SMELLIN’ SALTS
NO. 9 JANUARY 2014 - FREE
ARAF Collective London is a not-for profit cultural organisation which attempts to generate awareness, publicity and solidarity for artists, musicians and writers who require a public platform. We actively opt out of any commercial interests: the interests of ARAF are social and reactionary; a creative site of resistance against ‘arts cuts’ culture. Established in 2011, we have built a network of creative individuals who have performed, written or exhibited with us and we want to add YOU to the collective. ARAF is Welsh for ‘Slow’ and to be slow in an age of fast profit is political. We are the luddites of the culture industry.
THIS MONTH: ARAF COLLECTIVE PRESENT: GIG NO. NINE:
CANTER-CULTURE III @ THE HORSE & STABLES, WATERLOO featuring: THE ROPE AND THE COLT / JUNGLE BROWN + CeaSe MC / TRUE COLLECTIVES FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE!
FREE ENTRY!
And THIS, THE NINTH EDITION of our free zine, SMELLIN’ SALTS ON THE THEME of “ THE CITY” THE BANDS, ART, OPINIONS, and more FOR PERUSAL AT YOUR LEISURE! Not FOR WRAPPING CHIPS, you !
Cover: Object smashed over the head of a busker? Roscoe Street, Liverpool, by H.A.
ARAF IS THE FUTURE : CANTER CULTURE IV @ HORSE & STABLES, WATERLOO LIVE MUSIC FROM : LITTLE LIAR, HATTIE WHITEHEAD, THE DALLAS GUILD & more TBC!
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 28:
FRIDAY APRIL 11th: CANTER
CULTURE V @ HORSE & STABLES, WATERLOO
LIVE MUSIC FROM : DR PEABODY, KING OF HEARTS & more TBC!
AS ALWAYS FREE ENTRY!
ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON THANKS PROFUSELY:
THANKS AS EVER to JOSH MARIOTT THE SULTAN OF SUPERIOUR SOUNDS; ARAF Artists of the month: True Collectives, The Rope and The Colt, Jungle Brown & Cease MC. Thanks to Dean and Steve @ THE HORSE & STABLES, Waterloo. Thanks to Cerilan Rogers & The contributors to this issue of SMELLIN’ SALTS. Thanks to the SOUTH LONDON GALLERY & Peckham’s REVIEW Bookshop for stocking our Free zine & helping us to spread the word! ... AND SUGARLUMPS to YOU, our Salt Sniffers, Show Jumpers & Stable Hands!
SUBMISSIONS WELCOME for APRIL ZINE EDITION please send to: follow us:
@ARAFCollective
arafcollective@live.co.uk
check us out : WWW.ARAFCOLLECTIVELONDON.COM
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ARAF A serious note before we descend into the usual smorgasboard of horse puns and misspelt pretentions (think ‘Findus at The Horse’ etc)… As many of you know, the arrival of January marks the first birthday of ARAF, a feat of endurance which we could not have accomplished without the support of the hundreds of people who have attended our gigs, experienced our Fruit Machine lecture series and collected our ‘zines. It seems only yesterday that we were photocopying mis-aligned paragraphs for our first Smellin’ Salts to be distributed at our first ‘Lighthouse At The Wreck’ gig in Camberwell; time, it appears, is not araf. Anyway, before this Oscar acceptance speech reduces you all to tears, I will end by thanking every one of you for your continued support: from the various artists to Josh ‘The Sultan of Superior Sounds’, from the Horse, the Three Kings and the Wreck to Cerilan Rogers for her unending supply of jam, hand-outs and goodwill. Finally, I thank you, dear readers and listeners, ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON salutes you. Previously on Araf… November’s
CANTER-CULTURE III : A Culinary Review
Canter Culture II opened with an appetising Bebop/Hard Bop set from The Aedden Williams Trio who drew on Miles Davis and Charles Mingus to bring a taste of late 1950s New York to Waterloo. This course was followed by Araf favourite, Sample Answer who cleansed our palate with his own brand of Dublin-based hip-hop. For the main course, Edinburgh favourites Molly Wagger delivered one of their impeccable psychedelic post-folk casseroles, a delicious combination of Syd Barrett and Elliot Smith. Finally, the night concluded with a sweet vinyl set from True Collectives, the perfect pudding to accompany the autumnal feast. Go on, give us a Michelin Star…
FRUIT MACHINE II : The Christmas Lectures. All over the country Christmas trees lie unloved and balding in the gutter; a ‘pineful’ reminder of their postfestive insignificance. However, during their glory days of December, Araf held the second of its ‘Fruit Machine’ lecture-Jam series in Clerkenwell and even the foliage was invited. Highlights of the evening included literary performances by Oliver Zarandi and Rachel Long, Tal Williams’ talk on the politics of Welsh-language music, Wiggy Cheung’s lecture on Taxidermy with ‘live’ examples and SALT Collective’s discussion of their pizza/art project with Fruit Machine themed fruity pizza. We even had mince pies, chocolate logs, Christmas crackers and, of course, the obligatory ARAF-brand Jam, a wintery blackcurrant and apple number for those fireside evenings.
