by Rob Gallagher
Scenic Minehead and dry ice in the Starlite Lounge
By sheer coincidence I happened to be beside the seaside this weekend, having gone to All Tomorrows Parties to alternately sit in a chalet watching snooker and stand in a bar watching sludgy improv and conceptual metal. Chatting with music geeks on the last weekend but two of the decade it seemed appropriate to try and work out what, if anything, has characterised the 00s culturally. Here’s one thing we maybe felt secure ill-foundedly generalising about: that there’s a lot of C21st culture that bears witness to and/or solicits an exorbitant and sustained attention to little details, stuff about scaling up or recursively looping fragments.
This trend seems connected to a general backwards-looking attitude, the sort of preoccupation with canons and lists that was manifested at ATP in the shape of a bunch of re-formed bands and soundalike bands, plus stuff like the Yeahs Yeahs performing their ‘classic’ debut LP (all of, what, six years old now?) in its entirety. But it felt like there was something new in the relation to the old that this stuff – which isolates, focuses really intently on and radically stretches out certain aspects of a genre or piece – establishes.
Exhbit A would be Sunn O))), who did two sets over the weekend. Essentially they sound like the bass part from an old metal record played at about 3rpm, but incredibly loud. Onstage they wear monks’ habits and take full advantage of the fact that because they’re only hitting one string every 15 seconds they can do so really theatrically. There’s lots of dry ice too. Seeing them again reminded me of a Laura U. Marks essay about artist filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, a piece in which he runs two copies of a 90 second French porno from the 1920s through an assemblage of two projectors fitted with a propeller in such a way that the movie lasts 2 hours and frames are overlaid so as to create a flickering illusion of three dimensionality.
Jacobs sees his piece as having ‘transmuted’ the base material of the stag flick ‘into something glorious,’ bringing it ‘back to life’. It gives the audience the chance to really see the original, to lavish attention on its every nuance. That Jacobs’ piece is from the 1980s might discredit my claim that this is a very 00s way of relating to media, but I’d argue its only now technology’s made it easy for everyone to watch and/or make culture this way. Sunn zoom into, stretch out and arrest metal (like porn, a marginal, male, slightly shameful corner of pop culture) so as to really delve into its textures and effects. And like Jacob’s ‘performances’ of XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, which see him grapple physically with his complex projection equipment, Sunn arguably work best live, where their theatricality, the quality and volume of the sound (your ribs oscillate, your sleeves flap) and the disjunction between their minimal physical input and the magnitude of the sonic output can be appreciated.
Mermaid statuette from Minehead seafront souvenir shop, rubbish mermaid painting by one of Dirty Three, ATP gallery
Fuck Buttons also played ATP, and were, as is their wont, a bit rubbish. Their new stuff reminded me of how Axel Wilner of The Field takes a tiny fragment of a song and works it into a five minute composition. Wilner foregrounds the alchemical aspect of this approach when, at the end of his first LP he sonically ‘zooms out’ to reveal the basis for a track is an especially naff Lionel Richie sample. Again there’s this quasi-autistic or fetishistic obsession with savouring and isolating tiny details – Jacobs calls it resurrection but it’s kind of necrophile too. More than ever this years ATP felt reverential and retrospective – the average age of the performers must have been about 40 too.
In that sense Minehead’s a good fit; it too is stuck in a timewarp. We wandered into town for chips and souvenirs on Sunday and, having browsed some smutty postcards that belong to a bygone England surviving only in the deluded minds of Sun subeditors (a place where top cops are quizzed, where criminals are lags and scientists boffins, where weirdly jouncy tits are served with a side order of heaped perm) dropped into a cafe where it looked like the decor, the menu and, conceivably, the staff hadn’t changed for 50 years.Probably the polyester flowers in the window were of pre-‘Nam vintage too. That said, the hats in the souvenir shop no longer had ‘kiss me kwik’ printed on them. There was one that had ‘gagging for it’ on though. The tide goes in, the tide goes out et plus ce change…
Polyester flowers and jouncy laffs
There’s a weird homogeneity of time at ATP too: every day’s spent watching basically similar acts alongside (white, university-educated) people with hair directional along whatever few vectors are hip right now (a few pioneering girls had moved past the bangs or St. Joan option via kind of Shirley Temple-y bleached lambkin curls, incidentally). You’re also either – according to a tidal rhythm – strung out or hung over, both of which are the sort of states where drawn-out buzzings and squelchings and the sleekness of girls’ bangs and fur coats become incredibly appealing, soliciting the sort of rapt micro-scale fascination I started out talking about. Maybe not the ‘fun-packed’ weekend the Butlins brochure writers had in mind, but pretty close.
