9 771751 272046 42 £4.50 | ISSUE 42 | DEC/JAN 2013/14
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WHO NEEDS A M O U N TA I N
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ALLEN YING
CONTENTS SHORTS
THE BIG STORIES
END NOTES
14
THE DRUM THING
22
KIM GORDON & BILL NACE
85
B O D Y/ H E A D G U E S T E D I T
15
HALF MOON RUN
32
N Y C S K AT E
86
BYRON COLEY
15
K E V I N LY O N S
38
TOMORROWS TULIPS
90
IKUE MORI
16
SETH MCBRIDE
42
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
92
JAKE MEGINSKY
16
TOUCHING STRANGERS
46
KURT VILE
94
MICHAEL MORLEY
17
SPIKE JONZE & HER
50
SURFING & MUSIC
96
LUCRECIA MARTEL
18
ROUTE 66
52
THE NEW NEW DELHI
98
AN IMPROVISED HISTORY
18
FRONTSIDE GARDENS
58
WOLF EYES
19
KHUSHI
64
MAZEN KARBAJJ
20
G AV LY N
68
IMPROV PEOPLE
20
BROWNSTONE COWBOYS
76
N I X O N S K AT E
78
LOST BOYS OF ROMANIA
8 HUCK
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12 HUCK
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WorldMags.net INTRODUCTION
The world is in a constant state of flux. Stay nimble. Keep moving.
Join us for The Improv Issue. We’re making it up as we go along. WorldMags.net
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PHOTOGRAPHY DEIRDRE O CALLAGHAN
The Drum Thing New photobook turns the spotlight on the guys in the back keeping the beat. LA-based shooter Deirdre O Callaghan makes photographing folk in the margins something of a speciality. Her latest project The Drum Thing seeks to put the sticks man in the spotlight where he belongs. Her ƃrst book, the superbly observed Hide That Can, saw her document the residents of Arlington Road, a Camden Town, London, hostel for homeless men ravaged by alcohol addiction and exclusion. It was a tale of another Camden – one that the Britpop tourists seldom saw. The Drum Thing meanwhile focuses on thirty of the biggest names in drumming; men and women who have laid the backbeat to our personal soundtracks rather than hogged the spotlight. It's another important story-within-a-story and a beautiful one at that. “Drummers are usually the last ones to get credit, because they're there to serve the song, rather than themselves,” says Deirdre, who’s using Kickstarter to self-publish portraits and interviews with everyone from Dave Grohl and Topper Headon (The Clash) to Jack White and Jim Keltner (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell). “I thought it was time we paid these guys their dues.” Michael Fordham
deirdreocallaghan.co.uk
14 HUCK
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Montreal folksters strike out with a sound of their own.
Half Moon Run’s stirring Canadian folk took them on an eighteen-month tour after the international release of their critically acclaimed album Dark Eyes in July 2013. Now, as the four-piece return to Montreal to play homecoming shows, they can reƄect on how their city has shaped them. As well as being the birthplace of God Speed! You Black Emperor and Arcade Fire, the FrenchCanadian city’s cosmopolitan vibes have created the perfect home for some of today’s most inspired bands. “Part of what makes the Montreal music scene so interesting is that there is such a wide variety of music and styles,” explains drummer and pianist Dylan Phillips who, like all four members of the band, contributes vocally to their folksy sound. “That’s how people come up with music that is completely diƂerent to what is happening elsewhere. We all came from diƂerent places before the band. I was studying piano and involved in the opera scene, Conner [Molander] was studying Psychology, and Devon [Portielje] studied music.” Though they started out as a three-piece, and were later joined by Isaac Symonds, their outlook hasn’t changed as they’ve evolved into a bigger band. “We really felt, and still do, that if you have a song the band’s sound will follow,” says Dylan. “You can explore sonically after, but you need to have a good song at your core before you start exploring sounds.” After touring an hour-set for their debut, they now have a hunger to start writing again. “We want some new material. Not only to make the show better, but for our souls and our happiness,” says Dylan. “We are setting up a little cave for ourselves when we’ll ƃnally have sometime in February to start writing again.” Harry Wade
Half Moon Run’s new single, ‘Full Circle’, is out January 27, 2014, on Glassnote/ Communion/Island.
Montreal & More Half Moon Run share their hobbies and haunts, at home and on the road. Listen: Thus:Owls are an amazing new band in Montreal – halfSwedish, half-Canadian - that we have fallen in love with. They have a really unique style and only have a self-made EP but are deƃnitely a band to watch.
PHOTOGRAPH HANNAH BAILEY
Half Moon Run
Eat: Le Cagibi is an amazing vegan restaurant in Montreal that puts on all sorts of weird music nights and they sell good coƂee too. There are some wild experimental music jams going on there. It’s a pretty special spot in the Mile End neighbourhood. Eat again: Crudessence is another vegan restaurant in Montreal we love. They sell exclusively raw vegan food, and they do an incredible job. It’s absolutely our favourite restaurant in the city.
Read: Foodopoly is an interesting book about the food industry. There was an interview with the author, Wenonah Hauter, on NPR Radio and she spoke about how broken the food system is in the US - how everything is being run by the corporate world. She talks a lot about farming, and it’s super interesting. It is pretty scary that you never really know what you’re buying. Especially when you’re on the road in the US.
Kill time: Rubik’s cubes are our latest obsession on the road. Dylan solved his ƃrst cube the other day, and was so proud he took a picture to send to his mum, the same day we headlined Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, so we had two achievements in one day. Dylan Phillips
Kevin Lyons Monsters hijack snowboards in the artist’s latest collab. Kevin Lyons’ iconic bug-eyed characters may seem like outof-this-world creations but the artist puts little bits of himself in every cartoonesque design. The incredibly proliƃc illustrator, graphic designer, typographer, skater and all-round artsy G has had a particularly fruitful 2013 working on a bunch of projects – including collections with brands such as Stüssy and high-end helmet brand Les Ateliers Ruby – and his new Winter 2013 Snowboard Collection with DC Shoes is an aptly epic ƃnale. “Pop Pop Pop, Run Tings Proper, Boogie Down. All these things were references that could be interpreted in a snowboard kind of way,” says Lyons, who's held an array of enviable positions from art director of Girl Skateboards to creative director of Urban Outƃtters as well as starting his own brand Natural Born. “As a graphic designer I love words. Some of my favourite words come from sports or music/hip hop. Think of all the words for the tricks – backside noseslide, tailslide – these are all words that are crazy cool, words that have been made up by snowboarders and skateboarders. Just like hip hop is made up of funny words.” As well as launching the DC collection at progressive cultural retail space Colette, Paris, in November this year, the Brooklynbased multi-tasker also had a solo show Shits and Giggles! at HVW8 Gallery in LA and teamed up with Adidas Originals to produce a big wall mural in Miami for the Art Basel. But its his trademark monster doodles that keep him motivated to keep on making. “The characters all have elements of me in them,” says Lyons, characteristically cryptic. “I don't like to be serious in photos, and with the extremities of my beard and stuƂ like that, I feel like sometimes I really am a little bit of an old monster.” Hannah Bailey
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PHOTOGRAPHY KELLY SCHWAN
Long Road South
Cycle South! Seth and Kelly’s favourite cycle spots so far: Klamath, Oregon The small outposts of the Klamath Falls area are good for regular breaks, and Klamath Lake makes for some stunning scenery (unlike the inside of your local gym).
Seth McBride is cycling from Portland to Argentina, using arm-power alone. Long distance cycle rides have become a bit of a thing of late. As in – people ride from city to city over the course of, say, a day. But for Seth McBride and partner Kelly Schwan, the term ‘long-distance’ means transcontinental. Earlier this year, they set oƂ on a yearlong, 10,000-mile journey from their home in Portland, Oregon, to Patagonia, Argentina. Seth, a quadriplegic since a 2001 ski accident, is riding a handcycle and will be the ƃrst person to complete such a journey via arm-power alone. “The biggest reason why I’m doing this trip would be to encourage people to go out and do something, anything active,” says thirty-year-old McBride. Seth became furiously active after his accident and returned to his competitive self via wheelchair rugby, where he climbed from a Portland regional team to a spot on the 2008 gold medal winning US National team. At the onset of their continent-spanning bike journey, Seth and Kelly ran into the nasty climate that presides over a typical Paciƃc Northwest fall. They struggled to maintain their daily mileage quota as they crested into the Cascade Mountains and dropped south. Since then, they’ve battled the heaving mountains of Big Sur, truck-clogged traƅc in Mexico, and crippling dehydration in Baja. But three months in and their blog is still regularly updated with images of smiles, high-ƃves and friendly local faces met along a long and lonely road. The pair are immense advocates of a healthy, active lifestyle. To help inspire others, they plan to meet with leaders of disabled rights organisations along the route to promote the message that anything is possible. Kelly, an occupational therapist and former staƂ member of the Paralympic Team has ample experience breaking down barriers for people with disabilities. “We are hoping to show people how important it is to move, and how movement can help people explore having a fuller life,” she said in a recent video blog post. “Bodies were built to move,” says Seth down a phone-line from Baja. And he plans to spread that very message to the south of the Americas and beyond. Dave Zook 16 HUCK
Santa Cruz, California With sharp yellow cliƂs and lush hillsides on either side, the wave-rich stretch of Highway One is perfect for a pedal-powered surf trip. Big Sur, California This famous highway is a treat for road-trippers, but challenge for even the best of cyclists with multiple 1,000-foot-plus climbs, windy shoulder-less roads, and serious cliƂ exposure. But the whale-spotting opportunities are a good distraction from thigh-burn. El Rosario, Baja California The small town oƂers a cosy familyrun café and friendly local faces. Coincide a trip with the 'Baja 1000' oƂ-road race and you’ll ƃnd yourself surrounded by vehicles far faster and dirtier than bikes. Cataviña Boulder Fields, Baja Mexico Authentic desert. A stunning landscape with massive boulder piles and gigantic cacti provides a visual respite from the boiling empty landscape. Seth Mcbride
Touching Strangers Richard Renaldi’s stop-nshoot photobook is uniting unfamiliar faces. New York City shooter Richard Renaldi is taking portrait photography to a strange new place. Working on the street using a large format 8x10 camera, Renaldi asks two or more random people, strangers to each other, to pose for a group portrait. Pushing people outside of their comfort zone, Touching Strangers documents intimate relationships that exist for a Ƅeeting moment, like a collision of atoms whose impact momentarily reveals the unknown. “Finding good pairs is a matter of chance, patience and instinct. Most often, it is a matter of luck and timing,” says Richard. “Sometimes I try to ƃnd people from diƂerent socioeconomic backgrounds, diƂerent races, sizes and sexual orientation. But occasionally I ƃnd myself trying too hard to look for opposites. One of my favourite images is Reginald and Nicole - a portrait of a black man and black woman in Pershing Square in downtown LA. I wanted to make a portrait of Reginald, who was homeless, with a white middleclass woman to feature the contrast and explore any potential discomfort. But there weren't many people around, and a white girl I asked said no. After waiting and waiting, I decided to ask a black woman who was in the park talking on her cell phone - scolding myself for trying to force a contrast, when in fact race is only one small factor, and a rather obvious one, in our comfort level with touching a stranger.” Stuart Pilkington Touching Strangers will be published by Aperture in 2014.
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Her PHOTOGRAPHY RICHARD RENALDI
Spike Jonze’s new virtual love story feels realer than real. Spike Jonze has always been interested in the life of the mind, illuminating it through angsty voiceover (Adaptation), fantastical adventures (Where the Wild Things Are) and an actual portal (Being John Malkovich . In sci-ƃ rom-com Her, -onze’s ƃrst foray into directing a feature penned exclusively by himself, the guide to lead man Theodore’s (Joaquin Phoenix) inner world is future technology. The setting is a projected vision of LA in which artiƃcial intelligence has evolved making it socially acceptable to date your Operating System – or ‘OS’ as characters casually dub them. Theodore is a writer for a love-letter-providing service who cannot move on from his marriage to real woman, Catherine (Rooney Mara). Phoenix strolls through a soft-focus tangerinedream cityscape, melancholy and faintly perceptible beneath good manners. With the memory of The Master’s twistedin-every-way Freddie Quell burned deep, it is revelatory to see Phoenix reinvented, dressed like a pop art variety of a 1950s gentleman: very neat and yet so very sad. So he ƃres up an OS, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) and in the process induces the epiphany that Her is a tender love story. Through this unlikely pair, Jonze’s increasingly intelligent, compassionate and humorous script presents a universal vision of how positive relationships evolve with their dramatic tensions and tendency to stumble on past traumas. The chemistry between Phoenix and Johansson coupled with their witty and naturalistic dialogue charms and Amy Adams and Rooney Mara operate as equally eloquent voices for and against the legitimacy of this form of love. Originality pulses from every plot turn with Jonze never forgetting to nurture the sci-ƃ elements of his story. It is perfect that a warm look at how intelligence fuels love has been crafted with such warm and loving intelligence. With Her Spike Jonze has done that rare and (usually vainly hoped for thing and made a ƃlm that propels viewers on to the advanced world it depicts. Sophie Monks-KauƂman Love ƃlm? Check out our sister mag, Little White Lies, for movie reviews and more.
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Frontside Gardens A skatepark built from re-used waste in London’s Hackney Wick.
PHOTOGRAPHY ANGÈLE DEBUIRE
Route 66 Kicks
Skate & See! Elisa’s highway hot spots. Eat-Rite Diner Chicago, Illinois
Top spots on America’s most storied highway.
“Wicker place is a hip area full of street art. Reckless Records on Wilmaukee Avenue is a must-go for used-vinyl lovers.”
At the beginning of October 2013 Basque Country photographer Elisa Routa headed to the US with a couple of Foot Loose Skateboards, a few friends, and a simple mission: roadtrip along Route 66, skating spots from Chicago to LA, and embrace everything that happens on the way. The Ƅyaway freewheelers created a Facebook page – Happy Future For Broken Girls – where you could follow their adventures, mostly shot on 35mm, and set about discovering a fresh side to a historic stretch of tarmac. “We travelled for a month, not knowing where we were gonna end up the next day, with no precise goal except our last destination LA,” says Elisa. “We often felt we had a lucky star above our heads that told us to go to certain places and meet certain people. And at the end, all those unexpected moments made a perfect trip... Route 66 is not what I expected. You can make your own trip and ƃnd the best roads you'll ever skate.” Shelley Jones
Eat-Rite Diner Saint Louis, Missouri
18 HUCK
“With a jukebox in one corner and an old pinball machine in the other, this divey little eatery is classic Americana.”
The Burrito Cafe Company Santa Fe, New Mexico “Houses in Santa Fe are bright yellow. Indian craftsmen sell their art in the street and you can have a massive lunch for $6 at this joint.”
Coconino Center for the Arts FlagstaƂ, Arizona “I discovered folk band Elephant Revival in this peaceful place in the mountains.”
Bagdad Café Newberry Spring, California
Nestled among the industrial buildings and shabbychic artist studios of Hackney Wick sits a sanctuary called Frontside Gardens, a skatepark built from re-used materials by skateboarder Andrew Willis. More than just a solid spot, it's become a social hub that proves that eƂort and creativity count for more than a big budget. After winning a competition to ƃnd the most creative use for a temporary site, Andrew gave up his job in engineering to bring the skatepark to life. The project was never meant to be permanent as the land is scheduled for redevelopment, but the London Legacy Development Corporation was so impressed with its success that they gave him a grant and a year extension to the lease. At the heart of Andrew's vision was making the park sustainable and low cost. "I wanted to show how much you could do with just a few thousand pounds, the right eƂort and enough enthusiasm," he explains. "Wastage does upset me. I looked after a skatepark with friends for a long time where we made use of random bits of waste, but I've always wanted to make something out of reclaimed materials alone." Luckily, the end of the London Olympics produced a goldmine of leftovers crying out to be re-used. BuƂalo board for the ramps came from the Olympic park and the metal sections were once the volleyball courts. The rest came from a Nike project in Dagenham, while local businesses contributed tyres, plants and other bits and pieces. Andrew's aim has always been to "design spaces that are in touch with the environment and constantly adapting to the area". And that means welcoming in the whole community, not just cliques. To that end, he runs regular girls’ jams and free sessions for under-sixteens, and invites overthirties to shred late into the night. "Giving kids something to do on a daily basis, without having to spend any money, is incredibly important," says the new dad. "There's often a transition period between diƂerent sessions where they all skate together, which is always nice to see." Community space is extremely important," he adds. "You need areas where you can just breathe for a second. Bad environments create trouble and antisocial behaviour because there's nothing fun or constructive for people to do." Alex King
“'Calling You' plays in this remote Mojave Desert truck-stop café – just like the 1987 Percy Adlon movie.” Elisa Routa
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PHOTOGRAPHY ADRIAN MORRIS
Khushi So much more than tenderpop. Khushi may be Hindi for happiness, but Khushi the musician oƂers a nuanced blend of melancholic whispers and intensifying riƂs that ƃrst started to make airwaves on Hew Stephens’ BBC Radio 1 session. “Someone deƃned it as 'tenderpop' but I don't think there is any particular genre that I feel that comfortable with," he explains over the clatter of a Brick Lane café. "I don't necessarily want to make it all doom and gloom but I just try to get a sense of the darker things that maybe people keep to themselves.” A North Londoner, the singer-songwriter's charming conversational bumble transforms into a beautifully wistful Ƅow on stage, recently paired with a medley of strings, percussion and the tranquil hum of the harmonium (he's quarter Indian) for his new single ‘Magpie’. Magpies are one of the few animal species that can recognise their own reƄection and Khushi's soundscape captures that raw feeling of looking within, on track and in a haunting video. Released by Laissez Faire Club online and on vinyl, the single’s contemplative rhythms swept over a heaving crowd this October at its launch in Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, a venue renowned for debuting bands like White Lies. “Structurally it's the strongest song I've written and it's developed satisfyingly,” says Khushi. But what's next? “We're recording a song called ‘Phantom’ with Charlie Andrews who produced the Alt-J album, which is really exciting because he's amazing.” A bright future born from a dark sound, Khushi perfectly encapsulates life's hope. Amrita Riat
WorldMags.net PHOTOGRAPHY ADRIAN MORRIS
A Life In Sound Khushi shares the soundtrack to his present, past and future. That awkward ƃrst dance 'I Wanna Be Your Lover' - Prince I think it'd be funny to dance to this with your new spouse. Might bring a sense of lightness to the whole heavy wedding aƂair. Plus, it's the best song ever. Fit for a funeral Thank You' - Busta Rhymes ft. Q-Tip Nice to bow out with a 'thank you'. And if it’s a track that gets everyone dancing then even better. Everyday chill 'Berlin' – Ry X This is one of the most blissful ways of I can think of spending 2:51 minutes. Reminds me of home 'Take Me To The River' – Al Green My dad used to play this to me on vinyl and it always sounded amazing. Khushi
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Gavlyn Bringing the LA rap game to a city near you. Gavlyn handles long Ƅights well. You can tell that, quite literally, by looking at her. Los Angeles to London, an eleven-hour Ƅight, followed by two cab rides in heavy traƅc - one to the hotel to drop oƂ her stuƂ, then immediately into another one headed to a Brick Lane bagel shop for our interview. But Gavlyn looks like she just stepped oƂ the runway. The emcee, born Audrey May, is twenty-three years old and already a veteran of European domestic Ƅights. Over a cream cheese bagel, which she eats in small, delicate bites, we compare notes on the worst local carriers. “RyanAir is so bad, man,” she says. “I lost my mind!” Her DJ and manager, Zurich-based Mike Steez, is hanging around outside the shop. He was impressed by Gavlyn’s earlier work, particularly her rock-solid album From The Art, and booked her to do a couple of shows in January of this year. No one was more surprised than him, he says, when almost all the shows sold out. More were quickly arranged, and since then Gav has been back a number of times. She might only be a moderately recognisable name in the LA rap scene, but Europe has fallen in love with her Ƅow. She likes rocking over dusty boom-bap beats, placing words as precisely and carefully as the Wu Tang Clan’s GZA. “I’m trying to be a little more experimental on the new album,” she says. “With the boom-bap stuƂ, it feels like you have to get a little more personal with it. Like you’re locked-in by the beat. With the new music, I can explore a little more.” In many ways, Gavlyn embodies some of the current trends in rap – not only the idea that you can be huge on another continent before you make a real impact at home, but the idea of belonging to a much larger collective. She grew up in a large family, with multiple brothers and sisters jockeying for position, and when she started experimenting with music, she quickly found she was more comfortable around other people. Her crew is Organized Threat. At twenty-four members, it’s a monster of a collective. “We’re just a big group of artists who see eye-to-eye on a lot of things,” she says. “With big groups you have more support, and you have more people you can talk to about your shit.” Rob BoƂard
That’s What’s Up
A Gavlyn-curated playlist. Suga Free We hadn’t heard this man’s name mentioned in years, so Gav gets instant brownie points for the namecheck. The Ponoma-California rapper inspired Gavlyn’s own, ‘Too Cold To Trust’. DJ Quik A Los Angeles don, and one of the best deejays in hip-hop. “He’s one of my favourite West Coast artists,” says Gavlyn. “I love his music and what he raps about.” A$AP Ferg The A$AP Mob are known for bizarre fashion choices and even more bizarre hip-hop. “I’m addicted to the new Trap Lord album,” says Gav. Bone Thugs n Harmony This troubled Cleveland-Ohio group, which seems to shed members like dandruƂ, boasts rappers with names like Layzie Bone, Krayzie Bone, Flesh-n-Bone. What’s not to like? Nipsey Hussle The Crenshaw rapper recently released a mixtape that retailed for $100 a pop. He’s nothing if not ambitious, and has become a standardbearer for LA rap. Gavlyn
PHOTOGRAPHY LIAM RICKETTS
PHOTOGRAPHY JASON LEVINS
Found Beauty Jade Berreau and James Concannon recycle Americana in Stacy Adams & The Brownstone Cowboys exhibition. If you happened to meander oƂ the storied sidewalks of The Bowery, New York, in September and stumbled into The Great Jones Space, you would have discovered an Aladdin's cave of curious American artefacts. This group show, curated by stylist and former fashion editor of The Face Heathermary Jackson, turned everyday objects into an eclectic celebration of retro Americana. Installations were made mostly from found objects: Old-world ephemera like antlers, driftwood and battered Ƅags from New Orleans-based James Concannon; taxidermy light ƃxtures by owner of antique boutique The Hunt NYC Jake Lamagno; nude and talismanic collages by Let’s Panic mag editor Jade Berreau; and heady shots of friends, dollars, Ƅowers and more by photographer Jason Levins. Both James Concannon (a self-described dumpster diver from New Orleans) and Jade Berreau (alumni of the beautiful and damned New York art scene that consumed her late partner Dash Snow) are an undeniable part of the streets they deconstruct. So after the din of the opening died down, Jade and James hit a dive bar to riƂ on the compulsion to scavenge, cobble and create. As director Mike Mills once said, "Objects are a piece of history, someone’s idea of life.” "I feel like when you work with found objects they already have such a special history and voice and depth," says Jade. "You kind of create a backstory in your mind; imagining where it started, how it got to you and why. And then basically all you have to do is make it breathe again. But then you become so attached to it that it's hard to put a price on it." "I think that’s second-nature to the object itself, though," expands James. "Things are constantly manifesting. Like, I'll need a speciƃc object and then in two or three days I will ƃnd it. The streets give, you know? […] Also that you can be working on a piece and see something in the corner of your eye, that you’ve maybe had for years but could never use, which is suddenly the perfect thing. Finding homes for little artefacts. That always makes my day." Shelley Jones brownstonecowboys.com
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WorldMags.net WORDS STEVIE CHICK PHOTOGRAPHY OUTSIDE GREG FUNNELL PHOTOGRAPHY INSIDE JASON LARKIN ARTWORK KIM GORDON
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WorldMags.net Kim Gordon first came to us in the 1980s, as the female lynchpin in next-level noise punk b a n d S o n i c Yo u t h . F i e r c e l y i n d e p e n d e n t a n d resolutely experimental, her belief in selftaught creativity would inspire generations to c o m e . I n 2 0 1 1 S o n i c Yo u t h w e n t o n h i a t u s a n d Kim struck out with friend and fellow musician B i l l N a c e t o f o r m a v a n t - g a r d e d u o B o d y/ H e a d . Through improvised live performances and new record Coming Apart, Kim and Bill are exploring the sweet spot between practice and intuition, shaking up the staid rock game w i t h a h y p n o t i c n e w s o u n d . A s B o d y/ H e a d , t h e pair have a unique ability to dance between different worlds but, as we found out during their recent London trip, there‘s an order to the dissonance.
