Tag: music

Black Classical Music

Yussef Dayes’ majestic new album finds a home around the world

Photography Danika Magdelena

“I like being the bandleader,” Yussef Dayes tells me as the rain envelopes the leafy suburbs of south London where we meet. “But when you come to my show, I want you to be like, ‘Yussef was wicked, but Rocco Palladino killed it on the bass! Venna killed it on the saxophone!’ I’m all for that man, because I know in my heart, I can’t make this music without playing with the best.” In Dayes’ world, jazz music is the sum of its parts; instruments complement each other to create otherworldly moments of rhythmic bliss. Collaboration is the nascent heartbeat of this art, channelling creativity into music that transcends the genre itself. Dayes, a supreme drummer and musical polymath, lives and breathes this creed.

Across work with Wizkid, Virgil Abloh, Kali Uchis and Kehlani, as well as his brothers in the band United Vibrations and as Yussef Kamaal alongside Kamaal Williams, Dayes has built a catalogue that can be loosely described as jazz but represents the fluidity of Black music itself. His 2018 release ‘Love Is the Message’, sparkles with elements of 1970s soul and progressive rock, cascading over Mansur Brown’s keys and Dayes’ composed drum patterns. ‘Nightrider’, from his 2020 project What Kinda Music with Tom Misch, should soundtrack an episode of Miami Vice in its vintage ’80s feel. For sounds as disparate as these, Dayes is the glue, the connector. “It’s all classical music to me,” he explains. “Bach was how many hundreds of years ago, but his music is still relevant. I want to be part of that lineage of Black classical music and showcase what’s inspired me. It could be Lauryn Hill or Roni Size; the list is endless.”

Born and bred in south London, Dayes was an outlier of sorts, a gangly teen in tune with jazz and reggae even as his friends and peers were enthralled by grime music’s peak. Fed by his father with a diet of Bob Marley and The Wailers, Herbie Hancock and Fela Kuti, his destiny was set when he began drumming at age four, aided by a strong familial unit that backed his every move. “I remember when I was six or seven and my dad was helping me to set up my drums for a talent show,” he recalls. “My mum worked mad shifts to provide for us as a family. My brothers played instruments. I learned a lot just being in my house.” After-school clubs, talent shows and pub gigs were his arena for development, yet his young career blossomed under the tutelage of jazz legend Billy Cobham – once drummer for the incomparable Miles Davis – whose records were often in his father’s rotation, a full circle moment he holds dear. “ taught me to relax a bit more and trust in my technique,” Dayes remembers. “I was always playing drums with my shoulders high up – I still kind of do but he loosened me up. It’s very easy to veer off in terms of technique but he gave me the confidence to believe in how I approach the drums.”

Even before his arrival in 2016, Dayes had been a student of the game, eager to discover every sketch of sound he could. It is a journey that has taken him everywhere from Los Angeles to Salvador to Brazil, picking up game from an array of musicians. Which is why his new album, Black Classical Music, almost feels like a culmination of his life to this point, a love letter to his family, his experiences, and his first love: music. A majestic 19-tracker anchored by his crisp, ebullient drum smacks, the album reveals Dayes’ deep affinity with home; it features vocals from his daughter, his father, and his late mother, who also took the photo of young Yussef that adorns his album cover. But its musical scope is global, and having worked with Venna, Masego, Jamilah Barry, Tom Misch, Shabaka Hutchings, Rocco Palladino and more, Dayes unequivocally leads the creative charge. “It’s a natural progression to take full charge of a project in a sense,” he explains. “Stepping out and taking more ownership of my music. Not having to rely on other entities to produce something and learning that pursuing your own ideas can be a beautiful thing.” The title track, frenetic and bebop-like in tone, stops you in your tracks, while ‘Crystal Palace Park’ turns a celestial dream state into sound. The Chronixx-assisted ‘Pin Di Plaza’ is a warm marriage with dancehall; ‘Afro Cubanism’ carries truncated rhythms akin to afrobeat’s 1970s heyday and the Masego-featured ‘Marching Band’ borrows the tempo of Brazilian samba. The result is an opus, as much speaking to the history of Black music as it is a living symbol. “I think this album shows how I’ve got to where I am,” he says. “It gives people an insight into the different kinds of music I can make. You might think it’s just jazz, but it’s deeper than that. You can find different flavours to it according to your outlook.”

