iDose Therefore I Am
By Matthew Devereux
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Your child is already dead and as a parent you’re to blame for their fatally uncontrolled behaviour in a confusing, predatory and dangerous world. Professor Ray Surette’s (1998) law of opposites, based on an analysis of the media’s reporting of crime and violence states that there is greater media coverage of events that are particularly unusual or severe against individuals over and above the percentile risks associated with actual crime. Furthermore there is a seeming social bias at play with a concentration of stories focussing on older or higher status victims and offenders. An emphasis Gregg Barak (1994) argues which ‘reinforces forms of social control’ by dictating how society should view these events in terms of right or wrong, victimhood, race, sex and class.
The ecstasy related death of Leah Betts in 1995 and those of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith during 2010 at the hands of mephedrone in terms of the amount of coverage afforded to these three tragic occurrences can be said to have been boldly aggrandised by newsrooms in light of the public interest, or moral panic, or rank sensationalism. Mephedrone itself was unknown as miaow-miaow prior to the deaths and as Private Eye uncovered was a name concocted by the media itself (Private Eye 1259, 2010). Although the emphasis of new stories in correlating the taking of drugs as the prime cause of these fatalities was ultimately unmasked as erroneous, it helped to ensure the attention of public which in turn made the prohibition of mephedrone and ecstasy an easy political win in the UK. An act which has not stopped any further ‘drug related fatalities’ nor the use of either ecstasy or mephedrone, however it has criminalised a lot of otherwise carefree people.
Now the twist. In July 2010 we are presented with Drug Craze 2.0 in the form of iDosing, ‘A BIZARRE new craze in which youngsters get high by listening to droning MUSIC is sweeping the internet'. iDosing, or listening to Binaural music said to elicit illicit psychological responses, has been listed by US narcotic authorities as an insidious new gateway for teens to experiment with real drugs. The regularity of these hysterical panics suggest that we, the public, love them. The prurient heart pounding scares, the tang of alienation from a gloriously hedonistic society, the schadenfreude of the irresponsible in cuffs, why do we make these stories? And what makes them so good to tell?
And here lies the fundamental problem involved in this process of interpretation and re-interpretation. On the one hand, reportage of unusual events potentially affects perceptions of their probabilities. This was, in essence, the very centre of all the satire produced by Chris Morris in the Brass Eye era. Those who castigated Peadogeddon entirely confused the target of the satire (the increasingly hysterical representation of paedophilia in the media) with an affirmation of paedophilia itself. This is the equivalent of thinking that Jonathan Swift genuinely wanted English people to eat Irish babies, rather than satirically mocking the proto-Malthusianism of his age. However, rather like a variant of George Soros’s reflexivity theory in financial markets, perceptions also lead to changes in realities.
A hysterical news story might lead to a process of prohibition of a drug or, alternatively, it might lead to a massive uptake in its intake. I myself had never heard of an iDose until I read a news story which presented it as the new danger to the young, and then immediately and quite naturally rushed off to iDose (without much effect). Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe programme had a good segment on precisely this process where it argued that media representation of mass killings such as that in Columbine High School needed to be very subtle and very calm indeed in order to limit the propensity of similar events happening again.
It is constantly the case, however, that the “end of the world is nigh” message gets greater oxygen of publicity than the “things are moderately OK” communiqué. This is particularly true where journalism forgets its vocation of reporting events that have occurred or are occurring and instead speculates on future events, particularly when that speculation is based on an awareness of probability that would be intuitively understood as insane and as ludicrously fear-mongering by a primary school child (“Santa Claus not only doesn’t exist, but he is armed with a Kalashnikov and is outside your front door”).
This addled process operates in particular through the lens of the so-called ‘war on drugs’, a war unwinnable both pragmatically and in terms of nomenclature. This is not a new phenomenon: cannabis was vilified by the William Randolph Hearst media conglomerates in large part because of his extensive forestry interests, which were potentially threatened by hemp manufacture. The precise history of illegalisation is often very arbitrary. Moreover, as Thomas Szasz argued, the criminalisation of certain drugs leads to a situation where the drug-taker is infantilised; in Szasz’s typology, they are reduced to being versions of the Freudian id, desperately searching for short-termist highs, whilst the judiciary or police are institutionalised or entrenched as the ego or super-ego.
It is not the case that all drug-taking is benign, and in a subtle piece of journalism printed as part of his book Junk Mail Will Self wrote about the complexities of decriminalisation of cannabis in Amsterdam (although it does have to be said that those complexities are heightened by the existence of the Netherlands as an island of decriminalisation with the corollary of drugs tourism). Addictions of one kind or another can be hugely damaging and destructive. One can, however, become addicted to almost anything.
Whilst it is clear that crystal meth or Chris Morris’s cake have something inherently addictive in them at a physical level, it is the case that addictive behaviour is an underlying part of certain personalities, and, moreover, a form of behaviour that often arises when other problems are not being solved in the life of the addict (whether emotional, psychological, or in terms of housing and employment and so on). In so much of the depiction of addiction in the mainstream media, the focus is upon the symptom rather than the cause; on the external manifestation rather than the underlying dynamic, and on the mass production of panic.
A key question would be what effect on brain waves a hysterical news story has – does it boost alpha waves, delta waves, theta waves? Does it stimulate our natural fight or flight mechanisms and their chemical embodiments? Is it addictive? Does a diet of scare-mongering news lead one to desire experimentation with drugs – the dreaded gateway theory?
Another aspect of this rather curious story, therefore, is the very question of what drug-taking is. The brain itself is a potent chemical factory, and listening to music is only one way in which those chemical balances are changed and in which endorphins or serotonin or dopamine levels are played with. Other activities along with iDosing that involve such transmutations include cooking or having a conversation or kissing. Moreover, the targeted use of substances or of soundwaves to transform brain waves has been an element of all human societies. Isn’t music by definition sound structured for effect?
The question is, again, not so much whether a particular substance is healthy or unhealthy in itself, but rather whether the ways in which it is consumed are beneficial to the individual and the community. One of the most notable differences between Ecstasy culture and the culture of legal drugs such as Valium is that the former tends to be taken communally while the latter is taken on a more individual basis; the former is often used to ‘get high’ while the latter is often used to keep a person functioning in the everyday. Rather than simply seeing the two as the same process, there needs to be a consciousness of ‘set’ and ‘setting’ and of the end-goals of narcotic experiences. Taking Ecstasy every morning over the cornflakes in order to cope with the daily commute is not the same thing as taking it in at a music festival. Part of the discourse in some of the iDose reportage uses the term to ‘get high’ as a pejorative and as code for degenerative behaviour. But since it has happened throughout human history, what precisely is wrong with height? Again, there is the thought experiment of what a positive news story about drug taking would be like, as Bill Hicks had it.
The other subtext to this story is the fear of the internet as a place of chaos and access to the dangerous and the Dionysian. An element within that is, of course, the uneasy relationship between overwhelmingly top-down mainstream media and the overwhelmingly bottom-up world of cyberspace. These tensions are not new, since they also accompanied the development of the printing-press, the great antecedent of the internet. At times, today, there does seem to be a curious process where the top-down mainstream media and the bottom-up web 2.0 internet world create a kind of dance of short-termism. The Raoul Moat case was perhaps one of the most bizarre, with the formation of rapid pro-Moat and anti-Moat factions.
There is, of course, an immense attention deficit hyperactivity element to all this: this is today’s latest freak or outrage, to be forgotten by tomorrow morning’s caffeine intake. The danger, however, lies in the skewed perceptions of probability and reality that can accompany these fads, and the prohibitions that can follow them. As Montesquieu said, unnecessary laws weaken the necessary ones. A rule concocted out of hype is not likely to either be enforced or enforceable, let alone enlightened.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Despite the apparent Brave New World feel of the alpha waveology of the iDose, there is nothing new about moral panics and nothing new about fears over drug-taking and, on the other side of the coin, romanticisation and glamorisation and at times fetishisation. Particularly when there is a death as a result of drug-taking, we need to follow Voltaire’s argument that to the living we owe respect but to the dead nothing but the truth. One can only imagine how much excitement a death from an iDose, whether true or fictional, would cause – but, as in all these things, a sense of proportion and detachment is a healthy one. However, being hand reared for these stories all our lives, we are as a society jonesing for our next mad hit. The wildly hallucinatory accusations, the entreaties to youth, sex & music, the priapistic moral high ground culminating in climactic feelings of potent action, promises promises. In the sober light of morning declarations of the decline and fall of western civilisation as a result of iDose apathy may prove to have been premature.