Forty minutes into our interview, I mention to
photo you’ve seen of her: a half-lidded gaze
Kim Gordon that she’s an inspirational figure
and understated sense of style like cool itself
and ask her if she ever feels the weight of this
melted down and recast. Beside her, Bill is a
fact. Her response, which can be charted some-
bundle of enthusiastic energy that lends his
where on the spectrum between LOL and RME
already boyish features a glow, a grin never
[roll my eyes, duh], sees her fix me with a cold
far from his lips.
stare that seems to say, ‘How am I supposed
Days after our interview, Bust magazine
to answer that?’ But she politely indulges the
publishes a dialogue between Kim and Bikini
question nonetheless.
Kill/Le Tigre frontwoman and Riot Grrrl
“Would it be a difficult thing to live with?”
pioneer Kathleen Hanna, where Kim admits
she says. “Well it would be, I guess, if I believed
that being asked to comment on her supposed
it… I don’t know. I don’t really see it. Or I don’t
iconic status “falls under the category of, ‘I
really think about it. Journalists are always
don’t know how to respond.’” Had I known this
saying, ‘How does that make you feel?’ But I
beforehand, maybe I wouldn’t have asked the
don’t know. It’s kind of hard to figure out what
question. But I’m guessing I probably would.
people are influenced by. People get influenced by a lot of things.”
24 HUCK
Because even if Kim Gordon doesn’t believe she’s inspirational – given that thinking too
We’re sitting in the drawing room of The
much about how people revere ‘Kim Gordon’
Rookery, a plush little nest of a hotel tucked into
probably makes it tough to actually be Kim
the armpit of Farringdon, London, and Kim
Gordon – I know it to be the truth. It’s true
and Bill are both sunk deep in a brown leather
for countless musicians and anti-musicians
sofa. The pair are quick to laugh, conspiratorial,
and singers and anti-singers who’ve picked
and relaxed in each other’s company. Kim, who
up microphones and instruments to follow
turned sixty this year, looks exactly like she
the example she set with Sonic Youth, or Free
does on every Sonic Youth sleeve and magazine
Kitten, or Harry Crews (her 1980s band with No
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her erstwhile bandmates have delivered albums that fit snugly within their template
(Thurston’s Chelsea Light Moving consciously
evoking the detuned chaos-roar of SY’s earliest days; Lee Ranaldo’s solo albums proving he was always the George Harrison
of the group, in the best sense), Coming Apart – the debut album by Body/Head – is a genuinely startling record, with few precedents in either artist’s back catalogue.
Both true polymaths – Kim also writes, paints, designs, makes films, acts and
Wave punk pioneer Lydia Lunch), or any of the
produces and Bill has been an integral figure
other groups she’s been a part of the last three
in the Northampton and wider Boston free
decades. It’s true for pretty much every woman
rock scenes, collaborating with different
I know who’s in any way familiar with her work.
artists, creating artwork and popularising
It’s true for pretty much all the men, too.
the now defunct avant-garde performance
As interviewees, Kim and Bill are no open
space The Schoolhouse. Kim and Bill utilise
books, and it’s not hard to guess why. Sonic
whatever medium is available to them to
Youth, the group Kim founded with her husband
deliver a message.
Thurston Moore in 1981, went on hiatus in 2011,
“Instead of making criticism about popular
following the couple’s separation, an event
culture, as a lot of artists do,” Kim said in that
that shocked the many fans who had idealised
recent Elle interview, “I worked within it to do
their relationship from afar. Despite a candid
something.” Kim Gordon and Bill Nace may
interview with Elle magazine in April 2013 –
be the ultimate insider/outsiders and through
where she revealed that Thurston’s infidelity
their work they are able to bridge the many
had caused their split, and that she had survived
divides between what’s expected, and what’s
a battle with breast cancer shortly afterwards
actually possible. These are just some of the
– Kim has been understandably reluctant to
dichotomies in their oppositional world.
discuss her private life in public. “I find that when someone wants to write a profile about me, they don’t really want to talk about my work or anything,” Kim told Kathleen
Hanna, in Bust. “They want to talk about my
personal life.” But we are not here to discuss her personal life. Kim and Bill’s work is what
fascinates us, what intrigues us.
This collaboration with Bill is Kim’s first release since Sonic Youth’s hiatus. And while
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“It’s really all about control and submission –
groups with outlandish names like Vampire
the whole idea of separation of the body and the
Belt and Ceylon Mange, as well as occasional
head. It’s sort of an obvious thing that people
sessions with Thurston and Kim. He grew up
don’t really talk about... When it comes to this
listening to “lots of Motown”, the backbone of
kind of improv music, you’re listening and
his parents’ record collection, while his father
thinking with your body, and wanting to lose
was a devotee of Neil Diamond (“Which I never
your self-consciousness. Like any good thing,
understood,” he says) who introduced his son
you kind of go and just forget where you are.”
to the joys of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
- Kim Gordon, Interview Magazine, 2013
“That was, like, the first thing we agreed on,
musically,” he adds.
It took Bill a while to discover the under-
Body/Head is, Kim explains, an entirely improvised collaboration. Debut album Coming Apart
BODY/ HEAD
ground music he would later make his life.
– featuring ten tracks that range in length from
“I grew up in the suburbs on the outskirts
one minute and eight seconds, to the brilliant,
of Philadelphia, so access was a big deal,” he
overwhelming seventeen or so minutes of closer
explains. “There wasn’t a record store near us,
‘Frontal’ – finds the duo purposefully lost in a
and getting to the city was a bummer. But I had
conversation between their guitars, amps and
a sense that there was more out there than I was
FX pedals, stirring up a cloud of drone, feed-
hearing or seeing. That was really inspiring,
back and speaker-hum that, while impossible
trying to figure out what that was, whether
to chart via traditional musical notation, proves
it was music, movies or art. Like, I’d kind of
powerful, disturbing and emotionally erudite.
figure out what punk was supposed to sound
Over these abstract, bruised and inchoate
like. But then I’d hear Television, and it would
soundscapes, Kim freestyles blank verse under
blow my mind. Growing up before the internet,
titles like ‘Murderess’, ‘Last Mistress’, ‘Can’t
that was a real influence. But I knew there was
Help You’, ‘Ain’t’ and ‘Black’ – the last two refer-
something mysterious out there. And there was
encing Nina Simone’s ‘Ain’t Got No/I Got Life’
the Princeton radio station we could pick up,
and ‘Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair’
which was a big thing. Proper college radio.”
– that suggest their bleak, noir-ish tenor.
His aunt took him to his first concert, a
“How did we get together? I put an ad on
perhaps inauspicious choice. “I fell asleep
Craigslist,” grins Kim. “‘Wanted: Experimental
during it,” he laughs. “It was Fine Young Canni-
Guitarist with Sweet Disposition.’”
bals. She asked, ‘Do you wanna go?’ And I had
In truth, the pair met through the musical
never been to a concert, and for some reason I
community in Northampton, Massachusetts,
thought they were inherently violent. So I was
where Kim and Thurston moved after the birth
kind of nervous. And totally confused! Everyone
of their daughter Coco in 1994.
else was really excited, but I didn’t get it. And
“There’s, like, five colleges nearby,” she says,
so I fell asleep. Later, I figured out places to
of Northampton. “It’s not really ‘artsy’, but
see shows in Philadelphia.” Fifteen years ago,
there’s a creative writing course at University of
he migrated to Northampton. “It’s not that
Massachusetts, a small poetry press, an experi-
competitive,” he says, of the town. “It’s got a
mental music scene… There’s a lot of culture
real nurturing scene.”
around, it’s not really like living in a suburb.”
26 HUCK
“We just liked playing together,” offers Kim.
Bill has lived in Northampton for fifteen
“And we liked to talk. We’d talk about things
years, and previously played in subterranean
we had in common, like the TV show Friday
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WorldMags.net Night Lights [a drama series following a high school American Football team in Texas], and
the films of Catherine Breillat [Paris-based filmmaker and author whose bold explorations
of sex in movies like Romance, 36 Fillette and 2007’s The Last Mistress saw her described by more prudish critics as a “porno auteuriste”].
I was reading a book about her movies, and thinking about her, and female sexuality and
male control, and I came up with the name Body/Head. We said, ‘That’s a good name for a band. We should use that name.’” “We kind of became a band before we decided
we wanted to do anything,” chuckles Bill.
Their first recording was triggered when
Kim’s friend Dennis Tyfus, a Belgian musician and artist who runs the Ultra Eczema record
label, asked Kim to cover Peggy Lee’s jazz classic ‘Fever’. “I asked Bill if he’d record it with me,”
says Kim, “and that became the first thing we recorded together.”
The duo’s version swapped the original’s sultry sass for something altogether more
disquieting, Kim murmuring the lyrics through
a busted microphone over a needling whistle of feedback. They cut another couple of tracks for Dennis, who pressed up a 7”, The Eyes, The Mouth/Night Of The Ocean, in February 2012,
and played a brace of early shows at art galleries and similar happenings that spring. “We became a band on the road,” says Kim. “We were a band in name, but after playing so
TOGETHER/ ALONE
many improv gigs together, we really gelled.”
Improvisation is intrinsic to Body/Head. When they walk onstage to perform, Kim says, they have no real, coherent idea of the music
they’re about to make.
“When you’re working alone, you’re making
“Maybe we have a strategy for starting one
it all up by yourself. Whereas when you’re
of the songs,” she explains. “But then it goes
collaborating with just one other person,
wherever it’s going to go. It’s just completely
you’re playing off each other back and forth.
improvised. We don’t know what’s going to
When I play with Bill, I don’t feel like I’m
happen. And it’s incredibly nerve-wracking.
actively listening to him but I know what he’s
And sometimes it doesn’t work. Then you have
doing; it’s kind of weird chemistry. The music
to try something different.”
between us creates this sort of body, almost
projecting something that’s inside of it…” - Kim Gordon, Interview Magazine, 2013
For Body/Head, every performance is like a high-wire act without a net, like a musical trust game, each musician relying upon the other
to catch them. For Kim, abandoning the more
traditional verse/chorus song structures she explored with Sonic Youth helps her tap into hitherto unexplored creative spaces.
“[With improv], you can come up with ideas
and sounds that you wouldn’t necessarily come up with if you were trying to make it fit a song structure. Like, if we consciously set out to write
a song like ‘Frontal’, it would be impossible to
get the same result. So these accidents happen, these happy accidents.”
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WorldMags.net But how conscious are they of what’s happening when they’re on stage? “Depends on the night,” grins Bill. “Hopefully not conscious, because I think that’s when a lot of the best stuff comes out. But some nights are harder than others, to get to that place.” “If the sound at the venue isn’t good, then that’s a distraction,” says Kim. “It can make things seem limited and banal, or it can seem really magical and cool.” And what about the audience? Does their reaction affect the flow?
WOMAN / MAN
“I don’t look at the audience,” says Bill. “I try not to,” says Kim. “I do sometimes, but I try not to, because I don’t want to have to worry about what kind of a time they’re having. I mean, if everything’s going well, you’re on
“[In the book Girls Like Us] Joni Mitchell really
this ride, and you’re taking the audience with
decided to go off and have an adventure on her
you, somewhere, but you don’t know where
own, which was mostly a thing that guys did.
it’s going.”
She didn’t choose to settle down and have a
“Even if they hate it,” laughs Bill.
family and have that sort of lifestyle, which
When performing live, Body/Head play with a
was pretty unusual. I grew up really wanting
film projected at them, a hypnotic, beautiful and
to be in Laurel Canyon. I lived in this sort of
faintly menacing series of vignettes that capture
boring, middle-class part of LA. It was all so
actor James Ransone and Gordon’s niece in
glamorous to me up there.”
scenes from an indeterminate relationship, the
- Kim Gordon, Rookie, 2012
film flickering through a handful of frames, holding the actors in expressive slow-motion.
Kim Gordon flits effortlessly between loosely
“It gives people something to do,” says Kim,
connected worlds. Whether she’s making work
of the movies, “so you’re not worried that they’re
as a fine artist, as a designer (Kim founded
having a good time. I think it relaxes people.
X-Girl streetwear – little sister to the Beastie
In part, it’s to establish that the music is more
Boys-affiliated X-Large – in the early 1990s with
soundtrack-esque, that we’re playing episodes,
high-profile ambassadors like friend Sofia
rather than songs, per se.” Do they respond to
Coppola and currently produces a capsule
the images while performing? “I try not to,” she
collection for premium fashion brand Surface
says, “because I’m always afraid that’s gonna
To Air), as a style icon (she’s one of the faces
make it corny.”
of the current Yves Saint Laurent campaign),
The film is the work of Richard Kern, a
as a curator, producer and mentor (helping
master of transgressive art and cinema who rose
popularise the work of people like Chloë
to prominence in the New York underground of
Sevigny, Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain, Spike
the 1970s and 1980s, and who remains a main-
Jonze, Todd Haynes and many more), as a
stay in Sonic Youth’s wider cultural sphere.
cultural critic, as a filmmaker or as an actress,
The group’s ability to pass through the worlds
her free agency between these spheres has
of avant rock and modern art without ever
always been impressive and, dare we say it,
seeming like dilettantes has always been a key
not a little inspirational. But Kim says she finds
facet of their appeal, and no one in the band
the art world “hard to manoeuvre”.
exemplified this as thoroughly as Kim.
“I always did art,” she adds, “and I wanted to work as an artist, to make art. But the whole ‘getting-into-the-art-world’ thing didn’t seem accessible to me. It’s always been intimidating.” Raised mostly in California, Kim spent a year studying in Canada, at Toronto’s York University, where she played in a “crazy noise group” as part of a school art project. Dissatisfied at York, Kim enrolled at Los Angeles’ esteemed Otis College of Art and Design, and later followed friend and fellow Otis student Michael Gira – who subsequently formed infamous noise group Swans – to New York.
28 HUCK
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MAINSTREAM/ UNDERGROUND “I was making work about popular culture from the outside and in a way I felt like after Andy Warhol the next step was to work within popular culture – but, of course, we were “Not everybody in LA felt they needed to be
actually a subculture... We didn’t have any kind
in New York,” Kim remembers. “There were
of ambitions to be mainstream musicians. If
people who didn’t move to New York, like
anything, we just thought about getting a gig
[artists] Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. But most
at CBGB’s or putting a record out. It was just
people did. I did. I was attracted to the history
a dialogue and those were the exciting things
of the art world there.”
– music, fine art, downtown. Things like that.” - Kim Gordon, Mono.Kultur, 2013
At the dawn of the 1980s, New York was at the centre of a creative storm. “It was so right-in-your-face, so claustro-
Within a few years, both an audience and firm
phobic,” she says. “LA’s like a big sprawl, and
media support would materialise for Sonic
the eye of the media wasn’t so much on the
Youth, and although her duties often left little
art scene there, so there were a lot more odd
Max’s Kansas City’ thing was over, it wasn’t
time to spend on her painting, when Kim
and idiosyncratic things that happened there.
a glamorous Warhol-type thing,” she laughs.
returned her focus to the canvas several years
Whereas New York’s actually a lot more formal,
“But there was this small scene, centred around
back, her work enjoyed attention and respect. A
where people are very much aware of what
venues like Tier 3, A Space, even CBGB’s.”
case in point: Kim’s main reason to be in London
everyone’s doing.”
Underground rock was a testosterone-heavy
right now is to attend the opening of The Show
The art scene Kim witnessed in New York
realm, a quality that fascinated Kim and which
is Over, a new exhibition at London’s Gagosian
scarcely resembled the world she thought she
she appraised in a 1980 essay she penned for
Gallery with an iconoclastic, apocalyptic theme.
would be entering.
Real Life magazine titled ‘Trash Drugs and
‘This exhibition is about abstraction and the
“It was all about having ‘finished objects’, and
Male Bonding’ about Rhys Chatham and his
end of painting, often proposed but never
putting forth this attitude that you knew what
musicians, and in particular their pre-gig ritual
concluded,’ writes the catalogue. The list of
you were doing, whether you really did or not,”
of getting high off the fumes from an aerosol
names included in the group show reads like a
she says. “It wasn’t how I’d imagined it would
deodorant called ‘Locker Room’. Kim traversed
who’s who of twentieth century contemporary
be, more conceptual works and performances.”
this male-dominated world as bassist and
art, from Warhol to Richard Prince, Robert
What Kim did find, when she came to New
vocalist with Sonic Youth, an anomaly beside
Rauschenberg to Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein
punk peers like Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana.
to Willem De Kooning, Gerhard Richter to Cy
York, was the tail-end of No Wave, the dissonant, auto-destructive and arty music scene
Kim now admits a moment of anxiety as her
that had sparked into life in the wake of the
career path sent her tracking across America
mid-1970s punk movement.
in a dodgy bus surrounded by amplifiers, away
“It’s amazing company,” she emphasises.
from the fine art world she’d earlier aimed for.