This quest for new flavours continues to follow the musician as he strives to carve out a space for his free-flowing expressive form. As our conversation concludes, he outlines his world-facing mission: “When I went to Brazil last year, the drummers there were making me feel a certain way. I can’t explain, it just hits you. I want more of that feeling. I need to tap into the Caribbean more, visit family in Jamaica and Saint Lucia. I want to find the rhythm wherever I go.”

 

This article is taken from Port issue 33. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here

Each Page is Just a Little Song

Catching up with Jake Ewald of Slaughter Beach, Dog, around a new album and the reading and writing that went into it

Slaughter Beach, Dog has been through a few forms. It started as a solo outlet from Jake Ewald’s work in beloved emo band Modern Baseball, but following that band’s hiatus, became a larger band, initially with Modern Baseball bandmate Ian Farmer on bass, and now including drummer Zach Robbins, guitarist Adam Meisterhans and keyboard player Logan Roth.

It’s a roomy project that changes from album to album: Welcome was warm; Birdie goes between sparse and springy; Safe and Also No Fear is darker and more brooding; At the Moonbase adopts an identity and saxophone layer all its own. The most recent album, Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling, is much more candid, and much folkier.

The name itself is an edit of sorts – Ewald wanted to name the band after Slaughter Beach in Delaware, but a European band were already using the name, so he added ‘, Dog’. There’s always been a literary side to the band; Ewald talked about Welcome, the first album, as a fictional world, and has discussed his writing and reading in a few places, notably in a newsletter he’s been writing monthly since the start of last year.

We spoke over the phone shortly before the release of Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling.

At The Moonbase, Slaughter Beach, Dog’s last album, was mostly you working on your own – you’ve said before that you were working on another album with the rest of the band. Is Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling related to that album, or is it an entirely new thing?

That’s right. We were planning to go into the studio, we had just finished the tour, and then it was like smack dab the beginning of COVID when we really had, you know, no vaccines, no idea what was going on. We were too spooked to try to work together.

I was itching. I had been sitting on the songs for so long that I just wanted to get them out of the way, so I could write new songs. I just ended up recording it at home.

Then we pushed back whatever the next full band thing we would do. Yeah, that ended up being Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling. We ended up getting together to record those summer 2022. So two years behind.

It does feel like it’s picking up the same thread as the albums before Moonbase, but with a lot of the extra instrumentation you did on Moonbase that I feel like was quite new. Like Birdie, for example, is a lot more sparse.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Part of that was on purpose with Birdie. It was just me and Ian in the studio and we really wanted to do something that was kind of wholly focused on the songs without much else.

Moonbase was a little bit the opposite – I really wanted to go crazy on it. The cool thing about CLWS is that we’ve never done these loaded arrangements that were recorded in a live setting – where it’s actually five people in the room playing as opposed to, you know, me holing up in the studio and just layering a bunch of stuff up on top.

The general rundown was that we got together, the five of us, and recorded, drums, bass, guitar, keyboard for, something like 20 songs, and then we started whittling them down as time went by, figuring out which ones we liked the most. I redid the vocals on my own, and we replaced some of the keyboards with real pianos down the line – Zach added a bunch of extraneous stints at the end.

But yeah, the bones of the songs were the five of us in the room playing them for the first time, figuring them out in real time.

All those takes are on the record. All the drums are just, you know, the drums that happened when we first sat down to play the song, same with the bass, same with a lot of the guitars.

How do you feel about that new way of working?