Unless of course we all happen to die of boredom first, but never fear our children’s inappropriate behaviour assures our future’s destined to be outrageous.
References:
Technical Explanation of Binaural Beats
Java Applet Binaural Beat Generator
Ray Surette (1998)Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities (Wadsworth Contemporary Issues in Crime & Justice)
Gregg Barak (1995)Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Vol 10 (Current issues in criminal justice)
(please note: we are not affiliated with the authors of these books, however we do get a bit of money if you purchase the books via the links which goes some way to offsetting our costs, thanks.)
Venetian Snares. Deep Cuts.
‘The Swingle Singers? Yeah they’re great, camp operatic flight of the bumble bee. Now that’s some weird music!’
It's 2004, we sit crowded in a small office at a doomed Electronic festival, a nationwide power cut has Berlusconi’s Italy contemplating its future in pre-industrial darkness, the drug addled crowd, irresponsible and anonymous in the night, are tingling with nervous frustration and are contemplating acts of whimsical destruction. A bottle of cheap rum is clumsily passed around in the darkness and smashes on the floor, the doyen of American electronic music Richard Devine is discussing remixing the daft 80s classic ‘Broken Wings’ with Venetian Snares aka Aaron Funk who is distractedly grinding broken glass with his heel. This is a moment I’d like to savour but one of the artists in my ‘care’ has just slashed his chest and head with broken pieces of a toilet bowl that he’s just thrown at a security guard. Also the persistent rumour that a local Italian gang has taken exception to me for some act of disrespect is playing on my mind. I should do something, but what? Maintain order? How and in the end why?
Aaron Funk passes me another bottle of rum ‘this is great!’
Intensely prolific Aaron as Venetian Snares has managed to release an average of two diverse sounding albums per year for the last four years as well as varied and numerous singles and Ep’s. This slew of releases appear barely able to meet the demand of his rapidly expanding Indie fanbase of heavy beat heads. In concert his ferocious presence comes to the fore, split second mixes collage his better known epics within unknown whimsical forays which merge into mesmerising sonic voyages of demonic dancehall, paper cut melodies, rapid silences, and violent arrhythmia. Crowds usually whip themselves into violent ecstasy, jumping and gesturing like b-boys on a heavy speed and acid combination. Rome is no exception.
Seemingly at home amongst the darkness of a festival on the verge of collapse Funk’s performance drew heavily from ‘The Chocolate Wheelchair’ (2003) his latest release on Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu records. Described by Aaron in previous interviews as a ‘party’ album The Chocolate Wheelchair shows strong compositional skills as well as a talent for rebellious breakbeat anthems and was considered by the iconic Warp records, amongst other electronic luminaries, as his best work, perhaps even ‘landmark’.
In tracks like ‘Abomination Street’, the Coronation Street (a popular UK soap) theme is rearranged with the punk classic ‘O Bondage Up Yours’ by the X-ray Specs structurally held together by an intense cut-up of breakbeat drums. The striking feature of this and many other tracks on the album is that within the miasmic use of different funk, rock, kitsch, and dance samples a discerning and infectious rhythm remains to shock the listener forward. The staccato drum n’ metal anthem ‘Too Young’ streams a number of four-four beats through each other in an interlocking weave that samples a 80’s hair band to paleolithically stomp its way into the cosmically complicated ‘Langside’ and beyond into the vein popping jungle funk of ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’. Moving away from his darker more distorted beginnings Aaron’s production on 'The Chocolate Wheelchair' is surgical, deep, and overwhelmingly directed.
Created from inside a cold brick building deep inside Canada’s interior, Aaron’s music contains the kind of energy that speaks volumes of long dark days of cabin fever, numerous cigarettes, vodka from the bottle, years old chicken soup not to mention a ravenous appetite for electronic music’s more rock sensibilities. That he grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and has remained there brings into relief his regular raucous transgressions into North America and Europe. Boarding long plane rides, big and small, to venues of varying sizes he generally leaves his albums of cold musical atmospheres in people’s bedrooms preferring to cart his crowd pleasing yet ear bleeding anthems around in a stained rucksack.
In interviews Aaron often avoids or subverts questions of meaning, emotion and personal relevance, but we’re in Rome and neither of us is going anywhere.
‘I swear people ask me the same shit all the time. I feel like I shouldn't be helping these people who really are failures as journalists… like "your music can be very dark and scary, why is that?" The music’s fun! And not just the chocolate wheelchair others too’
Can you project where you want your music to go?
‘(laughs) that's something I always get asked’
and your standard answer is?
‘Don't know how to answer that. Probably "who cares", Although I think as far as electronic music goes these days, people do have more insight on the whole process, and that's from actually trying to do music themselves.’
‘Basically, I'm just doing the same thing I always have. I truly appreciate the fact folks are buying my records but at the same time it does seem funny that as a lot of my music becomes stranger and stranger it is better received. I have no real concept of what people expect from me, I think people are going to hate my new records because they usually represent such a different side of myself than the side I showed on the last record, but in the end they don’t.’
What makes The Chocolate Wheelchair such an integral work in the Venetian Snares' catalogue is the extent to which it provides an observation satellite to preceding works. Rumbling electronic chords splattered with drive-by breaks, overturned melodies, and hitch-hiking mc’s are all part of the Venetian Snares ride as much as deeper voyages into places that aren’t so easily characterised. What The Chocolate Wheelchair does leave unvisited are the more atmospheric and darkly whimsical continents of his back catalogue, ominous states of which are thoroughly explored on ‘Winter in the Belly of the Snake’ (Planet Mu 2003), ‘Printf…’ (Isolaterecords 2002) and parts of ‘Find Candace’ (Hymen 2003). This is appropriate because like the works of many musical atmosphericists they are to be taken as part of a whole and not really to be sampled individually.
‘Sometimes things just need to be completely synthetic. It's the only way to express that which does not exist on any tangible level.’
While placing Venetian Snares’ music amongst defining electronic artists such as Drexciya, Aphex Twin, or Squarepusher is warranted, happily comparisons fail to encapsulate the unique qualities that his music present. Let’s say that the charisma behind the sampler is different. The few thousand subtleties that torch a musical second in electronic music have to be particularly individualised, a guitar players pressure on the instrument will individualise it them way that is much more difficult with sequencer. The accomplishment of electronic music and production is in maintaining the individuality of the musical meme.
If classic rock’s ego lies in some expressive sexuality, then electronic music’s conceit is in its own cleverness. Punning titles, conceptual parody, obscurist tendencies, cheeky geeky sexuality, cartoons, and the creation of an intellectually aloof personae are all typical modus operandi of the genre (Venetian Snares song titles include: ‘More Drugs Less Love’, ‘Intense Demonic attacks’, ‘Einstein-Rosen Bridge’, ‘Twisting Ligneous’, ‘Breakfast Time for Baboons’, etc) . This is not to claim that Aaron embodies all or any other these things but it’s the felt underlay of the industry to at least be interesting, so there you are.
The evocative contradictions of Funk’s music are highly entertaining, as well as very human, and perhaps not so much complex as specific. Instead of simply sex, death, happiness, and angst read ‘looking down a stairwell at an ascending lover as a more emotional sexual position than sex itself’, ‘death by hanging after watching a program on hypnotising chickens’, ‘finding happiness in the articulated rhythm of a garbage truck compacting trash, punctuated suddenly by the brittle joyous ejaculations of breaking glass’, ‘Is the holiday/work cycle a rut?’. However the ‘intelligence’ per se, of electronic music is largely overplayed and many pundits generally shy away from the fact that as a whole it’s the most evocative genre of music working with a pulse.
Aaron claims that his interest in inanimate objects approaches the alchemical but its not simple symbolism that moves him, but the manner it which different symbols relate to each other. That is, not simply transmutation but understanding through the processes of symbolic ordering, not to mention the power of forms in repetition. In his recent work we can see similar musical lessons learnt from his early experiments with found sounds.
‘When I was a kid I'd use a bunch of ghetto blasters playing all at once to play different sounds I'd recorded with some other shitty ghetto blasters. Most of my sources I'd get riding around on my bicycle and just listening for interesting sounds. I'd use garbage bins and streetlights and anything else I could find that was hollow or metallic to bang out rhythms on. Then I'd set up all the ghettos and record them all playing into that same ghetto blaster. Then I'd play a bunch of those tapes all at the same time and record that and so on. Then I would do cut-ups or pause-ups of those tapes to create a more startling rhythmic effect. A strange ritual in retrospect. A turning point was when I somehow came across this looping delay pedal that held a 2 second sample. This pedal coupled with the ghetto blaster experiments really changed my life.’