“Quite amazing. Some of my favourite artists
musical world,” she says, of artists like Rhys
“I reached a point early on where I realised
– Mike Kelley, Lucio Fontana – are in the
Chatham, Glenn Branca and Christian Marclay,
that if I was a musician, and I was more
exhibition. And the ‘Blue’ painting is next to
whose music was experimental, conceptual,
recognised for that, that people wouldn’t take
work by one of my very favourite artists, Yves
and breathtaking. “That whole ‘backroom of
my art seriously,” she says. “And maybe, as a
Klein. His series of burned colour paintings
musician, you appeal to a wider audience than
mean a lot to me.”
“There was a community there, in this
Twombley. Among such company hang two works by Kim Gordon herself.
a painter, but we weren’t thinking about that
Of Kim’s pieces – ‘Wreath Painting,
in Sonic Youth, at least not when we started.
Northampton (Blue)’ and ‘Wreath Painting,
There wasn’t much of an audience for us at
Northampton (Silver)’, a pair of canvases upon
the start, and not much support in the media.”
which have been sprayed violent jets of blue and silver enamel, with the ghostly negative-space outline of a now-absent wreath at its centre – the catalogue writes: ‘A spirit of negation is evident in the anarchic actions that fuelled the urban punk movement, epitomised by… Kim Gordon’s evanescent wreaths.’
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So, is there a connection between theses canvases – all abstract violent beauty and wild improvised
form – and the abstract violent beauty of Body/ Head’s improvised Coming Apart? “They’re kind of different,” says Kim. “I
mean, I guess you could look at dissonant guitar
music as ‘nihilistic’. But there’s all this emotion in the music, which is really not the same as the wreath paintings, which deal specifically
with painting formalism. They’re nihilistic, in terms of painting as a formal thing. Body/Head
is more intuitive. I see music and painting as different kinds of expression.” And what about the person behind the work?
Is the Kim Gordon we find on canvas the same
Kim Gordon we hear on record or see in her
work as a designer? In which medium does she Kim’s world may be full of dichotomies
feel most at home?
“I don’t know… I don’t feel comfortable
but through her work she manages to resolve
doing any of it. But what motivates me is if I
a lot of the opposing themes. Kim and Bill
have an idea that I want to get out there, then I
might be something of an odd couple but it’s
become less self-conscious about my ability as
their passion, ambition and DIY approach –
a writer, or someone who plays music. I mean,
their willingness to pour themselves fully into
for me, playing music is also very physical, so I
anything they create – that, perhaps, draws
Design Office with Kim Gordon – Since
like that. I always wanted to be a dancer, I like to
people in. For Body/Head fans, there’s an
1980, White Columns, New York, 2013.
move around. But nothing comes really easy.”
unspoken order to the cacophony of the creative
In addition to the Gagosian show, in
output. Do they sense it too?
September 2013 Kim curated Design Office
“I mostly play in improv-type bands,” says
with Kim Gordon – Since 1980, a retrospective of
Bill. “So this is definitely a lot more ‘song’-
her work at White Columns in New York, the
orientated than anything I’ve done before.
same gallery where she had her first solo exhi-
They’re not songs, per se, but it has more of
bition, also titled Design Office, in 1981. Along
a foot in conventional song-writing than my
with news of a recently signed book deal with
previous work, which is something I really
Faber (a memoir due for 2014), and a cameo
like about it.”
spot on Lena Dunham’s epochal HBO series
A waitress brings over a pot of tea to soothe
Girls, Kim seems to be going through a kind
away the jet-lag and flu symptoms both are
of renaissance.
suffering from. As she sups at her teacup, Kim
“With the book, I’m just writing in bits,
adds, “Together, it kind of all makes more sense
about different moments, and then maybe
than I thought it would. Like, even though I’m
going back and filling things in more,” she
working in different mediums, there are threads
says. “I mean, I haven’t gotten very far. Have I
there. It sounds like there isn’t, but when you
read any autobiographies in preparation? No.
see it all together, it all makes sense.”
I really don’t wanna read any, just because I
don’t wanna be influenced. I could read up and
Stevie Chick is a music journalist and author
prepare, but I don’t wanna get discouraged. I’d
of subcultural books Spray Paint The Walls:
rather not know, and just dive into it.”
The Story Of Black Flag (PM Press, 2011) and
Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story (Omnibus, 2009) .
30 HUCK
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WorldMags.net If Los Angeles is home to skateboarding’s big-budget blockbusters, New York is its creative capital. Forget bright lights and hyper-smooth slo-mo; NYC edits capture the streets, plain and simple.
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLEN YING WORDS OLIVER PELLING
A NEW YORK THING
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t’s a funny thing about New York,” riffs skate photographer Allen Ying over the phone from his Brookyln abode. “There are independent videos coming out of cities all over the world, but sometimes just because
one’s from New York it gets noticed or picked up. People just seem fascinated with it. I guess I get it. That’s why I live here.” Allen and I are discussing the finer points of skate-
board filmmaking. More specifically, we’re discussing
the finer points of skateboard filmmaking in New York. See, the city’s skateboard-wielding inhabitants
seem to have something of a knack for producing timeless independent skateboard videos, using lo-fi
production techniques (i.e. Handycams and iPhones) that hark back to simpler times. The past decade has been a fruitful period for the scene’s cinematic output
(despite the effect post-9/11 security measures had on skateboarding in the city) but things have gathered
even more momentum over the past couple of years. A New York native, Allen kickstarted the popular 43 Magazine in 2011 because he felt the pages of skate-
boarding’s heritage mags were beginning to get a little light on substance. He spends his days in the city
streets shooting photos, skating and rubbing shoulders with likeminded plank-pushers. He knows his city and
its inhabitants well.
“I guess historically, skating in New York did always have really sick underground skate videos,” offers Allen on the subject of why NYC’s independent scene is so strong at the moment. “I think that tradition and inspiration is what most filmmakers out here draw from.”
It’s no secret that New York has always been a destination for the creatively frustrated. The city itself – complex, dirty, bright and glamorous all at once – is a living, breathing kind
of poetry. And with a history of turning raw intuition into high-art – from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s street tags to Patti Smith’s vagabond verse – it’s no surprise that independent filmmaking has borrowed from this past.
For the skateboarding world, it was the likes of RB Umali, the long-time Zoo York filmmaker, who began to set the
precedent for the city’s skate flicks. The release of Mixtape, circa 1997/’98, is perhaps the strongest example. Drenched
in dank 1990s hip hop, and spliced with footage of myriad rappers freestyling, the forty-minute film showcased some of the city’s finest (and now most revered) skateboarders
tearing the streets apart. The vibe seemed organic and the lines improvised, and by Umali’s own admission, that was essentially the case.
According to Allen, the best videos are those that simply capture what happens when a bunch of people go
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skateboarding. He cites filmmakers Colin Read (561 to NYC,
The Mandible Claw Video, Tengu) and Josh Stewart (Static, Static II: The Invisibles, Static III, Static IV) as two of the city’s
most seminal. Both have something of a cult-like following among skateboarding’s more independently minded enthu-
siasts. And both are clear that the secret to a good NYC clip isn’t hidden in some kind of formula. “I like films and skating that question the usual way things
are done,” says Colin. “[I like] skating that is surprising. I think every part of a film should be surprising in some way, whether it’s the skating itself or the way the film is put
together. The flow of a film is also very important to me; how the sections change and progress from one to another. The journey. I hate it when a video is just part-part-part-part. I
want my films to tell a story with skateboarding, so to speak.” On the subject of mixing up the ‘classic’ New York skate vid look, Colin references recent releases CCTV, Solo Jazz and
Cooper Winterson’s \m/. “All are independent NYC videos, all are good, and they all look, sound and feel completely different,” he explains. “Yet somehow, all are recognisable as having a New York aesthetic to some degree. I don’t agree
that New York videos necessarily have a certain style; rather, that the city simply tends to lend them a particular look – gritty and rough – that’s instantly recognisable on film.” Josh, originally from Florida, also believes that despite
the archetypal New York look and feel, it’s important for filmmakers to put their own spin on their work. “I’ve seen a ton of brands come to NY to shoot videos here and use the city as the backdrop to their films,” he says. “And when I watch most of these projects I see the same cliché portrayal of the city with the same cliché portrayal of skating in its streets.
Personally, it leaves me with a burning desire to present the city in a new way and to highlight what I think are the aspects of NYC that make it the raddest city in the world.” On speaking to the trio, it becomes clear that while the editing and art direction of any film is important, there’s just
something about New York that’s impossible to describe or measure. And despite cities like Philadelphia and Chicago having their own strong independent scenes, there’s no denying that right now, the eyes of the skateboarding world
are focused on New York. Josh echoes Allen’s sentiments on the wider world’s
fascination with the city. And while he doesn’t think the
hype will last forever, he’s confident the creativity will never cease. “New York is currently the ‘it’ city,” he says. “But
like most trends it will eventually come to an end. This city attracts an incredible amount of talent, so there will always be a fresh set of eyes, anxious to present the city as they see it. And skateboarding, like breakdancing and graffiti, is an integral part of New York’s culture. It’ll always continue to progress and thrive here.”
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Orange County surf punks Tomorrows Tulips embrace mistakes in everything they make. WORDS SHELLEY JONES PHOTOGRAPHY ADRIAN MORRIS
Alex Knost and Ford Archbold are stretching some cobwebs across a dressing room backstage at the Scala in King’s Cross, London. It’s
the night before Halloween and their band Tomorrows Tulips is about to open up for their friends and Costa Mesa neighbours The Growlers – who are all spooked up in matching witch costumes.
They’ve been on tour in Europe for just over a week and Alex and Ford have fully relaxed into rock-star road life, sporting psychedelic
thrift-store threads and matching sun-bleached bobs. Tomorrows Tulips – a three-piece (drummer Jamie couldn’t make this tour)
that’s gone through different line-ups over two albums – is a warped, beachy brand of stoner pop that channels 1960s doo-wop through 1990s grunge rock. And although both Alex and Ford balance band life with pro surf careers (counting progressive surf brand RVCA as one of their main sponsors), they’re pouring a lot into their music
right now, having just recorded a third album in San Francisco. Not a day goes by, the chilled artists say, “where we don’t pick up an instrument”. At the centre of two industries that have struggled in recent years
to retain their DIY roots, Alex and Ford are refreshingly unwilling to bend to the hyper-commercial constraints of modern creativity,
and seem to represent a new wave of Californian counterculture that embraces the impossibility of ‘going big’. Perched in this Scala
dressing room, with a box of wine and creepy pound-shop parapher-
nalia, the mid-twentysomethings are a far cry from the limelights and Lamborghinis of Sunset Strip, but Alex and Ford have a penchant for appreciating the smaller things.
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WorldMags.net You put out your first record Eternally Teenage on Thomas
Campbell’s label Galaxia and your new album Experimental Jelly on Burger Records. Why the switch? Alex: Galaxia put out the first record on vinyl and Burger actually
ended up putting that out on cassette afterwards. I think maybe our album just did better on Burger, they have more of a similar
audience perhaps than Galaxia, which is more jazz-based. It’s a really awesome label, but it’s like eight hours north of where we live
as opposed to Burger being ten minutes up the freeway. We were playing shows with a lot of bands that were on Burger too so it kind of just happened quite naturally.
Burger Records seems to be the centre of a garage rock revival in Orange County. What’s their vibe? Alex Knost.
Alex: I think they just embrace and support a lot of bands. Ford: They’re on the same level as all the bands. Alex: Yeah, it’s not like you go into a meeting and it’s some guy in a suit who wants to sell you something. They’re just like poor record
geeks who smoke pot and try to be as generous as they can with their income. So I think it’s important to have that in the modern world. People that are genuinely interested in music. Tell us about the Beach Goth Party night you recently played in
Santa Ana. Seems like a real celebration of this DIY OC scene. Alex: The Growlers put that together and it’s awesome! Kind of a step in the right direction of putting an audience together for this kind of music. It’s first-hand, by the bands for the bands, not some
outsiders trying to associate with a movement. It’s putting the power
back in the hands of musicians, which is cool, and there’s a real sense of camaraderie. The Growlers could probably hold that thing with only them playing, but I think it says something for them that every
year they try to implement new younger bands and water the seed rather than take the money and split. Or buy fancy cars, or whatever
[laughs]. They make it a brotherhood, or a sisterhood, or whatever. They embrace the people. It’s nice to see. The music industry flopped, everything has its period in time, but when something deconstructs
it reconstructs. I think we’re in the reconstruction period now, at least where we live.
The surf industry has been flopping now for years. Do you think it’ll have its reconstruction period? Alex: I think it’s difficult for us to have a vantage point on that
because it’s a really big industry. There are a lot more overheads, and manufacturing, tons of clothes overseas. But guys like Joel Tudor – who’s Duct Tape Invitational is an antidote to the elite pro surf scene – are really trying to steer things in a different direction?
Ford: Well he’s one of the great guys who’s always been himself and done things differently. Surfing still has money though. Alex: Yeah the system still works. You can witness it in California.
Kid grows up, dad’s a pro surfer, coaches and film teams groom the kid to be the next pro surfer. And that’s great, he’ll probably be one of the world’s best, but it’s a machine. It’s made to be a career.
Whereas that’s pretty impossible in music unless you abandon your interests and do pop music. Ford: If you’re in Hollywood and you’ve got rich parents and you’re
attractive you can become a pop star. Alex: Ford lives with [surf filmmaker] Jack Coleman, who’s about as
gung-ho and DIY as you can get. And I think having someone like that still alive in the surf industry, someone who basically lives off popcorn and cigarettes, who makes a rare cent and puts it back into
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WorldMags.net making films – not because he wants to be a celebrity but because he
actually enjoys the artistic process and documenting the culture – I think that’s what will save surfing. Because that’s what it stemmed from. Just like music, it’s a culture. Ty Segall said in a Pitchfork interview recently that all the kids
growing up to EDM like Skrillex are going to freak out when they hear
rock ‘n’ roll. Do you think playing garage rock is actually radical, not retro, now because it’s so different to what’s pop? Alex: Well it varies, you know? You go to certain places like Glasgow
and Manchester and it’s all house music, which is cool, but it was strange for us to be in towns that have so much heritage in rock ‘n’
roll and see that it’s completely vanished. We were in Liverpool asking kids where we could go to see live bands and they were like,
‘What’s that? [Laughs]’ It’s just constant evolution. Parents that were real hippies, their kids are into black metal, you know? I think with Orange County having so much money and having such large industries based there, the kids just naturally gravitate towards
things with less expectations. I know so many bands that work so hard and end up eating crappy food and touring non-stop, but that’s
kind of the heart and soul of the whole idea. It’s kind of weird, in this unsuccessful manner they’re creating something exciting and new. They’re disillusioned with the idea of success because success
is impossible man, at least on a financial level. There’s no music industry, there’s no limelight and Lamborghini on Sunset Strip.
You’re just gonna have to do it for the love of it, which is kind of
refreshing to see. One of our friends in the band Cosmonauts spends half his time flipping burgers and half his time on tour. So there’s more of a DIY approach? Ford: We’re DIY because there’s no other option. You wanna put
out an album? You’re going to have to design the cover. Or one of your friends is going to do it for free. It forces you to be creative. Alex: Obviously Ford and I make a paycheque from surfing. But for all our peers, even bands like Growlers, being DIY is the only avenue
you have. You don’t have any money to give to anyone to make a
music video or anything. So things just stem from your circle of friends, who are naturally like-minded. Like Jimmy [James Kinnaird] who did our music video [for single ‘Flowers on the Wall’]. Jimmy actually manages to make a living from surf filmmaking, which is insane because a lot of talented people don’t get recognised. The fact that someone like him gets paid by the surf industry is a step
in the right direction – in preserving it as a counterculture. Another of our friends, Dominic Santos, recently turned his house in San
Francisco into a recording studio for us to make our third album. Your live shows can be really experimental with you both reacting to each other and going off in different directions. Is improvisation
an integral part of Tomorrows Tulips? Ford: Yeah 100 per cent. We don't play instruments very correctly or grammatically or whatever. Alex: Everything comes out of having limited resources for us.
When you have fewer options, things come out of necessity. And in
a weird way the necessity creates originality because you don’t have a giant reverb machine so you trip something else out to fudge it, and you end up discovering something different. The music we’re interested in are the bands that had a great interest in exploration. When you stumble on something that hasn’t been done before it can’t really be wrong because there’s no precedent and there are
no guidelines. I think we both appreciate the lucky accidents from
having to play bass out of a guitar amp, or having to put direct inputs through certain pedals that aren’t normally associated, or
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WorldMags.net tape machines, or cellphones. We use iPhones to record as much
as we use vintage reel-to-reel and we discover new textures through that, which is exciting. You have to rely on intuitive reactions in surfing, too... Ford: Surfing is impossible to predict! Alex: Well it’s not possible for either of us. Maybe if you’re really good it’s different. [Laughs] We just surf outside Ford’s house and try to have fun. Ford: We don’t work during the day, we spend it surfing, and it’s
really cool being able to have that freedom. Is there a band or record that made you want to start a band?
Ford: Beck’s fourth album One Foot in the Grave. I thought that was awesome. Alex: I think I was sixteen or seventeen the first time I heard
the Velvet Underground box-set. I think I was on a surf trip, and I totally remember listening to that. My dad always listened to records by The Cars and Buffalo Springfield, but those bands always seemed so complex and it seemed impossible to become like that.
But I remember listening to Velvet Underground and the out-of-tune guitars and there was such a sense of freedom to it. I think I heard them and thought, ‘I wanna do that.’ Were you sad when Lou Reed died?
Alex: Yeah I was like, ‘Fuck that sucks.’ But Brooks [from The Growlers] was like, ‘Dude was like seventy-two and he was fucking
raging.’ And it’s true. He did everything you could possibly do in life and he did a great job. Fuck being sad for that. He achieved a lot more than a large percentage of our population, or music population. So he kicked ass for that. What does the future hold for Tomorrows Tulips? Ford: Big spotlights and strawberry-flavoured cocaine [laughs]. Alex: Just to be the best songwriters we can be, you know? We’re
surrounded by such a talented group of people. Our drummer Jamie plays in two bands called Holy Shit and Sam Flax and is a part of that
San Francisco music scene. Playing with him has opened so many doors. So I think as long as we continue to meet creative people and
surpass where we’ve been before and don’t limit ourselves, that’s a good direction to go. We’re just lucky to be able to do what we love. What about with surfing? Ford: Of course we’d like to see it go back to its roots. Alex: I think it’s just about exploring all the freedom you can in it. If
you try to dictate what the future will be, you’ll just end up limiting
yourself. I think there’s still a tremendous amount of freedom in surfing, as compared to a lot of other things in life, and the same with music, too. You’ve just got to appreciate all the different aspects. As
I get older I appreciate surfing so much more. I appreciate surfing shitty waves. I appreciate just catching a wave. When you’re younger
you kind of have this specific idea of what you want and where you
want the horizon to be, but the longer you do something the easier it is to appreciate the smaller things. We’re losing money on this tour but we would never have been able to come to all these towns and see these sights and meet new people and spend time with The Growlers,
who are some of our best friends from home, so that’s pretty rad experimentaljelly.com http://experimentaljelly.com/ e
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WorldMags.net Author, artist and cultural theorist Douglas Coupland breaks the world down into jigsaw pieces and reconstructs it in his own ad-hoc vision.
WORDS D’ARCY DORAN PHOTOGRAPHY GREG FUNNELL
ouglas Coupland is momentarily lost in the
D
basement of a West End London hotel. He throws
open a door, revealing chefs in kitchen whites and waiting staff scurrying. “Hotel kitchens always
remind me of assassinations,” Coupland says over his shoulder before disappearing around the corner. Spending time with Coupland is like stepping into one
of his novels – a freight train of unexpected occurrences, seemingly random observations, moments of nostalgia and
reflections on why things will never same again. Ever since his debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,
Douglas Coupland has been a cultural geiger counter, exploring modern crises of time, identity and the afterlife through fiction, non-fiction and visual art.
Coupland is here to launch his fourteenth novel Worst. Person. Ever. – a romp where he forsakes his usual
sensitive characters who try to make sense of life amid overwhelming change. Instead, he focuses on a reality-TV
UNEXPECTED NCES SEQUE-
camera man who questions nothing, wantonly pursues his appetites and refuses to learn from karma. Coupland
is also preparing for everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything the first major survey exhibition of his work as a
visual artist at the Vancouver Art Gallery this summer. Art is
Coupland’s first love. He fell into writing to help pay his studio bills and was knocked off course for a decade by an international bestseller.
