Context:
This would always
be a no brainer for me. I’ve always had
a soft spot for the music of Underworld, the band of which Karl Hyde is a long-standing
mainstay. Furthermore, the focus of his debut
solo album on the psychogeography of his Essex homeland and more generally, on
the idea of ‘The Edgelands’ made it doubly intriguing. The artistic investigation of the transitional
zones at the edge of large conurbations is a very current concern and something
I’ve alluded to myself several times in reference to Paul Farley & Michael Symmons
Roberts’ book ‘Edgelands’ [1.]; Robert Smithson’s investigations of New
Jersey’s industrial suburbia [2.]; the ‘Stolen Car’ paintings of Shaun Morris
or the writings of Iain Sinclair and J.G. Ballard [3]. I’m not one for ‘pre
ordering’ but did snap up the album as soon as it was released.
 |
| Karl Hyde, Pillar Of The Underworld |
Over the years Underworld
have been lauded for a literate brand of stadium dance music but with much
attention being paid to their general ‘bigness’ and willingness to ‘‘ave it large’
to a chorus of “lager, lager, lager, lager” [4]. Certainly,
that’s often been a load of fun but the more solemn or reflective aspects of
their music have always been just as engaging and show it to be artistically
and emotionally more multi-dimensional.
It’s definitely the latter sensibility that Hyde has emphasized most
with ‘Edgeland’. It seems worth mentioning 2007’s ‘Oblivion With Bells’, - an album with
moments of real atmospheric beauty, (most notably in the lush, ambient
interlude ‘To Heal’). It also included, in ‘Beautiful Burnout’, an emotive internal meditation on a train
journey and, in ‘Ring Road’, a
captivating exercise in human observation linked to location, (unfortunately
compromised by some dodgy half-rapping).
I suspect the signposts to Hyde’s solo record have been around for a
while.
 |
| Hyde & His Band Road Test The Edgelands In Japan, 2013 |
The other important thing
about ‘Edgeland’ is that it’s really
a multi-media project. At the risk of
doing Hyde’s marketing for him, anyone considering engaging with it really
needs to seek out the ‘Deluxe’ (ugh!) version.
That way you get the accompanying film ‘The Outer Edges’, made in collaboration with Kieran Evans [5.], and much more than a mere bonus extra. Both
the film and the music album are fully resolved artworks in their own right but
each informs the other, finding correspondences to create a whole far greater
than a sum of its parts. In a recent
radio interview Hyde spoke about his synesthetic abilities to find the audible
and visual worlds interchangeable [6.] and it’s
worth noting his long term involvement with the visual arts. This has included artwork and video for
Underworld releases; numerous design projects with the Tomato design agency and
some rather accomplished paintings.
 |
| Karl Hyde, 'Jump Through The Sky Hole', Medium Unknown, 2010. - "Shoulda..." |
Response:
The most obvious feature of
this music is that it largely abandons Underworld’s customary Techno aesthetic,
concentrating on more conventional song structures, working in close collaboration with
Brian Eno acolyte - Leo Abrahams. Hyde
has also moved away from his familiar cut-and-paste approach to lyric writing
in favour of something more through-written, although highly poetic, within
each piece. My initial reaction was, if
not disappointment, at least surprise.
An expansive, formally abstract, environmental musical approach might, superficially,
have seemed very appropriate to the project.
Likewise, the streams of consciousness engendered by his past juxtaposition
of collaged phrases often chime evocatively with my own thought processes in
Psychogeographical situations.
 |
| Essex Boy |
This is not to deride Hyde’s
songs though. The lyrics are intriguing
and emotive and it quickly becomes evident that they are sensitively performed
and augmented by beautiful, nuanced arrangements and production. Hyde hasn’t abandoned the impeccable
Underworld production values and appreciation of layered sounds, just adapted
them to rather different ends. This
becomes obvious from the opening of the first song, ‘The Night Slips Us Smiling Underneath Its Dress’. Here, a nominally ‘big’ stomping beat is
distanced to become something more textural behind a sumptuous mélange of
slightly glitchy electronics, tinkling piano, heavily treated acoustic guitar
and atmospheric ‘strings’. Hyde sings
seductively over the top and even inserts a surprising folk-like refrain into
the song’s bridge.
 |
| Shadow Boy |
This general approach prevails
as the album unfolds. If the overall
mood might be described as one of elegant melancholy, Hyde actually summons a
variety of emotions, adapting his vocal performances to recall both David
Sylvian and fellow East Londoner, Billy Bragg at times, whilst always applying
his own individual stamp to the songs. ‘Shoulda Been A Painter’ achieves a kind
of fuzzy, guitar-driven bustle whilst ‘Shadow
Boy’ opens with a low-key shimmer but grows slowly into a grand, elegiac
anthem. Even more surprising is ‘Dancing On The Graves Of La Courbusier’s
Dreams’. It’s positively on its toes
and shackles an 80s dance-pop sensibility to an intriguing lyric combining declarations
of love with nostalgia for Modernism’s failed Utopias.