A feature which regularly appears in Venetian Snares print is ‘questioning his sanity’ either through the guilty whimsy of childhood (repetitively counting his fingers to music) versus more introspective musing on the fringe benefits of abnormality. But these are really simple conceptual traps and snares of an artist that doesn’t particularly want to be represented, and this also may be to extent why he has stayed in a relatively small Canadian town. In his own words ‘I’m just a guy making music, if you want a superstar or something look elsewhere’. When asked whether he has travelled much other than on tour he laughingly replied;
‘Where am I going to go? The grand canyon?’
Indeed, it’s late and Rome remains in lurid darkness, the weirdness has abated, people have been patched up and transport is organised for those artists willing to go back into central Rome for connecting flights elsewhere. The rain pours down on post-rock acts Mice Parade and MuM as they strum guitars on rooftops and sing softly between boozy belches. Richard Devine drifts off into the crowd and Aaron gets a lift into town. Leaving amongst the medieval looking punters wandering around with candles covering in rags we promise to swap copies of rare David Lynch films and keep in touch, but its hard to imagine any continuity from this situation to a conversation elsewhere in normality.
James Brullige
Venetian Snares Website
Originally published ages ago in 2004.
Original photographs either incriminating, crap or lost.
All photos taken from Venetian Snares' Myspace.
James Brullige was barely present at the Press and Artist Desk, Bitz festival in Rome 2003.
Above the line: Stuart Semple
"But somewhere a piece of our disguise still sticks to us, which we forgot. A trace of exaggeration remains on our eyebrows; we don’t notice that the corners of our mouth are twisted. And this is how we go around, a laughing-stock and a half-truth: neither real beings nor actors.”
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Stuart Semple has become an established artist who reviews ephemeral media images through his painting, placing them in the context of an emotional historical collage. His use of what some might call ‘saturated’ media symbols owes a debt to Warhol and the pop art generation. However the contrast between their work and his most accurately describes the differences between Baby Boomer political egocentrism and Generation Y’s apparent modus operandi of using fame and celebrity as the pinnacle of personal statement. A position that Stuart ambiguously mocks, deifies and defines. At the time of the Fake Plastic Love exhibition he had become at once an overtly celebrity focussed painter and also a media savvy celebrity whose bio reads as a hagiography of a hardworking outsider given an insider pedestal.
While this posturing may appear commonplace, which is precisely his point, Stuart Semple is amongst the most successful artists of his generation as his bio illustrates:
“Commercial success soon followed with Stuart’s London exhibition ‘Epiphany’ (2006) taking over $1 Million in sales. However, it was his curatorial projects “The Black Market’ in NYC and ‘Mash-ups’ at The Design and Artists Copyright Society (London) that caused critics to sit up and listen to Stuart’s argument that “pop culture is a powerful vehicle for real meaning… after all it’s an almost universal language that we are most fluent in”. (Stuart Semple Bio)
The paradox within his bio hinges on his emphasis on empowering hard work versus serendipity or patronage and the elevation of disposable images and icons almost in an effort to ‘save’ fame from the transience of its nature. In Semple’s world the viewer seems driven to ask whether we have failed the fame monolith by being fickle, rather than simply walking away from what might appear to be the shallow, impersonal and exploitative nature of advertising. Given that these images and modes of being are inescapable in a consumer society Semple’s take has to be seen as an empowering one.
Days prior to Semple’s Fake Plastic Love exhibition Trebuchet caught up with Stuart on a noisy East London fire escape to discuss his choice of imagery and meaning in his paintings.
Stuart Semple: I make use of familiar images from the 80s, using icons as well as taking snapshots of things. I think the process of taking snapshots of momentary things, firstly making them strange and then making them permanent through the process of painting.
In a number of ways, it’s not just about preserving them but putting them back to what they were. They were seen as disposable, throwaway, by painting them it is sort of like claiming them back from mass media and putting them back into art again. On a personal level this enables me to make sense of things that I grew up with.
Trebuchet: Revaluating them?
Stuart Semple: When I was growing up in the 80s these things were - I don’t know if it’s quite right to say they were aspirational, but they certainly gave me my first feelings of something larger. But as you get older you get more jaded so now when you look back at these ‘nostalgic’ things, you’ve lost something. Here I’ve tried to look at them again in such as way as to rediscover that sense of feeling.
Nostalgic? Your paintings seem for more forward looking.
Stuart Semple: When you look back at symbols from the 80s, in a way they become rarefied, they become more special. They seem more ‘hi impact’ as opposed to now when things are more homogenised.
But is that the case? Perhaps this sort of nostalgia for a less homogenised, more meaningful past perhaps this is more of late 20s things rather than something characteristic of the 80s?
Stuart Semple: It could well be! But branding is different now. Advertising is different as when we were growing up things did change. Before, people bought washing up liquid based on whether it made their hands soft now people buy things based on it making them sexually attractive. The slant from where brands are more than what they sell is normal now and manufactured pop bands fell in from that and it did make things more homogenised in a way. However, powering it was a real creative impulse, almost a genuineness which is mostly lacking now. Those were the days of dissatisfaction, poverty, the Thatcher years and all that. Now we have the 5 minute celebrity.
This change from functional to moral basis of advertising/branding, the change in advertising from softer hand soap powder to soap powder that makes you a better person, is reflected in this series of paintings? For instance how is this reflected in your painting ‘Thunder in Our Hearts’?
Stuart Semple: Well you’ve got two women and you can’t see their eyes. They’re obvious catwalk models, the Castle Grayskull, Pinky from Pinky and the brain, and a pentagram with a logo in the middle.
[Silence]
So, the pentagram… ah. You made some Alastair Crowley t-shirts didn’t you?
Stuart Semple: Yes
Are you familiar with his work?
Stuart Semple: Yes
…The book of the law…
Stuart Semple: Yes
Does that inform your work?
Stuart Semple: Not at all! For me that is just something I read as a teenager. What I liked about Crowley was his use of symbolism, strong images that are strongly iconic.
Similarly though, your work is strongly symbolic where you use juxtaposed images to convey a sort of resonant meaning by placing different things together.
Do you think that identity is formed in the same way?
Stuart Semple: If we’re in a landscape, a cultural landscape, with strong references to TV it puts the individual in a different arena depending on who they are. Each person has a different cultural make up and a painting might describe who they are. I might be 50% punk, 20% Emo, 30% Castle Grayskull and this might describe someone better than painting them in bark or whatever.
So there are no absolutes when it comes to a person’s identity then?
Stuart Semple: No there is no absolutes. I think for my generation, take Myspace for instance there is a need to update a photo of yourself every five minutes to validate what you identity is. I think people need to see their reflection in something for it to be real.
Is replacing some other, more physical way of creating identity?
Stuart Semple: I don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with celebrity obsession where people feel the need to see themselves external media to feel part of something?
This reflects a general sense of meaningless in society as a whole?
Stuart Semple: Perhaps there is certainly something there where people think ‘I physically look like a pop star that’s why I’m as valid as one’.
On eve of what, I think will be a landmark show what do think about becoming a public person. Are you constructing a public persona?
Stuart Semple: I don’t know. I think of people like Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists (YBA) and what they did with their confrontational approach but try and make things, or find something more internal and externalise it. Like using the idea of branding and brand images that works well in that way. I think people have a real distaste for branding as something evil but I think there can be something very artistic it in. Take someone like Andy Warhol who played with image and branding in what he did.
Is that what you aim to do, control an image of yourself as a brand?
Stuart Semple: I don’t think you can control it but you have show something genuine. You can try.
When you smuggled a painting into the Saatchi gallery supporting the YBAs whre you trying to do something revolutionary, are you trying to energise people in the art world?
Stuart Semple: I was genuinely really annoyed. I was thinking ‘what is he on about’ all these artists who he’s championed or whatever are brilliant and suddenly he’s saying that they’re irrelevant or not important. I mean he’s made millions out of it and then to say that it’s crazy.
So does price equal value in art?