Coupland’s obsessions with media, technology and human behaviour have led to future-gazing requests from the likes of Steven Spielberg, who invited Coupland to join an ad-hoc think tank to imagine what the year 2050 might look like for the movie Minority Report.
His style has a web surfing quality. He breaks up his narratives with definitions of concepts and words that he’s either invented or finds fascinating. As we sit down, I offer a
list of definitions from his books and invite him to elaborate.
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WorldMags.net denarration
How am I ever going to stay relevant as the next new thing comes along and wipes me out?’
“the process whereby one’s life stops
The answer to that is to figure out what you enjoy doing,
feeling like a story.”
or what it is you like. Most people don’t do that. I would say
Throughout your books, there’s a recurring idea that telling
maybe eighty-five per cent of the people never learned this,
stories helps keep us sane. Why do you feel people no longer
or thought to learn, or their circumstances were never such
see their lives as a story? In the twentieth century you had
that they could. Say you like making shoes and they come
this very grand and romantic notion that, ‘I’m a romantic
up with a new laser shoe-making machine, or 3D printing,
individual and my life is a story,’ with a beginning, a middle,
or mango-flavoured fruit leather. They’re still shoes. And
and an end. And a denouement. What’s happened with
because you like shoes, you’ll just go with the times.
the internet is suddenly you’re not a romantic individual
The people who are unhappiest are the people who
anymore. You are just one human being unit among 6.5
became dentists to just please their father. That is the single
billion other human being units, which if you’re coming from
unhappiest group on the planet.
the old tradition is a bit of a step down. But if you’re herding
yaks and living in the middle of nowhere and suddenly
marshall mcluhan (1911-1980)
you’re online, you’re welcome to the global dinner party
“canadian philosopher of communication
conversation. So there’s this great, grand equilibration
theory and a public intellectual. mcluhan is
happening right now where, to be ruthless, unless you have
known for coining the expressions, ‘the medium is
a genuine skill like medicine, or cooking, or something,
the message,’ and, ‘the global village,’ and
then you’re just making it through life and you’ve got to be
for predicting the world wide web almost thirty
a person unit. Along with this whole trend goes an absence
years before it was invented.”
of class structure. I have this slogan, ‘Poverty without the internet would be truly dreadful.’ It’s kind of amazing what people will put up with as long as they have internet access.
Your biography of Marshall McLuhan had a big impact on your writing and art – you even designed a line of clothing
and a ‘Motherboard’ snowboard inspired by his story. Why catastrophasic shifts
does he resonate so much? The single biggest change for me
“enormous, life-changing decisions that
was the McLuhan biography. I had no idea who he was when
are delayed until a crisis has been reached.
I started. Like zero. I’d never read anything he had done
in most cases this is the worst time to be
before. The thing about him is through this weird absolutely
making such decisions.”
unrepeatable chain, or historical circumstances, he was able
to see the internet coming. He knew what it was and why What inspired you to go back to visual art? I was in a weird
it was. The only thing he didn’t know was the interface. He
situation because I got something that I didn’t even want
didn’t know about the laptop or iPad, or desktop metaphor,
and couldn’t figure out why anyone would want it. I felt like
or anything like that. So he tried to explain it using Greek
for the entire 1990s I got pushed into doing one thing and
poetry and nineteenth century pre-modern short stories
one thing only. It really started to piss me off towards the
and he just sounded like a nutcase. But now we look at it
end. I felt like I was literally going to go insane if I didn’t
and can say he was right and this is probably why he was
start to explore other parts of my brain. Fiction takes place
right. Part of what he was thinking was because his brain
in time and art takes place in space and there are hybrid
was such a pathological nut house that he had no choice but
forms like film, which are both. The spatial part of my brain
to think what he thought.
was having a revolution. biji
Around forty – plus or minus two to three years – you’re going to make two-and-half really stupid decisions. You’re
“a genre in classical chinese literature. it
going to hire someone, you’re going to fire someone, you’re
roughly translates as ‘notebook’ and can contain
going to go gay, straight, bi, you’re going to get divorced, get
anecdotes, quotations, random musings,
remarried. You’re going to do two-and-a-half really stupid
philological speculations, literary criticism
things. Anybody my age knows exactly what I’m talking
and indeed everything that the author
about. One of my stupid things was going right back into
deems worth recording.”
visual culture. It turned out not to be a stupid thing in the Your latest book sprang from a short story you wrote for
end, but it could well have been.
Dave Egger’s literary quarterly McSweeney’s. How did frankentime
the book take shape? McSweeney’s Issue 31 was all extinct
“what time feels like when you realise that most
literary forms brought back to life by contemporary writers
of your life is being spent working with and around
and McSweeney’s chose the biji for me. Who knows why.
a computer and the internet.”
It’s not even a Jeopardy question it’s so obscure. So we investigated it and it just seemed like a perfect fit for
What advice would you offer to someone in school? I went
this thing I had in mind. So we went ahead and did it.
prematurely white. I always knew I would, but I didn’t realise
Because it just splattered out of my subconscious meant
it would happen so quickly and that I would look so wise as a
there was something important there. When something
result of it. So I give speeches at graduation time and I think
gets coughed out quickly, it means there’s something
the number one question I get from young people is, ‘How
really, really good there. So it ended up becoming the book
do I protect myself against all this change that’s going on?
Worst. Person. Ever.
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he publisher’s publicist steps in and interrupts us,
take off, but it wasn’t like it happened instantly. Was there
saying we’ll have to cut short the interview due
any sense of all this coalescing? No. It was all about being
to filming Coupland has to do. The three of us
in a vacuum, in the desert and it turns out there were other
scurry into the hotel’s maze of doors and hallways,
people in their own desert documenting their own thoughts.
searching for the library where Huck photographer Greg sequential thinking
Funnell is waiting to shoot Coupland’s portrait. As we go out the door, Coupland suggests we meet for dinner to pick up the list where we left off.
“the ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows
Eight years ago, The Observer flew Coupland to Rome to
have been shown to sequence). dogs, while highly
interview Morrissey. The author is a Smiths fan; he named
intelligent still cannot form sequences, it’s the
a novel after the song ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’. But Coupland
reason why the competitors at dog sports shows
wrote when they met, Morrissey said, ‘You’re not really going
are led from station to station by handlers instead
to go through with this, are you?’ Coupland said he knew he
of completing the course by themselves.”
couldn’t pull out his tape recorder. When I meet Coupland in the restaurant one of the first
You describe yourself as a pattern recogniser, can you
things he says is, “Don’t even try recording anything in here.”
describe the process of how you spot patterns? You know
At dinner he tells me about: his work habits – he
what a dog is, you know what a cat is. You can look at a wolf
keeps two hours a day sacred for writing; Gold Panda
and say that’s obviously a dog and you can look at a bobcat and
cigarettes – on a recent trip to China he started collecting
that’s a cat. It’s not like there’s any traditional dogcat out there.
provincial cigarette brand cartons; and unintended side
The essence of our intelligence is that we’re hierarchical. We
effects – shelves of books are actually sound absorbers
can look at something and figure out what it is very quickly.
in libraries. As the waiter clears the plates, I pull out
When you’re in a train like I was today, your brain doesn’t
think it is being inundated by information. It’s smart enough
the tape recorder.
in terms of hierarchical thinking. ‘There’s nothing here that itness
is raising a red flag.’ Then you see a DayGlo orange 1975
“the ability of one agent to create the
Ford Cortina and that stops your brain there because this is some kind of hierarchical intrusion, an anomaly.
perception of an object, person or event as possessing ‘it’ – for example , not wanting to be
Pattern recognition is about having a certain kind of brain
‘it’ in a game of tag – or even the ability of a
to begin with, which I think most journalists, or artists, do and
dog owner to create instant itness when choosing
then training it to look between the hierarchical trees in the
a stick to be thrown for retrieval.”
brain, however it’s arranged. It’s like looking at the structural, symbolic, political and being able to pick things out very quickly.
It is said that Gen X broke in 1991 – your book came out,
If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. If you can, you can do it.
Nirvana released Nevermind and were touring with Sonic
If you’re being bombarded with information, it’s the act of
Youth. Did it feel at the time like it was all interconnected?
looking for patterns – not necessarily the finding of them – that’s
Part of being alive in 1990 was the sensation that I was living
going to give you psychic refuge, a sense of sanctuary. You might
in a world that had lost its ability to generate any meaning.
not have been born with the most pattern recognising kind
Generation X was supposed to have come out eight months
of brain, but the fact that you’re trying will protect you from
earlier except the Canadian publisher said, ‘Sorry we’re not
erosive voices, too much information, too many channels of
publishing it. We don’t believe in it.’ Then in the U.S., St.
information coming at you. That’s a wonderful thing to know
Martin’s Press published it because the junior staff said, ‘You
have to – or else we’ll mutiny.’ So the book sort of started to
Worst. Person. Ever. is out now on William Heinemann.
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Philly musician Kurt Vile has an intuitive approach to his shoegazey sounds. WORDS CIAN TRAYNOR PHOTOGRAPHY JUSTIN MAXON
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WorldMags.net here’s an image that Kurt Vile has been quietly chipping away at, a preconception his twisted strand of rock seems to
elicit: that he’s a stoned loner, a mumbling slacker, a melancholic drifter. Although the thirty-three-year-old admits to some self-
mythologising along the way – the formative period spent as a truck-lift driver in Boston, honing his guitar-playing while
adrift from the life he left behind in Philadelphia – the bigger picture makes
for a less seductive narrative. He’s just a cheerful guy with a young family,
steering a prolific output with obsessive focus. And no, he doesn’t do drugs. At fourteen, Vile was making his first home recordings. At seventeen, he began self-releasing cassettes and CD-Rs. At twenty-five, he launched
roots-rock outfit The War on Drugs with singer/guitarist Adam Granduciel. At twenty-eight, record labels began seeking out the wealth of material Vile had accumulated. In 2009, he signed with Matador and has since brought his discography up to five albums and six EPs. The latest additions are Jamaica Plain, an unreleased collaboration
with Sore Eros from Vile’s time in Boston, and It’s a Big World Out There
(And I Am Scared), a companion piece to this year’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze, his most assured album yet.
Each release has expanded Vile’s sound a little further, filtering introspection through textures ranging from scraggly to jagged, subdued
to amplified. Here, he illuminates the creative process propelling his career. Where do you think ideas come from? It depends. Some songwriters, like
Ray Davies, can come up with a crazy narrative on a really interesting subject matter. I feel like my ideas come more subliminally, like a catalyst to something else. When I pick up a guitar, it’s not like I’m thinking, ‘I want
to find this dreamy chord.’ It’s just there. I chant and the imagery kind
of floats through my head. It depends on the mood, too. My mind could be moving so quickly that the lyrics just pop out. But I think no matter what, it’s about being a receptor at that time. It’s all a stream of consciousness and subconscious. How would, say, having kids impact the creative process? It’s a different
one step at a time, in retrospect. ‘I’ve got to play this venue in Philly.’ Then:
mentality. But even before I had kids, I would wait until everybody was
‘I’ve got to play New York.’ Meeting people and making connections, the
asleep anyway. I come from a large family, so in terms of noise and people
whole process of getting to the next level is kind of electrifying.
always running around, I’ve had that my whole life. I can tap in and
out of consciousness with my surroundings. In another way, I guess my
What happens when you get that gig you’re after and then you have to go back
mentality as a father would affect how I look at certain things. I think your
to work on Monday morning? Certainly, at some points, that was a bummer.
life changes all the time through the little things going on but ultimately
Work was a very inconvenient reality [laughs]. But I felt like I was on my way,
my methods feel the same, once I get an idea in my head.
like it was getting better. I figured it out.
When you were working a full-time job, how did you fit in the writing and
As a music fan, obviously you’ve read a lot about older artists and I was
recording? Did you have a daily routine or a timetable? No. Honestly, I’m
wondering if you’ve ever seen patterns in the trajectory of their career paths.
always thinking about music, so it’s easy. You do it when you gotta do it.
Maybe at a certain point when you get older it just becomes really hard. I do
Stay up all night. Go into work hungover and late [laughs]. Think about
wonder about that sometimes. Some people manage to be better than ever in
whatever songs or albums you’re working on while doing the job. I feel
certain ways. It depends on the artist; you just try to stay as true to yourself as
like I’ve never been able to stop myself from thinking about the next thing.
you can. Look at Neil Young or Nick Cave. Everyone has holes in their career
I mean I had blue-collar, repetitive jobs – it’s not like I was in an office.
but they seem to be able to find themselves again without compromising.
Obviously that’s different. I’m talking about doing physical work while
But then there’s the question of, ‘How do I make sure I don’t...’
not being there in my head [laughs]. Then weekends and nights. Maybe you might miss a night here or there, but you find ways to figure it out.
...Repeat yourself? Exactly. I think about that. I don’t want to repeat myself; not exactly anyway. I mean you’ve got to be your own worst critic. I cut things out
The average person who aspires to be creative can feel worn down at the
all the time if they don’t work. I think I’m good at sensing that. If something I
end of the day, though. How would you still feel compelled to create after
think is good turns out to be shit later... well, we’re all doomed, I guess [laughs].
working all day? There are peaks and valleys in life, so there were definitely some bummed-out periods that left me feeling tired. Once things happen,
Do you think there are certain periods in life that are more conducive
like you write a song or get a gig, you’re high on adrenaline and excitement.
to creativity? There probably are, especially when you’re young and the
Just the idea of obsessively looking ahead keeps you awake longer than
whole world’s a wonder. When you’re thirty and so on, you’re a little more
normal. It’s different when there’s a lull all of a sudden. But you crash
knowledgeable and wiser. I don’t know what happens at forty or fifty yet. It
when you gotta crash. I was aspiring to so many things but I just took it
depends on what’s going on in your life. We’ll see!
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Do you think people always get the humour in your songs or is it so subtle
that wasn’t part of the mural has been washed off. I don’t know if they
that it can be missed? I think that my humour is definitely deadpan. There’s
do that often or just no one has tagged it since, but it was completely
always an element of truth in every joke anyway. You just have to look at
clean last time I saw it.
things with an open mind and assume that if it [sounds like] total despair, there’s got to be some joking in there. It’s an even amount of both. I think
As a record collector, are there any albums out there that you’ll always
that’s what life is – a little despair and a little laughter.
be searching for? Whenever I get obsessed with an artist, I covet getting pretty much their whole catalogue. In the past, one I searched for was
So, do you buy into the idea that you have to have a bit of struggle and conflict
Neil Young’s On the Beach. That’s not easy to find on vinyl. It’s just
going on in your life to create something worthwhile? Yeah, I think so. You
a masterpiece. There’s this LA country-rock pioneer named Chris
can’t just be fed grapes by a bunch of servants, laying around all the time and
Darrow and Drag City re-issued his album Artist Proof recently – that’s
doing whatever you want. Unfortunately, that’s not the way life is. Unless
really good. It’s in the vein of Gene Clark or Gram Parsons but really,
you’re ignorant and living in a bubble, not noticing sad things happening
really solid. Trying to find his records is hard to do. A fan is actually
all the time. I think the struggle keeps you strong.
mailing me them. A lot of the time what happens is I get into a kind
of popular classic-rock songwriter, like right now it’s Randy Newman. What’s the most important piece of advice you picked up along the way? You
Sail Away is my favourite album at the moment so, it’s funny, I have to
reminded me of it earlier. It was something a writer said, kinda joking, but
go to the record store and find all his albums, which is not that hard
it stuck. “The eleventh commandment is: ‘Thou shall not repeat thyself.’” I
to do but it’s fun.
always think of that randomly.
What’s the most gratifying part of making music? About the highest I When [artist] Steve Powers picked out references from Wakin on a Pretty
get is compiling whatever release I’m working on – being in the studio,
Daze for a mural that features on the record sleeve, did that make the album
getting really into it, playing it back, putting it all together. That’s what
feel like its own little universe? I guess it did. I didn’t know he was going to
I’ve been doing recently with the new EP and this tour-only cassette of
do that at the time. Seeing the lyrics written out before anyone even knew
the weirdest stuff. It’s getting high on creation, really.
the music, I got paranoid at first. But now it feels like its own universe, for sure. People were graffiti-ing on it even when we were making it. I heard
Are you content with what you have now or do you long for more? I am
it’s because ESPO [Powers] is pretty known, so people want to have their
content. I don’t long. I’m not unhappy. I’m on the right track to keep it
name next to his. When we took the picture for the cover art, there
growing. If I could have imagined I was going to be here back when I was
was graffiti on there and we just left it on. But since then anything
working, I’d probably lose my shit
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Catch a ride through the evolution of improvisational surf music, from Hawaii to the Lower East Side, with Ethnomusicology Professor (and surfer) Tim Cooley.
Long before
The Beach Boys and Dick Dale, Hawaiians were singing and dancing hula
about surfing. The early 1960s popular genre
“surf music” does tell us a lot about the cultural history of surfing, but it soon became a bit of a problem for surfing musicians
WORDS TIM COOLEY I L L U S T R AT I O N J A C K TAY L O R
who suddenly were expected to play reverb-dripping guitar. Not until the
recent spate of successful surfing musicians (Jack Johnson, Donavon Frankenreiter, Ben Howard, Tomorrows Tulips, Steph Gilmore etc.) has
there been a shift in popular thinking about music and surfing. One major change since the 1960s is that surfing now has a few siblings:
Every surfer knows you have to put yourself in harm’s way to catch a wave.
skateboarding and snowboarding. While they share a lot, there are differ-
The zone of bliss for the surfer is that thin line between a harmless swell
ences in the music that tends to happen in these overlapping communi-
and the impact zone of a crashing wave. As you paddle to catch a wave,
ties. Something about pushing the limits of control in skateboarding
you never know what’s going to happen. You might catch the wave, make
especially seems to resonate with hard-edged, sharply defined punk, post-
the drop, carve a bottom turn, and set your rail for the ride of your life. Or
punk, and hardcore. Take Sonic Youth’s music, which is scattered across
you might wipe out, crash in a torrent of thundering whitewater, and be
skate video soundtracks in the last couple of decades from Santa Cruz’s
left wondering which way is up. Either way, you’re going to try it again.
Streets on Fire in 1989 to Enjoi’s 2006 classic Bag of Suck and 2013’s A Place
Once you’ve ridden a wave, you don’t just want more, you need more.
In The Sun by New Balance. Their grungey, punk or noise-rock sound
Making music is not that different. You have to step over the edge. No
seems to teeter on the edge but even when improvising a live gig, they
matter how good you are, there's always risk. Like surfing, making music
are controlling the mayhem. The careful composition in their song struc-
can be terrifying. Surfing and music are cultural acts. Both are things we
tures, combined with the meticulous control of the timbre of each guitar,
do to make sense of the world around us. I was reminded of this time and
drum, and voice, draws comparisons with the act of shredding. Sure,
again when interviewing surfers for my book Surfing about Music. As the
play that guitar with a rusty screwdriver, but land it like Ed Templeton
prototypical lifestyle sport, surfing seems to demand musical expression.
stringing together railslides and grinds on just about every hard edge in
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Californian Alex Knost’s surfing references classic 1960s longboarding, but he takes it to extreme limits, teasing
our expectations with a full-rail bottom turn followed by a quick walk up to the nose for a teetering ten. He is so loose we think he is
going to fall, but he doesn’t. His band, Tomorrows Tulips, also refer-
Southern Cali-
ences and then messes with icons of the 1960s. Their track ‘Tired’ is
fornia. It's no surprise
a warped, weird, and hilarious cover of the Sandals’ ‘Theme to the
that the Tempster chose Sonic
Endless Summer’ from Bruce Brown’s iconic 1964 surf film. On the
Youth’s ‘Titanium Exposé’ for his sequence in
other end of the spectrum, Tom Curren’s music can be heard as an evolving soundtrack to his own growth as a surfer. One of his earlier
Toy Machine’s Welcome to Hell video. There are plenty of surfing films with hardcore soundtracks, too.
bands, Skipping Urchins, was a semi-thrash band that captured the
Taylor Steele’s Momentum set the standard for that. Even today’s icon of
intensity of his most competitive years. But his first album, Ocean
surfer-soft-rock Jack Johnson cut his teeth covering punk rock he heard
Surf Aces (1993) is much jazzier, mirroring the graceful lines he carves
in surf films. But with surfing, there is no fixed platform on which to try
on waves. A decade later when he released his eponymous album, his
your moves. The fluidity is so extreme that looser, more open jamming —
sound had mellowed considerably.
or improvisation — is demanded by each wave. Every wave is a new song.
