10-6 of The Records of the Year of My Choosing

It's the top 10! Which feels significant because our mathematics is predicated on a decimal base! Because we've got 10 fingers! How many fingers will we have in the future?

10 Deerhunter – Monomania

Deerhunter have produced excellent albums from day one, but it took Monomania for me to appreciate them as more than just another decent guitar band.

It’s a weird turn in their discography and one that could have come across as too self-aware and corny, in the sense that there’s a new braggadocio in their style and posturing in the lyrics that is, essentially, an introspective indie band playing at being proper rock ‘n’ roll.

But, in the stripping away of their noisy/ambient characteristics and the dreamy romanticism of Halcyon Digest they demonstrate the same attention to detail and texture, albeit applied to engineering a grinding, sleazy sensibility full of sawing guitars and delayed vocals. It’s like a studied exercise in notching up classic rock references (shitty bars, neon lights, leather jackets, motorbikes) that manages to appear both postmodern/wryly humorous and immediately believable.

Tracks like T.H.M. showcase their ability to encapsulate simplistic cool (an excellent bassline always helps), while Back to the Middle is a shit-hot garage pop tune and The Missing nods back to previous albums’ indie balladry.

9 Powell – Untitled EP

Powell makes the kind of music I’d make if I made music.

I think Boomkat described it as ‘techno for people who like rock and rock for people who like techno’, and I agree. This sense is largely produced by the extensive use of No Wave samples and Powell’s narrow but signature palette of drum sounds and effects – it satisfyingly combines a knowledge of its underground heritage with a rawness in its surface and a neck-snapping rhythm that places it in that murky territory between dance and rock.

Techno, at one extreme, can be obsessed with production and structure in such a way that it consistently ossifies conventions and appeals to tutting specialists who wear expensive headphones.

Rock can also too easily forget the importance of dancing, hypnotic rhythm and the texture of sound - but No Wave and Powell shrug off those potential flaws in both genres, with No Wave artists introducing repetitive rhythm and electronic noises to a punk shell and Powell reinserting the punk aesthetic into the often mechanically flawless surface of techno.

It results in a really filthy industrialism that’s got way more swing than much that’s previously been released under that banner - A Band being a fine example of an almost funky rhythm being wrought from clangs and clatters, and stand-out track Oh No New York directly referencing its No Wave heritage with foot-stomping beats, steampunk hisses and dissonant synth buzzes.

I say it’s the kind of music I’d make because I love this fusion of Industrial dirt, sonic innovation and rock 'n’ roll abandon, but also because that punk aesthetic feels inexpensive, DIY and approachable in that it wrenches something admirable from simple and unassuming components.


8 Vatican Shadow – When You Are Crawling / Remember Your Black Day

Dominick Fernow is no shrinking violet. As Prurient, he makes uncompromising Noise with a ferociously political performative aspect and he has explored the nexus of ritualistic spirituality and mass murder in his guise as Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement.

As Vatican Shadow, Fernow continues his commitment to imbuing traditionally nihilistic and self-contained genres with an explicit content. In this case, he utilises the repetitious and structured nature of techno to invoke the conformity, relentlessness and violence of the military-industrial complex.

The success of this project could be called into question since, ostensibly, the legibility of his message appears to rely on the excellent imagery on his album covers and the poignant and evocative track titles (Contractor Corpses Hung over the Euphrates River, Jet Fumes Above the Reflecting Pool). Nevertheless, the music manages to capture something of that weird marriage of beauty and horror in military imagery through wrenching some melancholic resonance out of industrial soundscapes.

There’s an element of satire in the use of sonic aesthetics that might just about fit in a Call of Duty soundtrack, but they’re lent a sinister malevolence that brings a reflective quality. The collagistic anti-propaganda that was explicit in the early cassette releases has matured into a subtle atmosphere of distant dread – of atrocities committed far away that scratch at the Western conscience.

When You Are Crawling is an EP that acts as something of an addendum to the full-length Remember Your Black Day and – with Silent Servant getting production credits – it packs a more immediate punch as out-and-out techno.

Both releases, taken together, present a compelling, thoughtful and resonant body of work that navigates a minefield of extremely serious subjects.

There are few people attempting such high-minded, coherent and controversial music around; it’s extremely hard to ignore.


7 Laurel Halo – Chance of Rain



I have to admit, I didn’t quite get Laurel Halo before. I found Hour Logic a bit stark and disjointed and, although I appreciated Quarantine’s scope and originality, it left me cold.

Chance of Rain adds a lot of physical depth and some darker shades to Halo’s sound, giving it far more traction than previous efforts. She’s removed the vocals that were foregrounded in Quarantine, but the album somehow presents a more engaging face and, true to its place in Hyperdub’s stable, adopts a more rhythmic focus.

The title track’s a belter, perfectly encapsulating everything that works about this album. High tempo kick drums are given a huge amount of momentum by filtered arpeggiations that climb up and down in the mix – and it’s given some serious bite by whip-crack snares that sustain throughout – but the whole thing segues into a melancholy keyboard phrase that sounds like it’s been lifted out of In a Silent Way.