Stuart Semple: Well I think there is a point in the art world where it becomes about money and not about work. There is an ‘art world’ where you can put on a show in East London and other artists come and see your work and that’s great and then there is another art world where all the right people attend and the prices go up etc. and then it isn’t about art anymore and that’s the kind of thing that I have a problem with. But then once an artist as a brand becomes more desirable and that sells then the sort of people you become involved with means that it’s more difficult to control your brand etc.
What interests you about brands and marketing?
Stuart Semple: I’ve studied brands a lot. A lot. I like the headspaces that branding gets into. Branding now is very complex. It takes in street art and guerrilla marketing I think it borders on art in a lot of ways. For me marketing is about communication more than anything else and for me as an artist you want to communicate. I mean you paint these things to say something so you look at the ways to get your message across.
It’s been said that the paintings in this show are about isolation and alienation, but then they’re also very accessible.
Stuart Semple: I think they’re accessible because of the language. The language is straight from popular culture. So they are symbolic in a way that a lot of people can identify with them. So in that way I want to reach people not just art world people but a lot of people across the board. I still feel like an outsider in the art world but I am a part of it I suppose in much the same way as people, myself included, feel represented in the world but also separate.
As part of the 2007 Frieze Art Fair the Fake Plastic Love exhibition opened to critical and popular acclaim. The show broke the $1 Million sales mark within the first five minutes and attracted over 10,000 visitors. Reviewers such as The Financial Times describing Stuart as ‘The Basquiat of the noughties’, the Independent newspaper placed him within the top 20 artists and ArtNews drew the comparison between Semple and Hamilton exactly 50 years after the latter had defined pop art.
Stuart Semple Website
After the future, all is change
After the future, all is change.
By Douglas Bulloch
Is change more than a cliché? More than simply a word uttered to capture unnamed aspirations? As the US election primaries are showing once again, change has a miraculous appeal. In spite of the weathered cynicism that flows after every lofty hope falls, large numbers of people always seem ready to believe again in something, anything, and – in the case of Barack Obama – almost everything. There is nothing certain in this world but that nothing is certain, as the old saying has it, yet this shallow maxim has the appearance of wisdom only because constant change defies the grasp of the present. It says nothing about the pace of change we are living through, nor where change leads. Yet although Obama momentarily captured the mantle of change in American politics, time will show that he is less the putative agent of change, than its product.
To say that there is always change is to disregard it, instead to place a lonely faith in human nature as a timeless challenge to the vicissitudes of providence and fortune. To speak seriously of change we need to look beyond individual examples, and look instead at change as a process – one with its own dynamics. Change does not simply describe the differences between one state of affairs and another, but is the means by which settled relationships are undermined and replaced by new configurations. Instead of seeing how change is an ever-present feature of our past, and therefore our future, we can look at the pace of change itself and see that change – technological, political and social – is perpetually accelerating. And this acceleration has effects all of its own, independent of the actual changes described. Simply put, it makes change the normal state of affairs, against which we search for stability, or at least for stable narratives. But as the process of change accelerates, the future becomes less certain, and we turn our attention towards common moments and common threats.
With the end of the Cold War, the future looked momentarily like a long slow procession to wealth and liberal happiness. The 1990s didn’t quite follow the script, but the future became condensed around the forthcoming Millennium celebrations when, around the world, most of the population jointly held their breath and watched a dawn of new possibilities wash away the sins of history. The end of that same year, the narrowest election in US history revealed an unanticipated indecision over what should come next, and in September 2001 a new threat emerged to hold the world’s gaze. Now, a few years and a couple of wars later, the ‘War on Terror’ hasn’t gone away, but it has to some extent been normalised into a question of police cooperation and political containment. The firebomb attacks on Piccadilly and Glasgow airport were revealed to be amateurish, and although there is no discounting new dangers, there is also the need to move on and imagine a world beyond the suffocating presumptions of security policy. Yet there is no Millennium ahead of us, nor any date that would unite the world in a moment of common reflection. Nor is there any agreed template of future progress, just an ever-tightening cycle of technological and social change, the principal effect of which is a stultifying ennui, a retreat from seriousness and a descent into consumerist accumulation. There are the apocalyptic warnings of climate change, but these are accompanied by the sense that it would at least provide spectacle to an ever more dreary world of prohibitions and material satisfaction. At the same time as we are afraid of the effects of climate change, we are seduced by the possible excitement.
The Christmas and New Year Television schedules in Britain were characteristically drenched in impressions of the past. Cranford, Sense and Sensibility and Oliver Twist, offered up merely the latest instalments in our continuing obsession with the 18th and 19th Centuries. This unending cycle of dramatic adaptations may stem from a profound alienation with our present place in the world, a yearning for the certainties of class and social hierarchy, or an abject fear of the future, or indeed an element of all three. It is tempting to think that the past is easy and that the watching public feel comfortable there, that edgy contemporary drama is too difficult for a general audience. But when contemporary British drama involves placing Tony Blair on trial and assassinating President Bush, then perhaps that serves as its own explanation. And now that we have an unelected Prime Minister and an eviscerated political discourse it is no wonder that America looms ever larger in our political and cultural imagination.
Another part of the appeal of period drama is the portrayal of societies in flux. Oliver Twist was after all a polemical exposition on the perils of poverty in a fast industrialising London. Cranford was a clever portrait of a fading age, the railway bringing more than commerce to the genteel habits of a rural Georgian village. The 19th Century was a period of dramatic social upheaval and technological innovation. This was matched in the world of ideas as Darwin exiled man from the Garden of Eden, Marx awakened new social forces, Empire brought the world fully into view and steam power made it closer. The end of the 19th Century was a time of unbridled optimism in Europe brought to a shattering halt in 1914. But we shouldn’t let this cloud the undercurrents of change throughout this period. War simply drove them onwards ever faster.
By the end of the First World War, war itself had changed, as had our revulsion of it. The next twenty years saw extravagant advances in science and technology; the rise of radio, television, antibiotics and new synthetic materials opened up whole new horizons of human possibility, along with authors like HG Wells and Aldous Huxley determined to embrace them. This coupled with new and threatening forms of political organisation, all focussed on grasping the future, produced another deadly conflict that bequeathed nuclear technology, jet engines, rockets and the computer. Therefore, although the world looked very different in 1900 than it had in 1800, the next hundred years would see exponentially greater change again. Nor should our consideration end there. The end of the Cold War unveiled technologies that were almost inconceivable just a few years before. The Gulf War in 1991 seemed less an attempt to establish a new world order than a showcase for it, as information systems and precision weapons turned a powerful, multidimensional, million-man army into target practice. And it did not stop there. The last fifteen years have witnessed the most intense period of technological change in history. Computer hardware doubles in speed and durability in shorter and shorter periods of time; software is limited only by human imagination. New methods of energy generation point the way toward the end of our dependence on fossil fuels, and genetic technology already raises more questions than we know how to ask, let alone answer. All this, and with new developments in nano-technology, we are stretching our capacity to imagine the future and testing the limits of language to describe it comprehensibly.
The evolution of the social arena has been no less dramatic. The old-fashioned idea that identity comes through the learning and mastering of the habits and customs of a region, class or profession have rapidly dissipated; to be replaced by a refutation of externally applied categories. The public and private domains have been reversed, and individuals demand to be understood as such. No longer are people judged according to the choices they make, but according to the feelings they reveal. Life now is a voyage of discovery, where every achievement or failure reveals innate characteristics and brings one closer to one’s ‘true self’. The Internet has accelerated this process exponentially as like-minds form distant communities of mutual appreciation, and shared obsession. The meaning of friendship has been destabilised, such that one can have thousands of friends, and none. Mobile phones have made communication potentially instantaneous, while facebook makes interaction passive and ad hoc. Information flows have multiplied and accelerated to such an extent that people are subsumed within it, and ‘identity theft’ becomes a matter of knowing someone’s birthday and their mother’s maiden name. It is now almost possible to know everything and nothing about a person, simultaneously.
Politically this translates as the abandonment of party loyalty, and the rise of single-issue campaigns. There is no use attempting to unite people behind a shared program of social transformation, as social transformation accelerates every day. Better to capture those fleeting moments when everyone agrees about one thing. Political parties used to be respectable associations of common loyalty to a way of life or general social disposition; now they are merely the receptacles of strident and fissiparous individual ambition. When this ambition is realised, then governing becomes the management – or mismanagement – of the everyday. Long-term investment decisions get overtaken by events; minor clerical errors cause ministerial resignations. Governments can no longer even win wars because the reasons for waging them are continually crowded out by the life story of the latest casualty. They are no longer concerned with the future for the simple reason that – due to the permutations and combinations of proliferating technological and social change – we know less about the future now than at any time in history.