I don’t know if surfers are inherently more musical than any other
Improvisation fuels many surfer musicians. Dave Rastovich’s Life Like
group of people, and this is not the point. I am convinced by my work
Liquid project is a good example – bringing together a loose alliance of
with surfing musicians from around the world that surfers need music
surfing musicians for two weeks in a beach house outfitted as a temporary
to help them make sense of surfing, and to create a sense of a surfing
recording studio to drive creativity. Everything was improvised. In the Life
community. Music is one of the ways we express who we are as indi-
Like Liquid film, Australian surfer and percussionist Terepai Richmond
viduals and as groups. It is no wonder that cultural practices as radical
puts it succinctly: “There is a certain level of musicianship that you need
as surfing and skating require edgy, risk-taking, yet fluid music to help
to develop before you can read signs in improvised music. But it’s the
express what it feels like to make that drop on our board of choice. Words
same in surfing.” He explained that you have to be able to improvise
don’t quite do it justice
to jam with a band, and to ride a wave without wiping out. Surfer and singer-songwriter Andrew Kidman would agree. His musical collective,
Tim Cooley is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Global and
The Val Dusty Experiment, created the soundtracks for several of his
International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is author of Making
surfing films. Some surfers make music that sounds so much like their
Music in the Polish Tatras (Indiana, 2005) and his latest book Surfing
surfing looks that it’s uncanny.
about Music is available now on University of California Press.
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WORDS AMRITA RIAT PHOTOGRAPHY TERESA GEER
Caught between a digital future and artisanal past, India is building creative bridges between the old world and the new.
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Hanif Kureshi
HandpaintedType Hanif Kureshi of HandpaintedType is reinvigorating Delhi’s last-standing sign-painters with a new life online. elhi’s shopping hot spot Hauz Khas
trade. He scoured the brimming labyrinth of
is bustling with the young and
Old Delhi for the typographic artisans respon-
on-trend. Away from the hubbub,
sible for the once-ubiquitous rainbow letters
up a steep flight of stairs, lies the
blanketing shop signs, trucks and billboards
HQ of HandpaintedType.com – the
across the city. “I asked them to design their
virtual home of an ancient art form.
own font, then we digitised them.” Today,
The website’s story starts with founder
HandpaintedType.com is an ever-evolving
Hanif Kureshi, who was born in the small
catalogue of vintage Hindi, Arab, Urdu and
town of Talaja, Gujarat. “Sign painters are as
English lettering. Hanif ’s team work with a
revered as MF Husain in my town,” he says,
sense of urgency to make sure it keeps growing
referring to late artist Maqbool Fida Husain,
as cheap plastic vinyls, manufactured by
known to many as India’s Picasso. “That's
desktop publishers and digital agencies in
what I wanted to be, before I realised that the
mere minutes, push the street craft to the
world [of graphic design] is bigger than sign
brink of extinction.
painting. Today you see a lot less handpainted
For Hanif, this “fate of change” saw the
type on the street and more printed vinyl. So
demise of the Bollywood poster painter. “It’s
I started to wonder what could connect these
not about saving, the times are changing,” he
[old] painters with the present?”
says. “New technology is much faster, sharper,
In 2010, Hanif took it upon himself to
cleaner and more professional than these
preserve India’s rich heritage of handpainted
painters. But before they disappear, if I can
typography – an influential precursor to artists
get them to contribute, at least their kids can
like Aaron Rose, Stephen Powers and Margaret
go and see what their father did.”
Kilgallen – by ensuring it remained a viable
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In this spirit, Hanif names each font after
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Kafeel Ahmed Ansari
its painter. The first typeface was called
together and talk in Hindi, the only language
‘Painter Umesh’ and could be downloaded for
aside from painting he knows.
As he rummages through the mass of paint-
ings, brushes and art equipment in the tight
free for non-commercial use. One free font has
Originally from Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh,
space, we discuss the industrialised factories
over 3,000 downloads, while another has been
Kafeel recounts his story. “My father was a
wiping out his craft. “Even a machine needs an
used by Heineken, though Hanif is currently
shopkeeper but he was also dharmic – an imam
artistic operator. If they don’t have a creative
in talks to address their requisition. “They
in the mosque. He was educated, cultured and
brain, they won’t produce the results,” says
understand we need to come to an agreement.
cooperative with my dreams. My teacher was
Kafeel, who’s taught himself to be computer
But the great thing is it means I’m seeing the
an ustad [highly skilled person]. He used to
literate through experimental button bashing.
font in other places; it’s becoming a thing from
teach me calligraphy, so my classmates would
Adjusting his glasses, he explains why he
India. Digitising typefaces is what new India
get me to write in their notebooks for them.
believes his work will always have a place.
is about. It’s not about kitsch, which has been
Then there was an artist that used to paint on
“Generally you will find thousands of these
done to death. That’s old India.”
boards outside his house in the gully. I used to
fonts, but there is something new about my
But it’s $50 font ‘Painter Kafeel’ that really
come from school and stand behind him for
fonts, it can’t be recreated on a computer.
gets Hanif going. “I’ve gone through many
hours, watching him work.” Kafeel kickstarted
There is a finish and accuracy. When I paint,
painters, but only a couple take it seriously, like
his own career by investing in some impro -
I don’t get up. I really sit and focus, it takes
Painter Kafeel,” he explains. “He has a finish,
vised self-promotion. “I bought a bicycle in
at least twenty hours. There will always be
a polish. I give him jobs as a typographer not
1980 and bolted a signboard on the front and
a demand for art, but the artists will wither.
as a street painter, and since he started his
back. That’s how I started to get work when I
Some will stay, but most will go. Of my genera-
life has also changed. Before, his audience
moved to Delhi.”
tion, most have died and only five or so really
was Old Delhi’s streets. He’d get maybe 300,
Today, Painter Kafeel’s folksy truck-art type
500 rupees. After HandpaintedType.com, he
can be seen on the book cover of Akash Kapur’s
Kafeel’s words echo something Hanif said
paints in offices, he was featured in The Inde-
India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern
back on his balcony. As the sun set behind him
pendent in the UK, people from around the
India, raved about by NYC critics as the New
on an open vista, Hanif contemplated India’s
world try and find him to give him a job where
Republic’s Editors’ and Writers’ Pick 2012. It’s
colourful typographic history, which may soon
he can earn 5,000 rupees. And as he’s gone on
also graced the sleeve of Amit Chaudhuri’s
be under the veil of dusk, too: “The transition
he’s earning more and more, because that’s
Calcutta: Two Years in the City. If the job comes
time is almost over, we’ve almost completely
what he deserves. I want more painters like
to the artist via HandpaintedType.com, fifty
changed. Maybe if you go elsewhere in India,
him, but I can’t find them.”
per cent of profits go to the painters, the other
you may see more handpainted type, but not
half goes back to the cause.
so much in Delhi. If I don’t do this for the
In the walled city of Dilli 6, down a maze
good ones are left.”
of streets brimming with heady spices, Kafeel
“I get more orders from outside,” explains
next five years, it will be gone completely. As
Ahmed Ansari welcomes us into a two-metre-
Kafeel. “Foreigners want more in-depth work.
long as it stays on web, it stays. It’s kind of
squared room with plastic cups of fizzy orange
Hanif gets me orders off the internet, and calls
immortal there.”
Mirinda, introducing us proudly to family
me every two weeks to pass them on to me. My
members like his son. Surrounded by life-size
wife complains I haven’t painted her yet, but
Buy the Painter Kafeel font, customised here
canvases and piles of poster rolls, we huddle
I am just inundated with work.”
in yellow and green, at handpaintedtype.com.
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set up as an entertainment rather than music collective with the aim of spreading the reggae word, with one person spinning records and
two people on the mics, hyping up the crowd.
Reggae Rajahs
Since then, the reggae triumvirate has gone
from holding a few low-key events in their hometown of New Delhi to invading venues in big cities like Mumbai. They’ve become a main-
stay act at mainstream festivals, collaborating with local artists like BASSFoundation and Ska
Jamaica’s greatest export is being tailored to India’s ears, thanks to a party-starting deejay crew who preach the reggae gospel.
Vengers and hosting established international acts such as Graeme Hamilton (of UB40 fame), Mr. Williamz, Apache Indian, Soom T, Mungo’s
Hi Fi (Scotland), Blessed Love (Germany) Subatomic Sound (USA) and Heartical Sound (France). They’ve also taken the high-powered
spirit of their own sound-system culture outside the subcontinent, playing one-of-a-kind track cuts known as dubplates in Peru, Panama, NYC
and beyond.
r Herbalist and Diggy Dang
first met Zorawar Shukla (aka Mr Herbalist)
“We play other people’s tunes, but we also
drag their chilled-out demean-
when he was hanging above the Rajasthani
play [dubplate] specials,” explains Diggy. “We
ours past an ancient stretch of
desert from a zip wire, set up by the adven-
interact with the crowd so they can relate to the
red sandstone arches dating
ture sports company where Zorawar worked.
music. Some people can be alienated by reggae
back to the Mughal period.
They started hanging out, less literally. Third
because they don’t really understand the patois,
We’ve snuck around the back of famous New
member, Mohammed Abood (aka DJ MoCity),
the accent, they don’t really understand what
Delhi monument Humayun’s Tomb to find
was a hip hop promoter at the time. He threw
they’re talking about. With specials we adapt
sanctuary in a city overpopulated with fami-
a party on Bob Marley’s birthday in 2009 and
a tune for the Indian massive. We customise it,
lies and lovebirds enjoying a sanctioned day
invited an Australian reggae collective to play.
talking about corruption, about society, about
off on Gandhi’s birthday. Aside from a guard
Raghav and Zorawar attended.
respecting Indian women.”
bribed with promises of, “Just one minute,” no
“When I witnessed that party I was like,
The guards kick us out mid-interview. As
one knows we’re here – a rare change of pace
‘Okay, this is going to change everything,’” says
we hustle away, we enter a scene that mirrors
for music promoters Reggae Rajahs.
Diggy. “There was absolutely no reggae music
the social complexity of Indian society. A train
Although they attended the same interna-
here – no promoting it, no parties, no one had
ruptures the serenity of the ruins carrying the
tional school, Raghav Dang (aka Diggy Dang)
heard of reggae beyond Bob Marley.” The trio
middle classes cross country as a community of
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P HO T O GR A P H: R O O T Z I SL AND
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says Mr Herbalist. “You could never do that before
because there was no music. There was Bollywood, but now there’s all types of things happening.”
Modifying tastes is just one ambition;
breaking stereotypes is another. “It’s slow music, so people are like, ‘Reggae is just too chilled, we can’t go to a club and listen to reggae, man.’ They don’t have the perception that reggae can actually be dance music. It’s music that carries
a message all the time.” He believes the industry needs more live venues, more reggae deejays,
more bands and more people buying tickets for shows. “It needs to be a scene, it can’t just be us.”
And a scene seems to be forming. As well as hosting the Dub Station stage – the first festival
stage to play reggae, drum ‘n’ bass, jungle and hip
hop – at Bacardi’s touring NH7 Weekender (with stops in Delhi, Bangalore, Pune and Kolkata)
Mr Herbalist and Diggy Dang
they now have a weekly show called Simmer Down on India’s first alternative underground
‘untouchables’ living in squalor look on. They
and play music, drop beats, not bombs.”
station, Radio 79. But the biggest endorsement
With Bollywood music taking up over seventy
of all has to be opening for Snoop Dogg in New
per cent of the market, Reggae Rajahs are awak-
Delhi – “The energy was crazy, it was electric,”
Where Bob Marley once preached ‘One love’
ening a pop-sick alternative crowd. But the
says Mr Herbalist – with Snoop coming off stage
in a Jamaican context, the trio work to spread
nation wasn’t always hypnotised by song-and-
to embrace them with a little message (“Guess
the reggae gospel on home soil. In 2010, Reggae
dance routines; before Bollywood blew up, Indian
what? We love India!”).
Rajahs’ DJ MoCity paid credence to this legacy
ears were more attuned to the bitter-sweet clas-
But Mr Herbalist is adamant that India’s
when he told India’s Rolling Stone: “If you’re
sical genres of Hindustani and Carnatic, which
subcultural heyday has yet to come. “Yes, we’re
playing reggae music, you’ve got to educate
boast chant-like ragas and droning melodies that
pioneering reggae music, but what we’re really
people about what’s going on in the world. Don’t
border on meditational. It’s no surprise, then, that
enjoying is actually being part of this music scene
overlook what’s going on around you. Try to stop
reggae’s steady laid-back tempo resonates with a
that’s exploding,” he adds. “It’s small right now,
corruption, make peace.” Iraqi-born, he shared
disillusioned youth in a country where the very
we know everyone in the music industry, but in
how reggae shaped his perspective on the inva-
idea of subculture is still in its formative years.
twenty to twenty-five years we’ll look back on this
wave and smile to the boys, living a world apart though in touching distance.
sion: “I try to spread knowledge about peace and
“Today, you can be a musician and make
the war, and remind people that we should stop
money, maybe not make pots of it but you can live,”
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and be like, ‘Damn, that’s the period where music
really started happening in India.’”
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Devilz Tattooz tattoist Vivek Dauze
Vihar, a rich neighbourhood in South West Delhi.
Studios in West Delhi’s Rajouri Garden, on the outskirts of the city in Gurgaon, and here in GK soon followed. “When I started, I hardly did any
Devilz Tattooz
tattoos. Maybe fifteen a month,” says Lokesh.
“Now we have nine artists in three practices and
we do around 400 tattoos a month. It’s a very reliable career and it has taken me places.” In
the last two years he’s been to Europe and the US five times, guest-tattooing in Sweden, Denmark,
In a country founded on ancient belief systems, tattooist Lokesh Verma is battling traditional mindsets with modern body art.
Germany and France. Witnessing freedom of expression in foreign
lands has left a permanent mark on Lokesh, who
is trying to connect new-world attitudes with oldworld values. “My mother’s father had a big Lord Hanuman tattoo on his thigh. He got it from a
local mela [village fair] where they would do godna [burning skin with a needle]. No one knew what
sterilisation was, I’m talking about the 1940s. And
in the north east state of Nagaland, they have the ehind a black tinted glass door in a
matised in a society that values conformity over
whole head-hunters’ tribal ritual. When they kill
busy market square in Greater Kailash,
individual freedom.
a person they get a tattoo done.”
South Delhi, sits an unassuming shop
But at Devilz, things are changing. Founded
Technique and style may have come a long way
called Devilz Tattooz. Inside you’re
by Lokesh Verma, a self-taught tattooist from a
since his grandfather’s day, but most of Lokesh’s
welcomed by an air-conditioned chill,
conservative Hindu upbringing (parents who pray
clients still err towards tradition. “People in India
and a deeper sense of cool that permeates the
twice a day every day and a Masters in Business),
don’t go for new-school designs. There are just
place. Two giant wall murals depict the faces of
this unorthodox, thriving business is shaking
two kinds of tattoos that go down very well here
tattoo legends Paul Booth and Bob Tyrell. Despite
things up. “I wanted to do something different so I
– either religious things or something related to
creative bric-a-brac – dreamcatchers, wooden
got my first tattoo,” says Lokesh. “I got hooked and
family, like names or portraits.”
ornaments and Buddha statues – this clean and
then wanted to do it myself. Someone from the
There’s no doubt that India’s tattoo culture
clinical tattoo parlour is rated among the best in
States was coming over, so I got the kit imported
is booming – a survey taken by mydala.com in
India, frequented by the young and rebellious.
and started on myself and my friends as a hobby.
2013 showed a 100 per cent rise across a broad
I never thought it would be a profession.”
age range – but according to Lokesh, the change
Body art in India is neither foreign nor new. But while temporary henna tattoos are seen as
In 2005, Lokesh opened his first tattoo space
is superficial. “It’s changing just because of TV
a female birthright, permanent ink is still stig-
inside a friend’s salon in then-trendy Vasant
shows like Miami Ink,” says Lokesh. “They
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think it’s in fashion. Before, tattooing used to be
numerous younger denominations – religion
a very underground society. Not everyone had
plays a central role in India, influencing every-
the courage to walk into a tattoo shop, but now
thing from community and family life to busi-
people can see it on TV.”
ness transactions and judicial practices. Often
Where gunpowder grafts of sacred gods were once inscribed in the name of devotion, copycat
shrouded in rituals and mythology, superstition tends to play a part, too.
A-List tattoos – like Bollywood actress Priyanka
“The other day two girls and a guy were
Chopra’s ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’ – are repeatedly
getting tattooed on that station and there was
plagiarised on impressionable flesh. It’s not
a big calamity in India, you know the natural
the show of individualism Lokesh was hoping
disaster where thousands of people died?” says
for. Feeling like the bird has flown the nest and
Lokesh, referring to the cloudburst that flooded
crash landed, he’s exasperated by the hollowness
the northern state of Uttarakhand in June 2013,
of this revolution. “Boys will even come to get
reportedly killing 5,700 people and trapping
‘Mama’s Little Boy’. Can you believe that? It’s so
100,000 pilgrims in holy sites located in valleys
stupid,” says Lokesh. “I try to tell them to be more
devastated by landslides. “Between them they
original, but then they’ll get ‘Rahul’s Little Angel’
were asking, ‘Why did this happen?’ The guy
instead! I always try to encourage them to think
said they had removed Lord Shiva’s sculpture
[and challenge things], not just about tattoos but
from somewhere, so this is his wrath, this is
other things like religion.”
the way of revenge. And the girl was like ‘Yes,
Lokesh insists that it’s not about going
Lokesh Verma
definitely, this is bound to happen!’”
against the grain (“You can’t just go against the
His face visibly pained, Lokesh goes on: “So
Instead of taking to a soapbox, Lokesh tries to
mainstream; it’s too mainstream to go against
this is the younger generation! You would think
trigger change by doing what he loves. Alongside his
the mainstream”) but his desire to push social
people who are getting tattooed would be more
hand-picked team, he has introduced safer, fresher,
boundaries hints at a deeper frustration with
open-minded, but if they are thinking like this,
artisanal inking techniques to the trade; importing
conformist society. Or, as he puts it, “A land of
then there is no hope. It’s like, ‘Screw logic, and
previously unseen designs and colours and seeing
followers, all sheep.”
screw science, and whatever ecological changes
to it that women infiltrate the industry in an effort
caused the calamity.’ And this is because they
to bring delicate art forms like filigree to the books.
He explains: “If you are born in jail, you will grow up and find the walls very normal. So if you
are just blindly taught by their parents.”
“I think [tattooing] has become accepted now,
have been brought up to pray and do the rituals
Though he doesn’t impress his views on
not in the small towns and villages, but at least in the
of your religion, you will think it’s normal. It’s the
others (“I try not to talk too much because I’ll
cities,” says Lokesh, who boasts a portrait of his wife
family who have to let the child develop its own
have a conflict with the client”) Lokesh tries in
on his arm. “My clients tell me they see more and
lifestyle and beliefs.”
stealth to promote free-thought in his young
more tattoos on the streets. It’s becoming normal.
As a home to ancient faiths – Islam,
clientele. “They are not confident, this is one
There are definitely alternative cultures that are
Buddhism, Jainism and of course Hinduism,
thing I see in India. Peer pressure and parental
emerging and thriving in Delhi. Whatever is here,
which dates back as far as 7000BC, and
consent is very much important.”
it’s growing.”
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WEIRD SOCIETY EXPERIMENT De t r oi t noise r ocker s Wolf Eyes t ake inspir ation f r om t he sk id-r ow sides of Mid west life.
WORDS ANTHONY PAPPALARDO PHOTOGRAPHY ROMAIN BLANQUART
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WorldMags.net etroit-based three-piece Wolf Eyes have been nothing but prolific since their first releases in the late 1990s. Their discography is a dizzying trail of cassettes, CDRs and vinyl, many of which are decorated by
hand and personalised – a testament to their DIY roots in punk and skateboarding. They’d rather be out skating a ramp and meeting new people than perpetuating some dark image often associated with the
noise scene – a somewhat impenetrable subpocket of hardcore that sits at the genre’s most avant-garde outer-edge. Because, you see, Wolf Eyes don’t posture or take things too seriously. Scraping microphones over battered metal to produce a kind of dentist’s
drill free jazz, their live performances may verge on inaccessible, but their life vibe is all about being down. Down to skate, to hang – to live life to an improvised beat. Founded in 2000 by vocalist Nate Young, drummer John Olson and
erstwhile guitarist Aaron Dilloway (James ‘Crazy Jim’ Baljo joined as guitarist in February of this year), the band have a raw and heavy sound
that has seen them touring in support of primitive party man Andrew WK and feedback flirts Sonic Youth. It’s a combined love of skate, though, that
keeps them firmly grounded. When asked who they’d like to collaborate with in the skate industry, Crazy Jim says emphatically, “HUF! Those weed
socks are my favourite. I love going through the airport wearing those.” So rather than prodding them to pontificate their avant-garde sound,
or the significance of a four-year gap between their last release and 2013’s No Answer: Lower Floors, we decided to chat skating, skinheads and grotesque graphics instead. Which left more time to hang out and have fun.
