Electronic Beats Magazine Issue 03/2010 by Telekom Electronic Beats

Editor’s Letter

DARE TO BE ROMANTICISED To each their own of course, but for me autumn is the most romantic season. Days grow shorter, nights cooler and as the (unbearable?) lightness of summer fades we all subside a little, naturally seeking out intimacy and transcendental pursuits. It feels like the right time for a Romantic issue. Not so much about love or passion really, rather about the romanticist principles that emphasise emotional, spontaneous and imaginative approaches. In this increasingly homogenous post-post-modern, digital-age so partial to irony and emotional detachment it’s even more important such values or sentiments are able to survive and thrive. Consider that Romanticism took shape in eighteenth century Europe partly as a reaction to the first signs of industrialisation, urban sprawl and overpopulation with people losing themselves in nature, visual arts, music and emotion, and we can understand that the need for such escapism can only have intensified.

Romantics are known for their predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird. And so I wonder if many of them ever went to Iceland. A trip to the world’s most northern capital would easily satisfy all this criteria (and more) in one fell swoop. Going to the island in the north Atlantic is a life-long dream for many and to say that expectations for our visit were high is an understatement. Disappointments proved not to be an option and the resulting pictures and articles should ensure Reykjavik heads up your list of must-see places too!

So, let the wave of romanticism take you. Step into the Manscapes where Caspar David Friedrich-like figures quietly contemplate the grand nature scenes in which they are placed. In Broken Beauty writer and academic Tully Rector explores our enduring fascination with the strange beauty of ruins, his point so beautifully illustrated in the arresting photographs of a dilapidated Motor City courtesy of The Ruins of Detroit (Steidl). Emer Grant showcases five contemporary painters for whom colour on canvas remains the ultimate medium and Wyndham Wallace tracks the recent evolution of classical music, which is shaking off its conservative mantle and making a new name for itself with brave and visionary releases from artists like Dustin O’Halloran, Ólafur Arnalds or Max Richter.

Much love,

From the cruel and fashionable La Belle Dame Sans Merci to the candid interview with piano virtuoso Chilly Gonzales there is much in this issue to feed your imagination, which – by the by – the romantics considered the gateway to transcendent experience and even spiritual enlightenment!

ELECTRONIC BEATS IMPRINT PUBLISHER

Toni Kappesz

PRODUCER

Commandante Berlin Gmbh, Schröderstr. 11, 10115 Berlin, Germany

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ART DIRECTOR FASHION & STYLE EDITOR GRAPHIC DESIGN & ILLUSTRATION

Viktoria Pelles (viktoria@electronicbeats.net) Lisa Borges (lisa@electronicbeats.net) Sandra Liermann (sandra@electronicbeats.net) Leona List (leona@electronicbeats.net) Dörte Lange (doerte@electronicbeats.net)

MUSIC EDITOR

Gareth Owen (gareth@electronicbeats.net)

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Paul Schlosser (paul@electronicbeats.net)

PROGRAM MANAGER

Claudia Jonas (claudia@electronicbeats.net)

PROJECT DIRECTOR ONLINE

Carlos de Brito (carlos@electronicbeats.net)

PRESS CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Stephanie Binder (stephanie.binder@haebmau.de) Max Willens, Gavin Blackburn, Ari Stein, Mathias Kilian Hanf, Paul Sullivan, Tully Rector, Wyndham Wallace, Emma Mclellan, Jean-Robert Saintil, Jan Joswig, Emer Grant

ARTWORK / PHOTOGRAPHY

Tobias Schult, Jamaica De Marco, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Patti Smith Archive, Lloyd Ziff, Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre, Sharmila Sandrasegar, Ben Mauze, Mikael Kennedy, Lars Borges, Delaney Allen, Hasisi Park, Jonas Lindström, Angeles Peña, Landon Metz, Jonas Loiske, Daniel Baker, Laurence Owen, Kate Groobey, Tom Ormond, Anna M. R. Freeman, Attila Hartwig, Laura Bateson

COVER WEBSITE

Subscribe ELECTRONIC BEATS MAGAZINE

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Inspired by varying topical themes Electronic Beats Magazine appears quarterly and free-of-charge. The last half a decade has seen over 20 engaging issues come into being and most of these can be ordered independently from a subscription from our online shop. Subscribe to Electronic Beats or make a gift of a yearly subscription for only €10 within Germany or €20 internationally. Single issues can be ordered for €3 (Germany) and €6 (international). More information and all orders via the online shop: WWW.ELECTRONICBEATS.NET/EBSHOP

03/2010 THE ROMANTIC ISSUE TUNE IN 08–25

Exhibitions Worth A Visit/ News..................................10 Ones To Watch: My Tiger My Timing...........................12 Ones To Watch: Pezzner................................................14 Ones To Watch: We Love . .............................................16 Caribou........................................................................18 Fritz Kalkbrenner........................................................20 Electronic Beats 10-Year Birthday festival.....................21 Feature: Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe................22

MOST WANTED 54–79

Gutter Romanticism.....................................................56 La Belle Dame Sans Merci ...........................................58 »And The Sweet Fragrance...«........................................68 Reykjavik: Pure and Unadulterated..............................70

FOCUS 26–55

Broken Beauty..............................................................28 Manscapes....................................................................34 This Must Be The Place..................................................44 Modern Painting..........................................................46

HEAR THIS 80–99

Margaret Dygas...........................................................82 Chilly Gonzales............................................................84 Hooked on Classics........................................................88 The Collector’s Guide to Songs About Romance................92 Music Reviews.............................................................94 My Music Moment: Red Rack’em..................................98

CONTRIBUTORS

Tully Rector Tully Rector is an American freelance writer and academic. He has written for a variety of publications, including GQ, The Best American Poetry, Time Out, and small scholarly journals that nobody has ever heard of. After four long years in Beijing, he now lives in Germany and will soon begin teaching at the University of Bamberg.

Tobias Schult Tobias was born and raised in Berlin. After stopping by in the USA to assist his uncle in photography he fell in love with it! Ever since then, nothing has ever kept him as passionate as photography. Today he works in fashion in advertising photography ...and he still loves it! WWW.TOBIASSCHULT.COM

Wyndham Wallace

Forsaking London for Berlin six years ago, Wyndham Wallace’s so-called career began as a publicist for US bands like Guided By Voices before he became head of City Slang Records’ UK office in 1996. He now works as a manager for Cortney Tidwell, consults for Træna, “the world's most beautiful and remote festival” (NME), and writes for Uncut, The Guardian, The Quietus, BBC Music and more…

Emer Grant

Emer Grant (28) comes from Derry, N.Ireland and is a freelance art and design curator. She graduated from the University of Brighton with a degree in fine art and critical studies, after which she moved to London where she worked for artists such Damien Hirst, Thomas Heatherwick and curated a number of exhibitions. Currently she is completing her MA in art history at the University of York and lives between the UK and Berlin.

ILLUSTRATION LISA BORGES IMAGES IDEAL HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY FASHION | © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION | © PATTI SMITH

Matthew Barney

PRAYER SHEET WITH THE WOUND AND THE NAIL

NEWS BY PAUL SCHLOSSER

Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail is an exhibition related to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint series opened in June 2010 at Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland. Including 16 sculptures, drawings, videos, and a ‘Drawing Restraint Archive’ of videos, these artworks are being juxtaposed with 15th and 16th century prints to draw parallels, not only with the trials and tribulations of mark-making, but with Christian iconography and Matthew’s representation of the body in extremes. The exhibition coincided with Art Basel and is running until the 3rd of October 2010. No reason to shed tears for those who can’t make it to Switzerland though. There is also a 160-page catalogue for the show (in German and English) including a discussion between Matthew Barney and the British psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, a large-format photo-spread depicting the exhibition at Schaulager, an essay by curator Neville Wakefield (who once sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with Barney), and a bibliography for further reading. The catalogue is available for 24 Euro plus shipping. SCHAULAGER RUCHFELDSTRASSE 19 | MÜNCHENSTEIN / BASEL JUNE 12, 2010 – OCTOBER 3, 2010

Les Arts Décoratifs – Mode et textile

IDEAL HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY FASHION VOLUME 1: 1970s –1980s A trip down memory lane of the great era of the 70s and 80s. Exploring the significant work of fashion designers such as Kenzo, Miyake, YSL, Gaultier and the kings of outrageous shoulder pads Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, Ideal History of Contemporary Fashion Volume 1: 1970s-1980s shows cutting edge couture pieces that have much influenced fashion even today. You can journey through the major trends of these electrifying decades and how the designers made their indelible marks on fashion with over 120 shows represented in photographs and videos HISTOIRE IDÉALE DE LA MODE CONTEMPORAINE VOL. I: 1970 - 1980 & VOL. II 1990 – 2000 LES ARTS DÉCORATIFS – MODE ET TEXTILE 107 RUE DE RIVOLI | PARIS APRIL 1, 2010 – OCTOBER 10, 2010 THE SECOND INSTALLATION OF THE MUSEUM’S REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FASHION HISTORY OPENS UP THE 25TH OF NOVEMBER WITH A LOOK AT FASHION THROUGH THE 90S AND THE 00S.

Weekday

SCANDINAVIAN COOL The concept store Weekday that’s been gaining a cult-like following, started up in Stockholm when Örjan Anderson founder of the ready-to-wear label Cheap Monday – which I’m sure you know was THE jean that launched the skinny jean revolution – gathered a couple of friends who all felt something was lacking in the Swedish fashion world. They missed a store in-between high-street fashion and niche brands – so they decided to create it themselves. Weekday was a hit from the very beginning; the mix of their own brands, other favourite designers and up-and-coming talent all at reasonable prices charmed the Swedes. Since being acquired by H&M they continue growing with recent store openings in both Denmark and a few cities in Germany like Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin. Visit once and be converted!

J. W. Anderson

DIVERSITY IS KING With J.W. Anderson’s AW/10 dark edge menswear line the 26-year-old breakthrough talent launches his new range of commercially viable but creatively uncompromising accessories, which extend the contradiction theme that is present throughout the whole collection. Assassin or saint? Love is being juxtaposed with unfulfilled love of two lovers separated by either physicality or death, engraved phrases giving the jewellery made of horn a gothic hint. The bright marble-like surface on top of the dark ring gives it a bold look, a necessary yet dreamy accent for your everyday outfit. WWW.OKI-NI.COM

Wundervoll

OH-SO-SUBTLE Wundervoll is a luxurious intimate apparel line based in Berlin, aiming to be the underwear label that fulfils the requirements of the fashion-oriented modern woman who is not just defined by how she looks, but how she feels and lives with very high quality demands. The brands collection ranging from what one might call Romantic Minimalism to Subtle Hollywood Starlet consists of regular as well as high waist panties, bras, briefs, boy shorts and lounge pants that are all made from the finest silk jersey material produced exclusively for the German label.

TEXT EMMA MCLELLAN

My Tiger My Timing

FIERY COLLECTIVE

“Some people came to us at a gig and said that they’d illegally downloaded two of our tracks, and I was like: fuckin’ right!” My Tiger My Timing may sound somewhat like an upcoming Kill Bill sequel from Tarantino, but in fact, are a group of five humble musicians who complete the line-up of one of the most amiable and charismatic bands you could ever meet, oozing down-to-earth charm with a hefty dose of songwriting talent. Relentlessly striving for recognition within an ever mutating industry, self assurance and a bit of naughtiness are the key to success, and these guys are letting it all hang out, literally! Exuding confidence, not only in song composition but also as a tightly-knit collaboration, MTMT give the impression that they’re one big happy family that have been to together for... well, forever; And in fact, they have! Well, almost. The family connection being that Anna and bass player James are brother and sister and founders of the band. However, the current line-up has only been in existence for around two years. James conveniently got to know guitarist Jamie and drummer Andy at University in Brighton. Sebastian, head of all things with keys and drum pads, then came along a little while afterwards having played with the electropop band ‚ thecocknbullkid. Anna remarks, “We all decided we wanted to do something new, something concise that was about the songs and not about individual virtuosity... there’s no one person that’s the best in the band... I always get uncomfortable when people say I’m the lead singer, because that’s just the instrument that I use, it doesn’t mean that I’m the leader of the band.” Whatever it is, it seems to be working! Their songs have an unde niable feel-good quality about them and you can’t go wrong when citing impressive influences ranging from ground-breaking band Talking Heads to rhythmic geniuses The Rapture. Their first single release ‘This is not the Fire’ produced by Andy Spence from electropop band New Young Pony Club, is living proof of how a song can sound effortless but with closer attention, turns out to be a complex piece of workmanship. MTMT are all about townshipinspired rhythms, chiming melodies that characterise their unmistakable sound, and vocal hooks with a singalong factor of 10! Anna explains: “James and I grew up in South East London, and township and dancehall were definitely sounds we heard while growing up. We didn’t wanna just do dance beats or four-to-the-floor.”My Tiger My Timing continued their producer collaboration and went on to record an entire EP with Andy Spence which, in turn, attracted some very useful support during the early stages. ‘This Is Not The Fire’ was up for the pick ‘n’ mix single of the week on Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie’s BBC Radio 2 show, and MTMT were also broadcast as part of Xfm’s Xposure Live sessions with John Kennedy. As a direct result of the radio attention, the band got picked to play on the BBC Introducing stage at this year’s Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Bangor, North Wales. An event which included big names such as Rihanna, Florence and the Machine, and Vampire Weekend. As if that wasn’t enough, French label Kitsuné, who are notoriously well-known for finepicking new talent, chose to include

them on their eighth Kitsuné Maison compilation. Not to mention that Modular included them on their Leave Them All behind III compilation alongside a dream team of artists including The Presets, Ladyhawke, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and newbies Delphic. Remarkably, after all that success it’s still not possible for them to truly live a life of excessive rock ’n’ roll decadence. Each member of the band has a second job to help finance their music careers, ranging from cinema ticket collector to call centre slave. There’s no chance of anyone developing inflated egos, let alone inflated bank accounts. Bassist James says, “We don’t want to buy Aleistair Crowley’s house like Led Zeppelin. We don’t want mansions, we just want to be able to have a roof over our heads!”Anna spends a great deal of time and effort in keeping up MTMT’s online presence. “Using the internet is really important for us because blogs were a huge thing for us early on in terms of support... I think that a lot of labels and more mainstream radio stations do look to what blogs are saying first... so if you’re getting support from those kind of places, it’s seen as a good sign that you’re doing something that people might like.” The important thing is spreading the music and creating a name. Drummer (Gary) says, “Some people came to us at a gig and said that they’d illegally downloaded two of our tracks, and I was like: fuckin’ right!” Having played a great deal around the UK and completing a mini tour this year in Germany, My Tiger My Timing are setting their sights high, with plans for a European tour next year as well as the completion of their debut album which is planned for release in March 2011. The important question is, how will they cope with spending so much time together in close quarters? Anna: “Every time we go on tour together, we get a little bit closer and sometimes it’s too much!” Possibly, a certain amount of anticipation or anxiety has arisen due to keyboardist Sebastian’s tendency for wandering around naked in hotel rooms sporting merely his favourite item of stage attire, his bow tie... WWW.MYTIGERMYTIMING.COM MYSPACE.COM/MYTIGERMYTIMING FACEBOOK.COM/MYTIGERMYTIMING TWITTER.COM/MYTIGERMYTIMING

Pezzner

THE MODEST MASTERMIND TEXT JEAN-ROBERT SAINTIL

Seattle’s own Dave Pezzner (aka Pezzner) has been around for more than a minute now. Odds are you’ve heard of his past incarnation as one half of Classic Records and Om-signed Chicago “boompty” house chaps Jacob London alongside his old school friend Bob Hansen. If you haven’t, their EPs Casual Bingo and Brown Alert back in ’03 and ’04 respectively set the bar for the fun loving slightly fidgety house being pumped out of labels like dot.bleep, the aforementioned Classic Records and Om at the time. Then there was silence. A few years later and out of nowhere appears the Almost Here EP on Freerange Records. A collection of left of centre house music which spliced the ingenuity and craftsmanship of Autechre with the dancefloor rousing pan-Atlantic deep house stylings of the likes of Wolf + Lamb or Stimming; all from some new guy on the block named Pezzner. “I tried to make a point when I started my solo project, that I was not going to be ‘Dave Pezzner of Jacob London.’ Adding: “The first releases I did on Freerange mentioned very little about my musical history on their one-sheets, and I felt that it was important to keep this separate. I hadn’t even included this information in my bio until after my third record came out.” Which is somewhat unsurprising as it is a touch more serious than the allout fun loving of the previous project. After a moment’s thought he recants a little. “Well… maybe I was using the Jacob London legacy a little bit – in the fact that I am using the same label network I acquired via the Jacob London days. I think that having already done a Jacob London remix on Om may have made it easier to put my music in front of their A&R. But then with any industry, the longer you are in it, the larger your network is, the easier it is to get the job done... it makes sense.” That it does. A new start from which, if the gushing reviews are anything to go by, have been very well received indeed. From the heavy play of his Jouets Fantastiques EP on Om to the gushing press on his debut LP, The Tracks Are Alive, on Freerange, it looks as if the strategy has worked. The typical story throughout the music industry of an artist becoming well known and leaving, respectfully, their old projects behind transcends genre. This however doesn’t appear to be the case with Pezzner and J. London. In fact, it looks as if it’s only a matter of

time before the duo pop back onto the map. Time willing. “I swear we’re going to do something new again but can’t put my finger on when... I really hope it will be soon.” Over the years one could say that Pezzner’s sound has been through a maturing of sorts. Although there are still a number of producers creating ‘jaunty’ tracks with a medley of unsuspecting sounds as hooks – from kazoos to bird calls – many of them fail to pack the punch and unabashedly joyous energy of the earlier releases. As for the general trends, house producers seemingly have veered towards warmer deep house. This can also be said of the awesome but slightly more sober cuts released by Dave’s Pezzner project. But it seems it’s not quite as easy to pinpoint the origin of the sound beyond that of the method of creating work between collective and that alone. “I still experiment all the time but I’m not having as much of a laugh in the studio by myself as I do when I work with Bob. We both have a twisted sense of humour about things and we love to joke around. A lot of the times we’d take these electronic genres and try to blend them in a way that should not make sense, and try to figure out how to make it work. Throw a little (or a lot) of tequila in the mix and we would just be cracking up at these ideas we somehow managed to work out.” Continuing… “I’ve got my ideas and all the techniques I’ve learned from working with Bob and I guess this is how it comes out. I’m happy with it.” And as he should be. The Tracks Are Alive is, as reviews attest, one of the finest electronic albums released this year. A rare beast that’s both an incredible collection to be listened to at home, but with a number of tracks with clout to work on any discerning floor (“I always wanted to do an LP and even hashed out in my head how this was supposed to sound. If I ever make an LP it will be diverse, with dance beats and experiments. The songs will flow together almost seamlessly, and it will tell a story to the listener. It will make people laugh and stop them for a moment to pick apart the music in their heads. It will make you think, and dance and love.’”). And seeing as he has a number of releases, remixes and gigs coming up , we advise keeping an eye out on the understated one known as Pezzner. Pumping life into house music like a defibrillator. The tracks, indeed, are alive.

R N P E O P LE D S FO R M O D E N U O S IC T C E C LE FA S H IO N A B LY

We Love

TREMENDOUS UPROAR The Italian duo known as We Love will often begin their sets with a song called ‘Hide Me’. As a hypnotic series of light projections bleeds and pulses over their bodies and behind them on walls, Piero Fragola and Giorgia Angiuli sway in front of a mix of Macs, sequencers, and custom-built instruments, trading verses about the vast catacombs of language and associations that shape friends and lovers; “Millions of words in your body / reading the words in your body / feeling the words in your body / cover, cover, cover, cover hide me.” TEXT EMMA MCLELLAN PHOTO JAMAICA DE MARCO

The overall effect, which is completed by the duo’s Diana Ferri-designed, space-suity costumes, is both sexy and scalable, a spectacle that would look great in a club or an aeroplane hangar. Giant, softfocus feathers float over them on ‘Underwater’; shuttering, shifting collections of bars blast in front of them during ‘Escape Destination’; their half-diamond, half-heart logo rotates, then melts into a slithering collection of beams during their opener. It might be just a light show, but it’s engrossing in a way that few live shows are. In most cases, shows like these are the work of great art directors like Arturo Vega, or the army of people that handles Lady Gaga. But Fragola, a designer and graphic artist by trade, and Angiuli, who holds a degree in arts management and organization, strive to make We Love something more than a typical band playing a typical show. “Our whole creative universe focuses on a strong connection between music and image,” they explain via e-mail. “We imagine the art as ‘La Danse’ of Matisse, where the different artistic languages, holding their hands, [are] moving in a circle,” they continue. Angiuli and Fragola take this synergy and harmony very seriously, and when they perform, their goals are lofty. We Love, they say, is meant “to lead the spectator to another dimension, to a place which seems static and in movement in the mean time, regulated by the mechanism of dream by music.” The music itself – dark, cavernous, and slick – does its part by sounding like a little of everything. We Love’s music is driven by shifting timbres and textures instead of a numbing, constant thud. Angiuli half gasps, half sneers her words like Karin Dreijer Anderson; Fragola has a melancholic tinge in his voice that would sit beautifully in a Trentemøller mix; strong melodies ping behind and across driving drum programming (‘Our Shapes’), their textures alternating between metallic (‘No Train No Plane’) and smooth (‘Don’t Cross’), a dynamic reinforced by the lights and movements of the group’s two members. Improbably, Angiuli and Fragola met just a year and a half ago. Almost immediately, Angiuli says, “everything happened at the same time”, their separate, but shared thirst for art helping them connect deeply and quickly. “People that come from small towns maybe have the opportunity to have deeper relationships,” Angiuli continues. “In those places, art and curiosity are the best ways to escape.” Both grew up in small, sleepy little towns in southern Italy, and the attendant boredom made them both need music, to the point that going to a concert became much more than simple entertainment. They were a way to get “out of us”, as they put it. These out-of-body experiences came from many different kinds of music. For Angiuli, who grew up studying classical guitar, it was about a kind of performative power, which could come from anybody: Björk or Sepultura, James Brown or Tori Amos, all the way up to her future label boss, Ellen Allien, when she and Apparat were touring Orchestra of Bubbles. For Fragola, who discovered electronic music

through Coil, the escape was more technological: he remembers the Cure, Pansonic, Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Murcof, and Matmos as the best concerts of his life. As critical as that passion was during their childhoods, it was even more important when they met. The world’s economic situation, Italy’s in particular, was “about to explode” when the two decided to move to Florence together. “There was so much uneasiness and nervousness in the air,” Angiuli recalls. But instead of muddling or diluting their ideas, the anxiety that had permeated the world around them galvanized them both. “We felt a big strength inside,” Angiuli says, “a kind of desire to be slaves of music believing in love.” It wasn’t long before both were “considering our music as a safe haven.” Creating something as whole as We Love, being “details lovers”, has taken a special commitment, one which Angiuli describes as “pleasant and strenuous”. But the fruits of that commitment are also a testament to what is truly exciting about art today. With a little help from their friends, Angiuli and Fragola have created a headlining, outsized experience, something that both embodies and updates the experience of going to one’s first big pop concert, the “awesomeness and intensity” that thrilled the two of them when they were younger. When asked about why everything about their music is so detail-oriented, We Love replies with a carefully tailored quote they attribute to Wassily Kandinsky. “The painter must start talking the same issue with the musician, the sculptor, the dancer, the architect , the playwright, etc. Surprisingly, everyone will understand, [...] there will be confusion and clarity, we will feel the impact of conflicting ideas, [...] but this will cause a tremendous uproar.” The tremendous uproar Kandinsky prophesied came from hearing and seeing those different forms debate one another for the first time. But today, as music and image and video are bound inextricably together, they can sing together, and at We Love’s shows, they do. MYSPACE.COM/WELOVEWELOVE TWITTER.COM/LOVEWELOVE

Caribou

CAPTURING THE MAGIC INTERVIEW ARI STEIN

Dan Snaith aka Caribou could point to any published review this year and be assured that his new album Swim could contain glowing praises. But considering Snaith’s down-to-earth nature, I doubt very much whether this would affect him at all. Snaith has this self-effacing ability to rise above all that whilst also filling the music world with an adventurousness and originality you rarely encounter with artists anymore. After four albums, Caribou is certainly at the top of his game, channelling the yesteryear of sixties’ psychedelia inside Snaith’s own shimmering pop universe. Taking his mind-bending show on the road this year, Electronic Beats will be rolling out a number of dates in honour of our EB Recommends tour. If you need a little more Caribou before then, take a listen to his Radio Session for Electronic Beats on Air as well. I sat down with this mathematical/musical explorer, to find out what really stimulates him other than his music, where he derives his inspiration from and just who Caribou is.

SPIRITUALITY Dan, are you a spiritual person? No. Definitely not, I’m a rational person; most people figure that out from my background. I’ve got a mathematics PHD. So I guess I’m a hard nose rationalist, but it depends on what you mean. Judging from your album, even when you were Manitoba and stuff, it’s hard not to feel that there are certain realms of spirituality in your music. It depends on what you mean. Music is an emotional thing, not rational at all, it’s about connecting, but spiritual denotes some other worldliness. It’s transformative for me and it kind of takes me somewhere else, but I’m under no illusions about the kind of traditional religious or spiritual realities. When I listen to your music there’s a lot I don’t understand, I can’t make sense of what’s going on, so by nature there should be some kind of unknown factor or spirituality? No one understands why music works the way it does, and it would be horrible if we did, but that’s the magic of it. It’s that gap that we all connect with. Like a Beatles song, we don’t understand why it makes some people cry, but that’s the magic, that’s the translation I’m trying to capture, to get that feeling. But I think that is spirituality. Well to me it’s not spiritual because it says something about us; it says something about human beings instead. Not some imagined thing, there is something magical about humanity about our experience, but it’s not about capturing something ethereal etc. SWIM & THE BEGINNING The album itself is based on some themes such as divorce, old age, loneliness, and fun stuff like that. Fun stuff ? Well, to be honest, I think that stuff has to come from somewhere; do some of those references come from experiences you’ve had? I mean, fortunately, I didn’t go through any of this, but Odessa is about a divorce, close friends of mine going through a divorce. Does this record release ring a bell? Ships Vs. Sinking; 1999. Oh wow, this is great. If only you could get a hold of this! Although this isn’t the beginning, but I made this CD-R, maybe a year before I started making my first album in 1998, Start Breaking My Heart, a couple of years actually, and I can’t even remember what it sounds like. But this release comes from a long line of, well when I was in high school, like 13 or 14 years old, I made cassettes of this like weird electronic prog-rock that I was making, and I tried to sell them out of my locker in high school. There might be like five of these CD-Rs worldwide. HERE’S WHERE IT GETS SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE Ari: So, now I’ll hand it over to you.

Caribou: Ok, so maybe I wasn’t briefed about this. Ari: Aha, I knew you weren’t briefed about this. You looked a bit surprised. So, I wanted to try doing something different where I would ask you questions and then you would ask me. Caribou: You know, this was my thing, I get asked the same questions all the time, so this year I wanted to ask the interviewer some questions. THE ART OF ANSWERING QUESTIONS FROM A MATH WIZ Caribou: So, are you a spiritual person? Ari: Yes, I am definitely. But I act out my spirituality in different ways, like music is holy to me. So, when you say you’re a rational person, I find that hard to believe in my heart because you act it out in your music. Caribou: Do you have distinctions between profane music and, say, spiritual music? Like, is all music the same, like Lady Gaga, Bach? Ari: Well, I could listen to a Prokofiev piece and then, say, any other piece. Caribou: Ok, but Lady Gaga? Is that sacred is the same way? Ari: To me, no – but to a 12 year old, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga might be on the same profound level, so it’s almost like an authoritarian kind of feeling. Caribou: Do you feel like you are a more sophisticated, a better judge of music than other people? Ari: Yes, perhaps. And it’s not about elements of ego and arrogance, because ego and arrogance is all the other crap that we throw in there to make us feel better or worse. But when you remove all that, one person might say he would know more about buildings than I do, and I totally believe that and respect that. Caribou: But what about you and someone else that knows a lot about music. Do you have subjective experiences, or is one of those people more right or wrong than someone else? Ari: There’s no right or wrong in that context. I mean if someone is playing death metal next to me and I find it offensive, I’ll just politely pick up my bag and walk away. EB RECOMMENDS TOUR 08.11. MUENCHEN, FEIERWERK 14.11. LEIPZIG, CENTRAL THEATER 15.11. HAMBURG, UEBEL & GEFAEHRLICH 16.11. HEIDELBERG, ENJOY JAZZ FESTIVAL 29.11. KOELN, GLORIA 04.12. WIEN, FLUC 05.12. FRANKFURT, MOUSONTURM MORE DATES TO FOLLOW, CHECK ELECTRONICBEATS.NET

Fritz Kalkbrenner

THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST TEXT PAUL SCHLOSSER PHOTO EDDY KRUSE

Whether you recognize his soulful voice or are familiar with his last name, as the youngest offspring of the Kalkbrenner clan. Known for lending his voice to his brother Paul, Sascha Funke or Alexander Kowalski, Fritz has been working on his solo career since 2002. After the success of his first single ‘Wingman’ and the 3-track EP The Dead End on Suol, Fritz Kalkbrenner is here with a stunning debut album, taking you on a smooth emotional ride made for driving through the night or dancing it away. If it’s true that the first cut is the deepest, what better place to meet than at the barbershop? I met with Fritz to discuss his thoughts on his first cut, due for release on October 15. What’s the story behind your album title Here Today Gone Tomorrow? I took the name from a song on an Ohio Players album; they were an American funk and R&B band in the seventies. It’s about a detached, unfaithful woman who destroys a love through her behaviour.In my case, the title speaks more generally. A musician’s life can also be unsettled, and the album’s title refers to the thought of momentariness. This has nothing to do with my personal position as an artist though. I already have plans for the second album. How are the songs on your new album different from your previous collaborations with other artists? Of course, on the technical side Here Today Gone Tomorrow is different from my collaborations. Apart from two or three pieces I did with professional bassists and guitarists I’m friends with, I produced it all by myself. Generally speaking, you can say my debut reflects my personal style, while collaborations are always an accommodation. Often I totally take back the soul component within my voice then. For example, the songs I did with Kowalski have a cold, very technical sound. It’s raising the roof – the tracks are much larger, denser productions. The lyrics on Here Today Gone Tomorrow are also more melancholic than the ones I’ve done before. How would you describe the style of your album? Everyone should decide for themselves. First and foremost, I truly hope that it’s club music. Everything in the spirit of the dancefloor. I tried to keep my debut quite organic. The basic abstraction of song arrangements was important for me as well, though that grid didn’t become dominant. The first break not as strong as the second break, and so on. Really classic, yet the songs are rather seven minutes instead of three minutes and thirty seconds.

Your pronounced singer/songwriter qualities are unusual for electronic artists. When did you decide to introduce them into your or other compositions? I actually didn’t decide it for myself. Although the whole club context always accompanied me, I have a huge hip hop and soul background, which has always co-existed as a means of expression. I’ve always incorporated rap lyrics, either intoned or sung. My old mentor, DJ ZKY, with whom I recorded my first tracks, used to own the Berlin-based Chicago house label Cabinet Records. One day he invited me to the studio to sing on a track for him. The result surprised and strengthened me so much that it wasn’t the last time we worked together. Still, songwriting is a language you have to learn. It’s under-represented in electronic music, but it’s how I’m able to express not-so-nice, though bolstering things in life. Although I don’t think I’m the only one doing this. Does it bother you to be constantly related to your most commercial success ‘Sky and Sand’? Every once in a while as an artist you get the impression that you’re not being represented the right way, especially when you continue to be asked about a one hit wonder years after its release. It all happened at its proper time and I still stand behind it without any reservation. It’s kinda ironic because the song actually never meant to be for the general public, as it was written for a single person. Paul and I worked on that track from time to time until it completely changed. Paul suddenly came up with the terrific idea of adding the consistent bass and strings theme. While still in the phase of planning Berlin Calling we both knew that we’d make use of Sky and Sand for the movie. With the album I tried to create something long-term / resistant. I produced the entire LP as I want to express myself. It’s been one year since your last release ‘Was Right Been Wrong.’ Why did it take so long to release this album? That’s the disadvantage when you want to be highly productive. In the techno scene the process of development is a bit more fractal than that of a rock musician, for example. You’re away every weekend, playing one, two gigs during the week, flying here and there, coming back Tuesday, leaving Thursday again. Of course I also had to take my time, as I wanted to create an adequate debut. The time was necessary to previously release some singles, to season the public with my sound and create some kind of contact.

10-Year Birthday Festival

PARTY WITH RÓISÍN MURPHY, DELPHIC AND SPECIAL GUESTS!

Whoa, did ten years of Electronic Beats really pass that fast? After a total amount of – please take a moment to savour the flavour of these stats thoroughly – 170 events including more than 180 artists such as Fever Ray, Kelis, Hot Chip, Peaches or The Whitest Boy Alive it’s about time to give this jubilee the celebration it so rightly deserves. Don’t be surprised if this line up hits you like a bullet to the knees, forcing you to the ground weeping like a child (in a good way of course). On November 4 at Radialsystem V in Berlin, Electronic Beats by Telekom hosts an evening where both Manchester’s great white hope Delphic and Irish dance innovator Róisín Murphy will sing us a ‘Happy Birthday’. Keep checking electronicbeats.net for the remaining killer acts soon to be revealed. Two days before the official birthday bash, Electronic Beats will host ‘Freundeabend’, an invitation-only pre-festival bash featuring performances by Caribou and Barbara Panther at Berlin’s Tape Club. Keep your eye on our website for the chance to win VIP-tickets to this exclusive event.

H A L L S T R E E T, B R O O K LY N , 1 9 6 8 , © L L O Y D Z I F F. U S E D B Y P E R M I S S I O N

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe

NO ORDINARY LOVE TEXT VIKTORIA PELLES PHOTOS ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE, LLOYD ZIFF

The story of the young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe is a fairy tale for our times, a rare and genuine piece of bohemian legend. Set in late-sixties New York City, the halcyon days for art and artists, Patti and Robert found a soul mate in each other. Embodying all our romantic ideals for pure love and art, these struggling young artists supported each other through desperate conditions to achieve their respective artistic ambitions. The relationship that evolved between them was strong enough to sustain the couple through poverty and squalor. In the year that Jimmy Hendrix burnt his guitar and protests against the Vietnam war intensified, change was afoot. In the maelstrom of New York, the photographs of Mappelthorpe and Smith capture more than just a moment in time. They signal a genesis of a shift in culture. Smith sowed the seeds of punk by challenging the notion that women couldn’t ‘do’ rock n roll, while adjusting the form to incorporate her own ideals and arrangements, her poetry. Mapplethorpe, meanwhile garnered much acclaim with his stylised black & white photography and portraiture while also courting controversy with his beautiful and confronting depiction of queer and S&M erotica. The young Mapplethorpe was of course not only working out his artistic identity but also his sexual nature. That his relation-

ship with Smith continued through this period of self-discovery is testament to the extraordinary bond they shared. In her compelling autobiography Just Kids, Smith has penned not only an elegy to Mapplethorpe but also a love-letter to the New York City art scene that inspired and shaped her. Her keen observations of the scene surrounding the mythical Chelsea Hotel and Warhol’s Factory are refreshingly down-to-earth, at times critical but lacking in irony or sophisticated cynicism. The book is also strewn with images from their existence together: notes, drawings and photos that provide a moving insight to the protective and prodding nature of their relationship. The cover shot of Just Kids is Patti and Robert at a fairground looking like a bohemian Bonnie & Clyde; it was taken on their two-year anniversary, a day Smith remembers affectionately as one when they were really relaxed and themselves. One of rock’s most iconic images, the Mapplethorpe photo of Patti Smith for the cover of Horses, feels entirely modern more than 30 years later. Smith’s is an androgynous beauty, fragile and strong at once, strongly reminiscent in fact of Mapplethorpe himself.

PICTURES CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: 1. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: PARROT TULIPS, 1988 © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION 2. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: SELF PORTRAIT, 1988 © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION 3. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: PATTI SMITH, 1975 © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION 4. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: PHILLIP PRIOLEAU, 1980 © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION 5. ROBERT WITH SAILORS HAT WITH KIND PERMISSION FROM THE PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE © PATTI SMITH 6. PATTI AND ROBERT ON CONEY ISLAND WITH KIND PERMISSION FROM THE PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE © PATTI SMITH 7. PATTI SMITH WITH KIND PERMISSION FROM THE PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE © LINDA SMITH BIANUCCI 8. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: LOWELL SMITH, 1981 © ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION. USED BY PERMISSION

ILLUSTRATION LISA BORGES IMAGES »THE RUINS OF DETROIT« BY YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE | MIKAEL KENNEDY | LAURENCE OWEN

BROKEN BEAUTY The aesthetic of ruins has a mysterious pull. Our fascination with abandoned hotels, run-down amusement parks, power stations and factories crumbling away can be seen in photo-galleries or felt in cities like Berlin, Mostar or Detroit on a daily basis. Supported by the haunting images of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffree, Tully Rector connects history with the present, identifying our preoccupation as neo-romantic. With a difference: where the German romantics saw ruins as relics of a lost past, ours are emblems of a lost future.

TEXT TULLY RECTOR PHOTOGRAPHY TAKEN FROM »THE RUINS OF DETROIT« BY YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE

Berlin was set ablaze in 1945, bombed in darkness from a great height. One victim of the fires was Caspar David Friedrich’s Klosterfriedhof im Schnee (1819). The painting was quintessentially Romantic: gravestones tilted in the snow, bare oak trees, and, in the centre, the crumbling walls of an abandoned medieval monastery. It was all about decay, about the loss of the former world. It was about nature’s capacity to terrify and save us. The painting survives now only in reproductions, and like many Romantic artworks its power has been dulled through endless cloning; we see these images on book covers, album sleeves, posters and postcards, and greet them with a yawn. Romanticism seems too nostalgic for us, too earnestly dramatic for our wised-up, mocking, post-everything age. But however distant is the world of Friedrich and Novalis, Schelling and the Schlegel brothers, Hölderlin and Kleist, one element of the Romantic vision remains stubbornly alive. We too are obsessed with ruins. They compel the urban imagination in ways easy to experience but hard to understand. For us, as for the Romantics, their power is symbolic. Nobody wants to live amidst ruins, but we’re half in love with what they mean. Images of disintegration, of collapsed buildings and forsaken spaces have been popular in art for a very long time. In the medieval and Renaissance periods they were a useful backdrop for religious episodes. They were places where the prophets wandered, where the saints were martyred, where Christ met his revolutionary fate. For 15th century humanists, the ruins of Greece and Rome were like scattered pages from a magnificent book: reassemble the order and you could discover what they knew. Their brokenness was a kind of testimony to some larger and more intelligible whole. It wasn’t until centuries later that brokenness itself – wreckage as a principle, disintegration as a force – became the central story. Beginning in the late 1790s, a core group of German artists and thinkers created the Romantic movement. They were originally based in Jena, which, as one philosopher put it, “was the arena where the fundamental inter-

ests of modern culture had their breakthrough.” It’s not hard to see why. Romantics like Hölderlin and the Schlegel brothers installed the hungry, imaginative individual at the centre of everything, and they made art into a kind of secular religion. Today’s culture, when avant-garde art serves largely as the R & D branch of the advertising industry, is like a sinister cartoon version of Romantic utopia. But their individualism was more complex. We become ourselves, they thought, through the deep actions of an impersonal force. Call it Nature. The Romantics saw the experience of creative inspiration as the moment when an individual mind, alive to its own inner feelings, merges with Nature itself, that great current of Being which flows through everything, including us. Especially us. The creative imagination is nearly divine in its freedom. Like God, it can both utterly surpass and fully inhabit any particular point of view. This is why the Romantics were art-worshippers, and why the centrepiece of their religion was the symbol. Symbols were invented things that stood both for themselves and for something deeper, and were therefore capable of bridging, as if by magic, all of the contraries that reason wants to separate: mind and world, spirit and matter, Nature and culture. And nothing was more symbolic than a ruin. The ruins of Greek temples, Roman amphitheatres, and medieval castles were beautiful in themselves; they stimulated all the right feelings. They also represented the defeat of the Romantics’ hated enemy, Classicism, which sought to put all art-making under the control of reason. Reason seeks a final unified form, and a ruin is a broken form reclaimed by Nature. Ruins were to architecture what the fragment was to poetry. Friedrich Schlegel wrote that the essence of great poetry is “that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected”. Why? Because the experience of its making was the important thing, and because the fragment, like the ruin, educates your mind about reality’s contradictions. The artwork should be open, full of potential, so that the imagination can venture forth into new realms, exploring endless possibilities. The point of ruins and fragments was their

incompleteness. And it was in the ruin that Romanticism connected with the lost past of antiquity. As another of Schlegel’s fragmentary pronouncements has it: “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.” The Romantics began as admirers of ancient Greece, whose culture they saw as authentic, vigorous, and organically bound to Nature’s dynamism and power. “If we do not become Greeks,” wrote Johann Gottfried von Herder, “we will become barbarians.” So the antique ruin, like the decaying medieval castle that later occupied their imaginations, was a nostalgic reminder of lost cultural health, symbolising both the essence of great art and the kind of authentic civilisation such greatness could make. This is where we part company with the Romantics. Our collective sensorium is haunted by ruins, true, but they are ruins of the time to come, of our vanished future. The novels of J.G. Ballard, Paul Virilio’s “archaeology” of abandoned military installations, Tarkovsky’s ruin-scapes, the recent spate of photographic projects documenting the decay of Detroit and Britain: these darlings of contemporary aesthetic culture don’t harken back to some lost paradise. They are messages from tomorrow’s world. They are also symbolic reminders, should we need them, of how things are not the way we were told they’d be. Modernity made us many promises – universal prosperity, international peace, the end of inequality – all of which relied on faith in the boundless power of technological and organisational mastery. This faith is dead. Pollution and global warming are here to stay. Slums are growing at unprecedented speed. Resource wars are becoming normal. The riots in France and Greece have shown how vulnerable we are to economic

upheaval. Modern ruins compress these realities, make them visual and clear, and the pleasure we take in beholding them is the pleasure of foreknowledge. We remain, however, inspired by a Romanticism whose trust in the past we no longer share. When asked about his deepest beliefs, J.G. Ballard wrote: “I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash... in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.” Reality has become so strange that the only way to grasp it is to imagine, with the fury of a Romantic artist, its sublime disintegration. On the boulevards of Detroit are decaying hotels, old ravaged theatres, train stations and office buildings overrun by riotous verdure. In winter, snowdrifts blow in through the broken walls. Nature is taking back the means of its subjection. We find beauty in this, and irony, and a measure of justified fear. Immanuel Kant, writing not long after the horrific Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which for his time was the ultimate catastrophe, described the strange and powerful thrill we get from violent storms and thundering volcanoes, how we regard them with the awe reserved for grandiose works of art. We discover in such experiences that the world was not made for us. This perhaps is the lesson of ruins. Our powers of control are limited, our future is always uncertain, our promises of utopia are blueprints for collapse. That we can know this, anticipate it, and find in its proof a special sort of loveliness: such is the legacy of Romanticism.

Nature is taking back the means of its subjection. We find beauty in this, and irony, and a measure of justified fear.

»THE RUINS OF DETROIT« BY YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE PUBLISHED BY STEIDL ISBN: 978-3-86930-042-9 PUBLICATION DATE: AUGUST 2010 WWW.MARCHANDMEFFRE.COM

BEN MAUZE WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/DARKMATTERPHOTO

Caspar David Friedrich inspires

MANSCAPES

MIKAEL KENNEDY WWW.MIKAELKENNEDY.COM

LARS BORGES WWW.LARSBORGES.DE

DELANEY ALLEN WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/DELANEYALLEN

HASISI PARK WWW.HASISIPARK.COM

JONAS LINDSTRÖM WWW.JLINDSTROEM.COM

ANGELES PEÑA WWW.ANPENA.COM.AR

LANDON METZ WWW.LANDONMETZ.COM

BOTH IMAGES JONAS LOISKE WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/LOISKE

»Heimweh & Fernweh«

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE TEXT VIKTORIA PELLES ILLUSTRATION SHARMILA SANDRASEGAR

Germans have a real knack for coining terms with an unsurpassable ring to them (see schadenfreude, zeitgeist et al.), and though they did not completely invent the Romantic movement (though they’re pretty sure they did) they did in this great German tradition come up with some words to arm the language of Romanticism with befitting gravitas. Weltschmerz sort of springs to mind here. In that same vein, the words Heimweh (aching for home) and Fernweh (aching to be away) are able to transcend being more than just abstract states of mind. These are painful conditions! The idea of ‘heimweh’ or ‘nostalgia’ (nóstos – returning home, álgos – pain or ache) really came into its own during Romanticism, an era characterised by a growing sense of nationalism (originally intended as pride in the land and people whence you came) and surrounded by war. Heimweh had the status of real illness; the playing of traditional horn melodies (Kuhreihen) were known to cause such severe outbreaks of nostalgia in Swiss mercenaries that the music was forbidden out of fear of desertion or death. These days it’s hard to relate to such irrepressible yearnings for home, at least in the sense of a hometown or motherland. Encompassing two nationalities at birth is not so unusual, then all it takes is one or two moves with your family or loved one and by age 25 the simple question of where you’re from requires a 20-minute explanation: “Well, my dad’s this and my mum’s that, I was born over there, but grew up somewhere else, spent most my life elsewhere and now I live here.” This is normally closely followed by the inevitable, “Right… but where’s home?” Yeah, good question. Or is it? What’s so important about national identity anyway? If history has taught us anything, it’s that the line between a healthy pride in one’s country and an aggressive feeling of superiority of other nations is a tricky one at best, and for that reason the patriotic path is one most of us tend to avoid altogether. It seems heimweh, nostalgia, homesickness should be unfashionable if not obsolete. Also, not really knowing where you belong leaves you free to make your home anywhere, which is great, right? And yet, there’s this nagging feeling…

Anja Mutic turned her compulsion into a profession. Born and raised in Yugoslavia, a country that doesn’t exist anymore, she works as a professional nomad/travel writer (everthenomad.com) from Brooklyn, NYC. To the question of where home is, she says: “In one way, ‘home’ is my apartment in New York, as it’s the only place where I let the world slip away, where everything around me reminds me of the long journey I’ve taken to get there. ‘Home’ can also sometimes be a trip, a journey from one place to the next.” Home being the journey seems ironic of course, but when you don’t have a single home, the no man’s land of being in transit can be strangely comforting. It’s just you, on the way somewhere. “I feel homesick all the time,” Anja admits, “and often feel I should be elsewhere. That elsewhere haunts me”. It would seem lack of roots make us open, curious and adaptable, but ironically no less susceptible to ‘heimweh’ or nostalgia. In fact the ‘modern nomad’ with his or her numerous mini-lives and transient existences often feels the tug of the past much more. Because in contrast to their contemporaries, whose childhoods, youth and young adulthoods are still very much present in the shape of family homes, school reunions and hometowns, the past is where the nomads have had to leave so many meaningful experiences and friends. The tragic side to life is that we only have one. In a magical universe we could have 15 lives and existences, but the reality is we have to settle for one at a time and so people and places inevitably get left behind to some extent or other. These memories are bittersweet. They are nostalgia.

When you don’t have a single home, the no man’s land of being in transit can be strangely comforting.

Well, if heimweh is out, the spirit of ‘fernweh’ – heimweh’s opposite – is most definitely in. Another creation of the crafty German wordsmiths, fernweh is all the ache and longing for faraway places in a single word, especially designed to give expression to that romanticist desire to travel and explore. A particularly painful case of wanderlust if you will. Once the domain of the privileged few or truly adventurous, the will and most importantly the means to experience faraway destinations and cultures has grown ubiquitous. To the point that ‘experience’ is even a bit of a generous term; for the Lonely Planet generation travel often seems to be more about ticking the right boxes, yet another status symbol for the profile neurotic hipster. But cynicism aside, the quest for the new or unknown is a genuine passion, and for some of us it becomes a way of life.

So fernweh causes heimweh, or was it the other way around? Maybe it was not always that way but in this modern age it’s pretty clear the two apparent opposites are totally intertwined, if not the same thing. The question remains if all this longing, searching and moving around leads where it’s supposed to, this ‘home’. Whatever that is supposed to be or feel like. Well, let’s consider this: A surprising insight other travellers might relate to is the strangeness of being somewhere completely alien and foreign but feeling somehow much closer to yourself than you ever have back in any familiar world where you understand when to laugh or how to eat your meal. Maybe it’s something about not even being able to pretend to fit in that strips you back to your essential being. This perhaps leaves you a little vulnerable but also liberated and strangely connected. “I’ve had a sense of belonging to the most random places in the world, places that I have no organic connection with,” Anja remarks. Our search for the new and unknown is about gaining knowledge and understanding about the outside world of course (and nothing fills the gaps in your half-knowledge like seeing firsthand the sites or sorrows you’ve only ever read about), but in our quest for the exotic we are often unexpectedly confronted with ourselves. In a few weeks we often learn and understand more about our own selves than we have over the course of a couple of years back in the routine of the everyday, where our senses are dulled by repetition and minds distracted by mass culture. And in this way the quest to be faraway will lead you closer to yourself, and that, after all, is most definitely the place to be.

Modern Painting

CANVASSING NEW TRUTH

LAURENCE OWEN »LESSON«

TEXT EMER GRANT

DANIEL BAKER

TOM ORMOND »SOL SPACE COPY«

KATE GROOBEY »THE CUTTING MAT«

LAURENCE OWEN »REPETITION 12«

LAURENCE OWEN »MISS ISABELLA«

Whether dead and buried or alive and kicking, painters have always played a Promethean role in the history of art. With each successive return to the limelight, a painting’s value as a medium has been debated against the reverence with which we hold it. The image of the obsessive, self-absorbed, deluded, lonely, penniless painter has provided a model for the essence of the romantic nomadic soul. A catch-up with the modern painter is perhaps long overdue. Electronic Beats speaks to five contemporary painters to see why they still paint and why they always will.

DANIEL BAKER »XXX«

Growing up in a gypsy community there were many cultures of making, a general sort of creative drive. I went to art school when I was seventeen, four years after graduating I worked on scenic art and interiors, which plays a role in my work today; this idea of ornamentation of interior spaces comes into play. At the moment I’m producing what I would call ‘looking glass paintings’ painting on top of mirrored surfaces, monumentalized texts or images taken from gypsy visual repertoire, things like birds or flowers or horses. Often the images are graffitied on, creating a contrast between romantic imagery and destructive mark making, showing both sides to the gypsy, the romantic ideal and the vagrant menace. I want the viewer to be a bit confused or unsure about what they want to do with the work. The diversions I create in the work are addressing how we come to works of art with preconceptions, or dealing with how we address anything with a preconception and breaking that down. I’ve done work with film and photography before, but the very low-fi aspect to painting serves a purpose as I also want to challenge preconceptions of painting, there is often a static idea of what painting can do.

DANIEL BAKER

DANIEL BAKER I am very aware of the transformative qualities of painting, I enjoy taking simple materials and making them into something that is hopefully much more than the sum of their parts. I still believe that there is a political agenda that can lie in painting, I don’t see painting as a dying art form, the challenge and debate surrounding whether or not it is dead is what is keeping it alive. To be an artist today is to challenge ideas, to challenge the status quo, to transmit one’s social agency, firstly from being a person and secondly from being an artist, and to do this through one’s art work, it’s basically about trying to make a difference. DANIEL BAKER, 48, PHD STUDENT RCA, SOVEREIGN EUROPEAN ART PRIZE 2010 NOMINEE, REPRESENTED BY THE FEINKOST GALLERY IN BERLIN

TOM ORMOND

TOM ORMOND »SUNCATCHER II«

TOM ORMOND »SOLAR SAUSAGE COOK-OUT«

There’s been a sci-fi label attached to my work, sometimes in quite a derogatory way too, it’s not that I want it to look like sci-fi, it just has this look to it. My early work was a twist on English landscape painting, bringing in a modernist element, now my work is a sort of hybrid of the two. There’s something about the sci-fi label I like, I know it can be cheesy, but sci-fi is essentially projecting ideas of today into tomorrow. You project into the future, try and look back and establish where we will be. I’m interested in what will happen in the future, whether painting will be relevant or whether it will be something that’s so ridiculous that it’s just not worth doing. I guess what makes me an artist is the belief in what I do as being in some way, worth of some value, not necessarily financial. Sometimes when people ask “what do you do?” and you hesitate if you’re not in so many shows and it’s harder to admit that you are a painter. Depending on who asks, I might be an artist or I might be a painter, it’s not really definitive the difference, painting is just a further specification. Painting, in a way, is about oldness, so we have an association of painting with the past and with subject matter, you can project into the future. I think there is a tension there and I like my work to operate in this tension. In terms of influence, the stuff I have in my studio is reference material. I went on a travel scholarship where I visited lots of ambitious architectural projects in America, things like nuclear test sites and ecological communities, places where these extreme contrasts existed, between nuclear war and utopian communities, ideas of what is local and international. History makes painting stand separate from what is blanketed as contemporary art. Things like video art carry their own history too, but it’s just more recent and this is why, in terms of painting and weight, it carries more, you can use its history, dip in and out of it for the means of your wo

Painting will always be around. When someone announced painting was dead it was said to be one of the best things to ever happen, as it resulted in a lot more painting. I think it’s quite primeval and humans are essentially like this. There’s something quite primitive about slapping paint on a canvas and moving it around. It’s also a fashion thing, market driven, where sometimes painting is in demand and sometimes it isn’t. I think people will always paint, but whether it will be recognised as cultural visual expression by the critics or philosophers of the future, in comparison to perhaps something like Big Brother, is yet to be seen. TOM ORMOND, 36, REPRESENTED BY ALISON JACQUES GALLERY, LONDON

My dad drew a picture when I was seven and I remember really enjoying copying it and thinking that this was something that I wanted to do or that this was something that I was quite good at. I liked art classes in school above most of the other subjects and then I went and did a foundation. I didn’t really think I was an artist until someone wanted to buy some work off me. I never actually knew where it would take me, nor was I channelling all my energy into thinking about where it would. In my work I’ve always been interested in this idea of contrast, two opposing ideas sharing the same space and creating a language through that. I use other materials, I love using felt tip pens, in how finite they are, and at the moment I’m using graphite, but I always paint; painting is the spine to everything I do. When I was at college there were these rumours going around that painting was dead, it came about at this time when the YBAs were popular and there was this conceptual flow of slick, quite structural art. Painting has always been accessible as a tool to reference itself historically. I like this about it, I like to reference other paintings and painters in my work and painting has this quality. It has its own self-awareness, its own weight attached to it and I like being able to play with this. For me, paint has its own alchemy, it’s about this first and foremost as a medium, more so than what it is I’m actually painting. It’s about the surface, the experimentation and the idea. I think that painting is just painting. It can’t do anything else apart from progress or develop. Like everything, there are trends and interests and times when the market pays attention to a certain type of art. Painting doesn’t die, it has been there and will always be there and each generation will turn to discover and play with and work out. It’s like a guitar where you’re never really going to run out of chords to play. I think that, essentially, you can still discover a lot more about painting within painting, in terms of finding out more about art; I think it’s entirely in the hands of the viewer. LAURENCE OWEN, 25, ARTIST, WORKS EXIST AS PART OF

LAURENCE OWEN »HORN DANCE«

HIRST’S MURDEME COLLECTION

LAURENCE OWEN »MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS«

LAURENCE OWEN

LAURENCE OWEN »REPETITION 5«

LAURENCE OWEN »TRUANCY«

LAURENCE OWEN »SPOT THE DOGGING«

ANNA M.R.FREEMAN »UNKNOWN TRACTS«

I find paint a very seductive medium, I love working with it and seeing what it can do. Using other mediums such as film explores the definition of painting today and reflects upon the use of composition and framing employed throughout the history of painting. The dramatic use of gesture in the brushstroke defies the definition of detail in the film works, and yet a sense of movement in both mediums unites the two opposing ways of working. My practice explores the significance of space and how different architectural or structural environments can provoke thinking about nostalgic longing, memory and eternity. Images of ostentatious Baroque beauty are played off against depictions of abandonment; querying the comfort and security that abundance seems to offer. I am drawn to certain images instinctively, but then I also select specific images that I think will work in paint and that will challenge my way of painting. I go through phases of obsessing over certain artists and then after a while, as my work moves on, their influence seems less relevant. Some of these artists have been Anselm Kiefer, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig, Michael Borremans and then, more recently, Adrian Ghenie. I am particularly interested in the artists Tacita Dean and Sarah Morris, whose films I find painterly and inspiring. I see the role of art as vital in society because art encourages people to stop and think about the world, what we believe, what we do, why we do it and what it means to live and to die on Earth today. If we are not thinking and contemplating about our lives then we are robots! Some paintings really can do that, stop you in your tracks and make you see things differently or remind you of the way that you see things. When that happens, then the painter is playing a crucial role on the world’s stage! ANNA M. R. FREEMAN, 27, NOMINATED FOR BLOOMBERG CONTEMPORARIES 2009, WINNER OF THE CHELSEA ARTS CLUB TRUST AWARD, 2009, LONDON

ANNA M.R.FREEMAN »FADE«

ANNA M. R. FREEMAN

KATE GROOBEY I used to get a huge kick out of painting when I was in my teens; I guess it was a slippery slope from there. My work consists of oil paintings dealing with body and force. They’re slightly comic, slightly grotesque. Characters form and deform through a process of cutting and re-arranging. I create a kind of arena out of which narratives can start to emerge, even as they begin to fragment and collapse under the scalpel. There’s a strong performance element in my work, both in the subject matter and in the particularly physical way they’re executed. There are certain underlying subjects that I’m deeply embroiled with and it’s that engagement that drives the work. But what pushes and inspires it to move in different directions is always changing depending on where I am, who I’m talking to and what I’m looking at. I use paint as my preferred medium, as I like its body and base, I like the mess.

KATE GROOBEY »HORSE«

KATE GROOBEY »THE FENCE«

Recently I’ve been looking a lot at Matisse, his design and colour. Hokusai’s drawing. I’ve had a copy of Baselitz’s B for Larry hanging round my studio for a year or two. And I recently went crackers over a show by the British surrealist painter Paul Nash at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. What always inspires me to create art is the thought “I wonder what would happen if...?”My standard response to tough times in the studio is to have a cup of tea... Maybe a biscuit if it’s really bad. For me, just accepting that things are often tough in the studio helps. It’s really important to have the right people around to support you. And sometimes the best thing can be to take a break. With regard to the business side of things and the business of being an artist today, I kind of muddle through the business side of things, it’s tricky... If I’m still an artist in ten years or still making work, I just see myself in the studio, maybe a slightly bigger one... Hopefully I’ve kept things playful and exploratory. If I were to give painters in the future some advice it would be that with paint, it all takes a long time. KATE GROOBEY, 31, RCA PAINTING GRADUATE 2010, LONDON

ILLUSTRATION LISA BORGES IMAGES TOBIAS SCHULT | LEONA LIST

A Fashion Perspective

GUTTER ROMANTICISM TEXT JAN JOSWIG ILLUSTRATION DÖRTE LANGE

Forget ethnic, forget gothic, here comes the gutter. Fashion focuses on a new exoticism: Gutter Romanticism. Gutter Romanticism is the most cynical form of romanticism. It’s not your swollen heart longing for an Arcadia. It’s your angry heart heading away from where you are. To show romanticism for the gutter is just an attempt to escape the privileged class you’re from – and all the untruthfulness and arrogance (or whatever) you hate about it. But you don’t want to become part of the unprivileged world. You just want to shock the privileged one. In a way you exploit the aesthetics of the poor and dropped-out. But on the other hand the Gutter Romanticism is the strongest symbolic ANTI against anything established. You show that you give a fuck. Generally people believe in the trickledown effect. The rich, famous and mighty set the fashion standards, the lower classes adopt them step by step. This may be true for the Mods of the sixties, who over-emphasized the business suit, or the Poppers of the eighties, who developed their style out of the casual Friday look of Wall Street. People play with the dress codes of a higher class. But there always has been the opposite movement. People pretending they’re from a lower class, from the gutter. That dates back to the times of Napoleon in France. The Parisian ‘Incroyables’ and ‘Merveilleuses’ at the beginning of the 19th century wore ill-fitting clothes in a used look as if they had found them in the trash. This was the most elaborate form of decadent elegance. High society stressed its love for antique times, high values and the Olympus, while the Incroyables and Merveilleuses pretended they were more into low pubs without any past or future. In a similar situation – just after escaping violent times, but 150 years later – the Beatniks used Gutter Romanticism for an equal statement. After World War II the kids from the white middleclass houses checked the black ghetto neighbourhoods and adopted the style of the poor, oppressed, but vital black community. Perhaps you got the money – but we got life, is the statement of their ragged cool ghetto wardrobe against their parents. The Beatniks revitalized Carl Spitzweg’s Biedermeier painting Der arme Poet with the poor but inspired artist in his cold and wet attic room – only in the updated Afro-American version. The trailer park people, the unemployed victims of the decline of US-American industry, are the blueprint for the Gutter Romanticism of the Slacker movement of the nineties, those students with the bad posture and the holes in the checked flannel of their shirts. Their hero, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, couldn’t stand the cynicism of this attitude and shot himself (at least that’s what the hobby psychologists around the world say. Sorry, dude, I might be totally wrong on that …) In recent times the western European youth chooses the opposite way and adopts the Preppy style. They enjoy the new pleasures of looking like neat and clean aspirants – without being completely

sure if it’s really still a game or serious bloody preparation for the restraints of capitalist society. In turn, this mainstream movement of dressing-up compels high fashion, the catwalk world of fashion, to sympathise with the aesthetic of those who have stopped having any aspirations at all. For summer 2009 Lanvin showed ripped and torn straw hats as if directly imported from the ‘Gammler Look’ (the ‘Bum Look’, as conservative critics called it in Germany) of the Beatniks. The same season Munich enfant terrible of fashion, Patrick Mohr, invited real homeless people to show his collection “Is the rhomboid ragpicker homeless?“ on the catwalk next to professional models at the Berlin Fashion Week. And the line between abstract inspiration by a group of people and usurpation of one single person was definitely crossed when the mentally ill Chinese bum Brother Sharp became a fashion icon via the blogosphere this spring.

Perhaps you got the money – but we got life, is the statement of their ragged cool ghetto wardrobe. A slightly, but importantly different, approach on Gutter Romanticism offers Gosha Rubchinskiy. The 26-year old whiz kid of Moscow fashion concentrates not on the inner city dropouts, but on the suburb kids. The kids from the projects in the UK, from the banlieues in France, the Trabantenstädte in Germany are underprivileged for sure, but they haven’t stopped struggling to get out of their situation. Here the Gutter Romanticism becomes more fierce and uptight. It’s not the attitude of those who give a fuck but the attitude of youngsters who will fuck anyone that stand in their way to the top. Gosha Rubchinskiy’s Gutter Romanticism is a modern post-perestroika version of the ‘Halbstarker’, the young rowdies from the fifties. It has much more in common with the Beatniks’ fascination for Afro-American sharpness than with the sentimental idealisation of the apparently contented poor people. This Gutter Romanticism is not flirting with the idea that it’s much greener on the non-capitalist’s side with no wealth but no rat race, above all – as long as someone lends you an old straw hat. It romanticises Gutter Capitalism, the style of kids who have to be tough and streetwise from an early age if they don’t want to get robbed of their lollipops. His shiny sportswear transcends the vulgar hunt for wealth much more honestly than the virgin white collar of the business suit. Perhaps that’s the only way to escape the cynicism of Gutter Romanticism.

Photographer Tobias

Schult

Sandra Liermann Maxine Schiff / Model Management Hair & Make-up Jazz Mang / Basics Styling Jennifer Hahn Photography Assistant Mohamed Elfar Studio www.studio-67.com Production Model

Dress Starstyling Bodice La Perla Belt Vintage

Left Jacket Garland Coo Pants Wolford Right Tunic Butterflysoulfire Bodice 6ixty 8ight Necklace Galeries Lafayette Boots Guess

Left Flap trousers Y-3 Negligee La Perla Shoes Empodium Fur Hat & Boots Vintage Right Jacket Firma Pants Wolford Garter Belt Vintage Necklace Baptiste Viry Boots Guess

Left Dress Butterflysoulfire Necklace Vintage Pants Wolford Boots Guess Right Blouse & Cape Butterflysoulfire Corsage Garland Goo Leggings Kilian Kerner

Left Dress Snob Socks Falke BootsEmpodium Stovepipe hat Vintage Bangle & Ring Eva Fischer Right Coat Franzius Boots Empodium

»And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee« Taken from »To Nature« by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Photography Attila Hartwig Production Sandra Liermann

Bath oil Susanne Kaufmann Silver Thorn Apple D.L. & Co Orange Blossom, eau de toilette Penhaligonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Black Skull with Lizard Candle by D.L. & Co Mandragore Pourpre, eau de toilette Annick Goutal Devin, country eau de cologne spray Aramis Fowl Play Writing Box with Feather Pen & Bird Claw Letter Opener D.L. & Co Lily of the Valley Pocket Watch D.L. & Co Correspondence Box with flourished notecards D.L. & Co Iris de Nuit, eau de parfum Heeley Bas de Soie, eau de parfum Serge Lutens Le Pomme Rose D.L. & Co Angels Trumpet Diffuser D.L. & Co Pomegranate Noir, cologne Jo Malone All D.L. & Co products @ Departmentstore Quartier 206

Reykjavik

Pure and Unadulterated

Remote, mysterious, definitely weird. The old Romantics would certainly have loved Reykjavik, and chances are you won’t be able to resist either. Surrounded by breathtaking landscapes with a vibrant arts and music scene, Reykjavikians are a cool crowd that nevertheless lack the aloofness and profile anxiety of their Scandinavian ancestors. This is pleasure – pure and unadulterated. TEXT VIKTORIA PELLES PHOTOGRAPHY LEONA LIST

For such a small city Reykjavik sure knows how to get itself noticed. This 200, 000 strong town has long made a name for itself in music circles with the individual sounds of artists like Sigur Rós, Gus Gus and Iceland’s national treasure, the inimitable Björk. The Iceland Airwaves Festival has become one of the premier showcases for new music in the world. Not one to be subdued into obscurity by a financial crisis, Reykjavik reached out to the rest of the international community earlier this year via the volcanic ash cloud of Eyjafjallajökull, which caused the biggest disruption to air-travel since the second world war. If you didn’t before, you definitely know about Iceland now. Of course, the attention and hype is more than deserved. The truly remarkable setting of this capital just 2° south of the Polar Circle has to be seen to be believed. The open and welcoming nature of the locals will disarm the darkest and most cynical continental hearts, while he legendary nightlife will bring back the feeling of the wild and unhinged nights your youth. The selection of cafés, eateries and fashion stores may not represent the quantity available in a metropolis like London, but the taste, style and quality of what is available is enough to satisfy international gourmands and fashionistas alike. Reykjavik is a city with aspirations above its station is how adopted local Kitty Von Sometime puts it, and the creative output and influence does manage to surpass many other cities with quadruple the population and infinitely more central locations. It seems to possess a boundless source of energy. Then again few other cities boast a location that practically bridges two continental plates, a reality that is regularly confirmed by all the steaming and bubbling that goes on across the breathtaking volcanic landscape surrounding Reykjavik. To say there must be something in the water of this town is most definitely an understatement.

Kitty von Sometime Video Artist

Kitty Von Sometime is originally from Devon, England, but settled permanently in Reykjavik in 2006 after visiting about ten times a year for seven years. She works as a producer for CCP Games and is gaining notoriety with her Weird Girls project. Over some homemade healthy and delicious muffins, Kitty shares the inspiration behind The Weird Girls project and what makes Reykjavik so damn special. WWW. THEWEIRDGIRLSPROJECT.COM

What is The Weird Girls project? This started out as a bit of fun, which it still is but has turned a little more professional now. There was this obsession with being cool or having a certain image, which got on my tits to be honest, but also serious body-consciousness issues leading to eating disorders among my friends. I wanted to shake things up a bit and organised the first Weird Girls ‘episode’! Although everything is visually recorded, it’s about the event itself, and the process the women go through stepping out of themselves. And, recently you’ve done a few commissions? Yes, I was recently commissioned to do a music video for an Italian band called Crookers. And I recently collaborated with a young composer, Ólafur Arnalds, but I produced something and he could decide if he liked it, which he does. I much prefer to work like this. Especially with a group of naked women, you don’t want to have some sort of pressure to ‘deliver’ something. Does Reykjavik ever feel isolated? The thing is with this place is that a lot of people want to come here and when they do – because it’s such a small place – you will most likely meet them. Is there a defining characteristic for the Reykjavikians? (“Impulsive”, says Kitty’s man, Daniel, lead-singer of GusGus from behind his laptop across the room). Impulsive, yes… but, Reykjavik THE WEIRD GIRLS PROJECT

is – and I say this with love – a town that thinks above its abilities. It’s ambitious. The clubs, the fashion, everything thinks above its station. And so it should because it’s saturated with creativity. Fashionwise – is there a distinctive style in Reykjavik? Yes, it’s all about capes and wings! I’ve always loved this style. I have been wearing batwings since about ’99 and had the piss taken out of me constantly, but when I moved here and my dad came to visit he was like, “You’ve found your people!” Do you think there’s anything lacking, do you miss anything? I miss dancefloors! The coffee shops become bars in the night and they move the furniture and people dance on the tables, and in a way I love this. But if you like a serious dance, and I do, you can never really get moving to the music you like without an elbow in your tit and beer in your face. What is a scene/setting/moment that sort of sums up the spirit of the city? Gay Pride! That is summing up the city! Gay Pride is the single biggest family day in Iceland, above the national day, even. Downtown is busier than any other day and it is full of families. I mean the gay population is minute, and most of the people on these floats are not, and will never be, gay, but they are still on the floats with their big fake eyelashes. This to me sums it up, they just take you for who you are, regardless of what you are doing and just they LOVE an excuse to party in this town! You could just name a day and they’d be like, “Ok, let’s make a festival!” What does a typical meal in Iceland have to include? Icelandic lobster, the langoustine. You can get langoustine pizza, langoustine soup, langoustine quesadillas…

PHOTO CREDITS FROM LEFT TO RIGHT LEÓ STEFANSSON | HÖRÐUR SVEINSSON | KRISTIN MAGNÚSSON | BEN MATHIS

Tell us how the story of how you came to Reykjavik? I first came to review the Airwaves Festival and I woke up on that first morning with a ‘husband’ and a hangover. I started hanging out with people who lived here very, very quickly – something that doesn’t really happen in London. I’m originally from Devon and it reminded me of life there, though more stylish of course!

Reykjavik Top Picks There are many treasures on this cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shopping and eatery scene. Conveniently most of them can be found on the same main street! This is a small selection of the must-sees and dos. 101 Hotel

101 Hotel

Kaffibarinn WWW.KAFFIBARINN.IS

101 Hotel WWW.101HOTEL.IS

Spaks

The 101 Hotel simply ticks all the right boxes: comfortably cut rooms, heavenly beds, AVEDA products, inviting spa area and a bar (featuring impressive work of local artists) that is also frequented by chic Reykjavikians.

WWW.SPAKSMANNSSPJARIR.IS

Fish Marked WWW.FISKMARKADURINN.IS

Geysir WWW. GEYSIRSHOPS.IS

Nostalgia, LAUGAVEGUR 32

Spark WWW.SPARKDESIGNSPACE.COM

Boston

LAUGAVEGUR 28B

Kaffi Mokka WWW.MOKKA.IS

Illustrator / Fashion Designer Ási (pronounced something like Au-see) was born and grew up in a small Icelandic town impossible to spell. As a sixteen-year old he moved to Reykjavik for college and has lived there since. Originally a fine art student at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Ási’s self-made clothing creations caught the eye of the fashion director and so he was sucked into the fashion-cosmos. Following internships with ThreeAsFour, Thomas Engel Hart and Martine Sitbon, this vivacious young talent designs and illustrates as Ási from Iceland (not to be confused with that other sailor-loving illustrator Tom of Finland of Physique Pictorial fame). His creations are available at the recently opened Kiosk fashion store, the gorgeously airy and quirky space he shares with fellow local designers. How would define style in Reykjavik? It is flowy and strong. Shiny and hard. Do you think people are influenced much by what’s happening in New York or other big centres? We have a lot of people with amazing style, and some have really done their own personal thing. But with the rise of fashion media, the blogs etc, there are also those people keeping up with the latest. In one way it is getting more homogenous, in the way that many people who didn’t used to dress up now do. What about the ubiquitous Iceland jumper? I think it’s cute but overpriced and just everywhere. With the pattern being used for bottle warmers and kitschy things and it’s becoming a cliché. I’m not that into them, but they are a symbol of childhood – we all wore them! The style-set who wear them get their jumpers especially knitted for them from their aunt or grandmother. Foreign labels and designers – how popular are they? Do people stick to local labels, as there is such a variety? Overseas design and products were gaining in popularity before the crash. It was sometimes hard to compete price-wise due to local production costs, but these days imports are obviously very expensive which is giving local labels an added edge.

The nightlife is so notorious, what is that all about? Icelandic people have a lot of raw energy in them. People generally just go out on weekend so they have been saving themselves all week. This leads to hardcore partying! It can get quite vile as well… What do you miss in Reykjavik if anything? Anonymity – it’s just so small here. You just can’t do anything without everyone knowing. At the same time I love how it’s a concentrated version of a big city. It has the energy of a much bigger city! What’s the defining characteristic of Reykjavikians? Even if they sometimes look tough, people are really friendly here. If they ever meet a tourist they’ll go out of their way to make sure they have a good time. They are…hospitable! Do you have a favourite building place? The house of artist/sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson. The garden there is very gothic and magical. Perfect day in Reykjavik, what would that look like? Wake up early and go to a swimming pool, of which there are plenty. Eat some sushi or other fresh fish. Hang out by the pond and drink some beers perhaps. And then go out of course!!

“KIOSK” FASHION STORE

ILLUSTRATIONS ÁSGRÍMUR MÁR FRIÐRIKSSON

Rockin’ Reykjavik Paul Sullivan, author of Waking Up In Iceland, a book on Iceland’s innovative music scene, and editor at Iceland Music Export, profiles Reykjavik’s dynamic music scene… TEXT PAUL SULLIVAN IMAGES LILJA BIRGISDÓTTIR (SEABEAR)

MUGISON

BJÖRK

FOR A MINOR REFLECTION

SEABEAR

OLAFUR ARNALDS

EMILIANA TORRINI SIGUR ROS

Even if you don’t know where the hell Iceland is on the map (north Atlantic), what language they speak (a medieval strain of Nordic Germanic) and what they eat for dinner (Puffin sandwiches, promise!), you’ll still probably be aware of at least some of the extraordinarily excellent music the country puts out. Oddly enough, no one knew shit about the country for eons (expect the Danish perhaps, given they occupied it for several centuries) until Björk steered The Sugarcubes to the top of the charts in 1989 and followed up with a singular solo career that’s become the envy of every independent, creatively-minded female artist on the planet. Post-Björk there’s been a relentless stream of world-class acts – Sigur Ros, múm, Mugison, Emiliana Torrini, amiina, Olafur Arnalds, seabear, For A Minor Reflection, to name a few – who have helped cement the country’s reputation for distinctive, and often distinctively left-field, sounds. If you visit the country, an odd thing happens. The ‘myth’ that it’s full of music-obsessed genii doesn’t shatter – it ossifies into fact. Spend a few days in downtown (101) Reykjavik, the hub of the independent / alternative scene, and you’ll soon realise this is no ordinary city, but a giant, amorphous band comprising thousands of singers and musicians of all ages who happen to have practical ‘hobbies’ like starting families and working for money. While ostensibly a charming, overgrown fishing village, Reykjavik has just about everything a major city has, the difference being it usually has literally just the one rather than 50 or 100. No, you won’t find “superfluity” in any Icelandic dictionary - and even if you do, you won’t be able to it pronounce it. The main part of Reykjavik is so risibly dinky you can mooch around it, taking in Tjörnin, the pretty lake, the ‘bustling’ high street Laugavegur, the museums and lovely harbour, in a morning or afternoon, coffee breaks and siestas included. Which is just as well, since there’s an insane amount of partying to be done. Those stories about Reykjavik’s nightlife scene being notoriously debauched? True. Every last one of them. During the weekend, the quiet, unassuming façade slips away to reveal the raucous Viking reality: a densely bearded and crazy-eyed thing, prone to unexpected midnight howls and perilous stage-dives from narrow ledges. From Friday night onwards – ok, and yes, also through the week – DJs and bands play their hairy bazookas off inside happening cafes and bars like the world-famous Kaffibarinn (where Damon Albarn allegedly passed out three nights in a row before buying shares) and Bakkus, concert venues like Faktorý, Sódóma and the imaginatively named Venue, and slick clubs like Jacobsen and Nasa. Record shops and churches get in on the act too, and guess what? A lot of it sounds damn fine. And thoroughly interesting. Sometimes both. “I think there is a widespread faith among Icelandic musicians that anything is possible, even such an eccentric thing as making a living from playing the trumpet,” comments multi-instrumentalist Kira Kira, whose recent album Our Map To The Monster Olympics features her own child-like drawings and the kind of musical and

instrumental whimsy that makes Björk look sane. “So many people take grand risks and are unafraid of throwing themselves completely into their dream thing to do.” For a geographically isolated country with only 295,000 inhabitants, Iceland does seems to have a disproportionate number of internationally appealing acts. So what makes it tick? Perhaps the most important factor in the dynamic is its size. Reykjavik’s close-knit community, most of whom know one another, creates a uniquely creative and highly interactive environment. “The scene is super-sweet harmony,” as Kira puts it. “I play banjo for you, you play accordion for me, I borrow your amp, you borrow my studio. Occasionally people hit each other on the head with beer glasses, but that’s rare.” “We have a pretty good scene going on here, which is fostered and encouraged by the smallness of the scene, the closeness of it, the intimacy of the musicians etc.” agrees Haukur S Magnusson, editor of esteemed (and deliciously irreverent) local magazine Grapevine and guitarist with punky livewires Reykjavik!. “Plus, up until now, there has been little or no hope for fiscal success or making this a job in the niches of Icelandic music that ultimately reach the outside world. This ensures co-operation, mutual back-scratches and that those within it will make music more as a creative outlet than any sort of road to fiscal glory.” Mugison, whose initial electronic experiments were released through Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records and whose recent Mugiboogie album saw him switch to balls-out bluesy rock & roll, adds that “another strength is that the scene has no class division. Björk and I don’t have special access to any clubs – small indie bands have the same access as everyone else. If you want your song to be played on national radio you can just look in the phone book and call the DJ.” Iceland, of course, has been having a weird old time of it lately to say the least. First there was the economic collapse, which in turn created the famous ‘saucepan’ revolution, whereby the population managed to oust their government via the cunning use of loudly banged kitchen utensils – a mark of a ‘rhythmically rebellious’ nation if ever there was one. Just as the political chaos was beginning to settle, a load more was expectorated into the air by a volcano with a name so bizarre and apparently lacking in vowels that one of the country’s musicians (Eliza Newman) wrote a song about how to pronounce it. After bringing its own country to a halt, Iceland then disrupted a huge swathe of Europe, creating economic losses that ran into billions. If you didn’t know where Iceland was back in 2008, you sure as fuck do now. As for the crash affecting the music scene – nah. “For the most part, I’d say that it hasn’t affected it one bit,” chirps Magnusson, “except maybe there’s better concert attendance for smaller acts as folks can’t afford to go abroad as much as they used to. Most of the people whose Icelandic music you like have day jobs and juggle their music in-between. Life has not changed at all for these people, especially since none of them chose high paying careers in the first place, as they probably wouldn’t have time to play their music.”

ILLUSTRATION LISA BORGES IMAGES ANGELIKA MARIA BOES

Margaret Dygas THE SOUND OF WATCHING PEOPLE TEXT PAUL SULLIVAN PHOTO SELF PORTRAIT

Margaret Dygas has spent the last couple of decades drifting insouciantly across the globe, from her native Poland to San Jose, New York, London (where she began DJing in the nineties) and her current hometown of Berlin. She’s resident DJ at the legendary Pano[rama] Bar and regularly weaves together tribal techno rhythms and abstract textures – including her own wraith-like experiments, produced for labels like Perlon and Contexterrior – in clubs inside and outside the city. Margaret’s debut full length, How Do You Do, is released this month on Japan’s powershovelaudio label, along with an accompanying 36-page booklet featuring her own snapshots. EB caught up with her to talk about Desmond Morris, people-watching and romance…

I hear your new album was inspired partly by Desmond Morris. How did you come to discover Britain’s most notorious zoologist? One of my last evenings in London over dinner with friends we began to talk about books, specifically me wanting to buy some before moving to Berlin. My best friend surprised me with a bunch, and Morris’ Peoplewatching was one of them. Is the peoplewatching thing something you indulge in yourself? Are you a ‘watcher’ or a ‘doer’ in general? I’ve noticed that I am a bit more of a watcher since reading this book and watching some of Dr. Morris’s documentaries. You get to understand people a bit more in general. Meanwhile, you start to notice things about yourself and realise that maybe you’re doing the same ‘stuff ’ you might not like in others, for example, sort of having them be your reflection. Being a watcher can also mean just paying more attention in general; maybe to that guy at a newsstand where you’ve been getting your daily paper for the last x number of years, but never said “thank you” to him. Being a watcher is hot, I think. What brought you to Berlin? Anything romantic perhaps? Many things ‘brought’ me to Berlin, but in general I fell in love with the city, the spirit of it. People seem more relaxed. There’s eye candy wherever you look; whole buildings are painted, graffiti is scattered around, there are sculptures someone just thought of displaying without having to have to ask for permission, small exhibitions that you can only see if you happen to be on a certain street by chance… so, a lot to discover. And, of course, the dirty raving! Some of which makes you feel like it’s a gathering of a lifetime… maybe there’s something in the air! How has your actual experience borne out your previous ideas about Berlin/the music scene? Now that I think about it, I didn’t have ‘clear’ previous ideas about Berlin, or its music scene. I moved here for many reasons, some very important to me, like being able to jump on the train anytime I want and see my family in Poland, which I was not able to do before. But no matter how you look at Berlin, it can be an intense little village, so I guess that makes some of us farmers? Your work as a DJ must give you some interesting insights into human behaviour… You can see things how you’d like to see them and if you choose to. There are always many ways of looking at why people act a certain way, but it’s not fair to analyse too much; maybe a little is healthy for understanding. But I don’t go to a club to be a conscious watcher. People go out to have a good time, including myself. I wouldn’t want to be watched with a magnifying glass… or binoculars! How did you set about translating the inspiration you felt from the book into the music on the album? It took a while to figure out how I was going to combine everything; the book with music and finally the photos. I used to read the book by chapters, not necessarily in a particular order, finding words or phrases I liked, thinking of my own experiences that I might have

had with people at the time, or looking at the general feeling of what these phrases from the book mean to me. But there are a couple of tracks that I had from before and I decided to include them; they just happened to fit the explanation for a certain phrase I found in the book that I wanted to use. Your take on techno is fairly unique. What factors have guided you towards making the kind of music you do? I’d say many different factors; some not even techno related. Some are making music and not thinking about it; some might like it or will want to listen to it, and some not; some might play it out if we’re talking about club music. But I’m guessing there will be at least one guy somewhere that will have an ear for it and this is inspiring and somehow reassuring because I’m already ‘one guy’. I don’t make a point of making music that is ‘unique’. I find it very nice that you say that, but I wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed in that way. I’m only trying things out, mostly for myself – a bit selfish, I guess. I love making music because of all the endless possibilities and that it can make you feel so many different ways. You are releasing a booklet of photographs too – how long have you been a photographer, and what kind of approach did you take to represent the album photographically? I’ve been a photographer since I bought my first camera. I was snapping photos like a crazy person for this project; pretty much everywhere I went it was the big mission to snap away. Two of the cameras I was using were analogue, the other one was digital, but you couldn’t see what you were shooting or what you’d actually catch on the photo as there was no ‘live screen’. You only got to see the picture after taking it with the little digital cam, or by developing the analogue film. Many surprises… and a lot of fun. Do you think there is much romance in human behaviour in 2010? Depends on where you live, your cultural habits or ways. I think people should flirt more, this alone could be the beginning of a romance. But it doesn’t mean you have to get naked, not straight away as far as I know. Romance can have a lot of humour, some cheekiness, naughtiness in the eyes – or just one. In the club, it’s all about dancing, or that’s what I wanna see anyway. You wanna get romantic? Try rubbing on someone while dancing. But keep in mind this could be dangerous, they might already be ‘romantic’ with someone else who is watching you rubbing their lover’s leg. You’d better have some excuse ready… What is the most romantic gesture anyone has ever made to you? Can’t tell you, it’s a bit too naughty for paper. I find giving flowers to your loved one without an occasion very romantic, just not those plastic ones. Many things can be romantic. At the end of the day, it’s the thought that counts!

TEXT GARETH OWEN PHOTO ANGELIKA MARIA BOES

Chilly Gonzales

»I WISH I COULD JUST SHUT UP AND PLAY THE PIANO«

As I take the lift with Gonzales to his room to conduct our interview I can’t help but hear him talking in hushed tones with the PR. It appears that last night he managed to leave his room door open, and his laptop was stolen. However, that is not what has made him most angry… “They took my fucking weed as well” ... ouch. “Those guys have got some seriously bad karma coming to them. If they had left it and just taken the computer, then in a way I might have felt some strange moral code from them,” he explains. And the laptop? “ Yeah, it’s annoying, but it’s like, what the fuck – is all of my creativity in a laptop? No way. I just went and bought another one.” Chilly Gonzales is clearly not short of a forthright opinion or two. Making his name alongside Feist and Peaches, he was part of a small Canadian invasion that changed the face of Berlin’s alternative club culture. With his latest album, The Ivory Tower, he explores themes of jealousy and envy. However, it is perhaps a surprise to learn that he has also produced a film, also called The Ivory Tower and about competitive chess, to accompany the album. We sat down, and as he rolled a joint – “…the kindness of strangers” – we started a rather interesting interview… When you were living in Berlin, you were so associated with the city, but now you have moved on it that respect – where are you now? I have a flat in Paris, I’ve got a little place in London, and I’m here (Berlin) really a lot still. But, yeah, I lived here solid for 5 years. All of the other Canadians though are still my main musical family, which is why it’s great to be here so often. I don’t have many people like that in Paris, who are like immediate members of my musical family. And is that the same in London? Well, in London it is a little bit different. I’ve known Erol [Alkan] really well for a long time. Then there’s this guy, Akira the Don, who’s a really good buddy. I mean every place is great, but Berlin is the one that really feels like home because of the people. You know, we all sort of came here together and we have all managed to grow our business very slowly, every year and it’s just a really beautiful thing that we can still collaborate, and the collaborations multiply. Your career has been pretty varied. When you came here ten years ago, what did you think you would be doing now? What I would say is where I have ended up has exceeded my fairly modest expectations, which were basically to just make a living doing music, and doing what I do. Of course once you get that, you inherently get more specific. No one can really be satisfied with just that. So you grow it, and you grow it slowly, and I think if ten years later you are with the same people and it’s still growing, and none of you have really fallen out, none of you have made a huge mistake, then you must be doing something right. I mean, I know musicians who, every time they make an album, change who they collaborate with and leave behind a trail of weird

broken relationships. Thank God we don’t have that. It’s very natural for us to ask each other to do sometime very strange, surreal jobs like “hey can you write me a five pager for this feminist magazine?”. I know Peaches can do it better than me. So it’s not just a creative relationship you have with people like Peaches, it’s also like a conventional family? Yeah, because the barrier between the professional relationship and the friendship is thankfully so blurred – one feeds the other. I love to be creative all of the time because I am a workaholic, so even on holiday my mind is planning projects, thinking about things ... planning projects and collaborations that may never even happen. You always seem to have a number of different things on the go, with a lot of things overlapping. Sure. The only moment I am not working is when I am being entertained. And that happens mostly by hanging around with entertaining people. I mean, just like hanging out here, with someone like Peaches – a combination of being creative by making each other laugh. I don’t feel like I am working, busting my ass. The friendship and the work just melt together. I am not like my Dad. He was an immigrant from Hungary who, you know, whipped himself to become even more capitalist than the capitalists. I grew up in a different way. Do you think you have inherited his work ethic? Absolutely. Just with a different set of circumstances. It’s a position of luxury to have been brought up by a guy like that, and then being able to apply that [work ethic] to something that is less about my immediate survival.

What does he think of your career? Well, since I started to get some success, he likes it. He has trouble understanding the value of something if it is not very tangible – like many people of that generation. He didn’t understand that when Daft Punk asked me to do a remix in 2001 that that was the biggest moment of my life! To have a connection with people who had inspired me so much was the pinnacle for me. But when I produced a Jane Birkin album, that he totally understood. The irony was that she didn’t even ask for me, she was put together with a guy who I was just forming a partnership with in Paris. So, it’s not even like Jane Birkin said, “I want this Gonzales guy” which is what Daft Punk did. They actually requested me to rework their track! [The look on Gonzales’ face is one of sheer wonder and joy at being asked to do this, even though the remix was nearly a decade ago. It’s quite touching.] Birkin was like an accidental thing, and I was trying to explain this to my Dad, and he’s like “Oh, you’re hitting the big time now! With Jane Birkin!” and I was like, yeah, but you know Dad, she didn’t really even ask me. I got lucky. But for him it didn’t make a difference. So is that still the pinnacle for you, working with Daft Punk? Well, it was one of a few brushes I have had with people that I have been very inspired by and got to work with. Because you have worked with such a diverse range of people – Jamie Lidell, for example. My business model is about diversity, not about gambling everything on one thing. With me, the problem is I can never predict what is going to connect with people. I am never sure what is going to work. I have been sure about some projects and they didn’t really seem to make the splash I thought they would, and then sometimes I’ll just throw a little pebble in the lake and it makes a tsunami! Like Solo Piano, which was just such an innocuous, modest project – for once! I thought, you know, this will be a nice side project for the people who like this side of me. It kind of became the definition of me, and now everything is measured against that. So the lesson is that I cannot plan which of those millions of projects I am going to do will work. I just need to be in as many places as I can, as many different worlds, as mainstream as possible, as underground as possible, and write with and find the people who are like-minded, and just maximise the options. I don’t have a clear path, and that’s why I am trying to lay as many eggs in as many nests as possible to see which ones hatch.

You have to stay true to your own ideals? Exactly. And most of all, take things that other people see as weaknesses and turn them into strengths. That is the key for longevity. Such as? Doing some radical changes between albums. Something like the piano album is not the best move on paper, because I was in a phase of building something. A certain image of electro rap. The logical thing to do would be to become more ambitious, maybe work with better producers and mixers, and trim off even more of the rough edges. What I actually did was something completely different – a piano album. Which is kind of counter-intuitive, but that’s why we’re sitting here, and you’re saying wow, you do all of these different projects. Like the Guinness world record? (He set a world record for playing piano for 27 hours, three minutes and 44 seconds at a Paris theatre in 2009) Yeah, it gets more and more away from ‘what kind of albums I make’ and more and more how I am on stage and what do I do with other people. The whole industry is moving away from the album anyway. Which must be good for you? I have the kinds of ideas that are not album-related, like the piano battle or making a film. I have never liked the idea of putting an album out every two years just to be seen as a musician and not some kind of comedian. So I have had to do that, but I am really hit-and-miss at making albums. I am not really sure what I am doing. Whereas on stage, I know exactly what I am trying to do. 95% of the time I kill it because I know exactly what I am doing and what I want to achieve.

“When I talk about being on stage or something, I have a tendency to sound arrogant, but I am just realistic.”

I think that the broader appeal you have, the more longevity you will earn in your career. I think it is interesting that you can flit between these different worlds and still be interesting to different groups of people. Well, I try to make an advantage, not a disadvantage. Some people could see it as a disadvantage, like saying I should just be clear about my style. Some people would say that I am not doing myself any favours by changing styles all of the time, but…..

What do you mean exactly by saying you don’t know how to make albums? Everything! I just don’t know what I am doing. It’s like – can you dance salsa? No... Well, if you go to a salsa bar, you are not exactly sure what you are meant to be doing. You’ll pick up a few things, you might get lucky and pull a few moves, but you are not going to go in there and be, like, “I am going to fucking kill this dancefloor tonight, because I am a fucking salsa motherfucker!” That’s how I feel when I get on stage. Of all of the things I know how to do that’s the one I can do the best, so I focus on that. What about collaborations? Well, the ones I like to work with, it’s like I am jealous of something they have. Something I can never have. So I want to be around them – I kind of get obsessed with them!

Do you mean their creative energy or their personalities? Like everything! I am just obsessed by them. It’s like you’re their stalker, but you’re not because you get to work with them every day. For me, to spend 4-5 days in a studio with Jarvis Cocker is like…. wow. I am fascinated with how he puts words together, his method. There are people who ask me to work with them, and they are really talented, but if I am not really jealous of something, I can’t really go that extra mile. Sure I can play piano on a song. But… it’s like Jamie Lidell. Just to be in a room with that guy, it’s insane. The guy is just a genius. If he rings and says “do you want to come over for three days and play piano on my album?” I just drop everything, because if I don’t do it, someone else will, and I am going to be jealous of them. If Feist says “come on, let’s write some songs for a new album” ... Of course I’ve got other stuff planned, but this is like, uhuh, you know? It just keeps me going. Do you think you sometimes have a lack of confidence in how to present your own music? Lack of confidence? No. Absolutely not. I have a lack of confidence in my ability to make an album, which is a specific thing. Making an album is very indirect. It’s chronological, and geographically removed from its destination. Voilà. I need to be close to my destination. But I am glad you have accused me of having a lack of confidence in my music! It wasn’t an accusation. No, I am glad, really! Most people say, oh he’s the megalomaniac. Which sometimes comes from a feeling of insecurity. Well, I would only boast about something I know I can do well. When I talk about being on stage or something, I have a tendency to sound arrogant, but I am just realistic. Just like I am realistic when I say I am not very good at making albums. Tell me some more about Ivory Tower, and the film that accompanies it. There are a lot of chess analogies in the song titles. Well, it’s a sports comedy about chess. So is it a soundtrack or a companion piece? It’s a companion piece. The album already existed. I just wanted to make a nice traditional movie about competition, which is a subject I always talk about in songs or interviews, and I thought maybe if I can put that into a movie it will be easier for people to identify with. Sometimes a song or an interview is not the best place to try to put that kind of taboo-breaking idea out there… I feel like I am one of the few musicians out there to admit to being motivated by ego and by jealousy. And, by the way, so are all musicians. But why am I the only one saying it out loud? Whatever is behind the idea, I tried to put it into the movie in a more poetic and fun way. It’s not about music, it’s about chess players, and maybe people can get into the idea more. Sometimes I feel it [music] is not the right form to throw these ideas out. Do people really want to know why a musician is motivated by jealousy?

Well it’s certainly something most people try to hide. Exactly! The myth of the authentic musician. I could just shut up and do what I do, but no. I am angry that all of these audiences are fooled by the authentic musician idea. I feel it is my duty to unmask them. I wish I could just shut up and play the piano. I just can’t. How did you find the process of making it? Were there any similarities with the feelings you have about making an album? The dynamics must be similar. Yeah, sure it has a lot of the same problems as making an album. I ran into exactly the same problem of not having an audience in front of me. It’s a different process. It’s something I am learning to do. The camera is not a replacement for the audience either. You can be a real charismatic motherfucker on stage, but it doesn’t mean you are good in front of the camera. With some people it’s the case, but I am still working on it. Making a movie is a lot of fun, You are moving mountains of people, and what I realised is that I am a good leader of a bigger team. I really enjoy choosing people and teaming people up to work together. The most fun and creative role for me was that of producer – the guy who has the idea.

HOOKED ON CLASSICS “Hey hey, my my,” sang Neil Young, “rock ‘n’ roll will never die.” Possibly not, argues Wyndham Wallace, but some of its bravest steps being taken by musicians willing to embrace its nemesis, classical music… TEXT WYNDHAM WALLACE

On a sunny afternoon in August 2008, crowds gathered in Oslo’s Mediaeval Park for the annual Øya Festival sporting T-shirts declaring their allegiance to bands like My Bloody Valentine, Holy Fuck, NERD and Yeasayer playing that weekend. But it was the quiet assembly of a small orchestra on the main stage, led by a plaidshirted Norwegian called Lars Horntveth, which caught the attention. Horntveth, a member of cult post-rock / jazz act Jaga Jazzist, was performing Kaleidoscopic, a 37-minute piece of music recorded with the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra, and in the late summer warmth, his instrumental journey, replete with strings, harp and vibraphone, proved arguably the most challenging and ambitious music heard during the festival. It sounded like nothing else: the endless familiar clatter of drums and guitars on other stages was replaced instead by a slowly building, hauntingly melodic, dramatically arranged epic that tugged the heartstrings and expanded the mind. Purists would baulk at the idea that it was classical music since it owed as much to ambient electronica, soundtrack scores and jazz, but it couldn’t have been more different to the verse/chorus fixations

on offer elsewhere, and for many of the hungover heads in the audience this vision of two worlds colliding – rock and classical, normally in opposition to one another – was eye- and ear-opening. Classical and rock music have always flirted with one another, of course, whether it be through Wendy Carlos’ experimentations with the Moog synthesiser on Switched on Bach, prog rock’s fascination with more expansive classical structures or artists’ intellectual need to prove their broadminded love of music through namedropping – witness the growing references to the likes of Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich or Gorecki over the last decade or two. (Trip hop act Lamb even named a song after the latter.) But for the most part, rock has merely leant on classical music for decoration rather than embracing its aesthetics. Now, however, a new generation of musicians and writers seems to be willing to use classical music as their starting point while employing other musical genres as influences.

The reasons this has taken so long to happen are manifold, no doubt, but amongst them is the strange, even quaint fact that there was a time not so long ago when rock ‘n’ roll and pop music were the preserve of youth, while anything else was for old fogeys. Kids terrorised their parents with a diet of loud guitars and drums, eager to assert their independence, while adulthood brought with it a gentle slide from rebellion to easy listening and into a civilised world of classical music. But the world has changed: rock, pop and its many variants are now everywhere, from the bars we drink in to the stores we shop in, soundtracking nature documentaries and filling orchestral halls. Neil Young and Madonna drop acclaimed new albums every year or two, generations are united at Rolling Stones shows, and festivals offer supervised kindergarten areas and Bombay Sapphire bars. Almost everyone listens to pop music these days, with age barriers no longer applicable, while classical music has become so specialised that, according to a Washington Post report in January this year, it takes less than 300 sales to secure an album’s place in the US Classical Top 10. Furthermore, classical music was especially shunned in the postpunk years for its academic rather than intuitive approach. The breaking of conventions, with which popular music has always been associated, became tied to the rejection of learned techniques, and part of punk’s gospel was that a lack of musical education allowed freedom of expression. Interestingly, however, many people operating in this currently emerging scene argue that they too are engaged in such rule-breaking. “A lot of us are untrained musicians, including myself,” Dustin O’Halloran, a member of the band Devics, though perhaps best known as the man who composed the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, insists. “We’re attempting to write for quartet, piano, even orchestra. So I think the punk rock spirit is very much alive in this respect. It’s not about the academic world anymore. It’s about making music, any way you can, and finding your own voice in the process.” “One of the great things about music,” adds Valgeir Sigurðsson, a former Björk engineer whose Bedroom Community label features a number of writers who seemingly owe a debt to classical music, “is that you can make awesome music without formal training, and you can also make awesome music after years of training, and everything in between. Perhaps these two ‘worlds’ are more open to each other than ever before and that is creating an interesting result.” But inevitably, perhaps the most important shift in attitudes has been brought about by the internet, which has allowed music fans to explore as instinctively as musicians. “With the digital age,” argues Ólafur Arnalds, whose compositions range from grandly orchestral to electronically embellished solo piano, “all such boundaries have faded and now it’s much easier for us to reach the general public, while before, music like mine could only be accessed through speciality music shops”. A Sigur Rós fan, for instance, might be intrigued by the string section that often performs with them, and the subsequent discovery that this collective have released an album, Kurr, under the name amiina might then lead them on to other associated artists, whether through automated recommendation or investiga-

tion into similar material. Fashion, too, no longer has the grip over what we listen to that it once had. Genres have blurred, and investigation now goes on behind closed doors rather than under the bright lights of high street stores, where the classical music section was traditionally the preserve of cardigan-wearing adults and nerds, or in specialist shops into which most young music heads would fear to tread. Nico Muhly, an arranger for the likes of Grizzly Bear who records for Bedroom Community, points out that “iTunes and other digital sources for music have really changed the lateral availability of music, by which I mean, if you click on Valgeir’s music, chances are, some other Icelandic things will come up, on even weirder, smaller labels, but then maybe you’ll click through to something of mine, and then you’ll be in a weird world of choral music and lesbian folk rock, and maybe you’ll have looked at ten albums and will buy five, and that’s a triumph”. Furthermore, old school media no longer acts as a gatekeeper for our tastes: for every step into the unknown that the music fan takes there is a website or blog to hold their hand. “I think people are in general quite open-minded about new music, if they can get access to it,” Jóhann Jóhannsson, who has released a number of albums which have combined symphonic sounds with electronic experimentation over the past years, argues. “It’s the media that’s closed. Everything has to fit into genres and formats, and things that fall in between have a hard time breaking out.” But artists are now freer to take steps that might in the past have made them unclassifiable, leaving their work to slip between the racks in stores and the various sections within the media in which music has for so long been classified. “I work with classical instruments and use some techniques associated with classical music,” Jóhannsson elaborates, “but my music is as much – if not more – informed by rock, experimental, electronic and film music. I have no boundaries in my appreciation of music. I love leaving my iPod on shuffling between Beethoven string quartets, Pan Sonic, Black Metal, East European film scores and La Monte Young, and in my writing I’m equally uninterested in boundaries of any kind.” Of course it helps that many of these artists aren’t making classical music per se, something underlined by the classical world’s own refusal to accept them amongst their ranks, devoted as its proponents are to older, more traditional values. O’Halloran has released two albums of piano solos that recall the work of Erik Satie, but questions whether he could actually be considered a classical composer even if he chose to be. “What is considered ‘classical’ music now?” he asks. “Is it only music that is accepted by the classical community? The classical world don’t seem to take much notice of a lot of current contemporary composers. Somehow I think they have become more interested in virtuosic playing than compositions.” Indeed, few of those involved in the emergent scene consider themselves classical composers. They point to the fact that classical music developed over hundreds of years until its style was accepted as ‘classic’. That they’re employing the same instruments and comparable techniques to composition doesn’t in itself mean that they’re making

classical music, whatever your definition of the term. As Sigurðsson comments wryly, “A lot of people and journalists will instantly call anything that has a violin in it, or musicians reading music from a page, ‘classical music’.” “I’m not actually sure what I would call my music,” ponders Arnalds. “Some like to say neo-classical, but I’m not sure if that gives the right picture. I would rather say post-classical, as I don’t really think it fits into the classical genre much, apart from me using classical instruments.” Lars Horntveth, meanwhile, jokes that his music is “classical music for indie kids who need a way into classical music”, while Hauschka, who trades in improvised music for treated piano, settles for “contemporary music, as it describes a feeling of today which is based on the knowledge and the experience of so many different music styles like jazz, rock, hip hop, soul and classical”. What’s especially intriguing about this new wave is that many of them are working with so-called ‘indie’ labels that traditionally specialised in alternative music. Labels like 4AD, who launched the careers of Pixies and TV On The Radio, have released two albums of symphonic masterpieces by Jóhann Jóhannsson, while Bella Union, home to Fleet Foxes, feature Dustin O’Halloran’s Piano Solos Volume 2 in their catalogue. Hauschka records for Fat Cat imprint 130701, which also boasts Max Richter – whose recent Infra album was commissioned by the London Royal Ballet – and Arnalds’ work sits comfortably alongside Nils Frahm’s minimalist piano work and the rowdy post-rock of Codes In The Clouds on Erased Tapes. But perhaps it isn’t so surprising that so-called ‘indie’ labels seem to be congregating around a scene that rejects the increasingly tired sound of traditional guitar rock and electronica’s ever-decreasing circles. Before its wholesale appropriation in the 1990s by major labels looking to gain credibility so they could shift second-rate guitar bands, ‘indie’ merely meant ‘independent’, and independent labels were the ones who caught wind of changing fashions long before their bigger rivals dared. Perhaps this is a sign that people are looking elsewhere for musical innovation, and the area that has been most neglected, and is therefore ripest for exploitation, is classical music. “I think there is an audience that is thinking and listening beyond the traditional categories, so the labels must reflect that diversity,” Max Richter comments, while Hauschka argues that, “everybody is searching for music that is touching and maybe new and modern, and indie labels with a strong vision are not labels because they are attached to indie rock music, but because they are attached to passion and authenticity.” O’Halloran simply concludes that “good indie labels always followed good music, no matter what styles it followed. It’s about having something honest to say”. But why are musicians and writers adopting these traditions after such a long period of rejecting them wholeheartedly? Possibly it’s because they are tired of the genre restrictions that media has insisted upon inflicting upon them. “I like the energy of a great rock song or the violin line of a Debussy piece,” Hauschka laughs, “so what shall I do with all the sources inside me?” while Muhly elabo-

rates further on the restrictions writers have faced: “I like the idea of audiences being drawn to that which is engaging and appealing. And as long as we continue making that music, no matter what it sounds like, or no matter into which category journalists decide to put it, everything’s gonna be fine.” Perhaps it’s also because they’re overfamiliar with the same old sounds: electronica may have opened up new horizons, but at the same time writers long for more organic, honest representations of their ideas without having to restrict themselves to the palette of guitars, keyboards and drums to which many have grown up listening to. “I always played piano and wrote pieces for it,” O’Halloran explains, “but I do think I was also getting a bit bored with guitardriven music and the repeated shapes. It feels exciting to me to step into this vast world of using different instruments for different colours. The possibilities really seem endless.” Of course there’s a downside to this new freedom, something associated with the ease with which music is now circulated and made. “I think that the development in music might be that there is more of everything now, and subsequently more mediocrity and more crap than ever, in all genres,” Sigurðsson says. “The filters are much fewer, which is a good thing and a bad thing. There is banality everywhere, and if you ask me, I would tell you that a lot of the so-called new ‘classical music’ is awful music full of banality and clichés. But hey,” he continues on an optimistic note, “there is a lot of really great music too, so it’s all good.” Whatever’s provoked it, however, and wherever it’s all leading, it’s proof of one thing: that music continues to chart unknown territories and crush boundaries. That some of the bravest steps are being taken by people inspired by what was once thought of as the most conservative format may be ironic, but whether this signals that the world is beginning to turn its back on superficial pop in favour of more intellectual approaches, whether it means orchestras may soon be regular features at festivals, or whether it implies that kids will now turn to Schubert to rile their parents is doubtful. It suggests, however, something often forgotten by those unaware of the groundbreaking steps taken in the past by the likes of Mozart, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich: classical music has always had the ability to be rock ‘n’ roll… THE NEW CLASSICS AMIINA: KURR (EVER RECORDS) DUSTIN O’HALLORAN: PIANO SOLOS VOLUME 2 (BELLA UNION) HAUSCHKA: FERNDORF (130701) JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON: IBM 1401 USER’S MANUAL (4AD) LARS HORNTVETH: KALEIDOSCOPIC (SMALLTOWN SUPERSOUND) MAX RICHTER: INFRA (130701) NICO MUHLY: MOTHER TONGUE (BEDROOM COMMUNITY) NILS FRAHM: THE BELLS (ERASED TAPES) OLAFUR ARNALDS: …AND THEY HAVE ESCAPED THE WEIGHT OF DARKNESS (ERASED TAPES) VALGEIR SIGURÐSSON: DRAUMALANDIÐ (BEDROOM COMMUNITY)

BMW Kurfürstendamm

www.bmwkurfuerstendamm.de

Welcome to BMW Kurfürstendamm! From October 29 to October 31, we cordially invite you to the exclusive premiere of the new BMW X3. This will give you an opportunity to test-drive it and learn all about it prior to the ofﬁcial launch. Prepare to be fascinated by the exhibition “xDrive. xLife. Joy wants you to have it all.” And experience three days full of surprises: in conjunction with the LEGO® Company, we have prepared an entertainment program for the whole family. With all that to look forward to, joy is guaranteed! www.bmw-kurfuerstendamm.de

JOY IS A WEEKEND FULL OF INSPIRATION: 29. – 31.10.2010.

BMW EfﬁcientDynamics

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SONGS ABOUT ROMANCE TEXT GARETH OWEN

Well, where do you begin with a theme like that? If there is one subject that towers above all others when it comes to inspiring songwriters to put pen to paper, then it is surely romance. Or love. Or heartbreak, or sex, or any of combination of these. We all have a favourite love song. We probably have one that reminds us of our first love or makes us feel romantic. I am no different to you, in fact, for someone who enjoys music from the periphery, I like some pretty middle of the road shit. But it’s all music, eh? So sit back and enjoy my selection of vaguely romantic songs. HOT RAW SEX

49 SECOND ROMANCE

WICKED GAME

If you’re young and in love, then you should be getting this all of the time. Although, it rarely works out like that, Mr Edgar cleary filled his boots prior to recording this smoky electro screamer. It literally and metaphorically screams sex.

Dystopian synth business that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. A bit like a 49 second romance, which doesn’t even make sense if you are ‘paying’ for it. The sort of song that gets blank-eyed Berlin girls in a lather. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Put aside all of the crappy (and they are ALL crap) remixes of this that have popped up recently, and you are still left with a heartachingly romantic song about not wanting to fall in love. Where ‘no’ really means ‘yes’.

Jimmy Edgar

FIRST TRUE LOVE AFFAIR

P1/E

Jimmy Ross

SHE’S NOT LIKE ANY GIRL

Total genius. Starting of with with one of the simplest, meanest one finger bass-lines ever, before segueing into one of the most uplifting melodies ever. Then he starts singing, and it’s like little Jimmy has crawled inside you heart and made a song out of the memories of your child hood sweetheart.

Kinda makes me want to vomit, but I would crawl over hot coals to get this back if I lost my copy. On the edges of the sixties pop world, the Rockin’ Berries nail one of those perfect harmonic melodies for which I am just a total sucker. Also see Dusty Springfield.

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART St Etienne

Way more longing fused into this compared to Neil Young’s original. If you had a tin called ‘heartbreak’ and you opened it up, this song would smack you in the face, fuck your boyfriend and disappear into the sunset leaving you feeling well and truly heartbroken.

Rockin’ Berries

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU Dolly Parton

Actually a kind of get-out-of-a-relationship song – get on Wikipedia and read the story behind this. Dolly Parton is quite possibly one of the most misunderstood and underrated artists of the last 100 years. If you think I’m being ironic, we’ve clearly never met.

Chris Isaak

EVERYWHERE Fleetwood Mac

My romantic song that makes me think of my woman. ‘We’ probably have more ‘special songs’ than any other couple ever, but this was the first. The lyrics say it all really.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME Dusty Springfield

“You don’t have to say you love me, just be close at hand.” If that doesn’t sum up longing for someone in 13 words, I don’t know what does.

I GOTTA BIG DICK Maurice Joshua

Juvenile? Yes, maybe, but apparently this is the kind of romance some ladies dig...

MUSIC REVIEWS TEXTS GARETH OWEN | MAX WILLENS | GAVIN BLACKBURN | ARI STEIN | MATHIAS KILIAN HANF

DJ NATE

K-X-P

DETACHMENTS

TONY LIONNI

(Planet Mu)

(Smalltown Supersound)

(Thisisnotanexit Records)

(Freerange Recordings)

There’s probably some kind of sub-sub genre for this kind of music. Possibly called doomgrime. Or in reality Juke, which comes from Chicago and is soundtrack music to ‘footwurking’ dances. Making use of heavily repeated samples from R&B and pop, it’s the inventive and irreverent in equal measure. I never thought I’d hear music that is 808 heavy sound quite so future. Not for everyone, but a must for those interested in bass music. GO

K-X-P will almost certainly be a new name to most people. Led by producer Timo Kaukolampi, who has in the past lent his studio chops to the likes of Annie, K-X-P are a stripped back outfit who make the most of an updated version of the drums / guitar three piece. Deep and hypnotic, K-X-P tread a fine line between kosmische, kraut and The Glitter Band, without being homage to any. Tribal percussion and an inky atmosphere replete with cinematic flourishes give the music a magnetic pull that conversely increases with the playback volume. Nice. GO

Needless to say, if you come up with an album that sounds like Visage in a nasty head-on collision with Ultravox, you must certainly come from the UK. And Detachments indeed do. Three sharply-dressed young chaps from London have come up with an album that reminds us of just how timeless synthpop actually is. It back-references shamelessly, but it’s all done with such an infectious streak of cool that you can forgive the blatant plagiarism. NL

Hype, hype and more hype. Or, if you are not a message board house head, it’s a case of who? You would probably be familiar with Tony Lionni’s music, as he makes very good club tracks that are in high demand. However, outside of house music circles I would hazard a guess that he is perceived as just another producer. That said, he makes music that is so expertly carved from the DNA of house music with enough contemporary sparkle and feeling that by this time next year I reckon he will be a name on a much wider selection of lips. GO

Da Trak Genious

K-X-P

Detachments

Found a Place

CHILLY GONZALES

THIRD SHOCK

RÖYKSOPP

(Boys Noize)

(Gamma Proforma)

(Wall of Sound )

At some point in time ex-pat member of the Canadian Crew, Gonzales, added Chilly to his official stage moniker, it is assumed in the hope this would lend an additional aura of... ahem...cool to his public persona. It was slightly unnecessary in the sense that he has already amassed an enviable collection of fans and celeb admirers but also from the point of view that is smacks somewhat of your dad suddenly hanging out with your mates as if ‘cool by association’ ever worked. The album is nice enough and has its fair share of highlights but how can one really take sensitive seriously from a chap who essentially looks a DWing thug coerced into a suit?

Resistant to engaging with the likes of me on every level, Third Shock – Belfast’s techno trio who have been associated with Mutant Disco and the early days of the UK’s intelligent techno movement – clearly want to let the music do the talking. What I think they are saying is “we like claustrophobic funky beats that draw from the past but look to the future, and this is how we want it to sound. Fuck off if you don’t like it.” Which is fine by me, as I rather do. GO

Röyksopp release Senior as an instrumental follow-up to predecessor Junior, released earlier this year. The album is quite a placid affair with a theme about getting older and the fears associated with it. Textured synths, icy melodies, OMD/BOC tendencies and live instruments layered over beautifully processed beats. Whilst definitely a slow grower, there are some bright sparkles on this album, the gloomy, reverb ridden ‘Coming Home’ and probably their best tune, ‘Senior Living’, a lonely ballad that screams out solitude and reflection. Maybe these boys are scared of getting older; senior is certainly another solid piece of work by the pair, but certainly not one for the dance floor. AS

Ivory Tower

Schedule One

RESTLESS PEOPLE Restless People

(IAMSOUND Records )

RED RACK’EM

The Early Years LP (Bergerac)

Gilles Peterson has found another perfect beat in the work of Red Rack’em. The Scotsman’s debut album, released through his own label Bergerac, explains acoustically why this comes as no surprise. The fourteen house jams, consisting of new and old material (including ‘Picnic’), all manage to conjure up a distinct melodic groove, complex enough to sense the deep worship of soulfulness in every inch, and simple enough to decide in time which part of the body to move next to it. Blistering barnacles, more of that stuff ! MKH

What do you get when you mix members of Tanlines, Professor Murder, and Family Edition together? Or, to put it another way, what do you get when you cross tropical melodies, sunny guitars, cheesy dancehall synths, air horns, dilettantish use of exotic rhythms and Ezra Koenigesque shouting about middle class identity crises? The answer, in both cases, is the eponymous debut album by Restless People, a record so inflated with promise (‘Days of our Lives’, ‘Little Sky’) you can almost forget that it’s mostly hot air. Somehow too long at just 27 minutes. MW

Senior

SUPERPITCHER Kilimanjaro (Kompakt)

Aksel Schaufler has had a close association with highly-regarded electro label Kompakt for some years now, and naturally called upon the Cologne-based imprint to handle his debut LP, Kilimanjaro. Genre-ists would have to sling it into the minimal/ emo file but there’s enough other concepts at work here (funk and disco, for example) to have appeal beyond the e-fuelled nothingness of a techno super club. NL

MATTHEW DEAR

LUKE ABBOTT

(Ghostly International)

(PIAS)

Black City

Michigan-based label Ghostly International defines its output as avant-pop, music of electronic means and pop methodology. Dear’s latest, a follow-up to 2007’s Asa Breed, fits right into this branch. It accommodates well conceptualized, easygoing drumbeats with Dear’s cranky vocals and the eighties. Even more interesting than the music is the marketing. Ghostly brings back the physical product with the totem, an art object designed by Boym Partners epitomizing the Black City conceived by Matthew Dear, and including a code to download the album. MKH

FABRICE LIG

Holkham Drones

Luke Abbott is scarcely what you would call prolific; he hasn’t released a bunch of records and EPs, hasn’t played the major festivals, nor does he have a rackload of big name remixes under his belt. However, things could rapidly change for the Norwich-born techno head if new LP Holkham Drones is a sign of things to come. It’s a clicky, squidgy mop kind of record, full of noises you have nightmares about but with a vague thread of melody running through it. A fine attempt at widening the borders of what electronic music can do. NL

MUMDANCE

Genesis of a Deep Sound

Different Circles: The Mixtape

That Fabrice Lig, and by default his latest album, Genesis of a Deep Sound, draw on many different templates is clear from the opening haze of BC98. Switching between misty loop tracks that whisper “heartbreak”, to straight-up electro and frantic techno, everything is as you would expect expertly produced, but injected with enough humanity to give it life as an album of kinetic electronic music. Still in thrall to the classic sounds of dance music, it is how he knits them together to make the magic happen that is important. GO

Mumdance, aka cheeky young roustabout Jack Adams, has, at 26, more experience than most at out-cooling his peers. His bootleg Black Lips remix turned heads among the DJ elite which led to more revamping work for the likes of The Whip and Santigold. Lord have mercy, he was even working as Vice’s events manager when he was 12 or something. Looks like Mumdance is around to stay, and this 40-minute mixtape of grimy afro-beat and UK funk punctuated with the occasional melodious moment of downtime heralds yet another step in the right direction toward a long, bright future. NL

(Fine Art Recordings)

(Mad Decent)

SOLAR BEARS

BOZZWELL

(Planet Mu)

(Firm Recordings)

Using a sample from The Shining as an opening gambit on your album is either a strike of populist genius or a bit obvious. It all depends on what the music is like. In the case of Solar Bears that sample almost set me off on the wrong foot. However, it didn’t take long for me to be distracted from theorising what Shining sampling music should sound like by glittering cosmic beats. There’s been enough ‘cosmic disco’ recently to ensure that only the absolute cream comes to the top, and the Solar Bears do just that when they divert into hazier psychedelic territory – ‘Cub’, for example, is just beautiful. That was the point that I really did forget about The Shining and allowed myself to be transported to outer and then inner space. GO

One time collaborator with Phil Oakey in the All Seeing Eye, dance-music producer of some repute who releases on Firm, Eskimo and Crosstown Rebels. Half of Hiem, David Boswell has pedigree aplenty. Not that I am calling him a dog. More a racehorse as proven on his debut album, Bits & Pieces. An apt title for an album that flits between dance music’s poppier edges and emotive club music. Laden with enough feeling to elevate it from being ‘just’ a collection of club tracks, Bits & Pieces excels at being whatever you want – including a collection of club tracks that bring to mind everyone from the Beloved to Superpitcher. GO

ZOLA JESUS

WE LOVE

(Sacred Bones Records)

(Bpitch Control)

Releasing two albums, two EPs and another album with another group in 18 months will make a girl grow up fast. That’s why Stridulum II, 21-year old Nika Roza Danilova’s third album as Zola Jesus, sounds suspiciously refined in its desolation. As aching synth-scapes stretch across strident, lonely drum machines, Danilova sings with a mixture of distance, drama and melancholic passion that you’ll have trouble finding anywhere else. At this rate, she’ll be a 21st century gothic legend by Christmas. MW

Good Lord, if Ellen Allien’s talent scouting skills sharpen up any more she’ll be running the world next and not just one of Germany’s finest imprints. She’s only gone and signed Italian electro duo We Love, whose new self-titled long player is a fine addition to the BP roster. There’s downtempo moments of experimental introversion, chopped up and mixed with beats and swooning ghostly vocals. Their non-schedule of phantom live shows only serves to make this duo all the more enigmatic. NL

She Was Coloured

Stridulum

Bits & Pieces

We Love

RED RACK’EM Red Rack’em, aka Hot Coins, aka Danny Berman, has released some of the best electro, boogie and house influenced electronic music of the last few years on labels such as Tirk, Society, Untracked and Deep Freeze. He also delivers a weekly armful of amazing, unreleased music via his weekly Smugglers Inn podcast, which has been running for three years now, and he's just about to drop his first album – a pleasingly effective selection of his best 12"s to date.; Red Rack’em The Early Years. He is also responsible for probably one of THE biggest edits / remixes / call it what you will of recent memory. TEXT GARETH OWEN

My music moment (so far) is undoubtedly my remix of ‘Stand On The Word’ by The Joubert Singers that I produced under my Hot Coins disco alias. The original track is a Gospel-disco classic which was recorded in 1982 as a praise record for the congregation of the First Baptist Church in Crown Heights, NYC. The story goes that a copy of the limited run vinyl ended up with Walter Gibbons and it became a hit at seminal clubs The Loft, Paradise Garage and Zanzibar. I was in the process of finishing off my Valiant Truth EP for Tirk during the summer of 2008 when Sav Remzi (a&r for Tirk and Nuphonic founder) got in touch asking me if I would try ‘something’ with Stand On The Word. I had already had some success editing ‘Express Yourself ’ by The New York Community Choir, and although I would have never dared to remix such a classic without being prompted, I thought, what the heck, and started messing around with the original track and the ‘clappapella’ (which was all I was provided with). I had a proper eureka moment when I wrote a fresh section of drums and squelchy synth bass and began cutting between sections of the original track (fattened up with new drums and fx) and my new acid squelchy sections. I tested it at Bestival in 2008, noticed the crowd’s positive reaction to the track. The familiar piano intro trickled in and everyone prepared themselves for the sickly vocals and then suddenly a new dubby acid boogie track kicked off. I didn’t really think

much of it apart from being pleased that it sounded good through the sound system. Suddenly Gilles Peterson began playing it on Radio 1. Getting played once by Gilles is an achievement but he played it on his show, then on his NYC special (alongside my heroes ESG) and even on Zane Lowe’s daytime show during a good-natured Zane vs. Gilles ‘Hottest Tracks Of All Time’ special. This was the first time I had ever had my music played on Radio 1 and I began to get airplay for my other projects from Gilles and Rob Da Bank as well. Gilles invited me to play at the 2009 Worldwide Awards where I performed a DJ set straight after my heroes Jazzanova in front of a sell-out crowd at Cargo in London. That night was the stuff dreams are made of. My parents were in the crowd being looked after by Michael Ruetten and Ashley Beedle, and unbeknown to me my set was recorded. I only found out when Gilles broadcasted it on his show the following week on Radio 1. Since then the Joubert remix has continued to be supported by none other than Greg Wilson who has played it in nearly all of his sets in the last year or so. I only found out when I was playing at Snowbombing in 2009 and Greg opened with it. I nearly fell off the stage. I regularly get texts from people at festivals saying “Greg’s just dropped your remix” which is great. It’s the track that will not die.