Slayer
2
1 Wristband 4 Venues 14 Stages 18 Hours of Music 60+ Acts
Simple Things returns in 2015 for two days of musical innovation in Bristol. Friday sees an Opening Concert from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, before the main festival programme on the Saturday takes place in the four hubs of Colston Hall, the Firestation, the O2 Academy and Lakota. This year promises to showcase an unparalleled breadth of music at what is the UK’s premier multi-venue event.
Opening Concert Friday 23 October 8pm - 11pm Colston Hall, Bristol Tickets from £23.00 + BF
Tickets from £29.50 + BF simplethingsfestival.co.uk tickets.crackmagazine.net
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Simple Things Festival
Skepta & JME Battles Savages
Live Lone Danny L Harle Romare Vessels Vessel Speedy Ortiz Liturgy Jam City Lower Dens Nicole Willis The Soft Moon Oliver Wilde Chastity Belt Long Arm Grumbling Fur Khruangbin Loyle Carner
DJ Galcher Lustwerk nd_baumecker Avalon Emerson Discodromo Moxie Futureboogie Studio 89 Pardon My French Gramrcy Strange Fruits Malestripper Kokoro The Quietus DJs
Live Penguin Cafe Wire Factory Floor Dean Blunt Holly Herndon HEALTH   DJ Funk DJ Ron Trent Mike Skinner Objekt Untold Hunee Helena Hauff Barnt
Saturday 24 October 12pm - 6am Various Venues, Bristol
Rock up, pop up and chill out!
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ROOTS MANUVA LIVE MIKE SKINNER (DJ) KOSHEEN LIVE MJ COLE STANTON WARRIORS JERU THE DAMAJA LIVE KOAN SOUND SUBMOTION ORCHESTRA LIVE THE BEATNUTS LIVE JEFF MILLS DERRICK MAY MIDLAND PAUL WOOLFORD LEON VYNEHALL FUNKINEVEN RYAN ELLIOTT SAN PROPER JEREMY UNDERGROUND MARQUIS HAWKES BILL BREWSTER ALFRESCO DISCO DJS SHAPES DJS DAVID RODIGAN FOREIGN BEGGARS LIVE DUB PHIZIX & STRATEGY BANDULU SHOWCASE KAHN & NEEK HI5GHOST BOOFY FLOWDAN SAM BINGA FT. REDDERS DURKLE DISCO FT. LAMONT KOAST TS2W JAY DROP FIREMAN SAM SPECIAL GUEST: KURUPT FM CALYX & TEEBEE HAZARD ED RUSH BREAK SPECTRASOUL LENZMAN BENNY PAGE ED SOLO RANDALL FRE4KNC DESPICABLE YOUTH SKIBADEE SP:MC GQ LX ONE SHABBA D REMIDY DIGITAL MYSTIKZ FT. SGT POKES YOUNGSTA SUKH KNIGHT COMMODO CHANNEL ONE ABA SHANTI-I O.B.F SOUND TOKYO HIFI DUTTY GIRL REGGAE ROAST BILLE D BY STA GES A RTISTS BILLED G E NE RAL RE L E ASE TICKE TS £30 - WWW.TOKYOWO R L D.O R G
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Exhibitions Exhibitions
Highlights Highlights
Eloise Lives on Wire EloiseHawser: Hawser: Lives on Wire 1 Jul 2015 – 6 Sep 2015 1 Jul 2015 – 6 Sep 2015 Lower Gallery Lower Gallery
Isa Basic Research Paintings IsaGenzken: Genzken: Basic Research Paintings 1 Jul 2015 – 6 Sep 2015 1 Jul 2015 – 6 Sep 2015 Upper Gallery Upper Gallery
Everything EverythingisisArchitecture: Architecture:Bau BauMagazine Magazinefrom fromthe the60s 60s and and 70s 70s 2929 JulJul 2015 –– 2727Sep 2015 Sep2015 2015 ICA Fox Reading ICA Fox ReadingRoom Room
Adam AdamLinder: Linder:Choreographic ChoreographicService ServiceNo. No.3: 3:Some Some Riding Riding
Events Events Workshop: Membranes, muscles Workshop: Membranes, muscles machines andand machines 8 Aug, Sat Sat 8 Aug, artists Mark Peter Wright JoinJoin artists Mark Peter Wright andand Helena Hunter a workshop Helena Hunter on aonworkshop on on listening sound practice. listening andand sound practice. Influence of Isa Genzken: TheThe Influence of Isa Genzken: Panel Disucssion + Screening Panel Disucssion + Screening 12 Aug, 6.30pm WedWed 12 Aug, 6.30pm Architect David Kohn in conversation Architect David Kohn in conversation Silka Rittson-Thomas withwith Silka Rittson-Thomas andand ICAICA Executive Director Gregor Muir. Executive Director Gregor Muir. Screening Event: Wild Lines Screening Event: Wild Lines 19 Aug WedWed 19 Aug Explores the use of sound in Explores the use of sound in experimental film, video, music and experimental film, video, music and expanded cinema practice. expanded cinema practice.
8 Sep 2015 –– 1313Sep 8 Sep 2015 Sep2015 2015 Upper Gallery Upper Gallery
Eloise Hawser: ErEr and other Conductors Eloise Hawser: and other Conductors Thu Aug, 8pm Thu 2727 Aug, 8pm A newly commissioned performanceinin A newly commissioned performance collaboration with Kara SarkodieMenMencollaboration with Kara Sarkodie AERIAL and House LadyDi.Di. sahsah of of AERIAL and House ofofLady Artist Self-Publishers’ Fair (ASP) Artist Self-Publishers’ Fair (ASP) Sep SatSat 1212 Sep inaugural one-day ArtistSelf-PubSelf-PubTheThe inaugural one-day Artist lishers’ (ASP) Fair, featuring over50 50UK UK lishers’ (ASP) Fair, featuring over and international independentartists artists and international independent self-publishers. self-publishers. Culture Now: Culture Now: Jaakko Pallasvuo Jaakko Pallasvuo 7 Aug, 1pm FriFri 7 Aug, 1pm Adam Linder Adam Linder Fri 11 Sep, 1pm Fri 11 Sep, 1pm
Artists’ Film Club: Friday Salon: On Skeuomorphism Artists’ Film Club: Friday Salon: On Skeuomorphism An Afternoon with Mike Kuchar with Fri 21 Aug, 2pm An Afternoonintroduction with Mike Kuchar with Fri 21 Aug, 2pm Director’s A discussion on the art of replicating an introduction A discussion the art of replicating an to Director’s Wed 5 Aug, 6.45pm artefact inon a form which is appropriate Wed 5 Aug, 6.45pm artefact in a form which is appropriate to another medium. another medium. Li Ran Li Ran Wed 26 Aug, 6.45pm Wed 26 Aug, 6.45pm Cinema Summer Sale: Cinema Summer Sale: 22 Jul – 20 Aug 2015 / Every Wednesday 22 Jul – 20onAug 2015 screenings / Every Wednesday 2-4-1 selected after 6pm 2-4-1 on selected screenings after 6pm
Institute of Contemporary Arts Institute of Contemporary The Mall London SW1Y Arts 5AH The020 Mall7930 London SW1Y 5AH 3647, www.ica.org.uk 020 7930 3647, www.ica.org.uk
Film Film ICA ICACinematheque: Cinematheque:Offside Offside Aug––15 15Sep Sep2015 2015 44Aug
Seasonofofscreenings screeningsininresponse response to to films films Season thatemploy employfootball footballas asaadevice device through through that whichtotoexplore explorewider widersocial socialand and political political which questions. Offside (4 Aug) and Zidane: questions. Offside (4 Aug) and Zidane: AA 21stCentury CenturyPortrait Portrait(18 (18Aug). Aug). 21st
TheDance DanceofofReality Reality The From21 21Aug Aug From Producedand anddirected directedby byAlejandro Alejandro Produced Jodorowsky, his first film in 23 years. years. Jodorowsky, his first film in 23 RocksininMy MyPockets Pockets++Shorts Shorts + + Rocks Paneldiscussion discussion Panel Sun23 23Aug, Aug,2pm 2pm Sun Crispin Glover at the ICA: It is fine! Crispin Glover at the ICA: It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE EVERYTHING IS FINE Tue 25 Aug, 7.45pm Tue 25 Aug, 7.45pm Semi-autobiographical, psycho-sexual Semi-autobiographical, psycho-sexual tale about a man with severe cerebral tale about a man with severe cerebral palsy. palsy. Catalan Avant-Garde: Born Catalan Avant-Garde: Fri 28 Aug, 8.50pm Born Fri 28 Aug, 8.50pm Director Claudio Zulian accurately reconDirector Zulian reconstructs Claudio Barcelona in theaccurately 18th century. structs Barcelona in the 18th century.
The ICA is a registered charity no. 236848
The ICA is a registered charity no. 236848
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Contents Features 22
SLAYER Over a 35-year career, Slayer has become a byword for aggression, controversy and extremity in music. But come 2015, and the thrash antagonists are a wounded beast, a vital limb severed. Geraint Davies speaks to the greatest metal band of all time, and finds them stolid, immovable and utterly Repentless
30
BEACH HOUSE Unpacking the motion of the universe: as the Baltimore duo prepare to release their fifth album, Depression Cherry, Angus Harrison meets them in London to contemplate “the inherent violence of existence”
34
VINCE STAPLES
38
DRINKS
While refusing to be moulded into the hip-hop stereotype, the Californian emcee has won widespread respect with his no-holds-barred reality rap. By Davy Reed
“I’m very funny. Tim’s kind of funny…” The breezy creative union of Cate Le Bon and White Fence’s Tim Presley has come as second nature. Sammy Jones speaks to the pair whose wistful psychedelia reflects a warm and playful friendship
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Slayer shot exclusively for Crack by Elliot Kennedy London: July 2015
DUCKTAILS As the man behind the blissful guitar riffs of Real Estate, Matt Mondanile’s Ducktails project lets him express himself with a slightly more leftfield approach. By James F. Thompson
30
46
46
SHED Dylan Thompson is granted a rare glimpse into the mind of techno’s evasive René Pawlowitz
48
Regulars 15
Bye then
THOMAS HIRSCHHORN The acclaimed Swiss installation artist has brought the disconcerting sight of ruin – the ‘generic aftermath of a generic catastrophe’ – to the interior of the South London Gallery. Augustin Macellari reports on the bold, liminal space which Hirschhorn has created
EDITORIAL
21
TURNING POINTS: SOURCE DIRECT After an emotionally turbulent ten year hiatus, Jim Baker of the legendary jungle outfit opens up to Tom Watson about advancing the genre, the duo’s separation, and his own reawakening
48 54
AESTHETIC: SIOBHAN BELL The rising DJ, promoter and NTS resident channels the infectious energy of her music in our styled fashion shoot
78
DIGRESSIONS Baines’ World, Tall Order with Eminem, the crossword and advice from Denzil Schnifferman
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20 QUESTIONS: JULIO BASHMORE Following the roaring success of his sexy, summery album Knockin’ Boots, we thought we’d call the Bristolian house producer to ask him about Slipknot, Dungeons & Dragons and Debenhams cafe
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PERSPECTIVE According to Terre Thaemlitz, aka DJ Sprinkles, Japan’s notorious ‘no-dancing’ laws are embroiled with issues of unspoken power. In a piece titled Trapped between legislative visibility and active invisibility, she reflects on what its revision really means
1st Room One �
Visionquest Ryan Crosson Lee Curtiss Shaun Reeves Ion Ludwig (live) Brett Johnson Room Two �
Terry Francis Silent Servant Dave Clarke & Mr Jones B2B Room Three �
Hudd Traxx 10th Anniversary Brett Johnson Iron Curtis (live) Eddie Leader Tomson
fabric August � www.fabriclondon.com
15th Room One �
Craig Richards Scuba Neil Landstrumm (live) Mr. Tophat and Art Alfie Room Two �
Marcel Dettmann Ron Morelli Lee Gamble
22nd Room One �
fabric 83: Joris Voorn Launch Joris Voorn Craig Richards Sebastian Mullaert (live) Mosca Room Two �
Terry Francis Agoria Clockwork Stephen Brown (live) Room Three �
Extraño Awanto 3 Rob Cockerton Ivan Kutz Scott Rozario Harry Ludermann
8th
29th
Acid Future After Dark
Room One �
Room One �
Seth Troxler The Martinez Brothers Craig Richards Phil Moffa (live) Enzo Tedeschi Room Two �
Jackmaster & Jasper James B2B Recondite (live) Terry Francis
Craig Richards Ricardo Villalobos Nastia Nicolas Lutz Room Two �
Terry Francis Ben Klock Room Three �
Warm Prosumer Ali Tillett Ollie Seaman Myles Mears Rob Summerhayes
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Issue 55
Executive Editors Thomas Frost tom@crackmagazine.net Jake Applebee jake@crackmagazine.net Editor Geraint Davies geraint@crackmagazine.net Marketing / Events Manager Luke Sutton luke@crackmagazine.net Deputy Editor Davy Reed
Junior Editor Anna Tehabsim Online Editor Billy Black Junior Online Editor Sammy Jones Editorial Assistant Duncan Harrison Creative Director Jake Applebee Art Direction & Design Alfie Allen Graphic Design Yasseen Faik Marketing / Events Assistant Lucy Harding Staff Writer Tom Watson Film Editor Tim Oxley Smith Art Editor Augustin Macellari Intern Gunseli Yalcinkyaa Fashion Roo Lewis, Jake Hunte, Charli Avery, Joel Benjamin Words Josh Baines, Denzil Schniffermann, Xavier Boucherat, Angus Harrison, James F. Thompson, Dylan Thompson, Jill Blackmore Evans, Harry Reddick, Robert McCallum, Rachel Mann, Farah Hayes, Aine Devaney, Josie Roberts, Francis Blagburn, Billie Monnier-Stokes, Tamsyn Aurelia-Eros Black, David Cloth, Terre Thaemlitz, Alfie Allen Photography Elliot Kennedy, Tom Johnson, Antonio Curcetti, Federico Ferrari, Juan José Ortiz, Rian Davidson, Chloé Rosolek, Camille Blake, Stephen Flad , Khris Cowley, Camille Blake, Mark Blower, Andy Keate Illustration Toby Leigh, James Burgess Advertising To enquire about advertising and to request a media pack: advertising@crackmagazine.net CRACK is published by Crack Industries Ltd © All rights reserved. All material in Crack magazine may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of Crack Industries Ltd. Crack Magazine and its contributors cannot accept any liability for reader discontent arising from the editorial features. Crack Magazine reserves the right to accept or reject any article or material supplied for publication or to edit this material prior to publishing. Crack magazine cannot be held responsible for loss or damage to supplied materials. The opinions expressed or recommendations given in the magazine are the views of the individual author and do not necessarily represent the views of Crack Industries Ltd. We accept no liability for any misprints or mistakes and no responsibility can be taken for the contents of these pages.
CRACK WAS CREATED USING EEK Trinity KAGOULE It Knows It YOUNG CHRIS Racks ft. Future DONMONIQUE ION HELM Olympic Mess JANET JACKSON No Sleep RP BOO Kemosabe CHILDBIRTH Nasty Grrls SLICK RICK
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.” If you’d told me when I joined Crack, four-and-a-half years ago, that one day I’d be Editor, I’d have told you to eff off and stop yanking my chain. If you’d told me three years ago, when I was appointed Editor, that one day I’d use my position and influence round here to successfully transform this magazine into Kerrang! by ramming Slayer – actual Slayer – on the cover, I’d have said: in my dreams, mate. And now, as I sit here having achieved just that, much like Alexander the Great when he basically completed the world, I think to myself: where can I go from here? What I’m getting at is, this’ll be my final issue as Editor. It’s not really because of Slayer, I don’t really think I’m like Alexander the Great. It’s for many reasons, but the timing feels right. It just makes sense. I’m not going to get too sentimental, but watching Crack grow from a tiny operation into what it is today is a source of indescribable pride to me. I’ve got no doubt at all that with the team we’ve got, and with the support of our incredibly astute, honest and open-minded readers, it’s going to continue to grow and improve as I pass the role on to Davy Reed – a wonderful writer with a breadth of taste and knowledge so ridiculously on-point that I’ve been playing catch-up ever since he got here. So it’s with a stupid, burdensome, heavy heart that I say goodbye to this amazing publication, all our tireless, patient and brilliant contributors, my best friends and colleagues who I spend pretty much all my time with and never get bored of, and to the hundreds of thousands of readers who have at some point or another picked up our bundle of paper, scanned its pages and smiled. And, finally, my eternal thanks to Tom and Jake for having me. It’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. Right … SLAYAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH Geraint Davies, Editor
Hey Young World TAME IMPALA Eventually JULIA HOLTER Feel You IRON MONKEY Bad Year BENJAMIN DAMAGE Cosmonaut BRIANA MARELA Dani HAIRCUT 100 Evil Smokestacking Baby MIGUEL The Valley ORCHID I Wanna Fight WAVVES Way Too Much EMPEROR I Am The Black Wizards FUZZ Pollinate KURT VILE Pretty Pimpin OUGHT Beautiful Blue Sky MICACHU & THE SHAPES Sad
Issue 54 | crackmagazine.net
Respect Geraint Davies Umbro Boys Moony & Dez Michelle Kerr Fallon McWilliams Peter Leung Alex Pattinson The NHS MetroBoomin Earth 2.0
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Recommended
O ur g uid e t o w ha t 's g o ing o n in y o ur cit y
CLUB TO CLUB Jeff Mills, Nicholas Jaar, Mumdance & Novelist Turin, Italy 4-8 November Prices Vary
VIET CONG Scala 29 August £11.50 Viet Cong’s self-titled debut LP has been one of the most frequently spun records in the Crack office since its release; the Calgary-founded foursome’s blend of brutalist post-punk, gothic dead-eyed indie and blackened severity just keeps us creeping back for more. Plus, in their track Continental Shelf they’ve constructed a shimmering masterpiece – one of the best rock songs of the decade thus far, we’d say. Live, Viet Cong are a pulsating, overwhelmingly intense organism of jerky rhythms and vivid delivery, swapping instruments and assaulting each one with feral abandon. They’re the real deal.
TODD TERJE (LIVE) Ministry of Sound, London 29 August One third of the holy Norwegian disco trinity and younger brother to Olaf Olsen, Todd Terje has been on a higher plane since the release of Inspector Norse. Less gold members club and more cocktailbar funk, Terje isn’t ashamed about his forays into unfashionable territory in order to get the party started. Terje’s wobbling, wavering beats conjure up the images of men swanning around in palm tree-decorated shirts, thrusting their hips to a squealing, synthheavy groove. Not one for the more self-conscious clubber.