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WorldMags.net There’s a perception that noise bands are comprised of brooding guys
Some skateboarders are critical of the amount of free public parks,
clad in black, but Wolf Eyes has a less serious side.
saying it makes skating too easy and accessible.
Crazy Jim: Why are people so serious man... seriously! [Laughs] C’mon!
John: The park I skate every day – Ranney Park in Lansing, Michigan – I
John: Now, especially that we have a group of three skaters, shit is
got a crew of friends there that don’t even know I play music. I met seven
more fun – we’re all on the same page. Everyone’s down to shred up
people in the session today, it brings people together. Half my homeboys
a spot. Today for example, we met up and skated. Ain’t no reason
at the skatepark in Lansing are going overseas to fight. They’re like, ‘Hey
to be some po-faced experimental cat, ain’t nobody wanna see that
man, I don’t know if I’m coming back.’ I’m not preaching patriotism or
shit. We saw these cats skating today and they were jammin’ and I’ve
anything like that, but that shit is heavy. If you’re just down there street
never been intimidated by a jammer, but kids today, they’ll put you in
skating a curb you wouldn’t run into that man. It’s just a cool environ-
your place. I forget who said it but there’s the saying, ‘Skating keeps
ment, it’s like anarchy – there’re no rules. People sell drugs there, make
you humble, because you’ll eat shit and die at any second.’ So fuck
out, cats are there from high school to smoke weed at lunch. It’s like a
it, why be serious?
weird society experiment, so I’m into it. The streets will never go away, you gotta know both – but hating free parks is ridiculous. It’s like saying
How was it working on the Born Liar video? It looks like a fun little
you have too much money in your bank account!
backyard ramp session.
Nate: There’s a larger culture in general [at parks], there’s a whole
Nate: That shit just kind of happened – it was organic. Our buddy wanted
counterculture that goes with it. One park we skated today is like a
to come by and get some shots of us rehearsing and Olson was going to
sculpture, it’s this crazy thing. There’s a lot of mainstreamism, but at
go to this ramp anyway, so we figured we’d go over and shoot the video.
the same time a lot of people think of skateboarding as a lifestyle and
It just happened to be what we were doing that day. This whole thing
not so much as a trendy thing or some basic activity. It’s a little heavier.
just happens to be what we’re up to, it just happens that way. We’re living
It’s a part of who we are.
an okay life I think.
John: We got in a big fight with a dude because he called skateboarding
John: We just skated two parks that you didn’t have to pay for or wear
“just a sport”. It’s not a sport at all; it’s like music – an individual
a helmet, there were all different types of people there and it was just
form of expression with style. There’s a lot of cats on the football
good vibes. To me that’s not just anarchy punk – that’s heaven. And
field with style, but at the end of the day that’s a sport. Skateboard-
right now we’re hanging out at our space and we don’t have any rules.
ing’s an individual expression. It’s what brought me to the table with
It’s cool. It’s pure freedom.
experimental music.
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Left to right: Crazy Jim, John Olson and Nate Young.
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What do you remember about your early days when you first got into
Which skaters do you currently like?
skating and found out it was an entire scene?
John: Jade Ryan, she’s my favourite ever. She’s a new shorty out of
John: I remember when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. One
Australia. She does raw old-school stuff, but it’s super – I hate to say
day in the summer a bunch of skinheads took me to a mini ramp and
it – female-based. It’s so amazing and creative. She’s got an amazing
to a gig with free beer and an experimental band called the Jesus Pigs
style. I heard about her because Mike Vallely was clapping about her,
played. It was the most insane day ever – you live your whole life for
saying how rad she is. She does tricks I’ve never seen before and her
days like that. That’s what changed the game for me, it was super
style is right on.
intense. It was like being brought into a whole other world that you
What would a Wolf Eyes graphic be and who would you choose to draw it?
didn’t know about.
John: I did one for Ecstatic Peace a few years ago, with the classic Ray Do you constantly skate while you’re on tour?
Barbee shape and the graphics were a web with spiders made out of
John: Oh yeah, this summer we got to skate FDR Park, we skated Tilburg
babies’ heads and shit – just mad disgusting – with a pink backdrop so it
Park in Holland, a bunch of parks in North Carolina. As many as we can,
was classic. I took my time on that shit.
it’s totally killer to have skaters on the road. I can’t tell you how many
Nate: I have one – it’s on my wall – but my old lady won’t let me ride it.
games of S.K.A.T.E we’ve played before and after gigs. That Endless
It’s a badass board.
Boogie band has got a rager in the band and we went at it head-to-head
John: That shit is grotesque!
with him. If you play S.K.A.T.E. Michigan-style you get three tries for
Wolf Eyes’ latest album No Answer: Lower Floors is out now on De
every trick.
Stijl Records. Who’s the best in Wolf Eyes at S.K.A.T.E then? John: There ain’t no best. Nate: I dunno, when you have a guy talking about getting three tries at a trick in a game of S.K.A.T.E.... it’s not about winning as much. I just wanna see them land that shit. John: I mean we can barely spell ‘skate’, so most of our games end at K and A.
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WAR IS ALWAYS PRESENT HERE Lebanese cartoonist Mazen Kerbaj is channelling a wry take on life in Beirut into hard-edged comics and bomb-fuelled jazz.
PHOTOGRAPHY TONY ELIeH ARTWORK MAZEN KERBAJ WORDS STEVE TURNER
t’s a fucking outlaw place, no one respects any laws here,” says Mazen Kerbaj, laughing and gesticulating at the
Beirut skyline from his sixth story apartment, discussing the insane cab ride I endured getting to his place. “Some-
times it’s funny, sometimes you go fucking crazy. We always say in Lebanon that outside is civilisation; you
have laws, people wait in line. But somehow, despite this, day-to-day life in Lebanon is easy, everything works.” Arriving in Beirut a week previously, the taxi journey
was the least of the challenges I faced trying to meet
with the Beirut-born artist. After weeks of emails arranging times and places, US intervention plans for neighbouring Syria almost triggered an evacuation of international visitors from the city, necessitating some last-minute renegotiations. “Same shit, different day,” Mazen muses by way of explanation. “It’s not something
we really worry about, war is always present here. When
we were young, we understood what was peace, but it was an abstract concept. It’s like we’re always living in-between wars in Beirut. We have times of peace, and we’re in a time of
peace now, but I always think that in this region, especially between Syria and Israel, you can never plan your future.” It’s easy to see how this ‘live today’ philosophy informs Mazen’s work. For years he spoke through Cette Histoire se Passé, a cartoon in Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhba that docu-
mented a life beset by war, gaining international recognition more recently with his Kafa-esque book on Beirut, Lettre à la Mère. Mazen’s comics depict everyday life in Lebanon
through satirical observations of the socio-political landscape, channelling a cultural situation that is surreal to
outsiders, but that’s been a reality his entire life. “In Lebanon there was no publisher of comics, no culture
of comics,” he ventures, kicking back on his sofa surrounded by a library of graphic novels and art. “So I published my
own books and sold them for a price that was suicidal. But they needed to exist. People were amazed that there is this guy drawing himself, drawing Lebanon, with drugs shit in there. I mean, most people thought it was a little fucked up.”
His books found a select audience and acted as a catalyst for a now thriving underground comics scene in Beirut. “Some very successful Lebanese artists told me that it was because of this they started doing comics.” Mazen continues. “I was never conscious that I was doing something big, but it gave an idea to many people.”
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WorldMags.net Despite his role in the city’s nascent comics scene, Mazen is possibly best known as an accomplished improv musician and the man behind Beirut’s annual experimental music
festival Irtijal, as well as independent record labels Al Maslakh (The Slaughterhouse) and Johnny Kafta’s Kids
Menu. “It all really started as a joke for me, I never thought I’d play music for real or become a musician. But my long-time musical partner, Sharif Sehnaoui, offered me a trumpet and
I got hooked. Eventually I thought that I could fuck around, do some experimental music, add tubes and shit. The funny
thing is that, while becoming more and more advanced in regards to this technique-less style, I really created my own musical language.” This language was never more realised than during the
July War in 2006, thirty-four days of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah paramilitary forces. It was during this time that Mazen established his improv credentials with the
composition of ‘Starry Nights’, a free-flowing soundscape that marches on for forty minutes. While Israel relentlessly bombed the city, Mazen took to his sixth-story balcony each
night to record against a bomb-filled backdrop, weaving his trumpet through explosions and car alarms, punctuating the
flow with, at times, an unbearable silence. The result is a portrait of life in war that most journalists will never realise.
“My wife would go to the bedroom and I would go outside to record,” he recalls. “I’m no hero, I was really shitting in my pants, but I thought, ‘Fuck it, I can defy the situation.’ I felt like I was defending my country and fighting back with my trumpet, but I was freaking out. This situation puts you in an emergency, and gives you an energy for working
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WorldMags.net because you have nothing else to do and you have to fight back. I was very lucky to live this as an artist; I was very
unlucky as a human being, it was terrible. But as an artist it was really a very intense period of work.”
Intent on pushing boundaries, Mazen is currently working on two projects fuelled by improv: Wormholes, an
audio-visual performance with partner Sharif Sehnaoui in which Mazen paints live in response to Sharif ’s guitar; and a minimalistic drawing style that sees him using both hands simultaneously.
"[Wormholes] is something I’ve been wanting to do with Sharif for a long time,” he explains, “but could never figure out how. I didn’t want the picture to exist at the end,
I wanted it to be gone like the music. I eventually found a way by drawing on glass, using inks and solvents with
light projecting up through the glass to create these shifting
patterns, and then wiping it away. I’ve also been developing a two-handed style of drawing for comics, one with a big
thick pen or brush and one is with a thin pen or pencil. People see me do it and say, ‘What the fuck, this is totally crazy.’ It’s kind of ambidextrous, but I’m not really. It’s just a really spontaneous, fast way to work.” It’s hard to contextualise Mazen’s place in Beirut which,
like the artist, is a city of contradictions; liberal yet governed
by deep cultural and religious values, although at times its hard to think of it actually being governed at all. “It’s really strange in all senses,” muses Mazen. “There is no separation between rich, poor, Arabic, French, religious
extremist, liberal. Everybody lives together in a very small area, and there is one street between rich and poor. Outside
it might be easier to see the ‘culture’, but we have no roots that everybody agrees on. So it’s a really strange situation. I have no idea what [Beirut culture] is or what it looks like.”
As we chat over strong coffee, it’s easy to pick out Mazen’s Arabic roots in the pictures that adorn his walls, modern
illustrations with a distinctly Middle Eastern styling. Internationally, he’s often cited as an Arab artist at the forefront of resistance culture in the Middle East, but does he feel comfortable with that tag? “I’m very reluctant to
use the term ‘Arab artist’. I am an Arab, for sure – I’m not questioning this – but I wish to see myself as an artist or a
musician, in that my work should be evaluated regarding the history of art and music, not smaller. What people expect from me as an Arabic artist is to talk about war, always. It’s normal; we are ‘exotic’. If I come and speak about spring, or
the flowers, I don’t fit anymore with the expectations of the audience. But we can also talk about other things, I mean, you also fall in love, you can also get sad, and you can also lose someone. Being Lebanese you are not just living the
war, you have day-to-day life. You eat, you shit – same as
everyone.” Steve Turner is the editor of comic and art magazine Your Days Are Numbered.
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M e e t t he s o und-m a k ing , ar t-j amming , r ap - spi t t ing doer s shy ing aw ay f r om chor eogr aphed cr e ati vit y t o m a ke i t up a s t he y go along. WorldMags.net
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HERMOT LONDON-BASED BAND
P HO T O GR A P HY : R O B I N ME L L O R
One of the truisms of life is that people never cease to surprise. Hermot is a band born on a whim, when a couple of skaters were walking home one night bemoaning the lack of sinister Finnish ballroom bands – as one does. Those skaters were Sami Seppala and Jussi Korhonen. Sami has long been a face on the European skateboard scene, with a proper job looking after the international wings of some of America’s most famous brands. Nowadays he fronts Hermot, an improvising, noir-soaked quartet who marry ululating Finnish folk with what sounds like forgotten scores from a stoned David Lynch dream sequence. When he is finally cornered in a rattly-window flat in Hackney, Seppala has that deliciously dangerous energy of a man who may scamper up a tree at any moment; the snaggle-toothed unpredictability of a natural frontman. Hermot has harnessed a hitherto hidden side of Sami’s otherworldliness which has the ability to disturb as much as enthral. Or, as he puts it, “Once we start playing and half the people leave, the other half really get into it.” The frequently improvised interplay between the slightly odd frontman and the assiduously cultivated jamming ability of the power section (led by a surprise turn from Finnish vert skating supremo Jussi Korhonen, with Mickey Gibbons – creative director of defunct but much-loved Adrenalin magazine – on drums) meld to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s been a slow-burning project,” says Sami. “I remember Steve Harris [of Iron Maiden] saying a band should be together for seven years before they are ready for getting out there. My confidence in improvising on stage only comes because I have total faith in how tight the band are. That confidence allows me to really let go. I feel like I’m standing there naked – like I’ve pissed on the stage. Sami may be hardwired for spontaneity (“What's that slogan? ‘Life starts just outside the comfort zone’”) but even he sees the benefits of taming that urge. “Now is the time for us to get a bit organised,” he says of their plans to take Hermot on tour. “Crack tango is ready to crawl out from the cave.” NIALL NEESON (Left) Sami wears Pigment Spray Black 511 jeans by LEVI'S® SKATEBOARDING COLLECTION.
facebook.com/hermotcracktango
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ADAM KAMMERLING POET AND RAPPER Tongue Fu isn’t your average poetry night. It’s what happens
when poetry grows a spine and melon-sized balls and leaves you screaming ‘holy fuck’.
We’re at London’s Rich Mix Theatre and there’s a threepiece band on stage – keyboard player, bassist, drummer
– plus a line-up of poets waiting in the wings. One steps onstage. Adam Kammerling tells the audience he has a poem
Adam wears Mora Fisherman jumper by FINISTERRE.
about a Conservative MP’s view on gay marriage, then turns to the band and says: “Guys, can you please be the tip of a wasp’s cock combined with the droning, inevitable march of the death of culture at the hands of the Conservatives?”
Keyboardist Arthur Lea doesn’t bat an eyelid. He just
nods to Riaan Vosloo, bassist, and drummer Patrick Davey. Davey starts a military drumbeat, and Lea gets the wasp’s
cock going with a droning synth. Kammerling begins reciting his poem – in time with the music. He and the band didn’t rehearse this. They had no idea what he was going to do.
But together, they make up a spoken-word performance
that takes the idea of improv and kicks it into orbit. It’s astonishing that something so polished could be made up on the spot.
Earlier in the Rich Mix bar, before the holy fucks landed,
Kammerling breaks down the collaboration. “They play what they feel, and you improvise with them,” he says. “Your
poems take on new forms. They’re not gonna play to your picture of the poem. You have to flip your poem over the
top of what they do. It’s scary, seat-of-your-pants stuff. Like, ‘Is this working? Is this working?’ But that’s the nature of improvisation, and when everyone knows it’s working, it’s just flying. That’s what you’re looking for.” Kammerling came up in the Brighton rap scene, and
moved to London to focus on his poetry. Chris Redmond,
Tongue Fu’s organiser and compere, soon booked him to do a slot. Boasting spoken-word artists Kate Tempest and Scroobius Pip as alumni, Tongue Fu has become a proving
ground for performance poets. “You feel the fear,” Kammerling says. “It’s less dramatic than it sounds – but you have to
let go of it to get in the zone.” R OB BO FFAR D adamkammerling.co.uk P HO T O GR A P HY : A D R IA N MO R R IS
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KASSIA AND DALIA ZERMON MUSICIAN, ARTIST
When Kassia and Dalia Zermon were kids, they’d hang out at their uncle’s London shop. He was a dressmaker by trade,
and the two unidentical twins would spend hours playing with the buttons and materials that littered the workspace.
They’re a lot older now. And although they’ve headed off
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in different creative fields – Kassia to music, Dalia to visual arts – there’s a common thread that binds them. They both thrive on work that is unpredictable, free-flowing, and made
up on the spot. “It’s an adventure,” says Kassia, better known as musician Bunty. Her one-woman live shows – which see her recording vocals on a loop station, then improvising off this soundscape with a keyboard and ukelele – always go
off in unexpected directions. “It’s so flexible – you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s about trying not to control everything. Improvisations are the best when I’ve totally let
go. I have to be some sort of vessel.” Dalia uses many of the same ideas in her work at Paint Jam, a workshop series that gives people the tools and envi-
ronment they need to create art, even if they don’t have an artistic bone in their body. She uses clever psychological
tricks to get people to experiment – getting them to make repeated marks on canvas, for example, and then having
them explore a particular mark they’re drawn too. “The way that I do things at Paint Jam is all about creative free-flow and experimentation,” she says. “I believe anyone can do it.
I see it repeatedly, and it’s a nourishing thing.”
That they both ended up creating careers out of improvisation, despite going in different directions, may come down to a family trait. “Our uncle’s a dress designer, another uncle is
a shoe designer, our aunty who we grew up with was always
Dalia (left) and Kassia (right) wear jumpers by RVCA.
singing songs to us,” explains Kassia. “We grew up in a fairly
creative environment without really realising it.” ROB BOFFARD paintjamlondon.co.uk facebook.com/bunty.music
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WorldMags.net DEFFINITION RAPPER AND EMCEE Ask anyone in the UK’s subterranean rap battle scene, ‘Who’s
the best at spitting lyrics on the fly?’ and the answer will see
you catching the first train to Newcastle, to meet a quick-witted lyricist who calls himself Deffinition. Rap battles, contrary to popular opinion, are a lot less improvised than one may think, with many contenders
spouting heavily scripted verses, meticulously prepared
weeks in advance to match an opponent’s strengths, weaknesses and foibles. But every so often, things take a different turn. Flashback to late 2012. The UK battle league Don’t Flop is celebrating its fourth birthday with a series of big name battles at London club Cable. Onstage is Mark Grist - a teacher-turned-battler who went viral online after he battled
(and thumped) one of his students. Facing him is Deffinition, PH O TOGR APH Y: A D R IA N MO R R IS
a veteran emcee from Newcastle with a reputation for hot bars. Both, in honour of the occasion, are suited up - Grist in a black number, Deff in light grey. Deffinition wins the coin flip and tells Grist to go first. At the end of his verse, Grist fingers his jacket. “These are decent threads, man,” he says, and points at Deff ’s clothes. “Those are Barack Obama’s granddad’s pyjamas.” Big laughter, big applause. Until Deffinition, confident as hell, spits back: “These are decent threads, man – tailor-
made. Yours are dark, and I’m about to put your bitch through Fifty Shades Of Grey.”
Freestyling in a battle is not easy. In the middle of a crowd, facing an aggressive opponent with three memorised verses
knocking around your head, it takes a little something extra
to pull off. Deffinition (born Paul Tweddle) is one of a fistful of rappers who are known for it, along with Dekay, Shuffle T, Eurgh and Zen. A lot of it, he says, is to do with experience. He’s been in Don’t Flop for five years, and has been battling for six. “It’s about being relaxed,” he says. “As soon as you start
panicking, you’re going to suffer. But if you’re like, ‘I know what I’m doing, and I have enough stuff in my head to get me through this,’ then you’re going to be alright.”
Early in his career, Deffinition put a huge amount of time
into scripting his verses, but quickly found that he was better off relying on the words bouncing around inside his head.
“I’m blessed with a good memory, and I’ve never choked in a battle yet,” he says. “I don’t write anything down. If
it’s all in your head, there’s a lot you can pull from. I can remember bars I had three years ago, and I can tie them
into the situation around me.” R O B B O F FA R D dontflop.com
Paul wears Coachy Jacket and Crewneck Fleece by LEVI'S® SKATEBOARDING COLLECTION.
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TOM ROGERSON P HO T O GR A P HY : R O B IN ME L L O R
MUSICIAN, THREE TRAPPED TIGERS If you're looking for a predictable evening of live music, Proof Positive is probably not for you. Explaining his new improvisation night at London's Servant Jazz Quarters, Tom
Rogerson – of instrumental noise-rock band Three Trapped Tigers - says eagerly, "You really don't know where the hell it's going to go. You're on the edge of your seat because it
could go wrong at any moment." Tom started the semi-regular event because his 'day job' was not fulfilling his craving for improvisation. Watching Three Trapped Tigers play live, you would be forgiven for
Tom wears Polperro jumper by FINISTERRE and shirt by PATAGONIA.
thinking the frenetic experience was wholly improvised - and many people do - but actually it's all a tightly controlled affair.
