disfigured, and the structure of the composition comes entwined in noise. It's like you're allowed to see into Tori's mind, but you don't have the words to understand what's going on.
For Reiko's solo work, Tori plays florid piano with lots of sustain pedal and dissonant, expansive detail welling in and out of Reiko's linear singing, her voice as fragile and constant as she is thin, a striking, indelible presence, in a mid-calf length blue velvet dress with long sleeves, a high, buttoned collar and a platinum blonde wig. She talks a lot before songs about individual people and scenes she's observed, either standing still, or crouching down, folded in three. Her lyrics are simple and sung with minimal vocal movement – the emotion contained and the expression dense.
The final collaborative set started with Tori leaning into the opened baby grand, playing stabs of mouth piano. Reiko started talking, in Japanese, saying that Otomo and Sachiko had arrived from Sweden where it was minus 18, that she had met a few ladies around the corner who made her happy, that she then saw a cat, and would it be ok for her to sing a cat song … I caught up with Tori and Reiko after this final set, both visibly spun out and spent, like they'd given their whole beings.

How do solos sets where you are playing together differ from Maher Shalal Hash Baz - are they part of the same thing?
Tori Kudo: No, it is different. Maher's songs are my songs but the songs that Reiko sings are her own and I just play piano

How do you work with words?
Reiko Kudo: I need to wait until the words sink down to the bottom and come up again, otherwise I cannot sing. I think of myself as a stenographer – I record what is going on around me. My lyrics are about myself and about other people, Mrs Weaver, the man from North Korea – I'm recording it all, as a document. I think about it that way.
TK: For Reiko the words come first, but for me it's the melody that comes first, and then lyrics follow. For me the sound and the meaning of words are both important. For Reiko it's different, it's only words.

It seems to me that listening and waiting, being still, as an activity, is important. Your music is so open…
RK: I live in a quiet place, not in a big city. I listen to the birds singing, the sound of cars passing. Neither of us actually play or listen to music that much, we listen to what is happening around us.
TK: I'm a bit like a coffee filter. Many sounds come in to my body, they percolate down and become sounds in my music. I choose some and not others. Even tonight, while playing, I was listening to what was happening outside, the police sirens – I listen to everything, but Reiko doesn't.

When you perform, do you need to be closed inside yourself or are you aware of what is happening around you?
TK: In early 2000 there was a lot of interest in environmental sound. We made a CD of field recordings mixed with music. But that was really only my interest. Reiko doesn't think sounds much.
RK: For me it's just words going up and down, Tori has music inside himself.
TK: …but she does improvise things all the time. She doesn't know about her ability to improvise, it's so natural. She responds very quickly. She has a certain flexibility or spontaneity.

Your words are very musical Reiko. This evening the phrases you were saying constantly ended in the syllables "ee-te" – it was like a train or footsteps…
TK: Yes! She should become a rapper!
RK: If I was younger, maybe I could be a rapper. But I was born earlier, I grew up with punk.

Collaboration seems to be a big part of the way you work.
TK: Often people arrange collaborations for us, and we accept. RK: I haven't played as much as he has, and it's nice to widen myself! Otherwise I'd be staying in my house with my cats. Always with my cats, they don't want me to go away.

Yesterday, Reiko, you quoted a passage from Revelation before a song. Is your faith important in your music?
TK: It's important for her. For me the distance is important. Sometimes it's very close, and sometimes it's very far. My lyrics are always about the distance between society and my melody. For her it's very close. She's very close to the creator, I think. So her lyrics are happily made. They are immediate. There's not that distance. God is her father, very close. I'm like a prodigal son.

Saya and Ueno from Tenniscoats were part of Maher at one point, and you have had many other young musicians pass through – it feels like a community, not just a band ...
TK: Yes, many young musicians come to Maher and go, like my little birds. I like young people. And I'm always glad to see them standing on their own two feet. Maher isn't really a band. It's like a theater troupe. They are actors and I'm the director – I'm making a film with them. But we – Reiko and I – are a band. Since the late 70s. We always make music together. And it's for life. We will carry on until one of us dies.

Deerhoof - interview with Satomi Matsuzaki

2011-01-17T12:07:00.015Z

Photograph: The Grizzly Life

The interview I did with Satomi for Dazed Digital is up, here. She was kind and funny and so easy to talk with. Like West Coast sunshine on skype.

Deerhoof, the master craftsmen of gigantic sonic question marks, are about to release their 10th album (on Polyvinyl/ATP Recordings), and their idiosyncratic approach to pretty much everything has meant the tracks are being leaked, one by one, to various websites around the world. The album’s site deerhoofvsevil.com features a Hulk-green world map with bright pink stars showing the date and location for each track’s outing. Thus No One Asked to Dance will be streamed from extravaganza.cl in Santiago, Chile, on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011… There are 12 tracks and the leak will take 12 weeks. This global percussive drip feed has created a sense of almost old-fashioned, pre-digital anticipation – and cemented the band’s reputation as unfettered by, well, anything. Their sound is free and bold – a skittish, hot-wired stylistic explosion, that just makes you want to dance.

How did you come up with this slow-leak idea?
We have been discussing what to do with album leaks for a long time. This time we thought why not just leak it ourselves, from all over the world. It’s going to happen anyway, so let’s make it more exciting!

You’ve often done similar things – like posting up the sheet music for Fresh Born, or the remix site for The Runners Four... Do you like the idea of fans playing with you?
Everyone has such a different understanding of music. We are open to anything, although actually playing music with the audience might be a bit difficult … But we like the idea of encouraging people to get interested. It’s a fun experiment with people we’ve never met.

Was the recording process for this album different than for your previous albums?
This time we really did do everything ourselves, without any sound engineers. Also, we all started playing drums. We wanted to focus on interesting rhythms – we used lots of percussion and samples. We mixed the songs on the car stereo while on tour.

Which songs are your favourites?
I like Behold a Marvel in the Darkness – we’ve been playing it on tour and I feel like I have a deeper understanding of it. I also like Qui Dorm, Només Somia. John wrote it and I like the medium tempo, and the climax. The guitar playing is clicky, twinkly, very rhythmic. I sing in Catalan – a friend of mine offered once to help me translate lyrics into Catalan. And I was like, well, I’ve never sung in Spanish before.

Do you enjoy collaboration?
At the moment Greg lives in New York, I live in Tokyo, Ed lives in Portland, Oregon and John lives in Alburquerque, New Mexico and we all have different side projects. Coming back to Deerhoof, everyone seems even more open-minded.

Do you have images or stories in your head when you’re writing lyrics?
I like to stick to simple, direct ideas, the first thing that comes to my mind. I like children’s books, like the Moomins – things that are very positive and happy but also have a dark side.

Are there artists or film-makers you find inspiring?
It’s hard to pick one film because I like so many! It all comes in a big ball and spins in my mind, and you know how when you are about to die, all of your memories come rushing through your head? – I sometimes get that feeling and the images inspire me to make music. It’s really dream-like. I recently saw a Rebecca Horn exhibition in Tokyo. There was this huge piano hanging from the ceiling, which falls apart, making a huge, dissonant sound – a better surprise than a haunted house!

Photograph: Sarah Cass

Goings on #3

2011-01-14T18:14:00.001Z

I'll be at Cafe Oto with Jean-Daniel Hégé (Accroche Note, Hégé Trio), Ute Kanngiesser, Guillaume Viltard (Treehouse) and Grundik Kasyansky on January 24.
I've played with Jean-Daniel and Ute before and both have an intense, and intensely beautiful way of playing – delicate, fierce, highly skilful but totally engaging …
I have heard a lot about Grundik and Guillaume, and am looking forward to whatever will happen.
It'll be a good night.
Come on down...

Maher Shalal Hash Baz X Filament

2011-01-14T10:58:00.004Z

A piece I did on Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide for Frieze is up, here. This is what I said …

Mid-December saw a three-night residency at Café Oto in East London for several giants of the Japanese experimental scene: Reiko and Tori Kudo, of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and Yoshihide Otomo and Sachiko M, who play together as Filament. The Dalston venue’s Keiko and Hamish Dunbar, who regularly curate collaborations, told me that, ‘Although these two couples are kind of opposites, we thought there might be an overlap point in their approaches to sound.’