If you’re a regular Crack reader, then our enthusiasm for Club to Club’s line-up will come as no surprise. Taking place in venues across the northern Italian city of Turin, the festival’s seventh edition will see sets from the likes of Jeff Mills, Nicolas Jaar, Holly Herndon, Battles, Apparat, Lotic, Omar Souleyman, Anthony Naples, Kuedo, Dominick Fernow under his Prurient guise and Principe Discos’ DJ Nigga Fox. In keeping with a fine tradition, this year’s special concert in the grandiose, 300 year old Teatro Carignano venue will host a live set from Floating Points – which, we can say with confidence, will be totally unmissable.
NICK HÖPPNER XOYO 8 August
FUZZ Heaven 4 September £16 Everyone knows that Ty Segall is the hardest working man in garage rock, and you could argue that Fuzz is the band which truly lets him blow off steam. Formed with two members of his backing band – who he’s known since high school – Segall swapped his guitar for drum sticks, and the home jamming sessions resulted in a project which oozes with the timeless sentiments of West Coast garage rock fused with old school heavy metal. With behemoth riffs, berserk drum fills and a brilliantly trippy aesthetic, our mouths are watering at the prospect of seeing these guys live.
GOLDEN TE ACHER Rye Wax 8 August
KODE9 The Nest 7 August
NOT TING HILL CARNIVAL W10 24 August
TAURON NOWA MUZ YK A Tyler, The Creator, Autechre, Jeff Mills Katowice, Poland 20-23 August 69€ SETH TROXLER Tobacco Dock 8 August
BOOMTOWN Sherwood & Pinch, Surgeon, Infected Mushroom Nr Winchester, Hampshire 13-16 August £150 DORNIK Notting Hill Arts Club 13 August
Boomtown’s evolution from small scale cider festival to full-on adult playground has seen the festival’s appeal grow from a hardcore following to a large and devoted crowd. This year the festival has set its sights on eclecticism, employing a diverse range of acts across a selection of intricately, lovingly designed stages and arenas. Fancy Surgeon’s relentless techno in a twisted Chinatown? Or how about the gypsy punk wanderings of Gogol Bordello in a fully functioning, entirely imagined town centre where “the ground throbs and the walls dance”? Boomtown can provide both – and we’re barely scratching the surface.
One of the most striking things about this festival is the site. Set against the backdrop of an abandoned coalmine, a giant pit shaft illuminates the crumbling industrial buildings embedded amongst the stages. This mix of rugged factory architecture and contemporary culture serves as a reminder that the town of Katowice, once known for its mining industry, is now attempting to repurpose itself as a cultural hub. With the likes of progressive German composer Nils Frahm, the cult electronics of Gerald Donald’s post-Drexciya project Dopplereffekt and two generations of dub trailblazers Sherwood & Pinch performing alongside Objekt, Vessel and Fatima, the line-up suits the exploratory setting. Oh, and another striking thing: weekend tickets are just 69€.
18+ Electrowerkz 26 August
17 JEFF MILLS Studio Spaces E1 30 August
LOGOS The Victoria, Dalston 9 August
SECRET SUNDA ZE Hunee, Roman Flügel, Shanti Celeste Village Underground / Oval Space 30 August Prices Vary This August bank holiday, Secretsundaze have summoned a slew of underground heroes into Village Underground and Oval Space for an extended all-day, all-night affair. The daytime event sees lauded Panorama Bar resident Steffi play alongside Hunee, whose gleeful, genre straddling style should go down a treat while the sun’s up, while Rhythm Section/ Boiler Room don Bradley Zero will join residents James Priestley and Giles Smith. Taking things into Oval Space, the darker hours will be soundtracked by Crack favourite Roman Flügel, ascendant Bristol producer Shanti Celeste and Electric Minds’ Endian.
DESPACIO Roundhouse 10-11 September
DAVID BYRNE’S MELTDOWN Young Marble Giants, Benjamin Clementine, Sunn O))) Barbican, London 17-30 August Since 1993, Meltdown Festival has never let its reputation down. It’s the place where Pete Doherty and Grace Jones sung Disney songs with Jarvis Cocker, it’s the event which hosted Jeff Buckley’s last ever UK show and it’s been curated by the likes of Nick Cave, Yoko Ono and Massive Attack. For this year’s festival, former Talking Heads frontman and bona fide genius David Byrne has pulled together a multitude of musicians from Italy, Spain, the UK, the USA, Russia and Nigeria, showcasing afro-funk, contemporary classical, drone metal, electronica, flamenco, soul and more. Check out the full programme online and start planning.
FIELD MANEUVERS Optimo, Throwing Shade, The Black Madonna Oxfordshire 4-6 September 93 + bf
VOISKI fabric 14 August
Our first impressions of Field Maneuvers last year were pretty good: the line-up was basically impeccable, the tiny 500 capacity generated a great atmosphere and the reasonable ticket price meant that the average young person didn’t have to spend half their weekend working in a high-vis jacket to gain entry. Our favourites on the line-up for the festival’s third edition include Glasgow party starters Optimo, Three Chairs member Marcellus Pittman, Blawan, The Black Madonna, Throwing Shade, Ben Sims, Slimzee, Ryan Elliott, Freerotation organisers Steevio and Suzybee as well Jane Fitz and Jade Seattle – who’ll be in charge of 24-hour Field Moves tent once again. Give this one some thought.
NILS FR AHM Royal Albert Hall 5 August
The recent retrospective on Isa Genzken’s life and work at the MoMA in New York City was a true celebration of figure in the art world who – through a diverse and multidisciplinary body of work – has become on of contemporary art’s most enduring and pioneering figures. While exhibitions of her work are often focused on her large-scale output, the walls of the ICA’s lower gallery will be decorated with Genzken’s lesser known painting work. The works range from microscopic looks at manmade structures to more abstract portrayals of natural vistas. The abstract paintings are equally as immersive, with a dark shades and an intentionally restricted palette. Even with a medium as traditional as painting, Genzken’s method still proves to be highly innovative.
ELIJAH & SKILLIAM Corsica Studios 21 August
RICARDO VILL ALOBOS fabric 29 August
GEORGE CLINTON Electric Ballroom 8 August
ARTHUR RUSSELL’S INSTRUMENTALS Oval Space 10 August MAC DEMARCO Roundhouse 1 September
ISA GENZKEN: BASIC RESE ARCH PAINTINGS ICA 1 July - 6 September Free with day membership
MICHAEL MAYER Patterns, Brighton Venue 29 August £8/10 Brighton’s box fresh Patterns club is already earning rave reviews as the city’s most on-point dispensary for world class beats. Having taken over the space formerly known as Audio, since their May launch this lot have already shepherded such luminaries as Tama Sumo, DVS1, Nick Höppner and Optimo through their doors, and this month promoters Vanishing Point welcome a first ever trip to the Brighton coast from Kompakt boss and emotive techno titan Michael Mayer, who will spin for four whole hours. A true master to grace this already-thriving establishment.
LTJ BUKEM Village Underground 21 August
ITALOJOHNSON Studio 338 8 August
alvvayS
The self titled debut album “a timeless, modern classic.” The Line of Best Fit – 9/10
hippo CampuS Bashful Creatures
A Dream Outside
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“Young geniuses…” Nylon
“A remarkable debut” 5/5 DIY Magazine
“A triumph” 4/5 The Observer
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19
New Music
ARTIFICIAL FLOWER COMPANY
CISUM THE PAINTER
DRIPPIN Baby-faced Norwegian beatcreator Erik Spanne (aka Drippin) experiments in and around the various gaps between grime, trap, hip-hop, dub, techno, garage… you get the picture. His 2014 EP Silver Cloak is indicative of the rigidity that marks out a Drippin production (stark, icy, tribal rhythms with satisfyingly heavy drops punched throughout), but Drippin doesn’t keep all his beats for himself – the young producer made beats for bop-star duo Sicko Mobb’s mixtape Mulah in May, for example, and he worked on outspoken rapper Le1f’s Coins back in 2013. More recently, he’s been picked as part of RBMA’s Class of 2015, co-run and DJed wildly popular Oslo club night Ball Em Up, and appeared alongside Novelist in NYC in July. It’s an impressive roll call of achievements for an artist that seems inevitably on the way up.
O Memory Foam 1 Evian Christ / Fatima Al Qadiri : @iamdrippin
DOUGL AS DARE Hailing from Bridport, Dorset, Douglas Dare can be best likened to a younger, cuter James Blake with stronger vocals and less bass. Having supported contemporary classical giants Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds last year, Dare’s one of the newest additions to avant-garde label Erased Tapes – home to Rival Consoles, Kiasmos and ambient duo A Winged Victory For The Sullen. Equipped with the sparse, timely accompaniment of producerpercussionist Fabian Prynn, Dare reveals a depth and timelessness that is not overwhelmed by the clichés and banalities attributed to modern-day ivory tinkling. Dare’s debut album Whelm entwines finely engineered piano with beautifully crafted lyrics, and while both gaining approval from the scarf-wearing overlords and the music-loving masses, has also been remixed by the likes of electronic contemporaries Throwing Snow and Rival Consoles. Evocative simplicity at its finest.
O Swim 1 Son Lux / Nils Frahm : douglasdare.com
Turning 20 is scary. The care-free novelty of youth is extinguished with mathematical finality as the 'teen' suffix is finally chopped off your age, leaving in its wake the tangled realities of debt, work and existential confusion. For many of us, a twenties birthday is a chance to forget this melée and bury our heads in the sand for a night, but for Atlanta's Cisum the Painter, it’s a chance to reflect. 20, his first official release for newly launched singles label Bound Recordings, is a paean to the beginning of his third decade on earth, and a reality check on how to retain your freedom from an ever-expanding web of millennial confusion. One way he manages to effectively promote this notion is to allow himself to make, keep and savour errors. "Freestyling is more attractive for me," he explains. "I have a love for mistakes." Occasional mumbles, gaps and spaces in his delivery contribute to a playful sincerity in his tracks, the slow spontaneity of which is a befitting affectation for Cisum's richly textured crooning. Such a lo-fi quality is atypical of the high calibre club-raiding sounds coming out of Atlanta. "I'm definitely on my own wave," he says, but acknowledges a debt to other Georgia-based artists and others stateside. "I've been adapting to their ways and lifestyles, which has diversified my content and concepts." This diversity is most obvious in his production, which conjures a sprawling ambience not dissimilar to John Talabot or The xx, all the while incorporating influences like Future, Kanye and Post Malone. “Pain gives me this urge, and also pleasure, they work hand in hand for me … it is definitely an escape”. Hailing from the Stone Mountain area of Georgia – with a population just over 5000 – Cisum’s sound is one born out of isolation and ambition. Enthusiasm and remoteness all rolled into to one kaleidoscopic whole. Looking out, but staying in. There’s an alchemic quality to Cisum’s music. Influences, afterthoughts and anxieties coming together in a process of synthesis. He’s reluctantly taking on the responsibilities of adulthood and he’s ready – after two years of making music under the radar – to open the drapes and introduce the world to his sound.
O 20 1 Post Malone / Chance The Rapper : soundcloud.com/cisum-the-painter
It’s not every month we find ourselves writing a new music column about a group who have already recorded 29 albums and a compilation of “early works” but to heck with it, that’s exactly what we’re about to do. You see, sometimes, longevity and prolificness are not mutually exclusive. Artificial Flower Company have only been about since 2013 (at the very earliest) and the Salt Lake City collective – led by the mysterious A. Mitchell – have already dropped 30 full length albums on Bandcamp. Their music is an eclectic mix of folk-pop, lo-fi meanderings and psychedelic gems. There’s a lot to trudge through here and don’t expect to fall in love instantly but if you search hard enough you’ll find what you’re looking for.
O Taffy Town 1 The Olivia Tremor Control / Of Montreal : artificialflowercompany. bandcamp.com
CHRONONAUTZ
BERNARD + EDITH Somewhere there is a red velvet curtain in a cave. Swathed in a thick layer of reverb and dry ice comes something beautiful and lonely. Oriental metallic chimes and soft pulses, old drum machines, the sound of rain and white noise. Unfurling and blooming out through that space – a voice. Here are two Mancunians making real dark pop on the Cocteau Twins’ Bella Union imprint alongside Beach House, Ballet School and Fleet Foxes. Their debut LP Jem is out now and floats as close to Fever Ray as it does to charming Japanese B-movie soundtracks that were made on early synthesisers – a strange world inspired by one heart-breaking glimmer in the eyes of singer Edith’s pet dog, after whom the album is named.
O Heartache 1 Julee Cruise / Avey Tare : soundcloud.com/bernardedith
Chrononautz’ sound is techno in its loosest form, but also its most exciting. Using tough, livewire electronics to weave a rich tapestry of twisting, unhinged sonics, Leeds based duo Dom Clare and Leon Carey previously played as part of mid-00s experimental trio Chops, and though they’ve left the art rock eccentricity behind, they still embrace some of its primitive qualities. Evident of their background in the DIY punk scene, the pair embrace chaos to jam out raw techno oddness. More unruly than the live techno workouts of the likes of Karenn and Blacknecks, this telepathic improvisation has birthed their latest, jerking, sprawling LP Noments. Having just seen a release on The Quietus’ label, it rapidly evolves and wildly unfurls over its continuous 32-minute stretch, in true Chrononautz style.
O Noments 1 Truss / HDMZ : @chrononautz
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Words: Tom Watson
Turning Points: Source Direct Any fan of the finest jungle and drum ‘n’ bass will testify that the Source Direct name is held in very high regard. By the mid 90s, Jim Baker’s music had been released by some of the scene’s most crucial labels – including LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking Records and Goldie’s Metalheadz – and the unmistakable Source Direct sound became a rich tapestry of inspiration for the producers and DJs who were eager to push boundaries. But things turned sour towards the turn of the millennium, with Baker separating from Source Direct member Phil Aslett on negative terms before taking a 10 year hiatus. Now, with the help of longterm friend and Nonplus Records founder Boddika, Baker is back. We reached out to Baker to hear his side of Source Direct’s remarkable story.
Early Years: Discovering breakbeats I was a wild child and I was expelled from school. I was always getting into trouble with the law. I was rebelling against everything. But then I heard N.W.A, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B & Rakim and Public Enemy. It was completely antiestablishment. They made their own scene that stuck two fingers up at the idea of ‘industry’. I wanted that but with a UK feel. Breakbeats in the late 80s early 90s had a closer BPM at around 120. We would go to parties that would play a hip-hop track followed by breakbeat, followed by acid. There was a lot of experimentation back then, and there was such a healthy competition between producers to find new samples in breaks. 1994-95: Releasing on Metalheadz and rise to prominence When Goldie dropped Terminator, it blew me away. So having releases on his label Metalheadz, supporting him in his vision and having his nod of approval was a mark on the board for me. I felt the same travelling around with LTJ Bukem in the early days. Bukem would come to my house every week without fail, cutting my tracks on dubplate, and I’d go out with him around the country and hear Source Direct played on huge soundsystems. When one of your tracks drops and gets about four rewinds ... moments like that I’ll never forget.
