SMELLIN’ SALTS
[NO. 3]
FREE
‘A REVIVIN’ WHIFF FOR THE MODERN NOSE’ BY ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON, APRIL 2013
THIS ZINE WAS NOT BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE BULLINGDON BOYS. (THE CHEAP PAPER IS A GIVEAWAY!)
ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON is a not-for profit organisation, with an aim to unite early career musicians, artists, writers, and performers seeking a testing ground for new projects or inspiration for new collaborations with an enthusiastic, interested, critical and creative audience. You don’t need proof of a paying fanclub to perform with us! You just need a great sound, a bad attitude,or a wild idea. We actively opt out of any commercial interests: the interests of Araf Collective are personal and reactionary; a creative site of resistance against ‘arts cuts’ culture... And before you ask...
‘ARAF’ (pronounced ‘ARAV’) is Welsh for ‘SLOW’. SO TAKE YOUR TIME AND ENJOY
THIS MONTH’S EVENTS:
ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON are proud to present : ‘LIGHTHOUSE’ at THE WRECK no. 3,
Camberwell, 25.04.13
featuring
SHARLEENA RAY/ CEASE
MC/ THE CAULFIELD BEATS
FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE! And THIS, the Third Edition of Free Zine...
SMELLIN’ SALTS featuring
THE BANDS, ART, OPINIONS, POETRY and more!
FOR PERUSAL AT YOUR LEISURE!
>>>>>>>>>>FUTURE ARAF EVENTS FOR YOUR DIARY>>>>>>>>>
23/04/13-LIGHTHOUSE @ THE WRECK 4: ABBEY 15/05/13- DEADLINE: SMELLIN’ SALTS
08/06/13- THE BIG NOISE FESTIVAL
JUNE(DATE
TBA)
BOWDEN, KATE THRELFALL, SENSE DEPARTMENT
: FRUIT MACHINE no. 2:
issue 4: OPEN CALL!
Call for Participants
ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON THANKS PROFUSELY: Rob @ THE WRECK, SHARLEENA RAY, CEASE MC, CAULFIELD BEATS Contributers to this issue: O.P.G., H.A., E.L., T.W., J.E., E.W. T.H, And you, our Salt Sniffers and Lighthouse Keepers. P.S. Yes, SMELLIN’ SALTS is a nod to the mid-70s Punk Zine SNIFFIN’ GLUE:oh those heady days of tippex & xerox...
completed a degree in classical music, Sharleena Ray soon began to explore the distant sounds beyond her early training. On her world tour into the unknown, Sharleena has worked as a backing singer for artists in the fields of Nigerian Yorubeat, American-Folk and Cuban HipHop alongside taking leading roles with The OneTaste Collective and Shasta Tribe. Her relationship with the Tribe began with a chance encounter with sound mechanic ‘The Snatcha’ who guided her towards electronic production and therein began another journey of discovery. Born and bred in Camden but Polish at heart, Sharleena is an atlas of sounds and talents; a pith helmet full of soul. ARAF are pleased to welcome this traveller to The Wreck for one night only. Give your ears a Camberwell safari…
Having
SHARLEENA RAY
Writing lines and dropping beats since fifteen, South London Rapper CeaSe MC brings his intelligent, introspective and lyrical style to April’s Lighthouse At The Wreck. The poetic and spiritual nature of his lyrics and the soulful feel of his music are both rooted in CeaSe’s youth. The son of Jamaican immigrants, CeaSe’s first exposure to music was undoubtedly Reggae and as a teenager he was exposed to religion and spirituality first hand in the streets of Streatham. Although his engagement with spirituality was perhaps suffocating, it provided him with an outlook on life that goes beyond what we are taught to think and see. His relationship with Hip-Hop began in the London Battle and Open-Mic Scene, most notably in the now defunct powerhouse underground venues such as Kung-Fu and Raw Deal. It was in places such as these that the lightning and thunder of Hip-Hop’s live performance drew CeaSe to the tonight’s stage. Give your ears a spiritual experience…
These Araf Collective London favourites are back. Following the success of their latest EP release ‘Garage Electronics No. 1’, TCB have been a hot act on the electronic/ garage music scene playing various sold out venues throughout London. This East London garageelectronica three piece provide a total immersive environment combining live-sequenced visualisations with what have been called ‘digital electro-collages’. The result is an unforgettable mix of sight, sound and satisfaction drawing on bit-torrent, Namco and bricolage cultures; rescuing electronic music from its current polished complacency only suitable for River Island changing rooms. The Caulfield Beats are a delicious mix of danger and satisfaction; an irresistible cocktail for all the senses. Give your ears a stiff drink…
THE CAULFIELD BEATS
ARAF COLLECTIVE PRESENTS...
CeaSe MC
THIS MONTH
>>ARAF NEWSFLASH >> WHAT WE GOT UP TO THIS MONTH>>
L
FRUIT MACHINE
IGHTHOUSE at the wreck, 25.03.13 was DEAFENINGLY GOOD. The packedout Wreck rocked to THE FAIRY JAIL’s raucous rendition of ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ , BENEDICT wowed us with his musical talent and THE HOLLOW GIANTS made sure that our ears were ringing well into April!!
F
RUIT MACHINE no. 1, 08.04.13 the pilot of ARAF Collectives’ free entry ‘ideas-jam’ at the pub, took us all by suprise! Thank you to everyone who came down to participate and listen, what a great crowd! Discussions and presentations on wide ranging subjects including London’s cinema architecture as social space, Ray Charles and gospel music, and British Pop art and the schizophrenic 1960s London, as well as readings of super poetry and prose, and screening of 1930s short nature films thrown in... An excellent night for all fans of Pensive Pondering over Pints, Pork Scratchings, Poetry, and Powerpoint Projections! Want to present YOUR ideas over a pint? Join us next time!! FRUIT MACHINE NO. 2, JUNE EDITION! OPEN CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS! ARAF COLLECTIVE’s MOUTHY YOUNGER SISTER EVENT, FRUIT MACHINE, is an OPEN FORUM IDEAS-JAM/ DISCUSSION GROUP HELD IN a PUB.
IDEAS JAM AT THE PUB, 2 !
OPEN CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS EXACT DATE & VENUE TBA. LOOK OUT FOR DETAILS. SOMEWHERE IN CAMBERWELL,
ANYONE is WELCOME to present/ discuss on ANY TOPIC for 10 minutes, to a friendly pub audience. DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SHARE with us? Want to show us an art work in progress, read us a poem, give your opinion on something, show us your research, etc. over a pint? AV equipment is available. SURPRISE US! DROP US AN EMAIL! email arafcollective@live.co.uk
A true story excerpt from:
A Jukebox With A Conscience: Confessions Of A Hotel Pianist by E.L.
Sitting at the piano, I play a few romantic songs to serenade the many couples out for dinner, exchanging gifts and staring into each other’s eyes. Timeless songs like The Way You Look Tonight and My Funny Valentine go down well, prompting knowing smiles. However, I avoid the temptation to play Let’s Get It On, which is perhaps a little too far. At moments like this, I feel immensely powerful, knowing that the atmosphere in the room is completely at my mercy; the human jukebox can spoil the atmosphere at any moment, launching into anything that might spoil the mood. Hit The Road Jack by Ray Charles? I Hate Everything About You by Three Days Grace? Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit…? I resist the overwhelming temptation with all of these (in all honesty, I can only actually play one of them) and continue to play appropriate music; after all, I am being paid to do this. Looking around the room, I see a middle-aged woman, sitting on the sofa by the piano, gently conducting with her glass of wine. She is a regular guest, always alone and always in seemingly deep thought; one of the many lonely people whose background I can only make guesses at. She smiles up at the piano as I play. ‘Can you do something old?’ she asks, in a delicate English accent. After some clarification we establish that she means George Gershwin, so I break into ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. Suddenly animated, she leaps up and leans on the piano in a seductive manner which alarms me a little. ‘Will they mind if I stand here?’ She asks. ‘I’ve been kicked out of so many bars, you see!’ I wonder why, and my face evidently betrays a growing anxiety about what may be in store, as she goes on to defend herself. ‘What? If somebody’s talking shit, why can’t I pour wine over their head?’ Suddenly, I’m concentrating very hard on my piano solo – a trusty technique at awkward moments such as this. Before she has a chance to say anything else, I cut her off and begin singing another verse. I can feel her eyes on me, but refuse to meet them, continuing to smile out at others in the room. Among them are the giggling bar staff who refuse to come to my aid. As I finish playing, I catch her eye. She is still staring, chin propped up on her fist as she leans over the piano keys. As the last chord rings out, she utters a word I hoped never to hear from somebody my mother’s age: ‘Yummy…’ My heart skips a few beats and I feel the blood rush to my reddening face. I quickly excuse myself and take an early break. Defeated, she returns to the sofa, stumbling as she does so.
