Walter's Fiery Pools

Melton Road, Leicester, May 2014

As I noted in my recent post, David Batchelor’s book, ‘The Luminous And The Grey’ [1.], makes reference to Walter Benjamin’s own writing in its discussion of luminous colour.  That sent me back to my own copy of the latter’s ‘One-Way Street And Other Writings’ [2.], having put down and bookmarked it some months earlier.  Spookily, I found the passage that Batchelor quotes from lay on the very next page.  Here then, is a longer excerpt from the piece in question,

‘Fools, who bewail the decline of criticism.  The fact is, its time expired long ago.  Criticism is a question of correct distance.  Criticism is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects matter, where it was still possible to adopt a stance.  Things have now begun to chivvy human society much too urgently.  ‘Impartiality’ and the ‘open outlook’ have become lies if not the wholly naïve expression of straight non-competence.  The name of the most intrinsic quality today, the mercantile look penetrating to the heart of things, is advertising…

‘What is it, ultimately, that makes advertising so superior to criticism?  Not what the red electric text up on the moving screen says – the pool of fire that mirrors it on the asphalt.’ [3.].

Melton Road, Leicester, May 2014

In another example of things connecting up, I found myself driving back into Leicester late the other night on wet roads.  Certain brightly illuminated businesses on the city’s Melton Road, (and the resulting reflections on wet pavements), immediately chimed with Benjamin’s text - causing me to park up and grab the camera.  Whilst not necessarily advertising in the classic sense, these illuminated texts do represent the way we’re all urgently, (and routinely), chivvied by our environment.  In fact, so immersed are we in the whole spectacle, that it’s useful to note just how much of a new phenomenon, and worthy of comment, it all once was to him.

Melton Road, Leicester, May, 2014

The general aesthetic espoused here, both stylistic and culinary, has little to do with critical discernment, leaving us to just drink in (and munch on) the gorgeous kitsch beauty of it all.  More simplistically, it’s also a great illustration of Batchelor’s comments on the reliance of coloured illumination on darkness, (or ‘not-colour’), as necessary context.

None of this was planned, but I suspect it was far from mere coincidence, and that reading those two books had subconsciously inclined me toward finding these images…

Postscript:

Is it just me, or do 'Choco Kebab' and 'Huge Candy Train' contain a certain resonant poetry all of their own?

[1.]:  David Batchelor, ‘The Luminous And The Grey’, London, Reaktion Books, 2014

[2.]:  Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street And Other Writings’, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

[3.]:  Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, (Original Essay Published 1928).

Forest Swords: 'Engravings' / Millie & Andrea: 'Drop The Vowels'

I’ve never wanted to overload this blog with music-related posts, but as with cinema, books, etc., listening to music remains intrinsic to how I relate to the world.  It’s certainly a fairly constant accompaniment to my own creative endeavours and must find its way into work, if only subconsciously.  Actually, it’s often quite conscious too, as I’ve noticed I regularly use musical analogies when considering paintings, and indeed, vice-versa.  Disclaimer over.

Context:

We’re far enough away in time from the high water mark of Dubstep for the music made in its backwash to coalesce into a whole new set of identifiable tropes.  Inevitably, as soon as they have emerged, journalists rush to apply new genre labels to them.  I try to avoid thinking too rigidly in such terms, persuading myself I’m more interested in judging each offering on its own musical merits.  It often seems that as soon as a musical meme becomes established and categorised, it also starts to parody itself with ever-diminishing returns.

Demdike Stare: Miles Whittaker (L), Sean Canty (R).

Nevertheless, there have been some common influences or a certain shared aesthetic knocking around for a while, whose main features would include an distinct sense of foreboding and the conjunction of a clotted Dub sensibility with the kind of sound design often employed by composers of horror movie soundtracks.  Actually, much of this would appear a fairly logical extension of classic Dubstep’s fixation with what lurks in urban shadows.  Beats still prevail in much of this dark, bass-heavy sound sculpture, but dancing is definitely secondary to the creation of a forbidding, even occult, atmosphere, (much is just far too slow, for a start).