Stephen McRobbie (of Glasgow band The Pastels) once called Maher’s music life-changing – ‘hopeful, original, unyielding.’ Watching them on stage is disconcerting: the ten musicians enjoy themselves, the audience often laughs and, though Tori is clearly the beating heart and the speeding mind of the operation, he smiles and jumps without a hint of pretension. Maher started in Tokyo in the 1980s, with many musicians, including Tenniscoats’ Saya and Ueno, passing through. ‘I like to play with young people,’ says Tori. ‘And I’m always glad to see them standing on their own two feet. Maher isn’t really a band. It’s like a theatre troupe. They are actors and I’m the director.’ At Café Oto, Tori started off a song by humming and counting out an off-kilter beat with handclaps. He ended another by suddenly turning around, waving his hands and shouting at everyone to stop. The tune came to a stuttering halt. Tori is a pierrot, a clown, turning songmaking on its head and causing you to see it again, as for the first time.

The second night saw each artist do a solo set. First up, Tori played florid piano to Reiko’s linear singing. She thinks of herself as a stenographer, recording what happens around her. ‘I wait until the words sink down to the bottom and come up again. Only then can I sing. Tori has music inside him, I only have words going up and down.’ During her last song, Otomo joined in. Hearing his piercing notes, she smiled broadly then crouched, a tiny folded figure fully occupying this wide space between two fierce entities. It was a beautiful moment.

Sachiko M was mesmerizing. She triggered pure tones with sine-wave generators; her set was 14 minutes of chilling austerity. She sat still, her hands moving with the precision and elegance of a 50s typist. She rarely played more than two sounds at once and these single elements deposited aural afterimages. They hit you in exactly the same way, time and time again, so many variations on the relentless humming of a device on standby. Otomo started his set with a folksong, his guitar and amp placed next to an up-turned snare drum with an EBow creating a sustained rattling. Feedback arcs of the guitar were thickened, as booming, jagged notes countered the gently sung phrases. Full and thin, it was startling, and it ended with a timid thank you.

The final collaborative set started with Tori leaning into an opened baby grand, playing stabs of mouth piano as Otomo scratched out rhythms on a snare. Sachiko sat in the middle, calm and tense. Reiko started talking about Otomo and Sachiko arriving from Sweden where it was minus 18 and the ladies around the corner who made her happy, then a cat, and would it be OK to sing a cat song. This spoken-word piece comprised rhythmic phrases that repeatedly ended with ‘ee-te’. Afterwards Tori told me: ‘She doesn’t know about her ability to improvise. She should be a rapper!’ While Tori has played with Otomo and Sachiko M before, this was the first time for Reiko to meet them. ‘It’s nice to widen myself,’ she says.

On the last night, Filament premiered a new work. Founded in Tokyo in the late ‘90s, and following mostly Sachiko’s lead, the duo is a constant challenge to Otomo to remain open, free of vocabulary: ‘It’s not about particular tools, but rather about escaping from meaning, from words, and making a sound map in my brain with the real space.’ Sachiko and Otomo sat back to back, with four speakers on stands facing outwards. She used a number of generators, he a modified turntable. Although your experience of the piece changed as you move around, few did – silence and minutiae are as integral as loudness. Every tiny movement was audible. The set was exactly 70 minutes of sonic investigation and insistence, vast distances covered despite the restricted instruments the two have at hand. After the show, Otomo told me that Filament is the most extreme side, ‘the most influential work in everything I have done,’ comparing it with his current exhibition Ensembles 2010 at Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki. Both are about a working space in which each collaborator does their own thing. ‘We wait, we don’t need to control.’

Yoshihide Otomo's exhibition, Ensembles 2010, is at Art Tower Mito until January 16, arttowermito.or.jp.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz: myspace.com/decablisty

Sachiko M: japanimprov.com/sachikom

Yoshihide Otomo: japanimprov.com/yotomo

Cafe Oto: cafeoto.co.uk

Dust

2011-01-13T11:27:00.006Z

Ai Weiwei's brand new Shanghai studio, commissioned by the government, was demolished on Tuesday, by the government. This piece by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker today is really good. Ai comes across as someone rock hard, undaunted but never unconcerned – he is not practicing in some kind of intellectual white cube vacuum, removed from his political and social context. At the same time, his keen political awareness and activism isn't watering down his art. It is all art. And the important thing is to keep moving.

"Ai was eventually released from house arrest, and he said he was told the demolition in Shanghai would begin sometime after Chinese New Year, which falls on February 3rd this year. Yesterday, however, he received another call, this time from a neighbor in Shanghai; the demolition had begun without warning. He hopped a plane, and by the time he arrived, the artist in him—he is known, after all, for his gleeful destruction of ancient urns—couldn’t help but be impressed by the speed of the destruction. “They had a very professional demolition team. Two sides, each side had four machines, big machines tearing it down and breaking it. I watched until night came.” He sent photos and videos out over the Web.

“I thought, huh, the destruction of it has already made it art. Art exists in different forms. What is art? Should we go back to the age of only sculpture? At least a hundred thousand people knew this news over the Internet. They watched it in front of their eyes.” […]

When we spoke by phone at midnight Wednesday, he was already back in Beijing. “It all goes down so fast. There’s no reason to stay,” he said, his tone alert and directed, rather than aggrieved. “Everything is in the past. And we have to look forward,” he added, sounding like a marathoner with miles left to run."

In the wind all day yesterday

2011-01-12T16:04:00.003Z

I'm a bit obsessed with Zach Hill's Face Tat at the moment and both his and Carson McWhirter's sound. Same warmth and pathos and wrecked soul as John Frusciante, same silent intensity in a iridescent shaft of blinding noise as Lightening Bolt.

Sasha

2011-01-06T17:07:00.004Z

This week's New Yorker features a profile by Sasha Frere Jones of Marnie Stern. To me SFJ is one of the best writers out there, and each piece is immensely satisfyingly readable. He's funny, he's incisive in his views, he can describe music like few others and he's concise. I was excited to hear his take on Marnie Stern and he does make an interesting point, saying "Stern’s recorded music is largely a successful duet with Hill; without him, this level of excitement would be very hard to maintain." While that gig was miserable disappointment (and Hill wasn't there), 'Marnie Stern' is an explosive album, and I just can't stop listening to it. And no matter how many times I do, I still feel jolted and stung with each listen – it succeeds in being systematically astonishing. SFJ says further on: "Stern’s claustrophobia is the kind that channels—there isn’t a slack moment on this album. “Gimme” is an example of how magnificent she can make her fidgety energy." Gimme, For Ash, Cinco de Mayo, Transparency is the New Mystery, full-on avalanches. Get this album.

Totoro Totoro

2011-01-05T11:43:00.002Z

Miyazaki Sensei otanjyoubi omedetou gozaimasu!

Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki turns 70 today. Steini have compiled a good list of stills from their favourite Miyazaki movies. My favourite is Totoro but I never tire of any of them. The rat and the buzzing insect that Sen carries to Yubaba's twin sister in Spirited Away, and the little soot creatures that carry the coal, Kiki's black cat, the rolling white forest creatures in Mononoke, the kurokuro suke soot creatures and the cat-bus in Totoro, Sophie's little helper kid who dresses up like a mini old man in Howl... all too good.

Thank you Miyazaki Sensei.