Read more at:
www.jukeboxwithaconscience.blogspot.com
Eleanor Wemyss is an artist and curator. Her interests lie in communicating elements of site-specific significance, utilising archival data, maps, architectural and city plans. This drawing, ‘Round and Round’, (2012) is exemplary of her ongoing investment in repetitive, hand-drawn techniques, and has been realised by tracing simple objects, exactly one millimetre apart. www.eleanorwemyss.com
POMOEROTICA 3000 by AUTHOR
Despite the best efforts of the doctors, their jacket pockets crammed with pens, to convince him otherwise, the patient refused to believe his own psychosis. That author of mine has done this on purpose, locked me in this institution with its yellow wallpaper. A sane man trapped in a mad house, it’s a cracking read. Page turning action. And you all thought I would resolve my conflicts by this conclusion. Bang. Finish me up quickly. Home for tea, cake and bondage porn on the Kindle. But, ahhhhaha, no. The author didn’t want to finish the story there. He can squeeze a sequel out of me, maybe a trilogy. I’ll be in Waterstones by Christmas, you see. Publishers must love him: he’s more businessman than writer. His spelling, grammar and style is appalling: he fills my head with semi-colons, bad jokes, repetitions and unending paragraphs. Bet you think you’re clever don’t you? Sitting above me stroking your chin and writing all this self-reflexive nonsense into my life story. ‘Postmodernist’ I bet he tells all the lovely young ladies at the tennis club. But I’ve got to live it; I’m down here fighting for my survival on the page; clinging to every apostrophe and full stop. I’m fucking pulp without a pulse. He made my mother a stereotype to sell his work; so adorable that the reader still weeps on the tube between Acton Town and Barons Court. Cathartic commuting they call it: weeping on the Piccadilly Line; vomiting on the Bakerloo. The Circle Line of life. Didn’t think of me did Mr Author? I had to watch her fade from the page while my supposed father, lost in a haze of scotch and filter-tips, wrote himself into the textbooks. Discovered DNA they tell me. That old fart with his wandering eye discovering the language of life…Bollocks. There was more Gene Vincent than Genome about that man. That man could hardly spell his own name, let alone write a genetic code. Another ‘postmodern trope’ you might say, ‘the discoverer of DNA mirrors the author’. Oh, what a genius this writer is. Clever boy, give him a glittering award for bullshit. How my mother loved, in clumsy sentences, my paternal creation. I was only a kid when she was written out. Could he have not waited a few chapters before she was killed off? Just a few paragraphs so I didn’t have to face the world he created with only a bullying and empty postmodern conceit as guidance. No, of course not. That wouldn’t make an interesting page-turning money-making popular novel would it? It’s understandable of course. I mean people like to read of misery; it sells the author’s books. My story makes your own problems look microscopic. How can you worry about the mortgage when a boy is beaten senseless by his frustrated father? How can that deadline matter when a young mother lies on her deathbed? It cannot. I hate you, reader, as you bury yourself in my life to escape your own story. Do you not have a shred of guilt? A slither of humanity? Can you not see how you are yourself being manipulated by your author to sell your own books? You are but a character in a story meant for publication. A story, written by businessmen calling themselves authors, where nothing is real but still turns a profit. Your character development is, at best, wooden; you are a literary archetype constructed to cause catharsis on the commute. Pomoerotica is always empty, knotted nonsense, just fucking pulp without a pulse, and neither you nor I can escape it. We are all pornstars. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, their jacket pockets crammed with pens, to convince you otherwise, the patient refused to believe his own psychosis.