ARAF PRESENTS: THE ROPE AND THE COLT The Rope & The Colt hijacked their name from a 1969 Spaghetti Western and attempt to channel the filmic escapism that Cowboy genre brought to post-war suburbia: Think Billy-TheKid in Basingstoke; Calamity Jane in Croydon. Their musical influences are as wide as the desert plain and range from Scott Walker who wrote the original soundtrack to ‘The Rope and The Colt’, through the Fleet Foxes and culminate in Goat. When living off the trail, we all culminate in goat. This five piece has been making a stir in the salons and gambling houses of London’s wild south-west and we welcome them to Araf Province. So cowboys and injuns of SE1, get off your horse, drink your milk and listen to these sheriffs of sound.
JUNGLE BROWN + CeaSe MC Araf is more than excited to welcome newly-founded hip-hop collective, Jungle Brown to Canter Culture. Having performed an improvised set during our September gig, this group of London-based Rappers and MCs have returned for an official slot with ARAF. Jungle Brown mix beats and words into an intoxicating cocktail that will leave you drunk on their sound. Also guesting on this session is Araf regular and talented wordsmith Mr CeaSe MC, and you all thought Christmas was over. Welcome to the Jungle…
TRUE COLLECTIVES Consisting of Ben Armstrong and Dominic Markes, True Collectives have been regular deckhands at ARAF over the last year playing some of the finest cuts, grooves and mixes to be recorded on vinyl. However, for our first birthday party they have left the decks in the capable hands of Jive Ass Slippers and brought a full band to perform tracks from their recent album release, Meanwhile, Love. Ben and Dom started working together in 2003 and in 2006 they began a yearlong residency at the Ministry of Sound. Between then and now, they have been working in production and in 2011 joined Nostalgia, the UK’s original steel pan band, playing Notting Hill Carnival, the opening ceremony London’s 2012 Olympic Games and Shanghai’s Festival of Tourism. Meanwhile, Love was launched to a crowded Westminster Reference Library last November and ARAF is thrilled to bring it to Waterloo.
JIVE ASS SLIPPERS (DJ Set) From the Big Top at Bestival, Araf are pleased to announce the return of Mr Jive Ass Slippers for a late-night vinyl set. Bringing with him a warming array of Soul, Funk, Disco and House, Mr Slippers will guide you into through the bleak mid-winter with his white hot decks. All you need is a pipe….
THIS WEEK’S THEME: THE WALKING CITY
2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary ‘The Walking City’ - a metropolis on legs which could freely roam the post-atomic globe. It was the brain child of Ron Herron who was a member of Archigram: a band of 1960s architects who published designs for ‘far out’ technological utopias which drew on science fiction comics and pop art. Previous designs by Herron included ‘The Virtual Olympics’ where competitors could compete via television headsets, a radical suggestion in a pre-internet period, and ‘The Plug-In City’ where airships would transport a series of audio-visual display systems and exhibits across the country, again prophetically recognising that ‘information would become the hard currency of the future’. The Walking City project anticipated a ‘fast-paced urban lifestyle of a technologically advanced society in which one need not be tied down to a permanent location’.. A critical article in the International Times likened Herron’s mega structures to dystopian war machines, to which Herron responded: ‘I’d always seen it differently, as an object which moved slowly across the earth like a giant hovercraft, using only its legs as a levelling device when it settled on its site. To me, it was a rather friendly-looking machine’
TY I C L A E R N U dreams,
passers-by. ty full of Unreal city, cis in broad daylight cling toMen’ 1857 Where ghost delaire ‘The Seven Old Charles Bau The very lifeblood of capitalism, the city, stands in the background of every story told. Howeve r, coinciden the city itself is city were ce that the novel a a text. It is no n born simu ltaneouslyd the industrial . Th e in th city’s se e row ntan s of ces sp quain ider t wo -web r ker’ a s cot round u tage s, thes:
concrete fingers of 60s estates p and the polished sho fronts of the High Street. The grammar of the streets. As Roland Barthes once noted ‘the city is writing, the man moves about in the city is a sort of reader’.
e street…
He died crossing th
We cannot escape the cit its characters. We do no y and its storytelling. In fa t just read the city’s ‘writ are written into its ‘reading in ’.
ty’s his ay I carr y my cit is de d ry ve e d an r e I am a London es; my character developmen o sh y m f o soles
e
who
act, we are ng’ but we
e ckets and on th story in my po y very urbanism. etermined by m
The city is a narrator. It booms instructions down from its typewriter.
the by stories the city d writes for us. e t na i m do are The very spectacular s nature of the live r u metropolis with its O nine million citizens, distracts us from our own memories and lived experiences. With every lamp post, blue plaque, brothel, castle and tower block, the city is telling the story it wants us to remember; forcing us to play the part which it has assigned us.