It wasn’t totally new, but it was absolutely my first time doing it in a setting where all the musicians were so comfortable with each other. In different iterations, we’d all been playing together for a little bit.

Maybe even more important than that was that I’ve never made a record like that at this age, which is obvious, but, you know, everybody in that room – at the point that we made the record – had played in so many bands, played on so many records, been through so many iterations of doing this. There was this calm, straightforward, open, listening perspective that we were all able to get on, in a way that I had never really experienced before.

I feel like so many of the records I made when I was younger were trying to prove something, or trying to put something for myself forward. Here everybody was on the same page, and everybody just wanted to lift up the songs as best we could.

I’ve always written the bones of the songs by myself and then brought them to some version of the band. With Birdie, I just went in the room with Ian, then with Safe and Also No Fear, it was me and Ian and Zack and the guitar player at the time, Nick. Then Moonbase, like I said, I went back and did by myself.

Me and Ian and Zack, we’ve just done so much together. We even went on a tour, maybe more than one tour, where it was just us playing as a trio.

So with this record, it’s a really interesting mix of this super tuned-in, long-time connection the three of us have, and new variables thrown in, with Adam and with Logan, to get some more surprises happening.

Is there anything that you feel like is really tied to the record books wise for you, or writer wise?

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago, trying to figure out if there was a certain type of thing I was reading that ended up on the record. I feel like I ended up with more story songs than usual on this one.

I was digging through my library, and one of the first things that popped out to me was remembering that I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in which every chapter is written from a different character’s perspective. It’s obviously been done so many times since then, probably before then, but the way that he did it really affected me, and pushed me to try to inhabit my own characters with as much care and grace as he does.

Oh, and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño . That one’s less of a straightforward chapter-by-character kind of thing, but it’s broken up into these big sections where it’s these different stories revolving around the same thing.

Then the other day I remembered – did you ever read The Copenhagen Trilogy? [by Tove Ditlesen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman] Man, it was so good. Probably the only time where I’ve gotten hit over the head with such good press about a book and it actually came through.

It blew my mind how short it was, because she just distills everything impeccably. She just reduces it down – just reduces her whole life down to this super simple, concrete narrative that still manages to have really visceral, intimate moments.

But it’s refined so far, you’re moving through the narrative so quickly. It starts from when she’s a child, like her earliest memories as a child, and then it goes through growing up, becoming a teenager, getting married, having her own kids, dealing with addiction issues.

It’s broken up into three sections technically, but all three sections together are I think less than 200 pages. So it’s really short.

It’s the same philosophy that I appreciate – have come to appreciate – in song, where you really have to refine what you’re trying to say because you only have two and a half minutes.

You have to take something really meaningful, and a lot of times larger than life, but sift through it, find the parts that mean the most, and create a storyline when you stack them all on top of each other.

It read like a song, it was one of those.

You’ve said you like Lydia Davis before – that sort of ruthless honing things down sounds a bit like her.

Yeah, for sure. That goes back to a bunch of years ago.

I got her Collected Stories. They’re mostly – this is almost all of her work – nothing more than three pages, most of them are on one page. I think whenever I first got that collection, which was probably six or seven years ago, I was just so enamoured with the idea that you could write stuff that short and be published. I always found the prose-writing scene so intimidating and to see a whole collection of stories that short I was like – oh, you can do anything if it’s good.

She’s one of those language people where just reading the words, separate from whatever’s going on narratively, can be so stimulating and interesting. I’ve read a few interviews with her, and I’ve ended up buying grammar books that she has recommended, like this one by Virginia Tufte.

I haven’t picked it up in in a couple of years. I stumble across things like these, that I would have read in college or should have read in college, or did read in college but didn’t pay attention to, and then I pick it up as an adult, and just go oh my god, this is so interesting.

I am now a person who writes sentences a lot of the time, as a job, and this is an instructional manual on how to write really interesting sentences. What is cooler than that?