Playlist 2010

2010-12-22T15:21:00.001Z

I've been to a bunch of gigs in the past few weeks, and today Fukuzono Yasuhiko from flau asked me to compile a playlist for 2010. I've been thinking a lot about performance and generosity and what makes good music. I saw CAVE, No Means No, Marnie Stern, John Legend and the Roots, Scout Niblett, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Filament in quick succession. The most established musicians, the ones playing to the largest crowd in the biggest room – the Legends – were the most humble, the most gracious. The one gig I was most excited about and had to go to the greatest lengths to get a ticket for – Marnie Stern – was the most disappointing.
Stern was playing a small venue above a pub next to where I work, and I was a metre away from the stage – this was no big show. As soon as they came on stage, her bass player – wide-eyed arrogant dude – turned her guitar up so loud it hurt to listen to for the rest of the night. And although I didn't enjoy their between-songs banter about her vagina, it didn't come close to the stupid thought she shared with us all at the end. It didn't shock me – just made me furious, and nauseous. So I walked out. Trying too hard to be both shocking and funny, and succeeding in neither. So unnecessary. I think her self-titled album is up there with the best I've listened to in ages. It's bold and fresh and shockingly exciting. It features Zach Hill – all the more reason to pay attention. For Ash, Cinco de Mayo – I've had days of listening to these tracks on loop, all day long, bowled over by the tension, the energy, the sheer avalanches of sound. She has the attitude and the talent to just stand up on stage and do her thing – no need to do anything else. Pretentious on-stage talk about her sex life does nothing other than make her live up to exactly every hipster cliché in the worst possible way. Have you ever spoken to Lightening Bolt's Brian Chippendale after one of their gigs? Drenched in sweat and visibly spun out, exhausted, he's the most generous guy – sincere, approachable, real. I have so much respect for him. And I wanted to have the same for Stern. For a couple weeks after the gig, every time I listened to her songs, I had images in my head I really could do without, so I just didn't go there. The thing is, it's a brilliant album, so I'm back with it – and it's on my 2010 playlist: "This is me lightened up". Here's to hoping Marnie Stern will grow up.

2010-12-07T11:40:00.004Z

Yesterday's little Jeremy-Hunt-as-Culture-Secretary gem, courtesy of James Naughtie AND Andrew Marr, spawned – among other things – some beautiful tweets, my favourite being "Words Emily won't be using on air at 2230, BBC2: Cuts/cut/hunt/culture/can’t/Kent countryside Full show details here: http://bbc.in/i0FMtu"
Cuts/cut/hunt/culture/can’t/Kent countryside
That's a really beautiful list. Reminds me of the sheer sonic joy in reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn out loud to myself. I like all kinds of lists of words. Looking something up in the dictionary is never a quick fix because I always get distracted. And so this post on Kottke today has made me very happy: The Antarctic Dictionary. A Complete Guide to Antarctic English, by Bernadette Hince. A long list of words that have been invented over the past 100 years in order to grapple with the extreme and unique characteristics of life on the South Pole... You can view pages here.

Scout Niblett

2010-11-30T11:18:00.004Z

An interview I did with Emma from Scout Niblett for Dazed Digital has just gone up. Here it is:

Emma Louise Niblett, who goes by the stage name Scout Niblett, is gentle and fierce, and as beautiful as Paris, Texas. With her first two albums, Sweet Heart Fever and I Am released on Secretly Canadian, Niblett demonstrated a resolute bent towards pared-down, raw sound – her clear, strident voice weaving between bare-boned solo drumming, searing electric guitar and silence. After a further two albums on Too Pure, which saw her pair up with Will Oldham and experiment with a wider range of instrumentation, The Calcination of… was released on Drag City in January 2010 – a masterful album of restraint and ire, which confirmed her as an artist undiluted and undeterred.

You’re in the middle of your fourth tour this year; how do you feel about 'The Calcination of …' now?I don’t really know – we’ve never actually played the whole album live. On every album there are songs that will never make it to a set list but when recording I never know which songs these are going to be. A set list is determined by which songs feel good together and what kind of momentum we want to go with. The people I play on tour with bring out different elements of my personality.
Can you talk about your song-writing process?
It is very solitary. I can’t really write unless I feel like no-one can hear me. It’s generally about telling a story, either inspired by real life or indirectly by astrological events taking place. Once the songs are done I take them to a drummer so they can work with them.
People often talk about your work in terms of minimalism but, in art at least, minimalism is cold and distant whereas your work is much closer, much more visceral. Where does your imagery come from?
The astrology that I do is full of stories and archetypal figures. Pluto and Saturn are the most important figures for me – my sun sits right next to Pluto and it’s squaring Saturn so my whole identity is tied up with those two planets. They’re definitely living things – I see them as parts of myself.
The last time I saw you was on the Hi, How Are You? tour with Daniel Johnston in 2008. Has Daniel been influential in your work?
Lyrically and melody-wise, he’s been one of the most important figures for me. Being on that tour felt like the peak of my musical career. It’s the simplicity of his music … Other people would never think to say the things he does – there’s something so honest and immediate about his songs. Most song-writers think about how to get some emotion across instead of just emoting it the way he does. I kind of put him on a pedestal. I’m sure I over-think things and I know I don’t have the capacity to be that immediate in my own head but it’s definitely something I aspire to.
With your background in art, are there figures outside of the music world who have been similarly important?
My tutor at college Shelley Sacks, who now lectures at Oxford Brookes, was hugely important. She worked with Joseph Beuys for a long time so she had a unique attitude towards art – anything you did was art. And that gave me a lot of confidence about what I was doing from a really early age.
It’s interesting to think about your work in terms of Beuys – the rawness and heaviness of his materials …
Yeah, the fat! And the felt ...
Scout Niblett is playing at Cafe Oto, London tonight, before performing at ATP (Nightmare Before Christmas) on December 4th.

Paper trail #2

2010-11-17T17:42:00.007Z

Le Consortium in Dijon is one of the most arresting contemporary art centres in France. With a small but imposing curatorial team, comprising Franck Gautherot, Xavier Douroux and Eric Troncy along with impressive external associate curators such as Seungduk Kim and Anne Pontégnie, it is a burning core of artistic and intellectual investigation. Each show challenges and foresees – the list of international artists who had their first French exhibitions there is testament to the strength of the curators' vision and commitment. Their interests range broadly from architecture to typography, art to ceramics, music to performance – they work with the best and the boldest.
I am always excited to receive their printed invitations in the post. If I'm not mistaken, these are produced in collaboration with Paris-based design agency M/M, and they are beautiful. I have been collecting them since 2008, and wish I could get my hands on earlier send-outs... They are usually 209mm x 448mm, made of 160-200g off-white paper, folded twice and printed on both sides. One side features a quote, printed each time in a different and elaborate typeface, with varnish-coated black ink. The source of the quote is always different, and the reasons behind the choice remain hidden. These texts differ in every way from the now ubiquitous quotes with which writers now preface their novels/essays/dissertations/articles – they are presented not as contextual mulch anchoring down some other thought, but as one thing, handpicked, to be considered here and now, no matter how obscure or opaque. They therefore open things up, like gigantic decorative punctuation marks falling from an otherwise empty sky. The other side features information on the new exhibition, the title of which is also printed in a new typeface in matt black ink. They are so much more than just a record of each show. The identities of the artists' work are not the driving force behind the invitation design. More than one show will often be present on the information side of the sheet – the visual identity therefore is that of a moment in time, one particular stretch of shows, without that identity forcing any kind of thematic grouping. There is no didactic explanation offered, no artificial hegemony, no coercive meaning. All of this serves only to make you wonder, question, think – and look. You go to a show at Le Consortium to look at art.
Here are some examples (click to enlarge).

Goings On #2

2010-11-16T18:22:00.000Z

*Francesca Woodman, Victoria Miro, London, November 17 - January 22

*CAVE + LA SERA + RUNNERS + HUSH ARBORS, The Nest, London, November 22, 8pm

Aram Bartholl

2010-11-16T10:39:00.005Z

Dead Drop, Aram Bartholl, 2010

This is an interview I did with German media artist Aram Bartholl for Dazed Digital.