PHOTO: HAZEL A., WYTHE AVENUE SIDEWALK SALE, BROOKLYN NEW YORK, 2006
After a week in New York I have only started discovering what this vibrant and gigantic city has to offer. I feel especially lucky to see New York for my first time in the Spring -the nicest season to be here according to its many locals. I have so far spent my days walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn, armed with two cameras – one film camera for ‘the cool pictures’, one digital for ‘the funny ones’. After exploring Greenwich, Soho, Downtown and Williamsburg, my next destination was Chelsea in West Manhattan. Chelsea is a rather quiet – although, I’m not sure anywhere in Manhattan can actually be called quiet – charming, yet thrilling area. On one side (East of the 10th Avenue) it is a typical Manhattan neighbourhood, with stunning traditional red brick houses and spring-trees along the pavement. On the other side of 10th Avenue and along the Hudson river, Chelsea is a faded industrial zone populated now by some of the most influential art dealers in the world, itself called ‘The Galleries District.’ The gathering of these two atmospheres makes Chelsea quintessentially ‘Manhattan’, and that is why I loved it so: the edgy industrial (and now arty) world of the converted warehouses meets a bohemian chic that recalls the Village with its beautiful buildings and its many restaurants and cafes.
ARAF’s Letter From America Made in Chelsea, NY : A French Londoner in NYC by JUSTINE DO ESPIRITO As I work in the contemporary art sector, I was pretty curious to see what the Galleries District had to offer. Here, the world’s biggest galleries set-up in the 1990s, including Gagosian, Pace, Gladstone, Haunch of Venison. I therefore arrived early in Chelsea on another warm and sunny Spring day. After having visited so many galleries in the past few years I should be used to it, but I always forget that, when you go to any ‘art district’ in the world, such Mayfair in London or Le Marais in Paris, at least half of the galleries will be closed for de-installation. And that was the case in Chelsea. Yet I saw a couple of very good shows: an incredible installation by Miroslaw Balka at Gladstone Gallery (520 W21st street, until 20 April) and an exhibition of new paintings by Adrain Ghenie at Pace Gallery (534 W25th street, until 4 May). Of course I only went to a few galleries (there are around 250), but after a couple of hours of artseeing, I felt pretty hungry. I hadn’t yet tried the renowned ‘New York Bagel’ since my arrival, but I am a huge fan of these chewy round breads and a regular customer of the Brick Lane Bagel shops. I therefore opted for Murray’s Bagels (242 8th Avenue, between 22nd and 23rd streets), said to be the best bagel place in Manhattan. I was rather shocked when I saw the size of my ‘Tuna basics’ sandwich, definitely twice the size of a Brick Lane bagel, but still it was delicious. After lunch I carried on walking around Chelsea and reached the High Line, the suspended park which opened in 2009 on the former elevated New York Central Railroad. By the time I got
on the promenade, it was early afternoon and the sun was high and bright, it was now 21° (or 69.8° Fahrenheit if you want to stay local)! The High Line is a magnificent example of successful urban planning. New Yorkers and tourists come up there to relax, being both outside and inside the city at the same time. People can enjoy great views of the city, a landscape of industrial buildings decorated with murals and amazing new buildings, especially the fantastic Standard hotel, built on top of the High Line. On this amazingly warm April afternoon, a lot of people were sunbathing on the benches, while I was taking as many pictures as I could (both cool and fun ones). The High Line finishes in the Meatpacking District, in North-West Greenwich. Former home to slaughter houses and packing plants, this small neighbourhood has now become Manhattan’s new trendy hot spot, with its many boutiques, art galleries, restaurants and nightclubs. I was so eager to discover the area and walk around for another two hours: in New York, you just never want to stop. But I had been walking for quite a few hours and my feet were dying. It was 4 o’clock and yet still sunny and warm: time for a beer! (for one must not forget those old British Habits even on the Yanks’ side of the ocean). I sat at the shaded terrace of Spanish bar and sipped a fresh Corona. Although I was the only one on the terrace drinking alcohol at that time of the afternoon, I felt so happy to be in one of the coolest places in the world, enjoying its wonderful weather and, of course, a beer.
‘lonely cactus’ by Tiffany Horan THIS ZINE IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOU MAKE ITSend submissions for MAY arafcollective@live.co.uk follow us: @ARAFCollective
check us out : www.arafcollectivelondon.com
ARAF ARTZ GALLERY
This picture is by ________ DRAW AT THE GIG, TWEET IT TO US & WE’LL PROJECT IT ON THE WALL (UNLESS ITS A COCK.) @ARAFCollective
ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON PRESENTS
LIGHTHOUSE AT THE
WRECK 4
@ THE RECREATION GROUND
FREE LIVE MUSIC CAMBERWELL ABBEY BOWDEN 30 MAY KATE THRELFALL 7PM SENSE DEPARTMENT