The environment meets multimedia theatrical performances in EcoStudio Review: ‘UGLY’ is a post-punk rebirth

Top Track: ‘Yum’

ARMAN SAXENA FOR THE THRESHER

When I put on Slowthai’s newest project on a cozy Friday morning, I was not expecting to be met with a propulsive, anxious and fervidly aggressive electro-industrial track. Slowthai’s last album “Tyron” was a departure from the UK rapper’s grime and punk roots, alternating between boastful trap anthems and R&B-influenced introspection. With “UGLY,” the Northampton-born rapper has reinvented himself once again.

“Yum” is a phenomenal opener, introducing the listener to the raw and angry contemplation that Slowthai has displayed in spurts but lets completely loose on this project. Hurried breathing, explicit sex noises and pulsating synths conjoined with Slowthai’s impassioned illustration of his self-hatred and anxiety culminate in a feverish climax — and that’s just the album’s first four minutes.

yourself because you can’t rely on the world for it.

The album’s penultimate track is another highlight. While “Tourniquet” may initially seem like a quiet reprieve from the anger of the previous track “Wotz Funny,” it is as, if not more, powerful. Produced by ingenues Ethan B. Flynn and Taylor Skye, the song is a devastating and soul-baring alternative rock piece that sees Slowthai at the end of his rope, screaming lyrics like “I’ll play the wound / You play the salt.” After “Yum,” this is Slowthai at his most emotionally naked, the song’s growing freneticism representing the final stage of his self-destruction. The track ends with 30 seconds of instrumental post-rock; in context, it sounds almost funereal.

Inside the Shepherd School’s Wortham Theater, environmental issues are regularly brought to life in the form of multimedia works. Wortham Theater is the stage for ENST 422: EcoStudio, a space transformed into a multimedia classroom by Kurt D. Stallmann, Director of the Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs. Stallmann and his co-instructor Joseph A. Campana, Rice English professor and poet, spent months discussing how to get students to collaborate and engage with environmental issues. The idea for the course was born from these discussions.

“People can interface with really hard environmental questions and conversations more easily through the arts often than directly through science or policy,” Campana said. “The idea [is] that every expertise on campus provides an archive for artists to learn [from] everything.”

Much of the discussion centered on how artists can bring multiple disciplines together. Inspired by their own collaborative work, Stallmann and Campana want to present themselves in the classroom as fellow artists generating responses to the world around them. Their current project, “The Work and the Fruit,” is a collaborative performance piece, with an excerpt that will be presented at the Moody Center for the Arts for the public, “Thinking with Bees.”

“This particular creature, the honeybee, has inspired and confounded and fascinated humans for literally a millennia,” Campana said. “That’s become an occasion for creating things, so poetry and text in my case, and in conversation with Kurt’s work which is electroacoustic composition. And thinking through sensation and sound worlds, putting the two together, that’s been part of our method.”

For each instructional unit, Campana and Stallmann will lead a discussion and present multimedia works from an environmental theme, ranging from insect sensory abilities to the treatment of toxicity and pollution in the environment. Then, the student groups have one week to collaborate on creative, multimedia responses and perform their works on stage at the next class session.

“The idea [for] that turnaround is, first of all, to immediately get into the action of thinking of creating. So that really is a response, that’s how we think about these [unit projects],” Stallmann said. “But then [it is] also to familiarize yourself with everybody in the room and what they bring to the table.”

EcoStudio presents a smorgasbord of multimedia art forms as responses to environmental themes. To bridge the gaps between fields, Campana and Stallmann invited a wide array of guest speakers. Scott Solomon, Rice professor of biosciences, presented ongoing research to model insects and how they sense and perceive the world.

Rice History professor Lisa Balabanillar showcased the long history of automated mobile gardens from the Ottoman and Mughal empires. From the arts, they invited Aaron Ambroso, an art historian who cofounded the Houston Climate Justice Museum, and Theodore Bale, a dance critic and reporter who presented the Butoh dance form.

“A class should include all the perspectives [Rice] has to offer,” Stallmann said. “It seems like here’s an opportunity to bring together all these perspectives, and focus them on these different topics and come up with responses that are performative or related to art in that way.”

Campana and Stallman’s hope is for EcoStudio’s course format to be guided by each future instructor’s interdisciplinary background and expertise. They said that this structure can break down barriers that prevent multidisciplinary work from happening.

“We want [the course] to broaden over time. Different people will be teaching it, so [sometimes] it will be angled towards a more particular subject,” Campana said. “Each set of instructors will figure out how they want to model this kind of work and to also encourage students to generate their work.”

While many albums don’t live up to the expectations set by their phenomenal openers, there are no songs following “Yum” that feel ineffective in Slowthai’s exploration of his deepest thoughts and emotions. This is Slowthai at his most experimental. There are many interesting musical choices utilized to great effect: the breakbeat-influenced production on “Never Again,” the shoegaze-y noise of “Falling” and “UGLY” and the psychedelic post-rock on “Tourniquet” are some of the most memorable.

Similarly to “Yum,” Slowthai is clearly pouring his heart out on the title track. While still introspective, “UGLY” positions Slowthai as a cultural commentator with the lyrics, “When pigment’s a depiction of class / When your body has to be a wine glass / You drop your guard, you realize it’s hard, it’s ugly.” According to Slowthai, the letters UGLY stand for “U Gotta Love Yourself,” and with this song he seems to tell listeners that in the midst of racism, classism and violence, you have to remember to love

Unlike his previous two projects, Slowthai fully leans into the post-punk genre with “UGLY.” His musical choices, from the guitar work from Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. to the Radiohead-influenced production on “Tourniquet,” make this one of the most quintessentially British albums in recent years.

At only 28 years old, Slowthai has released the best project of his career thus far, and it will be incredibly exciting to see how he continues to reinvent himself. He clearly has a passion for experimentation and subverting expectations with each new project, and his next one is sure to be worth the wait.