With a background in architecture and an avid interest in street art, web development and DIY culture, Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl explores the relationship between the online and offline worlds, continually questioning the impact on our lives of the digital age. Since 1995, Bartholl has exhibited extensively in festivals and exhibitions worldwide, including Space Invaders at FACT Liverpool (2009/10), Transmediale (2007, 2008 and 2010) and Ars Electronica (2006, 2007 and 2010). Currently in residence at New York’s Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, his most recent excursion into public space is the Dead Drop project, a set of USB drives cemented into the physical fabric of the city.
So your residency started in September. What have you been working on?
Aram Bartholl: My ongoing Speed Show series, and the Dead Drops. For a Speed Show, I organise a one-night group show in an internet cafe, showing web art on all the posts. Both projects transpose the idea of digital connectivity into a reduced, analogue space. The Dead Drops make the audience physically connect to the city – I like this image of data literally being inserted into walls, and of people bending over to connect their 3,000 € laptop to the curb to maybe find some files. It inverts the idea of the portable memory stick. The city itself becomes an immobile USB drive that you have to go to it to plug in.
What has been interesting about people’s response to the project for you?
AB: In the US there is this culture of seeing sexual undertones in all kinds of things, and people have been quick to point them out here too. There are viruses out there, on the web, that attack all kinds of machines. We know this, but we feel safe sitting at home with our computers and warm mugs of coffee. Moving this activity to the street makes the danger more obvious. If you want to plug into one of the Dead Drops, you need to protect your machine.
How did you choose locations for the first Drops?
AB: It was a mixture of places which were important to me and landmarks: the New Museum and Eyebeam, both in art areas of the city; Makerbot Industries in Brooklyn – a prominent New York hacker spot; Union Square subway station for sheer volume of traffic and convenience; and the Manhattan bridge because I wanted to connect these tiny data spots to the iconic skyline.
Those locations allow you to connect to or highlight other layers of networks in the city.
AB: Yeah, the art network, the hacker network, the urban transport network. This has also tapped into the basic underlying fear in the US, which 9/11 only served to heighten, that something could happen – some people react instantly saying, “This is so dangerous”…
I thought that was kind of an odd fear to have in this context because these are dead ends, so much less efficient and more limited a network than the internet is.
AB: That idea is present in the title – a dead drop is the classic term for spots used by spies in spy movies. It is true that the cloud and new data centres will take more and more control of what we have on our hard drives. iPads don’t have USB connections anymore, and we are increasingly going in this direction.
How do you see the project evolving?
AB: I want to build a platform for people to take part. I get a lot of emails from people who want to put out their own Dead Drops in the world, and that’s exactly the idea. That kind of crowd-sourcing extension is part of my work.

For more information on the Dead Drops project, go to deaddrops.com. Check eyebeam.org or Bartholl’s website, datenform.de, for upcoming events and projects.

It's Oh So Quiet

2010-11-11T12:27:00.006Z

This is excellent. If We Don't, Remember Me is a tumblr of the most subtle gif animations. With lines like Margot Tennenbaum's "I think we're just gonna have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that, Ritchie" and gestures like Eli Cash's wildcat hand raised to Margot at her first floor window and the sky above their heads, these anonymous fragments perfectly capture what makes certain filmic moments embed themselves in your mind for ever.

“You mean more to me than any scientific truth.”
Solyaris (1972)
If We Don't, Remember Me

Goings On #1

2010-11-10T16:14:00.003Z

*Sam Griffin, Corvée, Gallery Vela, London, November 25 - January 1

*Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, The Barbican, London, October 15 - February 6

*Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M in residence at Cafe Oto, London, December 6-8

Paper trail

2010-11-10T15:29:00.006Z

Exhibtion poster folded in transparent envelope, front and back, Otomo Yoshihide, Ensembles 2010, Art Tower Mito, November 30-January 16

Art Paper Invitations is a blog by Osvaldo Sanviti, documenting invitation cards from leading galleries around the world. This is a good idea, and I'm surprised that Sanviti says, in this interview in AnOther magazine, that only a few galleries make paper invitations anymore. I'm not sure how this happened but we seem to receive a invitation every other day in the post and this overabundance can make me less inclined to really pay attention. But invitations are such a big part of preparing a show – so much work goes into the poster and the card and the title. And they are, as Sanviti says, often little pieces of art.
This week we got posters for Otomo Yoshihide's Ensembles 2010 exhibition at Art Tower Mito – beautiful, elaborate and densely detailed.

Below: poster front and back – click to zoom in on details, there are comic strips, sound instructions and doodles in there...

World of echo

2010-11-03T12:16:00.003Z

Francesca Woodman, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1976

This is good news – more previously unheard Arthur Russell tunes to be released soon. His sound is one of the most haunting, the most distressingly, achingly beautiful. Like Sokourov's Hidden Pages, like Francesca Woodman, like WS Merwin (Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle / Everything I do is stitched with its color Separation, 1963 ). Listen…

Here in the valley

2010-11-02T16:54:00.008Z

I started out my day with Diane Birch's wurlitzer sounds and Tavi looking like a neko-bus made of scooby-doo wire, candy floss and straw, and carried on along oblique lines, with Aram Bartholl's NYC-USB project, Willow Smith on Ellen and now David Hidalgo and Latin Playboys. Oh how I love his voice.

Here]

I'll be your Tokyo

2010-10-29T11:33:00.001+01:00

My friend Schokosays says this: More ATP news. I'll Be Your Mirror has been announced for February. In Tokyo. I want to be there... The first time I went to Tokyo was in 2005. I was only in Japan for about 5 days in total – for the boy's opening at the Yokohama Triennale. I arrived having had very little sleep for days on end, and this exhaustion joined forces with extreme jetlag and the utterly overwhelmingness of Tokyo to an unsuspecting newcomer to make me feel decidely ill. The noise - the onslaught of sounds and musics and loudhailers and pedestrian signals and train announcements and jingles and machines of every shape and size talking to you - did my head in. But since then, every time I go back, Tokyo softens and warps into a quieter place, one I can navigate with greater ease, one where I know small corners and good friends and legendary shops and hidden neighbourhoods whose ancient hearts are right there behind the thin layers of contemporary cosmopolitain life. Most of my Tokyo is somehow related to music – all my friends there are either artists or musicians. So whenever I think of the city, I think in songs, or filmtracks. ATP in Tokyo is a good idea. Who do you think play??

'April and the Phantom'

2010-10-28T14:41:00.011+01:00

Leon Kossoff, Dalston Junction With Ridley Road Street Market, Friday Evening, November, 1972. Animal Collective. Lewis Heriz, God is Able Hair Salon, 2010. Mikrophony–awesome from Awesome Tapes From Africa

So Animal Collective have just been announced as the curators for next spring's ATP. Which is exciting. And their first confirmed choice is a DJ and film set from Sublime Frequencies, a worthy descendant of Smithsonian Folkways and Alan Lomax. Which is very exciting. And which brings me to this:
Awesome Tapes From Africa
Our studio is on Ridley Road market in Dalston, right opposite one of the music stalls – the guy who plays the same record all day long for months on end. At the end of every messy day, when the rubbish is knee high and the butchers are scrubbing their floors, the music is turned up to saturated cracking level on small speakers in pretty much every market-side shop. And even in those questionable sound-quality conditions (or maybe enhanced by them? i'm always undecided) there are great tunes to be heard. I always want to know who's playing. Now Awesome Tapes-From-Africa-man is in Brooklyn, a long way away from Ridley Road, but he has a collection of tapes that could defo be found or compared to the CDRs and other things available in our neck of the woods. And he's archiving all his finds on his site. There is so much to listen to there.
Therefore: new playlist in the making – Fantômas (for Soweto and all things kwaito, Baltimore, my new friend in Brooklyn and the ladies who run the God is Able hair salon)

Like lightening

2010-10-22T14:22:00.003+01:00

Today's become a Marnie Stern / Zach Hill day. Now Carson Mcwhirter too. Right now listening – well trying to only listen as I am at work – but not watching is becoming a bit difficult, to this:

Damn.
I'm making a youtube playlist of the tracks as I listen. Here. Ok, so, you will find Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence in there too, but there is beauty everywhere. Stay open///

Pull up a memory

2010-10-21T16:20:00.000+01:00

Dan Locke went to the Slade with me. He's one of the first people I met there, and one of the kindest. His website is now ready for the world, which is exciting. He draws a lot – comics mostly, with all kinds of perspectives and observations and details that you'd only glean on your own if you were actually Dan yourself, going through life with his peculiar, funny, skew take on the world and with his heart of pure gold. You can find his work here at daniellocke.com