Has that come back into your songwriting a lot, then, revising sentences?

Yes, which I didn’t do for a long time.

There was a while where I came at it from a much more musical perspective – I would sit down with the guitar and a pad and paper and try to do everything at the same time. People do that all the time and it just happens, but I find it’s so difficult trying to do three things at once.

I think I was writing this song for Moonbase, I committed to this practice of just sitting down at the computer and writing lines or stanzas and then revising them after writing them. I was talking to Adam, our guitar player, recently. I hadn’t really thought about why that worked so well for me, but I think it’s because if you’re writing sentences that work, and stanzas that work, you are setting a rhythm inherently. Melody is huge, obviously, but for the kind of music that I listen to and the kind of music that I like to write, rhythm is so crucial to your phrasing and the way you deliver a line, and whether it sounds casual or familiar. It can have such a huge effect on whether the thing you’re saying sounds believable.

The thing that I’m always striving for is a conversational tone – I feel like so much of that is just sounding unbothered, or unhurried, or not like you’re trying to shove a bunch of words into a sentence that’s too short.

That is kind of pre-melody – you can just look at the words on the page and say them out loud and read them back and be like, oh, this is going to work, this isn’t going to work, I need to shorten this and tighten this up, I need to make this word hit at this place in the line because that’s where the emphasis is, you know.

So is Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling the same process?

Yeah, definitely. I think I’m pretty sure all of those songs, except maybe one, were written that way. I’m just sitting down at the computer, writing the lyrics, refining the lyrics, and then starting to fit them into chords and melodies.

I feel like I’m able to express things that I’m more interested in. When I think back to songs that I wrote when I was trying to do everything at once – with the singing and the guitar playing and the lyric writing – there’s this, like, black cloud hanging over the situation, of just trying to make it all work, trying to make it all interesting, having it go together and make sense.

But whenever I’m just writing the lyrics, I actually have the space to explore an emotion or a feeling that I’m interested in exploring. Being able to investigate it further than I used to be able to. It’s less like just trying to make a song. It’s more like the idea and the feeling come first, and then they’re kind of modified to fit inside a song.

There’s a song called “Engine” – that was one of the ones where it was just a stream of consciousness thing, lyrically. The music ended up being so dark and brooding, it made me keep exploring the idea over and over again. Since I wrote it, I have been convinced that it means like five different things.

But yeah, it feels more more conducive to that happening, which is my favourite thing to experience when I’m listening to somebody else’s song, something that rewards repeated listens and changes over time the same way that a person would.

Do you still think of Slaughter Beach, Dog as a fictional world that you’re working on?

When I first started doing it, I could only see writing as these two poles: on the one hand, there’s this stuff that’s hyper personal and literal; and then on the other hand, there’s this stuff that’s completely fictionalised and impersonal and detached from whatever’s going on in my life.

I feel like I’m occupying this space now that’s really satisfying – sometimes something comes from something that happened to me, sometimes it comes from something that I just made up, but as I get going, it becomes this constant volleying back and forth of those things informing one another, whenever one is needed.

If I’m trying to write about an emotion that I felt that was really powerful, that doesn’t always happen in a super, like, pleasing, concise, romantic way. Sometimes it happens in a stupid dumb way. I have to translate something that I felt that I want to convey, and stick it inside a vessel.

I write more than I ever did before. It’s led me to so much more inspiration, and I like the songs that I’m writing.

Was it a revelation or is it just where you’ve arrived?

I don’t think I realised what was happening. I first started doing it a lot, I think, on Safe and Also to Fear. Around that time, I started getting obsessed with reading interviews with novelists and story writers and poets, because I was like, I want to figure out how to do this so I don’t have to go on tour anymore. I would love to do that one day.

But I think reading about the process for those kinds of writers, I think I picked it up. I feel like novelists and poets and story writers talk about that way more often – process – than songwriters do.