The entire album revels in this sort of oscillation; between hard-edged metallic sounds that are expertly modelled into jittery digital rhythms and a warm, blue-filtered jazz sensibility that only occasionally flickers into view.

The album comes across, therefore, as lurking in that territory where the bleak landscape of fragmented digitalia and mechanical dance music – disjointed rhythms and stark sounds (think Mouse on Mars circa Glam) – meets an irrepressible musicality. It’s easy to identify the former with sinister, mindless process and the latter with human warmth and creativity, but Halo brilliantly blurs these distinctions by delighting in the rapturous possibilities of anonymous sounds.

6 My Bloody Valentine – m b v

Probably the only reason this isn’t higher in the list is that it was so bloody late and I’ve penalised it for tardiness. Some of the textures and influences on this album do sound too 90s for an album that was released in 2013 (like the vaguely D&B clamour of Wonder 2), giving the whole thing an atmosphere of curious distance.

But My Bloody Valentine transcends all that nonsense about time and space. Coming after 17 years of Shields’ digestion and monkish crafting, m b v blew most other records in 2013 out of the water; it hopefully made swathes of half-arsed indie bands realise that transcendental aural experiences can make people physically shit themselves, and that they should be attempting to elicit this most flattering of responses from their listeners too.

Some of the tracks on this album are up there with moments on Loveless, and I really didn’t expect that. Who Sees You achieves that characteristically stirring, queasy beauty that can make both tears and blood stream down your face like Eisenstein’s screaming nurse, and If I Am manages to sustain a real groove behind its ephemeral vocals and gorgeously subtle guitar line.

Nothing Is takes the record somewhere a little different, spearheading its riotous close. Something of Shields’ love for balls-out rock ‘n’ roll creeps out here and it’s the only track I actually remember from witnessing them live (virtually unconscious for 80% of the gig). I remember the stage looked like the mouth of hell and I was about as happy as I’ve ever been.

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There ya go; eat yer cauliflower and you'll get the next lot fer afters...



 

Trickling Music

The next part of my 25 RECORDS OF THE YEAR will appear soon; here's a distraction:

 

Trickling Music

It’s probable that innovations in the musical avant-garde ‘trickle down’ into more popular forms. 

This notion appears to provide an easy justification for the often technocratic and rarefied explorations of ‘difficult’ composers and sound artists.

“They make waves, and slowly inspire more popular artists that actually have a direct impact on mass sonic culture”.

In a real avant-garde, activities are (ideally) unfettered by the need to function and can be truly autonomous, allowing the sort of genuinely innovative developments that would otherwise be filtered out. These innovations don’t just stay floating around in the world of musical academia however; there exists a sort of musical hierarchy of mass appeal, through which ideas can be passed.

The need to see these avant-garde experiments as having a real ‘impact’ or ‘effect’ completely undermines the very notion of a rarefied culture of innovation that isn’t smothered by the crippling demands of utility. In seeking justification for avant-garde art, we succumb to an implicit capitalist ideology, wherein nothing has inherent value beyond its power to generate further value (defined abstractly).

We shouldn’t view this web of inspiration as a justification of the initial act, but as an inevitable process of cultural digestion.

Do avant-garde artists feel vindicated by their displaced notoriety? What happens to these ideas once they are adopted in other forms? Are they bastardised or simply utilised? If we layer a William Basinski loop over a drum-track, is it even the same thing at all? What’s carried over into the new form, if anything?

I have a feeling that, in the main, avant-garde composers are imbuing their work with a fair amount of conceptual content that cannot possibly be carried, in toto, into other forms.

But, this amounts to saying that two pieces of art are different, having different inceptions and different meanings. A Cageian would say that two different performances of Beethoven’s 9^th have two different meanings and effectively constitute two different artworks.

When sonic tropes from the underground (e.g. early dubstep) are imported into other cultures (e.g. brostep), we are simply witnessing different attempts to realise the objective potential of aural materials.

We must be careful in conflating the morphological similarity of sounds with an ideological or functional proximity.



15-11 of the Records of the Year of My Choosing

Sharpen your ears: it's the records that are a bit better than the last lot but not quite as good as the others!

15 Factory Floor – S/T

Thing is, all the best tracks on this album have been released before (Fall Back, Two Different Ways) which makes the record something of a disappointment. Despite that, it’s full of sophisticated techno that’s got Industrial/Noise chops as well as analogue dance appeal. In contrast to Nik Void’s work on Transverse with Chris & Cosey, the washes of noise are kept to a minimum and the album operates largely on the interplay between the excellent drum programming and Void’s treated vocals.

Sometimes it can be a bit route-one with its reliance on arpeggiated synths (guaranteed to make you move) and thunderous New Order beats, but it’s all so well orchestrated, sharply produced and deadpan in its delivery that it overcomes a limited dynamic by staring you down and bludgeoning you to dance with relentless techno sex. I want a befringed robot to fuck me right in the 80s.

14 Grouper - The Man Who Died in His Boat

 

Pretty hard to argue with this one; Liz Harris has released a bunch of older material under this title that deals with her witnessing of an empty boat washing ashore – the owner apparently absent and, presumably, lost at sea.

She deftly confounds expectations in her unusual compositions that threaten to be merely pretty in their reverb-drenched greyness, by allowing layered vocals to clash and melodies to hang, unresolved.

It’s heart-breaking and tender, with Harris’s gorgeous high vocal register breaking free of the murkiness of the mix – not enough to enunciate clearly, but enough to intone and generate a melancholic ambiguity.

13 Darkside - Psychic



This was obviously going to be good – Nicolas Jaar’s got a virtually impeccable back catalogue and he marries an evident intelligence with a searching ear and attention to detail, always managing to retain an immediacy in the sensuality of his production and vocals.

As Darkside, Jaar works with guitarist Dave Harrington to create music that bears all the hallmarks of Jaar’s own work, but expands into a space-disco aesthetic that’s propelled by Harrington’s 70s noodlings. It’s telling that Darkside released a remixed version of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories earlier in the year, since they’re also operating in the same territory – slickly produced, ambitious long players that hark back to the era of disco and prog.

Darkside shit all over Daft Punk’s syrupy mess by still retaining a progressive attitude and merely learning from past eras, rather than just creating a novelty record with all their mates. The album is full of space and moments of reverie, allowing the grooves to bubble up organically and, while Harrington is no Nile Rodgers, the funkiness is couched in subtly inventive electronics that allow the album to snake around into surprising corners.

Sometimes it’s in danger of meandering aimlessly, but the psychedelic and exploratory attitude opens it out to unusual modes of engagement, while the humanity is retained in Jaar’s characteristic vocals and jarring keyboard melodies.

12 Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin

Yes, yes, yes. As soon as this fucking monster opens, it’s pretty clear that it’s Thee Oh Sees on top form. On occasion, Dwyer’s bloodlust lyrics can sound a bit daft, but there’s cartoonish edge to Thee Oh Sees that suits the balance of seriousness and hedonism in garage.

There’s a lot of breakneck riffing that stays amazingly rigid despite the spectre of chaos and mayhem that’s always behind Dwyer’s innocent falsetto (the cover depicts a load of strawberries intermingled with bared fangs) and there’s a well-judged balance of wide-eyed psychedelia with crisp melodies (No Spell); dirty, drifting grunge (Strawberries 1 + 2) and dexterous foot-stompers to lose your shit to (Maze Fancier).

Play it loud and take your shirt off, please.

11 Demdike Stare - Test Pressings #001, #002, #003, #004



 

A strange and audacious set of 12” singles from Demdike Stare; the Test Pressings series sees them adapting the production techniques that had previously generated their haunted, pagan techno to a slew of recognisable dance formats.

The mystical strand of occultism that colours their take on dance music produces a violent, satanic, sexualised broth. They’ve successfully married the hedonistic and hypnotic nature of house/techno with the psychedelic abandon of pagan ritual. It’s fucking volatile. If anyone could actually play it to a dancefloor, they’d all start fucking each other with crucifixes.

In the Test Pressings series they disappointingly dial down the vampiric bloodlust but compensate with improved dancefloor mechanics. It’s all excellent, and makes explicit the origins of Demdike’s previous dancefloor emptiers by re-examining the classic dance templates that have inspired the explosion of sonically innovative electronic artists with tangential relationships to their Detroit / Chicago / Berlin origins (see Blackest Ever Black).

It’s all about Eulogy and Dyslogy from #003 for me however; an engrossing cut of dubby techno from the Basic Channel mould on the A-side with a ridiculous bit of pots-and-pans breakbeat on the other.

The only disappointment is the loss of all the weirdo-chanting, doomy piano chords and atmospheric hiss that made their earlier material so compelling; perhaps their next release will be a perfectly symbiotic pairing of The Wicker Man and Drexciya, but this is pretty good for now.

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Get in the recovery position and await your top 10...

20-16 of the Records of the Year of My Choosing

Continuing yesterday's ball-tingling countdown...

20 Matmos – The Marriage of True Minds



Matmos can come across as annoyingly conceptual and didactic, but often the conceit behind the album is so esoteric and charming that you kind of let them off, before being slightly bored by the album.

They manage to overcome a lot of niggles with this record, producing a really engaging, sometimes danceable, often amusing and completely weird album that’s eccentric, intelligent, coherent and unpredictable.

Matmos apparently got a bunch of test subjects together and tried to telepathically convey the concept of the album to them, before recording their responses and building the album around the subjects’ fumbled attempts to describe half-imagined sounds and shapes.

It sometimes sounds like The Books, with plucked strings and metallic plonks supporting lots of vocal samples, and it sometimes sounds too slick – like the backing track to an educational documentary about the Future of Cell Biology – but it won me over with its highbrow humour and smart production.

19 Co La - Moody Coup
 

If Co La’s latest album had matched up to the promise of some of the better moments from Daydream Repeater and the brilliantly glossy dub on Dialtone Earth, it would easily be up there at the top of this list.

Unfortunately, Moody Coup struggles to coalesce into a really satisfying whole, but Co La’s overall project is so aesthetically coherent, blissfully lush and compellingly inventive that it’s still a real stand-out.

Moody Coup retains the dubby roots of Dialtone Earth in its vocal samples and use of reverb/bass, as well as the fluorescent sheen of Daydream Repeater, but it moves on from both works by dropping the rhythmic tethering to Bmore and Dub, and opening up weird syncopations that challenge its dancefloor aspirations.

The extension of his sound is evident in the album art, which drops the quasi-satirical, VIP sleekness of previous efforts to utilise an artfully textured and tactile surface with an abstracted grimace in the centre, reminiscent of Benedict Drew’s artwork. It speaks of Co La’s desire to look away from Earthly concerns, existing genres and recognisable sounds to grope for new and transcendental noises.

Get fucked, drink coffee, take drugs, sit in the sun, stroke the bonnets of cars and see faces in spray-painted driveway gravel.

18 The Field - Cupid's Head



I think The Field loses something in this record by adding something – his previous, From Here We Go Sublime, was almost sublime in its repetitious clarity; gorgeous loops lifted out of the sludge of reality through sheer persistence.

Nevertheless, even though Cupid’s Head is a little less striking due to its more conventionally full sound, it still achieves moments of hypnotic bliss. It’s pretty much simple 4/4 house beats from start to finish, but there are beautifully subtle rhythmic touches throughout, absurdly simple chord shifts that are so warm they make your face red, and smothering walls of glistening noise that would make your Nan chew her face off.

17 Dirty Beaches - Drifters / Love is the Devil

I can’t work out whether this album is anything other than just really fucking cool.

It’s all submerged, lo-fi vocals, stuttering drum machine loops and no-wave basslines that owe a massive debt to Suicide, but stand-out tracks like I Dream in Neon add an extra facet of sleazy nihilism that feels trippy and warm as well as foreboding and confrontational.

Plus, there are moments when it’s got a weird funk to it (e.g. Casino Lisboa) or an unhinged sadness (Alone at the Danube River) that take it beyond mere retro fetishism and the tired ‘neon city’ tropes that threaten to overburden it. While Suicide sound rightfully angry at New York’s underbelly, Dirty Beaches has had time to stop and rue some of that neglect, kicking litter about and wondering what it all means.

It’s important that you wear leather and eat glass bottles while listening to this album.

16 Blood Music - Blood Music EP

I saw these guys play live at Wysing Arts Festival with a raging hangover and a belly full of potent, homemade alcoholic ginger beer. I can’t be sure whether that experience has coloured my appreciation of this record or not, but it’s stood up to repeated listens.

The EP is really percussive, with stabs of distorted guitar backed by both live drums and a punchy drum machine; both of the longer tracks are, consequently, propulsive and menacing, engineering a restrained anger through layers of noise, semi-whispered vocals and a snarling, throbbing backbone.

This EP was released on Powell’s ‘Diagonal’ label and, while their sound possesses a more traditional guitar-based tone, it shares something of the potent marriage of rock’s darkness and techno’s propulsive, electronic rhythm. In that sense, the guitar – although sounding often like it’s coming from a metal band – isn’t used for riffs, but to bolster the backbeat and to build texture.

It's managing to do something a little different with a potentially tired template, without sounding contrived.
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Records 15-11 in the post...

25-21 of the Records of the Year of My Choosing

 

Before you whinge:

1. I will have forgotten records that I like a lot.

2. I will have omitted most of the records you like (I haven't listened to everything and we don't have the same taste).

3. The ordering is largely impulsive and almost certainly arbitrary.

4. I favour innovative, jarring and contemporary things over staid, comforting and snuggly things.

5. Those of you who know what I like will be unsurprised and, therefore, disappointed.

6. None of this really fucking matters anyway because I just want to show off my musical interests and you're just bored.

7. Kanye West may or may not feature.

Selections are based on:
ENJOYABILIANCE, INTERESTINGNESS, UNUSUALITY, SOUNDY-POPS and NOTHING

25 Rabit – Sun Showers EP

I don’t know anything about Rabit and I can’t remember where I heard this EP.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty good. Forged from the same stuff as guys like Ramadanman, Co La and SND, Rabit wrenches some awkwardly danceable rhythms out of really relentless, stark samples that are processed and repeated to an almost musique concrète level of abstraction.

The production is minimal and full of space, with each crisp sound given plenty of foreground, and samples dart about according to either complex or arbitrary structures. You’ll get laser blasts, glass smashes, laughter and vocal stabs flung at your head before Rabit tantalisingly drops about 3 seconds of warm kick drums in, makes you think you’re about to dance, and then changes it up again.


24 C Spencer Yeh, Lasse Marhaug, Okkyung Lee – Wake Up Awesome

Three experimental/improv stalwarts concoct a broth of thoroughly enjoyable dissonance with surprisingly tender and lush synth & string elements.

A lot of the time it’s pinging violins, squalling electronic fuzz and aural fuckery but reflective moments like Ophelia Gimme Shelter and the opening half of Tonight We Sleep Like Empty Hard Drives are really, really beautiful.

Plus, there’s a track called The Mermaids of Extended Technique.

 

23 Eric Copeland – Joke in the Hole

Copeland makes anti-dance music that’s equal parts funny and funky. He's from Black Dice, in case you didn’t know, and he kind of does what Black Dice do, but with a more focused and rhythmic sound.

It’s neater and more accessible than some of Black Dice’s wilder moments, but it’s still all frayed at the edges, collapsing in on itself and full of weird sleaziness. The cover, yet again, features a disembodied naked ass.

22 Keith Fullerton Whitman / Floris Vanhoof – Split

Keith gets into the groove! Three short tracks of generative blips, degrading synth tones and dissonant blasts precede a fourth track which is effectively a collage of each independent element; it has surprising levity and rhythm, and a strange reverberating aesthetic that disorientates as it excites.

Vanhoof’s B-Side is a swirling, panning, glittering mélange of pulses and space-age gargles that perfectly complements.


21 Mohamad – Som Sakrifis

Mohamad are a Greek trio of musicians (Cello, Contrabass, ‘Oscillators’) who, on the evidence of Som Sakrifis, make extraordinarily visceral and enveloping music that creeps towards Drone in its use of extended, layered strings.

It’s reminiscent of KTL by virtue of the dense, gravitational bass notes that sink and warp against a slightly higher, phasing register – the two stringed instruments groan and shimmer while the electronics provide a subtle counterpoint that adds flashes of colour.

Som Sakrifis has the grandeur and depth of a black hole, but Mohamad’s use of traditional chamber instruments, alongside the stark animal imagery in their videos and album art, bring it back to Earth.

Stirring and physically engrossing.

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I will post the next part shortly, featuring choices 20-16. Salivate.

 

 

 

A Room, Unbounded

A Room, Unbounded

 



 

I have no idea how I chanced upon this room. It was after many hours of walking that I came face to face with the tall, heavy-set door standing slightly ajar, the colour of dense tissue on an x-ray.

A tentative push revealed it was easier to move than anticipated and it opened with one smooth, continuous motion in an elegant arc. It uncovered a stark and cold light that bathed the entire room. Several windows at the far side shone with such ferocity that I couldn’t see anything beyond them. While my eyes adjusted, I followed the light as it traced the hard edges of a huge cluster of metallic machinery that ran from the back of the room, into the centre.

The machinery occupied a low height toward the windows, but escalated to a height of a dozen feet in the centre of the room, its peak formed by a huge funnel that towered above me. My glance continued upwards to note that no ceiling was visible since the room disappeared out of sight on the vertical plane and I shuddered at the prospect of an infinite regress.

Just then, above the low hum of technology, I heard the clear, reverberating sound of a chair scrape. My gaze darted down and to the right to meet a startlingly present figure, seated upon a chair of the same colour as the door and the funnel and every other single thing in this room, picked out in this light that paradoxically gave everything a wan pallor in its piercing intensity.

He sat facing the funnel, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees in a display of resigned weariness. He looked deep into the metal surface of the funnel and beyond it. No doubt his reflection was the only point of interest in this room, and he scoured it for something that couldn’t be returned by this passive projection that only multiplied his evident sadness.

He was old – over 70 at least – with a scattering of white hair topped by a bald crown, his face framed by a surprisingly neat and clean white beard. He wore humble clothes of brown and blue that hung loosely around his body and gathered at his unshod feet.

I fell still and felt my hands perspire as his head slowly turned to look at me. The eyes were heavy and his movements were painfully drawn out, as if he hadn’t moved in years and feared he may shatter. His eyes met mine and I saw no glimmer of recognition, no spark of surprise, nor even a hint of curiosity. I was merely there, human or not.

As soon as his head completed its 90° turn, it began its return journey. No pause, just a slow sweep to look at me, and a slow sweep back to rest at the funnel. He clasped his hands and settled back into the position he had held before I arrived.

I jumped at the sudden, shrill sound that filled the room. An alarm rang on the opposite wall, emanating from a sinister black cube that hung above another door, mirroring the one I had entered through. It was unmistakably a digital sound – emitted through speakers – but, oddly, it mimicked an old-fashioned metal bell alarm. I looked at the man to see how he would react.

He responded in much the same way as he had responded to my entrance; after a small delay, his head slowly swept round to meet the alarm before it began its return to rest at the funnel. The alarm continued to sound and, just as I began to wonder what it was in aid of, the man abruptly began to stand. Still staring ahead, he clambered to his feet and reached out to grip a thin metal ladder that ran to the top of the funnel.

He tentatively pressed his right foot into the first rung and, with a small exertion of effort, pulled himself up into a slow ascent. I watched with curious amusement until it became evident what the purpose of this exercise was.

The man’s feet reached the top few rungs of the ladder and he paused. Leaning slightly forward to maintain his grip, the man’s head began that familiar sweep. Again, his eyes turned to meet mine but, in contrast to the previous occasion, he stopped to look.

He maintained eye contact up until the very moment that he toppled forlornly into the funnel.

Before I had chance to move, the door opposite me swung open with a loud boom. To my surprise, another man, clad in very similar clothing, entered through the doorway. He looked nervous, and a lot younger than the previous man. Without acknowledging my presence, he sheepishly walked across the room to take his place in the recently vacated chair.

He sat down, toying with the edges of his sleeves, and stared into the pristine surface of the funnel.

 

What is Painting, What Can Painting Be?

What is Painting, What Can Painting Be?