"The improvised element in the band has dropped away, which in the early days I was hoping would be a bit more foregrounded,” says Tom. But it was a Tigers gig at the Punkt
festival in Norway in September 2012 that set in motion the thought process that gave birth to Proof Positive.
The innovative Punkt festival forms the centre of gravity of the vibrant Norwegian electronic improvisation scene,
and performances on the main stage are remixed live by musicians on another stage who add their own improvisatory elements. Tom wanted to open a space for similar musical experi-
mentation in London, so he teamed up with indie label founder Simon Morley – whose experimental label, Blood
'n' Biscuits, is the perfect home for TTT – and together they started the night. Proof Positive borrows heavily from
Punkt in terms of both format and ethos; fusing acoustic instruments – usually live drummers and Tom's piano - with
analogue electronics, such as modular synths. "The crucial thing is you're not just pressing play, you're keeping it live and there's a possibility of collapse at any
point - nothing is going to bail you out." It might seem odd for a musician to flirt so enthusiasti-
cally with catastrophe but Tom recognises, 'the possibility of failure is essential'. “Improvisation serves a really important
purpose,” says Tom. “But modern culture puts emphasis on
the product - the finished article – rather than the uncertainty, fragility and strangeness of improvisation." In our increasingly pre-packaged and risk-averse society,
the success of Proof Positive clearly reveals a yearning by a growing number of people for more authentic, less predictable experiences. A L E X K IN G proofpositivegig.com
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WorldMags.net LUCY ADAMS S K AT E B O A R D C O A C H UK shredder, coach and all-round skate advocate Lucy Adams gets just as much satisfaction from you landing your
tricks as she does from hers. Well, almost. The bundle of kick-push energy – who this year won the Vans UKSA skate championships, The Ledge UK Miniramp
Champs, The Unicorn Girls Skate Jam and more – is just passionate about creating environments where all kinds of people can experiment and have fun with their own style
of skateboarding. “Improvisation is one of the fundamental aspects of
skateboarding,” says Lucy, who currently coaches a weekly, female-only skateboard session in Brighton (called Brighton
She Shredders) as well as other group sessions and private classes. “It's creative and spontaneous in its raw form and you get to see this a lot when in coaching sessions. Participants are learning to take in quite a lot of info and they may
together. Once they start to progress you can see them go
down a ramp and start to improvise when they reach the other side by adding something else they’ve learned to their line. The formation of lines is wicked to see!” Lucy started coaching in 2002 after getting involved
in some Powerpuff Girls Skate Workshops at the Sprite Urban Games. She has lesson plans that she refers to but generally each session is unique, encouraging the newbies
to go with their instincts. “I try to arm them with all the
P HO T O GR A P HY : A D R IA N MO R R IS
have a few skills but not necessarily be able to link them
knowledge about a specific trick and how it should feel and look and then they have more confidence,” she says. “Then I encourage the rider to go for it but offer them some advice
Lucy wears Rigid Indigo 504 jeans by LEVI'S® SKATEBOARDING COLLECTION.
on how and when to bail safely.” But is coaching at odds with something that’s usually
profoundly intuitive and self-taught? “The type of teaching I’m doing with novice skaters is much more about giving tips
and advice to help them learn the basics quicker,” says Lucy,
now thirty. “Those imperfections and the development of a unique style still happens as it takes a lot of time to learn to really skate! Giving someone a hint on where to put their foot in order to master a certain move is what happens all
the time during skating anyway. The environment in which we do it just tends to build people’s confidence, especially with a lot of females. It provides a good learning atmosphere
and skaters buzz off each other’s stoke.” So what keeps the supportive coach motivated to keep
helping others get their lines? “When people get really stoked on the tricks they learn and when I hear those words, ‘I
never thought I could do that!’” she says. “It’s good to see people overcoming their fears. Also, shredding the gnar!
Pushing myself and making myself ache all over after a long session. Also, just the skatepark vibes and the good
people.” SHEL L EY J ONES lucyadamsskatecoach.com
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SICILY SKATE PHOTOGRAPHY Kévin Métallier WORDS ALEX KING
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Photographer Kévin Métallier chases a continental crew across the Mediterranean isle.
A
s winter descends on Europe and the best street spots are blanketed
But while everyone else gets to experiment and play around in new
by rain or snow, Sicily is one of the last places to hold onto some
spaces, for Kévin each unexplored location comes with a set of chal-
semblance of skate-friendly weather. The picturesque island in the
lenges. “When you shoot skateboarding, your photo studio is the street.
centre of the Mediterranean is also one of the last undiscovered
In the street you can’t just do whatever you want, you have to deal with
skate paradises. With that in mind, Nixon gathered together a continental
the people and the environment every single day.”
crew – Alex Mizurov (Germany), Alain Goikoetxea (Basque Country), Denny
Like all the other dynamics at play, the light is in constant flux. Kévin has
Pham (Germany), JB Gillet (France), Antony Lopez (France) and Javier
to continually react to situations on the fly, but when it all comes together
Sarmiento (Spain) – threw them under the gaze of French photographer
in that fleeting split-second, a single moment can be immortalised for all
Kévin Métallier, rented a villa outside the coastal town of Catania, and set
time. His favourite is a switch backside tailslide where Antony Lopez just
about exploring what the island had to offer in way of concrete landmass.
escapes the bright ball of light flooding the frame from the sun as it peers
Over two weeks in October, the Nixon crew hit every corner of the island,
over the top of a stair set. “The art is in mastering these different parameters,
taking in ancient cities and tourist-friendly beaches, all under the shadow
then finding a good angle and playing with the light, which is the crucial,
of Mount Etna, the active volcano that dominates the vista. Mauro Caruso,
indispensable element,” he explains.
a Sicilian skater and gatekeeper to the ancient isle’s dopest spots guided
So, is skate photography, especially in unknown lands, the ultimate
them on their voyage of discovery through one of Europe’s most beautiful
improv act? “I would say pure skateboard photography is more about
but still largely unknown skate destinations.
adaptation, but improvisation is really important for reportage or lifestyle
Travelling is all about discovery, relying on your instincts to find hidden
treasures. And seeking out the possibilities of new environments, as Kévin
shots,” says Kévin. “You need to be ready to catch the best moments at any time, under any circumstances.”
explains, is what skateboarders do best. “We view places through a unique
Responding to the environment and adapting to unexpected situations
lens, looking at cities, urban landscape and architecture in a wholly different
is essential to documenting skate action. But for Kévin, keeping an eye
way,” he says. “I don’t think you find many tourists who get fascinated by
out for quieter moments is just as important. “After a few days of long
sets of stairs, street gaps or handrails.”
and intense skate sessions there’s nothing better than just cruising
In Rosolini the crew skated a huge plaza made up of different levels of banks and ledges that kept them rolling all day. “It’s just one of those
through the city with my camera, getting lost in the middle of nowhere and capturing moments of life.”
spots,” explains Mauro casually. “You go there and you stay all day – skating,
drinking beers and just chilling.”
nixon.com
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J o o s t Va n d e b r u g ‘ s i n t i m a t e p h o t o p r o j e c t captures the cobbled-together community of the lost boys of Bucharest. WORDS MATEI ROSCA PHOTOGRAPHY Joost Vandebrug
Romania is a country with a troubled present and a violent
“The whole thing just happened,” says Joost. “I’m not a
past. Far from healed, it still bears scars from Nicolae
documentarian in the sense that now I will be looking for
Ceauşescu’s totalitarian communist regime. Two of the deeper
the next project. This one will stick with me way beyond the
ones are the failing child protection and healthcare systems.
borders of conventional documentary. I have never tried to
Despite a lack of data, charities estimate that 1,000-1,200
protect myself from going in too deep. And it’s too late for
minors aged between four and eighteen are sleeping and
that now, anyway. I never thought about my role as a docu-
living rough in the city of Bucharest. About half are thought
mentarian because I don’t see myself that way. I do think a
to be Roma. Drug, alcohol abuse, hepatitis, AIDS and other
lot about what it means to be their friend, and I’m taking my
health problems are rampant. They are constant targets of
responsibility in this friendship.”
paedophiles and violent policing and they survive mainly
off charity, petty crime and panhandling.
Joost’s introduction came via Costel, a “quiet and timid
kid” with heaps of street cred. Homeless since the age of
But, like every story that starts with dark statistics, the
six, Costel knows the nooks and crannies of this patch of
full picture is less black and white. In a society that has
Bucharest better than anyone. Now he’s sixteen and his
failed them, a group of homeless boys have forged their own
mind is set on singing his way to success, like his hero Babi
semblance of community in the tunnels beneath Bucharest’s
Minune who’s now topping charts after warbling on the dusty
notorious train station, Gara de Nord. And in 2010, an
boulevards as a homeless child.
unassuming fashion photographer from Rotterdam found himself welcomed into their world.
“It was so special what happened,” says Joost of the firsttime he met Costel, near the tunnels where the boys live.
Joost Vandebrug first met orphans Costel, Nicu, Liviu,
“To me it was out of this world. I knew I needed to stick to
Stefan and Bruce Lee while researching another gig in the
this.” Costel introduced Joost to the others and they found
Romanian capital. For the past three years he’s become a part
ways to connect despite the language barrier. “We just used
of their community, spending time with them below ground,
gestures and about three Romanian words that I had learned
documenting their lives and building a visual narrative that
and kept using in different ways,” says Joost.
he’ll soon self-publish as a photobook titled Cinci Lei (The
The kids were initially sceptical of Joost’s openness (“At
the beginning they thought I was just another foreigner
Lost Boys Project).
When we meet at The Clapton Hart in gentrified Hackney,
there,” he says) until an unexpected event became his initia-
Joost looks bewildered to find a Romanian reporter, asking in
tion. While hanging out with Bruce Lee, the heavily tattooed
earnest about the ‘Lost Boys’ of Bucharest. “Many Romanians
older alpha male of the group, Joost was arrested by the
are aggressive towards this, they say I give Romania a bad
police. “They took us to the station and questioned us. After
name,” Joost explains over a pint of cold beer.
a while they had to let us go as they didn’t have anything on
The question of partiality is a pertinent one. A fashion
us.” From that point on, Bruce Lee’s trust deepened and
photographer documenting the homeless and disenfran-
he protected Joost when things got tense. “Nobody was
chised in Eastern Europe is bound to raise a few eyebrows.
robbing me and everyone kept away from me because of
But far from glamourising life on the margins or rendering it
him,” he confides.
‘exotic’, the images Joost captured seem to fill a void, plugging
Over the next few weeks, Joost spent every day with the
a gap left by the media’s detached reporting with intimate
group. The kids would pass time at Gara de Nord by hustling
snapshots of friendship and adolescence that anyone can
for money and huffing Aurolac – an addictive mixture of paint
relate to. But objectivity, in the classic sense, was never on the
and thinner with narcotic effects – out of plastic bags. “I’d
cards for Joost, just like Hunter S. Thompson never worried
just sit there with them for hours on end,” says Joost. “It’s
where his Gonzo words strayed.
their life and I wanted to be a part of it.”
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The first one to accept Joost was Nicu, then thirteen.
At sixteen, he’s never been to school a day in his life. Being
Over time the friendship evolved, with Joost developing a
a Roma kid living in and out of orphanages, Nicu’s lack of
sense of responsibility that would test his position as an
documentation meant he couldn’t enrol in school, but Joost
objective documentarian. “I want them to be safe,” he says.
and his carer made the necessary arrangements.
“Last year I met this lady who runs a dog shelter. I love
Today Nicu is a happy pupil, as happy as he ever was
dogs, and I love Bucharest for all its stray dogs [64,000 this
on the street. In fact, what makes Nicu extraordinary even
September, according to the council] and because I can’t
among his peers is his sheer exuberance. Even when faced
talk all the time, sometimes I just hang about with the dogs.
with imminent death, he still found ways to laugh. “When
So anyway, I met this lady who feeds them and takes the ill
I took him to hospital, in the back of the car you could see
ones away and I started to help her out. She had this space,
him drifting in and out of consciousness, that’s how sick he
but it was all run down so when winter came I said, ‘Why
was,” says Joost. “And every time he woke up he would babble
don’t we build a room here? I’ll pay for it, get all the shit out
joyfully then slip back out of it again.”
and make a little room.’ So I got the kids, we cleaned it up,
During that trip, Joost rounded up the group and brought
put the floor in, a ceiling, windows, doors, a bunk bed. This
them to visit Nicu in hospital – but they weren’t allowed in.
was three months ago.”
Nicu came down and used all the strength he could muster to
Joost may have had the best intentions but of the six
give Bruce a warm hug. “That moment was one of the most
or so people for whom the room was built, only Nicu and
beautiful I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Joost. He talks of the
Stefan made it their permanent home. The others opted
experience with admiration in his voice. “I saw Nicu going
for life back in the tunnels. But it hasn’t stopped Joost from
from a healthy boy living on the street, then getting very ill.
involving himself in their world. During a lengthy visit last
I saw him [nearly] die in the hospital, pretty much nothing
year, concerned with Nicu’s deteriorating health, he took
left of him, then bouncing back and going to school.”
him to hospital. Nicu was hospitalised and diagnosed with
Though not all the boys’ stories have turned out that
AIDS. “I was there for two weeks making sure he didn’t run
well (Joost refrains from details, but admits they’re “not
away again, because he had run away before,” says Joost. “He
quite there yet”) there seems to be a sense of order to their
couldn’t get his head around being free then being bound
improvised community. According to the boys, orphanages
to bed in hospital.”
are rife with bullying from other children and apathy or even
Since then, Nicu’s AIDS-related illness has weakened
abuse from the carers, whereas the tunnels are a sanctuary
him greatly and he needs plenty of rest. But having a room,
where they know they won’t be harmed. If Bruce Lee can
and a female carer who makes sure he takes his medication,
help it, that is. As the fatherly figure of the group, Bruce
has provided enough stability to embark on an education.
takes a hands-on approach to ensure they have a home.
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He’s rigged the tunnels with electricity from the main panel,
What they’re missing out on, though – and what Joost seems
installed fans to cool them during sweltering summers under
to have captured – is the compassion these children show
the tarmac, and improvised a cement bath filled by pierced
towards each other and towards the animals that share their
hot water pipes. There are even disco lights, a DVD player
space. “For a group of young adolescent boys living on the street
and an LCD screen for entertainment.
with no parental guidance and nobody telling them what to
It may have taken a stint in prison for Bruce to rise to this
do, they show absolutely no sign of aggression,” says Joost.
role; he went in addicted to Aurolac, says Joost, but seems
“They’re very close to each other, physically close, very kind and
to have emerged with a renewed sense of responsibility.
sweet. They’re not afraid of a hug or a kiss. They express a lot
Today, he’s the closest they’ve got to a foster parent and,
of affection and they realise that violence is a luxury. If you get
in the complete absence of any guardian, the head of their
hurt you’ll need healthcare and that is not available to them.”
self-made society. But that also makes it difficult to get them
Romania’s disenfranchised youth are symptomatic of
off the streets. Try, as some have, and “you’re taking them
complex issues. A hangover from Ottoman times, worsened
away from a place where they have finally found friendship,
by the obsessively bureaucratic communist regime, small-fry
family, care, some safety,” explains Joost, having learned
corruption wreaks havoc in the post-revolutionary society.
that lesson the hard way after trying to intervene. More
Being Romanian, it’s an issue I’m familiar with and face
often than not, the boys run back when they’re removed
casually. Joost, on the other hand, tries not to comment. “It’s
from one another and put into yet another alien place. “Who
the culture of the place, not mine, so I’m not judging it,” he says.
are you to tell take them away from that and tell them to go
But perhaps his work is comment enough. Beneath the
to school every day and to go to church on Sunday? It’s just
black pavement lies a makeshift world, where innocent
not a good deal. It’s not fair and it’s not respectful either.”
faces are brushed out of sight. They’re coming of age as
Joost has picked up other lessons from the boys. “Friend-
the rich world above them is also maturing, moving apart
ship to me is when a man doesn’t have food, I’ll give him
from one another like the steam and the rain.
what I’ve got even if it’s very little,” Costel told Joost one
“I know this weird part of Bucharest that not even
day. It’s a lesson of compassion that we could all do well to
Romanians know,” says Joost. “I can’t even remember
heed. Walk around Bucharest and you’ll see ‘respectable
going to a café for a cup of coffee. All I know is the Bucharest
citizens’ giving ‘street children’ maximum berth.
of Gara de Nord.”
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“Los Angeles is really exotic and not like anywhere else on earth. It has this glitzy side a n d a l s o y o u s e e a s a d s i d e .” Sofia Coppola
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Rad Bodies and Heads
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WorldMags.net N O WA V E N O W
Byron Coley Music critic Byron Coley helped tame the frenetic 1980s into comprehensible indie canons through corrosive wordplay that unfurled with the energy it sought to describe. Interviews, reviews and features in epoch-making mags like Forced Exposure and Spin evolved into collabs and friendships and Coley's words have appeared on liner notes for everyone from Dinosaur Jr. to Sonic Youth. He co-writes a column for Arthurmagazine r with Thurston Moore, a listicle-style breakdown of their joint knowledge of underground culture. In 2008, these encyclopedic insights manifested as a co-authored book, The No Wave movement was a dark flash of underground No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. energy occurring between the years 1976 and 1980. New York New York 1976-1980. Now, at the City was where most of the musicians, artists and filmmakers dawn of 2014, Coley’s joining the lived at the time, but there were parallel movements in cities dots from that point to the present like Berlin, Melbourne and Zurich. The No Wave aesthetic tense. There’s no one better placed revolved around the punk-derived notion that technique was to pick apart our cultural landscape shit. Bands were assembled with members who knew more and drop a peg on the people and about painting than playing music. Films were created by firstplaces that still embody the No time directors using first-time actors. Art was spraypainted or Wave way. magic-markered or pasted onto public walls. It was a weird, urban explosion of creativity among a small group of people, and it didn't even really have a name until it was almost over. The term ‘No Wave’ was a throw-away joke used in an interview with Lydia Lunch, a wise-ass runaway whose combo, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was one of the scene’s most implausible stars. By the time Eno put together the No New York compilation, most of the original bands had dissolved, and many of the musicians (who had now learned how to play) were attempting to create dance music. But the basics of the raw, art-damaged impulse near the heart of No Wave continues to make its influence felt. It also provided the initial spark that led directly to bands like the Birthday Party, Einsturzende Neubauten and Sonic Youth. Here’s some random evidence of its living continuum.
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WorldMags.net MAGIK MARKERS This New England trio was unknowingly formed in adherence to a couple of the basic tenets of No Wave bands – the guitarists didn’t know how to play, and they were women. The No Wave bands were notably democratic in their inclusion of female members as players – Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus, Nancy Arlen and Connie Burg in Mars, Ikue Mori in DNA, Pat Place and Adele Bertei in the Contortions, Nina Canal in Tone Death, etc. At their debut show, the two women in Magic Markers looked like they had never even held guitars before, and they combined this truly artastic befuddlement with a roaring blare of sound. Their approach would mature a bit sonically over the years, but it was replaced by overwhelming on-stage aggression, equal to the example set by the Contortions’ James Chance when he attacked Village Voice music writer Robert Christgau during a live set at NYC's Artist’s Space one night in 1978. The Markers are actually a bit calmer now, but they continue to generate Discordianist energy galore.
PHOTOGRAPHY CHRISTEL GRIGNON
JIM JARMUSCH Although during the No Wave era, Jarmusch was thought of as a musician more than a filmmaker, he is one of the most notable directors to have brought a No Wave sensibility to his ouevre. It might seem questionable to ascribe much weight to a film movement that was birthed primarily because one purveyor of stolen goods on the Lower East Side came into possession of a truckload of high end Super 8 cameras, but what the hell. Watching that beautiful scene where Bill Murray stalls in front of his television in Broken Flowers always reminds me of the chain-smoking astronauts in the 1978 film, Men in Orbit, by John Lurie (better known as a painter, musician and actor). There are also glimmers of No Wave cinema that pop up throughout the movies of the Mumblecore directors and filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, who employs musicians as actors. Sure there’s a wide gulf between Will Oldham's stillness in Old Joy and the menacing appearance of the Cramps as a gang who hang out a CBGBs in Amos Poe’s The Foreigner, but the model remains No Wave eternally.