“When your track drops and gets about four rewinds – moments like that you never forget”
1996: Signing to Virgin Records’ offshoot Science The deal was that if I was signing to Science, I wouldn’t be told what I could or couldn’t do. I wanted full artistic license. So that was written into the original agreement, and it all seemed like a step forward. The deal was looked upon with a philosophy to further the UK d’n’b sound and encourage a hub of creativity with the backing of Virgin. But things didn’t pan out as I had hoped. I had an old school mate Phil who was regarded as a co-partner. He was just in the right place at the right time. It’s ridiculous that he somehow ended up involved with me and a contract. I was making all the music and he was just in it for the ride. I initially invited him to DJ an hour’s worth of records at a few local events, and from there he found himself involved with Source Direct. By the time the Science deal came about, I saw it as a foot in the door. For Phil, it all went to his head. My heart and soul was crushed. It wasn’t working. 1999 : The dissolution of Source Direct Phil pulled out of our first major tour. By the time I returned, it was agreed that I would buy Phil out of his contract. But I needed a break from everything. It was all escaping my control, my life went very strange for a few years. I fell in love with a girl and bought a house. A few years fly past and she’s lost to cancer. And when I went through a bad patch, I got hooked on some hardcore Class As. Sticking pins in my arm is nothing I will ever do again. Eight years clean. That’s something that will continue. 2015: Rerelease series for Nonplus I’ve known Alex [Boddika] since around ‘97, but I met up with him a couple of years back. He wouldn’t stop going on about an SD return. I wasn’t sure at all, but he kicked me up the arse to get back in to the scene again. There’s a lot of unfinished business for me. I’m sitting on a lot of unreleased material. We’re releasing the old catalogue, remixed by underground artists with new perspectives. It’s basically the start of an 18 month project with a potential release on Metalheadz, all leading up to a new Source Direct album – or two. I feel reborn. Source Direct appears at Outlook Festival, Pula, Croatia, 2-6 September
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Slayer: From The Depths In 1986, four young men from LA, clad head-to-toe in clinging leather and glistening spikes, greasy hair descending towards their studded belts, decided to make the fastest, most brutal record of all time. Across 28 minutes and 58 seconds, these gleefully confrontational provocateurs, all in their early-to-mid 20s, changed the very notion of how intense music could be. They created something that, it might be argued, has never been bettered. By anyone. Reign in Blood was Slayer’s third album, hot on the heels of the rushed, embryonic Show No Mercy (1983) and the disarmingly brash Hell Awaits (1985). The burgeoning sound of thrash metal, which merged the pace and intensity of hardcore punk with the jagged riffs and theatricality of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, had become an arms race. And while LA compatriots Metallica had blown the game apart with 1983’s Kill ‘Em All, Slayer were intent on pushing the red button. For Reign In Blood, Slayer were coaxed into employing the production skills of Rick Rubin, the hip-hop mogul then best known for his work with Run-D.M.C, LL Cool J and Beastie Boys. He sliced away the extraneous elaborations and progressive structures, leaving only abrupt, sordid perfection. It marked a departure from Slayer’s overt obsession with Satanic imagery, engaging instead with the grimmest depths of the human condition. From the unparalleled savagery of opener Angel of Death, guitarist/lyricist Jeff Hanneman’s paean to the horrific acts of Nazi SS officer Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, to the portentous knell of thunder which welcomed closer Raining Blood; from Larry Carroll’s graphic, grotesque cover art, to the unrelenting 210bpm barrage of double-bass-drum pioneer Dave Lombardo, underpinning Tom Araya’s harrowing hollers and the searing leads of the titanic Kerry King and
partner-in-crime Hanneman – this was face-meltingly corrosive, intelligent and controversial. They'd succeeded. It was the fastest, most brutal album of all time. --Over the past three decades, Slayer have become a byword for musical extremity; a totem for a way of life, an attitude. They’ve evolved, morphed, remained utterly ferocious. Albums like 1990’s sandblasted vision of the futility of war Seasons In The Abyss, 1994’s hateful Divine Intervention and 2001’s nihilistic monolith God Hates Us All have contributed to one of music’s most confounding catalogues. The image of the windmilling Araya winged by thicknecked King and sneering Hanneman headbanging through another machine-gun solo has become the most iconic sight in metal. But it’s 2015, and Slayer is a wounded beast, worn by age, physical and mental turmoil. Just half of the original quartet remain. Tom Araya, the raging barbarian whose hell-raising screams have always been curiously offset by a surprisingly gentle nature, is 54, no longer the dervish of old. He’s a dented tank: solid, but showing signs of corrosion. He murmurs down the phone line to me, his LA-Latino voice worn to a wispy husk, his frequent chuckles rattling around his throat like coins in a washing machine. Our conversation is dotted with tales of bodily decline: their current, North America-spanning tour is “as good as can be expected”; my voice struggles to translate into his battered ears. His headbanging days, he tells me, are over. “Dude, I have two titanium plates in my back and six screws. After my first tour after the operation I visited the doctor and he said ‘It all looks good – have you been headbanging?’ I looked at him and said ‘Headbanging? Can I?’ He waited a second and said, ‘Not advisable!’” Araya emits one
of those throaty cackles. “Now I just have to give the ugly look when we play.” But Araya’s creaking body is nothing. Jeff Hanneman, the malevolent, blonde-haired force of nature who penned many of the band’s most memorable riffs and lyrics, was forced to leave the band in early 2011 having contracted an illness which couldn’t sound more like a Slayer song title if it tried: necrotizing fasciitis. While he recovered from this flesh-eating disease, linked to a spider bite, he was temporarily replaced by Exodus guitarist Gary Holt, a friend since both bands supported black metal progenitors Venom back in ’84. Having warded off the carnivorous bacteria, Hanneman joined his Slayer brothers onstage on 23 April 2011 for two songs: his opus Angel of Death and, with a damning clairvoyance, South Of Heaven. He would never play with Slayer again. In April 2013, Hanneman – who was seldom pictured without a beer in hand – was finally gripped by his demons and dragged to the netherworld, dying of alcohol-related liver failure that May. Next month Slayer release their 11th studio album, their first in a turbulent six years. Repentless is the album’s title, but more than that, it’s become their mantra. “I think the title track not only speaks of Jeff and how we as a band have been,” Araya barks, his voice gaining volume. “That’s Slayer in a nutshell. We’re gonna keep doing what we do, we’ll keep going and we don’t give a shit what people think.” Repentless acts as a riposte to those keen to predict the band’s expiration ever since 1998’s Diabolus in Musica, which bore the conspicuous mark of the nu-metal zeitgeist. Now King and Araya are in no mood to suffer in silence. “It’s for the haters out there,” Araya declares. “For the shit we’ve been through. Coming out with this record after all that’s happened.” Lyrically, the titletrack, which emerges after a brief, Easterntinged intro, is unlike anything they’ve done
24 before: a defiant, personal account of what it is to be Slayer. “Having that as the first song you hear, that says a lot,” Araya says. “It says a lot about how we feel about what we do and who we are. It’s a very strong ‘fuck you’.” And from this mindset, a very good Slayer album has emerged; losses have been transformed to strengths. After the departure of classic drummer Dave Lombardo following a pay dispute, his replacement Paul Bostaph is on stunning form, dominating with slamming thrash battery and intoxicating fills. A staple of Slayer listening was always to hear those panned solo leads and decipher whether they were the work of the livid King or the bolshy Hanneman, but his replacement Holt more than holds his own in the shredding tussle. The elephantine grooves of Vices and the archetypal Slayer smash of Take Control, meanwhile, are instant classics. With one of the band’s key creative limbs severed, Araya and King have formed a more traditional yin and yang – King’s wraparound shades and serrated tattoos, muscular and tense; Araya unkempt, primal and emotional. But the latter makes no bones about who has grasped control. “Kerry took the reigns and put together all of the music on this record,” he says, “and he did a really great job of trying to understand and assemble a really wellrounded Slayer album, not just half of one.” But the spectre of Hanneman looms heavy over Repentless – not just through what will presumably be his final Slayer composition, Piano Wire. Songs like Chasing Death (“You’re just a fuckin’ slave of discontent / I’m sick of watching you dig this hole”) and Vices (“You’ve always been powerless to your vices”) explicitly address the guitarist’s expiration. The band put on a remarkably stolid front following Hanneman’s death, proving
Words: Geraint Davies Photography: Elliot Kennedy
indubitably that sentimentality doesn’t enter the Slayer vocabulary – King even went as far as to describe his three-decade bandmate and creative partner as “worm food” in an interview earlier this year. But I’m keen to know whether his loss has made the remaining members more conscious of their own mortality. Araya is open, and sincere, in his reply. “I started changing the way I live a long time ago, I learned a long time ago that…” he pauses, and chugs out a laugh. “You know, we were pretty fuckin’ crazy! There were several things that made me change how I lived my life. I had a one-man car wreck on the freeway because of drinking and driving, that’s where it began. We all approach life differently, and that’s what I chose to do. Jeff passing wasn’t something that I expected. I knew he had problems, I knew he was seriously ill, but I didn’t think he’d fuckin’ die. I thought he’d pull through, I thought he’d get better.” Through the brash front which forms part of the Slayer uniform, Araya shows a rare glimmer of vulnerability. “I was at a point where I needed him back in the band for it to work. I didn’t care to what extent his abilities were at their best, I just needed him back. So I was reaching out to him, leaving messages, but he wouldn’t return my calls. He’d decided he wanted to disappear. That was really hard.” And so the band were forced to reconsider their way of working. The first stop was to build a relationship between Araya and King that Hanneman had previously worked as a conduit for. “Me and Jeff were always closer than me and Kerry,” Araya admits. “We were more on a personal level, we could talk, we could hold a conversation. Not so much with Kerry.” He laughs. “But we sat down and we communicated, which we haven’t always done.” When we’d pinned the pair down for a photo shoot in London, a month or so prior
We don’t cause controversy, OK? We see something we like, something we think is cool. So that’s controversial, huh? Well, if you fuckin’ say so
to my conversation with Araya, this change had been palpable. The two bounced off each other with ease – though stopping short of our photographer’s admittedly ambitious request to play-fight for the camera (“I ain’t fuckin’ doing that” came King’s gruff shoot-down). “We had a talk, a serious talk,” says Araya. “We had shit to talk about, before we went in and decided to finish what we’d started – this record. It’s the cliché, but a relationship works on communication, and maybe we hadn’t always been able to think that way.” There’s one obvious starting-point for King and Araya’s long-standing difficulties in reaching a level: a fundamental clash in personalities. While King was the mastermind behind Slayer’s signature controversy-baiting Satanic/anti-Christian angle, Araya holds deep-rooted spiritual, even Christian-sympathising beliefs. So has Araya ever felt King’s words went a little too far, even for him? Did he ever feel uncomfortable being the voicebox for songs like 2001’s Disciple (“I never said I wanted to be God’s disciple / I’ll never be the one to blindly follow”)? “No,” he insists, “because [King] writes some pretty heavy shit. When you approach it in a creative sense, the only one way for
Issue 55 | crackmagazine.net
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me to think is: ‘fuck, this is really good.’ I’m the singer in this band, how can I not sing that? That’s how I approach it. I’m not gonna sit there and say something sucks cause it’s not something I believe. The thought process goes like this: it has to be fuckin’ awesome, or it doesn’t make the cut. If it’s not fuckin’ awesome, then it’s not Slayer.” But there’s no denying that what Slayer consider awesome rarely tallies what mainstream culture thinks is awesome. Be that the early accusations of Nazi sympathy linked to Angel Of Death – a song which has joined Minor Threat’s Guilty Of Being White in being entirely misinterpreted and adopted by far right groups on literal terms – or God Hates Us All’s explicit message, one of the philosophical idea of the ‘Problem Of Evil’ – that if a God exists, how can atrocities be allowed to happen – which wasn’t exactly aided by the album’s grimly prophetic release date: 11 September, 2001. Factor in songs like 1985 cut Necrophiliac, which would push even the most iron-stomached death metal gore-lover to double-take, or the band’s consistently subversive lyrical content and artwork, which saw Bob Slagel, owner of the band’s first label, Metal Blade, barraged by letters from Tipper Gore’s infamous PMRC (Parents Music Resource Centre)
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This band came together 35 years ago with a simpl e truth in attitude: we don’t give a shit what peopl e say
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K err y’s writing has to be fu ckin’ aweso m e, o r it do esn’t mak e the cut. If it’s not fu ckin’ aweso m e, then it’s not Sl ayer”
29 movement – the people you can thank for Parental Advisory stickers – and saw 2006’s Christ Illusion album recalled from every record store in India and destroyed. Factor in the song Jihad, which addressed 9/11 from the perspective of the terrorists themselves, and it’s difficult to argue that Slayer haven’t basked in their role as arch antagonists, playing public opinion with the same deft technical brilliance as King’s guitar or Lombardo’s double-kick drums. But Araya insists they’ve never indulged in controversy for controversy’s sake. “I’ve said this a million times, buddy,” he says, his grating voice intensifying. “We don’t cause controversy, OK? We see something we like, something we think is cool. It’s not there to cause controversy, it’s just our taste. We’re here to keep doing what we’re doing. It’s not about controversy, it’s about being Slayer. Then everybody else stirs up the shit pot. So that’s controversial, huh? Well, if you fuckin’ say so.” True to form, Araya – the (relatively) good conscience to King’s demonic bad – makes one lyrical contribution to Repentless, closer Pride in Prejudice, a song with an undoubtedly provocative title which hides a depth of social commentary. “That song is something I wrote a long time ago, around the time of the Rodney King LA incident,’” he reveals. “It was something that struck a chord with me. I’m an immigrant, we migrated to the US [from Chile] at a time when there was a lot of chaos in LA in the 60s, when we had the Watts riots. I was able to witness a lot of discrimination, even though we weren’t black, we still went through a lot of the discrimination that come with being different in America. I saw that first hand with my father, a lot of things that he had to deal with, things he had to overcome.” “Abuse of power, civil unrest / Guarantee we blood the same blood red / Inner rage waiting to ignite / Blood of the innocent unites”, the song orates. “So when [Rodney King] happened, there’s a lot of things that I felt were wrong,” Araya continues. “I’ve learned that, growing up in America – growing up, period – nobody owes you fuckin’ anything dude, know what I mean? Nobody owes anyone anything,
and you have to take the life that you’re born with and make the best of it and not make excuses as to why you are what you are.” It’s this idea that keeps raising its head throughout our interview, and throughout Slayer’s latest statement: a spirit of refusing to accept fate, of refusing to bow to the pressures of time, or outward dissidence. It’s an attitude Araya sees manifest in the band’s notoriously spartan fanbase. “I love them, they’re fuckin' loco!” he chuckles. “You hear stories about that guy at a show, any show, a band’s playing and one voice screams ‘Slaaaayaaaargh!’ It’s that one raisin in the bowl of oatmeal, screaming in everybody’s face, then standing there with the attitude: ‘what you gonna do about it?’ I have no words to describe the feeling it gives me, it’s really cool that they feel that way about us. And I feel like I have to say this: we share that passion. No one carries that Repentless attitude like they do.” It’s as if, from these most torturous of circumstances, a new momentum has been found. Slayer are no strangers to emerging from the fiery depths, victorious and galvanised, but Hanneman’s loss has been their greatest challenge of all. On several past occasions, Araya has voiced the opinion that the band may be approaching its conclusion, both prior to and following his bandmate’s death. But no more. This doesn’t feel like a band with the end in sight. So do Slayer feel like the underdogs, yet again? Do they have a point to prove? “Honestly, I don’t think we have anything to prove,” Araya insists. Laughter chugs. “We’re fully aware of how people are and what people say and these people all claim to be ‘fans’.” He laughs once again, wearily, knowingly – laughter born from a lifetime of fighting against the tide; of defending the indefensible; of being the lead singer of Slayer. “There’s a lot of people who think we have something to prove. But this band came together 35 years ago with a simple truth in attitude: we don’t give a shit what people say. We’re gonna do what we do.” Repentless is released 11 September via Nuclear Blast. Slayer tour the UK and Europe this November
The Essential Sl ayer Aggressive Perfector – 1983 When Metal Blade Records’ Bob Slagel saw Slayer performing cover versions at a local bar, he asked the band to contribute to his upcoming Metal Massacre III compilation. This raw, hastily-recorded offering exemplifies the band’s baby steps. Angel Of Death – 1986 The opening salvo of the greatest metal album of all time: Hanneman’s chilling imagery, Araya’s harrowing scream and a double-bass fill from Lombardo which changed the way drummers approached their instrument. Untouchable.
War Ensemble – 1990 While Seasons In The Abyss’s creeping title track became a Slayer staple, the opener is one of their most ferociously powerful constructions, complete with an unerringly told narrative which surmised the horrors of the first Gulf War. 213 – 1994 Nestled amongst the embittered Divine Intervention album was what Araya described as that most unlikely of things: a Slayer ‘love song’; it was, in fact, a tale of fatal lust written from the perspective of prolific serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Bloodline – 2001 As close as you’ll get to a Slayer ‘hit’, this single came with a sinister but memorable chorus and relatively slick video – featuring the band doused in blood, of course – introducing Slayer’s confrontational front to a new generation. Jihad – 2006 A zenith in Slayer’s mission statement to inhabit humanity at its most uninhabitable, Jihad approached the 9/11 bombings through the eyes of the bombers. An intriguing exercise in creative expression, it unsurprisingly caused shockwaves. Chasing Death – 2015 As Slayer emerge from a period of brutal turmoil, Chasing Death is Kerry King’s embittered open letter to his lost bandmate Jeff Hanneman, and the addictions which caused his demise. Self-referential and gutwrenchingly honest – Slayer 2.0 incarnate.
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Suffering sweetly with Baltimore’s Beach House
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Words: Angus Harrison Photography: Antonio Curcetti
just what has happened. We’ve always been very good at listening to what we need to do, or don’t need to do.”
That’s the funny thing about how it feels; you can’t touch it, but you can taste it. A good place to start, when explaining the un-named and intangible sentiments whirling around Beach House’s fifth LP, Depression Cherry, would be to quote the record itself. In particular, a sevenword sentence at the album’s close: “The universe is riding off with you”. In short, it’s an album about the motion of everything and just how impossible understanding that everything is: a topic the band and I have just under 45 minutes to clamber through, around a sticky wooden table in an otherwise silent bar, stale with its hungover Sunday smells. Beach House are Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, Legrand the band’s honeyed vocalist and organ player, Scally responsible for their gooey, rolling guitar lines. Their records, while often filed into the same box as the likes of Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors, have been consistent and singular delights, with lightly lurching, melodic wanderings, balancing in equal measure blushing pop-philosophies and undertows of longing. More than anything, the band and their sound are natural in the realest sense of the word.
Continuing on the period preceding Depression Cherry, Scally is keen to impress the importance of touring to their eventual productivity. “We tour so much on each record, just because we enjoy it so much, and it’s good because it means you get sick of your old music and it pushes you towards the future. When we get back to writing, this very unspoken thing presents itself.”
We begin trying to unpack some of these ideas with the new album’s title. A blunt, almost punk, couple of words that explode with either endless interpretations or complete meaninglessness. “The words came very naturally, side by side,” Legrand says, “it was a gift from the ether. It was confrontational to a point. We liked that.” Inducing flavour and colour, while evoking something darker and guttural, it introduces the record perfectly: an album of both the intensely personal, and the wildly abstract. “We thought it had an irreverence that felt very natural for the record,” Scally adds. “There’s a middle finger aspect to it.”
“Getting older is bewildering because you realise how deep everything actually goes. You start to grasp the heaviness of things, the inherent violence of existence” - Alex Scally
This confidence, Legrand explains, comes from letting the creative impulse guide above anything else. “We took time before this album, just to breathe and forget the past. We didn’t know if we would make more music. We’ve always been totally accepting of whatever outcome. I think that’s a place some bands never get back to or don’t let themselves.” Fortunately, since the release of their self-titled first album in 2006, the impulse has seized with refreshing regularity. “We’ve never planned on making a record every two years, that’s
This unspoken thing, from the coloured narratives of 2008’s Devotion to the apocalyptic romanticisms of 2012’s Bloom, has been framed within a sound that has retained a common arrangement. Exercising ideas of every shape through a recurrent collection of drum machines, muted organs, and cavernous, reverberating guitars. This same arranged universe is the lifeblood, once again, on Depression Cherry, yet this time it feels weightier. The production is more raw and sprawling than before, ideas and method collide, along with concepts that are far less about story, and more sensation.
The irreverence, or middle finger, in the title is far from aggressive, but is instead a triumphant shrug at the futility of trying to articulate a feeling. “Several times throughout the writing of it, it definitely felt like something spiritual,” Legrand explains. “Something deeper that you can’t quite put your finger on. So much had this deep, but unplaceable feeling. You can attach any word to it, but really it’s what’s going on in all people.”