With all this change comes an intensification of the present. Change is not simply upon us, it overwhelms us daily. It generates fear and alienation. As the world changes, so we feel less at home in it. We fear being left behind, so we master new technologies and novel social codes, or we retreat and reach for old certainties. As the past becomes more distant, we venerate it all the more. We dig it up carefully on live TV, we recreate it meticulously as a tribute to an imagined stability and coherence. We hang on inexplicably to a simulation of traditional monarchy for the disguise it permits our tawdry voyeurism over their pointless, infantile lives. Most of all we adopt the latest fashionable opinion, and strive endlessly to seem familiar – even if disdainful – with the new. But of course, we do it ‘ironically’. We laugh at ourselves as we slavishly join facebook, we ‘do our bit’ for the environment, as long as it doesn’t mean any genuine sacrifice. We wear armbands and go to concerts to save the environment, laughing all the time at Ricky Gervais – laughing at us, laughing at him, laughing at us, etc. Life has become so ironic that irony itself is now meaningless. This crisis of meaning is revealed not simply by our obsession with the past, but also by strange direction comedy has taken. Ricky Gervais offers moments of original and deeply powerful social critique but is perhaps exceptional for that. Little Britain on the other hand is surely amusing, but nobody can explain why without just repeating the catchphrases and laughing. Not everyone likes Little Britain, but everyone knows about it, and it wins awards. To call it a freakshow serves no longer to condemn it as the rootless turmoil of our post-millennial life looks a little bit like a freakshow, doesn’t it? Where once we could draw on narratives of progress and national purpose for some consensus upon which to base our criticism and satire, now we are simply wheeling about looking for something odd to laugh at, and Big Brother offers us not just the vision, but the reality of a society that simply sits around, watching itself, laughing.
This vortex of technological and social change that sucks away the meaning in our lives by destabilising all certainties produces a generalised psychological distemper which meets the future with an exhausted shrug; a post-millennial condition which reduces to a kind of nervous, reflective cynicism, an arch contempt for purposeful risk and endeavour, and a soulless post-ironic reductionism that disdains seriousness in favour of wit and unapologetic self-obsession. To hold an opinion, or to believe something, is not the result of thoughtful consideration, but a kind of social performance. To believe is to value being perceived as believing.
Nevertheless, the world demands interpretation. Life still requires meaning. And even if the increasing pace of change elevates insouciant dilettantism up the social hierarchy, the need for interpretation renders public opinion both volatile and powerful. Influence becomes a case of playing the Pied Piper of Hamelin, seducing rats and children with irresistible mood-music. Given that change is a remorseless dynamo, we vest inordinate faith in those who claim to be its master, those who claim to know the way ahead. It is not necessary to say exactly what change is necessary, merely to pull at the bridle and look serene. Nor is this entirely negative. For a population to be sold an idea is not to interrupt change, nor to control it, but it may create fleeting commonalities of perception, and thus restore a semblance of joint purpose to the whole, distilling from the chaos and anomie a precious moment of parallel reflection.
And people clearly want to believe in the future. When everything is so uncertain, it’s no surprise that we grasp at any trace of meaning, any attempt to chart a path to progress. It is impossible to see the renewed enthusiasm among the US electorate and come to any other conclusion. Indeed, even if it is assumed that Obama’s message is short on specifics, that in itself is indicative of the lack of conditions his supporters place on the content of his message. They are simply seduced by the idea of hope after 7 years dominated by fear. But this article has been less about the specifics of Obama’s appeal, and more about the post-Millennial mindset, which acts as the context of conceptual instability in which grand appeals to the future can prove so attractive, not because of their specificity, but in spite of it.
A desire for change, so visible in the current US elections, is not what it seems. It is indicative of a yearning for predictable points in the future; moments to hang on to, things to be sure about. It is a perfect encapsulation of the post-millennial condition, where increasing uncertainty about the future raises the stakes of every private wager with aspiration. And when these desires coalesce around a political figure, it provides a moment of intense relief. To believe that a new face, one promising change, will deliver at least a point of common agreement momentarily sweeps aside the cloying retinue of meritless curiosities that occupy our degraded public life, and reminds us what politics is for. If we have abandoned grand narratives of political and social transformation, we cannot abandon the effects of change on our lives. We cannot simply sit back and show contempt for it all like monks in a weird form of public retreat, or pick at it like diners in a vast buffet. If change is perpetually accelerating and making our grasp of the future less certain everyday, then commitment to an idea of political community becomes more important, not less. And it is this sweeping undercurrent of social transformation that makes us reach out for the idea of unity. Living in the modern world can be a rollercoaster, but rollercoasters are no fun riding solo. As the idea of the future becomes more distant and opaque, we must become accustomed to change as the norm, to see it as much more than a cliché or an empty aspiration, but as the only thing we have left.
Lebowski fest UK
The Queen and her damned undies: the Lebowski fest comes east
I love The Big Lebowski (TBL). Characters weaving in and out with scant regard for their responsibilities as usual plot devices. Things coming together, making sense, like casual mystic revelations or suburban acid flashbacks and as new shit comes to light one understands that it is from a state of horizontal equilibrium that issues seek their own resolution; the centre abides the ball returns to the bowler. As a fan, you know that some films shake you but the special ones really tie your world together.
As a film, the effortless perfection of the TBL, classic dialogue, and sluggish box office sales guaranteed that it would be a cult film (albeit in hindsight) but hardly anyone could have foreseen the manner in which the cult would grow. And grow it did.
From what started as a bowling rendezvous of lazy hedonism in celebration of the Coen brother’s masterpiece TBL, Lebowskifest has become a long running event where fans from all over the world congregate, share beverages, dress up, and (of course) bowl. Since the 2002 Lebowskifest in Kentucky, each festival has become bigger, toured other cities, and produced some fine merchandise but refreshingly the basic informal and non-corporate format is largely unchanged. So it is that this August there will be Lebowski festivals in Edinburgh (24th) and London (30th) to promote the fan book ‘I’m a Lebowski, you’re a Lebowski’ to be released on August 21st (Canongate).
For ‘I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski’ (IALYAL) Will Russell, Scott Shuffitt, Bill Green and Ben Peskoe have exhaustively tracked down the inspirations, characters, actors, locations, text, trivia, and a ‘whole lot of what-have-you’ of TBL to answer many of the questions fans have about the movie. Trebuchet decided to ask some more.
First off, what is it about The Big Lebowski?
Will Russell: The film is overflowing with quirky characters, interesting situations and tremendously quotable dialogue. There's something for everyone: Nihilists, porn stars, slackers, war veterans, bowlers, rich fucks, fascists, pederasts, liberals, conservatives, stoners, arty debutantes - the list goes on. It’s mind boggling how much the Coens stuffed into 117 minutes.
Scott Shuffitt: I think that one constant thing about the Coen brother's writing is that they create really strong characters, Raising Arizona, O' Brother, for example, you could dress as the lead characters and someone will know who you are. They are very definable.
WR: From all the interviews we did with the people that know the Coens, they are easily amused by quirky people. They get the biggest kick out of people like Peter Exline who had them over for barbecue chicken to watch the Super Bowl. Every time he would point to a rug that he had taken from an abandoned neighboring apartment and say "doesnt this rug really tie the room together?" they would fall out of their chair laughing. I think the Coens are unique in their ability to see the tiny idiosyncrasies that people have. Apparently they do a lot of "giggling" and only they get what they're giggling at.
“The dialogue in the book seems different from how I remember it” Do you get that a lot? Is what people come up with more interesting?
WR: I'll tell you what we're blathering about, we have incorporated the dialogue as part of our everyday speaking and writing so we may have been referencing dialogue in the text without even being aware of it. Even just keywords or key phrases peppered into sentences are enough to satisfy the Achiever within. It's always cool when someone can seamlessly work in a reference to the dialogue and only the true Achiever is aware of the reference.
SS: We haven't gotten it yet since the book has hit the selves yet, but I know myself, I have seen the film close to a hundred times and the dialogue will seem different. Of course there are strands and the drug regiment that could have something to do with that.
You use the term ‘gateway quote’ in an almost creepy fashion throughout the book (pg 129), why?