'On top of the world without the fear of fallin'

2010-10-20T16:39:00.010+01:00

Have you listened to Black Milk's Album of the Year? He wasn't kidding with that title, presumptuous though it might have seemed. It has something of the beauty, the magic touch of a real Dilla. He appears in part 2 of this documentary about Detroit – a place of magnetic, tantalising raw potential. Total decrepitude and bankruptcy have meant that the city has been abandoned by practially every semblance of official authority and left to its own devices. And so the prairie and the free are taking control, and it's a beautiful thing to behold. The narrator is annoying, but the people he talks to (who include Carl Craig and Mr Larry Mongo, a total don in a bright pink shirt) are not, and the ruins, the intitatives and the perspectives they talk about are inspiring. If I could find me a way to get there, it would be an exciting move.
Check it Black Milk's Losing Out here:

'He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world'

2010-10-18T15:52:00.005+01:00

Last week I went to see Fallout, Wilhelm Sasnal's new film, at the Prince Charles, and it hasn't left my thoughts since. I need to see it again to be clearer in what I think of it, but instinctively i was drawn to the palette of both sound and colour, the rhythms and tones of this desolate, debris-ridden world, where those left live on in tension and in anger. The beginning of the film is beautiful. The camera tracks someone cautiously as they descend a hill, hesitant images of some kind of pylon or tower silhouetted against a slowly clearing pre-dawn sky, blue and intense, with crisp, strident sounds, industrial perhaps – I keep thinking of a factory, although I know there wasn't one. The person arrives on level ground. There are a few others seated on the ground, strewn with rubbish and dead-looking scrub, the landscape punctuated by obscure and perhaps obsolete towers, which reminded me of the sound-barrier pylons encircling the abandoned Dharma Initiative village (bringing up Lost when talking about Sasnal is potentially questionable... what can I say – I did watch the whole series in less than a month and that was bound to leave its mark).
   Some terrible but unexplained catastrophe has taken place and these people survive in its wake, collecting, foraging, bartering, with abrasive mistrust and immense weariness colouring their every waking moment. They are ill. They are cold. They are hungry – but not starving. Their bodily presence is thick and heavy, as is their despair. They have no hope. There is an intense sequence of a man walking through the grounds of an estate, high-rises towering on every side. He has his hands cupped around his mouth, and shouts over and over the same call to action, amplified by the amphitheatre of the estate. The words (translated into English in the subtitles) don't make immediate sense, but they are mesmerising in their repetition. And while their meaning might evade you, their urgency is palpable. It brought to mind rallying angry shouts from 70s punk anthems or no-bullshit, no-RNB hiphop tracks – Black Flag's Rise Above, for example, or Dead Prez's Murda Box.
   I first saw Sasnal's film work during a talk he gave at Bezalel art school in Tel Aviv last November. The film he showed there was of footage filmed during an extended road trip throughout the US, homing in with eyes wide open on those murky backwaters of the American way most often overlooked or ignored. The images that stuck in my mind most were of Texan ranchers branding and castrating their young bulls, and a group of predominantly black kids bored out of their minds in dusty urban squallor. Sasnal seemed to quietly be seeking out complexity. His film spoke of a bitty, foreign culture – a place we definitely don't know or understand and one that is far too layered and dense to frame.
   There is something unflinching in the artist's take on his subject - whatever that may be. He does not shy away nor does he judge. This is raw, unapologetic, withering honesty – he records tiny details and great overviews with the same strength and determination. I keep thinking of how unbearably real Cormac McCarthy's tales become, a vividness which is, in great part, due to his unerring thoroughness. He only writes about places he himself has travelled to. So when he talks of the young boy's father taking apart a machine in The Road, you can feel the weight of each bit part, the cold, slimy touch of greased-up metal, the clockwork precision of the mecanism – he knows each thing, each action, each thought from the inside. Sasnal has that same exacting sleight of hand. Everything is measured and counted – the tenderness and the horror.
   The main character in Fallout leaves his workshop and goes by bicycle back to his appartment. He eats directly from a tin can in a kitchen as bleak and empty as the sky outside, then walks through successive rooms to a bedroom. He stands in the doorway and watches a naked woman as she washes herself, standing up and leaning over in a small tin basin. The light is slight and cold, she is as raw as any other of the film's people, and yet it is a moment of unmistakable grace. The woman glances at him. They don't speak. You shiver in spite of yourself – these bare interior spaces can't be much warmer than the barren frozen outside. But she is beautiful in her exposed state, and as old and familiar an image as can be fashioned. The motif of the woman bathing is ancient and with those depths of time comes an intimation of life enduring. 'Borrowed time', perhaps, but time no less.

'He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.'
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Fake rocks

2010-10-06T11:23:00.003+01:00

I'm working on a piece about Full Metal Jacket right now, and I've just read this Kubrick quote:
'We worked from still photographs of Hue in 1968. And we found an area that had the same 1930's functionalist architecture. Now, not every bit of it was right, but some of the buildings were absolute carbon copies of the outer industrial areas of Hue...We had demolition guys in there for a week, laying charges...Then we had a wrecking ball there for two months, with the art director telling the operator which hole to knock in which building... I don't think anybody's ever had a set like that...To make that kind of three-dimensional rubble, you'd have to have everything done by plasterers, modeled, and you couldn't build that if you spent $80 million and had five years to do it. You couldn't duplicate, oh, all those twisted bits of reinforcement. And to make rubble, you'd have to go find some real rubble and copy it...no one can make up a rock. I found that out in Paths of Glory. We had to copy rocks, but every rock also has an inherent logic you're not aware of until you see a fake rock. Every detail looks right, but something's wrong. So we had real rubble. We brought in palm trees from Spain and a hundred thousand plastic tropical plants from Hong Kong...All in all, a tremendous set dressing and rubble job.'
No one can make up a rock – I like that statement.
This is making me think of Andy Holden's piece at Tate Britain earlier this year: Return of the Pyramid Piece, 2008. And, tangentially, the slow-motion close-ups of rubble lifting from the impact of a bomb in The Hurt Locker – the closeness and precision of those sounds, the maddening crispness in the detail.

Ode to Scout Niblett

2010-10-05T15:25:00.002+01:00

She is playing at Cafe Oto late November, and if you've never seen her live, and you live anywhere nearby, this is not to be missed. Scout Niblett plays with fire in her eyes and fingers. She's raw and tense and fierce, and as beautiful as Paris, Texas.

'Espresso with a lemon twist'*

2010-09-23T16:17:00.007+01:00

Wednesday October 6, Catalogue magazine is celebrating its first anniversary at South London Gallery. There will be a talk with Tatiana Trouvé and screenings of works by Ivan Argote, Neil Beloufa, Julien Crépieux, Colin Guillemet, Raphaël Julliard, Barbara Kruger, Charlotte Moth, Open Music Archive, Hiraki Sawa.
Coline Millard and Florence Ostende are doing great work on this new publication. Check it out.
Other good online places that actually draw you in with their design and focus, making you WANt to read what they have to say about art/design/fashion/whatever, I've found recently are:
we make money not art
feeling listless
things magazine
amelia's magazine
art sleuth

I keep thinking about Axel Foley walking into the art gallery where his friend works in Beverly Hills, looking at the installation and freaking out – with a line I love – when he meets *Serge and the latter tells him how much said installation just sold for. It's a classic film, a great bit of dialogue and a nice poke at the 80s artworld going mental. Why am I thinking about this? Because it always makes me laugh and because, having just read a comment thread on Jonathan Jone's guardian art blog, I feel swamped in heavy, wordy, painfully dull stuff about what art is and what it isn't and why this prize/gallery/artist sucks etc etc etc ad nauseum. I often don't agree with JJ's views, but he does write engagingly – and he does love art. You can feel it. OK, so maybe comment threads are often boring. But they don't have to be – there can be a real buzz... I'm wondering if there'll ever be a place where people will find as much brightness and energy – and discord, from time to time – in thinking and talking about art as they do on, say, StyleBubble or StyleRookie – with a light, deft touch and the immediacy of a gasp, as well as well argumented critical discourse. Those are blogs that make you want to go and eat clothes, swim in fashion – get drunk on new ideas. I read a lot of stuff about art and I just want to stuff my head under a pillow to crowd out the boredom. Exhibitions like the recent Francis Alÿs or like Tacita Dean's Craneway Event at Frith Street Gallery make me A just want to go to the studio and make more work and B talk about them, loudly. They remind me that I'm still alive and that art has a lot to do with that. The above blogs are new to me, but I'm hoping to find good things there – online space with a bit of magic...