At this point in our conversation I, with some reticence, reach into my bag. The band, by their own admission, had written their own press release for Depression Cherry. Rather than packaging the record in neatly sellable soundbites, the first things I read about it were their thoughts. A collection of lyrics from the album, along with quotes from writers they felt best reached the unreachable places they were grasping for with every track. One of the quotes included belonged to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” Through sheer coincidence, and admittedly a selfindulgent desire to make the bookshelf in
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my bedroom look more impressive, I had bought a Schopenhauer book a month earlier. Now, at risk of looking like the sort of fusty twat who corners you at a dinner party for an hour filling the room with bad breath and truisms, I was placing my book on the table. “Our existence has no foundation on which to rest except the transient present” After a moment or two turning this line over, Alex Scally leans forward to read it again, before reclining back into his chair. “If you say to a 22-year-old, ‘do you know that everything that happens in your life is irreversible? That there is this one direction, and that once something has happened, it has happened.’ The 22-year-old will be like, ‘yes of course’, but they won’t really understand what it means.” Does this make Depression Cherry a reflection on age; on the rush of existence that passes unnoticed “in the moment” of youth? He nods, “I think getting older is bewildering because you realise how deep everything actually goes. You start to grasp the heaviness of things, but it’s very beautiful. The inherent violence of existence.” Perhaps wary of sounding too 'wise', Legrand weighs in. “Depression Cherry is definitely not an answer, it’s an exploration. It’s just an exploration of everything. Our life, the music, it’s all fused into one at this point, we’ve been doing it for so long. It’s part of the cycle of our lives.” Yet in a way, this is the wisdom of Depression Cherry, albeit unintentionally via exploration. It is a record brave enough to reflect on life simply as a series of confused moments swallowing each other, existing briefly only to dissolve before they could ever be understood. The beauty then is how, through their closeness and experience as a partnership, Beach House have converted this energy into poetry above nihilism. As Scally puts it, “I think that the energies being channelled could not have been accessed before this point. There is something here that has never been there before.” Sensing the focus of the book might be helping us articulate these vaguest of feelings, I try another sentence. “It resembles the course of a man running down a mountain who would fall over if
he tried to stop, and can stay on his feet only by running on; or a pole balanced on the tip of a finger; or a planet which would fall into its sun if it ever ceased to plunge irresistibly forward.” Once again, we return to that lyric from the album’s close, “the universe is riding off with you.” Whether understood in reference to the self, or somebody else being pulled away by the mechanics of time, both call to that devastating heavy swell in the pit of your stomach. The sudden knowledge that, completely out of your control, relationships, places, people, and even versions of yourself, are forever running away. “It’s constantly in motion,” Legrand begins, with a strangely comforting tone of peace in the face of such a hugely brutal idea. “It’s not like you should be constantly living in the mind, but those moments when you can see this giant universe, inside and out, it’s psychedelic, and amazing, but it’s also overwhelming, to realise you’re living. I guess the album was our opportunity to celebrate or grieve or admit or be violent.” Scally quietly agrees, “I think that’s a feeling all humans encounter.” In effect, Depression Cherry allows the opportunity to relish in that sadness. To basically admit that even the things we are most sure we feel, know, or love, can and will escape us in an instant. It might sound like a lot for a nine-track album by an alternative rock band, and it might even sound pretentious, but in fact that couldn’t be further from the album’s point. Schopenhauer references aside, Legrand and Scally aren’t talking about a grand design, or a meticulously composed thesis. This is just a conversation about everything happening, over and over again. Depression Cherry is released 28 August via Bella Union
“When we were writing the album we felt something spiritual, something deeper that you can’t quite put your finger on” - Victoria Legrand
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Vince Staples: Cold in the Summer
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Words: Davy Reed Photography: Juan José Ortiz
Vince Staples rubs his eyes. He’s come straight to the hotel from a freestyle session at Tim Westwood’s Capital XTRA studio and he’s visibly jet-lagged from a transatlantic flight, but he insists that we get the interview going while his crew check in. Today is his 22nd birthday, and I ask if he’ll at least take a little time off to celebrate? He raises an eyebrow as if the question is absurd. “Hell no. I don’t do any of that stuff. I don’t have any party habits.”
alongside industry-backed artists such as Tink and Raury as well as viral-hit stars Dej Loaf and Fetty Wap as part of their influential ‘Freshmen List’. It’s an accolade that could offer a small taste of fame, but Vince remains cautious. “You have to earn loyalty,” he says. “I think [Summertime ’06] is a good step in that direction. Because the radio doesn’t sell records. It does in a sense, but not really in hip-hop. Because the fans are stealing shit, let’s be real. They either stream it or download it.”
The Long Beach rapper chooses not to drink, he doesn’t smoke, sip lean, pop ‘molly’ or assert his ego with emotionless sexual conquests – he’s settled in a longterm relationship. A total disinterest in hedonism is just one example of the way that he follows his own lead. Much of his lyricism is based on his experiences as a member of the Crip gang, but his honest, steely-eyed perspective is devoid of the kind of glamour that presents the lifestyle as a marketable fantasy. And although he signed to Def Jam in 2013, his first LP for the legendary major label is Summertime ’06 – a 20 track record which features no potential radio hits. So does he agree that he’s kind of a hard sell?
Our interview takes place a couple of days after the mainstream rapper Tyga had been widely mocked for the abysmal sales of his fourth LP The Gold Album. Having been caught up in the dramatic meltdown of Cash Money Records, Tyga rush-released the album, sharing a link to the Spotify stream before posting the iTunes shortly after. Although The Gold Album credits Kanye West as an executive producer and had social media support from the Kardashians, the album clocked a measly 2,200 sales in its first week, and therefore Tyga felt the unforgiving wrath of rap Twitter.
“Yeah, but so were the Beastie Boys,” he says, referencing the unlikely early breakout stars of Def Jam’s early days. “I’m not signed to Def Jam to be the biggest artist on the label. I’m not there to be Iggy Azalea or Justin Bieber, I’m there to be myself. They understand that. We didn’t come to Def Jam like we were gonna have a radio hit, but they weren’t expecting one.”
“It’s fucking ridiculous,” Vince argues. “Why do we even care? Why are we looking at people’s numbers? Because we’re looking for a reason to feel like ‘Oh they’re worth something’ or ‘they’re worthless’. More than 2000 people heard it. That says more about the listener than the artist. Tyga didn’t fuck up, you fucked up. Cause he had four million streams on Spotify alone. Before streaming, that probably would have been four million dollars.”
But while Vince seems unwilling to compromise when it comes to image or lyrical content, over the years he’s managed to sustain a buzz that’s secured him a mid-range level of success. This year he appeared on the cover of XXL magazine
Although Def Jam may have opened his eyes to the mechanisms of the industry, the real story of Vince Staples’ development is based on the growing maturity of his lyricism. After returning to LA from a brief
spell in Atlanta, where his family sent him to steer him away from trouble, Vince found himself in the company of Earl Sweatshirt and Syd tha Kid of the then-burgeoning Odd Future collective. Despite having no previous desire to rap at all, Vince had a natural gift for wordplay, and his new friends encouraged him to flaunt a dark, twisted sense of humour in the recording booth. “I didn’t care about any of that stuff like 2009, 2010,” he says dismissively. “I was like 14, 15 years old, you know what I mean? I’m an older person now, you don’t act how you do when you were 15 or 16, and if you do, you got some fucking problems.” Vince released Shyne Coldchain Vol.1 – his first full length mixtape – in 2011. And while it saw him begin to shed his old persona and broaden lyrically, an air of gloomy nihilism lingered. “Rap ain’t never did shit for a nigga with no options / If you want some positivity go listen to some Common,” he rapped. Three years later, Vince found himself contributing an emotive verse to Common’s track Kingdom, and at 2014's BET hip-hop awards, they performed a remix of the song alongside Jay Electronica. At the end of the performance, the trio were joined onstage by the parents of Michael Brown – the unarmed African-American teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mississippi – and the entire crowd raised their hands for a moment of silence. The BET tribute was inspired by the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” slogan which dominated the widespread protests following Brown’s death. With lyrics which describe the prejudice and brutality the police force inflict on young black men and women, many presumed that the chorus and title of Vince’s track Hands Up was inspired by the
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"I don’t know the answers, I’m just a fucking regular person that writes rap music. But I feel like we all have the power, we all have that voice"
slogan, but he insists that wasn’t the case. “The world is a fucked up place, like I made that song a year before that shit happened,” he clarifies, “we just didn’t have a beat for it. That shows you how much things haven’t changed.” Hands Up saw Vince Staples vent a righteous sense of rage like a young Ice Cube: “Payin’ taxes for some fuckin’ clowns to ride around / Whoopin’ niggas’ asses, scared to man up / Handcuffs giving niggas gashes / On the wrist I use to lift my fist to fight the power with.” The track appeared Vince’s excellent 2014 EP Hell Can Wait, which now serves as a kind of prequel to Summertime ’06. Both records are inspired by a specific period in Vince Staples’ life – from November 2005 to the summer of 2006 – during which he witnessed the incarceration and death of his peers and followed his father’s footsteps by pursuing gang activity. With harsh street anecdotes told from the perspective of a coldly streetwise teenager who’s been robbed of his youth, there’s no neatly-packaged value system or political conclusion to be drawn from the record, but only the most ignorant listener could feel apathetic towards the socio-political subtext behind Vince’s story. “I don’t know the answers,” Vince insists. “I’m not a politician or anything crazy, I’m just a fucking regular person that writes rap music. But of course, we all have opinions and we all have emotions. I feel like we all have the power, we all have that voice.”
There’s a moment on the album where Vince Staples’ stony exterior fully cracks. On the song Summertime, his vehement rapping is replaced by a light, croaky singing voice: “My teachers told me we was slaves / My mama told me we was kings / I don’t know who to listen to / I guess we’re somewhere in between / My feelings told me love was real / But feelings known to get you killed.” It’s a flicker of the emotion that’s often repressed in order to survive. And while Vince refrains from preaching or moralising, he’s aware that, as a hip-hop artist, he has the ability to shine light on the darkness. “As long as people are creating something, it can have a relation to what’s going on in the world,” he says. “So whether it’s art or film or music – no matter what genre – it’s always going to have opportunities to be influences on the sense of what’s going on. And I feel like it should be that way." Summertime '06 is out now via Dej Jam. Vince Staples appears at: Øya Festival, Oslo, 11-15 Way Out West, Gothenburg, 13-15 August Flow Festival, Helsinki, 14-18 August
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Issue 55 | crackmagazine.net
With creative synergy coming naturally, Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley need no game plan for their new project Drinks
39 Words: Sammy Jones Photography: Tom Johnson
“I think we’re both lovers of spontaneity and chaos” - Cate Le Bon
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Both Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley are hard to put in boxes. You’ll often read that Cate sounds like a ‘joyful Nico’, but not every velvet-throated female artist is a Nico, and her most recent solo LP, Mug Museum, explores emotional shifts after the death of her grandmother – hardly the most optimistic subject matter. Tim gets treated much the same: he’s the San Francisco garage rock producer done good who sounds like a warped tape, a description that skips over how wonderfully evocative his lyrics are, and that his White Fence project consistently releases meticulously crafted, warm-sounding guitar records, spawning seven original fulllengths in just four years, never mind the EPs. How wonderful, then, that these two exceptions to the rule have found each other. “There’s not many people we’d collaborate with,” says Cate, speaking to me in her low Carmarthenshire accent over Skype from LA. Tim, of course, is by her side – it sounds like they’ve been inseparable ever since Cate toured with White Fence. “I think we both knew it would be a great collaboration and it was. I mean, not the outcome – I mean personally, for us.” Hermits on Holiday – the pair’s debut LP as Drinks – is like a visitor’s guide to the trippy recesses of their collective consciousness. Ice-cream van chords loop into tick-tock rhythms, seemingly unstoppable riff locomotives fracture into melancholy spokes of layered vocal, but however wild and patchwork Hermits on Holiday might appear at first listen, there are ever-recognisable landmarks of the musicians’ previous works flowing throughout to keep you on track. Both have collaborated before (Cate most notably with Gruff Rhys, and Tim with Ty Segall among many others), but never, it seems, with such ease. “The definition of ‘compromise’ never really came in to play,” insists Tim. “Whereas it can when you collaborate, y’know? We never really butted heads at all.” While they’re both old hands at the sometimes-wearing cycle of writing, recording and touring as individuals, Tim and Cate have placed the focus firmly on
fun as Drinks. Try too hard to “moralise” (as Cate puts it) anything on the album and the pair will stop you short. When I try and find the deeper meaning behind the supremely strange, comedy skit-like album track Tim, Do I Like That Dog?, for example, I’m told there is no such thing. “It was meant to be playful. It’s just us having a nice time, and not taking anything too seriously, you know?” This sense of excitement and fun was key to how Hermits on Holiday took shape. “I think we’re both lovers of spontaneity and chaos,” says Cate. True to their word, the album’s recording started with no plan at all. “We kind of went down the complete abandon route,” she continues. “We immediately came off the White Fence tour and went, ‘we have to do this record or we’re never going to do it’. Initially we were throwing around some songs that we knew we could do, songs I’d written, songs Tim had written, but we thought, ‘my god that is so boring, I’m bored, how can we expect people not to be bored if we’re bored?" There’s a sense of mutual adoration of each other’s creative outputs that surfaces more than once during our chat. When I ask Tim for his favourite Cate Le Bon song, and Cate vice versa, I wonder if there might never be a conclusive answer. In the end, Cate has to pick two: Goodbye Law, from White Fence’s most recent LP For the Recently Found Innocent and Chairs in the Dark, from Cyclops Reap. “Still?” asks Presley, surprised. “Even though you did it [on tour with White Fence]? Really?” It’s still an unequivocal “yeah!” from Cate. Tim finds it even harder to choose a Cate Le Bon song he’d rate above any other. He’s had a sneaky listen of her forthcoming album, you see, and it’s “fucking amazing – I think I might like it better than Mug Museum, which I thought was impossible”. So again, it’s a tie – this time three-way. Shoeing the Bones, Duke and “a few on the new one that I know are going to be my favourite” get the title. The pair have each visited the other’s familial homes, but while Tim is gushing about Cate’s native West Wales (“Wales is so pretty”), Cate claims to have had a less enjoyable time on San Fran’s famously “touristy” Pier 39. Her review playfully ribs
"We drank a lot of coffee and played guitar to each other until little things started to poke through the cacophony" - Tim Presley
Tim: “It’s this horrible pier where these horrible seals that are all disgusting lie on top of each other and fight, and it makes me sad about life,” she grumbles, a smile hidden in her voice. “Some people go there to eat burgers which is baffling to me because it stinks.” Oh, she had a fantastic time there then, Tim? I ask. “Oh she loved it, yeah,” he mock sighs. Cate laughs demonically in the background. There are plenty of moments like this, where it feels like I’m listening in on one big comfortable in-joke, but while they both share a dry sense of humour that shakes off any deep and meaningful chat about what the music means, another thing they share is a passion for making something that feels honest-to-god exciting, with no stress attached. “It just is what it is. Music for music’s sake,” Cate concludes. Tim, of course, agrees. Hermits On Holiday is released 21 August via Heavenly Records. Catch Drinks at: Festival No6, Portmeirion, 3-6 September End of the Road, Dorset, 4-6 September
Produced exclusively for Crack by Saskia Pomeroy. @ saskiapomeroy.com
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As Ducktails, Matt Mondanile lets his horizontal indie-pop breathe in the LA air Words: James F. Thompson Photography: Federico Ferrari
An encounter with Matt Mondanile is like being enveloped by a gentle California breeze. The lanky Real Estate guitarist might be from New Jersey, but when I meet him on a surprisingly blissful afternoon in London, he’s an enviable paragon of West Coast cool with his Hollywood megawatt smile, chestnut hair and perfect tan. ‘What a bastard,’ I think to myself, as I broil slowly in the summer sun. Mondanile’s sanguinity shouldn’t come as much of a surprise for anybody who’s detected the 60s jangle-pop influences in Real Estate’s music. The Brooklyn-based band have always sounded out of time but even more obviously, out of place. And in 2013, Mondanile relocated to Los Angeles after becoming disenchanted with New York. “I don’t miss Brooklyn really, it’s too much,” he says. “It’s like … If you were in Shoreditch or something – it’s totally blown-over and corporatised, right? Well, it’s like that in Williamsburg. I just didn’t want to be there.” Mondanile also had other motives for the move besides escaping corporate colonisation. “I moved to LA for personal reasons and artistic reasons. Like, I was dating a girl out there so I moved out and just wanted to see what it was like to live on another coast.” He won’t be drawn on the specifics of ‘the girl’, but new album St. Catherine is a noticeably more personal affair than previous Ducktails outings. Mondanile wrote the album on tour with Real Estate and recorded it across multiple cities, but at its core the music reflects the recent upheaval in Mondanile’s life: following a girl to LA and finding his feet.
Recent single Headbanging in the Mirror is a case in point. “I just talk about how I’m from New Jersey and how I’ve moved to California and I drive on the highway and I don’t work,” Mondanile laughs. “It’s kind of an autobiographical story of myself. I wanted the record to sound like going to a new place and experiencing a new land.”
Beck producer Rob Schnapf takes the reins this time. For what is an ostensibly deeply personal and individualistic record, St. Catherine still exists along a familiar continuum to much else of Mondanile’s and Real Estate’s output: wistful melancholia wrapped around the prettiest of guitar and organ melodies.
It feels like there might be something to prove here. Ducktails previous album The Flower Lane met rave reviews in some quarters but also a fair degree of cynicism, with some suggesting that the music was gorgeous but ultimately hollow. I wonder aloud whether this was something he was conscious of when recording St. Catherine? “I guess that’s true,” he concedes. “I wanted the record to sound personal, that it was coming from me and yeah – straightforward and sincere. You know, from the heart. All the songs and lyrics are very realistic depictions of my life. A lot of them are using religious imagery and Bible imagery to explain my relationships. I’m not religious but I was raised Catholic and I think the idea of Catholicism and the imagery that they use in Christianity is really beautiful.”
However, there are a couple of outliers which recall Ducktails’ more experimental early material. Penultimate track Krumme Lanke and album closer Reprise, for example, feature the kind lo-fi woozyness which saw Mondanile’s name fall under the hypnagogic pop category a few years back, with breathy vocals, vintage DX7-style synths and muddy electronic percussion reflecting a dream-like state.