I’d be lying if I claimed I haven’t used my discovery of a particular artist/record to act as a gateway to other others whose names drop from online reviews or genre surveys.  This sense of a ‘scene’ is further fortified by the fact that artists such as The Haxan Cloak, Demdike Stare, Vessel, Raime, et al, have reached an audience via the Tri Angle and Modern Love labels.  The output of Sam Shackleton’s Skull Disco label, and his own attempts to push the genre into new shapes and greater conceptual complexity, could also be seen as antecedents, for those looking to join the dots over recent years.

Vessel, 'Order Of Noise', Tri Angle Records, 2012.

To be honest, I can take or leave some of the more pantomimic gothic trappings often attached to some of this music.  Much as I admire the dread-laden (in both senses) soundscapes of many current gloom-mongers, I am slightly disquieted by the presence of just one too many references to the Pendle Witches, or incidences of blacker-than-black cover artwork.  All is usually well whilst Post Modernist detachment is maintained, but I always fear the moment someone chooses to play live with robes and a pentagram backdrop.  Either way, it was with some pleasure that I encountered the releases discussed below.  Both can be certainly viewed as reflecting the same overall zeitgeist as many of the above, but both transcend the expected by augmenting an increasingly familiar sonic palette with new sounds, or re-engineering the rhythmic structures often associated with it.

Forest Swords, ‘Engravings’:

Forest Swords, 'Engravings'.

Forest Swords is the alter ego of Wirral-based producer and graphic designer, Matthew Barnes.  Released in 2013, ‘Engravings’ [1.] was his first full-length album release, but was actually a development of the sound he prototyped on his, admittedly lengthy ‘Dagger Paths’ EP in 2010 [2.].  This one surprised and impressed me immediately, and I’m clearly not alone, judging by the widespread critical acclaim greeting its release.

Forest Swords/Matthew Barnes.

The real source of its startling, individual impact might be summed up in one word, - ‘guitar’.  Barnes draws on a wide enough range of typical components to create his overall sound, including Dub, Hip Hop, film music, heavily treated vocals, orchestral strings and much else beside.  These are stitched together, (with the joins often showing), into multi-faceted, melodramatic forms which repay repeated listening.  However, it’s the distorted, twanging, guitar riffs running through it all, that really set his music apart from anything else in the same field.  It’s hard to ignore suggestions of Spaghetti Westerns or American desert music in this.  However, there’s an equally powerful Oriental flavour there too, - both in some of this guitar phrases, and in those massed strings that often rise to the surface.

Forest Swords, 'Dagger Paths EP'.

Much as enjoy ‘Dagger Paths’, there is the suspicion of a good idea repeated once too often.  I find it hard to stay focused for the duration on something that eventually starts to feel a bit one-dimensional.  Rather than backing off on ‘Engravings’, Barnes solved this problem by opening up more breathing space between the different events in each piece, varying the mood and narrative implications between tracks, and tempering that trademark guitar sound with a much wider vocabulary of other instrumental sounds.  Many of these pieces unfold through several gear changes, with varying degrees of light and shade, and there’s a definite sense of progression in most of them.

Forest Swords/Matthew Barnes.

I’m guessing that much is sampled, but it’s impressive just how coherent each track becomes in its overall ambience.  The main key to this is hardly a secret.  As with everything that ultimately derives from the Jamaican Dub pioneers, each disparate element is so drenched in reverb that it simply locates itself, almost physically within the resulting cavernous space.  Barnes’ other main production trick is the extensive and judicious use of distortion, - particularly when applied to vocals.  There are many parallels to be drawn between ‘Engravings’ and the work of Burial, but whereas the latter often litters his tracks with intriguing, audible phases, Forest Swords distorts everything into almost total abstraction.  The human voice becomes just another sound source, and there’s hardly a word or phrase I can actually decipher, (although that could just be my ears of course).

A marvelous example of all this would be the track, ‘Irby Tremor’.  It opens with what sounds like distinctly foreign incidental music coming from a distorted TV speaker in the next room, before moving into a highly distinctive main theme in which crisp Reggae-derived high hats combine with a sonorous, rolling guitar riff.  This is then re-punctuated by more incongruous sounding strings and flutes and the suggestion of a distant, soulful vocal.  In just over four minutes, the track creates a deeply cinematic sound world in which one might construct any number of imaginary but non-specific narratives.  It’s all achieved by the simple expedient of conjoining several unrelated elements, immersing them in humid atmospherics, and hanging them off a killer rhythm pattern.

Forest Swords

It’s a stunt that Barnes pulls off repeatedly on ‘Engravings’.  I suspect it’s that ability to find something new each time that has drawn me back to ‘Engravings’ repeatedly in recent weeks.

Millie & Andrea, ‘Drop The Vowels’:

‘Killer rhythm patterns’, seems to be absolutely what ‘Drop The Vowels’ [3.] is about.  Indeed, it often focuses on relatively little else.

Millie & Andrea is the name adopted by part-time collaborators Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott.  Whittaker is one half of the highly rated dark soundscape project, Demdike Stare, (with Sean Canty), also working under the names Miles, Mlz and with Stott and GH as Hate.  Stott himself is best known for a series of Techno-related releases under his own name.  His trademark sound involves a scuzzy, claustrophobic take on the form normally labelled Dub Techno, developed to incorporate elegant female vocals on the standout album, ‘Luxury Problems’ [4.].

Millie/Miles Whittaker (L.) & Andrea/Andy Stott (R).

They’re clearly busy boys and, whilst I haven’t heard all their stuff, can happily recommend those bits I have.  The Millie & Andrea project itself seems to be an attempt to produce something les serious or conceptually overburdened.  In fact, ‘Drop The Vowels ‘ actually reimagines and augments some previously released material but hangs together very well as an album.  It also dwells in the shadows, far more than in the light, despite any claims of uncomplicated hedonism.

Andy Stott.

After a brief intro of tribal chanting, the album sets its stall out early with ‘Gif Riff’, a track that effectively sounds like a percussion group let loose on the pipework and industrial plant of an echoing, abandoned factory building.  There follows a sequence of tracks that draw from the rhythmic blueprints of various contemporary sub genres, (such as Trap and Footwork, with which, I admit, I’m relatively unacquainted), but also look further back to a heavy Junglist aesthetic.  Cutting edge scenesters may scoff that this is old news, but I never claimed to be one of them.  To me, it comes as something of a refreshing change.  I derived much pleasure from Drum & Bass music in its 1990s heyday, and it’s a pleasure to hear someone pick up the pace again after years of relatively stately time signatures.

Miles Whittaker.

Whilst not without its subtleties, ‘Drop The Vowels’ is definitely one for those who enjoy a good pummeling from time to time.  ‘Temper Tantrum’ and ‘Spectral Source’ both focus steadfastly on beats, leavened by only minimal harmonic elements.  ‘Stay Ugly’ features a typical Stottian Bassline, sunk in heavily corroded murk, over which it posits clattering, metallic beats and an implied organ melody from which half the notes appear to have been lost.  That whole track is sufficiently mired in distortion to have me regularly checking my amp for dust and speaker cones for damage.  Meanwhile, the album’s central passage is lost in deep jungle.  ‘Corrosive’ starts a bit worryingly with snares, ticking high hats and bubbling synths, but then just turns plain nasty with clumsily sequenced jungle beats best described as brutal.

Should all this aggressive chunkiness prove too exhausting, Stott and Whittaker allow their album’s latter stages to gradually recede into the kind of cinematic atmospherics often associated with the latter’s Demdike output.  The final track, ‘Quay’, is an affecting exercise in dark ambience, textured with static interference and punctuated by thuds and metallic clanking.  If, like many of their contemporaries, Stott and Whittaker seem intent on making recreational music for a collapsing society, that last track might suggest waking on the first morning after the lights went out and the dust settled.

Conclusion:

Maybe, in the end, that’s the key to all this sombre electronica.  The socially and politically nightmarish late 1970s and 1980s spawned Industrial music and Gothic Rock.  Perhaps then, the current emphasis on musical gloom, occasionally woven through with strands of the eldritch or Pagan, is both a reflection of, and simultaneous escape from, the insecurity and tensions of these current dark times.

[1.]:  Forest Swords, ‘Engravings’, Tri Angle Records, 2013.

[2.]:  Forest Swords, ‘Dagger Paths EP (Expanded Edition)’, No Pain In Pop, 2010.

[3.]:  Millie & Andrea, ‘Drop The Vowels’, Modern Love, 2014.

[4.]:  Andy Stott, 'Luxury Problems', Modern Love, 2012.

...You've Got Us Into.

Somehow, this one slipped through the net.

Alexis Harding, 'Untitled Study', Oil & Gloss On Canvas, 1995

‘Somewhat Abstract: Selections From The Arts Council Collection’, continues until 29 June 2014 at Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB.

David Batchelor: 'The Luminous And The Grey'

In a recent post, I mentioned I was planning to read David Batchelor’s Book, ‘The Luminous And The Grey’ [1.].  It’s a pretty slim volume, which, in the event, I polished off pretty quickly, (over a couple of long baths, in fact).

David Batchelor.  Photo: Croydon Advertiser.

The book is Batchelor’s meditation on the relationship between colour and grey, or ‘not colour’ as he initially designates it.  I generally enjoy this kind of thing, in which an artist engages with a theoretical or philosophical subject in the spirit of personal/artistic discovery, rather than as merely an academic exercise.  ‘The Luminous And The Grey’, is no exception, being both thought-provoking and clearly connected with Batchelor’s own art, and left me keen to read his earlier book, ‘Chromopohobia’ [2.].  The text is split into three thematic sections, so I’ll use this post to highlight certain passages from each that particularly caught my attention.

Nice Typo Design, - Shame About The Hard Sell.

In his first chapter, ‘The Beginning And The End Of Colour’, Batchelor discusses differing interpretations of how colour might have arrived in the world/human mind, before contemplating the appalling implications of a descent back into an achromatic state.  His most terrifying example of this is Cormac McCarthy’s deeply affecting post-apocalyptic novel ‘The Road’ [3.].  McCarthy’s all too plausible vision follows a father and son’s futile trudge through the hostile environment of a world sunk in a nuclear winter, or some other brand of societal/environmental collapse.  As the subsequent film adaptation [4.] emphasises, it is the denuding of the world of nearly all colour that proves one of the most persistent reminders of their hopeless state.

Both Images:  Stills From, John Hillcoat (Dir.), USA,  Dimension Films/2929 Productions/
Nick Weschler Productions, 2010

‘Very occasionally some colour does punctuate this all-enveloping grey-black darkness. For the most part, it comes in the form of a remnant of plasticized tarpaulin or another fragment of the petrochemical past. Or it is the muted orange of the fires that either erupt spontaneously in the dying landscape or are carefully cultivated out of scraps of wood and tiny amounts of leftover fuel.  In each case these moments of colour serve as brutal reminders of something almost beyond memory … The colour is an unbearable trace of a world that is shrinking and dying by the day: “The names of things following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one once believed to be true”[5.]’ [6.].

Birmingham, January 2014.  (Camera Operator: David Weight).

Batchelor’s second chapter is where much of the meat of the book, (with which it shares its title), really lies.  The author is informative on the chemistry, physics and perceptual psychology of colour, without becoming overly dry or theoretical.  The scientific breakthroughs of the global chemical industry, dating from the nineteenth century, have a very clear bearing on how we mostly experience colour today and indeed, could be seen as a watershed in the history of humanity’s chromatic relationship.  There is an obvious connection here with the materials he chooses to work with himself, as with the whole subject of coloured illumination which he goes on to discuss.

Birmingham, January 2014.  (Camera Operator: David Weight).

It’s hardly rocket science to point out how artificially illuminated colour only reaches its full potential after dark, but Batchelor is right to identify just how profoundly this shifts our perception and emotional responses to colour away from the original experience of natural pigments seen under daylight with which we evolved.  It also highlights just how interdependently connected are light, colour and darkness, (grey).  All of this lies at the very heart of our apprehension of urban environments, and is something that immediately chimed with my own city-dwelling fixations.