In the late 1950s, a radical group of writers and artists attempted to recalibrate our relationship to the city and thus to Capitalism itself. The Situationists, as they were known, suggested a method of moving towards ‘reading’ the city rather than being ‘read to’ by the city:The dérive (or ‘drift’).The dérive developed out of Baudelaire’s literary notion of the flâneur (‘a person who walks the city in order to experience it’) and existed as a means of measuring the ‘psychogeographic’ formations of place. Psychogeography was defined as ‘the study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions of the individuals’ and attempts to activate and record place within psychological experience. Guy Debord, one of the founders of the Situationists, published an instructional essay on how to conduct a dérive. He writes, ‘In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a derivé point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.’ The d demandérive is thus of curr s of your p a letting go meand ents and ung er son; a foll of all owing uided d of placeer. ‘A destinatio ir e c t io ’. n of spac In the new -less explo n. A car togr e, one forg psychogeog ration aphy: es a n r ew poaphy etic
r y.
it
to ys
u Yo
nc w ro
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Wasteland’ 1922
Debord notes ‘One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.’ He suggests the space of a dérive can be ‘delimited or vague’ depending ‘on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself ’. Debord writes ‘the maximum area of the spatial field [should] not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambience: a single neighbourhood or even a single block of houses’. The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. Meanwhile ‘the influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favourable for dérives.’ A dérive is a literar y vic e for stepping off the page You can only becomede . a reader if you cease be ing a character.
However is this possible? I have, after all, written in sentences, followed average grammar and told stories . Have I not built a city on the page?
Ankita Saxena Ankita is a seventeen year old poet who is a member of both the Barbican Young Poets group and the Burn After Reading Collective. She has been commended three times in the Foyles Young Poets of the Year Award and been published by Storm Books, Cuckoo Quarterly and The Cadaverine. Ankita writes: ‘As a Londoner from Delhi, cities feature in a lot of my poetry’ and it is this urban emphasis that made her work so very appropriate for the theme of this issue.
Halesworth Layover
Corrugated Captivity
London has stamped us with a need for coffee-shops on every second street. Un-caffeinated, we stumble on, as if mid-evening was pre-dawn. We speak of all the Saturday nights they’d spend in kitchen clean up fights. All the hours online shopping, Because the nearest store’s not walking. I think of train-ride free-range rants because there is no ‘Metro’ stand. At home my crumpled coffee sleeve becomes my instant light relief. They say the country air is sweeter; it’s true: our dreams are made of sweetener.
from this bridge I see a whole city waking to the sirens of a mother a bare-breasted mother rearing children ‘til her childhood scabs rearing children ‘til her premature family incubates in a too hot un-house a premature family of bare-chested boys repairing corrugated roof-tops of corrugated girls drooped with shackles of weeding gold of infants weeding in the undergrowth of monsoon-puddled playgrounds all finding Home in the undergrowth of this whole holed city
Times Square, Fall Season, 2013
Becoming Maternal
daydreams littered like deadbeats on the red line, uptown
The girl was thirteen and a star was born under Kingston bridge. She was an Emma Watson sound-alike; she took a hard line on rock and lived life imitating art
an autistic boy’s missing and everyone’s relocated to the first carriage because he twists his hands funny and his teeth threaten collapse the city’s on the stretchers, hiding skeletons and ghosts under coats so we resort to the backwaters where motels gain TV licenses quicker than vacuum cleaners behind us, is a false daze it’s not really dawning, but outside, you can see the dawn
because watching Bridget Jones’ Diary was the closest thing she got to weekly confession. Her wedding was planned out far from river Thames, and her honeymoon would never feature a toilet-rolled one bedroom with half-whipped kisses and Asda white wine. But his voice was only a drone in the rainclouds, and she got struck but could never track it down. The ring he gave her was the overkill ‘Cocktail’ at quarter past two, and her romantic retreat was the ten hour hangover the morning after the star was born under Kingston bridge. Light-years later, it too would explode.
Ange Mukeza - Concrete
www.ange-mukeza.co.uk
NEXT ISSUE THEME: “CONSUMER” DEADLINE : 3RD FEBRUARY 2014. OPEN CALL: Send submissions to arafcollective@live.co.uk
live music from
HATTIE WHITEHEAD THE DALLAS GUILD DJs & more acts t.b.c.