WR: The term 'gateway quote' is used on page 129 as the first quote that is spoken from one Achiever to another wherein they recognize they are equally obsessed with The Big Lebowski. There is an alternate theory, however:
We've all been taught that the real dangers of marijuana are not that it makes you giggle and gives you the munchies, but that it is a "gateway" drug that can lead to heavier drugs. The highly-addictive quotability of the script can start out innocent with an occasional "Over the line!" or "The Dude Abides" but can evolve into much heavier use where the afflicted cannot help but quote the movie in any situation, usually inappropriately. Instead of simply saying "that would be fine with me" the subject blurts out "mark it, Dude!" In extreme cases, subjects have been seen mumbling to themselves "How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?" or "I can get you a toe." The only known treatment involves bubble baths and whale sounds and is highly experimental at this time.
Many of the people interviewed for the book can’t actually bowl but love bowling anyway, why is that particularly Lebowski?
WR: Bowling is fun! It's the only "sport" where eating deep-fried cheese, smoking and drinking beer is the norm during the game play.
SS: Bowling is very social and it lends itself to munchies and drinking. I would say that is the sport of the Achiever.
Why the UK, why now?
WR: We have gotten tons of requests to come across the pond, as it were. And yes, we aint never seen the Queen in her damn undies as the fella once said. After Lebowski Fest UK, we can die with a smile on our faces without felling like the good lord gypped us.
SS: Why not? We wanna see the Queen in her damn undies! Over the years we have gotten a number of request to come to this city or that including a number in the UK and Europe so when the book was being negotiated, they wanted us to come over to promote it, so how could we pass up on it. It was just the push that we needed.
In terms of inspired Lebowski casting, two words - Jeff Bridges. Is Jeff Bridges the dude?
WR: He's even more Dude than the Dude. He's just as cool as you would hope he would be. Most of the clothes he wore in the movie came from his own closet. He wore his jelly sandals when he came to the Lebowski Fest in LA. However, he doesn't drink White Russians, just Russians (Vodka on the rocks). It is impossible to imagine the Dude being played by anybody else.
SS: Jeff Bridges is the dude! Of course we know a good portion is character, being unemployed, what-have you, but from what I have gathered Jeff is really laid back.
Where will this fascination end? Japan? Afganistan? Australia? Greenland?
WR: Lebowski Fest Tokyo would have to be the last one. The souvenirs would have to light up and be very "blinky."
SS: It's hard to say. We have gotten a number of request to take it to Australia and a couple from Japan. If the Achievers want us, we will ah, you know try to gather the unmarked twenties. When we started, going to the UK was far beyond anything I could imagine so you never know.
Is there a sense of progression from one festival to the next (is even asking this question completely undude)?
WR: Other than being in a different place each time, it's pretty much a bunch of people who love the movie getting together and having the time of their lives. No need to progress from there.
The basic format has been the same since the very first one: bowling, a few beers, a few laughs - our fucking troubles are over.
At each Fest, a "world of Lebowski" is created. The first night, we watch the movie. The next night we become the movie. Valkyries, Dudes, severed toes, and nihilists run amok in a bowling alley fueled by White Russians and great music. Lines of dialogue being traded back and forth, instant bonding among strangers. It's always a trip!
Have there been any documentaries made of the Lebowski fest?
WR: Many have tried. None have succeeded. We've got a pretty promising lead on one getting started this month in Louisville. We shall see.
SS: There have been several attempts. One is called "Over the Line" it looks like it may get finished, but you never know.
Do you think that any costume will ever top the person that came as the ‘Creedence tape’?
WR: I'm still waiting to see someone roll in in an iron lung.
So there you have it folks, books out on the 21st and go to www.lebowskifest.com for festival details.
Mark it, dude.
--
Poster credit: Bill Green
Sight and Sound
PLASA 2006 PLASA is a yearly trade show for lighting, sound, rigging, and staging professionals looking to spend four days having a good drool over the latest hardware and software for their respective industries. The two floors of Earl's Court exhibition centre are rammed full of high power, high tech equipment, and men in t-shirts sipping beer and trading stories. Trebuchet was there to twiddle some knobs and gain the insight on what developments we might be seeing on stage in the future.
It's quite a sight: stage fog drifts lazily over the carpet towards the cafeteria, jets of smoke blast like a ships horn sending the fifteen foot inflatable stick people into a low dive for cover. Bursts of music drown the vicinity for another demonstration of high power frequency response, and everywhere are people, screens, cables, company logos, and noise. Only just bearable is the heat from gigawatts of lights, humming boxes, and stand workers getting their sell on.
These are the people who do the big shows. For sheer scale and impact of presentation it's hard to find a better example than ETC UK who rack up giant cannon shaped slide projectors to throw high resolution images over large public buildings - they plastered Buckingham Palace with patriotic visuals for the Golden Jubilee in 2002 - and use heavy duty video projectors for events such as the MTV awards.
Nestling amongst other, more traditional lighting companies, and indeed among their own tropical foliage decked stand, Green Hippo were giving their first public demonstration of the latest Hippotizer media server that is able to mix three layers of High Definition video in real-time with a mind bending array of visual effects and combinations. R Systems' 'Track the Actors' technology outfits up to sixty-four people on stage with a small radio transmitter that tracks their position in 3D space and can then be used to precisely control the amplification of the actors voice as they move around.
Coolux had a real-time polarised stereoscopic projection, requiring the use of a pair of glasses, while PSCO were showing off the Dynascan 360 degree projection unit, and had a rather pleasing interactive fog screen system that looks like a slow motion waterfall of vapour allowing different images to be projected on both sides.
PLASA is all about the technology. If you're looking to deck out your venue with gobo lights or curtain raising winches, you can spend many happy hours pouring over the promotional material and chatting with the sales guys. Want to get your hands on the latest DMX lighting controller desks and multi screen projection systems, this is the place, they have it all.
Four days of flashing lights, lasers, large display screens and audio intensity, compounded with a late night after show party at the Dali Universe exhibition on the South Bank after the second day, and it's time to go and lie down in a dark, quiet cave for a little while.
Did you have to be there? 21st Century Adventure Cinema
Managing editor Daniel Howe investigates whether adventure cinema offers anything other than vicarious thrills for the armchair abseiler. When do adventure films become art? Given the scope and material that is presented why is it that so many ‘look at me I’m jumping off something’ films fail to ignite the passions of their audience?
-------------
You had to be there.
What makes modern commercial cinema so stale and formulaic? Radical ideas are risky ideas, and major studios seem unwilling to do anything but throw money at genre mainstays with big box-office potential. This is hardly helped by the uncritical blindness of the general viewing public. Bolstered by huge publicity campaigns and homogenised cinema chains trawling the crowd is it time to turn off the mainstream and look elsewhere?
There are the obvious alternatives; art-house and independent releases, inspired pieces from certain talented directors and the like. Without question original and captivating cinema exists for those willing to search. However studios and audiences alike have proved unresponsive, often due to the perceived lack of wide appeal. The current popularity of ‘reality’, whether in television or break-through documentaries, implies an area with a potential for real box office draw; namely documentary adventure films. For the adrenaline buff, jaded with the modern reliance on special effects and CGI these stories of courage, endurance and adventure must surely satisfy. Add to this drama peeled raw through context and you’re really onto something. Why then are so many adventure documentary films failing to pass muster?
Trebuchet attended the Adventure Film Festival 2006 showings in London to question whether adventure films can evolve as a genre of quality, whether they offer the viewer more than scenery, bombast, and antipodean accents, and whether they deserve mainstream recognition at all.
Historically, adventure documentaries have mostly relied on education and spectacle to draw viewers and this selection is no exception. They range from extreme sports to wildlife exposés to the exploration of hostile or isolated environments. The intention is generally to give as intimate and accurate a portrayal of the subject matter as possible while still presenting something new and exciting to the audience.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about these adventure documentary film is that’s easy to be awed by the bravery and skill, the symbiosis of man and nature, without the need to buy into generic hero characters and storylines. Happily, of the films on show at the London Adventure Film festival succeed within their own remit. From the high-wire antics of mountain climbers in Masters of Stone to the escapades of South African adventurer Mike Horn in Swimming the Amazon, we were acquainted with some truly fearless individuals.