I’ve tried to make myself a student of songwriting, reading the same kinds of interviews, but I feel like when people talk about process, I don’t know… I feel like if it is really personal, people talk about how personal it is, and if it’s not personal people don’t really talk about it, and they try to keep it a secret. There’s not so much talk about the middle ground.

I wonder if it’s the realities of songwriting and being in a band; you’re kind of doing ten different jobs all the time, writing and playing and recording and touring and making fucking t-shirts, and everything else you have to do. But in an interview with a novelist, 80% of what you’re talking about is just how the fuck are they sitting down and writing this book?

I subscribed to the Paris Review, and got obsessed with those longform interviews. Authors that I didn’t know and I’d never heard of. I just found it so illuminating for those processes.

Anything that you really, really liked?

I loved the George Saunders one.

Not exactly for the process. He’s really open about how he spent so many years basically just trying to be Faulkner and totally failing. At some point in his late 30s or early 40s, I think, he was so miserable, he found himself just writing these little stories on the bus when he would come home from teaching that were written – like the way that he writes voices sometimes, everyone is speaking English and they sound like adults, but they also sound kind of nuts, like they just got dropped in from space.

It’s so cool to hear that in the context of him coming from trying to be Faulkner, which is just so, you know, regal. He just started writing in these weird, broken, hilarious voices, and that was what clicked.

I’m reading the book for the way that it sounds and the way that it makes me feel and the trip that it puts me on, psychologically and emotionally. I heard this interview with Patti Smith a couple years ago, I think she was on Mark Maron.

And she was talking to Maron and he was like getting all up in her ear about Burroughs and saying, Do you actually understand everything that Burroughs writes about?

Like:

he’s so insane, he’s on a different planet.

Do you actually like dig in and like feel like you get that stuff on a gut level?

And she was like:

it’s not about getting it.

It’s like listening to a fucking saxophone solo, you know, it just happens to you like it washes over you and that is the experience. That’s the point of the thing.

I think before I heard her say that I had felt that for a long time, but was always kind of self-conscious about it and I didn’t know how to describe it.

Hearing her say that really gave me permission to just read way more – I was like, yeah, this is what I want from it. It’s like going on a roller coaster.

I used to get so self-conscious – I’ve read interviews of people who can just like, quote passages. Like, what do you do in hanging around long enough to quote this passage? Why aren’t you just burning through these pages?

I know you do a newsletter, how has that changed things?

It’s definitely changed the way that I write songs in the sense that since I’ve been in school, the newsletter is the first time I’ve had to write anything on a deadline. It’s created this environment where sometimes I’m prepared, but it’s not often.

It’s a week until the end of the month, and I’m like, I have to write something. It’s schooled me in being able to just suck it up, sit down, and do it. That sounds more disciplinary than I mean it to – just in the sense of being able to start, not being afraid, and trusting. It doesn’t have to be this terrifying thing.

I also did a songwriting workshop with my friend Dave from the band Trace Mountains, where we had to turn in a song every week.

With both of those, I had to get over the fear of making stuff that’s bad, and learn that, you know, making stuff that’s bad puts you on the track to make something that’s good. A lot of times the thing that’s good is just something that started out bad, but you worked on it more.

I would love to write, spend more time writing stuff that’s not songs, but I never know what that would be. But it would be possible, I know how to just sit down and write now. Which feels good.

So you’re not dying to do it?

Well, I don’t know.

I feel like I try to hide how much I’m dying to do it. Just, realistically, I don’t even have time to write songs, most of the time.

So to think about taking the time to write something that’s way more involved than writing 10 songs, it just seems so impossible.

Is there anything else that comes to mind when you think about writing?

Reading those Paris Review interviews, and reading more interviews with musicians, I feel has given me so much license give myself to these things; to give myself to books, to give myself to music and to trust and know at this point that it’s going to show up in my work and it’s also gonna make my interior life more fulfilling.