Although there are a couple of collaborators on hand, including the experimental producer James Ferraro and fellow LA native Julia Holter, St. Catherine represents an unfiltered statement from Mondanile. Long-time band members Luka Usmiani, Alex Craig and Samuel Franklin are still involved but largely as hired hands. That said, Mondanile has again outsourced production duties – former Elliot Smith and
It’ll be interesting to see where Mondanile takes Ducktails next. He’s already five albums in to what is allegedly just a sideproject, and it’s hard to imagine Real Estate producing a drone or krautrock track, for instance. “Right, but I can do that with Ducktails and people will accept it. I guess it’s just a way to express all the different interests I have in music. It’s a bit more restricted in Real Estate. I just…” Mondanile catches his breath. “Ducktails to me is anything I want it to be. It’s kind of my project and how I explore – creatively – artistic elements, different styles of music, whatever I’m thinking around themes and imagery. It’s basically just me.” St. Catherine is out now via Domino
45 "I wanted the record to sound like going to a new place and experiencing a new land"
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"No playing around, no effects, just boom-boomboom. That's my power house"
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Rethinking the ordinary – and the surly reputation – with the elusive Shed Words: Dylan Thompson Photography: Rian Davidson
Carefully dabbing the sweat from his brow, René Pawlowitz takes a seat opposite mine. It’s a typically sweltering July afternoon in Kreuzberg, and, I’ll admit, I’m sweating a bit too. Pawlowitz’s prickly reputation as an interviewee is weighing on my mind. This awkward repute has tailed him since the powerful statement of intent that was his 2008 album Shedding The Past; it’s one borne of a series of terse replies to journalists and a general unwillingness to engage with the PR machine. Yet, following some amiable small talk on the stairs up to the Monkeytown office – weather chat always prevails – and even a joke about the interview being conducted in German (it wasn’t, and he knew this all along), I’m beginning to think my apprehension was misguided. As well as a knack for crafting dancefloor destroyers, Pawlowitz’s legacy has been solidified through diversity and a sense of constant forward motion – remixing the past to forge the future. His output as Shed marries the lush textures of Detroit techno to an immediacy and bass-weight borrowed from rave and hardcore. This provocative sound has been explored through a triptych of cinematic full lengths – Shedding The Past, The Traveller, The Killer – on Ostgut Ton and the soon-to-be-defunct 50Weapons. Under the WAX and EQD monikers, both now officially retired, he constructed a series of compelling and ruthlessly efficient club tools that are being continually rinsed to this day, in addition to exploring dubstep mutations as The Panamax Project and STP. Currently, it’s his Power House imprint – both a label name and an encompassing genre – that’s in the spotlight, providing a platform for the gripping and visceral house bombs he makes as WK7 and Head High. “At the moment I’m more into house music. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older,” he laughs. Detached from his spiky reputation, Pawlowitz seems totally relaxed. This affable state doesn’t dilute his outspoken nature though, looking me intently in the eye as he speaks openly of a
continued disaffection with much of today’s identikit techno. Pawlowitz maintains that techno is “his music.” He discovered the sound in the early 90s, and would regularly endure the 100-mile round trip from his hometown of Schwedt to Berlin to buy the latest records from the legendary Hard Wax, later being employed behind the counter. Today, he bemoans a lack of consistently good new releases. “Sometimes you can feel it, and sometimes, a year later, you think ‘oh shit, it’s still the same,’ but then the next year it’s OK again”. Dissatisfied with the straighter, more functional elements of the genre, Pawlowitz laments the slowing-down of the rapidly-mutating, sub bass-heavy sound otherwise known as ‘UK bass’, which splintered off into different styles around 2012. “I was a bit sad about this”, he says, “because suddenly for me, there was only techno left.” The past 18 months, therefore, have found him DJing more than ever under the Head High guise. As someone who began his career solely as a DJ, embracing production later, it’s a change he welcomes. “I thought playing some house records as Head High would be cool. Back to the roots a bit.” Pawlowitz has also recently completed a power house-focused tour, playing a number of gigs back-to-back with former Hard Wax colleague Prosumer, Achim Brandenburg to his friends. Merging Head High’s euphoria with Prosumer’s loose and unabashed style, their respective tastes intersected in the DJ booth. “He’s more into disco music, more into late 80s Chicago house … on that past tour, I’d be going to Prosumer and saying ‘Achim, no disco. We play power house here, no disco,’” he says, with a wag of his finger and a cheeky smile. Pawlowitz cites the 90s output of New York’s DJ Duke as one of the biggest influences on his own power house productions, in addition to the likes of Chez Damier, Ron Trent and Kevin Saunderson’s work as E-Dancer and Tronik House. I ask if Duke’s label, Power Music, provided inspiration for the naming of his own imprint. “Yeah kind of, I think,” comes his
response. “When I talked to [DJ] Pete at Hard Wax it was always like, if you have this pumping house beat, with no cheesy stuff, only the drums – the rhythm stuff – and maybe a chord, we always said, ‘yeah, this is power house.’ No sounds that are playing around, no effects, just ‘boom-boom-boom’. That was my power house. And yeah of course, Power Music was kind of cool.” That’s not to say that Pawlowitz is wholly averse to more colourful strains of house music. I was pleasantly surprised to hear him playing some of my favourite Pépé Bradock and Norma Jean Bell tracks during a particularly heady set in the Berghain garden last year. “That’s the kind of house music I would like to play, when it’s more slower, more brighter.” Indeed, it’s a strong grasp of melody that sets much of Pawlowitz’s work apart from his contemporaries – full of evocative flourishes that summon a sense of forgotten nostalgia. “Without a melody, you don’t have any emotions … it’s just a percussive track. And I think that can also be good, but you can’t remember this track again later on. A melody is like an anchor in your head.” I ask if this is something he consciously tries to achieve, only to finally receive the kind of notoriously curt responses that plagued previous interviews. “Yeah, maybe. It could be. I don’t think about why I do this or this, I like it. That’s why I’m doing this”, he says nonchalantly. This laissez-faire approach bleeds into his latest project, a new audio-visual show as Shed, which will premiere at this month’s Berlin Atonal festival. The visual element of the performance will consist of “some slow movies from not very spectacular places”, he tells me. “Like under a bridge, or in the countryside, in a field. Together with my brother, we made some machines, and we could put the camera on it, and it rotates very slowly. And we would leave it for two or three hours in this place, and go somewhere else while it’s recording … it’s always on places which are not really – at first sight – very interesting. But when you record a longer period, it has something special. And that fits really good with my music.”
For an artist who thrives off excavating and repurposing his own musical heritage, Pawlowitz refrains from getting misty-eyed about it all. He seems more than content with life in the present as a married father of two. Clubbing, for him, is strictly a business pursuit these days. “I don’t know why. I’m too old, I think. When it’s so crowded, I can’t have it,” he admits. “It’s good that it’s over, I think … I just didn’t like it at all, in the morning when you come back home and it’s 10am or later, and the whole day is wasted.” Though his cagey reputation may not hold up in person, Pawlowitz is, and has always been, about cutting out the bullshit, whether that’s overtly functional techno, the tendency to relentlessly overthink his craft, or the exhausting nature of the clubbing circuit. Instead, he’ll continue to be inspired by other, non-musical sources. “I like to go fishing, that’s cool ... it’s all about my home at the moment,” he tells me, in a rare glimpse into his reality. “It’s all about the kids. And the wife.” Shed performs his live A/V show at Berlin Atonal, Kraftwerk Berlin, 22 August
By harnessing the trauma of the ruin within the sterilisation of the art space, Thomas Hirschhorn has created an unsettling between-world
Thomas Hirschhorn, In-Between, installation view at the South London Gallery, 2015. Courtesy Thomas Hirschhorn. Photos Mark Blower.
Thomas Hirschhorn, In-Between, installation view at the South London Gallery, 2015. Courtesy Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Mark Blower.
“The ruin is a form. To build a ruin is form, it’s not an aesthetic, it’s not a reconstruction – it’s pure form. Art is not journalism or illustration”
“Destruction is difficult; indeed it is as difficult as creation.” So reads the spray-painted banner that hangs at the back of Thomas Hirschhorn’s latest sculptural installation, In-Between. The celebrated Swiss artist has transformed the main exhibition space of the South London Gallery into a ruin; girders and cabling hang from the walls and ceiling. Rooms at the second level have had walls and floor torn away, rubble and detritus litters the floor, obstructing access to the corners, where further destruction is apparent. The brickwork of this spoiled edifice is exposed on the walls, and tattered black fabric hangs, protecting us – the audience, occupiers of this abused site – from the sun, or the view of drones, or sniper fire. With In-Between, Hirschhorn presents the generic aftermath of a generic catastrophe. The work is instantly familiar and yet deeply unsettling. The destruction is rendered in cardboard, polystyrene and packing-tape. Cable-casing and aluminium ventilation tubing represents itself. Ditto toilets, nondescript chairs and the odd table. Hanging at the back, the banner and its semi-aphoristic proclamation seem like the work of a squatter, an occupier. A pithy and slightly bad-taste joke hung up by those displaced by the catastrophe, it, like everything else, unsettles.
Words: Augustin Macellari
Superficially the statement seems like a platitude, even a pseudo-profundity.
“Destruction is difficult” – no, it’s easy. By the same token, once the spectacle of the disintegrating interior of the space is acclimatised to, the contents superficially noted, the work seems to quickly make a sort of sense: this is a synthetic ruin, its inauthenticity compounded by clearly unused furniture, new chairs and tables, the absence of dust. There’s a temptation to start projecting, now, onto this work. To imbue it with some narrative, try and understand what has happened, maybe why. To get to the bottom of what this site was – apartment block, offices? – and what it meant, and to whom. As a transformed space it feels loaded – charged, almost – with narrative potential. Superficially, still operating on this same platform of projection, the place is terrible but unreal; a set, fake. Hirschhorn has made engagement unavoidable. The presence of familiar objects reinforces the representation of the ruin; the pathos of disaster photos is always compounded by the baths, the kitchen tables, the domestic residue that highlights the deficit between what was (a home/ workspace) and what is (rubble, nothing). But those objects’ uncanny newness in this scene of dereliction highlights the gallery, reminds us where we are, provides the means for cool, rational distance. Enter the curveball. These objects are not all new, as supposed; a toilet here has clearly been used. Suddenly, the scene is shaken up. The safety-net is removed and, with it, any chance of detachment.
Over email, Hirschhorn expands on the extensive notes and Q&A with South London Gallery director, Margot Heller, which accompany the exhibition. “InBetween wants to be a work of art which creates its own truth, beyond cultural, aesthetical, political habits. This is the ambition, and therefore the work must remain in a kind of uncertainty, instability, and must resist the will of satisfaction.” His discussion of the work presents its own challenges; rather than provide clarity, he bombards each question with a rhetoric more akin to manifesto than interview. It’s simultaneously frustrating and illuminating in a way that rather complements the show. “In-Between with all its components is a form. Each element is important in this form and each element counts.” References, whilst clearly present – “There obviously is a reference to Marcel Duchamp” – are present without significance; so are any parts of this work taken in isolation from its whole. Individual conceptual devices mislead in the same way; that search for narrative distracts from Hirschhorn’s aims: the construction of a unified whole, a physical environment which aids transportation to another headspace. “Confronting a work of art means making an experience. A new experience, an experience you may not want to make, but an experience,” he writes. “As the artist, I have to work out the conditions so that an experience can take place. Only if I am completely committed in giving form can the work have a chance to touch the truth.”
Thomas Hirschhorn, In-Between, installation view at the South London Gallery, 2015. Courtesy Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.
Thomas Hirschhorn, In-Between, installation view at the South London Gallery, 2015. Courtesy Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.
This space entered, elements morph and shift; the quotation takes on a new and multilayered resonance. Lifted from the prison notebooks of celebrated Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (who spent the last 11 years of his life incarcerated by Mussolini’s regime), its depths are revealed through the circumstances in which it is hung. Directly, it references the obvious difficulties of manufacturing destruction, of creating something ruined – InBetween is elaborate, fragile and clearly labour-intensive, but it also introduces further thought, acquiring a particular political relevance. For Hirschhorn, the balance of the statement is crucial – that it acknowledges not just the less obvious difficulties of destruction, but also the more apparent (and universally familiar) difficulties of creation: “I understand Antonio Gramsci’s challenging interrogation as: how can I do a work of art – today – that operates beyond its own actuality?
And how can I do a work – today – reaching beyond its own historicity?” In this, the employment of the ruin as an aesthetic and thematic hook makes sense. Ruins do strange things to time – providing lasting documentation of a disaster that may only have happened in an instant, or offering a flawed bridge into the past – and come with an instantly familiar set of aesthetics. “My interest in ruins comes from their meaningfulness: Each ruin shows us why it’s a ruin. But before showing why, it first tells us that it is a ruin. Archaeological ruins, corruption, natural catastrophe, fire, cultural-, political-, aesthetical-, economic disaster, material collapse, accident, bomb blasts. No ruin is innocent. All ruins connect beyond location and time – a ruin reaches universality.” The false-familiarity we visitors have with ruins, from the news, or else in a controlled form – peeped over builder’s hoardings – further ensures access to that place of universality, where a discourse rooted in both shared memory and the artist’s new context can be allowed to occur. So Hirschhorn successfully creates this new place. He accomplishes form, but what about content? There’s no question that this work is political, but there is no explicit (or maybe even implicit) social criticism here. In his Q&A with Margot Heller, Hirschhorn discusses “today’s consumerist ideology,
trying to push the idea of consumerism as a creative act.” This seems particularly relevant in London, where businesses and startups routinely spin their acquisitive greed into “creativity” (see ad agency as ‘Creative Communication Studio’), but when questioned, the artist brushes it off: “I am not interested in the particular LondonSituation which you mention, because my In-Between is not site-specific, this work aims to be a universal work of art.” His rejection of criticism of any specific social issue can be made sense of; “The ruin is a form. To build a ruin is form, it’s not an aesthetic, it’s not a reconstruction – it’s pure form … Art is not journalism or illustration.” To highlight any specific social issue, to provide any explicit content for critical discourse, would be to co-opt art as an illustrative tool; to use it as a means of framing a discussion. Rather, In-Between is a catalyst, or a platform – a loaded and altered space, at once familiar and unknown, that invites and guides reflection unrestrained by external context. It is not concerned with minutiae, policies and social issues; it engages, precariously, with ideology. It “creates its own truth.” In-Between runs at South London Gallery until 13 September
Issue 55 | crackmagazine.net
In this, Hirschhorn is intent on creating a work that will, in a sense, supply its own context. The dischordancy of unused objects mingled with the employment of used objects, which seems to imply human presence and activity in an entirely false environment, is a way of destabilising the viewer. It denies refuge in either the familiarity of actual disaster or in the comfort of art-history, and creates a liminal space – In-Between.
Clarence Clarity
Bernard + Edith
Father John Misty
NO NOW
JEM
I Love You, Honeybear
PINS
E zra Furman
L andshapes
Wild Nights
Perpetual Motion People
Heyoon
B e a c h H o us e
John Grant
Mercur y Rev
Depression Cherry
Grey Tickles Black Pressure
The Light In You
coming soon
coming soon
coming soon
available now from www.bellaunion.com
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Aesthetic: Siobhan Bell When Siobhan Bell sets her sights on something, there’s no stopping her. The ascendant DJ is embedded among a wave of young London talent embracing style, sound and culture to push things forward in unique ways. Initially fuelled by her like-minded peers, the likes of London collectives Livin Proof, Don’t Watch That and Work It, Bell has thrived in the city’s music scene by embracing her passions. “There are no limits because you are a girl or young, just do what you feel and be as expressive as you can,” she tells us. “Think big!” Dropping out of university to pursue music, Bell went on to learn the ropes of the industry through working at Warner, Atlantic and Cash Money Records, including a summer spent working in Birdman’s rather opulent New York office. And after abandoning her desk to get behind the decks, she honed her skills as a DJ through promoting her own nights across London. As well as continuing to throw her own monthly party Cherryade, Bell now sits comfortably on line-ups alongside A$AP Mob and Skepta, DJing her own brand of hi-octane, bottomheavy fire across the world. She also holds two residencies on London’s NTS Radio, the city’s outpost for young upstarts, including PDA with Mischa Mafia and her recently inaugurated solo show. Raised on the London-born syncopations of garage and grime, Siobhan merges this with influences in trap,
90s RnB and Jersey club to create her own incendiary sound. Her look borrows from the streetwearfocused aesthetic of the city, and as a result of her growing profile, she’s become a cult favourite in the fashion world. As well as DJing for the likes of Moschino, Nasir Mazhar and The British Fashion Council, Bell has more recently completed her first production project for a label, producing the score for Bobby Abley’s SS16 show at LC:M. The almond-eyed entrepreneur has also pursued her own design endeavours, last year launching Cherryade hair extensions, the range mirroring the constantly changing pastel tones of her own locks. In a scene where success can hinge on amplifying a persona through a smart phone screen, Bell isn’t shy to label it the evolution of her personal brand, channeling the infectious energy and ambition of her personality through music. “My DJ sets are hyped, happy and energetic,” she says, “and that definitely describes me.” Catch Siobhan Bell at Outlook Festival, Pula, Croatia, 2-6 September
Photographer: Roo Lewis Stylist: Jake Hunte MUA: Charli Avery Hair: Joel Benjamin
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This Spread Zip up: Illustrated People x VFiles Skirt: Illustrated People x VFiles
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This Spread Jacket: Fyodor Golan Top: Illustrated People Jeans: Welcome
This Spread Jacket: Peter Jensen Hoodie: Carhartt Skirt: Ashish Trainers: Adidas Originals
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GARDEN FESTIVAL The Garden Tisno, Croatia 1 - 9 July
The bell was broken and Gala, our affable host, wasn’t responding to our firm door knocking and whistling. After 36-hours of semi-constant socialising, partying and swimming, we had come to the end. Our host’s open-plan apartment – the bed, in particular – was weighing heavily on our minds.
any festival you have to pick and choose your battles. But here, both the natural beauty of the Adriatic and the length of the festival allows for so much more. Due to its seven-day stretch, there were friends at the festival we didn’t see all weekend. But such is the vastness of experience on offer that no one person’s time there directly mimicked another.
Kindly helped in by a local, we finally got some rest that morning. But after five days in Tisno and the surrounding area, the general feeling among our entourage was that you could have put us in a fair few more precarious situations and it probably would have worked out. Things work out at Garden. The festival’s rich and varied experience, soundtracked by this year’s expansive programme of music, had brought a serenity to our mental state that we can’t imagine being achieved at a UK festival.
Tisno’s welcoming community and tolerance of a few thousand Brits descending on their idyllic 16th century fishing village is wonderful. The restaurants are gorgeous, the seafood is fresh and exploring the less immediate parts of the setting reveals undiscovered views and beaches. Taking a day out to visit the Krka National Park was an unbelievably rewarding retreat from the festival. Europe doesn’t get much more beautiful than this: a valley boat ride flanked by natural forest that opens out into a series of freshwater waterfalls in which you can swim. Stunning.
Yes, if you want to party solidly for seven days, there will always be an outlet. The coast will always be stunning, Prosecco will always be available and one unnamed afterparty bar seemed to be constantly kicking off. But approaching an event in this way carries pitfalls. At
Garden’s glorious bow out continued to make great use of its glistening surroundings. The secret island party was an undeniable highlight, where attendees journeyed on the Adriatic to a beautiful, secluded wooded area, with this intimate setting playing host to Felix Dickinson
and the Wilde Renate residents.
had us pumping till dawn.
The two boat parties we attended also provided singular experiences. The Disco Knights party featured Craig Richards and Seth Troxler, but the 80 or so San Francisco partygoers over for the event unequivocally stole the show. The daytime party hosted by Ran$om Note and Dance Tunnel made for an equally heady affair, with Dan Beaumont and Mark E on especially good form and 500 or so exclusive Ran$om Boat maracas proving a particularly innovative way to spend your brand fee.
Musically, the festival’s main stage and beach stage played the most major parts in our adventure: Talaboman’s seductive wanderings, International Feel’s Balearic after-party session and Paranoid London’s aggressive acid techno being the highlights. But beyond that, the consistency of running into enthusiastic selectors playing throughout the day made musical mooching an easy task.
One of the finest nightclubs we’ve attended and possibly the finest outdoor nightclub, Barbarella’s is the perfect setting to experience night turn to day. An exemplary sunrise set from Job Jobse featured the likes of Fatima Yamaha’s What’s a Girl To Do, a special edit of Jamie xx’s Gosh and Tame Impala’s Let It Happen, showing many a DJ exactly the kind of thing you should be dropping when the sun comes up. Lukas’s variation and an encouraging change of direction from Waifs and Strays made for a solid Edible party, the Futureboogie party had many festival goers talking in rapturous tones the next day and, despite feeling a little formulaic, the Seth Troxler and Craig Richards party
Closing out our festival experience was surely the most apt character to play the final ever Garden set: DJ Harvey’s musical selections perfectly encapsulated the vibe of the event. From the half hour of ambience at the start, through to the pulsating techno midway and the inevitable disco glory in between, the festival’s culmination was also its musical peak. Final word on the last ever Garden needs to go both the clientele and the organisation. The effort to sustain a feeling of universality here is one of the primary reasons people return. There is no distinction between organisers and attendees and this familial approach creates the warm feeling that resonates among its audience, while the sheer enthusiasm of the crowd acceler-
ates the free-spirited nature of the event. Moving forward with a change of personnel at the helm, there seems to be a real determination among Garden affiliates old and new to continue the mantra laid down by this incredibly special festival. With the next event going under the name of Love International, the evolution of what has been achieved here will be eagerly anticipated. The hope is that more and more people continue to discover what is the definitive Croatian festival.