The film, ‘The
Outer Edges’ documents a
journey along the course of the River Roding and on to the Thames and the towns
and estuary mouth beyond. It adheres to
the proven Psychogeographical procedures of seeking alternative routes, (or the
reverse side of official routes); pausing, wherever possible, to assimilate the
normally overlooked features of a given location; and projecting oneself
vertically through layers of history, meaning and significance as well as
horizontally through the landscape.
 |
| Still From 'The Outer Edges', Dir: Kieran Evans, 2013 |
Hyde and Evans
have placed themselves firmly in the tradition of flâneurism, and subjective
exploration to produce a genuinely resonant and lyrical artifact. It relates to Sinclair, Ballard and Patrick
Kieller, amongst many others and, indeed, is very close to my own habitual
modes of relating to the environment. It’s certainly full of the kind of
static-camera references to transport systems, elevated roadways, more or less
active industrial development, housing estates, river/banks, pylons, signage
and graffiti that crowd my own hard-drive.
My only fear would be that by this stage we may all be in danger of
resorting to a kind of over-familiar Pyschogeog.-by-numbers but I won’t pretend
I don’t still love this stuff. The film
is narrated by Hyde and sound-tracked by his music, in the more instrumental/abstract
form one might have expected all along.
 |
| Still From 'The Outer Edges', Dir: Kieran Evans, 2013 |
However, it’s
here that the logic of Hyde’s song based approach also becomes clear. The film is intercut with the spoken,
autobiographical accounts of various Essex folk encountered on the
journey. If some, like the members of a
boxing gym or The Dagenham Girl Pipers, seem initially like traditional human
interest ‘types’, their words actually prove to be highly personal evidence of
individual lives lived in a landscape.
Most touching, for me, are the dignified independence of a bereaved allotment
holder and the Utopian nostalgia of a couple who still live on the slightly
remote model estate built for employees of the defunct Bata shoe company. The latters’ fond memories of highly
structured but well catered-for younger lives speak of a very different era of
employer/worker relations and feed into the lyric of ‘Dancing On The Graves of Le Corbusier’s Dreams’. The abandoned modernist edifice of the
factory itself makes for a stunning image of industrial and societal decline
but the voices lend a much more human slant to the whole project.
 |
| Still From 'The Outer Edges', Dir: Kieran Evans, 2013. Urban Text, Graffiti, Mundane Architecture & A Fox, - What's Not To Like? |
Thus, we realize
that many of the songs are actually written from the implied viewpoint of characters
such as those encountered in the film.
Elsewhere, as in ‘Shoulda Been A
Painter’ and ‘Angel Café’, we
gain insights into Hyde’s own life and understand that he too is an Essex boy (albeit
of Welsh heritage), and has been inescapably shaped by the territory he contemplates
and depicts. Repeat viewings and listens
reveal just how well, and with what attention to detail, music and film have
been integrated as two sides of the same coin.
One such example would be the startling, possibly unplanned, passage of
a silhouetted BMX rider across a shot of the estuary. This brief moment is enough to title an
entire song, (‘Shadow Boy’), and feed
the line, “Shadow boy rides a bike
like a missile, Life erupts all around us.” [7.]
Should any doubts
about Hyde’s real intentions remain, Hyde concludes his narration with the
words,
“I started this journey
under a motorway, a road that runs along the edge of a city I love. I followed a course set by nature - not by
man, along a path that has taken me to a place beyond the outer edges. Now, I realize its not about the geographic
route you take, - it’s about the people who show you the way.” [8.]
 |
| Can't Think Of Any More Undeworld Gags... |
Conclusion:
Karl Hyde (with Kieran Evans), has produced a project so close to some of my own current
artistic concerns that I suppose I could feel deflated that, yet again, someone
else got there first. Indeed, whilst researching this post I discovered that
Hyde’s own website journal is peppered with photographs I might easily have
taken myself, even down to the details of tattered posters and rust leaching
through painted graffiti. It would be
churlish to feel too envious though.
Actually, it feels like yet one more encouraging validation of a
particular, admittedly Romantic, way of relating to the contemporary world that means so
much to myself and many others.
Taken as a whole,
I think ‘Edgeland’/’The Outer Edges’ constitutes an affecting, well resolved
Psychogeographical statement and one that injects an important element of humanism
sometimes missing from what can easily become a rather detached idiom. I really like the music too.
[1.]: Paul Farley & Michael
Symmons Roberts, ‘Edgelands, Journeys
Into England’s True Wilderness’, London, Jonathan Cape, 2011
[2.]: Robert Smithson, ‘The Crystal Land’, 1966 and ‘A Tour Of The Monuments Of Passaic, New
Jersey’, 1967, in: Robert Smithson, Jack Flam (Ed.), ‘Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings’, Berkeley, University Of
California Press, 1996
[3.]: In a video interview featured
on his website, Hyde name-checks both Sinclair and Ballard’s ‘Concrete Island’ as specific
influences.
[4.]: Underworld, ‘Born Slippy’, Junior Boys Own, 1996
[5.]: Evans has form with this
kind of collaboration, having previously made ‘Finisterre’ - an impressionistic film portrait of London, with the
pop-dance act Saint Etienne.
[6.]: Karl Hyde (In Interview), ‘Front Row’, BBC Radio 4, 10 May 2013
[7.]: Karl Hyde, ‘Shadow Boy’, Universal, 2013
[8.]: Karl Hyde & Kieran
Evans, ‘The Outer Edges (Edgeland
Version)’, Universal, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment