The XX – XX

Originally published in The Quietus , August 2009 – www.thequietus.com

Despite the egregious youth of its creators, the principal impression of this record is neither its melancholy nor its idealism, but the perfection of its musical judgement. Though critically-feted South London four-piece The XX have released just two singles and performed only a handful of shows, they’ve already developed a trademark langourous understatement, professing to record only what they can reproduce live. This album successfully brokers their style into an economically luxurious, musically complex, self-titled world, more than capable of laying any remotely susceptible human flat out, dreaming. There’s so much space in the stereo picture, you see; it follows that you’ll want to wander.

The album accomplishes a great deal with relatively few tools: the crystalline keyboards of Baria Qureshi; the Cooderish, Cure-ish, spare guitar of Romy Madley Croft; and the modal bass of Oliver Sim. Jamie Smith, the album’s producer-programmer, is principally responsible for its deceptively simple air, but its arrangements are intricately designed, taking in the click and bounce of R&B — a reverential cover of Aaliyah’s ‘Hot Like Fire’ is a live staple — and the gigantic boom and crunch of dubstep.

It’s not a perfect record, quite; ‘VCR’ in particular sounds comparatively unfinished, especially after the sinister, dry sweetness of the first track, ‘Intro’. There are some small structural issues too: on such an otherworldly album, the crisply perky ‘Basic Space’ and ‘Crystalised’ suffer somewhat from punctuating the mood (though this is merely a problem of context — released as singles, the strength of each is clear). The record seems to be built around a carefully constructed core, the killer one-two-three-four punch of ‘Islands’, ‘Heart Skips A Beat’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Shelter’. Each of these tracks sees a radical shift in perspective on a similar — perhaps a single — love story. One moment, great spaces are conjectured; the next, tones spill, break, and pool alongside the vocals. Miniscule tonal refractions are examined at length. These tracks tilt into one another; motifs trickle over edges, an outro becomes a chorus. Huge bass rumbles are still decaying bars later. Time travels backwards — “see you August, see you June” — and then fractures, light years away, before the heartbreaking refrain of ‘Shelter’ returns the attention to more human concerns and you realise how far away from being human you were, for a while. It’s impressively de-realising.

“I’ll see you August, see you June. I want fantasy. It’s deep in the middle of me.” Fantasy is deep in this record, in this sound: in the vocal unison (never harmony; they often sing as though unaware of one another) of childhood friends Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. Fantastical, the Coco-Rosie genderlessness of their dreamworlds — no him or her, only you you you. Most of all, the body fantastical, their central lyrical theme. Several tracks see the non-couple set up a dialectic, Sim describing the body’s external surfaces, Madley Croft its internal spaces, the fears they provoke, the succour they provide. “I can’t give it up to someone else’s touch”, coos Madley Croft in ‘Infinity’. “Give it up, give it up,” cajoles Sim (later boasting sadly, “I can give it up on the first date”, in the post-coital comedown of ‘Stars’.) The chorus of ‘Basic Space’ sees Sim sensually describing hot wax pouring over skin, before Madley Croft reveals that the wax seals in the body, insulates the track’s vital “basic space, open air”. A fascination with the space inside, where everything really happens, is this band’s biggest strength.

The XX

Originally published in Plan B magazine, April 2009 – http://www.planbmag.com/shop

I think I’m going to go about this backwards, bare bones first, meat after, then skin, like it feels, like it works, backwards. You’ll see, have seen, the XX on tour with Micachu, will be awaiting their album – their album, as yet unnamed, they finished a matter of days ago, now. Already, you’ll know, might love, their unreleased single, ‘Crystallised’, sweet, dark and dusty, one-note like a chocolate drop. You’ll have read, maybe blogged even, how it recalls Hercules and Love Affair, Coco Rosie and Tracy And The Plastics – all are namechecked as influences in the scantlings available to me, now, beforehand. The photos of them that I can’t find, their faces I can’t picture, you’ll know all that. It’s all folded in, the way it feels by the time you know.

For a band so clearly about to break, the XX are pretty much still invisible, still unformed, hard to pin an intention to, tough to locate with words alone, Schrodinger’s band. I spent a day or so taking readings, grokking on their single, the demos on their myspace. I thought of hopping on a train to London and spending a couple of hours with them. In the end, waylaid by illness and impossibility, I stayed in bed, and I spoke to them one by one, awkwardly handing the phone around, sweet to make up for it, stepping out of their Saturday afternoon cafe shade into fickle March sunshine and street noise.

“Amazing, amazing,” singsongs Ollie, singer/bassist, like he knows it’s going to be. “I’m so excited. We’ve been basically in the studio for four months and now we’re come out and are starting to do a few interviews, photos…”

Stylist?

“Um, no. No stylist. Wear black, it’s not hard.”

Watch things on VCRs, drink tea and talk about making love. I think we’re superstars. And you, you just know, you just do. – VCR

“In music lessons the teacher would just send us off into our own little room, because we were the ones who were actually interested in music, instead of playing the same thing over and over on a keyboard,” says programmer/producerJamie. “We were all at school together.”

“We learned to talk together, let along sing together,” says Ollie of singer/guitarist Romy. “We went to school together, learned music together – she’s my sister. We’ve known each other since we were two.”

She’s not his sister. They don’t sing like brother and sister. They sing like they’re sad they’re not in love; they sing in unison, perfectly, facing away, dreaming in opposite directions. There’s romance, of a kind, in unison, in the shared attack, sustain, and decay.

“I mean, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Ollie,” says Romy. “He’s my best friend. But the songs, they mean different things to each of us, I think. Even though there’s generally a vocal duet happening, we’re never singing to each other about anything. I like that – that we each have our mind on someone else completely. ”

Like there’s more people in the song than should fit.

“Amazing,” she says, and I can’t help laughing.

You can’t resist.. and kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss and, kiss. – ‘Hot Like Fire’, Amerie cover

They’re natural successors to the Knife, The XX. Populist, humid and sinister, dreamy and clever at the same time, oddly uncomfortable, despite the familiarity of their idioms. What they have that the titanic Knife don’t have is an axiomatic understatement.

“We’ve always said from the beginning that everything we record, we want to be able to play live,” says Romy. “So when we’re recording there are no overdubs. No extra bits.”

“We never really think about it in terms of recording,” explains Jamie. “We always just use what we have, we don’t use loops, we always want to do stuff in real time.”

“I once read an interview with the Sugababes that really impressed me,” Romy elucidates. “Someone asked them a question about whether they wrote their own songs, and they said that each of them wrote their own verses, each of them wrote what each of them would sing. We sort of made that into a principle.”

Is that true?

“Well.. no. Later on we met someone who wrote all the Sugababes songs. But I still like the idea. It’s more of a romantic image I think about when I’m writing.”

Stories don’t have to be true to be important. They just have to be perfect, so. So that’s the real secret of romance – that it doesn’t have to be real.

Ladyfest

Originally published in Plan B magazine, September 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

The feature as published also included wonderful pieces by Lauren Strain, Jesse Darlin’ and Beth Capper, and the timeline at the foot of this piece was a collaboration with Lauren Strain.

LADYFEST: THE POP-UP BOOK

Writing any kind of historiography has a homogenising effect. Difference and deviation in flow become invisible, all compasses point north; disparate and diverse voices move from clamour to unison. Hierarchies impose themselves ruthlessly over time: certain viewpoints are foregrounded and made representative, others lost. A flattening takes place, a loss of contour.

Ladyfest is the product of the work, thought, activism, communication, resistance and organisation of thousands of women (and many men and transpeople) over the last 8 years. Its lineage stretches back through Riot Grrl into cutie, queercore, punk, gay liberation, second-wave feminism, and the birth of identity politics. Its impact extends out into academic discourse, popular artefact, cultural history, political activism, applied philosophy and ethics. Ladyfest covers a stunningly diverse range of expression from graffiti, zines, parenting, djing, cooking, cross-stitch, comic art, fiction, journaling, self-defence, filmmaking, design and promotion, to the more traditional performative norm of getting up on stage and making a racket (or a drone), but a list of attributes cannot convey its real impact. It’s tempting to put together an anecdotal history, a selection of subjectivities, some indication of the force Ladyfests have been in the lives of the people who organise, perform and participate in them.

“I caught the tampon L7 threw at Reading,” deadpans Mira Manga, once a leading light of Teen-C with her band Disco Pistol, now ebullient frontwoman of all-grrl pop warriors the Duloks, and veteran of a multitude of Ladyfest appearances. “I held it aloft and behold: I harnessed the power of ROCK.”

OK. You’re right. It’s not gonna work.

“Sorry,” she sympathises. “I’m not really a riot grrl anyway. I’m more of a libertarian.”

As Ms. Manga implies, Ladyfest’s immediate roots lie in the riot grrl movement of the early 90’s. Originating in the Portland/Olympia nexus and Washington DC, mirrored in the UK, riot grrl (music version) first pitched itself against the sexism of the hardcore scene and the exclusion of women from DIY culture, using the insurrectionary language and anarcho-punk methodology of the queercore uprising that had preceded it by half a decade. Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Bikini Kill, Huggy Bear, Voodoo Queens, Pussycat Trash – inherent in these names is the claim laid to their stage. The movement’s broader sense of complaint, however, better expressed in the incredible variety of self-published writing that marked its early years, struck at the heart of the failings of second-wave feminism – the increasing alienation young women felt from the imperatives of both capital politics and academia, where second-wave feminism had pitched its struggles; instead riot grrl writing focused on popular culture and daily experience, on the quotidian jigsaw of the picture of oppression. It was to seek, and in Ladyfest it found, a language and methodology of its own, a practical means of empowering and involving women in the production of their own popular culture; one that has of late come to stand not only for feminism in music in the popular imagination, but also as a model of DIY self-organisation transportable across geographical and philosophical boundaries. The Ladyfest strain is viral for sure. Since 2000, more than 50 Ladyfests have been held all over the US, the UK, and in Australia, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe; countries as far afield as Singapore have adopted the model and made it their own. Each Ladyfest is autonomous, marshalling the idiosyncratic resources of a local community with one goal: the empowerment of women.

The first Ladyfest was held in Olympia in August 2000. Among its instigators were Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman of Bratmobile, Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, Sarah Dougher and Corin Tucker of Cadallaca, Cat Power and Neko Case. “I think it was a great politicized event put on by many strong talented women. We had access to a lot of resources and talent at the time,” understates Allison Wolfe. Surely she can see the impact Ladyfest has had? “Oh, totally,” she laughs. “I think it can stand as an alternative to the standard model of music events, and hopefully it has influenced promoters, clubs, participants and artists to see how it can be done differently. It’s one of many forms of feminist activity, and I believe it’s truly important for the psychic and creative survival of women.”

“I was in a band called the Riff Randells at the time – we had a boy singer, so we weren’t allowed to play the festival,” recalls Mar Sellars of the Duloks. “The Gossip hosted a pre-festival house show and we played there instead, with Gene Defcon, the Gossip, Trail of Dead, and the Frumpies. And that was the craziest show I’ve ever played.”

The inaugural Ladyfest would maintain an avowedly grrl-positive stance and a focus on empowering women in music (in the wake of the Woodstock rapes the year before, the sexualpolitik of the music industry was once again the subject of fervent debate). What riot grrl conventions, Queeruption and the Grrlstyle Revolution had instigated, Ladyfest now inherited, though debates about separatism and incest survival had been replaced with workshops on Making It In The Music Business and panels on sex work. The micropolitical pragmatism and sex-positivism of third-wave feminism had clearly had an impact, and the ideologies of Ladyfest were a development on prior models. Trans inclusion – the notion that ‘lady’ as a category also includes female-identified gender variant people – was one development that made itself felt immediately; Freddie Fagula, transgendered partner of Beth Ditto, gave a talk on body fascism to enormous acclaim. Ladyfest had received the queering of feminist space from its long association with both queercore and lesbian feminism.

“Ladyfest, I think, has always come from not just a feminist perspective but a queer one too,” argues Ros Murray of Electrelane and Lesbo Pig. “It’s really important. I think that when you put feminism and DIY politics together, it’s just natural that queer politics should be involved. Personally, I don’t separate feminist politics from queer politics because I see feminism as fighting clear gender boundaries, which is a very queer idea.”

Ladyfest also inherited riot grrl’s difficulty with race politics. The assumption that cultural differences would be resolved by uniting under the term ‘riot grrl’ was flawed for many. As Lauren Jade Martin had written in her 1997 zine You might as well live: ‘Some of you say “we’re out to kill white boy mentality”, but have you examined your own mentality? Your white, upper-middle glass girl mentality? What would you say if I said I wanted to kill that mentality too?’

This critique, never resolved by riot grrl, remains a thorny issue for Ladyfest. The limitations placed on it by the white, middle class roots of riot grrl are, to some extent, mitigated by the localness of each event; Ladyfest London, for example, chose immigration and asylum as its theme last year as a direct challenge to the whiteness of past events. Mina Gichinga of the Duloks, though, believes it’s the indie-music bias of many Ladyfests that is most limiting.

“I think there’s a need for alternative genres to be introduced to Ladyfest- say female grime for example,” she says. “There are talented girls making music that’s not centrally punk or indie, so why not show that off too? Variation is important if Ladyfest is to grow.”

For Anat Ben-David of Chicks on Speed, who has performed at Ladyfests as a solo artist, the issue is less inclusivity than a lack of ambition. The not-for-profit, anarcho-feminist roots of Ladyfest can leave some women wondering why they’re being asked to play another free show.

“There’s this thing of wanting artists to play for free, just because it’s for women. Come on – this is our job! Ladyfest, more than any other festival, should be making sure women artists are getting paid. Clearly women’s liberation hasn’t gone so far as to affect how women in the art world and music business treat and and respect themselves and each other,” she argues. “I respect the organisers, but it needs to go further and happen big time. Get some support, be strong with it, pay all the artists, not just the head liners.”

Though playing a Ladyfest may not now be a commercially astute decision in the way it was for the Gossip in 2000 (the band was booked for a UK Ladyfest tour the following year, breaking them in to the British market), there remains a certain transformative power that immersion in subversive, often directly transgressive, action and culture can bring about.

“One of the things that for me is important is that it supports the local scene, and stays true to the DIY roots of Ladyfest. It´s not about shipping over a bunch of riot grrl bands from Olympia,” says Ros Murray. “It’s about encouraging new local bands and giving people an opportunity to play that might not normally get to in the male dominated music scene. it feels really great to be part of a process that aims to inspire other people to be creative, rather than to just sit back and watch. That was really important for Electrelane.”

“If Ladyfest has one concept, it’s that of providing an “in” for females in an industry that’s so male dominated the smell of testosterone is tangible,” agrees Mira Manga. “Don’t forget, in the 90s women were facing the new laddism, the Blur vs. Oasis pissing contest – and I think that hasn’t really gone away.”

“So many Ladyfests have spawned bonds and networks that continue on with exciting feminist activities, like the First Ladies DJ Collective and the District of Ladies visual arts collective that formed out of the Washington DC Ladyfest,” points out Allison Wolfe. “I believe the antiwar activist group Pink Bloque formed from connections made at Ladyfest Chicago. Unskinny Bop came out of Ladyfest London. And The Here gallery and DIY art/craft store, the Local Kid label, and the Café Kino vegan café, all came out of Ladyfest Bristol. It’s amazing – these communities are left with a bigger set of possibilities after Ladyfest.“

For Kieron Gillen, writer of the Phonogram series of graphic novels, the proper term for such a literal empowerment is ‘magic’. The first Phonogram book is set at a Ladyfest, and documents, to some extent, both Gillen’s own doubts about the event, and their eventual resolution.

“The idea of magic in Phonogram is always about the metaphoric effect of music on people,” he explains. “At Ladyfest Bristol, I realised that so much of my life I’ve been inspired by the music the festival celebrated… but it hadn’t affected my behaviour one fucking jot. I really beat myself up over it, which I channelled into the book by having the lead character beaten up by a goddess. The experience did alter my behaviour – I think I was a better person walking out of the venue than when I walked in, and if that isn’t magic, I dunno what is.”

UK LADYFEST TIMELINE

1986 – 1989

’87: Ablaze! Mag is founded by Karen Ablaze (still kicking ass in Leeds). The girls involved form bands; the bands spawn more bands, and the ‘zine spawns more ‘zines.

1990 – 1992

‘90: Erica Smith conjures up Girlfrenzy magazine while wandering around the local shop. It provides a platform for female comic artists and adopts a more informal, fun attitude than more traditional feminist magazines. First published in ’91, it’s still going today.

‘91: Brightonian refuseniks Huggy Bear form; play shows, change world.

’92: the Slampt Underground Organisation record label is founded in Newcastle by Rachel Holborow and Pete Dale, soon becomes famous for nurturing Kenickie’s first output among its roster of defiantly idiosyncratic wrong-pop.

1993 – 1994

’93: Cazz Blase initiates the long reign of the Riot Grrrl fanzine (culminating in 1999). The London edition goes viral, inspiring Leeds and Bradford issues shortly afterwards. Elsewhere, Bratmobile bounce around the country to excitement and acclaim, and Huggy Bear embark upon a tour with American contemporaries, Bikini Kill, accompanied by filmmaker Lucy Thane, later to produce It changed my life: Bikini Kill in the UK, her documentary of the experience. Huggies also appear on the Word, riot live on TV, and are rewarded with a stunningly hostile press reaction. The year’s finale comes with the Grrrlstyle Revolution at London’s ICA just before Christmas.

’94: Yay for the Piao! Festival, held at the Emerald Centre, Hammersmith, London and featuring performances from the likes of Heavenly, Avocado Baby, Linus and Pussycat Trash. This was the brainchild of those behind Squab, an international distribution service for cassettes ‘n’ fanzines that had blinked into life around the same time as Slampt, but acquired the Piao name in tandem with the festival. Boo for Huggy Bear’s last gig, tho’, early the same year.

1995 – 1996

’96: Mathew Fletcher of Talulah Gosh (whose older sister, Amelia, was a core member also of Heavenly, Marine Research and Tender Trap) defines the term ‘riot grrrl’ for the Oxford English Dictionary. Later that year, he commits suicide.

1997 – 1999

’97: The redoubtable Anna Moulson founds independent promotions company Melting Vinyl and the Brighton Crawl, an early grrl-positive festival, in Brighton; releases ramalama commemorative Crawl 7-in featuring Gilded Lil, Mellow and Bette Davis and the Balconettes.

’98: The first annual Queeruption event, at the 121 Centre, Brixton, a self-organised, non-profit DIY event for radical queers to make, do, be, learn, organise, resist, and generally rule. The ethos and praxis of Queeruption would later form the skeleton of the nascent Ladyfest movement in the US, just as riot grrl zines had followed in the wake of 80’s queercore punk zines.

‘99: Erica Smith publishes the Girlfrenzy Millennial, containing comic strips, interviews, fiction and photostories, including work by Charlotte Cooper and Fawn Gehweiler.

2000 – 2001

‘01: In the wake of the first Ladyfest, held in Olympia, Washington in 2000, a 2001 UK Ladyfest tour is organised, featuring spiky girlpop greats the Lollies alongside Bangs, Sarah Dougher and the Gossip (playing their first UK shows); in the same year, the UK holds its first Ladyfest in Glasgow, featuring Bis, Bratmobile, and Katastrophe Wife, as well as workshops in DJing and self-defence for women.

2002 – 2003

‘02: In the ridiculously sultry summer of 2002, Ladyfest London takes up the mantle, headlining Chicks on Speed, Electrelane, Holly Golightly, and Katastrophe Wife, alongside digital hardcore darlings Lolita Storm, lo-fi romantic Mirah, riot grrl stalwarts Linus, twee monsters the Blue Minkies, and Gina Birch of the Raincoats. Workshops include Men in Feminism, songwriting, dance, cross-stitch and self-publishing. Unskinny Bop, a club night inspired by Beth Ditto’s onstage striptease at Ladyfest Glasgow, makes its first appearance here. Its aims:to celebrate the achievements of fat people in pop, from Missy to Meatloaf, and to create a safe space for fat people to shake that badonkadonk free from judgement and inhibition. Joy ensues.

‘03: 2003 sees, alongside Ladyfests in Exeter, Bristol, and Manchester, a proliferation of Ladyfest-associated or inspired events, with Unskinny Bop and the polysexual kaos of Club Motherfucker going monthly in London, Homocrime setting up its first queercore event, spearheaded by the Gossip, and the Local Kid label and the Here shop pushing the envelope in Bristol. In Brighton, the Punktrap night opens to all genders and sexualities, ages and body types, with a door policy favouring drag and nerd, while the Cowley Club provides a libertarian space for political organising and social events, as well as a library and cafe. It provides a home for local campaigning organisations in their dozens, later becoming a venue for local queer and grrl bands and club nights, including the Flesh Machine, Husbands, Peepholes and Miss Pain.

2004 – 2005

‘04: Ladyfests are held in Birmingham, Dublin and Exeter, while the growth of grrl- and queer-positive collectives and events continues with the founding of Manchester’s Kaffequeeria, and Cardiff’s Peppermint Patti collective.

05: Brighton’s first Ladyfest proper is held in 2005, featuring performances from Electrelane, Afrirampo, the Polly Shang Kuan Band, Spider and the Webs and Partyline, a Riot Grrl film showing and panel featuring Jon Slade, Tobi Vail and Allison Wolfe, and a lesbian riot (unplanned) on the final night.

2006 – 2007

06: Having showcased, among others, Rhythm King and her Friends, Lesbo Pig, Husbands, Blood Red Shoes, the Corey O’s, Drunk Granny, Jean Genet, Sleeping States and Winston Echo, Homocrime holds its final event – Nomocrime – in 2006. The Homocrime Singles club and label continues. Ladyfests Bournemouth, Cardiff, and Newcastle bring the noise.

07: Ladyfest spreads to Leicester, Cambridge, Leeds and Nottingham, and Cardiff responds with its own F.A.G. club – cake, raffle and riot for queers of all genders and sexualities. In Manchester, the Female Trouble women’s collective begins its roster of fundraisers, shows and club nights, and Bristol’s Cafe Kino, providing a radical space for DIY political activism (and amazing food), opens.

UK LADYFEST TIMELINE

1986 – 1989

’87: Ablaze! Mag is founded by Karen Ablaze (still kicking ass in Leeds). The girls involved form bands; the bands spawn more bands, and the ‘zine spawns more ‘zines.

1990 – 1992

‘90: Erica Smith conjures up Girlfrenzy magazine while wandering around the local shop. It provides a platform for female comic artists and adopts a more informal, fun attitude than more traditional feminist magazines. First published in ’91, it’s still going today.

‘91: Brightonian refuseniks Huggy Bear form; play shows, change world.

’92: the Slampt Underground Organisation record label is founded in Newcastle by Rachel Holborow and Pete Dale, soon becomes famous for nurturing Kenickie’s first output among its roster of defiantly idiosyncratic wrong-pop.

1993 – 1994

’93: Cazz Blase initiates the long reign of the Riot Grrrl fanzine (culminating in 1999). The London edition goes viral, inspiring Leeds and Bradford issues shortly afterwards. Elsewhere, Bratmobile bounce around the country to excitement and acclaim, and Huggy Bear embark upon a tour with American contemporaries, Bikini Kill, accompanied by filmmaker Lucy Thane, later to produce It changed my life: Bikini Kill in the UK, her documentary of the experience. Huggies also appear on the Word, riot live on TV, and are rewarded with a stunningly hostile press reaction. The year’s finale comes with the Grrrlstyle Revolution at London’s ICA just before Christmas.

’94: Yay for the Piao! Festival, held at the Emerald Centre, Hammersmith, London and featuring performances from the likes of Heavenly, Avocado Baby, Linus and Pussycat Trash. This was the brainchild of those behind Squab, an international distribution service for cassettes ‘n’ fanzines that had blinked into life around the same time as Slampt, but acquired the Piao name in tandem with the festival. Boo for Huggy Bear’s last gig, tho’, early the same year.

1995 – 1996

’96: Mathew Fletcher of Talulah Gosh (whose older sister, Amelia, was a core member also of Heavenly, Marine Research and Tender Trap) defines the term ‘riot grrrl’ for the Oxford English Dictionary. Later that year, he commits suicide.

1997 – 1999

’97: The redoubtable Anna Moulson founds independent promotions company Melting Vinyl and the Brighton Crawl, an early grrl-positive festival, in Brighton; releases ramalama commemorative Crawl 7-in featuring Gilded Lil, Mellow and Bette Davis and the Balconettes.

’98: The first annual Queeruption event, at the 121 Centre, Brixton, a self-organised, non-profit DIY event for radical queers to make, do, be, learn, organise, resist, and generally rule. The ethos and praxis of Queeruption would later form the skeleton of the nascent Ladyfest movement in the US, just as riot grrl zines had followed in the wake of 80’s queercore punk zines.

‘99: Erica Smith publishes the Girlfrenzy Millennial, containing comic strips, interviews, fiction and photostories, including work by Charlotte Cooper and Fawn Gehweiler.

2000 – 2001

‘01: In the wake of the first Ladyfest, held in Olympia, Washington in 2000, a 2001 UK Ladyfest tour is organised, featuring spiky girlpop greats the Lollies alongside Bangs, Sarah Dougher and the Gossip (playing their first UK shows); in the same year, the UK holds its first Ladyfest in Glasgow, featuring Bis, Bratmobile, and Katastrophe Wife, as well as workshops in DJing and self-defence for women.

2002 – 2003

‘02: In the ridiculously sultry summer of 2002, Ladyfest London takes up the mantle, headlining Chicks on Speed, Electrelane, Holly Golightly, and Katastrophe Wife, alongside digital hardcore darlings Lolita Storm, lo-fi romantic Mirah, riot grrl stalwarts Linus, twee monsters the Blue Minkies, and Gina Birch of the Raincoats. Workshops include Men in Feminism, songwriting, dance, cross-stitch and self-publishing. Unskinny Bop, a club night inspired by Beth Ditto’s onstage striptease at Ladyfest Glasgow, makes its first appearance here. Its aims:to celebrate the achievements of fat people in pop, from Missy to Meatloaf, and to create a safe space for fat people to shake that badonkadonk free from judgement and inhibition. Joy ensues.

‘03: 2003 sees, alongside Ladyfests in Exeter, Bristol, and Manchester, a proliferation of Ladyfest-associated or inspired events, with Unskinny Bop and the polysexual kaos of Club Motherfucker going monthly in London, Homocrime setting up its first queercore event, spearheaded by the Gossip, and the Local Kid label and the Here shop pushing the envelope in Bristol. In Brighton, the Punktrap night opens to all genders and sexualities, ages and body types, with a door policy favouring drag and nerd, while the Cowley Club provides a libertarian space for political organising and social events, as well as a library and cafe. It provides a home for local campaigning organisations in their dozens, later becoming a venue for local queer and grrl bands and club nights, including the Flesh Machine, Husbands, Peepholes and Miss Pain.

2004 – 2005

‘04: Ladyfests are held in Birmingham, Dublin and Exeter, while the growth of grrl- and queer-positive collectives and events continues with the founding of Manchester’s Kaffequeeria, and Cardiff’s Peppermint Patti collective.

05: Brighton’s first Ladyfest proper is held in 2005, featuring performances from Electrelane, Afrirampo, the Polly Shang Kuan Band, Spider and the Webs and Partyline, a Riot Grrl film showing and panel featuring Jon Slade, Tobi Vail and Allison Wolfe, and a lesbian riot (unplanned) on the final night.

2006 – 2007

06: Having showcased, among others, Rhythm King and her Friends, Lesbo Pig, Husbands, Blood Red Shoes, the Corey O’s, Drunk Granny, Jean Genet, Sleeping States and Winston Echo, Homocrime holds its final event – Nomocrime – in 2006. The Homocrime Singles club and label continues. Ladyfests Bournemouth, Cardiff, and Newcastle bring the noise.

07: Ladyfest spreads to Leicester, Cambridge, Leeds and Nottingham, and Cardiff responds with its own F.A.G. club – cake, raffle and riot for queers of all genders and sexualities. In Manchester, the Female Trouble women’s collective begins its roster of fundraisers, shows and club nights, and Bristol’s Cafe Kino, providing a radical space for DIY political activism (and amazing food), opens.

Rolo Tomassi

Originally published in Plan B magazine, March 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Rolo Tomassi, Camden Underworld, 03/02/08

“Faggots,” opines a moron.

It’s possible that he intended to say “your precocious Henry Cowisms are giving me the fear,” but he’s drunk, so “faggots” it is. Later, there will also be “bitch, you suck” and “get your tits out”. It’s a Sunday afternoon, kid. You eat your roast beef with that mouth? A good portion of this young crowd shares his disdain; emo jailbait coats the rear wall. It’s the pauses most seem to object to – the moments of gathered breath, the lengthy keyboard breaks between, oh yeah, movements, in this murderously-delivered set. But all along and beside the stage, thrilled and beaming and stamping and screaming, are other kids; bitches and faggots, perhaps, with their cameras set to FOREVER.

Though Rolo Tomassi have so far delivered precisely one bruising and beautiful mini-album for Holy Roar, this ambitious performance (punctuated only twice, by polite thanks and shy offers of merch) gathers those songs, and several newer, into a thunderous and complex tale. This one hour, this grimy afternoon, makes meat of their many swift and brutal changes of pace, mood and mode; of punk chromatics so brisk and heady it’s hard to notice how deeply-felt they are, until they veer one last time and suddenly, all compasses point to a previously-imperceptible magnetic north; of ensemble riffs and roaring, and of their separation, their subsiding into delicacy and tenderness. It’s all the same, utterly absorbing story.

It’s hard to imagine where these 5 teenagers can have acquired either their conspicuous virtuosity or their impressive range. Their references, sonic, literary and filmic, tear eclecticism a new rear window.  In  ‘C Is For Calculus’ alone, they manage to conjure the prog/spacerock theatrics of Yes and Hawkwind, the romp and rigour of Dillinger or Converge, and the spiralling fusion of Return to Forever, in a manner it took Mike Patton 15 years to attempt. Though the sound this afternoon is doing them few favours, Edward’s drums manage nevertheless to preside triumphantly over a stage split dialectically between Joe and Joseph’s guitar/bass unison and the call and response vocals of Eva and James. As the set progresses, though, as ‘Seagull’ offers its bleak, sinister vision and ‘Digital History’ presents its bouquet of knives, I begin to notice how carefully the various voices intertwine, how the psychedelia of James’ keyboards signals increasingly complex sets of possibilities. Instruments are disguising themselves before my eyes: guitars cozen as keyboards, voices as drums, songs sew themselves to one another, riffs shred away, trade parts, and reform voluptuously. On the heels of new single ‘Beat Rotter’, ‘Film Noir’’s triple-tapped, sniper-fire introduction is a shock to the chest.  ‘Cirque Du Funk’ shakes a single, circling riff down to its basest properties, surrounding it with shifting drums that attack and defend its sinous curves by turns, as Eva abandons her mic to career across the stage, ecstatically stamping out every change in pattern. Imagine bumper cars, choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Imagine bitches and faggots, tits out and roaring, ruling heaven, always.

Why I love: outros

Originally published in Plan B magazine, October 2007  – www.planbag.com/shop

Why I love: outros.

Sometimes our own time is the very best time to live in. Some things engender faith in our cultural instincts. Some pop forms are high art, and the outro is one of them.

The outro is pop’s nod to the classical coda – a final passage that draws from the forms and themes of a long piece to conclude it. Codas, like most classical forms, grew in complexity over time until they became these big-deal self-referential musical vessels, aching for the plunder of the modern and the bold. Outros are our pirate badge of honour, a hook at the wrist. Lots of songs pare down or shine up their component parts for a big finish – think ‘Joyful Girl’, or ‘This Charming Man’ – but these are not outros. The true outro is a distinct new passage, scrambling for your attention, compulsively answering the song’s own questions, an end not ready yet to end.

It’s tempting to think of the outro song as a perpetual crescendo, and outros are, mostly, a joyful form, but they can also bring a reckoning, a thematic conclusion of frightening intensity. ‘Drive’, by Throwing Muses – which sees Kristin Hersh threaten to ‘fight the clouds with your head on a stick’ – burns a long fuse of malintent through a lengthy, repetitive outro. Guitars settle into a chugging riff, short vocal phrases grow in scale, piling body parts, hers and her lover’s, ‘in my head/in your heart,’ roadkill alongside ‘the road/the road home,’ concluding in a defiant chant: ‘I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.’ PJ Harvey’s horrific ‘Nina In Ecstasy II’, which dates from Is This Desire?, preempts the ghostly child-actors of White Chalk with a single, high-register vocal line, a young girl lamenting her own demise and calling for her mother (the chorus’ only word, drawn-out and shaky, is ‘MAMA’) – and then flatly gives us the time-of-death by using the chorus of 1971’s winter warmer ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ as an outro. ‘Where’s your mama gone? Far, far away.’ The melody floats down from the heights of the chorus to meet a funereal organ part. You’re left feeling as though you found the body, and it’s the outro that does it, that sets Nina down where she can clearly be seen. Take that, Nick Cave! Back to murder-ballad school with you!

But the truest, most lovingest-best function of the outro is not to conclude. It’s takeoff, not landing, that is the outro’s real business, and the more pop the form, the faster the ascent. That’s why DJ’s love outro songs; they glitter-glue people to the dancefloor with sheer excitement. Tell me your favourite Daft Punk song isn’t Aerodynamic. I won’t believe you. I don’t believe you didn’t lose your breath when you first heard the song move directly from intro to double-tapping outro heaven. Such a radical gesture, the song as means to its own end – I don’t believe you didn’t run around and fall all over yourself and shout. They knew you would, too, knew they had written possibly the greatest outro of all time, and that’s why when they play it live, they segue straight into it from ‘One More Time’, a song which is, lyrically at least, a perpetual intro. ‘One more time, we’re gonna celebrate,’ they call; the ragged, insistent, irresistible arpeggios of ‘Aerodynamic’ – and the absolute abandon they bring – are the only possible response.

Judee Sill

Judee

Originally published in Plan B magazine, April 2009 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Somewhere Out There – Judee Sill

“This is a religious song about flying saucers coming at the end of the world to take all of the sensitive, deserving people away. When I wrote it, I think I believed it more literally than I do now, although I still believe poetically that deserving people will be spared.”

Judee Sill’s speaking voice, though darker in texture, tougher and more sardonic than her singing voice, is the best possible introduction to her songs. As she hands out her descriptive buttonholes, busting herself proudly for stealing licks from R&B, gospel, or cartoon soundtracks; as she gives her halting, often angry depictions of the imagistic landscapes conjured by the songs; as she relates so straightforwardly her times of spiritual difficulty, her tone never wavers. Sill’s voice is always companionable, even at its most painful or arcane, and until she leans in to the microphone to sing, and breathes, I sometimes forget she’s gone. Long gone, and not as she hoped, the way the gentle go home, spared the darkness of the end times, but in undeserved pain and confusion.

Maybe she never was one of the gentle. Despite her Californian background, her melodic intricacy and the intimacy of her vocal delivery, Judee Sill is emphatically not a Canyon lady, a flower child baking musical cakes. Her work is structurally faultless by self-imposed, ahistorical standards and subject to a supremely accomplished production ethic, drawing from traditions and techniques as disparate as gospel, bluegrass and baroque classical to form a style she termed ‘country-cult-baroque’. Sill’s working life as a musician was brief: she released only two albums, 1971’s Judee Sill and 1973’s Heart Food, neither of which flourished commercially, despite very favourable critical responses, albeit within the constraints allotted to women musicians at the time.

2009 is the 30^th anniversary of her death, and for most of those 30 years, despite a growing underground profile, both albums have been out of print. The lengthy unavailability of her recorded output – by various accounts, the result of oversight or grudge on the part of David Geffen, with whom Sill had a troubled professional relationship – had, until recently, meant that her work was largely overlooked for reappraisal. But since the reissue of both albums in 2005, the Live In London collection and the posthumous Dreams Come True, an anthology of unreleased songs and rarities, Sill’s work has been more readily understood, in part through the influence she has had upon artists as varied as XTC, Joanna Newsom, Elliott Smith and Jim O’Rourke.

“Judee Sill committed the capital crime of being better than the male competition,” insists Andy Partridge of XTC, who wrote liner notes for the re-releases and readily admits to a ‘What Would Judee Do’ production ethic. “She should be considered in the same breath as Brian Wilson. In fact [Wilson] is the nearest male I can think of to Judee Sill. Surf’s Up has the kind of arrangements and treatments that she did, the multitracked vocal and the reverb, and the kind of chorus sound on the guitar.”

“Her melodies and songwriting are kind of unparalleled, by a certain set of standards,” Joanna Newsom told Plan B in 2007. “She’s really good at one particular idiom, this American vernacular thing that in some ways Van Dyke Parks is kind of the king of, in modern pop music. [Aaron] Copland-isms; the American frontier classical symphonic sound. Almost every one of her songs has these figures that are 100 per cent part of Twenties or Thirties American classical music. And she has these weird gospel harmonies on top of that.”

If Sill looks, with hindsight, somewhat awkward among the pantheon of Seventies female singer-songwriters, she was also anomalous within the context in which she worked. She came to prominence among the Laurel Canyon scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies, the relatively commercial bunch based around David Geffen’s nascent Asylum label, a stable which included Linda Ronstadt, The Eagles, and Jackson Browne. In this company, Sill was not considered an especially profitable prospect. An ambitious minor heiress adrift in the sad remnants of hippy culture, she was promiscuous and openly bisexual; witchy-looking, unpredictable and narcissistic, she would never be the cover girl Geffen wanted for his label. Sill was comfortable neither in mainstream society nor in the limited countercultural niches available to women in contemporary Los Angeles. She played bass in several bands, studied Rosicrucianism and theosophy, and kept a small harem of women at her beckon-call – and by 1971, at a time when women musicians were still expected to look pretty and behave, she was already notoriously uppity, growling at inadequately respectful audiences and complaining about her support slots for ’snotty rock groups’. Sill did not come easily to performance; behind her were her profoundly troubled family life, a stint as a teenage armed robber, reform school, sex work, addiction and prison. Immediately before her was a meteoric, frustrating career as a commercial musician, whose lack of viability would prompt a relapse into depression and ultimately into the addiction that was to end her life; yet the two albums she produced, in the window between periods of chaos and unbearable sadness, contain some of the most consummate and, above all, esoteric pop compositions of any era.

Sill’s self-titled debut, on Asylum in 1971, was the label’s first release. Eleven ambrosial, carefully arranged tracks – Sill listed her influences at the time as Bach, Pythagoras, and Ray Charles – it’s an extraordinarily self-assured and coherent debut, hewn over years spent in the shadow of LA pop bands for whom Sill wrote songs or opened shows. After one such effort, ‘Lady-O’, scored a minor commercial success for the Turtles, David Geffen, until then an agent, was interested enough to give Sill a retainer until his label was up and running.

Characteristically stubborn and competitive was Sill’s insistence on re-recording ‘Lady-O’ for her own album. Both the Turtles version and Sill’s own share the same complex orchestration, but Sill’s is by far the more coherent-sounding; the multitracked vocal, expertly managed phrasing, and creamy quality to the tonal picture, add a sense of completeness to the intertwining of guitar and strings. The vocal is gauged perfectly as a segment of the sound; the earlier Turtles vocal sounds tacked-on by comparison. All the parts at play are fully realised, in all their dimensions: the interplay of melody and arrangement, the tiny shifts of mood as the vocal races the guitar to resolution, Sill’s vocal sustain mimicking the swell and the weight of the strings. The key is the compositional understanding, a grasp of the architecture of the song in macro and micro. ‘May You Savor Each Word Like A Raspberry,’ reads the album inset, and Sill’s version does feel as naturally developed, as perfectly formed, as fruit.

The album foregrounds Sill’s lyrical concerns as much as her idiosyncratic musicality and perfectionism. The songs are a provocative mix of quasi-religious imagery and gender confusion, shot through with a longing for redemption underscored by hard experience, and yet the overall impression is somehow of ease and comfort. Given the conceptual difficulty and metaphysical struggle of the average Sill lyric, the sense of supernatural well-being that she manages to confer on the listener might be surprising, had she not had such a clarity of intent for her arrangements. Multitracked vocals, often in choral form, shimmer through piano, strings, brass and guitar; melodic lines are answered by their chordal context in such satisfying ways, their resonance is barely grasped before being replaced by the next moment of delicious tension or abundant resolution.

‘Though the beast within me’s a liar, he made me glow with a strange desire, and I rode on the fire, with a blue sacred opal to bless the battleground; but I turned to see its reflection, and the lamb ran away with the crown’, Sill sings blithely in ‘The Lamb Ran Away With The Crown’. The vocal glosses over a shift in time signature between 4/4 and 3/4, as guitar, backing vocals and trumpets swap roles in the melodic picture, presaging an imminent four-part vocal round reminiscent of the closing bars of ‘God Only Knows’. Sill’s interest in both classical mythology and Crowleyan mysticism is visible here – she was an avid reader of Aleister Crowley’s poetry, and the sexual imagery of demonic possession springs directly from early works such as Snowdrops From A Curate’s Garden, while also reminiscent of the sexual ecstasies of the early female Catholic martyrs. Within the lyric, Sill portrays herself variously as the debased, flawed exile from the Garden, and the triumphant beast who sails the heavens on ‘ten crested cardinals’. ‘But I laughed so hard I cried,’ closes the song, ‘and the lamb ran away with the crown.’ A baritone saxophone positively chuckles at the thought as the vocal round fades out, no one line or perspective clearly dominant. In live performances, Sill would use her voice alone to replicate all four parts of the round, then the backing vocals. “I wanted to write a song where good triumphs over evil,” she said as she performed the song in London, neglecting to mention that she had cast herself as the vanquished.

“In her lyrics, she’s always wrestling with the devil, and she’s the devil,” suggests Partridge. “The man is Christ and she’s the devil, and she wants the man but she can’t have the man, and she’s gonna kill the man, and he’s gonna kill her – and it’s all one giant fight with herself.”

Seldom is this conflation of sexual and spiritual warfare within Sill’s work clearer than in ‘Jesus Was A Crossmaker’, a song written in the wake of a painful jilting at the hands of country singer and labelmate J D Souther, and produced by Graham Nash. Initially, the lyric identifies Souther with the carpenter-Christ, toolmaker of his own torture and death. Sill presents this idea, morbid in the hands of a lesser songwriter, as deeply hopeful – in a contemporary recording on the Old Grey Whistle Test, she explains that with this realisation, she began to see redemption as available to all of humanity – and yet still she begs for release from the burden of empathy for her torturer. ‘Hiding me, I flee, desire dividing me; he’s a bandit and a heartbreaker – oh, but Jesus was a crossmaker. Sweet silver angels over the sea, please come down flying low for me,’ she sings, trapped in her own Gethsemane. Once again, her voice is multitracked, this time in unison, before breaking into choral harmony – two, three, four parts, as the strings filigree like a baroque harpsichord trill, and backing vocals alternate between human call and angelic response. In one video of a very early solo performance of the song, seated at her guitar, Sill closes by humming an approximation of the string part, so complete is her imagination of the necessary variation. She was later to hum these same approximations to the album’s arranger, her ex-husband, keyboard player Bob Harris, to aid the orchestration of the various parts, since she herself could not at that time notate a multi-instrumental score.

By the time Asylum released Sill’s second album, Heart Food, in 1973, that would no longer be the case. Sill arranged, produced and orchestrated the album herself, and seems more confident still: the gospel influence is considerably stronger, dominating the arrangements of ‘When The Bridegroom Comes’ and ‘Down Where The Valleys Are Low’, and the country idioms also more pronounced, particularly in the sweet fiddle of ‘Rugged Road’. But at the heart of this heart’s food lies the baroque influence that provided so much of Sill’s structural approach to songwriting and arrangement. As Gershwin is to Brian Wilson, so Bach is to Sill. The piano part for ‘The Kiss’, the album’s second track, closely resembles the prelude of Bach’s first cello suite, transposed into 3/4 and augmented by a legato vocal that recalls the cello both tonally – Sill’s characteristic, swelling sustain and dramatically extended vowel sounds – and melodically. As the piano abandons its arpeggiation to supply insistent gospel chords over the song’s bridge, the vocal finds an ostinato that sets the template for a new counterpoint harmony. The lyric is impressionistic, and the place of the vocal in the mix all but binds it into the dense sound picture, until the string counterpoint emerges to emphasise its most solemn moments. ‘Storms bursting in the sky, hear the sad nova’s dying cry shimmer in memory,’ Sill sings with great tenderness and calm, violins pushing the mind’s eye heavenward as surely as any celestial reference in the lyric. The sum of the parts would be enough, but Sill manages, somehow, more; the effect is both mindbending and heartrending, a healing in sound.

“You can try to pin that golden smoke to the wall, but you’re still only getting glimpses of what makes it,” warns Partridge. “ ‘The Kiss’ reduces me to tears faster than any other song I’ve ever heard. The lyrics are a set of clues, they build the tension, and then the melody cuts every string in your body. She was on her way; she could have become the world’s best songwriter and arranger.”

Could have, had she lived. The release of Dreams Come True in 2005, which gathered the early recordings of songs Sill had planned for her third album, as well as rarities, home recordings and a lengthy anecdotal oral history, is sadly the final word on Sill’s life and work. Mixed by Jim O’Rourke, the songs are strangely shiny and cheerful at a time when Sill’s own frustration, always a fruitful source of inspiration, seems to have been turning to despair. When she died, overdosing on codeine and cocaine she was taking to manage the pain of a spinal injury, Sill was once again living hand to mouth and managing a growing addiction, alone and out of touch with the musical community. Many of her former friends heard of her death only later. It’s far too hard a passing for this soldier of the heart, a woman who struggled so mightily, and who built out of her struggle such a strange, merciful refuge for her listeners.

Gowns

Originally published in Plan B magazine, February 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Gowns@ The Greenhouse Effect, December 14th, 2007

The Gowns album, Red State, was possibly the most truthful record of 2007. Last year, that nosebleed of a year, its frightening Rorschach of losses and blows, its surreal relentlessness, was best soundtracked by Red State’s sinister, dronebound poppetry, its chant-in-mitigation to, what – some minor school-bully god of dread, of resignation? Gowns narrated their own trajectory, and ours, shocked and numb and self-medicated as we were, our lives describing, suddenly and intimately, the cracks in everything: in every little thing.

On this freezing, bright-dark December evening, halfway through a beleaguered set, 24 people are watching Gowns. The Greenhouse Effect is full, the staircase outside is festooned with smokers, the bar is three-deep; Zettosaur have already skronked their way through a half-hour’s pleasurable mayhem; and Erika is standing in the corner, facing a crowd of more than a hundred, her eyes screwed shut, her lips brushing the microphone. Her white Mustang beats rhythmically against her hip as it swings, and her hands describe some part of the past spilling out here, again, for us, and only 24 people are watching, squandered randomly among the first 8 rows of a crowd intent on boredom. Join the dots: it spells FUCK YOU.

Gowns began their set with a spoken-word piece. Erika strode onstage, wearing her familiar tour uniform, a torn, home-made t-shirt that reads ‘MY OVARIES ARE A BREEDING GROUND FOR TERRORISTS’, and whispered, clawing at her wrists, images of children and animals minded by maniacs, of plump arms in puppy jaws. Ezra, crouched behind his synth, and Jacob, seated on his bass amp, played pedal hopscotch. Erika’s breath, pushing gently at the air around the PA, began to recall the Lynchian midwesternisms of the record, kids in the yard, a summersworth of lawn sprinklers, as Corey bowed his ride cymbal, both slowly and violently, a lovely cadence growing.

But then, during the second song, as Erika coos ‘and don’t you know that I would never hurt you, you are such… a pretty…. thing,’ the PA fails. The band waits a long time before anyone even moves to help, to begin the song again. And the sound fails once, twice more. This level of frustration is difficult to watch; the crowd begins to move away from the stage. People turn to one another, smirking over their beers, and most never really look back.

Gowns understand the impulse to look away. Seeing is painful, sight reveals far too much for comfort, throughout Red State: ropes hang by open windows, the pattern of a kitchen table describes the unbearably expanding universe. Even light is dangerous. The golden, endless glow of ‘Fargo’ reveals dust and an empty room, waiting for a soldier to return; ‘Take, take all the shine out of me,’ begs ‘Mercy’, which, tonight, is excruciating – Ezra screams until he can no longer be heard, until the sound is utterly extinguished, then pulls needle-tones from his violin, bloody, and drops them to the floor. The last time I saw Ezra, touring with the Mae Shi, his ebullience recalled a cuckoo clock. This show could not be further removed. It’s merciless and unrelenting: very little comfort is offered or taken. All Gowns have their eyes tight shut whenever possible, though the impression is not of an attempt at hiding, but of a preferable internal world, recreated under impossible circumstances, at risk of shattering in plain sight.

No matter where in the crowd I am, the noise is inescapable. During a halting, sinister cover of ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, braving the backroom to get to the bar, I come closer to a fistfight than I’ve been in years. But the opening drone of ‘White Like Heaven’ clusters hope in my stomach, and I push through until I’m inches away from the speakers, saturating. ‘I was sitting at the table and suddenly I could see it, I could see it, I could feel it, I saw the world break open, oh, I could see all of it,’ Erika yells, over the distorted chorale of guitars and violin. Corey’s occasional Bonhamisms find such a home in this song; the drums rattle and bang against my chest before slinking back into the final, utterly absorbing phrase.

Then, over the lovely opening diads of ‘Cherylee’, the roar returns. The sound of the crowd is hollow, like a failing engine. ‘I can’t even see your faces anymore’, Erika calls, as though across a huge distance. In what universe, when a band travels thousands of miles, starts and restarts and restarts a set, a set delivered, nevertheless, unflinchingly, and with such commitment, do you not shut the fuck up and listen? In what universe do you not take every possible moment of this into yourself? You’ve gotta look it in the eyes and say that I don’t believe, you’ve gotta look up out the water until you can’t hardly see. You’ve gotta know. Gowns leave the stage, and the crowd moves towards the exits to smoke, out in the well-deserved dark.

Pumajaw

Originally published in Plan B magazine, January 2009 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Pinkie Maclure – From Memorial Crossing (Liquid)

Lumen – This Day And Age (Ghost Train)

Pinkie Maclure & John Wills – Cat’s Cradle (Trefingle)

Pumajaw (aka Pinkie Maclure & John Wills) – Becoming Pumajaw (Trefingle)

This batch of re-releases charts the emergence of Pumajaw, red-haired brainchild of Loop drummer John Wills and prolific folk singer Pinkie Maclure, in the wake of this year’s quietly triumphant album, the tempered and textured Curiosity Box. Scotland’s Fence Collective, the Fife-based aggregation of folk types (of whom most famous alumnus KT Tunstall is far from representative) has produced some interesting work of late, in particular the increasingly krauty folktronica of James Yorkston, and these four albums go some way to contextualising the increasingly harmonious marriage of two distinct musical heritages.

Pumajaw is derived from a phonetic pronunciation of PMJW, the initials of Maclure and Wills, and such a literal interpretation of the process of collaboration is a useful way into the pair’s ethos. When folk and electronica have historically met, they have tended to read one another, to interpret an already-agreed set of values from another point of view, or to borrow and re-contextualise recognisable gestures; think of Rustin Man’s work with Beth Gibbons on 2002’s Out Of Season, of Four Tet’s Pause, or even of Ultramarine’s Folk. Rarely is the opportunity taken to contest the ground – the values, the tropes, the scope – of either genre, but this is what Maclure and Wills, in their various guises, have succeeded in doing.

Each brings considerable chops to the deconstructive process. Maclure’s range and technical ability as a folk vocalist are both extensive, and her lower register is particularly substantial. Though best known for his work in dronerockers Loop, Wills’s take on avant-noise found a new severity and abandon in later project The Hair And Skin Trading Company. The pair’s first collaboration, 2000’s From Memorial Crossing, finds its early consensus in borrowed otherworlds; the album contains renderings of Tom Waits’ ‘I’ll Shoot The Moon’ and Lynch and Badalamenti’s ‘Sycamore Trees’, from the Twin Peaks soundtrack. Further tracks are entitled ‘Blue Rose’ – another Twin Peaks reference – and ‘Fellini Overdrive’. Maclure’s voice swoops through and nestles in these adopted landscapes as though indigenous, but from her lair she scrolls out alien narratives thickly illustrated by Wills. Gradually, feelings of familiarity are subverted, and the pair seem to lament that loss even as they impose it.

The tendency to set up a familiar construct, only to paralyse and undermine it, is carried through their subsequent work, though they no longer need the world on loan. This Day And Age allows itself considerable license with the basis of folk; the vocal and its accompaniment take turns to illustrate and to thwart one another. “I am stranded in language”, Maclure intones repeatedly in ‘Stranded’, in a tone sometimes pleading, sometimes gloating. There is little prettiness, little storytelling, but much feeling here – the sound is reminiscent of later Swans – and an urgency that was to return from sonics to narrative in later work. “Once upon a wickedness, I fell into some arms”, begins ‘Buttons’, “bigger than my belly, tighter than a clown. The key was heavy in my little purse, and every penny burned when I turned and tried to run.” Maclure drags her voice reluctantly along a frightening path, overhung with briars of noise that turn her narrative here and there. On both Cat’s Cradle and Becoming Pumajaw, dream-lore such as this is interspersed with more classical fare, such as the traditionals ‘Rosemary Lane’ and ‘Fine Flowers In The Valley’. Pumajaw point out the dark inconsistency, the fluttering at the heart of folk: its ability to recite, and then forswear a point of view, the abruptness of its tragedy, the abandonment of its swift conclusion. Into the silence after, into the meaning-gap, Pumajaw pour their capricious sound, and they mean to leave the listener no reprieve.

Video game music

Originally published in Plan B magazine, February 2009 – www.planbmag.com/shop – and many thanks to Louis for the edit.

Formative influences being what they are, it’s little wonder that a generation raised in darkened rooms, eyes transfixed by bouncing sprites traversing blocky mazes, should now be found recreating video games culture in their art. Marnie Stern’s looping runs and baroque lack of variation in tone should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever wielded a joypad, while Wizardzz – a side project of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Gibson – made an entire gaming concept album with 2006’s Hidden City Of Taurmond. Look deeper, though, and you’ll find a thriving subculture of games-influenced musicians that’s broad in ambition and scope, encompassing everything from emulation, remixing, cover bands, and original composition – projects borrowing not just from the games themselves, but from the culture, music and community that has grown around them.

In the US, this culture is traceable back to the late Nineties, when

bands such as Generic (later the Advantage) and Jenova Project

(later the Minibosses) began to arrange and cover popular game

music themes, touring often, making recordings freely available, and

encouraging others to join the remix culture – a growing scene of

musicians dedicated to re-recording game music.

It’s a culture that grew directly from the ranks of gaming fanboys. “I

met some kids that were learning 8-bit songs in my high school,”

explains Spencer Seim, drummer for The Advantage (who also

count amongst their number touring Marnie Stern guitarist Robby

Moncrieff). ”They were playing along to some previously

programmed drums, but I’d just bought a drum-set, so I asked if I

could play along. It was something I’d thought about doing a bunch

but had no idea in going about it, but they’d already taken all the

nerdy steps to go about learning all the stuff.” Many of these bands

typically gravitate towards Nintendo games, attractive for their instant

recognition, insistent and repetitive lead melodies, distinctive tones,

over-layered arpeggiation, and frequent modulation – many of the

staples, of course, of prog-metal and math rock. Game music is, in

short, noodle heaven.

Yet outside of its stories, there is little of the fustiness of prog or the

arcana of math-rock in game music. As a form, it’s progressed from

a classically Japanese foregrounding of melody towards the greater

textures brought by FM synthesis and multi-channel sampling, each

innovation giving rise to its own heroes, foremost among them Koji

Kondo, author of generational earworm the Super Mario Brothers

theme, Koichi Sugiyama, whose Dragon Quest 3 was the first game

music arranged symphonically, and Nobuo Uemura, whose Final

Fantasy soundtracks have synthesised Japanese and Western

traditions to such popular effect.

It’s perhaps no surprise that game sound technology, driven as it

was by composers pushing the envelope of both hardware and

programming, for some time became a staple of home electronic

composition. The Amiga and Atari ST were widely used by

contemporary Western musicians – the Amiga for its sequencer, the

ST for its MIDI – as affordable, state-of-the-art kit unavailable

elsewhere. Use of game consoles and chips – particularly, but not

exclusively, the SNES (or, for the faithful, the original Famicom) and Game Boy –

has since given rise to the thriving chiptune and 8-bit scenes, inhabited by the

likes of Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and Unicorn Kid. “I was pretty fascinated by the

texture and mood of video game music as a kid, and the economy and

efficiency of these programs has really spoiled me,” said Bit Shifter

to digizine Chaos Control of his decision to reach for 8-bit

technology over traditional musical tools. ”It’s a pretty abstract

system, which to me is really a plus. It forces you into an unfamiliar

mode of conceptualising music and sound, which can lend well to

happy accidents and unexpected results.”

The chiptune scene is beginning to be popularly influential, as we

saw with last year’s global crush on Crystal Castles’ punk 8-bit. But

as evocative as the tones are, the majority of the chiptune scene is

remarkably futuristic; less a feint at kitsch than a passionate

advocacy of the power of polyharmonic bleeps, assembled like

edifices, yet retaining the plasticity and innovation of the best

interactive in-game music. Chiptune has instituted its own annual

bonanza, New York’s Blip Festival, while Two Player Productions

has documented the scene in the excellent Reformat The Planet,

which toured international film festivals in 2008.

Far from the filesharing and DIY shows of chiptune and remix is the

orchestral performance tradition, which has arisen primarily from the

lush scores dominating game music since Dragon Quest 3. Koichi

Sugiyama instituted his ’Family Classic Concert’ in 1987, bringing

the most popular game music compositions to the stage. The Final

Fantasy soundtracks are perhaps the apoetheosis of orchestral

game music composition, and the first to break the international

market. Since 2002, these compositions have been performed

orchestrally to concert halls all over the world, while 2007, the 20th

anniversary of Final Fantasy, saw the start of a world tour which

continues into 2009. Game franchises are wise to the remix scene

too: in 2003, Uemura recruited the Black Mages, a prog metal band,

to perform new arrangements of the Final Fantasy themes. The

Black Mages are as much a part of the Final Fantasy franchise as

Uemura himself, appearing at official concerts and events.

The symbiotic relationship between game music and Western music

cultures has come full circle with the institution of music-making

games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band saturating Western gaming

markets. When players pick up the controls to wail along to Blue

Oyster Cult, they are, wittingly or unwittingly, parodying two decades

of video game music culture by learning new, game-oriented

arrangements of rock staples. Game music is an evolutionarily lively

form, replicating and variating, inviting participation and innovation

by its very nature.

PJ Harvey and John Parish, A Woman A Man Walked By

Originally published on the Quietus website, February 2009 – www.thequietus.com

PJ Harvey and John Parish, A Woman A Man Walked By (Island)

PJ Harvey surprised many last year by bringing out an album so small in scale, so finnicky and chilly, that many critics saw it as a stubborn step back into dilemma by an artist who flourishes there. Though Harvey’s recent larger albums, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and Uh Huh Her, have seen the majority of her commercial success, stylistically White Chalk saw her taking more risks than at any time since her first solo record, 1995’s To Bring You My Love. Working principally on the piano, until then an unfamiliar instrument, Harvey’s compositions became a specialist lens through which to view spectral characters and stories otherwise lost to view. Both To Bring You My Love and White Chalk were produced by John Parish, his approach a dextrous combination of flexibility and sureness of touch perhaps needed by such brilliantly static and abhuman records.

The release of A Woman A Man Walked By sees the pair’s second collaboration with Parish in the songwriter’s chair, the first being Dance Hall At Louse Point, the 1996 album into which Harvey retreated after the effort and exhaustion of To Bring You My Love. Louse Point found Harvey sending her narrators out to wander the sinister mazes of Parish’s songs, an approach she clearly found liberating; her subsequent album, Is This Desire, contained some of her most accomplished, confident character writing to date, finally seeing off the biographical readings that had dominated critical response to her work until then.

Once again in A Woman A Man Walked By Parish has provided the settings for Harvey’s lyrical and vocal explorations. Perhaps fittingly after such a long wait, here the overriding feeling is one of glee; there’s a familiarity in contending for space among Parish’s often laden tonal picture. Where the lyrics might seem bereft or even hopeless, the tone is often contrastingly bold, even knowing. Harvey plays syllabic guessing-games, chasing from phrase to phrase of Parish’s arrangement. ‘Pieces, pieces of my love,’ she sings almost triumphantly over the swelling, urgent piano and percussion break of ‘The Chair’, before abruptly settling down into a set of descending phrases like a nesting duck. In the song’s final moments, to no accompaniment, Harvey tells its whole secret story: ‘..washed away in the water that took my son.’

It’s a cold heart or a brave black humour that can abandon such a line in the reeds, and elsewhere on this album, a piratical swagger lends distance to Harvey’s almost Von Trierian penchant for feminine extremity. Whether daring her lover to outblacken her heart (‘Black Hearted Love’) or squealing and barking in animalistic protest (‘Pig Will Not’) , Harvey’s gutsy take on genderfuck is literal and particular, an organic critique. The title track is especially explicit: Harvey explores the ‘lily livered little parts’, the ‘chicken liver balls’ and ‘damp alleyways’ of a cowardly ‘woman-man’, joyfully enumerating his various lacks, his premature balding, his inadequate ‘little toy’, before concluding ‘I WANT HIS FUCKING ASS’. Parish’s skewed, simple little riff gradually yields to thunderous drums that counter the vocal rhythm. This is no mere murder ballad; this is torture stomp. Harvey’s sexual aggression and gendered body horror owe much to Diamanda Galas, whose blithe take on sexual revenge is possibly best captured in The Sporting Life, as she chatters and cackles her way through the rape, torture and lynching of a trick by prostitutes.

For all its cocksurety and buttlust, this album deftly isolates some moments of dreamy uncertainty. ‘Passionless, Pointless’ is a photographic re-examination of an ended relationship, casting slight variations of perspective on the same small, telling events: ‘I slept facing the wall; I dreamed of buildings in pieces. You slept facing the wall, and you wanted less than I wanted.’ No modern songwriter is more capable of enumerating heartbreak’s immersive power than Harvey; snapshots of memory are examined for clues and flicked to the floor. But the pictures change for the looking, become meaningless. ‘I don’t remember,’ sings Harvey quietly. ‘How did we ever…?’ Parish’s guitar shimmers a chordal cloud of disquiet over the verses, then picks a silver thread through the refrain, and discordant flutes contest one another for a way through the confusion. Musically as much as narratively, the song argues persuasively for the phantasmagorical turmoil in everyday tragedy, the awful specialness of common loss. It’s Harvey’s good fortune that in this collaboration she can make such characteristic work, and Parish’s loss that his contribution may well be overlooked by fans, frustrated by the trenchant experimentalism of White Chalk, who are waiting for Harvey’s return to the blues-based rock idiom.

Antony & The Johnsons

Originally published in Plan B magazine, December 2008. http://www.planbmag.com/shop

In gradually dawning light, I’m in the front few rows for the Halloween performance from Antony And The Johnsons. Nestled in among the London Symphony Orchestra, members of the Johnsons lead new arrangements of songs stretching back as far as the first album. ‘The Rapture’ and ‘I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy’ are freshly stately in this environment; the Barbican is ghostly-new, fingers of sound penetrating through heavy curtains. ‘For Today I Am A Boy’, from 2005’s I Am A Bird Now, the album which managed to shock the music industry by winning the usually predictable Mercury Music Prize, is confident to the point of abandonment, the centrepiece ad-libs bubbling out irrepressibly, as strings sob joyfully all around.

Antony, robed and Junoesque, is measured and gentle, his movements deliberate gestures. With an entire orchestra to flow through and compete with, his voice sounds more daring and beautiful than ever as it presents the otherworldly tableaux of songs from new album, The Crying Light. This is far from the intimate, confessional performances of the I Am A Bird Now tour, nor is it a return to Antony’s former incarnation in performance art and genderqueer cabaret. This is something else; and it’s something else.

The glow lasts. A couple of days later, I arrive at Antony’s hotel, where I am met by his glorious travelling companion Joey, one of the NYC Beauties that Antony and Charles Atlas (1) immortalised in the ‘Turning’ video art project, and justly cast as a goddess in the video for Hercules and Love Affair’s ‘Blind’. I feel I’m still radiating what the performance has given me, that characteristic openness to idea and feeling that it inspires. Antony picks through his breakfast, and we gradually wake up together.

Antony’s work since I Am A Bird Now in collaboration with other artists is some of his strongest work, vocally, particularly the aching, hopeful ‘Blind’ and his collaborations with Björk on Volta. ‘The Dull Flame Of Desire’ demonstrates stunning range, and despite the repetition of the poem (the lyric was taken from a poem by the great Russian Romantic poet Fyodor Tyutchev), each pass he makes at the refrain makes the whole song feel larger, to the point of bursting.

“It’s such a challenge singing with Bjork because she’s so expansive. That’s where that bursting feeling comes from, I think. I have literally never seen someone so full-on in the studio. She’s totally committed every moment that she’s there. She pushed me out of self-consciousness.”

Hercules and Love Affair’s take on queer-positive disco seems to have really taken off.

“I’m so happy about that. It’s great that Hercules And Love Affair are emphasising that side of it. Apparently they’re doing really well, in Italy in particular. Andy [Butler, DJ mastermind of Hercules And Love Affair] and I recorded ‘Blind’ before we did the rest of the songs. It was a real experiment. We were messing around, he had this lyric he wanted me to work with – I think he wanted me to be his Alison Moyet [laughter]. I liked the challenge of trying to sing to a beat, trying to literally move people with the vocal. It’s a very different goal. I hadn’t ever done that before.”

‘Blind’ is a moving lyric in the figurative sense too. The story is alien and familiar at the same time – the landscape seems unknown, but the hopes of the main character provoke so much feeling. Is that Andy’s lyric in its entirety?

“Absolutely. There are other lyrics on that record that I wrote, ‘Time Will’, and ‘Brace Me Up’, but they’re far thornier; ‘Blind’ has an innocence that’s really important and as you say, it’s empathetic. I focussed on that, on telling that story, on remaining true to it.”

The new performances seem to draw on some of these new experiences too. The symphonic arrangements are very idiosyncratic – are they [producer and composer] Nico Muhly (2)?

“Nico and I arranged all the songs for the LSO. Most of the older songs are the ones Nico did by himself, but the newer songs we did are also on the album. I’m not classically trained, I can’t read music – I’m self-taught. So we have very different skills sets, me and Nico. I have simple ideas about melody and countermelody, voice and tone, and we go from there. He has this panoramic sense of the possible, like, working with a symphony – I would never have known how to approach that.

“The older songs, those that he arranged that we’re performing on this tour, are fantastic, but they’re interpretations. My intention was to record the newer songs definitively, as opposed to interpret them – I wanted to be the sculptor. Performing them now with the symphonies is tremendously exciting.”

At the Halloween show, the LSO was such a gigantic noise generator, and you were playing with it like a kitten.

“[Laughter] It’s like being on a really big river. A flood. Such energy being generated, and I’m being carried through it. I’m more used to having to be the river.”

***

The crying light/A sanctuary that can hold me/Allow me to come awake/Allow the child in me to rise and gaze upon the world with open, shining eyes/I am safe here, dancing my brokenness/I know my joy/I step into myself and become a shadow/Remember when I was my grandmother, when I was a fish/I remember who I will become/The crying light comes from the crystals in the dark hearts of mountains. – ‘The Crying Light’

The embodiment of nature is a perpetual theme of new album, The Crying Light. In these songs, the barrier between the self and the world is dismantled. Limbs become water, leaves become eyes, sunlight becomes crystalline emotion. ‘Everglade’ describes a moment of connection with the natural world that resonates throughout the physical and spiritual being of the storyteller. It’s a bodily journey that’s in a different dimension entirely to the gender-transformative narratives more familiar to Johnson listeners.

“They’re actually entwined, those two ideas – being born into the transgender community, my experience of being in my body has been quite alienated. I felt I was stuck inside this thing. I have been searching my whole life for a place where I belonged, and ‘Everglade’ is about my realisation that I do belong. I am at home. I am a part of the sunlight and the water and the trees. My body stopped crying for home, I stopped feeling alienated. I stopped having such cruel thoughts in my head, that I was alone and would always be alone.

“A few years ago I was lying in a canoe at a friend’s house in upstate New York, flat out on the water, and looking up at the trees above me, and suddenly was struck by imagining that each of the leaves was an eye. ‘Everglade’ is addressing that alienation, seeking to re-connect with that perpetually watching world.

“I know it sounds crazy, but for a while I was so afraid of rocks. In Catholic cosmography, human beings have souls and everything else is a question mark at best. We have a unique spirit content, and everything else is consumable. That in itself has a huge effect on what we think of as sacred – that the soul, which we have and nothing else has, is inconsumable. But for other civilisations and cultures, that’s not the case. Aboriginal Australians believe that their dead become rocks – that there are families of rocks, that rocks are family. Their ancestors are these sacred containers, the rocks.

“I visited the North Pole, and I was standing on a slate hill in Svalbard, and I really felt a tremendous sense of energy from the hill. I think perhaps it was because it’s such a remote place, so far from civilisation, there were no distractions. But I felt the life inside the mountain. I felt it so strongly, and it was a real turning point for me, the idea that I could imagine that within the stone there was such a joy and spirit and freedom – energy dancing inside of it, even in something as still as a stone. And I wrote ’Dust And Water’ about that experience.”

The stillness of rocks can be misleading. My name means ‘rock’, too. I come from a little seaside town called Hastings, which is basically a medieval fishing village between two giant hills to the west and east. The East Hill has a nature reserve on top of it, up over vast cliffs. There’s a private, rocky beach that you have to climb to reach. I would go there all the time, even in the middle of the night, freezing cold, I’d go there and sit on the rocks, and watch the sun come up and reveal all the different kinds of stone – flint and slate and sandstone, all these seams of stone gradually crumbling and falling down. The cliff face is different every day. And where those stones and the sea meet and correspond, I feel absolutely at home. That’s where everything that I know somehow begins.

God, I’m sorry.

“No, Don’t be. I’m always crying when I sing Dust And Water. That’s the idea – that when water meets dust, life begins. It’s about me being afraid of being stuck in the stone, that the stones are lifeless, but then – oh no, even the moon – the ice is coming, the water is coming. Nothing is stuck forever, everything is changing, always. Thank you for doing this with me. I’m right there with you.”

There’s such a sense of urgency to this record. Where does it come from?

“I wanted to make a marker in time, marking the incredible loss we’re all feeling as we deplete the world, the only world we know, the only world we will ever know. Heaven is not elsewhere; this is all we have. We’re at such a critical point with it, not only in the physical sense but also on a threshold of feeling. This has preoccupied me throughout my adult life, and it has reached critical mass in terms of my wanting to take it as a clear theme for this group of work, at this particular point in time. I set myself a task to be really clear about it, to write and talk unmediatedly, to set down a marker in time to show directly how I’m feeling, and that’s what Another World is.”

The version of ‘Another World’ used on both the album and EP is far from a bald statement. It conveys both presence and distance, a commitment to the world and a sense of its demise. In the recitation of what will be missed, there grows a vision of paradise, both present and lost. What is unequivocal is its grief; the vocal gradually submits to tears, wavering at the edge of sustainable tone. There’s a palpable sense of farewell that feels almost suicidal, and this new album spends much of its time talking to the dying and the dead.

“Yes, to an extent. For me what’s more interesting though is how those people and worlds are still alive, the way that all things are alive, the presence of all things. Everything is available, all the time.

“‘Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground’, which is a lyric that could easily be interpreted as being about death, is a song that at first I thought was about my mother. Later, I realised it’s a song written by my mother about her mother, through me. I believe we’ve got our local sense of self, the personal life of each of us, but I also imagine I carry all the lives that came before, the line of life that goes back to the beginning of time, that you can tap into or give voice to, or find inspiration from.”

An understanding of the self, and the enlarged set of representational possibilities it brings, are borne out visibly within the within the new symphony show. As Antony sings, small and graceful choreographies of feeling carried out through figurative gestures, powerful and characteristic, though rarely drawn from the singular source of personality.

“When I’m on stage, I’m always seeking the imagery that will carry me through, and oftentimes that’s not a particularly personal imagery. As I perform more it’s rare that I’ll be indulging personal details of my life a as a source. I use more abstract sources like a flock of flamingos flying through my body, or a ghost stepping into me from five generations ago, coursing through my arms.”

“It’s an idea that comes from studying butoh, the dance form that was developed by Kazuo Ohno(3), to whom this album is dedicated. Dance was more than a form to him, it was a spirit form. He would cast a circle of light around himself, and in that safety, some very precious part of his spirit would emerge. This part of him was feminine, childlike, filled with wonderment, as though everything was discovered for the first time. He made his masterwork as a dancer between the ages of 79 and 95, so obviously it wasn’t about acrobatic prowess. It was about this movement of essence from one state to another, that you witness when you watched him, that is tremendously moving. I studied with one of his students. Maureen Fleming, a wonderful dancer from New York. A lot of my process is very informed by his work; I’ve tried to apply the lessons he taught around finding movement to finding a voice.”

Is it important to you to equate that essence with the feminine?

“Well, I think the album definitely addresses themes of mother and father in terms of masculine and feminine forces. The song ‘Aeon’ is a song about the father, but it’s also about the brokenness of men in general. I believe men have to undergo a transformation in order for the way we’re living now to shift. They’re operating at a disadvantage, hormonally. It’s a different kettle of fish, testosterone [laughter].”

Speaking to trans men who’re taking hormones, I hear a lot about the effects of testosterone. They find it can be a really big change to have testosterone in their bodies.

“There’s no one who can teach us more about being a man or a woman than transgender people. They’ll tell you what it’s like to take those hormones. If you talk to trans men, that transformation they go through, you hear how radically it affects their person, their whole spiritual and psychic makeup, and their emotional and behavioural makeup too. I’m not saying that’s the entire directive force in a person’s manifestation, but it makes a huge difference. In terms of the way society’s set up, I feel that we’re coming to the end of this crazy male-dominant, patriarchal era of thousands of years. That has to shift if things are going to go forward. Does that sound crazy to you?”

No. It doesn’t sound crazy, but I don’t think it’s just men who are in need of change. I think gender is showing itself to be unstable, and I look to trans people as being pioneers of gender. These are people who embody unavoidable questions about where gender actually sits. Where is it really alive? Does it sit in other people’s perceptions? Does it sit in your physical body, which is changing all the time? Does it sit in chromosomal identity? Is it about the hormones in your body? Is it about who you have sex with? These issues are very present for trans people – and they’re issues that are actually there for all of us, but we don’t think about them because patriarchy sets out systems that we think with instead.

“Right, but for me, it’s been a process of unlearning gender. I feel I’ve been raised in a world that’s male-neutral, where god is male, or devoid of the feminine, if not male; that’s very clear in Catholicism. The power systems are male. Capitalism is based on values that are associated with very masculine archetypes, in our own system. The male patrols the perimeter, is territorial, is competing and hoarding resources for his own family. All those things come from a desire to survive and protect one’s own, but there is a different time now. There are seven billion of us, and all the other life forms are disappearing. Now what we need is the wisdom of the inner circle, of the feminine. Not that the feminine is always gentle; Johanna [Constantine](3), who’s my lifelong creative partner, portrays femininity as quite Kali-esque.

“But that’s the next phase – to discover how we are part of this world, as opposed to how to dominate it, and eke from it the things we need. It’s almost as though we need to have a paradigm shift to the feminine neutral, to the ways that we are collective, and connected to the world. No more building the fort and fighting off and killing intruders, killing food and hoarding fuel. There’s nowhere to go with that process anymore. We’re at the punch-line of that particular joke.

“Being born transgender, we’re very lucky, to be able to swim against the prevailing current of the culture. No matter how intimately something’s put on you, you have something inside you, that tells you are something else. And you know that, in a way that few people are gifted with. There’s something in you that tells you to fight that imposition. I will always have more in common with another tranny from Bangladesh than I do with my next-door neighbour.

“We are at a point now where that kind of consciousness is about to emerge. I think trans people’s experiences are very important to that; trans people have experienced being socially positioned as the opposite gender, we are acutely aware of how gender works in society, in the family structure and in the prevailing culture. I think there’s a really practical, useful purpose for trans people in society – to bridge the gap that is there, that painful gap that’s been imposed by societal ideas of gender.”

You’ve spoken about Catholicism being an imposition on you, but I don’t think there’s such a gap between the magical thinking of Catholicism – that sense of being perpetually surrounded by angels, demons, saints and martyrs, of the world being driven by a metaphysical struggle – and the kind of feminine-neutral animism you’re talking about. It might not be such a leap; it might be a natural next step.

“So much of Catholicism is lifted from Paganism. I remember the May Day parades as a child; the Maryan imagery was very pagan and obviously, in terms of the calendar, was lifted from the pagan celebrations of Beltane. The pagan panel of deities, a lot of them also were transferred over to martyrs and saints; there are so many parallels. The ritual remains – the name changes, but the soul is alive. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of magical thinking.”

FOOTNOTES

1. Charles Atlas: filmmaker and video artist Charles Atlas has worked in New York since the 70’s, documenting and elaborating the city’s dance and club scenes. He has had long and fruitful relationships with many figures in the dance and performance worlds, including dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, co-creator of the Fall’s I Am Kurious, Oranj, and renowned performer and designer Leigh Bowery.

Atlas has also collaborated with avant-garde musicians, including Diamanda Galas and Fennesz. In 2006 he and Antony Hegarty created and toured ‘Turning’, a set of collaborative portraits of New York women and trans women in live video and sound, including performances by Antony & the Johnsons.

2. Nico Muhly: a prolific young composer and arranger whose work is influenced as much by Reich and Glass as it is by Byrd and Tavener, Nico Muhly has worked with both Bjork and Antony & the Johnsons for several years, first providing live piano and string arrangements, and later collaborating with Hegarty on his own duet for viola and voice, ‘Keep in Touch’, from his 2006 collection, Speaks Volumes. Recently Muhly has contributed symphonic arrangements for the Antony & the Johnsons tour, and co-arranged several songs on The Crying Light. He is currently working on an opera, due to premiere at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2009.

3. Kazuo Ohno: Ohno’s iconic career as a dancer and performer began in 1949, at the age of 43, when he held his first recital. Rejecting Western forms that dominated dance in Japan at that time, Ohno at first sought an authentic means of expressing the great turmoil he had witnessed while serving in the Japanese army; one of his early recitals described watching jellyfish feed on the bodies of soldiers buried at sea. He worked with Tatsumi Hijikata in developing an entirely new form of dance, ankoku-butoh (the ‘dance of utter darkness’, now known as butoh), which, though formally very controlled, dealt in surreal grotesqueries. Despite this, the techniques of butoh are transformative in intent, allowing the expression of essential aspects of the spirit. At 102 years of age, and having performed well into his nineties, Ohno is still alive; his son, Yoshito, runs his dance studio.

4. Johanna Constantine: a founder member of the notorious Blacklips Performance Cult, a high-gothic avant-garde troupe of self-described ‘downtown artists, gender mutants, and drug addicted hybrids’, performance artist and dancer Johanna Constantine has been a collaborator of Antony Hegarty’s since their time studying at Santa Cruz. From there, the pair moved to New York to study in NYU’s prestigious Creative Theater program, and to immerse themselves in the city’s genderqueer performance scene. When Hegarty went on to form Antony and the Johnsons, Constantine became a Johnson. Constantine’s style is transgressive and intimate simultaneously; her performance often involves using blood and bodily fluids, either real or fake, as adornment.

Nadja

Originally published in Terrorizer magazine, April 2008

Nadja – Written On The Body

2007 was the year Nadja emerged head and shoulders above their peers in ambient doom metal, dragging behind them an extraordinary pedigree and a reputation as an incandescent live act. In advance of their Roadburn appearance, and with re-releases from their huge back-catalogue selling like chthonian fairy cakes, Nadja discuss their new record, ‘Desire In Uneasiness’, and their personal history, with Petra Davis.

I traced along the length of your forearm,

Can you hear me?

…at least (it seems)

your flesh, your body,

can hear me.

From Fingerspelling, by Aidan Baker

From text on the body to the body in the text, it seems Aidan Baker, one half of improvisational doom duo Nadja, is concerned with the boundaries of the physical, with what sound can do to the body. The textures contained (and barely) within Nadja’s characteristic euphonic blast – what Baker playfully refers to as their ‘wall-of-sound approach’, referencing Phil Spector’s riproaring chorales – are each discernible in themselves, singularly and in interaction, in their sensual swoop and sway, their proximity and distance; and finally, in their merging, in their unison. While Earth allow light to play over their sinister landscapes, while Cobalt call down their limitless thunder, Nadja allow the listener to witness distinct and graceful skeins of sound working to cocoon a mysterious entity, conspiring its inevitable transformation.

Nadja began in 2003 as a deliberately doomy and metal-influenced project. Baker is also a solo artist, having released more than 50 recordings under his own name on a variety of Canadian and international labels: something of a personal interest for him is dispersing his music among cultures very different from his own. While his eponymous releases tend towards ambience and experiment, with influences as widespread as Hendrix and Sun Ra, Nadja is a far denser proposition:

“It’s really an outlet for my interests in heavier and noisier sounds: it allows for a certain level of aggression that doesn’t always feel appropriate in my solo work,” Baker explains. “That may or may not be readily apparent in our sound. I know a lot of people consider Nadja’s music soothing and mellow, but an equal number find it dark and disturbing. For me there’s usually an element of aggression in there somewhere, even if only in terms of sonic obliteration. Part of our aesthetic is embracing those contradictions or ambiguities between heaviness and ambience, darkness and light.”

______________________________________________________________

at some point we become different something other than what we were simultaneously more & less than two at some point our languages change & the stroke of my tongue is nonsense against your skin

From Phage, by Aidan Baker

______________________________________________________________

As Baker points out, what sets Nadja apart from his solo projects is a shared aesthetic. Bassist Leah Buckareff joined in 2005 to allow the band to go on the road. But Baker and Buckareff share more than a tour bus: they have been in a romantic relationship since before Nadja began. Given the pair’s correspondence of ideas, the sensual interplay of instruments, voices and textures that characterises Nadja’s sound, and the onstage (and instudio) communion of their collaborative improvisation, it’s tempting to read Nadja as a relationship band – a Fleetwood Mac or an ABBA. Is that temptation deliberate?

“There is probably always a ‘me’ and ‘you’ in our music,” admits Baker. “Does that make us a relationship band? I don’t know! Perhaps it’s our Swans influence – Gira’s lyrics are so often about power relationships, master and servant, self and other, mind and body…”

So it’s about competing dualities, rather than a more personal relationship? The push and pull of an irresolvable difference?

“…well, I hope our ‘me’ and ‘you’ aren’t always locked in a love/hate relationship! Some of our songs do have positive ‘outcomes’, even if only through the element of transfiguration.”

“I suppose our being together does make this easier for both of us; we’re such compatible individuals,” Buckareff relents. “Aidan’s desire was to move Nadja away from strictly an ‘Aidan Baker’ project to an entity that includes us both. My involvement has grown in all aspects of what we do, from performing to songwriting to art direction.”

For a band whose imagistic palette is so rich and dense, it is perhaps not surprising that both Baker and Buckareff work in other artistic disciplines also: Baker is a prolific writer, having published several prose works, while Buckareff’s interest lies more in artisan forms. She recently gave a lecture at a Toronto arts festival on the maths of hyperbolic crochet – knitwear design based on Pythagorean geometry.

“How did you hear about that?” she laughs. “Math is what drew me to it, really. I promote all kinds of craft outside of Nadja, but actually the music we make is very much crafted – we improvise live around a solid structure.”

For Baker, too, there are thematic and structural correspondences between his writing and his music. Duality, animality, loaded sensuality, all are quite as alive in his written work as in the world Nadja constructs. The textual music of his prose seems close to the textural sonics at play in ‘Touched’ or ‘Corrasion’.

“Duality, the other, the self, perception – in the eyes of the self and that other, whoever it might be – are certainly recurring themes for my writing, and they are there in Nadja,” he agrees, “but I think my prose and my lyrics are fairly different; in terms of substance, at least, if not thematically. I’ve always considered vocals more like another instrument: they’re just another texture, rather than a focal point for a song. And my lyrics are usually pretty abstract. They’re meant to suggest an idea or an image or an emotion, rather than state it clearly. But because my prose doesn’t have music to lend it support, it has to be more specific – it has to embody a more concrete notion.”

But there have been specific projects which seem to correspond, not just thematically, but to be aware of one another, almost. ‘Bodycage’, Nadja’s 2005 release – focusing on the debilitative disease fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, which gradually encases the body with a bony exoskeleton – seems very close in its concerns to Wound Culture, Baker’s prose musings on psychosexuality and the body. A familiarly Cronenbergian mix of romance and horror stalks both works.

“I suppose it comes down to that fascination with “the other” – or fear of it,” Baker elaborates, “the idea of a mind/body divide, where the body is the other to the mind. With Wound Culture this manifests via an exploration of sexuality and how the physical affects the psychological (and vice versa). But in ‘Bodycage’ the mind/body divide is a more literal one; the mind imprisoned within the body by disease…the body imposing itself on the other…or the vagaries of natural selection, via a seemingly science-fictional disease, imposing itself on humankind.”

______________________________________________________________

I fall into you

& replicate

reproduce like a virus,

rearrange like a mutagen

- from Lysis, by Aidan Baker

______________________________________________________________

New release ‘Desire In Uneasiness’ is no less infectious – and no less brutal – than its more thematically dystopian precedents, but introduces a new sense of space and dimensionality to the band’s sound. At the core of many of the songs, the band’s characteristic heartbeat patterns remain, but around them, drones reverberate hugely across the stereo picture, and deliciously dubby basslines fade in and out of focus. It seems there has been a shift of perspective, from inner to outer space. Perhaps the shared internal world of Baker and Buckareff has been externalised somewhat by working with a live drummer for the first time. Jakob Thiesen joined Nadja to record ‘Desire In Uneasiness’ last year.

“We haven’t actually performed live with a drummer yet,” admits Baker. “The songs on ‘Desire In Uneasiness’ were less written than constructed – taken from jams that we did with Jakob. Some more so than others, but the majority of the tracks were chopped up from the original sessions and pieced together. Usually, we start out with a simple structure of riffs or chords, and then I build a drumtrack, so this was very different for us.”

Despite the manipulation of samples from various sessions, improvisation – moment-to-moment communication between separate, harmonious sonic textures – remains at the core of Nadja’s recording process.

“It is quite important to us, yeah,” Baker says. “Once we have the skeleton of a song down, we usually add layers and/or improvise soundscapes and textures over top. Often these parts will determine how a song or movement transitions into the next, so improvisation does play a huge part in the structure of an album as a whole. It’s not just for atmosphere, for texture.”

And how much of the live performance is similarly improvised?

“We usually have a couple of set songs which we play more or less the same way, but we do specifically leave some time in the set for some free-form, improvisational material,” Baker emphasises. “Live, things often sound very different anyway, songs can’t easily be transferred from a studio setting. “

“By improvising, we’re really allowing our audiences to witness the ‘making’ of a song,” adds Buckareff, “although I don’t know if anyone actually thinks about it that way.”

“We connect with the sound rather than performing or presenting it”, agrees Baker.

So far, so exceptional. Is there a significant or influential context that makes sense of the Brobdingnagian ambition and alterity of Nadja’s work? Do the band’s roots lie in metal, in drone, in noise, in avant garde?

“People are totally divided over that,” deadpans Baker, “they don’t know whether we’re metal or noise. Or shoegaze or experimental, or WHAT.”

What do you think you are?

“Whatever. I guess we’re something else,” he grins.

Boredoms – Super Roots 9

Originally published in Plan B magazine, April 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Boredoms - Super Roots 9 (Thrill Jockey)

The Super Roots series of EP’s, spanning 15 years of the band’s history, is usually accepted as being the best introduction to the various guises
Boredoms have taken. From the skronky exhibitionism of their early work,
through their mid-period acid rock, to the urgent, lush soundscapes they
currently inhabit, via multiple lineup-changes, Super Roots marks out the
various territories Boredoms have traversed. This ninth release in that
series, after a gap of 8 years, captures a performance on Christmas Eve
2004 which saw the band joined by a live 20-piece plainsong choir,
performing a single, 40-minute long piece. Of the EP’s so far, this is the
most exuberant and generous yet: a gorgeous offering both musically and as
an artefact, with a bound booklet of the score and suitably psychedelic
artwork by eYe himself, all wrapped under the tree and heralded by
reindeer. Hoofbeats clop. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?

It’s been argued that to read the Super Roots EP’s as a progression is to
denigrate the band’s previous incarnations and impose a false sense of
evolution, and it’s true that Boredoms’ early work stands up independently;
but there is such movement in their current sound, such a sense of
propulsion, that some notion of momentum cannot but suggest itself. This
recording, however, works carefully to subvert expectations of forward
motion, both structurally and sonically. It begins by ending: immediately
following the arrival of Dasher, Dancer and friends, the choir introduces
itself with a major arpeggio over two octaves, repeating and extending it
for long minutes until, urged ever faster by cymbal crashes, it becomes an
exaggerated concerto finale, almost a musical joke. It’s not until the
choir has thoroughly bidden a farewell that eYe swirls in sythesisers and
shouts a demented greeting in response, and Yoshimi, Yojiro and Muneomi
start the unstable tattoo, so far removed from the steady motorik of Super
Roots 7, that signals the beginning of the first movement proper. The
effect is of being folded back into the tonal heart of the chorale; of
moving backwards or towards a centre, rather than outward into space.
To match this false beginning, there’s also a false ending, 27 minutes into
the piece. With explosions, phased reverb and shouted encouragement from
eYe, as the choir moves ever further up the scale, the drums begin to pass
a pattern around their circle in a manner (familiar enough to those who
have seen Boredoms play) suggestive of imminent climax; the synths conspire with the choir, once more referencing the language of classical finale, and the piece shudders to a temporary halt. It fools the crowd, in any case, until their shouts are interrupted by the resumption of the drums’ central, deconstructed theme, this time in half-time, before the drums follow eYe’s delayed synth, his tone-generation toybox briefly abandoned, into the
full-on psychedelic freakout that dominates the last movement. The synth
works in and out of the tonal picture so dimensionally, above and below, in
front and behind, pitch-bending into the attack of the choir, sliding forward from behind its decay to lead it elsewhere or provoke it to outburst.
Super Roots 9, then, is far too careful and referential to fit easily into
the critical expectation of FAR OUT SPACE RACE. This is not the Sun Ship
that John Coltrane conjectured in 1965, although it borrows some
polyrhythms from Elvin Jones. Nor does it ape Reich or Gibson – it’s just
too abundant, although again, it owes is repetition and variation, and its
manipulation of classical motifs, to the minimalist tradition. Yet despite
showing its workings, this record, as with much of Boredoms’ recent output,
maintains a sense of ecstatic celebration. The plainsong here suggests a
pastoral rather than ecclesiastical worship, a celebration of all things,
everywhere at once; something close to the Universal Consciousness of Alice Coltrane, the celestial made personal, the perpetual affirmative beaten out of a thousand hearts.

Boredoms

Originally published in Terrorizer magazine, May 2008.

Boredoms: dance for the dead

Latterday psych-trance drum troupe Boredoms have been beating out the rhythm of the unknowable for 20 years, set against unbearable noise, incomparable riffs, and now pastoral-classical minimalism. Ringmaster Yamantaka eYe talks to Petra Davis about history, purity, and music as violent ceremony.

More than five centuries ago, Mokuren, disciple of the Buddha, was concerned about the fate of his dead mother. He had become convinced that she was suffering in the afterlife. Mokuren used the powers he had acquired in his studies of the Buddha’s wisdom to gaze into the afterlife and discover the fate of his mother. He found that she was, indeed, suffering greatly; she had fallen into a shadow realm, becoming a preta, or Hungry Ghost – a restless, vampiric spirit envious of the living, suffering insatiable hunger for human substance.

Horrified, Mokuren returned to the Buddha to ask for help in liberating his mother’s spirit. On the advice of the Buddha, Mokuren made offerings to the priests returning from summer retreat, and by means of his work and sacrifice, saw the spirit of his mother released. In his happiness, he attained realisation of the many sacrifices his mother had, in her turn, made for him, and the great love she had borne him all her life. Transported, he danced with joy, his feet beating an ancient rhythm on the ground, giving rise to the bon-odori dance.

The bon-odori is still danced today all over Japan, at the summer festival of Obon, the Japanese equivalent of Mexico’s Dia de los muertos, which sees families visit the shrines of their ancestors to tend the graves of those gone before, to celebrate their lives, loves and achievements, and to save them, through careful ritual, drumming and dance, from the fate of the shadow realm.

“Bon-odori dancing is what makes our shows so physical,” explains Yamantaka eYe, singer, programmer, choreographer and master of ceremonies for Boredoms, referring to the intense physical discipline of their shows. (For the uninitiated, Japan’s Boredoms, consisting of three drummers – Yoshimi P-we, Muneomi Senju and Yojiro Tatekawa – as well as eYe, can perform their tribal ecstatics for hours at a time, facing one another in a circle they liken to a spinning turntable of energy, drumming constantly.) “The way these drummers utilize the space in between sounds and their breathing techniques inspire me. Sometimes during a performance, I feel like I am in contact with my deep inner self. When I’m able to do that it is very liberating.”

The bon-odori carries connotations both of celebration and of mourning; it is a rhythmic sacrifice to the elders, an acknowledgement of their work and an amelioration of their suffering. The rhythms of the bon-odori, the insistent pounding of its drums, are designed to transport living and dead alike, to distract the pretas from their longing by sheer percussive bliss. Similarly, Boredoms seek to move the hungry ghosts of their audience to the altered states to which they themselves aspire.

Throughout their 20 year career, through numerous changes in line-up and a near-constant evolution in their sound, Boredoms have retained an unshakeable faith in the spiritually transformative properties of ancient forms of music, perhaps akin to the faith inherent in nationalist pagan or Odinist metal traditions, though more open to adaptation. “Music can’t be seen or touched, and it passes you by. But it has the power to leave an imprint and keep on reverberating in your mind,” says eYe. “When you’re communicating with an animal, it feels natural because you’re not in a surface level of consciousness or using verbal language. You’re communicating through your mind, which is the same power that is inherent in music.”

From such transcendental musing, one might suppose that the roots of Boredoms lie in meditative, gently synaesthetic traditions, but the reverse is the case. Bon-odori may be a celebratory form, but it is also fierce and deathly, its polyrhythmic attack considered a highly effective means of communicating with Japan’s most fearful ghosts. In more modern terms, too, Boredoms spring from the gritty theatre-of-cruelty experimentations of no wave. eYe’s former incarnation was in peerless thrash confrontationists Hanatarash (with Mitsuru Tabata, latterday axe-maniac of Zeni Geva), whose performances pushed sonic and physical boundaries to the extent of imperiling both the audience and themselves. One memorable show saw eYe hot-wiring a bulldozer which he then used to demolish the room; another involved chopping up a dead cat with a machete. Recordings were sporadic, sometimes consisting of a limited edition of one, packaged with a tooth pulled from eYe’s mouth. Shows were equally confrontational sonically. Preempting the Japanoise movement by several years, Hanatarash used machinery and power tools to produce almost unbearable frequencies, extending them far beyond the comfort zone of their audience. Boredoms sprang from that same wish to jolt the listener out of an imaginary safety.

“When you drop a physical object on the ground, it makes a sound. Confrontation is similar to that,” explains eYe, linking the shock tactics of Hanatarash to the more conscious challenges of Boredoms. “It’s something that I perceive as being percussive – like drumming. We’ve been screaming and banging on stuff for the past 20 years! And we still play tricks and games on the listener, when it comes to the way we record. We definitely explore those dimensions. “It’s a paradox, but extremity will eternally exist in all things that are universal. It’s possible to feel unbearably loud in perfect silence, or you might feel complete silence in noise,” he muses. “Such extremity might be a doorway in getting closer to a state of nothingness, a zero point.” The earliest Boredoms shows expanded on the idea of that nothingness, either pushing feedback so far that the signals flatlined at the boundaries of human sensory possibility, or else evoking the shock of silence (one show consisted of eYe gesturing with a hooked hand over a near-imperceptible drone).

These more conceptual live performances (eYe admits to being influenced by the media art concepts of Laurie Anderson) gradually settled into their noise/thrash sound, showcased on the early Anal Series recordings and their first studio album, Osorezan no Stooges Kyo. At the same time, the band began quietly releasing their more thoughtful, musically referential series of EP’s, the Super Roots releases. This series, now in its ninth incarnation, swiftly began to borrow from a wide array of traditions and genres, including deep house, techno, doom, and free jazz, as well as more traditional drumming styles such as oodaiko, wadaiko, and gagaku, all Japanese classical or shinto ritual forms.

“I see ‘Super Roots’ as a blank canvas, that’s the only thing those recordings have in common,” says eYe. “They’re a place where I can freely experiment.” In fact, while mid-period Boredoms albums began to move gradually away from the abrasion and fracture characteristic of Osorezan no Stooges Kyo or second album Soul Discharge, Super Roots was already preempting the band’s latest incarnation as a psychedelic-tribal drum troupe led by eYe’s tape-loop manipulations. “We’re still influenced by no wave,” insists eYe. “But it’s more the DNA-type stuff, that tribal percussiveness. Our sound has grown organically; we’ve never really concentrated on any one style or genre. I’m as influenced by Merzbow as I am by early hardcore techno. People can categorise us as they wish – noise, alternative, whatever.”

Boredoms’ latest release, Super Roots 9, sees Boredoms look to classical minimalism for inspiration. The EP’s single 45-minute track sees an expansion on the band’s celebratory psych, incorporating new structural games borrowed from Steve Reich and Jon Gibson, and eYe’s pitch-shifting tone generation gives way to a live choral arrangement throughout the piece, consolidating eYe’s role as composer and conductor of a very measured chaos. “I was messing around on a turntable with a Jon Gibson record, and changing the pitch to make different phrases,” explains eYe. “It started to sound like human voices to me, so I decided to have those sounds written out as a score, and actually have a choir sing the score for a performance.” The confidence and complexity of Super Roots 9 is the mark of the band’s increasing ambition. On 7th July 2007, in Brooklyn, Boredoms played their ‘77 Boadrum’ show, performing for 77 minutes with 74 other drummers (including, among a considerable cast, Andrew W.K., Taylor Richardson of Sunburned Hand of the Man, and Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale) arranged in a perfect spiral of 77 drum kits, playing a composition which was (did you guess?) a meditation on the number 7. The effect was mesmerising, a twisting harmony of rhythms and tones giving way to a stunning unison of beats. It is Boredoms’ most ambitious project to date, and one that eYe is keen to expand upon. Though critics had expected a ‘88 Boadrum’ for the 8th of August 2008, it seemes eYe has even grander designs: “Doing ‘77 Boadrum’ was one ambition of mine it was important to fulfil. Now I want to do a ‘777 Boadrum’ show. That would be incredible,” he enthuses. Presumably, decoding the relation between numbers and dates, that would place the performance on the 7th July 2077, making Boredoms almost 100 years old, and its members considerably older than that. Perhaps Boredoms have chanced upon a rhythmic alchemy, the secret of immortality, training their hearts to beat out an unending dance; or perhaps, finally, Boredoms will take their place once again at the centre of the spiral; this time they themselves will be the hungry ghosts of the bon-odori, immortally pining for the pounding drums which are their solace, and their salvation.

DeSalvo

Originally published in Plan B magazine, January 2009 – www.planbmag.com/shop

DeSalvo

DeSalvo’s take on proggy, technical metalcore is relentlessly full-sounding. Their debut, last year’s Mood Poisoner, tightly demonstrated their abilities: joyfully nasty riffs driven by vocals and drums that conspire like bullies. But with titles like ‘Cock Swastika’, and cover art portraying crying, ball-gagged nuns, DeSalvo are not drawing from standard metal iconography.

“Like a lot of gay men I’m inspired by gay reference points, like (filmmaker Rainer Werner) Fassbinder and (genius writer and quasi-fascist insurrectionary Yukio) Mishima,” elaborates DeSalvo’s ebulliently friendly frontman P6. “Literary and cinematic reference points. But honestly, apart from Sylvester and gay disco, I really have a problem with queer guys in rock, because a lot of the people who label themselves like that are some of the most derivative and least interesting and creative people. There are queer people in music who inspire me, are like Klaus Nomi, out queer people like Jayne County and Coil, trans people like Genesis P Orridge. But within rock music, we’ve always been pretty fucking lame, to be honest, from what I’ve experienced. My inspiration comes from stuff outside and outwith that scene.”

“As a band there are lots of post hardcore bands we all admire, like Helmet or Jesus Lizard, but also more technical and conceptual stuff like Mastodon or Meshuggah,” says Alan Stewart (guitar). “This record is an amalgam of the music we’ve made together since 2001 – ish, though there are a couple of much newer songs.”

“I’m not sure it’s possible to take the record on its own merits without understanding how we perform,” says P6. “We recorded the album live for a reason. In a sense, recorded music has become kind of dead and irrelevant, and hopefully the trade-off is that live music and experiences are gonna become much more profound, much more interesting and much more participative. Streaming sound files and downloading stuff is so fucking passive. Sure, like tape culture it’s freed up lots of music, and tape culture has been central to some radical movements, especially hardcore, but eventually it just becomes part of commerce.”

DeSalvo’s live shows are not only riveting – watching the band tackle their stop-start technical multi-riffs without pause for breath while P6 dons leather butcher’s apron and pig snout to lapdance the moshpit is not your average metal show – but also radical in intent. P6’s take on crowd interaction completely changes the standard power dynamic of metal, making the norm visible by disputing it; suddenly there is palpable tension, social mechanics grinding. Some literally run away. “When we play metal shows – like when we supported Converge – it can be odd,” agrees Alan. “You’re up against the black t-shirt brigades, and they’re quite narrowminded. They’re intimidated by the fact that our singer is gay. They like the music, it’s harsh enough for them, they start moshing or whatever, then [P6] starts doing his thing and they don’t know what to do with themselves. You know, in metal you’ve usually got these guys onstage, screaming and yelling confrontational stuff, but always from the supposition that men in the audience can identify with them. You know, they can raise their fists or give the devil sign or whatever to show that they are on the side of the confronter. That doesn’t actually challenge them at all. This is different. They are being confronted in a way they can’t avoid.”

“Yeah, I’m the Uncle Monty of metal,” jokes P6. “It’s quite a standard surrealist technique, to turn power structures on their heads. But it works. I love the male reaction, that discomfort and shame. Usually women are very comfortable and amused and completely get it. Men tend to get very uncomfortable and leave, or sometimes they try to take the piss. A boy started shouting at me, telling me how sexy I was, and I really didn’t believe a 43 year old obese man was his type. Or when you saw us play at Stereo, that was the night I got a beer thrown in my face. It obviously pushes buttons.

“I think seeing guys losing a bit of power at gigs is something quite exciting, because I don’t think men understand how fucking privileged they are in those spaces, how they control those spaces in lots of ways. And women are, either through the music, or the way it’s set up, or through force of numbers, expected to be submissive in those spaces. That’s part of what I’m playing with. Hopefully it gives men permission to be different. Put on a ski mask and jump around, be a gimp for a night – don’t just stand around with your arms folded, just asserting that you own the space, that’s really boring.”

Mood Poisoner is out now on Rock Action.

Bjork

Originally publshed in Plan B magazine, May 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Bjork, Hammersmith Apollo, 14.04.08

The beast is back; her face is buried in a constellation of rainbow suns, her footprints are luminous. Fire streams out across the evening’s purple, then disappears, leaving thick marshmallow traces. A twilit toadsong fills everything, and I begin to change. Here’s what happened first, though, and it happened years ago: she sprang forward on the teeth of a roar, fastened her sticky pads on my throat, wrestled me down with strong back legs and kissed me, gripping my surprised tongue with hers and pulling, pulling, stretching out, until what emerged from my throat was a string of small flags, decorated with the heraldry of my individual vertebrae, shining like new scales, scented with iron and oak.

Tonight, there are songs for a shield and a voice for a sword. There are cayman and marlin and martlet, drums and brass and kora, helmets and pennants and spears for spines. There are patterns small and large, within and between songs, around and over arrangements. ‘Earth Intruders’ sets out to beguile; I could swear she is singing in runes, stalking the stage like an oracle, each word flung down separately to spell out a future – turmoil, carnage, she tears off her mask – ill-omened by the rumble of Corsano’s drums and Damian Taylor’s beats. The stage darkens to an orange glow for ‘The Dull Flame Of Desire’, and she duels rather than duets with Antony Hegarty, bearing down on his voice, the lulling creak of it, with a merciless electric crackle in her throat. A vampish ‘Hunter’ climaxes with furious streams of technicolour energy blasting thirty feet across the stage from her hands.

There is no gentleness here, no ‘Pneumonia’, no ‘All Is Full Of love’; ‘Hyperballad’ and ‘Joga’ are hectic, laser-tongues flicking over the debris; even ‘Unravel’ has mutated in this swamp-light, its refrain turned from affectionate repetition to chilly insistence, its verses from plaint to blame. ‘Byrin Min’ is pared down like bones, Jonas Sen picking at a toothsome harpsichord part. Only the considered, loving ambition of ‘Desired Constellation’ and the untrammelled goodwill of ‘Hope’, better expressed by Toumani Diabate’s glorious kora than by the vocal’s eternal whirlwind, provide any break in the happy hostilities. But not for long.

She has marshalled her hoplites; shaking their manes and stamping, dancing in between one another with their long brass noses, they blare out in terrible unison. ‘Excuse me’, she hisses, ‘but I just have to… explode,’ and she gathers the energy rippling along her arms and flings it, fists clenched, in our faces, over and over. It feels like skin peeling back. Lasers peck out the eyes of those in the balconies; my lips flatten against my teeth, my teeth revert to bone, my bones petrify, and she screams in absolute triumph, sinking back into the darkness, flanked by her macabre menagerie. My anatomy, my own terrain, my interior flag, is in rebellion; my ideas of me submit to an inexorable will. For some time, everything is roaring and stamping in blackness, until her return.

Marnie Stern & Zach Hill

Originally published in Plan B magazine, October 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Marnie Stern – This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That (Kill Rock Stars)

Zach Hill – Astrological Straits (Ipecac)

Marnie Stern shares with Joanna Newsom and Bjork that happy delicacy of both feature and phrase that tempts critics to the language of intuition and ingenuity: if spiders were cheerleaders, if guitars had hearts, etcetera. But Stern, like her equally overpixified counterparts, is a virtuoso, not an ingénue: she seems more invested in the concrete geometry of technique than the metonymic logic of poetry. As she described her process shyly over and over, during the press storm on In Advance Of The Broken Arm, she emphasised the importance of both constant practice and influence – Eddie Van Halen, Carrie Brownstein, Spencer Seim, Ian Williams, and three hours’ playing a day, taken like medicine, like clockwork.

This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That is equally virtuosic. Stern draws on a language of exploration rather than experience; “I’m like a raging animation,” she howls on ‘Steely’. “I wonder what it’s like to be one?” ‘The Crippled Jazzer’ finds her paralysed outside of interaction by a surfeit of possibilities: “stuck in composing, finding an angle: hellbent on choosing”, she intones. Yet the album’s emotional dimension is notably richer than that of its predecessor, and on this record, unlike the last, Stern is willing to make choices without playfully undermining them. “Here’s what I want, here’s what I want: someone to come at me. Someone to design. Pull me from the dream world, pull me from the dream world”, she pleads on ‘Simon Says’. It’s a torch song for humans from the woman who sings on ‘Prime’, the album’s opening track, “all I can see is dolphins; I feel close to them and no one else.” That lyric, which on the first album would have been a celebration, on This Is It more closely resembles a panic attack.

This time around, Stern is wearing her goofy soft rock influences, always discernible in live performance – possibly thanks to Robbie Moncrief, her touring guitarist, whose noodly brilliance sets off the technicolour in her tapping – on her album sleeve. ‘Vault’ sounds like nothing so much as Pat Benatar; ‘Shea Stadium’ is deconstructed Cheap Trick. In response, Zach Hill’s drums are characterised here by more straightforward patterns: where on In Advance they often countered Stern’s tapping, pointing out alternate readings and rhythmic possibilities, here they are in collusion with the guitar lines, reinforcing rather than questioning. The result is extraordinary: an elevation of technique to its own certainties and stories. The closest parallel is possibly Joanna Newsom’s work with Van Dyke Parks on Ys; but where Newsom, ever the philologist, allows syllabic quantities to guide the flow of both narrative and arrangement , it’s the geometry of Stern’s idiosyncratic sonics that rules here. And, on this record at least, Hill’s work is intrinsic to the process, most clearly on ‘Clone Cycle’, which sees Stern solemnly describing her own take on the Pythagorean qualities of numbers, pushed into slant rhyme by the scansion of Hill’s patterns.

Since they first collaborated on Mick Barr’s Shred Earthship project in 2006, Stern and Hill have found an uncanny shared understanding. Each self-taught as an adult, they are the newest additions to experimental rock’s growing roster of bandleaders – directors and performers whose collaborations deeply explore their own personal preoccupations, and a form more closely associated with jazz than with rock, Beefheart and Zappa notwithstanding. But of late, Mick Barr, Mike Patton, Thurston Moore, Brians both Gibson and Chippendale, and Yamataka Eye have followed this path while maintaining their involvement with more egalitarian forms. Hill too maintains both Hella and Holy Smokes, while this year sees his first solo record, Astrological Straits, which allows him free rein as a multi-instrumentalist and composer.

The bluster and splatter of Hill in full flow, combining influences as disparate as punk and big-band in syncretic rhythmic licks, will be familiar to those who have encountered his work with Holy Smokes, particularly their 2004 project, the book and soundtrack Masculine Drugs/ Destroying Yourself Is Too Accessible: Old Children’s Ramblings for the New and Improved Child and Hypocritically Dexterous Hippy. For Astrological Straits, however, Hill is joined by old cohorts Robbie Moncrief and John-Reed Thompson from Stern’s band, and Chino Moreno, with whom he works in fantastical experimentalists Team Sleep. New additions to the collaborative roster come from Les Claypool of Primus and both Dean Spunt and Randy Randall of No Age. But It’s the evolution of Hill’s relationship with Stern that gives rise to the sweetest fruit of this new offering. The 33-minute long track, ‘Necromancer’, which constitutes the entire second part of the album, is a redrawing of the pair’s relationship on This Is It, and an eloquent response to ‘Clone Cycle’. ‘Necromancer’ finds Stern narrating an improvised psych freakout for piano and percussion (Marco Benevento, on piano, admirably keeping up). The track is one continuous take, a sinuous exposition of the possibilities of collaboration, and the grace there is in relationship.

Diamanda Galas – Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

First published in Plan B magazine, March 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Diamanda Galas – Guilty, Guilty, Guilty (Mute, 2008)

Now, for a time, you are mine

Every year, on Valentines Day, Diamanda Galas plays a massacre in New York. Stakes out the hearts of the assembled, snakes tales of deathbound love into ready ears. It’s a powerful prohibition. This collection is largely taken from the 2006 show at the Knitting Factory. It’s not only that rare moth, a successful live document; it is also a beautifully balanced and persuasive argument on our inevitable mortality, and equally, of its powerlessness against the love that survives it.

This it has in common with Galas’ entire recorded output. This woman is notorious for her complexity and range. Her ability to marry – no, not to marry, to forge – styles and traditions that only make sense together as a gigantic labour of love and rage; her subjects, isolation, dispossession, the cry of last resort at the moment before, or even after, death; contrary to expectation, these sit squarely behind this collection of largely jazz and blues-based covers, including such standards as ‘Autumn leaves’, ‘O death’ and ‘Heaven have mercy’. Though these choices recall her work on 1992’s The Singer, which gathered gospel and blues under her prodigious crow’s wing, she instills them with every bit of the same passion and protest that inhabit her less obliquely political work, such as Defixiones -Will And Testament (her last, 2004 project, describing the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides at the hands of the Turks). These love songs, all but one, have in common a desperation, seeking the possibility of beauty and dignity at crisis point. The strength of her delivery alone is apotropaic – not merely an expression of extreme emotion, but a warning, a hint of the power of the powerless, the secret of the curse in the final breath. Perhaps her interest turns on that moment of extremity, rather than its history, the betrayal and devastation that precede it.

So much more than my heart can hold

But it’s the one song that does not explore that crisis point that Galas has chosen to centre this collection. ‘Interlude (Time)’, with pride of place at track 4 of 7, abandons the certainty and finality of the rest of the songs to pour a creamy, reverberant vibrato over lines describing the mystery of love’s origin. I’ve listened to this song maybe 40 or 50 times over the last few days, attempting to analyse its power, and my conscious mind slides right off it every time, lulled by its ghostly comfort, its Debussyan otherworldliness. Galas changes the lyric slightly from the 1968 rendition, made famous by tragic blue-eyed soul star Timi Yuro; rather than asking ‘who knows if it’s real, or just something we’re all dreaming of?’, Galas quarantines the character with her imagined lover, addressing the question only to him. Love, this version contends, has the power to destroy time, remake the world, defy the grave, yet it deranges, leaves lovers somehow alone, isolating us in our uncertainty.

Could be the beginning of love

Galas enjoys mastery of not one, but two, monumental instruments, too often discussed separately. Armed with an astonishing voice, the woman also plays the piano like the byzantine monster it is. Her background as a concert pianist – a teenage concert pianist, her first solo outing with the San Diego Symphony aged 14, if that gives you any idea – was followed by a lengthy stint in the improvisational jazz scene of 70’s LA, playing with Bobby Bradford and Roberto Miranda (which is rather like saying you came up as a librarian in Alexandria). And it’s not even her primary instrument. Perhaps a more human touchstone, and the one most return to in reference to Galas’ blues-based work, is that she accompanied her father’s gospel band on piano as a child.

Her blues style is percussive and emotive, almost essential. She allows the piano to preempt her swift changes of mood, leaving the songs’ sometimes complex narratives to chord changes to convey, and reacting with vocal theatrics as tender as they are extreme. She melds jazz and blues, playing ‘8 Men And 4 Women’ as a gnarly amalgam of both, swapping blues bass hand with lightning strikes of high-register improvised right-hand, and adding the honkytonk of silent film – a technique to which she returns often on this record – before her voice shifts from 12-bar blues to the indescribable, multitonal ululation for which she is most famous. The album closes with an outstanding performance of Edith Piaf’s ‘Heaven Have Mercy’, which paints lost love as slavery, as much by its juxtaposition to the preceding track, Ralph Stanley’s ‘O Death’, as by the atonal, guttural hopelessness of its misericordian appeal. ‘Must I stay here in hell? Lord above, let me die’, begs Galas, before returning for the last time to the unbearable refrain which is the album’s final word.

Diamanda Galas

Originally published in Plan B magazine in May 2008 – www.planbmag.com/shop

Once, in a panelled room, with all the reassurance of high academe outside the window, I sat earnestly debating my paper on the threat of the feminine in Classical art history with my supervisor, a grizzled and brilliant man who had made my introduction to the work of the post-Lacanian(1) French feminists(2) that so informed my thesis. On the table between us was my frontispiece – the  face of a woman, teeth bared, her eyes swimming rage through the blood that covered her, her fist closed around the knife she held before her, beaming out her inescapable intention in a perfect congruence of gesture and bone. He looked at her for a moment, then his eyes dropped, and he shifted uncomfortably.

“Let’s just put her away for a bit,” he said.

In a hotel bar in Chelsea, a sudden March snowshower calmly tapping the window, gentlewoman polymath Diamanda Galas pulls faces for me. She draws her upper lip down towards her chin, tautens her eyelids, and extends her jaw, her face suddenly an archetypal mask of tragedy and menace. No blood, no weapon, is necessary. My neck prickles in instinctual response.

“It’s that smile, right?” she says, and then, seeing my shocked face, booms out a joyful cackle. “The Greek face. And the Middle Eastern face, and all through the Meditteranean, you see it in their art and in their people still. We all have this… brutal smile. Have you ever seen Anna Magnani(3), in Pasolini(4)’s Mamma Roma(5)? Magnani’s character in that film uses her laugh to convey pain – it’s set after the second world war, and she plays a whore. In one scene she is walking the streets and she throws back her head and laughs – it’s a loud laugh, but it’s also the sound of absolute tragedy.”

In Mamma Roma, Pasolini also breaks with cinematic convention by allowing Magnani’s character to look directly into the camera, her look a gauntlet. Like the image of Galas referred to above – an image from Plague Mass, her heartrending 1991 album excoriorating the Catholic church for its complicity in the AIDS crisis – Magnani’s unwavering gaze both reflects and promises violence. The images that Galas uses, similarly, echo the violent subject matter of much of her work, presage the extremity of her sound, and present her essence – her face, her body, her will – as terror.

“I think it’s a form of katara(6)’, she says. “I look back over the magazine covers that I’ve done and realise they were all really aggressive! The innocent kind of sexuality that’s expected of women now is so far from sexual displays in other art forms -  think of the can-can; the women looked tough, they were tough. This disingenuous sexuality is very recent and very culturally specific, too. Melina Mercouri(7), who was worshipped in Greece, would never be considered beautiful in America. We who are outside are either fetishised, exotic, or invisible. And that’s reflected in the way that both white and black traditions sample our music.”

It’s an uncomfortable thought; my face reddens. I find myself shifting on the sofa as guiltily as my supervisor once did. I’ve grown accustomed to thinking of sampling as a form of protest against the historic plunder of black culture by pop culture, yet increasingly, hip-hop musicians are finding other cultures to borrow from. ‘World music’ turns distinct cultures and traditions into mulch.

“Exactly. So anyone can steal from it. Jay-z  takes Greek and Tunisian music, and uses it for Beyonce, as rhythm tracks or backing vocals. We have some of the greatest singers in the world and they are used as background for Beyonce? That’s American imperialism – I don’t care if it’s a black artist doing it.”

Galas has a point: Yemenite song ‘Im nin’alu(8)’, for example, has been sampled over and over in hip-hop, ever since Coldcut used it for the remix of ‘Paid In Full’, but it’s Madonna’s ‘Isaac’ that is perhaps most crass. Particularly offensive was the Confessions tour, which accompanied the song with a woman dressed as a sort of disco dervish, caged, in front of images of the Judean desert.

“Oh, Madonna’s shameless. She’ll just steal. There’s a piece in Dazed and Confused – it was ‘The Madonna Issue’, you know, and then there’s this little subheader about me, ‘Devil Woman’ – I’m not kidding. Devil woman(9)! My record company thought it was so perfect that an article about someone genuinely transgressive should appear with Madonna – pseudo-transgressor and cultural rapist. Have you seen her schtick in ‘Frozen’? It’s Greek symbolism! This stuff has meaning!”

The indignation in Galas’ tone is infectious, her frown a sinister thunder. Impassioned defence of cultures under attack, and particularly of the artistic traditions of Greece and the middle east, is a thematic constant in Galas’ 25-year body of work, most overtly in Defixiones: Will And Testament, her 2003 album concerning the Greek, Assyrian and Armenian genocides at the hands of the Turks. While Defixiones makes Galas the moiroloyistra(10) of the victims themselves, her next project, Nekropolis, will consider the artistic consequences of genocide – the lost and stolen artistic traditions of subjugated cultures.

“Nekropolis treats Istanbul(11) as a city of the dead,” she says flatly. “I have gathered Urdu artists, Arabic artists, traditions that were exiled, or eliminated. I want to do a lot of the work in Istanbul itself – and also in Patmos, which is where St John, who himself was an exile, wrote Revelations, his warning to the Eastern Orthodox churches that the end of their tradition was nigh.”

For Galas, the preservation of endangered cultures is a political act, in art or in life. At the behest of genocide scholar Desmond Fernandes, she contributed a speech on the ethnic cleansing of art to the memorial of Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink(12) that took place at the Houses of Parliament earlier this year. ‘Robbery is not just the robbery of money or human flesh,’ she wrote. ‘It involves the soul murder of cultures which will soon die if it they have no more songs to sing.’

Galas’ own cultural and artistic background is diverse. Born in San Diego, the daughter of a Spartan(13) mother and an Anatolian(14) father, she was immersed in Greek music at home. A musical prodigy, she was classically trained in both piano and voice, while her father directed a gospel band. As a child, she would sit on the stairs, listening to the choir’s ecstatic polyphony, then, when rehearsal was over, she’d accompany herself singing the same songs by ear. Her face radiates memory.

The mix of classical and blues traditions would later lead Galas to its logical conclusion: jazz. She takes me through a lightning tour of the traditions she perceives in jazz, including the West African tradition, Somalian and Ethiopian music, and Eastern European classical music. As she reels off (and demonstrates, in a throaty tone that blessedly subjugates the bar’s infernal jazz-lite) the various scales, I begin to see how she packs a thousand years of ethnomusicological history into her knockout punch of a voice. Though best known for her multitonal work, a split shriek of protest and despair, she is also a spinto soprano(15) of great texture, drama and dynamism, with a lower extension comparable to Leontyne Price(16) for attack and depth. In practice, this means she’s capable of pinning you like a butterfly and mauling you like a bear, all in one breath.

At her performance earlier in March, I was transfixed by her rendition of Ornette Coleman’s ‘All My Life’, which saw her wrestle a single phrase from impossibly high overhead and pursue it down into a dark-blue, crackling growl, before returning to a sustained, heady tone that suffused the air around me. “I’ve waited all my life for you, and now you’re here,” she sang. “It seems so long ago. Joy that I never knew never will exist for me and you.” As she travels through her extraordinary tonal palette, so the song travels through perspectives. Such accomplishment is moving to witness, even were it not redolent with association.

“In ‘All My Life’,  there’s one interval that’s D to an F# in the octave above – that’s a Mozart interval, an aria, like something from Seraglio(17). Ornette is very precise. I go from the head voice to the chest voice, and back again. I’m trained in bel canto(18) – that’s the basis of my freedom vocally, the control of the breath throughout the vocal range, regardless of the constant changes of timbre. I’m usually compared to Maria Callas(19), but I think actually Leontyne Price is closer. She has a very warm, rich tone and I love her singing. There are a couple more sopranos that I really like – Anna Netrebka, she’s a young Russian soprano, she’s wonderful, and Renee Fleming (20), I really enjoy her work. Her recording of Strauss’ Vier letzte Lieder(21) is terrific. She’s becoming a jazz singer now, interestingly enough.”

Galas’ association with (read: dominion over) the avant-garde scene has meant she has become a touchstone for independent artists too. PJ Harvey spoke in 1993 of her admiration for Galas, attracting comparison for her own theatrics on 1995’s To Bring You My Love. Long after Harvey has abandoned her efforts at coloratura, Galas’ eyes still narrow at the impudence of the compliment.

“There were friends of mine, drag queens, calling me saying ‘there’s somebody who’s dressing like you, wearing your hair, studying your vocals, wearing your makeup.’ At first I said ‘I don’t want to know, I’m working,” Galas bites off peremptorily. “But then I went to one of her concerts. And I’m telling you, if you’re gonna do me in drag? You’d better be taller than me. And tougher than me. And you’d better be a man,” she growls.

Galas is dearly beloved of drag queens. Her good friend, Kentucky drag doyenne Bradley Pickleheimer, introduced her to two of the most stunning songs on her current live album, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, which she’s presently taking on tour.

“I heard the gigantic orchestral introduction to ‘Heaven Have Mercy’ and yelled ‘what the fuck is that?’  – it’s a very subtle song, as well as very emotionally extreme. I heard her voice – I was in tears. And then he played me ‘Interlude (Time)’ -  that’s like a music box, with a little ballerina in it. And it’s made of mirrors; it only sees itself. It’s very demanding to sing; it’s actually the most difficult song on the album.”

Galas picks up her coffee, but doesn’t taste it. She seems to be watching her reflection.

“Autumn leaves has my parents in mind,” she says quietly. “I had had to have my mother admitted to hospital. My father and I went to visit her the next day, and as he was leaving he was hit by a car. 91 years old. And a chaplain came up to tell my mother that my father was in the trauma ward. It was horrifying. Brutal. But when they came home again, I’d sit and play songs for them that they loved. It was very emotional for me. I’d sit and play standards, just try and play without stopping; it made them happy. And ‘Autumn leaves’ was one I played over and over.”

Such associations make for an emotionally taxing live show, but Galas’ improvisational technique means the songs grow as she plays them, and her performances are as technically complex as they are inventive.

“Each time I perform, it’s necessary to do a very long sound check to see how each song plays in the room, how it sounds in the acoustic chamber of each hall. So in fact I have probably sung for at least three hours before even doing the show. All the settings for each song must be modified from one room to the next – Carnegie Hall is vastly different to the natural reverb and delay you’d find in St John The Divine, for example.”

Galas always works in quadrophonic sound, whether in an indoor or outdoor venue, using ring modulation, delay, distortion, and feedback, which she controls with her own set of pedals. The result is an often overwhelming proliferation of tones, as individual mic signals batter violently against one another. She’s widely recognised as a pioneer of mic technique and sound engineering; Bjork admitted to having studied Galas’ kamikaze sonics for her own live performances. In a recent interview, Jarboe, late of Swans, contrasted the aggression of Galas’ performance ethic with her own willingness to risk everything, to die, if necessary, for those present.

“What? She’s ready to die for whoever’s in the audience?” hoots Galas, thoroughly amused at the thought. “Well, I’m ready to kill whoever’s in the audience! Like in Female Trouble: ‘who wants to die for art?’ – someone stands up, and Divine shoots them.” Her great green eyes blacken again with glee.

FOOTNOTES

1) Jacques Lacan – French psychoanalyst, highly influential within the post-structuralist movement.

2) Post-Lacanian French feminists: Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva. Interdisciplinary post-structuralist feminist scholars broadly concerned with the construction of female identity and locating feminine forms of expression – ‘L’ecriture feminine’.

3) Anna Magnani – nightclub singer and Oscar-winning actress in the expository tradition, of Italian and middle-eastern origin. Best known for her role in Daniel Mann’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo.

4) Pier Paulo Pasolini – Italian filmmaker, philosopher, playwright, novelist and poet, whose poem, ‘Supplica a mia madre’ (‘Prayer to my mother’), Galas set to music for her 1998 album Malediction And Prayer, along with works by Charles Baudelaire and Salvadorean poet Miguel Huezo Mixco.

5) Mamma Roma – 1962 film by Pasolini, focusing on postwar Rome.

5) Katara – curse. In both the ancient and the modern Greek traditions, a katara is a powerful tool used to exert one’s will on another. Galas’s 2003 work, Defixiones, refers to the curses left on the graves of the dead of the Greek, Assyrian and Armenian genocides, to forewarn those who might desecrate the graves of their incipient fate.

6) Melina Mercouri – singer, actress and activist, later Minister for Culture in Greece. “She  was a very masculine woman, very powerful”, says Galas. Both of us found it difficult to imagine a US equivalent.

7) Im nin’alu – sacred 17th Yemenite poem, written by Rabbi Shalom Shabazi. Recorded most famously by Yemenite singer Ofra Haza in 1988, whose version was a hit in both the UK and US. The song was subsequently sampled by Coldcut for Eric B and Rakim, Snoop Dogg, and Nas (in his battle with Jay-Z, ‘H to the Homo’). The poem itself elevates spritual riches over earthly wealth: ‘Im nin’alu daltei n’divim, daltei marom lo nin’alu’ (‘even though the gates of the rich may be closed, the gates of heaven will never be closed’).

8 ) Stop press: my boyfriend returns from a visit to the local shop with the May issue of Q magazine, another of its upsettingly condescending ‘women in music’ specials. “You’re gonna love this,” he grins . Past the enormofeatures on Madonna, Debbie Harry, Amy McDonald and Adele, in a half-pager named ‘Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown: 5 female artists who just went too far’, he points out a paragraph on Diamanda Galas. Her crimes, apparently, include having a 5-octave range, singing depressing songs and tackling the subject of AIDS.

9) Moiroloyistra – ancient tradition of professional women mourners whose role was a feminine parallel to that of the priest. Considered, therefore, heretical by the Greek Orthodox church. Performed moiroloyia – funeral laments, often harrowing, at the graveside of the deceased. “Needless to say, the oracle at Delphi was female”, says Galas, explaining the ancient Greek role of the feminine as the guardian of the sacred. “Moiroloyia is a speaking directly to the dead rather than through the priest. The moiroloyistras are not interested in a three-way medium to speak to the dead – especially not a man. Men are not present for the caregiving or the death rituals.”

11) Istanbul – formerly Constantinople, more formerly Byzantium, the current capital of Turkey. At varying points in its history it has been the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman empires, and is as such second only (and perhaps) to Jerusalem in terms of military history and cultural significance. Galas refers to it as the city of the dead because of its history of genocide. “So many artists were exiled or executed,” says Galas. “There are texts left behind that are about the impending firing squads.”

12) Hrant Dink – Armenian editor of the newspaper Agos in Turkey, assassinated in 2007 by a teenage Turkish nationalist. Dink had long been critical of Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, had been prosecuted repeatedly for ‘denigrating Turkishness’, and was subject to constant threats from nationalists. His death has become a focus for many campaigners against the Turkish government’s genocide denial. Galas’ speech in its entirety can be found here.

13) Sparta – area of southern Greece, distinct culturally from the Athenian tradition which has dominated European understanding of Greek culture since the Renaissance.

14) Anatolia – Peninsular region between the Black and Meditteranean seas. Strategic point of contact between Asia and Europe, Anatolia has an idiosyncratically diverse cultural tradition. “People don’t understand the term ‘Anatolian’, so they just write ‘Armenian’ and think that’ll do”, says Galas. “it means ‘the sun rising in the East’ – it’s the oriental Greek tradition, very different from the mainland.”

15) Spinto soprano – a lyric soprano with both a darker texture than the traditional lyric tonality, and a more cutting attack (or scrillo) than that of a dramatic soprano.

16) Leontyne Price – black American spinto soprano best known for her interpretation of Verdi’s Aida.

17) The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782, an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

18) Bel canto – late 17th-century vocal technique allowing for great flexibility and agility. “The core of my technique is bel canto,” says Galas. “I can sing for hours at a time and never ever damage my voice.”

19) Maria Callas – celebrated Greek-American dramatic soprano, also extremely accomplished in bel canto.

20) Renee Fleming – American lyric soprano lauded for her interpretations of the lieder of Schubert and Strauss.

21) Vier letzte Lieder (four last songs) – the final work of Richard Strauss, composed in 1948 for soprano and orchestra, in the last years of Strauss’ life. He died before the work was ever performed.