In some sense, any painter is asking these questions whenever they make a painting.  As Kosuth suggested: every artwork is a definition of art. There is a parallel between this reflexivity of art – and its inherent historicity – and that of philosophy.

Jean Hyppolite makes the case that philosophy comes to question itself by interrogating the very basis of metaphysical thinking (á la Wittgenstein). This is not to say that it loses touch with questions of being and meaning, but that it thinks its way through to the good stuff in an indirect fashion. It never stares straight at the sun but becomes faintly aware of light at the edges of its vision.

Artists must also interrogate their artwork's roots in non-artistic factors (its existential conditions) at the same time as they explore its content. If we take Badiou seriously and consider art to be an autonomous domain of truth-production (as I think someone like Richter does), then we must question the nature of its truths, and the relationship between its objects and its means.

What is confusing is the plurality of these domains' truths. Rauschenberg suggested that any aesthetic will always challenge someone else's, implying that we might consider any painting – in the light of Kosuth – as a prescriptive assertion of what painting should be. This might be a confusion arising from the cross-pollination of art and philosophy; their 'suturing', as Badiou would put it. When we conceive of philosophy as an a-historical discipline (pace Hyppolite) then we might import the apparent linearity of its thinking into art and assume that paintings are incompatible rival doctrines.

According to Hyppolite, metaphysical questions are as indeterminate as artistic ones, and opposing accounts of being are as sustainable as opposing accounts of beauty. The question is: are there artistic 'truths' that sustain but reappear among different truth conditions (capturing the slide between eternity and temporality that Badiou recognises), or does art function differently? We can safely say it isn't like mathematics, whose truths collapse into a given present, but is it akin to Hyppolite's philosophy; weighed upon by its history to the point that it is always in a process of becoming – its thinking through of its history being an integral part of its function?

If so, then both the story of art history and the story of philosophy are ones of becoming, of complex dialectics without resolution, and of infinitudes made temporarily finite – not ones of linear progression, superseded theories and transient forms.

Each new painting becomes, then, not a novel definition of what painting is (or what painting can be) but an attempt to gesture at something eternal by giving it a temporary glance.

Its newness is not total, but relative.

 

Pop Michael Stubbs Pop

Pop Michael Stubbs Pop

 

Michael Stubbs (michaelstubbs.org) is fantastic, and I feel a strong affinity to his interest in clashing the Greenbergian tradition of flatness and purity in painting with other modes of constructing painterly space. In particular, I acknowledge the way he wants to replicate our experience of digital screens; they create illusions of depth on a flat surface – sure, so did Renaissance paintings – but it is a recognisably shallow depth that is paradoxically infinite (think of layering windows).

I think he could go further in exploring the screen’s glossiness, radiance and addictive allure: we can’t help but look at them when they’re there, and I think it may be because they offer the promise of unbounded mutability and interactivity through scrolling, zooming or panning. What could painting do here?

He also imports some slightly outmoded preoccupations into his paintings: the ‘Pop’ imagery of billboards and consumerism, as well as a fascination with household paint colours and their distinctively calming register. This is perhaps a product of his generation (Stubbs was born in 1961), since this relationship between the sensationalist billboard and the idealised modern home was once the most contemporary of concerns.

I don’t really share this interest in commercial imagery, and maybe it’s because I’m more of an estranged and insular Modernist than Stubbs is, but I think it has more to do with its relevance. Since the dawn of Modernism, painters have interpreted dominant, contemporary aesthetics – the Futurists gawped at advanced industrial machinery and Pop artists fed on adverts and disposable goods. These things stand in for (represent, symbolise?) defining technological and socio-economic realities, but they are of a time. They don’t go away – we still use machinery, we are still deeply entrenched in a consumerist society – but they fail to encapsulate that which distinguishes our contemporary experience from whatever has gone before. A major goal of abstract painting (I believe) is to identify and shape these novel facets of reality.

The Pop imagery that Stubbs utilises is an art historical relic (he knows this), but perhaps we don’t have enough distance from it to use it in this way. Instead, the paintings of his that prominently feature commercial text strike me as strangely transitional – neither here, nor there.

We know about commercial imagery - abstract painting should touch a little more upon the Unknown. This is why we intuit that art should always 'move on'; it's not simply about banal originality, which is often the accusation levelled at contemporary art (and a real problem with sensationalism), but a reflection of the real need for an avant-garde to present the incomprehensible.

 

 

Apocalypse Dreams (Part 4)

Apocalypse Dreams (Part 4)

The dreams of apocalypse don't explicitly feature the end of the world and I don't believe they are borne of a serious fear of global annihilation. I'm keenly aware of the many potential eschatological scenarios that might befall us but I maintain a cowardly optimism that amounts to almost total psychological avoidance.

I could never understand Heidegger's 'being-towards-death'; the assertion that the proper approach to an Existentialist life lived in 'good faith' is to live it towards death, in the shadow of it, with complete contented awareness of its inextricable relationship to life. That life implies death is a philosophical platitude; it is not a matter of metaphysical certainty, just a contingency of extant biology. What is ‘human’ is not an eternal mode of being – a la Dasein – but a mutable fabric of diachronic biological and socio-political facts.

This abstract thinking allows me a small sliver of redemptive doubt regarding the fate of humanity, and an even smaller one about my own (virtually) inevitable demise. Of course, the end of the human race is vastly different to one's own death, and it's not at all about its cosmic significance: one's own death could not fail to be more significant to oneself, and the human race’s importance is equally reliant on the perspective of interested parties (i.e. the collective ego). In space, no-one can hear the entire human race scream.

Instead, these ‘apocalyptic’ dreams carry within them the implication that vast, uncontrollable events, on the scale of the sublime, are unfolding. The promise of annihilation is merely a subsection of that greater menace: brute action, mindless occurrence, the Godless Universe.

Creationists face the Uncanny appearance of design in our world with the appropriate trembling, but they resolve it with the myth of comforting sentience: a mind that can be pleaded with, reasoned with and understood. In these dreams, the same insentience possessed by tree roots is ascribed to human society, and it is made clear that we can no more control the direction of global policy, macroeconomics or technological change than we can implore God to redeem sinners, relieve suffering or prevent the Sun from exploding.

This, I believe, is the significance of aeroplanes, monolithic towers and traffic jams. In my dreams they appear as un-designed as a snail’s shell and as alien as vegetation. They are archetypal symbols of the city – the most concentrated evidence of human creation – but they appear as arbitrary carbuncles; sinister remnants of an uncaused process. This is not a fear of chaos, by the way – quite the opposite. It is the uneasy observation of order without orchestration. Sometimes the towers and the aeroplanes carry the whiff of sentience: a desperate illusion, seeking minds in the objects themselves in the absence of a conscious creator.

It’s a solipsistic universe too. My fellow humans, en masse, appear mindless. My detachment is total, finding no solace in familiar locations (just the uneasiness of confrontation with distorted realities) and finding only fear in the presence of man-made objects. What a strange mess these cities are, the planes are escaping.

The common structure of these dreams is the juxtaposition of a very present, forceful occurrence (explosions, crashes, gunfire) with a distant, slow and quiet menace. This ‘thing’ can’t be called an event, it is too intangible and indistinct – it is an atmosphere. It’s a gestalt that’s caused by the re-presentation of familiar things; the most familiar and human things possible (cities, cars, buildings) become organic and unexplained (a touch of the Nausea).

The menace is in the distance, at the edges, glimpsed with the mind’s eye. It is too terrible to grasp in toto, but the very elusiveness of its scale engenders this terror. It is a mutable and intangible situation that coalesces and garners enough gravity to form a semi-tangible thing - we might wonder whether it’s a plague or a war but, really, its very inability to be grasped is the totality of its content.

The blast that happens right in front of me is the force of banal reality – it serves to remind me of the interplay between those distant energies and the very tangible actuality of falling buildings, authentic pain, real death. These two dramas resemble the constant oscillation between prizing hedonism/nihilism (there’s panic outside, we’ll stay here and eat) and recognising the occasional need to grope for meaning (staring at the rubble).

Nothing really matters because we’re all going to die, but art is important because it helps us to understand. Lumbering global crises suffer personal tragedies, and the inhumanity of the mindless Universe implicates me in its cold unfolding.

Apocalypse Dreams (Part 3)

Apocalypse Dreams (Part 3)

We met in the garden under the shadow of Canary Wharf. The porch looked like a restaurant, with a deep orange glow and a tiled table that was set with candles and half a dozen flimsy chairs. They’d returned from abroad and this was a fortuitous, chance meeting.

‘I didn’t know you live near Canary Wharf.’

‘We don’t.’

I noticed two planes go overhead and took a step inside the house.

We sat and conversed about things we'd done since our last meeting many years ago; tales of other countries, discussions of literature and idle chatter about friends and family. Conversation was light, but it turned to darker subjects after a glance out the window brought the traffic jams into sight. I only acknowledged the distant rumbles and constant, desperate cacophony of car horns after spying the scene outside. None of us knew what was happening, and I’m not sure that anybody else did. Their flight didn’t seem to be the result of a conscious acknowledgement of a threat, followed by a reasoned response to leave. It was more like lava flowing down a mountainside or the slow trickle of blood from a nose. I sharply inhaled and shut the window.

It hadn’t even occurred to us to leave and we just discussed evening plans as normal – restaurant? Bar? Who else shall we invite? The lump in my throat was the only evidence of something amiss. We put on our coats and departed.

Outside, the air was pale blue and the grass was grey-green –it shimmered with the dullness of polished chrome and the sky seemed warped. The usual soft dome had been replaced by a steep bulge, and clouds gathered at its peak in a violent, abstract tangle.

Canary Wharf vibrated on the horizon, closer than it was. As we walked it didn’t move, but the sky rushed like a hologram, its colours subtly changing with each step. London was seething with the heavy air that accompanies thunder and the portentous sounds that signal evening. We arrived at the restaurant too soon and stood smoking on the pavement. Someone’s parents waited inside and I counted four planes flying low.

I had to stoop to get inside and the air was thick with smoke. The place was dark and filled with tables of different heights, just a few of them occupied by people with thin hands and tousled hair who probably always sat in the same places so that the décor matched their tops and the staff, who were actors, didn’t have to learn too many lines. The kitchen didn’t have any food. That’s ok; we’re not here to eat.

I heard a commotion outside and stepped onto the street, which had widened since we entered the restaurant. It was long and straight like an airfield and people stood around looking at the floor or the buildings, but not up. The sun was shining now – a bright, saturated light that drained the colour out of everything and gave off no heat. Over the backs of peoples’ heads I saw another low-flying plane and thought I glimpsed someone running off to my left.

The plane settled into the concrete ground as if it had always been there – an airborne Cutty Sark – and I found myself standing alone, staring at the rubble. I looked down at myself from a fourth-storey window and thought I looked like a lost child.

Apocalyse Dreams (Part 2)

Apocalypse Dreams (Part 2)

Another square, another crowd.

The square is where we gather, it’s a ‘no-place’ that is merely context. The scene of the action, with seats encircling the tragedy played out upon a lowered floor.

A tenement block, a modest tower.

This is a domestic building where life is separated from art and attention is accustomed to being dispersed from within its impervious walls. Nothing happy was taking place inside this edifice, and the crowd was comprised of its own fear. We all wore heavy clothes: wool, muslin and thick cotton covered in dust, with boots and overcoats the colour of aerial photographs. Each one of us faced the tower, motionless.

The truth appeared in my head, as it does in dreams, written into the protagonist’s mind with an abrupt genesis; a spontaneous mutation. There were people inside that building. One family, cowering. Cowering from us.

Their Gauguin-brown faces were only visible in my mind’s eye, but they were covered in terror and each member of the family was an archetype that spoke to the theatrical origins of this dream, with its overtones of tragedy and the staging that seemed so deliberate: a vista created by the focal point of the tenement block, hemmed in by the concrete stairs upon which we waited, surrounding the pale square. The father was stoic, the mother was concerned and clutching the crying baby and consoling her other children who dealt with it all in their own individual ways.

I looked down at my gun and felt its weight.

A breeze shivered through the square and ruffled a few hairs and shook coats like damp flags. The noise of the wind was the only noise save the occasional crunch of feet on gravel and the whirr of my own nervous system. They were mostly men with legs cocked and looking sure of themselves that seemed to be waiting for a signal or a decision from someone, none of us knew who, and the women were there with shawls on their heads and rifles pointed low.

There was a crisp, wintry, featureless sky that could have been a painted screen since it offered no sense of depth, just an arbitrary transition between this terrible foreground and everything else.

I don't know why they wanted to kill them - this town had turned on them, and they had been made scapegoats by men who sat in rooms with no answers and strange beliefs. The moon was missing, and it had been for a long time.

Who knows if other towns had gathered like this, to kill in the name of vengeance or sacrifice or desperation. A lot of regrettable things happen when planets disappear.

The wait continued, and I began to feel a deep sympathy for the family – a sympathy that turned to dread and now spilled over into panic. I noticed a dog barking but I couldn't hear it; the noiseless bugle shaved my reverie in half and sent sweat to the tips of my fingers. I recalled the family's faces blinking quickly somewhere once.

Unheard and uncaused, my gun fired.

The shot was like a breath that crept through the square, restoring life to all those men and women, whose guns also fired in a volley of cracks and flashes.

As the dust settled and I felt the crunch of broken glass beneath my feet, the smell of burnt concrete and dried blood filled my nostrils. The tower looked much the same as it had done before and we all looked to the sky, waiting for the moon to return.

Apocalypse Dreams (Part 1)



Apocalypse Dreams (Part 1)

Last night I had another apocalyptic dream.

This time we stood huddled in a square, facing a Baroque building with statues that Arabesqued and a roof that blended into the sky. The sky was in two halves; the bottom was a deep orange like a Great Fire and the top was slate-grey.

We weren’t huddled for any sinister reasons, just tourists at a landmark trying to remember the architecture. An event was taking place inside the building – one of note, not just any old metaphysical event that begins and ends with indeterminate boundaries and a causality of infinite fractal complexity. It was a ‘happy’ event befitting of that Baroque building: an Opera or a Molière. They may have been wearing masks inside (we couldn’t see).

I remind you that this was a dream, so it needn’t follow a linear logic or conform to the laws of physics. I was transported to Spain, where the newsreaders in my head told me without words about the situation that was unfolding there. Grainy footage of indistinguishable bodies, pale blues and deep browns: the colours of contemporary horror (no blood or limbs, just clinical fields of colour and the snake-that-eats-itself contortions of Sarah Lucas or Francis Bacon).

I became unsure whether I was in Spain or England. This square had the unfamiliarity of a foreign landmark, but I sensed that Catalonia was remote and hostile. I was displaced and uncomfortable, being surrounded by people I didn’t know while my friends laughed inside the building, and unable to distinguish between home and elsewhere. Europe pulsed and this anonymous square felt like the epicentre of its throbs.

I noted a plane. It’s always a plane – the bringer of bombs, the unmistakable rumble, the sentient bird that has travelled and can fall.

All noise was sucked from the square and, for a moment, there swelled a sense of awe.

‘Those inside might exit.’

‘Something has ended. Something has begun.’

Great plumes of sand and concrete rose like dusty fireworks.