PHOTOGRAPHY MILES RADOSAVAC
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THE JULIE RUIN Kathleen Hanna’s newest band may not be quite as No Wave damaged as Bikini Kill was, but its rawness is a distinct move in that direction. The whole Riot Grrrl movement was far more politically oriented than No Wave (which was ultimately as nihilistic about politics as it was about everything else), but initial Riot Grrrl bands – Bratmobile, Bikini Kill, et al. – were far more similar to No Wave bands like UT (an all-female trio who rotated instrumental chores after each song) and their scum-rock children like Pussy Galore (whose Julia Cafritz was an insanely primitive guitarist) than anything else you could name. Julie Ruin’s music shares much of the dissonance with its progenitor, and Kathleen’s new image recalls Lydia Lunch’s approach with 8-Eyed Spy, the first unit she ever had with which she interacted at all with the audience. With earlier bands – Teenage Jesus and Beirut Slump – attendees were 'lucky' to get even a sneer out of Lydia. 8-Eyed Spy actually played encores now and then. Surely The Julie Ruin follow suit.
PHOTOGRAPHY CHRIS SIKICH
BANKSY Most people associate the transition of graffiti from public nuisance to upscale-gallery-bait with hip hop culture, and that's certainly part of the story. But of the original Big Three of the genre’s upscale trajectory – (arguably) Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Futura 2000 – only Futura was really associated with hip hop. Basquiat had a noisy rock band that verged on No Wave called Gray (also including Vincent Gallo at times) and Basquiat was always hanging around Tier 3 and the Mudd Club when No Wave bands were on stage. Tier 3 was probably the closest thing No Wave musicians had to a clubhouse, and Basquiat once did a show of his drawings there. I seem to recall they were available for the taking and I’m still kicking myself for not filling my pockets. Haring also curated an exhibition space at the Mudd Club (another No Wave clubhouse). Without their examples it’s unclear if street art would have ever had the impact it did. Which would have meant that no one would actually care who the hell Banksy even is.
PHOTOGRAPHY GEORGE HIROSE
And maybe that’s the way Lydia Lunch would like it, but surely you are made of sweeter stuff. Like Madonna. Who actually had a No Wave-ish combo with the Braun brothers before they hooked up with Swans’ Michael Gira. But she never acknowledges the band, so I guess we won’t either. Byron Coley
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WorldMags.net BEYOND NOISE
Ikue Mori
Drummer, composer and graphic designer Ikue Mori grew up in Tokyo but came into her own in New York City, at the tailend of the 1970s and the height of punk. She joined Arto Lindsay – a familiar face in the burgeoning East Village art scene – as a member of No Wave act DNA and became an experimental centrepiece at Mudd Club, CBGB’s and Tier 3. These days, as a creator of percussive, broken beats and diaphanous, unmappable soundscapes, her music seems far removed from the unschooled noise and energy of Manhatten's Lower East Side. But a love for improvisation remains. We skyped for nineteen minutes and twenty seconds from Tokyo, where she had just completed a solo tour of Japan. How would you describe your work? I am a musician and a composer. I use noise, I make noise, personal sounds that I cannot describe. I also make songs. My main instrument is the computer, but for some reason I am categorised more often as a ‘jazz musician’ rather than someone involved in ‘electronica’. I don't often get invited to sonar-type festivals for example, but more often to jazz events and improvisation happenings. I find that interesting. I write and I improvise. Often, if I am invited by another artist I will improvise, but if I am playing solo the material is composed. I also make visuals and construct stories using the sounds and the images that I make. My inspiration is a mixture of my own personal experience and also a lot of visual art, particularly Japanese classical paintings and the stories to which they refer. I think of myself as making imaginary soundtracks, or soundtracks for films that have never existed.
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WorldMags.net Is there room for an improvised impulse in contemporary popular music? For me improvisation is used to make songs more unpredictable. I like to use improvisation within composed music. More and more I think there is an experimental element in popular music. When I make music, and when I was making music with DNA in the early days, we were not thinking like, ‘I am making noise.’ We were making music, expressing things that we were influenced by and that continue to influence us. We weren’t trained musicians, but I don’t want to be called a ‘noise musician’ because to be categorised like that is useless. Of course we make noise, of course we make a sound, but for us it is always music. What was it like in 1977 for someone like you, a Japanese punk girl, to turn up in NYC? When I went to New York I wasn’t a musician, or really interested in being a musician. I was just there to see what was happening in the scene. We’d hang out at CBGB's and Max Kansas City. I was with my boyfriend who was a guitar player and we were just hanging. We kind of stood out because there weren't too many Asian punks in New York at the time! I think it was James Chance and Lydia Lunch who approached us first. They were starting a band called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and they needed a bass guitar player so my boyfriend got the gig. Then some other people asked me what I did and I just said I don’t do anything. ‘Okay,’ they said, ‘you can be our drummer!’ By chance I realised I could make a 4/4 beat and that was that.
PHOTOGRAPHY SCOTT IRVINE
Had you had any access to rock 'n' roll, jazz or improvised music up to that point? Well, growing up in Tokyo in the 1960s we had access to American culture. It was everywhere, really, and by the time I went to New York American TV programmes, rock music and films were very popular. I was particularly a fan of the Velvet Underground. I never really thought I would have been a musician, though, particularly in Japan. In Japan the rock scene is absolutely dominated by men – there were hardly any female musicians around. I had been surrounded by musicians, but it was very intimidating. Being a rock musician seemed impossible for me. But when I got to New York I met people like Lydia Lunch and Connie Bug who were artists, but were playing instruments and starting their own bands. You’d never hear them talking about technique or how to play – it was all about the idea, about doing what you wanted to do, expressing what you wanted to express. It was very liberating for me. Do you think that women have maintained that sort of liberated position in the music industry? Well, in the experimental music scene all over the world they certainly have. There are women drummers, on computers, guitarists. Experimental music has never relied on women being sexy in the same way that pop or rock music has. How influential do you think the No Wave scene really was? Well, it surprises me how often it is referred to and how often it comes up as a discussion. I have a long, long history in music since that time and it’s a bit annoying sometimes. It was an important part of my life and my development as an artist but even though I have moved on at so many levels, for some I will always be the drummer from DNA.
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WorldMags.net PHYSICAL SOUNDS
Jake Meginsky Originally hailing from Springfield, Massachusetts, experimental musician Jake Meginsky now lives and works between New York City and the arty suburb of Northampton, MA. Invention is at the heart of Jake’s performances before he even strikes a note. He builds his own customised instruments and electronic circuitry, combining them with percussion, modular drum machines and sampling software. Constantly transgressing the boundaries between acoustic and electronic, analogue and digital, Jake floats with similar ease between performing, composing, sound installation and live scoring. In a dazzling array of projects, side projects, labels and collaborations, Jake has worked with everyone from Milford Graves and Bill Nace to nmperign and the Emergent Improvisation Ensemble. But whatever the nature of his output, improvisation is always the essence of Jake’s art. Instruments For me, acoustic instruments and electronics are always in dialogue, even though I rarely play them together. I often approach my drums with electronic music in mind. Alternatively, when I make music or sound installations with electronics I am always trying to find ways to physicalise the sound. I am continually fascinated by the way elements from electronic or computerised music production can illuminate the way to new approaches as an instrumentalist, and vice versa. Sound and Body I have been working with my friend and mentor Milford Graves on his project recording the sounds of the body. He has found a huge array of rhythmic and tonal variation in his collection of heart, circulatory and nervous system recordings. I turn to these and other biological recordings for inspiration every time I play, compose, build a circuit, or design an instrument. I weigh my music against the quality of these sounds, which every human being has access to and can freely incorporate into music or other forms of expression. Composition I see improvisation and experimentation as the foundational way of doing or making anything – art, music, having a conversation, making a meal, walking – not as a discreet mode of creativity. Different situations call for different approaches. In my experience, it's best to just try and find some music; how
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that happens depends on the people present and the environment. Creative expression seems to exist on a continuum that includes structure, experimentation, preparation, openness and emergence. Performance Most performances I have seen are improvisational on some level. Everything in the world is always changing. Any time something is created, there is an element of reacting to the moment, no matter how much is planned. Making music is like this as well. Even with the idea of set scores, notation and other pre-determined plans, improvisation is present. Any performer can show up to the venue feeling tired and angry after a bad day, but once they begin to play they have to find a way to bring the music to life, finding the truth in the performance for that particular night. In a sense, this takes the same type of improvisation that ‘free’ players use to create music spontaneously. Collaboration Creating music spontaneously with other people can sometimes feel like you are pushing each other, even challenging each other to engage in new ways. Other times, the music manifests itself as a wild snarling beast and everyone has to figure out how to hop on and ride it together. Sometimes music just appears that way, and it's always a powerful experience for all involved. Bill Nace Over the last fifteen years, Bill and I have spent thousands of hours together listening to records, going to shows, watching movies and playing music together in various contexts. He has has been a huge influence on me, both musically and in life. Bill has a huge heart, and you can feel it in every note he plays. Body/Head I love how expansive and emotive Body/Head’s music is. I recently got to work with some of their isolated studio tracks and was struck by all the minutia, open space and detail I found in the recordings. From Bill's use of static and amp noise, to Kim's breathing and whispering. Each song on Coming Apart feels like it opens up a whole world, one that you have to explore to discover. Jake Meginsky’s Vapor Gourds LP is out now on Feeding Tube Records.
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WorldMags.net NZ VS NYC
Michael Morley
Michael Morley is an experimental musician and artist from New Zealand. His label, Precious Metal, and bands – Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, The Dead C, and (mostly solo) Gate – have been a staple of the avant-garde NZ music and art scene since the mid-1980s and as well as embracing improvisational techniques, Morley uses all kinds of distortion equipment – like self-made pedals, laptops and analogue synthesisers – to make warped cacophonies that sound like soundtracks to disturbing movies. So how did a kid who came of age on an island in the South Pacific find synchronicity with No Wave – a sound born in NY across the seas? This is the story of Michael Morley’s musical youth and it’s full of geeky malcontents.
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WorldMags.net MICHAEL MORLEY
I was at high school, 1977-1981, in rural New Zealand. It was interesting to experience what happened during that period, becoming engaged in music, punk rock, and art as social forces within an unhinged limitless reality. Listening to obscure late-night radio to try and figure out what was going on. Importing records from the UK and the USA, despite crippling exchange rates and customs duties and an inconsistent mail delivery service due to an outmoded series of systems. NZ in the late 1970s is a bizarre dream of isolation, neo-classical oppression and post-World War II, post-colonial, antipodean socialism gone bad. We listened to music to escape the encroaching suburbia and fascism. A friend came around with the LP No New York on one summer afternoon in 1980. It sounded so strange, and this after hearing and living with Wire’s 154, The Clash's London's Calling and Cabaret Voltaire’s Voice of America. We listened to punk rock, new wave, disco, funk, and rock. It was a great mixture of sound. The music defines the period for me – sound from everywhere that was amazing and enlightening and offered a way to think about sound as an art form. There was no music or art scene where I grew up, just a bunch of geeky malcontents. We could have been playing video games if there were some, but it was Pong and Pac-Man and Gyrus, and that was not at home. We hung out at the local punk rock group’s practice room on a Saturday night, a disused industrial bread oven – the rain leaked in somewhere so that there was always a puddle inside the room that had to be negotiated. Somehow we managed to buy beer from the local pub. I have no idea how we did that. When I moved to Dunedin in 1982 I encountered a ‘scene’ for the first time. There was a university and a lot of people my own age and slightly older, all making music and being in bands and playing live. It was an education. I had been playing with a high school friend. We had devised a way of playing that required little musical knowledge and a lot of sheer will. I was painting at this time too, drawing and experimenting with a lot of different things. I didn’t really look to New York for inspiration. It didn’t really feature in the cultural landscape apart from The Velvet Underground, Television and The Ramones – and I didn’t put those bands and the city together at all. It was too vague. Only later did I understand the significance of NYC after being there and wandering the streets and breathing the air and listening to the place. My experience with art was based in New Zealand, the art that I identified with was New Zealand art, Colin McCahon, Rhona Hazard, Toss Woollaston, Frances Hodgkins, Ralph Hotere, Louise Henderson, Philip Clairmont, and others. It took a while to place this history alongside the other histories of Modernism and to work out how things become infected, in painting in particular. As far as sound goes it was the never-ending dialogue with friends, discussing bands and records and hunting these things out, mostly by mail order, but also through lucky finds in record stores and junk shops. Listening and listening and listening. For visual art it was mostly my mother being an artist and having books and journals and going to art museums and dealer galleries, thin on the ground in New Zealand but a mighty bulwark to the rugby culture that afflicts the country. It all represented an alternative to the New Zealand that smothered and destroyed the unique and the different. Michael Morley
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WorldMags.net A R G E N T I N I A N S AVA N T E
Lucrecia Martel is an Argentinian filmmaker whose made three features and many shorts since her debut El 56 in 1998. One of the pioneers of New Argentina Cinema – a film movement characterised by its refusal to provide explicit comment on politics as well as its focus on the margins (social and geographical) and ‘small stories’ – Martel is an art-house auteur who focuses her lens on the experiences of women, especially the complexities of sexuality, religion and patriarchal society. She also happens to be one of David Jenkins’ (editor of HUCK’s sister film mag Little White Lies) favourite filmmakers. This is his take on the inspiring savante. Some cinephiles would deign to call Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel one of the greatest female filmmakers currently working. Others would just drop the caveat 'female' altogether. Her career making movies began in the late ’80s, with various award-winning short works which she produced to test the cinematic waters – what kind of filmmaker did she want to become? The arrival of La Ciénaga (aka The Swamp) in 2001 announced Martel as an artist existing in that strange liminal space between surrealism and social realism – Luis Buñuel was quickly name-checked as her direct creative and political antecedent. Creative, because the way in which she shoots and edits suggests a half-formed dream state, in which the people and the action we are seeing may exist as a fantasy inside one of the character's own heads. And
political, because La Ciénaga directed a withering broadside at Argentina’s slumming elite, braying petit bourgeois layabouts who are far more concerned with the retention of status than they are with what foul deeds their children are up to. Martel retained her status with the release in 2005 of her second film, The Holy Girl, which was less surreal and cutting than her first movie, but no less dramatic and appealing. The concept of modern religious martyrs was the central theme of the film, but Martel channelled her weighty notions into a beautifully controlled drama that palpably buzzed with a coiled sexual frisson. Martel delivered her masterpiece in 2008, but few realised it at the time. The Headless Woman received its world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and many left the screening room feeling baffled and perplexed. Yet with hindsight, the film represented a filmmaker unwilling to rest on her creative laurels and constantly challenge viewers’ perception of time and space. The Headless Woman is now considered a masterpiece, a feminist riposte to Hitchcock’s Vertigo with a hokey moral thriller facade that cloaks its darker, richer conceptual underbelly. As of 2013, she has yet to make a follow-up, though funding is apparently in place for a movie entitled Zama, which has been mooted as an Argentine riff on Camus' The Outsider. David Jenkins
Lucrecia Martel M A RT E L’S M A S T E R P I E C E S
The Swamp (La Ciénaga) This sinister and discomforting debut reveals the darkness at the heart of a decadent and decaying middle class family. The film is also a thinly veiled attack on the social class that both raised Martel and supported Argentina’s brutal dictatorship.
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The Holy Girl (La Niña Santa) The Holy Girl is another of Martel’s films that looks back in anger at her own upbringing, featuring a sixteen-year-old girl torn between her own sexual awakening and the indoctrination of her strict Catholic education.
The Headless Woman (La Mujer Sin Cabeza) After losing concentration while driving, Verónica hears a sickening thud but carries on driving. Was she responsible for the disappearance of a local Indian boy? What becomes clear is how close to the surface violence remains in Argentine society.
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WorldMags.net A N I M P R O V I S E D H I S T O R Y O F I M P R O V I S AT I O N
Bebop Jazz Bebop came forth screaming a new individualism that radically challenged the conformism of America’s post-war society. The unforgettable opium-infused sound was the most revolutionary music to come out of black America to date and elevated the role of improvisation to new heights. It was beautiful but angry music that explicitly challenged racial oppression. For Ralph Ellison, Bebop “illuminated the blackness of my invisibility… the invisible music of my isolation.” Jack Kerouac and the Beats “Where are we going, man?” “I don’t know but we gotta go.” The Beats brought a frantic new energy to American society, embracing spontaneity and self-expression above all else. The legend goes that the defining text of the movement, Jack Kerouac’s explosive On the Road, was written in a continuous benzedrine-fuelled stream of consciousness on one roll of typewriter paper. While this slightly exaggerated tale is a product of Kerouac’s self-mythologising, the Beats’ search for self still resonates today. Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism All art is self expression, but Abstract Expressionism sought to whittle down that journey to its purest form. Pollock was heavily influenced by improvisation in jazz and was determined to look within himself and express his deepest emotions through non-verbal, abstract forms. He used techniques and mediums that facilitated the relaxation of conscious control over the artistic process in the hope that it would release unbridled creativity. Performance Magic Since before the Common Era (that’s everything since year 0, fyi), performance magicians have improvised with our sense of true and false, experimenting with our mental blind spots through sleight of hand and infallible poker faces. Peter Pan’s J.M. Barrie said, “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,” and though the more cynical among us have tried to kill illusion by dissecting it and laying out its bones, the only possible death is incredulity and exposure. Contemporary illusionists – like Dynamo, David Blaine and Derren Brown – have a wizardly insight into human nature that allows them to toy unpredictably with our expectations and emotions. John Coltrane’s Ascension Coltrane reached the apogee of improvisation with his 1966 session Ascension. Recorded in NYC it’s a collective improvisation in which each of the eleven assembled musicians improvise freely around an opening statement and then blast into solo flights to punch through rules of structure and flow. The ensemble ebbs and wanes and swells and falls, creating an abstracted rush of joyful noise. The album lit the torch of free jazz and freed the exploratory edge of AfricanAmerican music from rhythmic structure. It alienated many and was for some a creative cul-de-sac – but its intervention into the volatile aesthetic politics of the period resulted in powerful music with revolutionary implications.
Kelly Slater and Surfing Surfing is less of an action and more of a reaction. It’s often compared to a dance, but if that’s true it’s a dance which the surfer never gets to lead. The best people – like Kelly Slater, Lisa Anderson, Gerry Lopez and Carissa Moore – seem to have the gift of clairvoyance, so effortlessly do they swoop across wave faces. In reality, it’s a gift for improvisation, a rare ability to grab a hold of each slippery moment and use it to your advantage. What sets the great apart from the good is the faith they place in the spirit of play. Improvisation is not meant to be taken too seriously. The second it begins to look like work the spell is broken, the enchantment lost. Kelly Slater, for all his mastery of wave-riding, has never lost the look of a child playing in the water. Graffiti and Low-Brow Art It’s fair to say that any art or writing produced on a public object, in secret, with the fear of police intervention at any point is going to retain a certain immediacy. The power of graffiti is in its ephemerality – the fact it could be destroyed at any minute – and the risk and ambition at the heart of its creation. A street language that offers hidden meanings to those who know it, graffiti – pioneered, legend goes, by kids like Dondi in the Lower East Side – has paved the way for many explosive art movements including lowbrow, an unschooled, instinctive genre that subverts the precious and highly considered manifestations of the elitist world of indoor art. Punk and DIY Culture The ‘punkest’ acts in the last forty-odd years or so – since American music critic Dave Marsh used the term in 1971 to describe Bay City rockers Question Mark and the Mysterians (Shakespeare used it a couple centuries earlier for a prostitute or hoodlum) – have been those that happened spontaneously. Whether it was Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones telling BBC journalist Bill Grundy he was a ‘dirty fucker’ on live television in 1976, Ozzy Osborne biting off a bat’s head onstage in 1982, GG Allin trashing venues in various ad hoc performances till the early 1990s or Pussy Riot storming Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ The Saviour in 2012, these are all moments unified by their improvised nature. Punk, and the DIY culture it helped spawn, is a movement characterised by anti-establishment views and the promotion of individual freedom which embraces impromptu wildness as a way to differentiate itself from the norm. Joey Ramone once said, ‘All punk is attitude,’ and there’s nowhere better to lose your mind than in the middle of a pit. Street Skateboarding Is there anything freer than jumping on a skateboard and cruising into the city with no specific agenda to fulfil? Street skateboarding, like dancing, can be the ultimate embodiment of improvisation. Repetition and rehearsal may be required to learn tricks, but once you push and roll through the playground of architecture and infrastructure that makes up the urban landscape, you are – like Gonz shredding LES in an orange fedora, pink pants and blue-studded shoes – the haphazard author of your own poppin’ fate. Grab your board, get outside, and have fun with whatever crazy shit comes your way.
Street Dance Street dance – a catch-all for the various improvisational dance styles that have developed around pop music over the last thirty-odd years – is wonderfully, frustratingly ephemeral. It began, for the purposes of this brief study, with the development of hip hop music, itself improvised from older funk and soul records, and the isolation of ‘breaks’ in which the tune would cut out, the beat would ramp up and the dancers would take the floor. The only way to learn was to seek out those already in the know.
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