If we consider how these documentaries are generally filmed, with POV cameras either handheld or attached to people leaping from cliffs, skiing down precipices and surfing through the barrels of waves these films achieve both immediacy and a visceral form of intimacy. We fear, not only for the lives of the participants, but briefly our own and more, we share the participants wonder at the breathtaking scenery and wildlife. All proof enough that adventure film can thrill and exhilarate. The popularity of brain-dead effects-laden blockbusters implies that this is enough to gain wide appeal. At best what connects what could be a potentially repetitive collection of action shots is a story and dramatically speaking what a key strength of adventure film is the authenticity of the people and the veracity of their actions, consequences and reactions.
The most fundamental rule of cinema is that you must engage the audience. You must bring the audience from their world into yours. Adventure films too often lack a coherent story, central interest, character development or any other transportive hook by which an audience can transport themselves. Poor edited and shoddy camerawork can be used successfully to develop a sense of reality but usually they emphasise the negative answer to the question ‘is this of any interest to anyone but the people jumping off buildings?’
At this stage to find any semblance of art in adventure films you have to look pretty selectively at what’s presented. Are they like bling-bling music videos, presenting a snapshot of an elite group of the unemployable? Is this elitism a key factor in their appeal? The easy healthy bon homie of people jumping from planes, eating rocks, climbing mountains, does this speak to us and if so what does it tell us? If we look at Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man with its puzzling insights into a (possibly fictitious) adventurer/ecologist’s motivations and exploits what really are we to think of these people?
Adventure films generally dress their tendencies toward the spectacular rather than the thought-provoking by alluding to primal human themes of survival (and of course virility). The ideas of freedom and mental and physical conquest are almost ubiquitous and the more successful films seem to facsimile Boys Own Annual notions of comradeship (surfing documentary Step Into Water and BASE jumping exposé Radiks). Why do they avoid going deeper? Is it that these men (largely) are afraid to be seen as emotional by describing the internal mountains they face on the way? Often what we are shown is essentially dull people falling at speed through the air and while not strictly a documentary Touching the Void describes comradeship with an intensity few other films achieve. So much so that one starts to wonder if there wasn’t enough adventure to warrant such depth of feeling amongst the participants why bother making the film in the first place? Simply, for those that live below the obviously thin air of professional adventurers jumps, falls, waves, and mountains are not enough.
It is however encouraging to note that the majority of the films presented at the festival managed to traverse the knife edge between being glorified jackass features and woefully self absorbed soliloquies on the nature of ‘cold (or high, or wet, or sharp toothed etc)’.
Moreover, coming away from five evenings of non-fiction entertainment, there is a sense that these people have the right ideas about life! By that I mean my own routine practices of western consumerist lifestyle™ seem even more unidyllically themselves after witnessing such exuberant fun, challenge and adventure in the most beautifully remote areas of the world. I got sold on the bling-bling of adventure, I became jealous. Perhaps that comparison is where adventure film transcends mere entertainment; perhaps it is the element of reality that reflects our own lives and illustrates just how much world is out there and how many ways there are in which to experience it.
Apart from those which gain publicity through courting controversy it is difficult to see documentaries competing with fiction in mainstream cinemas. There are still plenty of hidden theatres as well as television channels devoted to such fare. Adventure film itself is not the most progressive of sub-genres, and it would be good to see more thought-provoking pieces produced. Yet it does have something fresh to offer, and so we should be grateful there are those individuals willing to keep making their films for us, often at great personal risk.
By Daniel Howe www.adventurefest.co.uk
White Water, Blue Sky: Rafting the Rio Grande
By Mike Laird
www.ses-explore.org
Chris Clarke: Acoustic Body Music
Chris Clark or simply Clark these days is a busy man, making music, incessant touring and learning new instruments. While uncomfortable with the title of Warp records’ electronic standard bearer with each release Clark has remained popular by keeping the tracks funky, immediate, and accessibly extroverted.
Body riddle is no different, layered, crowd pleasing and already garnering the sort of attention that artists more focused on popularity crave. With a large portion of electronic musicians wanting to become more and more obscure we talked to Clark about what it means to him to make music that reaches people.
Trebuchet found Clark in Peckham, wearing a pink shirt, and ready to talk.
Trebuchet: You seem to enjoy releasing stuff on small unconventional formats like mini CDs, do you have a lot unreleased material?
Clark: Yeah I really liked the format, 3 inches, there is something quite cute about them. I want to do a whole series, there’s a free one (Throttle Clarence) with the album (Body Riddle), and there’s loads more stuff coming out on them.
I’m giving away loads of stuff at the moment but I just sort of forget to release music a lot of the time.
The album was ready two years ago but I just wrote a few more tunes, and kept on forgetting to hand it in. Just generally being forgetful about the fact that I’ve got a profile. If you’re really diligent and geared to the industry you make an effort to keep it up; which I haven’t done at all over the last three years. I’ve been doing loads of gigs and playing loads of new material. I don’t see the point of putting a new record out just for the sake of it; just to keep your profile up. I mean, there are so many people out there who are really well known but perhaps not really well liked.
Also, its just quite fun waiting three years; you get quite a big development within that length of time, and I learned how to play the drums for this album and it’s more live-sounding as a result. I think it’s just good to have that space away from… well just to have no pressure basically.
T: Tell me about writing a track like Herzog.
C: I can’t remember how I did that, it’s a pretty old track. I think I wrote that one really quickly – I just came up with a riff really late at night, like I usually do. I was in a relationship at the time, but I’d always set my alarm for like, 3am, and just get up to do music then.
You’re sort of in a weird intuitive zone then; you’re not bogged down by all the stuff that clouds your head up in the day. I guess you’re pretty egoless in a way, just plucking things, notes, out of places that you don’t usually explore.
You’re a bit more impressionable when you’re barely awake, to sounds and hearing certain melodies. Its clichéd but its almost like listening as a child… you can have a sense of wonder about stuff… and being in that zone where you can lose any cynicism about music and not treat it like any kind of equation.
Just kinda being impressed by stuff, and I think the only way I can get into that zone is by constantly working on stuff. I guess I just find it hard not to be inspired by music in a way. I think the reason my music sounds the way it does is because I spend a lot of time in my own little world - it doesn’t really involve any social activities based around it. It is what it is and I just get on with it on my own terms.
If you look at a scene like Hiphop or DnB its very much based on a community, its homogenised and in that way its very restrictive, with boundaries and etiquette, and there’s just none of that in my music, there’s no etiquette at all; I just totally please myself, and that’s exactly how I want it. That’s not to say I’m totally hermetic; I’ve got plenty of friends who influence each other and work with each other and do stuff and help each other out; but its very sort of non-conformist really, so everything’s panned out pretty well.
T: Drum n Bass seems like less of an influence on Body Riddle than in previous releases.
Mm yeah, I was totally influenced by it in the late ‘90s, and that’s where a lot of my early releases came from. I was really into Nico, No U-turn, stuff like that, it was mental when I first heard that. I guess it was cheesy brutal sci-fi, but in a good way rather than the shit way that it became.
I don’t really follow it now at all, some of it now is laughable, like you get on digital TV. I’ve got a mate who’s really into Grime, he keeps doing me mixtapes that are ace… like so, so aggro, its fucking amazing.
As for DnB, I haven’t followed it for so long but I still find myself going back to the old stuff, and then maybe some of the more recent Dillinja stuff, I think his stuff is incredible, almost like he’s taking the piss the production is so amazing. Not on all of it and it’s still got the cheese element, but tracks like ‘Crunch’ etc. I’ve listened to those more than I have supposedly timeless avant-garde stuff.
There’s so much posturing in the avant-garde in that you listen to it and you’re supposed to reflect on how it’s part of this canon and its forever immortal or whatever…and like I’ve listened to pieces that I really like but I never go back to them. Whereas someone like Dillinja, who’s so ‘low brow’ and mainstream or whatever, but I’ve gone back to his music so many times, and what does that say about timelessness and all these concepts that you’re supposed to revere and aspire to as a musician? It’s just absolute horse-shit. The idea of posterity in your music, and doing something that’s going to last… I think a lot of people get infected and caught up with those ideas, and often it makes their music really dull. It just proves that it’s an illusion and something that people manipulate in order to project their ‘art’ onto the world. But basically I’m just sticking up for Dillinja’s production because I think it’s so awesome.
---
T: When did you start listening to Moondog?
A mate did me a CD about a year and a half ago. He’s been sampled to fuck it’s really depressing. Mr. Scruff sampled him, and everyone hears Mr. Scruff songs and goes, ‘Oh it’s Mr. Scruff, he’s really wicked’, when in actual fact like all the good bits are just Moondog loops, like massive sections.
T: Do you do a lot of sampling yourself?
No, not really at all, just make my own stuff. I did at first, like when I first got a sampler I was really interested in it, and that was when samplers were really high tech…they were like machines of the future, I must have been about 16 at the time. I mean, I’m not saying its bad; some people do it really well. With Mr. Scruff, its not necessarily slagging him off, maybe it’s only a few tracks he’s used Moondog samples on. No, people do it really well and you can do amazing stuff with other people’s music (I’m not a puritan!) but I was always much better at making my own sounds.
T: You have cited (Bernard) Parmegiani as an influence.
Yeah, the last album, I was really into his stuff; recently I haven’t been so much into Musique Concrete as I was for the last record. I’ve got a lot of mates who are purely into avant-garde stuff, so it felt like doing this album and doing something more poppy was the most unique path I could follow. I guess if you’re only exposed to pop music then Musique Concrete and electro-acoustic music seems really fresh and it did to me for a while but, because that’s kinda my history it felt like the most unique path I could follow would be to do really strong melodic stuff.
I think I just get more confident with music the more I learn about it, and this record is just a lot more punchy…like on Roulette Thrift Run, there’s a sort of James Chancy horn that’s like found sound, but its not an actual horn, I just found a way to make it using lots of different sounds, using different sampling techniques at different sampling rates. I think this album just has more swagger, and that’s why I like Parmegiani: his stuff is really kinda academic but it’s punchy and direct, not wanky and drifty. His work is homogenous and solid, almost pop-electro-acoustic. His best album I think is ‘The Nature of Sound’, 13 or 14 tracks, and they’re all only 3 or 4 minutes long; it’s a pretty accessible format for that sort of music, and that’s partly why he’s a big influence.
T: Have you ever seen Parmegiani, is he still playing?
I saw him play in Birmingham, he just sort of played that album, it was a bit disappointing actually, not because of him, rather ‘cos of all the tossers that run that sort of sound-design project; they’re just so insular.
T: That said, Warp has a reputation for being pretty insular?
I don’t really talk to Warp that much, perhaps I haven’t noticed because I’m on the inside (laughs). Perhaps it is a very ‘bubble-like’ experience, but then, you know, what isn’t in the media really?
T: So to step outside that bubble is to go in a poppier direction?
Yeah, but then I’m under no delusions…its no James Blunt, but to me its catchy music, accessible.
T: In a lot of interviews I’ve read, and your biography, you are often referred to as a torch-bearer for Warp records?
I’ve heard similar things. I’ve got no idea how to respond to that except that I don’t see that as my responsibility at all. I rarely speak to Warp as I said, on this record there was just the time when I handed it in.
What I like about Warp is they do let you go and get on with stuff. I suppose they’re just too busy. But I really don’t let those sorts of comments or remarks affect me or how I perceive what I do. I still have the same attitude I had when I was 16 you know?
I had this German interviewer once that had a very romanticised vision of music producers, that when we meet each other we have these real intense conversations about music. But I think the truth is that that is just an image, purely an image that has been manufactured to present a cosy, cohesive idea of musicians.
Also, being of a younger generation, I wasn’t around with people like Aphex and Squarepusher doing music in the ‘90s, so in that sense I’m not involved and not really got any desire to be involved in a particular clique or whatever. And I don’t think they have either, it’s just a comfortable image that the media might use.
This German interviewer, I didn’t mean to sound facetious, but I was saying that when we do meet up we might talk about really normal things, and he was really enamoured with this idea of us sparking off one another and wouldn’t let it go.
That said, I’ve got loads of friends doing music that no one has heard about, that I think do awesome stuff, like Bibio who’s released a few things and Ed Law who did an album on Planet MU that was really ace.
T: I take it you’re still writing and recording at the moment?
I haven’t gone near a computer for a while, just been playing instruments, drums, bits-n-bobs. To become enchanted by something again I think the best thing is to keep away from it for a while, get some space between you and it. I’ve still been writing and recording on samplers and stuff.
But mostly drums and guitar, I like finger picking, classical styles, more James Blunt (laughs), we’re all mere streams flowing into the major current that is James Blunt, he’s a genius (laughter).
Strange isn’t it, that someone can write music that’s that contrived and commercial, and just like the lowest common-denominator but still…
T: But is it? I mean he believes in it.
Possibly yeah. It’s like politicians: if they believe what they say then it makes them stronger in a way. Like it’s very easy to think of them as two-faced, but although they’re embroiled in contradictions I’m sure they often believe in it all.
T: How about professional musicians, which I guess you are?
I’ve never…I just find the term really amusing, and I know it’s pointless to get pedantic,
T: So do you think that they don’t inject what they do with emotion and feeling? Is that part of the professionalism?
I’m sure they do, but really I have no idea, I’m just referring to a vague stereotype that I’m enjoying poking fun at. It’s a bit harsh and maybe they do…but yeah James Blunt: maybe he does totally believe in what he does, I mean I guess he must do.
---
T: Bodyriddle?
Bodyriddle! I just like the sound of the words, together, there’s no grand concept behind it. It doesn’t link to the music, the title always comes afterwards for me. It would just be really pretentious for me to pretend I had a clear-cut idea of what it meant, cos I don’t at all, it was an afterthought. It’s something that you just tie in and I think it fits; I like the sound. I don’t want to puncture anyone’s imaginative leaps of what it could mean.
T: Ahem, ‘Herzog’ is a film-director...
Yeah I can’t lie about that, that’s a pretty blatant dedication to him. I watched ‘Heart of Glass’, which is a really good film, but the part I find amazing is the first ten minutes. It’s got a proggy soundtrack and the first ten minutes is just mind-blowingly fucking amazing.
You’d have to watch it, I couldn’t do it justice in words, but the script and dialogue is so relentlessly moving, and I watched that and wanted to do a piece of music related to it; perhaps use the visuals in a live set for that track. He comes up with iconic images, and that sense of tiny ineffectual people attempting the impossible; that sense of adventure. Herzog seems such an interesting guy in interviews, and it’s hard not to be inspired by his egalitarian visions.
He riles against academia and the idea of film being a formal thing that you study. He says what an artist should do is basically, they should box for about an hour a day, and then he says they should walk from one country to another across the border, with a notepad, just recording everything they see. I dunno, I just think he gives you a beating in terms of your self-concept of what you do and I find that really inspiring…just his whole approach is so hands-on. And ‘Grizzly Man’ is amazing…
T: ‘Grizzly Man’ yes! I mean, there was this huge thing about whether it was staged or not, but what an amazing film!
Yeah I kinda feel that he deserved it, in a kinda rough-justice way. He’s a pretty weird guy.
T: But then, his character, and Steve Irwin’s character…
Yeah totally. Did you read that his fans have been cutting off the tails of sting-rays in vengeance attacks? Isn’t that the most retarded thing? It’s so wrong.
T: Surely that’s something that he would disagree with
Well I don’t know, maybe he would, but at the same time he was just totally invading animals’ private spaces and breaking all sorts of entrenched rules of nature, and in that way, the fact that he died like that is sorta rough-justice.
Clark is one the one hand a lauded musician on an immensely influential label that has housed some of the greatest musicians in the last twenty years and on the other, like many electronic musicians. he makes music in a social vacuum. However, rather than being isolated by this he talks about connecting with sound in an abstract, awe filled way, often in the small hours of the morning, with little pretensions about previous music he’s made and perhaps even moving away from the idea that he’s making ‘music’ in a larger defined way rather than creating something psychologically elemental that intimately moves people.
With releases like Body Riddle the clichés of exploring through music certainly applies here, internal journeys, found sounds that throw titillating curveballs at the listeners, but perhaps paradoxically the musical vocabulary here is vox dancefloor.
Off tape he spoke at length about the craft of making the music that he does, explaining again that to him the intellectual and academic explanations of music aren’t what interests him as a producer, so much as the process of twisting sound slightly past the familiar but keeping enough textural and rhythmic clues that people whether they want to think about music or just move to it are satiated. That said, through the IDM tag Clark is surrounded by people that do think about the intellectual pretensions of making and listening to music and like the poor German reporter are hoping for some easy enlightenment.
Indeed, Clark wants to make intellectual records that don’t sound like intellectual records and so stands not so much an imposter as a dangerous interloper and in the end, the intellectualism of Body Riddle, as the name suggests, isn’t in posterity but immediacy, which is in itself pretty smart.