Words: Thomas Frost Photography: Khris Cowley
On the Sunday of Garden Festival we got locked out of our Tisno apartment.
THE DEBUT ALBUM DELUXE LP with BONUS 10” LP / CD / DL OUT NOW!
14.08.2015
LP/CD/DL
PERSONAL COMPUTER DELUXE LP / LP / CD / DL
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Live
OUTLINE Karacharovsky Mechanical Plant, Moscow 4-5 July
LOVEBOX Victoria Park, London July 17-18 Lovebox has established itself as a bastion for vibrant, carefree fun in the centre of London; an annual retreat where you can wear what you want to wear and be who you want to be – for a couple of days, at least. Its signature colourful atmosphere was this year offset by a darker edge, with the festival’s arid dustbowl frequently whipped up into an intense storm by cutting-edge hip-hop and grime talent. Skepta and Novelist were the first big hitters; set an hour apart, they represented a fiery cross-section of contemporary grime. Elsewhere hordes of attendees witnessed Action Bronson deliver an unyielding rendition of tracks from Mr. Wonderful. Even when a stage invader tried to interrupt his flow, a sharp right hook brought swift justice. Maintaining its hedonistic roots, Lovebox’s dance line-up was seriously strong, and the addition of James Murphy and 2manydjs’ Despacio tent added an exciting new dimension to proceedings. Underneath an oversized mirrorball, cuts that included the Grange Hill theme tune darted across the dance floor with euphoric clarity. An essential touchstone for both purists and tourists, the Despacio tent is unique and totally essential; a wonderfully universal experience. Saturday welcomed two acts with headline potential. Hot Chip didn’t let the only rain of the weekend dampen their spirits, bringing on their bemused looking children on for a rousing version of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark. By this stage the crowd was wholly riled up for Snoop Dogg. He started strong, playing crowd-pleasing hits, and his own tracks continued to earn rousing responses. An elongated rendition of Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll and a closing run-through of Bob Marley’s Jammin’, however, had a distinct karaoke feel, considering this is one of rap’s greatest icons. But this is a party after all, and that wasn't enough to dampen yet another thoroughly enjoyable entry into Lovebox’s history. !
Robert McCallum & Duncan Harrison N Chloé Rosolek
MELT! Ferropolis, Germany 17-19 July As one of Germany's most prized large-scale festivals, Melt! rolled into its 18th year with its loyal, cross-generational audience firmly intact. Despite the ever growing number of European festivals, Melt! has managed to retain a global appeal by consistently conjuring up adventurous line-ups and thrilling its attendees with the unique infrastructure of the festival site. The Ferropolis provides an austere but epic backdrop to the festival. No kitschy bunting or hay bale colosseums to be found here, instead huge industrial machinery from a bygone era creates a constant sense of intimidation. Our first dalliance with the main stage was to witness Nils Frahm succeed in taming a Friday night crowd, with the amphitheatre serving its purpose beautifully as a platform for Frahm's host of weird and wonderful instruments. Kylie Minogue was also a stroke of genius from the Melt! office, while Django Django and Alt-J were less inspiring but not uncharacteristic acts for Melt!, who have always opted for a more accessible booking policy when it comes to guitar-based bands. The main course of the festival on an occasion such as this will inevitably come from the more techno driven stages of the industrial playground – the most substantial of which is The Big Wheel stage. The winners from where we were standing were the two glorious closing sets from Ryan Elliot (Saturday) and Nina Kraviz (Sunday). Finally, there was the Sleepless Floor – the end/beginning of everyone’s night and the roughest of the festival’s diamonds. It stands outside of the festival both geographically and visually with a kind of Mad Max rebel camp vibe that you can’t fake. Undoubtedly the place to go if you were looking to run into the right kind of trouble. With countless other three day rave events nipping at its heels, Melt! still stylishly entertains the youth of Europe en mass while maintaining an amiable atmosphere. Though it’s in its twilight years, the night is still young for this German institution. ! Alfie Allen N Stephen Flad
A product of a union between Moscow clubbing institution Arma17, film collective Stereotactic and visual studio/production company Sila Sveta, Outline festival takes the form of one continuous, 24-hour party – a thrilling snapshot of a dedicated underground community within a city marred by an often unfavourable international reputation Last year Outline took over a man-made island, and this year inhabited the brutalist ruins of an industrial site with its loosely techno-centric music policy and liberally-minded crowd. This year’s location was a disarming, beautifully-dishevelled ruin of industry in East Moscow. Piles of rubble and equipment lay carelessly in corners, relics of the site’s industrial past haunted the occasional wall and backrooms were filled with a procession of dingy mattresses and strange, scrappy murals. The opening evening brought a showcase of dense and potent sounds. First up, Andy Stott gathered a huge crowd with deep, sticky bottom end junk punctuated by slamming snares, and offbeat jungle. Demdike Stare followed, with a magisterial display of storytelling schlock techno against a graphic backdrop of video gnarlies, anatomical body horror montages and ancient iconography. The festival organisers took great satisfaction in utilising Outline as a showcase for artists from the thriving Moscow underground, in particular Phillip Gorbachev’s typically eccentric live show and impressive live sets from local Freska and respected Moscow artist Alex Danilov, taking Outline deep into its second day. In the hours that followed, Ben UFO and Ricardo Villalobos provided emphatic proof why they’re two of the best on the planet at what they do, and Nina Kraviz received a borderline religious greeting on Sunday morning, backed by a huge wall of entourage behind the decks. Outline is a very special festival, realised by an important community at the heart of Moscow’s clubbing life. The people who attend Outline fully, unreservedly recognise this, and respond accordingly. The festival officially ended at 10pm on Sunday, but when we left in the early hours of Monday morning, there was still a large and devoted crowd losing themselves to the sounds of a;rpia;r in the woods, showing no intention of leaving. They’re probably still going now. ! Geraint Davies N Camille Blake
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Albums
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FUTURE Dirty Sprite 2 Epic / Free Bandz CHELSE A WOLFE Abyss Sargent House
It’s not easy to separate a band from their legacy at the best of times. Yo La Tengo’s latest album is a soul-seeking, half new, half used collection which both reveals and plays on their transition from fuzzy, alternative band-du-jour to middle-aged, reticent rockers. 2013’s Fade was easily the band’s most laid back, most mature and probably most lap steel-laden release to date. Stuff Like That There takes things up a gear. The album features a ramshackle assembly of covers, reworks of pre-grown up YLT songs and original material. All tracks are slide guitar and double bass led with drums tapping and tittering, jazz-like, in the background. It’s not classic Yo La Tengo but it has its moments. Their loungey rework of their own track Deeper Into Movies is a tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating affair that works a heck of a lot better than the verging-on-tacky job they do of The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love. Stuff Like That There is a mix of heady ideas, a nod to Yo La Tengo’s 30-year evolution and a careful deconstruction of their influences and first-loves. The new tracks Rickety and Awhileaway could sit sweetly in the background of a Sunday afternoon but they’re hardly earth shattering. Speaking as a fan of the band, it’s an intriguing document, speaking as a fan of music I’d urge you to take the time to discover YLT’s back catalogue instead. You won’t be disappointed – and you won’t find any uncomfortable covers of 80s pop hits either.
Following last year’s Sonno, multi-instrumentalist and Nine Inch Nails guy Alessandro Cortini returns with more brooding synth drone. Like Sonno, Risveglio is an all-hardware outing that Cortini recorded on tour. Using a Roland 202, 303 and 606, the Italian has crafted something that’s very at home on Hospital. He’s not the first to repurpose the machines for more ambient purposes, but whereas guys like TM404 pursue a cleaner sound, Cortini feeds his through so much overdrive and delay that they emerge tortured, burnt-out and full of menace. The constraints of old hardware mean that Risveglio’s tracks are built largely of simple synth-loops. What makes them engaging are the nuances, like the filter movements, or the background hum of effect pedals. Opener Stambecco’s saturated patterns unfold at a mammoth’s pace, like a pair of city gates being slowly wrenched open. La Sveglia’s gloomy pulse shimmers and breaks beneath the weight of tape-delay. Lotta’s molten-thick melody drifts abysmally, corrupt and lonely. Unsurprisingly it’s a little exhausting to absorb all at once. Harsher, percussive tracks like La Meta do little to break up the dense synthscapes, nor drive the record forward. By the time we reach penultimate track Ricadere, we’re still wandering the same bleak territory. A great record, if not emotionally demanding – but then again, probably not half as demanding as spending half your working life with Trent Reznor. Count yourself lucky.
Home has been a recurring theme in the major hip-hop releases of 2015. It has manifested itself in a range of forms. Kendrick’s pilgrimage to Compton gave rise to the communitarian ideals of To Pimp A Butterfly, Vince Staples dug deep into his memories of summertime in Long Beach for his stunning debut LP and Drake craftily mythologised Toronto as “the 6”. So far, the trips back home have been tributes. If Compton is Kendrick’s salvation and Toronto is Drake’s battlefield, then Atlanta is Future’s only vice. He’s shaved off the major-label excesses of his 2014 album Honest and turned in his most focused and troubled work to date. He’s moved back to Atlanta. A heady diet of drugs and the cocktail outlined in the LP’s title dominate. Every stage of the binge plays out on DS2. The anxious questioning of Where Ya At, the bullheaded highs of Groupies and the fleeting clarity of Slave Master – a song which ends with the line, “Long live A$AP Yams, I'm on that codeine right now”. Future celebrates his new single life with a bruised, exhausted delivery. It’s the same juxtaposition that plays out on the record’s opener – on one bar he’s flexing about sex in Gucci flip flops, two lines later there’s promethazine in his urine. The blowout and the fallout are crystallised into one distressed whole. Like the countless dichotomies and contradictions of Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, the demons of DS2’s maker are what makes it so totally enthralling. A sprawling hedonism that leaves Future gasping for breath but never quite drowning. A distorted reminder that you can never take the city out of the kid.
Helen Hauff, in her first full-length release, has just produced an album of throbbing, three-dimensional electro that hums and buzzes with a dark and decadent energy. Given the reputation of her fabled DJ sets – eclectic, intense and incendiary – perhaps the biggest surprise is that the album sticks to a relatively narrow stylistic silo. But the restricted rhythmic focus only serves to highlight how ballsy and provocative her sound has become; her dalliances with the galvanised experimentalism of labels like PAN remains in the ethos if not the song structures of Discreet Desires. We all know that Hauff has great taste in music, and she’s channeled these influences in industrial, EBM and whiplash electro into a sound that is truly her own. Opening track Tripartite Pact is a dark and industrial introduction – powerful, in an austere kind of way, but easily the album’s weakest. The synthesised strides of Spursoon obliterates it, signalling a shift that defines the rest of the album: simmering, sultry, and hard-edged electro, flowing like hot molten lava. With song titles that reflect two themes (sex and death), Discreet Desires is a powerful and primal statement. Adding to the feeling that these are raw recordings – trapped rather than coaxed onto tape – most of the tracks abruptly fade as Hauff’s melodies and synth lines degrade; the hum of Hauff’s machines has purposefully not been edited away. The seven cyclical and hypnotic minutes of L’Homme Mort are exquisite: tumbling synths fighting for centre stage as a machine-gun drumbeat stutters in the background. Piece of Pleasure is gutsy, anthemic and draped in gothic aesthetics. Tryst bolts a sparkling melody on to an acid beat and pensive, snaking bassline. And the two helpings of Sworn to Secrecy – menacing and provocative – sound like lost classics from DJ Hell’s International DeeJay Gigolo vault. Hauff’s performances have become widely revered for extending and enhancing a long line of electronic experimentation, and Discreet Desires expertly transposes the dark matter of her DJ sets into an intense and impressive debut album.
Across the sparse trauma of 2010’s The Grime and The Glow and the raw, sinewy drone-folk of Apokalypsis the following year, Chelsea Wolfe’s bold, gothic expressions sounded utterly otherworldly and unique. Her breakthrough came in 2013: Pain Is Beauty shared the same deathly purview, the same potent melodrama and deeply imbedded morbidity, but while in the past Wolfe herself felt like a shady, unknowable silhouette, a figure had now emerged from behind the shroud. With momentum on her side, Abyss could be Wolfe’s opportunity to become a most unlikely star; a blackened antihero. The most apparent shift here is in production values: Abyss feels fuller, crisper, far less experimental than previous work, revolving around a more traditional doom/ industrial palette. At points this works in its favour: the soupy bottom-end of Iron Moon would give Sleep or Cult of Luna a run for their money, and, for what it lacks in subtlety, the crashing clarity of Grey Days makes up for in allowing Wolfe’s voice to soar – at its best, her pining tone recalls the ageless, creeping melancholia of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. But more often the album feels disjointed, unsure of itself, even a little dated. Carrion Flowers, After The Fall and Color Of Blood’s vast synthetic structures rob Wolfe of what makes her so intriguing: her mysterious fragility, her hopeless humanity. As the closing title track descends into a horror of detuned strings, sucking you in, pleading for attention, you’re left with the slightly hollow feeling of an opportunity missed.
! Billy Black
! Xavier Boucherat
! Duncan Harrison
! Adam Corner
! Rachel Mann
YO L A TENGO Stuff Like That There Matador Records
ALESSANDRO CORTINI Risveglio Hospital
HELENA HAUFF Discreet Desires Werkdiscs
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RP BOO Fingers, Bank Pads and Shoe Prints Planet Mu “House music is still here. I am what happened to house music,” once said Kavain Space, aka RP Boo. And for once, such impudence is well-founded. RP Boo’s contribution to the manifestation of footwork music spans decades: all feet follow under RP Boo’s leadership. Obscured in the raided dust of Chicago’s basements, early tracks were cut solely for battles between dance crews. His directorship is unparalleled and, despite spawning an international identity only within the past five years, his footwork is critical. This, his second full-length on Planet Mu, is validation of RP Boo the innovator, the architect – the confirmation that he really is what happened to house music. An air of restraint has been applied since his Mu debut, Legacy. His entrance was brash, bullish and undisciplined; like the reaction of magnesium to water. This release, however, counteracts the autonomy with structured authority. As the closing line of B’Ware goes, “It’s time to move the juke out the way, ‘cus I am footwork,” a soothed vocal looping croons over stuttered clicks and clacks, equally as combative as it is disciplined. Space’s ability to manipulate samples alongside abnormal time signatures is approached with a refined sense of humour and grace. The irreverent rave whistle pestering malicious snare cracks in I’m Laughing is comic yet maniacal. Opener, 1-2D-20’2 proudly catalogues dominant footwork crews before wheeling around prickly taunts. “Motherfuck your favourite DJ,” goes Finish Line D’jayz over and over with incalculable hostility. Beat Me chops up a slowed rendition of Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us, somehow making it undeniably thuggish. This really is the defining footwork record from the scene’s equivalent to Juan Atkins. Forged from rare cuts collated before and after Legacy, there is something cumulative about Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints. And as the mourning of Rashad’s passing intensifies, it’s records such as this which capture the staying power of footwork. One of its prime movers may be lost but their desire to see you work the dancefloor into the ground lives on through RP Boo.
It’s hard to imagine Mac DeMarco getting too down. He’s walked his ever-growing band of disciples through irresistible sun-stained daydreams with his unpretentious, softly swaggering indie records. Single-handedly he developed the cult of Mac, a success propelled by his sloppy, sincere self. But something's up with Mac on Another One. A forlorn and disillusioned sense of insecurity is palpable. This is a Mac DeMarco break-up album. On The Way You’d Love Her, his syrupy guitar riffs wobble more than ever, bending and stretching under his gentle vocals – a beautifully burned-out ode to a romance slipping out of reach. The misty subdued synths of the title track carry his mournful words “afraid she might not love you anymore”. The faint delicacy of A Heart Like Hers will cause your own tender ventricles to rupture. Sounding like a lost track from The Virgin Suicides, Mac bleeds over weary sliding notes: “Tried so hard to believe in something that will never be, never be.” There’s no coming back from here, even with the chirpy rhythms and airy harmonies of I’ve Been Waiting For Her, which are left feeling a little like a forced smile. Bringing the album almost to its end, Without Me is a cathartic sigh of acceptance. With a synth lead reminiscent of a 70s high school sitcom theme, it laments an intense love slowly ebbing away. Mac’s lost his taste for sunny-side up slacker ballads. The dreary synths cascading downwards and an invitation to My House By The Water speak volumes. The future of Mac DeMarco doesn’t lie solely in his talent for crafting immaculate jangle-pop. The charismatic everyman is growing and expanding, and while there aren’t as many earworms to be found here, he’s hopelessly endearing – even with a broken heart.
! Tom Watson
! Aine Devaney
MEEK MILL Dreams Worth More Than Money Maybach Music / Atlantic
MAC DEMARCO Another One Captured Tracks
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There’s something profoundly cyclical about Morning/Evening, Kieran Hebden’s eighth studio album as Four Tet. Citing an inherited collection of his late grandfather’s Hindu devotional records as its underpinning influence, the sounds of his Indian heritage run through the veins of the LP. Comprised of two 20-minute halves, as Morning Side explores the sounds that shaped his childhood and his heritage – most strikingly through the poignant vocal sample from the 1983 Bollywood film Souten – the gently thumping outro to Evening Side pulsates with the house rhythms explored through his present. Just as sunrise and sunset are awash with haziness, Hebden shies away from anything too arresting or acute. Sure, its final moments could easily find themselves reverberating off basement walls, but for the most part the LP is hung in a kind of celestial airiness where tiny sonic ripples dance across its soundscape. And so Morning/Evening requires an element of patience. Unlike 2013’s Beautiful Rewind there’s no instant gratification of a four-minute floor-rattler, nothing to match the heavyweight of cuts like Parallel Jalebi or Kool FM. Instead, as one 40-minute entity, it is an intricately constructed piece that ventures into expansive and ambitious realms. For all of its bloated glow and slowly stretched progression, Hebden’s kaleidoscopic blend of cosmic and organic sounds are totally rewarding. It may not pack the strongest punch, but it draws you out of the rushing everyday into somewhere far more serene.