Thus, it’s not surprising that Batchelor should conclude his chapter with reference to Walter Benjamin – the archetypal philosopher of modern city life.  In ‘One Way Street’ [7.], Benjamin asks,

‘What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? ... Not what the red neon sign says - but the fiery pool reflecting in the asphalt’ [8.].

Batchelor himself comments,

‘The fiery pool is not glimpsed in isolation: it is seen against the hard horizontal plane of the road. And this is the point. In the colour life of the city, vivid colour almost always coexists with a degree of darkness.  By day or at night colour is usually accompanied by the less than colourful. It is supported by the contingencies of the street: it is literally bolted onto the sides of buildings, propped up on ledges and secured to roofs, and its reflections form in the potholes and gutters on the ground. These less-to-be-looked-at elements are none the less essential to the experience of colour in the city. This colour needs resistance and thrives on opposition. In the city the luminous is always accompanied by the grey: they cohabit and sustain each other in an often unacknowledged relationship of interdependence’ [9.].

He concludes,

‘The city is at the intersection of the luminous and the grey, or is itself that intersection. And this is not just a fact of the colour space of the city, but one of its defining qualities’ [10.].

Sneinton Market, Nottingham, April 2014

The book closes with a chapter primarily focused on the idea of grey itself, and maintains the urban theme with an anecdote from Batchelor’s own experience.  He accounts the story of an elderly man (Robert), who regularly set up an easel outside Batchelor’s home, in order to make the same apparently abstract drawing without reference to the scene before him.  Only after observing the man for some time did he realise that Robert was actually drawing the manhole cover immediately beneath his easel, (redefining the drawing as not really ‘abstract’ at all, I note).  Delighting in his initial misunderstanding, of the situation, and that of other passers-by, Batchelor sets himself the task of carefully observing all those generally overlooked features of his immediate surroundings in which grey resides in all its surprising complexity.

Sneinton Market, Nottingham, April 2014

‘The dark grey tarmac on the road was flecked with at least three or four different hues and had a maroonish-grey cast, at least where it wasn’t interrupted by all the other asphalt greys where the road had been repaired over the years. A patch of original nineteenth-century cobbles had a worn, steely-blue-to violet-grey sheen, offset by some lazily mismatched pale yellowish-grey cement infilling. The old brown-grey paving stones on one side of the road were also mottled but in a different way to the tarmac, whilst their newer replacement slabs had a lighter, smoother and more consistent industrial cement-grey finish. The dark blue-grey granite kerbstones were also worn smooth and shiny, as was the tarnished brown-grey iron manhole cover. The small off-circles of flattened chewing gum on the pavements were for some reason either very white-grey or nearly black-grey, but nothing in between. I have no idea why. Looking up a little from the embedded horizontal forms to the rising vertical elements of the street, the grey of a weathered aluminium pole in the pavement is obviously quite different from the several greys that make up a weathered galvanized steel railing next to it, and lead grey flashing on the corner of a building has entirely its own weathered grey personality. This slightly elevated realm is also where the more durable colours that are intrinsic to materials begin to give way to applied and generally less durable surface colours.  Here the row of painted steel bollards are a consistent but again entirely different surface grey from the recently redecorated matt green-grey of the shop on the corner’ [11].

Sneinton Market, Nottingham, April 2014

I apologise for quoting at such length, but that last passage seems to me a perfect example of urban observation, and how the greatest visual poetry can be found in supposedly objective recording of the least regarded features of the city’s very fabric.  It justifies the impressions gained between the shoes of every flâneur down the years, and Indeed, over the handlebars of my own bike as I hop another kerb.

All Images:  Cornwall, February 2014

[1.][6.][9.][10.][11.]:  David Batchelor, 'The Luminous And The Grey', London, Reaktion Books, 2014.

[2.]:  David Batchelor, 'Chromophobia', London, Reaktion Books, 2000.

[3.][5.]:  Cormac McCarthy, 'The Road', New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

[4.]:  John Hillcoat (Dir.), USA,  Dimension Films/2929 Productions/Nick Weschler Productions, 2010

[7.][8.]:  Walter Benjamin, 'One Way Street & Other Writings', London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009