'Tavi says'

2010-09-13T10:24:00.003+01:00

Tavi is on the front page of newyorker.com today. The slide show is worth a browse, even though if you read her site, you'll remember every one of those particular posts. Damn paywall though – I can't read the full article without subscribing. This might just be the shove that pushes me over into subscribing full stop. I spend so much time on the site, and every time I can get a hold of a copy I read it from cover to cover. So. Last fashion week there was all sorts of bad feeling and backlash in the press, mostly from fashion insiders, against Tavi – for being young and out there and doing stuff. "When other people are trying to make a living." A flood of the most badly dissimulated jealousy and ire, prompted mostly by her wearing That Pink Bow. I just felt so depressed at that display of mean-spiritedness. Reading her blog is a highlight of my day, she is bright and sparkling and funny and candid and her heart is right there on her spotted sleeves. Everyone is trying to make a living, trying to make it in whichever world they chose to live in, and it's never easy, even when success rains on you. It's all as fragile and as transient as sunlight in winter. This kid IS like sunshine and it's thrilling to see her filter into all these different places, be it style.com or the new yorker, because she wears magnificently unexpected shapes, she laughs out loud and she casts weird shadows.

'They bow shyly as wet swans'

2010-09-09T12:17:00.005+01:00

Auto Retrato en el Espejo de Frida, 2008

I met Jodie Vicenta Jacobson when I was at the Slade in 2002. She was taking these mesmerising photos of her daily surroundings, bathed in a soft and gentle light that came as much from inside her mind as it did from lampshades and window sills. They weren't shocking, they weren't brash, they weren't even always new – but they were other, and they stayed with me. They embedded themselves in my brain, welding their otherness to memories and fragments of poems or novels read, places dreamt of, people loved. Jacobson looks at the world with the same generosity of heart and indomitable curiosity with which she greets each new person who crosses her path. And her photographs are infused with this spirit – they are stills from a film you don't want to end, because it is alive and restless and utterly engaging. They make me think of Ozu – Tokyo Story, The Flavour of Green Tea on Rice, The Record of a Tenement Gentleman. Or William Eggleston's photo of Lesa and Karen. Or James Wright – The Blessing. Or Low's (That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace.

Jodie Vicenta Jacobson is based in New York. She is represented by Yancey Richardson and Foil.

Shock the monkey

2010-09-07T17:29:00.006+01:00

Thinking about various things today. Fever Ray and her cover of Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street. Which I haven't yet listened to, because reading about that made me listen to a bunch of old PG tracks: Solisbury Hill, Sledgehammer, Shock the Monkey. And that's leading to Eddie Grant - Electric Avenue, Robert Palmer - Woke Up Laughing, Brenda Fassi - Matsidiso, DJ Mujava - Township Funk, Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa and Joan Jett - Bad Reputation. So they're all here in my Twin Pines Mall playlist.

(Lone Pine Mall. Twin Pines Mall.
Had you ever noticed that??

)

And is that Eddie Grant video not amazing? The black helmets, the beach, the kids, the interiors, the way he's killing the camera with that intense and sincere and determined glare, while chilling, awkwardly, on that lounge chair. The colours. The motorbikes. I find it addictive. And of course, the track itself immediately brings Dale Denton to mind, which makes me happy. His being my namesake is irrelevant – Dale Denton and Saul and Red and the random, unhappy extras just sitting around in the background, the two bad-ass gansters, Budlofski and Matheson, the fact that most of the guys in Pineapple Express secretely have the same hair-do, Bill Hader's entire cameo, oh just about everything in there makes me happy. My plan is to watch everything David Gordon Green has done.

Tunes #1

2010-09-02T10:44:00.009+01:00

Today is starting with Califone - The Orchids

And continuing with Black Star. Definition. One of my favourite hip hop tracks ever.

Funny Face

2010-09-01T16:16:00.008+01:00

I watched Funny Face for the first time last night. Actually, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's for the first time on Saturday. And then Funny Face the following day, and Sabrina last night. I can't quite believe I'm admitting to this. But then again, the amount of things I've not seen/listened to/read is just depressingly HUGE. Anyway, I can't really handle musicals, and this was no exception. I fastforwarded through every song. But the visuals – dancing, the clothes, the colours, the rhythms and textures, and Hepburn's eyes – were too good to be true.
I've also been watching Arrested Development, which I find myself almost addicted to – because of Jason Bateman's voice. That voice. And the general surreal feel. On Friday I saw Scott Pilgrim vs the World, really want to see it again and own it on DVD. Throughout I've been reading about Mesopotamian legends, cuneiform writing and Babylonian deities. And I recently read Amer Béton (Tekkonkinkreet - 鉄コン筋クリート).
So right now the images populating my brain are Audrey Hepburn in black with white socks, Michael in the Bluth Staircar chasing Gob on a Segway, Gilgamesh and Enkidu fighting Humbaba in the forest, Kuro and Shiro flying above the most spectacular jumblesale of a decaying urban dump and Jesse Eisenberg as Nega-Cera.

A Shrigley Esquire

2010-08-31T17:28:00.001+01:00

David Shrigley just tweeted this.
"I just did a cover design for Esquire magazine. They said they are not going to use it. Why on earth not?"

Jonah Sack

2010-08-31T11:09:00.000+01:00

I work at the Guardian, and for the Guide to Drawing we did last year I interviewed Jonah Sack. Jonah is currently based in Cape Town where he recently completed a fellowship at the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts. He makes intriguing narrative sequences exploring landscapes, urban and other. His touch is both light and frail, bold and fresh. Check him out here.

Dexter Dalwood

2010-08-20T15:07:00.002+01:00

I wrote this piece for Catalogue Magazine a few months ago. It was great speaking to Dexter about his work, and then seeing he'd been nominated for the Turner Prize this year... I'm excited to see the show when it's up.

The Poll Tax Riots, 2005, oil on canvas, 98-1/2 x 134 inches (250 x 340 cm)

Dexter Dalwood’s cultural roots lie in the experimentation of ‘60s rock and early punk. He left school at 16 to pursue a career in music, playing with a number of bands including Bristol-based punks The Cortinas. Dalwood discovered painting in the late ‘70s: ‘a light came on’, he says, ‘and I became really fascinated’. He went about studying the great masters with characteristic thoroughness. In London, at both Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art he fought against the prevalent teaching style, then still infused with the remnants of abstract expressionism and the ideal of ‘true’ painting. Instead, the pluralism of the ‘70s, of Andy Warhol's Factory, William S Burroughs' literary cut-ups, David Bowie’s lyrics and David Salle’s pastiches were an inspiration. From his punk beginnings, Dalwood kept the defiant and fiercely independent attitude as well as an experimental, DIY approach to creativity. Following in the footsteps of pop artists such as James Rosenquist and Richard Hamilton, ‘sampling’ became integral to his practice.

Catalyst

Since 1998, Dalwood’s works have primarily depicted figureless spaces: interiors linked to the tragic passing of celebrities (Kurt Cobain’s Greenhouse, 2000; Hendrix’s Last Basement, 2001), as well as symbolic places (Bay of Pigs, 2004). He often starts with a single catalyst - a date, a name – from there drawing a personal line through the world’s political and cultural history. In The Brighton Bomb (2006), on the 1984 IRA bomb at Brighton, Dalwood borrowed Jean-Michel Basquiat’s aesthetic and colours which, in his memory, were particular to that period: the acidic pinks, yellows and blues of the painting thus refer to the ubiquitous ‘80s shell suit. Dalwood builds up his works gradually through visual and conceptual association. ‘I want to create images which make you think about other images’, he says. ‘The painting works as either a foil against your imagination or places a new, stubborn image there.’
Looking around the Tate St Ives show is a singular history lesson. Painters are explicitly quoted – Willem De Kooning, Henri Matisse, Clyfford Still, Cy Twombly amongst others. This borrowing is never irreverent, nor is it an ironic end in itself. Rather, it speaks of Dalwood’s intense admiration for and thorough knowledge of the painters who came before him. ‘To walk into an empty gallery of Nicolas Poussin paintings or Ed Ruscha paintings still gives me a thrill equal to untrodden snow’, he says.

Collages

In Death of David Kelly (2008), a tortuous tree trunk cuts obliquely across a flat deep blue with a bulbous moon overhead and ripped earth underfoot. The tree is Lucas Cranach's, and the ground Edvard Munch's. The sky is exactly as it was on the day of David Kelly's passing. Kelly was a biological warfare expert involved in the British government’s enquiry into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; he committed suicide on July 17 2003, in the woods on Harrowdown Hill. His death came as a profound shock to the British public. The compositional reduction of this painting is altogether more potent because Dalwood relates it specifically to this man’s story. In a few pictorial gestures, the artist questions the political circumstances of Kelly’s death and places it within an artistic context. The visual minimalism that characterises the work stands in stark contrast with Burroughs in Tangiers (2005), a vibrant composition that combines collaged newspaper and cards with painterly quotations, including part of a Robert Rauschenberg. This is the third work Dalwood has made about a writer who has particular importance for the artist. ‘Burroughs is complicated for me’, he says. ‘I’ve been with him for a long time. With him there isn’t one single incident.’
Pulsating with the sheer urgency of the present, Dalwood’s work constantly questions what an image of ‘now’ would look like, and what painting can be today, at the beginning of the 21st century. ‘I always thought that if I could be the person who assembled stuff and painted in any way’, he says, ‘the parameters of painting would keep moving outwards.’

Depths

2010-08-19T15:40:00.000+01:00

I read this quote by DH Lawrence, on witnessing a communcal dance at Taos, New Mexico, in a catalogue of an exhibition entitled Art of the Ancient Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 80s.

"Never shall I forget the utter absorption of the dance, so quiet, so steadily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent, with the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth's center, the very reverse of the upflow of Sionysiac or Christian ecstasy. Never shall I forget the feep singing of the men at the drum, swelling and sinking, the deepest sound I have heard in all my life, deeper than thunder, deeper than the sound of the Pacific ocean, deeper than the roar of a deep waterfall: the wonderful deep sound of men calling to the unspeakable depths."

The catalogue features pieces about the Nazca lines, Chaco Canyon, Teotihuacan and Tiwanaku. All these ancient ancient places with names like Tabasco that jolt you right back into the greasy spoons and leatherette diners of our times.

Upcoming things

2010-08-18T16:13:00.001+01:00

Shirifune (Butt Boat) by my friend Moriro Moriyama is being screened at Cafe Oto on October 2. I met Moriyama in Osaka in 2005 when I did a residency at Osaka Arts Aporia. He lived with Umeda near the Tsutenkaku, proper downtown Osaka where everything takes you by surprise. I walked around with them a lot, listened to lots of music, hung out at Bridge, the most exciting venue I've ever been to, and met lots of interesting people. The area at the foot of the Tsutenkaku tower looks just like the cityscapes in Tekkonkinreet – muddled, jagged, rough, faded and raw. Homeless guys everywhere with their loaded handpulled carts and beautiful blue tent constructions, dodgy dive bars, innards nabe restaurants and kushikatsu restaurants, huge sculptures on buildings, lots of old broken messy stuff. It's a magical place, dark and sad but also (quite literally luminous) and full of strange energies, and amazing music.

Moriyama and Umeda came to London a couple years ago for shows/screenings. We walked around Dalston, ate festivals and cornmeal porridge at Pepper and Spice, drank chai and it was wonderful.

Don't miss Moriyama's screening, and any performance Umeda does, anywhere near to wherever you are, don't miss that either. There's no one else like him.

If I do any upcoming gigs, they'll be posted here, at daleisloup.com. And here, on bunt.

Francis Alÿs

2010-07-29T18:15:00.003+01:00

I went to see A story of Deception at the Tate last Friday. I've never been a member of the Tate, but this one show is going to change that. I have to go back and spend more time with it. Probably more than once... Alÿs is a truly great artist – there is so much to think about, such beauty in his movements of thought and foot, such poetry and such anguish and such triumph and such poignancy. I've just read this piece by Edward Platt – he contends that Alÿs is a maker of rumors, a master storyteller whose work is continued, its life extended, by the articles and reviews and other instances of people retelling one of his stories. I've thinking a lot about artists whose practice lies in writing perfect sentences – pieces (installations, performances, videos) that can be uttered in one whole complete, sometimes beautiful, sentence – and wondering what then makes their works, beyond the sentences, important or vital. If the sentence works, what makes the piece necessary? Alÿs's pieces are stories and they can be retold. But they are so much more than the stories they embody. And his presence fills them to overflowing. There is so much loss in the retelling of them. I imagine being a part of, or a witness to, any one of his actual actions being much, much more powerful than the rumor that they become.
Anyway, the show simply can't be taken in in one visit, Platt's piece is wonderfully written, and you should defintely explore Alÿs's work if you don't know it yet.

yesterday's times

2010-07-27T15:05:00.001+01:00

Here it is. Photo by Daniel Naupold

Descent

2010-07-26T12:15:00.002+01:00

Today's front page of The Times has a deep 2-column width photo illustrating the Love Parade catastrophe. As soon as I can scan in the front to show you I'll post it up. It has the movement, the dynamic composition, the extreme emotion, the inter-relationships, the hands, the feet, the faces – the narrative of a Rogier van der Weyden. Whoever is the picture editor working on the front page of the Times is really very good, so good that I often want to buy the paper just so I can keep that front. There was that landscape shot during the Obama campaign of the future president and a blurred US flag, shot from the back – one of the most abstract and compelling photos I've ever seen in a newspaper. Often they'll use a really deep portrait image over two columns, like today – a tight crop, difficult to make work, and they stick in my mind for weeks and months.

la blogothèque #perfect: Yo La Tengo

2010-07-15T16:18:00.000+01:00

Just listen.

Yo La tengo - A Take Away Show - Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Yo La Tengo - A Take Away Show - Part 2 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

la blogothèque #2 Scout Niblett

2010-07-15T16:04:00.000+01:00

Nevada, another concert à emporter with fierce raging, fire in her veins. I admire Scout Niblett's utterly stripped down strength. She's like copper wire. I love the sound - always raw, always essential, she kind of says it all without an ounce of overmatter.

Magic Music Take-Aways … La Blogothèque #1: Tenniscoats

2010-07-15T12:35:00.003+01:00

I've been stealthing at work, watching as many of these Concerts à emporter by La Blogothèque as I can, and have just discovered they did one with Tenniscoats. Madness. I'm not paying attention...
Saya's approach to music and singing is one of the freest and most beautiful to behold for me. She radiates a boundless intensity in the lightest of ways. She's calm. She laughs. And then she sings one note, or three, plays a simple two-note harmonic phrase on one of her old keyboards and I can't see for tears, the whole world melts in a depth of feeling I ache to hold on to, just for a moment longer, just one. Her voice is peach skin and milk and grating stone and baking sun and she always knows exactly where to go next, even when there's palpable fragility, a wavering in the tones. She is sunlight and the moon and as rock hard as any clenched fist. Umeda once told me she's a genius. Sometimes I think that might be true.

les gars de la blogothèque, you rule. merci, mille fois, pour ce que vous faites.

Tenniscoats - Baibaba Bimba | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

things to come and see

2010-07-07T15:11:00.000+01:00

I'll be performing with Mildred Rambaud at BHVU on Sunday July 18, and then at the end of the month, on July 30 at the Serpentine's Sleep Over event, to be held in Jean Nouvel's big red 3D exclamation mark in the park.

Come come come

joy part 5

2010-07-07T12:27:00.001+01:00

My Shelley's choice here:

joy part 4

2010-07-07T12:05:00.004+01:00

Happy End - Nastu nan desu
A song about summer and sunshine. Their sound is warm and wide like a river and never fails to make me smile

joy part 3

2010-07-07T12:01:00.000+01:00

Katie my friend from Volume Magazine said i should add these:

joy part 2

2010-07-07T11:24:00.019+01:00

Tavi just posted the above goodness, a fittingly bright image for the tune I'm listening to – Beirut's The Flying Club Cup. Yesterday it was The Rebirth Brass Band. I was spinning in my seat, bouncing with boundless joy... What tunes make you happiest? like you might just explode with all the force of an exploding star happy? Here are some of mine...

Le Deuil in Marseille

2010-07-05T18:30:00.001+01:00

Le Deuil, a group show curated by Iff, opens this week at Atelier National in Marseille. Gavin Morrison is doing excellent things with Iff, and if I could get to Marseille this Thursday I would be happy...

My friend Franck Lesbros is part of Atelier National, a new collective of artists predominantly from the south of France, which aims to host artist residencies and exhibitions. I think this Iff/AN collaboration is promising.

Sleep Over...

2010-07-01T16:26:00.001+01:00

I'm taking part in the Sleep Over at the Serpentine Gallery, on July 30. Insomniacs, dreams, starry skies and lullabies and FOOD! Come on down …

joy part 1: tennis + surfing

2010-06-25T17:43:00.002+01:00

it's friday and i'm watching the tennis and working and dancing in my seat with this song

in my ears
it's summertime,
it's almost hometime,
i've been thinking about music that inspires unbridled, indomitable joy and i'm trying to think of artists whose work accomplishes that – no names are springing to mind... help me out???

basel and besançon

2010-06-24T11:31:00.009+01:00

I've just returned from a weirdly zigzag trip to Adelboden (for the mountains and the love), Strasbourg (for a show and friends), Besançon (for a show), Basel (for too many shows) and Metz (for a building and an unfortunate show). My head is chockablock full of images and languages and cheese...

A few things I'm keeping though.
At Basel I liked Haroon Mirza's piece in the Unlimited section (image above from Lisson Gallery's website). It wasn't polished but it wasn't flippant either; the sound, although repetitive, was fascinating; the space was well thought through. I want to see more of his work...

In Metz I loved Shigeru Ban's wooden structure and that flowing ice-cream lid, the building is light and spacious and airy, and I could have stayed on the small balcony on the third floor all day long. I didn't think much of the show though. I find 'masterpiece' a strangely bland and generic theme for what should be a massive statement show for the opening of a new museum. Don't museums generally aim to acquire masterpieces, or at the very least good artworks? Isn't calling a show Masterpiece a bit like just calling it Artwork? Do we really need a show asking what is an artwork? Or what is a good artwork? Now? It was super full of stuff, artists, designer, architects, composers, but not really thorough. So Renoir and Boulez and Starck were present, alongside all the usual suspects in most modern and contemporary art collections in France. I realise the show was about the Pompidou's collection, and so then became not about masterpieces in general but perhaps more about the history of collecting art, and the history of museums, as embodied by the Pompidou et al. André Malraux was represented by a portion of his library, which brought in the theoretical tenets of French museology. So if you sat down and thought about it all, it became really cerebral and dense, but ultimately no more satisfying – it was almost annoying to walk through. Just a bit of a bore. Not thorough and overwhelming enough to be the exhibition equivalent of reading the dictionary or physically walking through Harrison and Wood's Art in Theory, for example (both of which, were they actually doable activities, would make me very very happy). But then not spacious and daring and selective (SELECTIVE) and bold enough to be a punch-in-your-face POW show that a beautiful new sculpture of a museum in such an unexpected corner of the country could ultimately deliver.

But I did enjoy seeing a few things.

This, in particular:

I knew Eric Satie's composition but didn't know it was for this film, Entr'acte, by René Clair.
Those long slow-motion shots of men and ladies running and jumping in mid-air, in elaborate formal dress - totally mesmerising...

Tabaimo

2010-05-26T11:38:00.006+01:00

Tabaimo, Japanese Kitchen, 1999, 5 min 10 sec, video installation. Photo: Hirotaka Yonekura, © The artist, Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi

Last night we went to the opening of Tabaimo's show, Boundary Layer, at Parasol Unit. I got there late and promptly had to leave for the dinner at Ginnan, so I'll have to go back soon to actually see the exhibition. This is the only piece I caught a glimpse of.
I was intrigued to meet her – you immediately sense her strength and steely determination, even though she is gentle and softly spoken. Ziba de Weck – who I admire endlessly– spoke about Tabaimo perfectly capturing the struggle between generations. I'm curious to spend more time with her work.

Smother

2010-05-23T17:00:00.004+01:00

Photo: Artangel

On Thursday Anna, Lucy and I went to see Smother, a collaboration between Sarah Cole and the Coram Young Parents project, commissioned by Artangel. It's a live immersive performance set throughout a narrow five-storey house. You walk throughout the space as the performers are doing their thing – it is obviously narrative but the order in which you read the story follows the route you take through the house.
The journey starts with us waiting to be fetched a courtroom (Clink Hostel was formerly the Clerkenwell Magistrates' Courthouse), seated on a witness bench, surrounded by all the original brass plaque notices. One of the performers comes to get us and led us outside, across a few streets to 101 Kings Cross Road, a dilapidated, rickety building with sagging floors, gaping holes in the ceilings and the steepest, narrowest staircase.
On each floor – the width of a single, triangular-shaped room and staircase landing – various activities are underway. A girl lies on a mattress on the floor, wearing leopard-print leggings and a white babygrow over her face; another girl sits on the floor one floor down, wrapped in a voluminous white sheet, colouring in a page of a lined jotter with a red marker with her one free hand. An older looking girl in velvet tracksuit hood, denim shorts and fluffy-toy slippers is walking up the stairs with a balloon balancing under one hand, at the height of a small child. She takes the balloon to the next room, speaking softly, and then the balloon escapes and lands in the corner of the ceiling. The girl, panicked, jumps and stretches to reach it, climbs on to the window ledge, attempts to climb the frame, leans across the room and rests her foot on the opposite wall, precarious and tense, blowing all the while to coax the balloon closer. The wall is smudged with marks of her previous attempts to get it back. She finally catches it and carefully balances it under her palm, walks across the room and wedges it inside the loop of string hanging down from a window blind. When it is secure, she starts rocking the balloon in string, back and forth, like you would push a child on a swing.
On the ground floor as you enter is a cupboard which almost entirely conceals a small monitor – if you stand in front of it, you can peer in between the doors and watch the video: a sequence of portraits of young women talking about being a mother, each wearing extremely long fake eyelashes, with glitter or strips of colour or beaded edges. The effect is remarkable – the lashes instantly make you aware of the rhythm of their eyes blinking, softly brushing their cheeks as they smile or frown and talk.
I don't know how long we stayed – probably 40 minutes. And although I didn't think much of the set-up when I first walked up and down from room to room, the more time I spent with each individual fragment, or story, the more it drew me in.
Has anyone been? What did you think?

listen

2010-05-14T11:39:00.007+01:00

In mid sentence

2010-05-11T18:02:00.009+01:00

The Turner prize nominations were announced this week and I found them exciting. Four unexpected names, artists I respect and work I want to see more of. And then Jonathan Jones posted a deplorable rant about the lack of merit and talent on display and that made me as angry as can be. Art is at the core of my world and I like reading things about it that make me pay attention to the work. So that's what I'm going to try to do here.

Photo: Tacita Dean
Tacita Deans's new exhibition, Craneway Event, opens May 13 at Frith Street Gallery. The stills are mesmerising.