Meek Mill’s love for dirtbikes can be heard in his voice. The Philly rapper’s social media is filled with footage of illegal street riders – either on two wheelers or ATV quads – burning rubber by driving donuts, pulling their front wheels up to a near vertical angle and raising their arms from the handle bars while driving at a breakneck speed. A notoriously intense rapper, Meek’s delivery is fuelled by reckless abandon, an impatient thirst for adrenaline and a flagrant disregard for authority. Meek’s second retail album Dreams Worth More Than Money was initially scheduled to be released in 2014, but the promotional campaign was abruptly cut short after he was incarcerated for parole violation. In keeping with his reputation for creating emotive, exhilaratingly fierce intro tracks, on Lord Knows he yells passionately over a grandiose orchestral beat, and there’s one line in particular which sticks out the most: “Shout out to that judge that denied me my bail / It made me smarter and made me go harder”. Since being released from prison, Meek has been invited to hip-hop’s top table – partially due to his relationship with Nicki Minaj – and while his more level-headed attitude is undoubtedly good for his personal well-being, the major label rap LP template feels too restrictive. With a predicable cast of A-list guests, Meek is often submerged by his collaborators; Future steals the spotlight on Jump Out The Face, Pullin Up sounds like The Weekend ft. Meek Mill and the sugary Nicki duet All Eyes On You sees Chris Brown fill out the bulk of the track like an overbearing third wheel. Meek is an incredible rapper, and he’s got enough energy to potentially shake up the game. It’s good to have him back, but let’s hope that an outpour of looser mixtape material allows him to flaunt his raw appeal in the forthcoming months.
Illegals in Heaven lives between past and present fun. Blank Realm’s fourth LP, it’s impulsive yet nostalgic – it’s pulling on your shoes and running across fields when you were a kid, running into green and more green, unashamedly freed. The Australian band channel this feeling of reflective escapism from fizzy opener No Views. The over-arching impulsiveness of the album is captured in its eminently shoutable chorus: “I’ve got no views on it, it’s just something that I did”. ‘Just do it’, it seems to whisper. Lead single River of Longing speaks only in the most hopeful of terms. “Meet me on the other side / and we’ll make up for stolen time” chant sibling singers Daniel and Sarah, arms outstretched – “won’t you take me by the hand?” It bubbles over with an unbridled, youthful charm. It’s not all incredible – dreamy slow-burner Cruel Night sort of plinks and plonks into nothingness and the lyrics on Gold are slightly cheesy – but if you can be in a band for as long as these guys have and still conjure a naked flame of joy like this, then you’ve got something that’ll arouse a smile in almost anyone – and that’s something to be enjoyed forever.
Jim Jarmusch wasn’t the first but was close to saying it best: ‘Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.’ The culture that fuels our virtuosity is founded upon the art of theft. And this is what O$VMV$M do. This is the debut LP from Young Echo members Sam ‘Neek’ Barrett and Amos ‘Jabu & Zhou’ Childs, under their estranged cut’n’paste, analogue-fondling moniker. Only two months ago, this idiosyncratic Bristol duo had released a No Corner backed EP called Memoryz Of U. It was a practice in sonic splicing; falsifying originality by disassembling samples to their lowest denomination and refashioning them into something wholly different. Now, their eponymous album on Idle Hands consists of brief vignettes of lo-fi synth slurs and esoteric experimentalism. Sad Grime’s whiney X-Filesthemed cooing flutters repeatedly and refrains from reaching any apex. Instead it ambles, echoing itself like the reflection of sound off of a wall. Goodbye the same. No build, but an off-kilter strain of tones filtered to sound totally inhuman. Even Surprise Sisters Devil Mix, which contains audible vocal lines, is steeped in indecipherable oddities: is it actually breathing? These eight momentary audio segments are short but last long enough to question everything you hear. Cold and curious throughout.
! Josie Roberts
! Davy Reed
! Sammy Jones
! Tom Watson
FOUR TET Morning/Evening Text
O$VMV$M O$VMV$M Idle Hands
BL ANK RE ALM Illegals in Heaven Fire Records
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13 LHF For The Thrown Keysound Recordings
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Kompakt deliver another mix of emotionally loaded minimalism with the latest in their annual compilation series. Contributors include mainstays like Kölsch and John Tejada, recent additions like Dauwd, and one-track-a-piece from label founders Wolfgang Voight, Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape. As usual, the tracks are a mix of recent Kompakt favourites and previously unreleased material. Kölsch opens it up with DerDieDas, a nod to the German version of Sesame Street which, allegedly, turned the Danish producer on to making music. It’s a big statement of intent – a dense floor-filler with overdriven builds that bristle with tension. Audion’s Dem Howl follows, with Troel Abrahamsen’s soulful vocals soaring above an unashamedly big-room mix. It’s the little things that drive minimal tracks, and part of what makes the Total series such fun listens is bringing together the different ideas on what those little things could be. Reinhard Voight scatters percussive hits through The Buddy that repeatedly threaten to take the track up a notch, but stop just short. Patrice Bäumel’s The Vanishing is essentially one long build, carried by a tom-pattern subtly rising and falling in pitch. The ominous brassy blasts on Agoria’s Baptême lend what’s otherwise a straightforward summery house jam an unsettling edge. Voight returns under his Wasserman moniker for the unreleased Eisen Mein Herz. The beat alone is a subtle work of art – grainy and ever so slightly dragged out, it demonstrates Voight’s mastery of putting together an understated four-to-the-floor pattern that really breathes. The subdued treatment lends the rhythmic clicks of the synth and the menacing, choppedup utterances lots of impact. A real highlight that sees Total 15 at its most austere.
Earlier this year, chimerical London outfit LHF released EP4: From The Edge on Dusk and Blackdown’s Keysound Recordings. It was the first public address from the group since their debut LP, 2012’s Keepers of the Light. Featuring angsty junglists Ragga Twins, the fourtrack EP had more than a touch of Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin about it, which, in turn, made it redolent in UK dance nostalgia. This is something LHF do very well: decoding the binary of electronic music. They have a capability of chronicling the past with concentrated production standards. The faction, consisting of Double Helix, Low Density Matter, No Fixed Abode and Amen Ra, are one of the only acts that can pull off this type of progressively dubbed-out, bassdriven mosaic of genres come and gone and still sound reformist. Despite EP4 seeing Double Helix take the productive reigns, For The Thrown is a record almost solely managed by Amen Ra. In contrast to his associate’s wayward work on EP4, For The Throne is notably muted, pastoral and brooding. There’s a Boards of Canada-cum-Burial foundation to these ten cuts. Yielding seemingly pays duty to Leftfield’s Leftism while Entrapment is like the better part of an AFX Soundcloud dump. But this is not merely a practice in private zonal listening. Wet Harmonic gallops through to Mud and Root, and Triumph takes literal shots at conventional house with distilled layers of staggered synth lines piling upon strategic 4/4 percussion. Considering Amen Ra’s softpedalled steering, For The Throne permits just enough drive to be regarded as ‘club friendly’. And this merges perfectly with LHF’s predilections. They are a collective of interpreters, realigning the UK’s affiliation with dance and reinstating the significance of vilified sub-genres. This record is more refined than Keepers of the Light and more subtle in its intentions than EP4. It’s a record teemed with highs and lows; much like the UK’s helter-skelter relationship with electronic music.
Foals have always been a strikingly capable band. They haven’t just won over fans on the basis of what they do – there has always been a conversation about what they might do. Always on the brink of sprawling angular rock chaos, reined in by a penchant for buoyant pop singles. It’s never been clear which direction they should steer towards but there’s been a belief that when they left the crossroads, they’d be headed for the history books. For What Went Down, they’ve maintained the balancing act. Like the pair of singles that preceded Holy Fire, we’ve been teased with a supercharged, howling epic in the form of the title track and a hook-heavy follow-up in the form of Mountain At My Gates. It’s a tried and tested formula – one song dicing with titanic main stage destruction and another custom-built to soundtrack a montage of all the great work Children In Need does. When the flashes of decisiveness do appear on What Went Down, they show a band far from finished. Night Swimmers climaxes in a commotion of drum machine skitters and afrobeat syncopations; a kind of elevated model of the math-rock blueprints of their debut. The closer, A Knife In The Ocean, might be up their with some of their best work, Yannis Philippakis’s vocals awash with rich, theatrical instrumentation in the only song that nears the seven-minute mark. According to interviews, the band planned to take a longer period of time off after Holy Fire but when they went in to the studio something “clicked”. That story is plausible – Foals aren’t on autopilot here. The raw aggression is present and the songs live up to the standards you might expect from one of the country’s biggest bands. There’d be a temptation to celebrate this record for that very reason and repeatedly praise the band for doing what they do so brilliantly and consistently. But for as long as we’re lauding them as they are, we’ll be wondering what they could be.
2012’s sophomore Tender New Sings saw heavily-tipped New Zealand shoegaze artist Tamaryn live up to her billing in emphatic form. A muggy, blissful, headphone-friendly listen, it was a one of the revelations of the year. After a considerable break, Crane Kiss now sees her gleefully discard the formula which made her name, embarking on a new, pop-oriented route; one which is more Sia in its roots than Slowdive. Songs like Sugar Fix – as addictive as its title – clash sharply with the sombre tones which marked her previous works. Such was Tamaryn’s burgeoning reputation, this confident expansion in sound, attitude and aesthetic has to be seen as admirable; brave, even. The subtle, watercolour washes of guitar have been substituted for a thinner, more digitally-inclined sound. And while there’s undoubtedly a degree of surface-level satisfaction to be found here, on repeated listens, the layers of texture that used to emerge during dusky listens are found sadly absent. Crane Kiss is an enjoyable, well-written pop album – it’s just difficult not to pine for those darker, more delicate depths.
! Xavier Boucherat
! Tom Watson
! Duncan Harrison
! Billie Monnier-Stokes
MA X RICHTER From SLEEP Deutsche Grammophon
VARIOUS ARTISTS Kompakt Total 15 Kompakt
There can’t be many people whose output piques the interest of both Gramophone and Crack magazine readers alike. Ever since the neo-classical melancholia of second solo effort The Blue Notebooks back in 2004, Max Richter has operated within a kind of Venn diagram space between alternative popular music and the avant-garde. Part of that has been down to the powerful immediacy of his melodies: whether making film soundtracks or releasing his own records, Richter’s music has invariably conveyed an emotional resonance capable of reaching just about anyone. Yet the vast majority of new composition SLEEP will probably reach nobody at all, at least not consciously. The full work lasts eight hours and as Richter says, functions as “a personal lullaby for a frenetic world.” He’s not kidding either: the audience for the world premiere in Berlin are to literally be given beds instead of seats. Helpfully Richter is also releasing From SLEEP, a seven-song, hour-long sampler in conventional album format. Sure enough, these are lush, glacially-paced movements that continually glide in and out of focus like fragments of halfremembered dreams. The aptly-titled Dream 3, Dream 8 and Dream 13 form the spine of the album and sound exactly as you would imagine; all delicate piano and ponderous violin. Interspersed between those are snippets from two other pieces: Path and Space. The claustrophobia of the latter makes for the most arresting listening on the album but also the most unsettling, which sort of defeats the purpose here and signposts the obvious challenge with From SLEEP: as an album this doesn’t do enough to hold the attention or serve its conceptual purpose. Everybody needs a full eight hours of SLEEP.
! James F. Thompson
TAMARYN Crane Kiss Mexican Summer
FOALS What Went Down Warner Bros
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Film When was the last time a documentary became a national event? Asif Kapadia’s Amy bridged the gap between broad public interest and the human condition. By contrasting the innocuous, shallow world of popular music with the still raw mythology of Amy Winehouse’s life and death, its key message was one of the brutality of celebrity. As the nation sobbed with self-shame, Pixar – global proprietors of warm fuzzy feelings – chimed in with one of their very best. We also checked out a disappointingly placid Western, found Magic Mike XXL’s shallow soul-searching a major turn off and saw a film about a struggling DJ which left us feeling as empty as the dancefloors he plays to.
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SLOW WEST dir: John Maclean Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ben Mendelsohn
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MAGIC MIKE X XL dir: Gregory Jacobs Starring: Channing Tatum, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash In the follow-up to the 2012 runaway hit Magic Mike, we join the remaining Kings of Tampa on a ramshackle roadtrip as they head towards a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, dragging Mike (Channing Tatum) out of retirement for one last blow-out performance. The success of Magic Mike was due to a few simple factors: it was fun, it was fast-paced, and most importantly, it unashamedly and unreservedly objectified men in the way that women are so often objectified. All the sequel needed to do was stick to this formula, but they tried to go bigger, and ended up with a hot mess. No one is seeing this film for the storyline, and absolutely no one watching this wants to see a male stripper have an existential crisis over their life choices. What the audience really wants is abs, abs, and more abs, with a few close-ups of Tatum staring into their eyes like he is going to do bad things to them and they’re going to love it. While the film’s ambition of ‘equal opportunity objectification’ and focus on the ‘female gaze’ – a counter to the male gaze posited by British feminist Laura Mulvey - is to be encouraged, you may as well save your money, stay home, and watch the trailer on repeat as that’s got most of the good shit in it anyway. ! Tamsyn Aurelia-Eros Black
EDEN dir. Mia Hansen-Løve Starring: Greta Gerwid, Golshifteh Farahani, Brady Corbet The history of nightclubs on-screen is littered with failure, largely because in most cases the filmmaker only has a perfunctory interest in capturing the smells and swells of a basement full of bodies. More often than not a nightclub scene is only there to serve another purpose, be that a setting for a fight or an excuse for people to hook up — the environment is a background platform for the human experience. Strange then, that the case with Eden veers so sharply in the other direction. Set largely in Paris, beginning during the pre-millennial rise of Daft Punk, the film follows Paul, an aspiring DJ whose career (unlike his robotic acquaintances) never quite lifts to the heights he dreams of. The moments the film spends inside clubs and at parties are a total joy, drenched in the sounds of early, soulful house, the soundtrack bounces from Joe Smooth, to Frankie Knuckles, perhaps peaking with an ebullient whole-club rendition of Kings of Tomorrow’s Finally. Hansen-Løve moves through these scenes with elegance and confidence, capturing every euphoric yelp, awkward shuffle and drunk stumble with poetry and poise. Sadly, the human side of the story doesn’t fare as well. The performances feel stilted, even from a usually unbeatable Greta Gerwig, and before long, the plot itself devolves into a slew of hangover-anguish, that ultimately comes off as whiny. Ultimately, Eden will ask you to care about a failing DJ with a bit of a coke habit, which as countless smoking area conversations and after-party encounters will tell you, is a pretty big ask. . ! David Cloth
Fassbender? A cowboy? We're in. A British/New Zealand production that was filmed in the Antipodean expanses but set in America, Slow West tells the tale of Jay (Smit-McPhee, aka the kid from The Road) accompanied by Silas (Fassbender) in search of a fugitive lost love, Rose (Caren Pistorious). Written and directed by Brit John Maclean, Slow West turns out to be very un-American for a Western – but like directors before him (most notably Sergio Leone), it’s not the first time a Western hasn’t been made in the West. Maclean enjoys this displacement, instilling it into characters meandering across a ravaged frontier. New Zealand’s vast beauty renders the settings beautifully alien. Despite some handy cinematography, the film is fractured by its script, resulting in a series of cowboy-related sketches, presented on a set of lovely postcards. Slow West strolls rather than swaggers, more of a 4-pints-of-Western than the Acid-Western we were hoping for – not nearly weird enough. But Fassbender was a cowboy and that – it has to be said – was good. ! Tim Oxley Smith
18 INSIDE OUT dir. Pete Docter Starring: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader Like advocating the legalisation of cannabis or pointing out that David Attenborough would be an awesome granddad, you’re always safe with the opinion that “the great thing about Pixar is that they make films for kids, but there are jokes in there for the adults as well”. Trot that one out whenever the studio come up in conversation, and you can guarantee a nice roll of nodding heads and mumbled ‘yeah’s in response. However, say it about Inside Out and you will be wrong. Inside Out is a movie made for adults, but there are jokes in there for the kids as well. The action takes place largely in the head of an 11-year-old girl, Riley, and the film’s characters are her emotions; Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. When Riley’s parents relocate her from Minnesota to San Francisco, leaving her friends behind, the emotions are tasked with the impossible job of getting her through the ordeal. What follows is essentially a very colourful telling of the corruption of adulthood, the inevitable reality that your childhood is a blessed period of ignorance before the eventual toil of age and experience centralises melancholy. That the joys of youth will become memory, and then memory will be forgotten. As I sat at the film’s end, a dry pained cloud clasping my throat, a tear rolling down my cheek, I was reminded that life is essentially a cycle of constant death and re-invention; and with every new version of yourself you create, you lose some joy, irreplaceably. There is also a pink elephant made of candy floss called Bing-Bong. ! Angus Harrison
AMY dir. Asif Kapadia From Grizzly Man to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the role of the modern documentary filmmaker has become that of an anthropologist-cum-freakshow proprietor whose basic job is to find people weird enough and wheel them out for our amusement. Amy flips this formula on its head. Instead of indulging the voyeurism of his audience, Asif Kapadia has put a mirror up to it, showing us the ugly horror of our own curiosity. The most interesting character in the film is us, the public, whose insatiable thirst for Winehouse as ‘celebrity’ came with no obligation to see her as a human being. An impressive technique used to emphasise media and public insensitivity is the inter-splicing of clips we’ve all seen before. In one cut from Live At The Apollo, Frankie Boyle jokes that Amy “looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses”. Set against footage of her struggle with addiction, depression and bulimia, the real impact of these glib remarks hits home, with the double impact of revealing a societywide stigmatisation of mental illness. “Amy Winehouse is a mad woman,” Graham Norton says bluntly in one clip; there’s mocking laughter from the TV audience, and guilty wincing in the cinema. Importantly, though, for all its high-minded social commentary, the film never loses sight of the personal story it sets out to tell. Amy is both towering epic and humble home video, and it tells a story far stranger than fiction. ! Francis Blagburn
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Directors' Note Geraint Davies is the best writer we know and by writer we also mean any other discipline that involves the manipulation of the English language within the context of producing a magazine. His care, work-ethic and attention to detail has left Crack Magazine positioned at a level we could have only dreamed of six years ago, and his prodigious knowledge of the musical world in which we chose to position ourselves is totally unrivalled. A true “head”, but more than that, the head that has steered this magazine to its current position, no one has ever had more influence on the tone, style or content you receive in this paper every month. Over the years, the results of his effort have given rise to opportunities for other people to work here and for us to expand what we offer as a brand. Geraint's talent has been delivered with an approach that looks not for self-gratification, but takes pleasure in the final product, promoting the
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music and art he’s truly passionate about and having the opportunity to converse with his idols – with Quentin Blake, Josh Homme, Flying Lotus, Frank Black, DFA 1979 and, of course, Slayer being among his greatest hits. Just as importantly, he also happens to be the funniest bloke we’ve ever met. If you’ve enjoyed Crack at all in the last four years, then we’re inviting you to raise either a literal or figurative glass and wish “The Editor” well as he moves on. Jake Applebee & Thomas Frost Directors Crack Magazine
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Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane E8 2EB—shacklewellarms.com—@ShacklewellArms
Fri & Sat 3am close
DANCING UPSTAIRS TIL LATE FRI & SAT — ALWAYS FREE ENTRY
The Waiting Room
OPENING 3RD SEPTEMBER
Wednesday 5 August
Saturday 15 August
ROYCE WOOD JUNIOR
VOGUE DOTS
Thursday 6 August
LUPO
HACKNEY
mothclub.co.uk — MothClub
GRASS HOUSE Friday 21 August
Friday 7 August
MOTH
Wednesday 19 August
ITOA Tuesday 11 August
GRASS HOUSE Wednesday 12 August
ROYCE WOOD JUNIOR Friday 14 August
KABLAM DINAMARCA THROWING SHADE
LAST JAPAN B2B BLACKWAX Saturday 22 August
ZZZ Thursday 27 August
DEMDIKE STARE VS RAIME Friday 28 August
GRASS HOUSE Friday 18 September
ALEX BANKS
(Underneath The Three Crowns) 175 Stoke Newington High Street, London N16 0LH waitingroomn16.com • waitingroomn16
UPC O MING LOND ON SHOWS www.rockfeedbackconcerts.com
VISIONS FESTIVAL London Fields Saturday 8 Aug
ARTHUR RUSSELL
INSTRUMENTALS
PISSED JEANS
Oval Space Hackney Monday 10 Aug
100 Club Soho
Dingwalls Camden
Tues 18 & Weds 19 Aug
Thursday 3 Sep
GIRLPOOL
UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA
JACCO GARDENER
ALV VAYS
CAYUCAS
O2 Shepherds Bush Empire Fri 11 Sep
Sebright Arms
Scala Kings Cross
Monday 14 Sep
Tuesday 15 Sep
FATHER
BOXED IN
THE SOF T MOON
BORN RUFFIANS
O2 Shepherds Bush Empire Wed 23 Sep
JOHN MIST Y
100 Club Soho
XOYO Shoreditch
Electrowerkz
Wednesday 7 Oct
Thursday 15 Oct
Wednesday 21 Oct
O2 Shepherds Bush Empire 28 & 29 Oct
WA XAHATCHEE
THREE TRAPPED TIGERS & LITURGY
HOLLY HERNDON
SONGHOY BLUES
Islington Assembly Hall Thurs 29 Oct
The Dome Tufnell Park Friday 30 Oct
Oval Space Hackney
KOKO Camden
Wednesday 4 Nov
Wednesday 4 Nov
MICACHU
TIT US
&THE SHAPES
ANDRONICUS
MARIK A HACKMAN
ZOL A JESUS
Oval Space Hackney
Village Underground
Union Chapel
Thursday 5 Nov
Thursday 5 Nov
Friday 6 Nov
Islington Assembly Hall Sat 7 Nov
ALEL A DIANE
LOS
MEAT WAVE
NATALIE PRASS
CAMPESINOS
Bush Hall
Scala Kings Cross
The Victoria Dalston
KOKO Camden
Wednesday 11 Nov
Sunday 22 Nov
Thursday 26 Nov
Monday 30 Nov
get tickets and full info at www.rockfeedback.com
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The #clickbait music news rounded up by Josh Baines SHEERAN IN SHARTING SCANDAL I’ve always thought that Ed Sheeran looked like one of those blokes who smells a bit like mud. Mud and spit. Spitty mud. Muddy spit. I went to school with someone who smelled a bit like that actually, poor guy. Anyway, it turns out that Ed Sheeran is more likely to smell of shit, after having shat himself on stage once. Ed Sheeran smells of shit. FIFTY CENT? MORE LIKE FIFTY PENCE!!! 50 Cent has reportedly gone bankrupt. This, apparently, is funny. It is funny that someone is facing financial ruin and the complete destabalisation of their life. Isn’t it funny? Yeah, 50 Cent is now, get this, get ready for this, here we go ... is worth less then his name suggests! That is quality stuff. I’m still laughing about it. He’s broke! Ruined! Love it.
Denzil Schniffermann Love, life and business advice from Crack’s esteemed agony uncle
SKEPTA TATTOO CAUSES RELATIONSHIP SHUTDOWN I remember seeing Skepta live in the backroom of a pub in New Cross seven years ago. I had paid 10 pounds to get in. Skepta arrived late, did two songs and fucked off. From then on, I knew that he would become the megastar he is now. Isn’t it also funny that someone got Skepta’s name tattooed on themselves and then got dumped? Ha ha. Loving it. I wish I had a Skepta tattoo because I would walk into rooms and say 'shut down' a lot ... but ... get this, get ready for this, here we go ... that’s not me!
Dear Denzil,
Denzil says:
What do you make of all the beef? So much beef. Beef everywhere. Ghostface beefing with Bronson, Taylor Swift beefing with Nicki Minaj, who is caught up in the beef between Meek Mill and Drake, who is beefing with Birdman, who is beefing with Lil Wayne but Birdman says Lil Wayne is like his son but they don’t speak because of the beef. Beef.
What’s the meaning of this? If you’re referring to the gossip about the Ipswich branch of Schniffermann’s Steak House then, please, let bygones be bygones. We’ve had three star hygiene ratings year-onyear since 2006 for Christ’s sake, and I’ve got the certificates to prove it.
Keith, 27, Ibiza
Dear Denzil,
Denzil says:
I’m addicted to nicking footy stickers. When the World Cup started last summer, I got a free book with The Sun. I felt an urge rising, and before I knew it I was emerging from the supermarket with pockets full of unpaid-for stickers, day after day. I’d return home and rip open the packets, laughing and haphazardly slapping Cameroon’s goalie or Costa Rica’s left back into their spot. The season’s creeping back around, Denz, and I can feel the hunger rising once again. What should I do?
Monetise. Monetise. Monetise. Now, I’m not going to sit here and condone shoplifting – an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay (plus expenses) is more my style. But if you’ve got a weakness, turn it into a strength. Sell your doublers on the black market, slip packets to local kids for half price. Do what you’ve got to do to turn a profit. Cause what I always say is: so long as your bank balance is going up, you won’t get too down.
Anon, 29, Bristol
READY TO CRY I don’t read comic books because I’m capable of reading things without pictures and I’m not nine years old. But apparently, Marvel have re-intepreted some classic hip-hop album covers ... with cartoon superheroes! When I heard this news, I spent a solid hour punching myself in the face until all that was left of my once glorious visage was gnarled tissue and a few crooked teeth. I then scooped up the remnants of myself and smeared them on rye bread before falling into a deep and peaceful slumber. SMELLS LIKE TEEN RELATEABLE CONTENT Apparently, according to Noisey, there’s a video of a shovel that sounds like a Nirvana song. I do not want to know how this works. I have no desire to ever know how this works. Take me, Lord, take me. @bain3z
Problems? email denzil@crackmagazine.net
Duuuuuude,
Denzil says:
I fucked up pretty bad. Hear me out: I’m sinking a couple of brewskies at the bar where I hang all the time, and all the guys look so bored, so I decide to sock this dumb ass little cardboard box. I punch a hole right through it, the dudes laugh and we all high-five. Then this cute old couple come round the corner looking for their cake. The cake was inside the box man! I feel ultra, ultra bogus, How do I rat on these gnarly vibes bro?
Firstly, I’d rather you didn’t “bro” me if you don’t know me. Secondly, as a man who’s had three-tiers worth of marzipan and soft icing thrown in his face in front of a packed-out registry office, I know that nothing reeks of tragedy more than a destroyed cake. Alas, I presume it’s too late to apologise to these poor folks with a suitably luxurious gateaux, so my only advice is that you find some friends who have IQs higher than the average chimpanzee.
Dag Hennessy, 21, Pedro’s place
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The Crack Magazine Crossword Across 03. This Family could be Lifted! (10) 05. Steve Zissou’s kinda life (7) 07. RnB sensation behind the 80s smash hit Caribbean Queen (5,5) 08. RnB sensation, once of Odd Future, now just busy being FUCKING GREAT (5,5) 09. A load of casino-robbing schmoozers (6,6) 10. Mass of water separating the UK from Scandinavia (5,3) 13. Britpop also-rans with hits including The Day We Caught The Train (5,6,5) 16. Sea fodder; loads of little animals that whales eat in one bite like greedy bastards (8) 18. The Village People have signed up (2,3,4) Down 01. Where pirates look from to try and find trouble, those pesky pirates (5,4) 02. Loads of Aussie coral. Loads of it (5,7,4) 04. Famously crap ship (7) 06. Underwater turbo babe (7) 11. Drop it, then you’re not going anywhere (6) 12. Dead tasty molluscs (8) 14. Crazy whale that looks like a sea-unicorn or some shit (7) 15. 2010 coming-of-age comedy directed by Richard Ayoade (9) 17. OH MY GOD THAT SHARK IS MASSIVE and seems to be made of plastic (4) Solution to last month’s crossword: Theme: Food. ACROSS: 03. CREAM, 05. SALT-N-PEPA, 08. CRANBERRIES, 09. CLAMS-CASINO 13. BLACK-GRAPE, 15. ORANGE-JUICE, 16. ONION, 17. PIE DOWN: 01. HOT-CHIP 02. JAM, 04. KELIS, 06. PORK-AND-BEANS, 07. MELT-BANANA, 10. SWORDFISH, 11. MEAT, 12. BURRITO, 14. CHOP-SUEY
COMING UP AT DANCE TUNNEL AUGUST FRIDAY 14TH
NEIGHBOURHOOD ANTHONY PARASOLE / RANDOMER
SATURDAY 15TH
VENT FIT / WILLIE BURNS
SATURDAY 22ND
YOUR LOVE TAMA SUMO / DC DJ SOULMIND
FRIDAY 28TH
MAKE ME EWAN PEARSON / RUPES / RUBIN
SATURDAY 29TH
ASTRAL INDUSTRIES NEEL / ARIO / O.UTLIER
SUNDAY 30TH
CHURCH SPECIAL GUESTS / APES / LOCK EYES / HOLLICK
SEPTEMBER SATURDAY 11TH
THUNDER DERRICK CARTER / RESIDENTS
DANCE TUNNEL 95 KINGSLAND HIGH STREET, LONDON E8 2PB WWW.DANCETUNNEL.COM
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20 Questions: Julio Bashmore
“My signature recipe is the Great British Skewer. It’s a miniature beef wellington, a Cornish pasty and a miniature ham hock”
Legend has it that Julio Bashmore has read every single Star Trek novel. That’s pretty much impossible – the Shatnerverse series alone boasts ten instalments. But he’s definitely read quite a few of them, which is testament to the utter devotion he has towards his inspirations, or something. Anyway, the fiery-haired Bristolian has finally got round to releasing his debut album Knockin’ Boots – a record that blends his distinctive style of bass-heavy house with luxurious dousings of disco, funk and 80s pop. We called him up to chat about Dungeons & Dragons, Debenhams’ restaurant and hybridising meat-based dishes.
Who’s your favourite member of Slipknot? I’ll have to say Joey, his upside down drum kit is pretty mesmerising. And who’s your favourite character in The Wire? Probably Bubbles. He’s got an honest soul. What’s your signature recipe? My Great British Skewer. It’s a kebab with a miniature beef wellington, a Cornish pasty and a miniature ham hock. It’s a medieval banquet for one on a skewer. Delicious. If you were trying to seduce a potential lover, what would you play? I feel that Marvin is the obvious choice. I think it’s bold. And I think it’s good to be bold with this kind of thing, so fuck it – stick some Marvin on. If you could pick a surrogate grandparent who would it be? Vince McMahon. What’s your favourite boardgame? Probably Dungeons & Dragons. It’s long, it’s a quest. Once all this bullshit dies down, I’m gonna be back in the game. Happy hardcore or jump-up drum ‘n’ bass? Erm … I’ve never been to a happy hardcore night, but I’ve been to a couple of drum ‘n’ bass nights, so I’ll go with happy hardcore. Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met? Define ‘met’. Because I was sat down eating a sandwich at Coachella once and when I looked behind me, Katy Perry was also sat down. No words were exchanged, but I think we might have caught eyes. What was the last book you read? I Partridge, We need to talk about Alan. Out of all the tracks you’ve recorded, what’s your least favourite? Probably… I don’t know, it’s a tough one. I’m generally happy with all of them, but I used to struggle with remixes a lot. So it’s probably one of those.
Would go for a pint with Kanye West? Yeah, absolutely. I think we’d do something more ambitious, because y’know he’s an ambitious guy. Maybe share a Great British Skewer with him? I think I’d readjust it to an all-game menu – pheasant, partridge... What’s the longest you’ve run in one go? It’s probably not that impressive. I get bored. If I’m trying to exercise it’ll probably be a maximum of 10-15 minute runs. Have you ever shoplifted? Never. Not at least intentionally. I’ve never committed any crime. Good boy. Do you have a nickname? There’s been a few over the years. It started off with Minnie Mouse, Maggot, Piglet, then Pig, and now it’s Bash. Aside from Bash, they’re some seriously unflattering nicknames. I think it comes from having three older brothers. What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Probably Debenhams restaurant. At one point, just before I left, someone had their wedding reception there. They clearly didn’t want to be there. Both of them had the roast, but I’m pretty sure one person had the all-day fry up. Describe the worst haircut you’ve ever had. It was short on the back and the sides, the parting was run down the middle of some kind of mid-length hair, forming the shape of a curtain with heavily applied gel. Pair that with a matching tracksuit of your older sibling. A pretty strong look actually. What’s your favourite drunken snack? One of the best fusion cuisines I’ve ever had, in New York where they have a big Jamaican and Italian population. You get a Jamaican patty but it’s got big slab of mozzarella on top. Fucking incredible man. What’s the first thing you’re going to do after this interview? Another interview. I’ve rented a room in Claridges. It’s going to be like Notting Hill, my dog Gryff is my Hugh Grant.
Knockin’ Boots is out now via Broadwalk Catch Julio Bashmore at The Garden Party, Leeds, 29 August
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Perspective
US-born, Japan-based Terre Thaemlitz is a producer, writer and transgender activist best known for material released under the DJ Sprinkles guise. Here, she reacts to the news that Japan’s infamous ‘no-dancing’ legislation, dating back to 1948, has been officially revised. Over the past few years, I am sure you have heard about struggles against Japan’s Entertainment Establishments Control Law (Fuueihou) – mostly likely oversimplified as the fight to end a 1am curfew on dancing. You may have also heard that changes to the Fuueihou became official this past June 17, 2015 (effective in 2016) – likely misreported as the Fuueihou being “struck down” or “overturned.” To be clear, the Fuueihou has not been overturned. It is in many ways more here than ever, with both legal and social repercussions. The Fuueihou is essentially Japan’s morality code. It is a broad piece of legislation that covers many aspects of culture, ranging from the regulation of sex work to ballroom dancing. Over the years, producers and participants of various musical genres have had their unique struggles with this law. For example, in the early 80s Japan’s jazz scene was decimated by bans on playing music after midnight. Clubs were forced to start performances at 6pm, but of course this was too early for most people to attend. It was out of desperation that clubs like Tokyo’s Blue Note began serving dinner in order to get people in earlier. The current Fuueihou revisions will make it easier for large night clubs with dance permits to have all-night events (although in classic Neoliberal legislative style, things are never made ‘too easy’) – all of which should be well in place for party-minded tourists coming to the 2020 Olympics. Hooray! Of course, the majority of clubs – which are too small to qualify for dance permits – shall continue to exist illegally as always, but fuck ’em, right? To celebrate, a group of over 40 prominent Japanese DJs, mostly techno and hip-hop, issued a co-signed Declaration On the Future Of Japan’s Club Culture, poetically restarting history by declaring 2015 as “the
first year of dance music in Japan,” and concluding with a father-pleasing pledge to straighten up and seriously “endeavor to develop Japan’s culture, society and economy.” Bizarrely, their conservative declaration was printed in the Asahi Shimbun, a major Left-leaning newspaper. I quickly issued a counter-declaration asking among other things, “Japanese culture as sanctioned by whom? Whose society? Are profits the sign of cultural validity?” One of the dark undercurrents of the revisions is that the police now have clearer control in defining what constitutes legal ‘entertainment’ (yuukyou). This is devastating, since the Fuueihou revisions are not simply about the “right to dance,” but the state’s physical and social policing of our bodies and their movements. Given the Fuueihou’s role in governing sex work, this aspect is undeniable. Similarly, these issues are entwined with other feminist and queer struggles with labor issues, censorship and control of one’s body. Therefore, any meaningful analysis of the failures of the current Fuueihou revisions must situate them within a greater history of Japanese civil rights activism and legislative failures. Japan has often been described as an authoritarian-democracy: an authoritarian society without an authoritarian government. The culture and language are historically structured around nuance and active silences, such as learning to ‘read the air’ (kuuki wo yomu). Meanwhile, Japan was forced to adapt a Western political paradigm in which power is inseparable from visibility. Between these contradictions of unspoken and spoken power lies the grey areas within which people here move and express themselves daily. Maintaining the ‘grey’ is vital to protecting social mobility and freedom amidst dominant cultural restrictions. Whenever possible, one avoids speaking the rules, lest one be held accountable to following them to the letter. For better or worse, all of this has a special resonance for me as a non-essentialist transgendered person and pansexual Queer who has always lived through greys and closets. Sadly, when attempting to clarify and resolve social injustices through legislation in Japan, all that has been
hitherto unspoken must suddenly be put into language. Language that is invariably controlled by and manipulated in the favour of those in power. For example, when legislation was begrudgingly passed guaranteeing women equal opportunity in the workplace, language was introduced that distinguished between full-time jobs to be protected under the law, and part-time or temp-agency positions not ‘serious’ enough to need protection. In effect, politicians deemed such positions need not be spoken for by the law, thus they were explicitly excluded from protection. Of course, the majority of Japan’s women are only able to find employment as part-time or temp-agency workers, making the hard-fought law all but meaningless. I should say, meaningless to the needs of women, yet from the perspective of politicians and corporations it managed to further crystalize those economic and social abuses feminists sought to ease. Under the guise of equality, the law made it clear that the majority of jobs inhabited by women were excluded from legal protection against gender bias. As part of the Fuueihou revisions, police are forcing clubs to brighten their interior lighting, and yet it just seems to get darker and darker. Some of the Japanese lawyers whose worthy struggles against the Fuueihou resulted in today’s painful legal paradoxes are respected friends of mine. I know they continue to fight as best they can to remedy and finesse the law – battling for vagary as much as clarity. They are as trapped as the rest of us. Meanwhile, small and underground dance clubs remain illegal, as ever. Although it is of little comfort, this is the entirety of Japan’s club cultures to date. This is all that has been known until now. 2015 is not the first year of anything. 2015 is just another grey year. Read album annotations, articles, essays, lecture transcripts and other texts by Terre Thaemlitz at comatonse.com
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