I wish I had given myself that license when I was younger. Even after I started playing in bands… I don’t know, I wasn’t that invested in listening to records or reading books or anything.

But I find, every time that the people whose work I find the most excitement in are people who are just obsessive consumers of art. I just find myself thinking like, that’s what I want to do. That’s all I want to do. It’s cool if there’s a public document of it, some element of it where it’s kind of passing through me and turning into something else.

So the songs are like a bonus.

Yeah totally. It does feel like my current mode of investigation – in the stuff that I’m reading it’s just people investigating a feeling or investigating an idea, song is my… I don’t know.. my magnifying glass, yeah.

What are you reading now?

I’ve never read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, I’m reading that, It’s really fucking good. One of my buddies is trying to get me into Stephen King, so I’m reading Needful Things. I’m rereading All About Love by bell hooks because I feel like I’m being really selfish recently.I read this fucking beautiful – not exactly a cookbook, it’s right here: An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler.

She’s a renowned chef. It’s instructional a lot of the time, but it’s really more so about how cooking fits into her actual life, and her personal philosophies behind it. The thing that I come back to is I’ve always had so much trouble making omelets for myself, and the way that she describes how to make an omelet – not just how to but the omelet in the context of her morning from an emotional perspective – it finally made sense to me. Which sounds really over-romantic and dramatic probably.

Oh and then Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan.

Aug 9–Fog, that was another huge influence on the record. Like, this is what writing can be.

That book is almost non-narrative, but at the same time, you’re just fully inhabiting one person’s perspective. Kind of just like The Copenhagen Trilogy, it’s so refined and so carefully assembled that it just takes the guts of that individual experience. It’s like dressing it up in a ball gown, or something.

It’s so spare. That’s another one that’s like a song, you know? Each page is just like a little song.

 

Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling is out now.

Soundtrack: The Sirens of Titan

Photography Andrew Hobbs Styling William Gilchrist Clothing by Favourbrook

Around the release of Age of Treason, John-Paul Pryor, frontman of The Sirens of Titan, writes on a life spent listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home.

I’m a music junkie, and have been as long as I can remember. There are so many albums I return to again and again, and again, chasing the initial high I felt upon first listen. And while my sonic tastes could be said to span a pretty broad church, or cult, most of them probably fall into the ‘classic’ vein, spanning everything from the likes of Maggot Brainby Funkadelic to Beggars Banquet by The Stones and Music Has The Right to Children by Boards of Canada, with everything you can possibly imagine in-between. So, in terms of choosing one album to talk about, it’s been near impossible. After much deliberation it came down to the Velvet Underground’s Loaded and Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, and, in the end, I have chosen to talk about the latter, because I think it has genuinely soundtracked so much of my life, and meant so many different things to me at different times. 

I can distinctly recall the very first moment I became aware of Bob Dylan. I was about seven years old, and one of our neighbours was getting married and moving from our sleepy North London suburb to the incredibly exotic sounding United States. Although I can’t recall the reason he deigned to gift me his collection of vinyl records and cassette tapes, or indeed even his name, the offering proved to be an eclectic sonic treasure trove, with the likes of Bowie (Aladdin Sane, equally formative, but another story), to Suicidal Tendencies and Thin Lizzy among its riches. Nestled deep within this haul of sonic swag were three classic Dylan offerings, Slow Train Coming, Live At Budokan and, of course, Bringing It All Back Home. 

To say that this act of kindness changed my life would be an understatement. I was utterly mesmerised by rock’n’roll from the get-go. My journey into Dylan began distinctly with “Gotta Serve Somebody” from Slow Train Coming – the very first track by the troubadour I ever played in my suburban bedroom – but it was, and has always been, Bringing It All Back Home that immersed itself deep into my psyche.  Listening to the album at a very young age was very much like watching an animated cartoon in my head – all of these fascinatingly jumbled up words tumbling into my brain via a rasping drawl and the infectious rhythm of its opener, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. I also recall being taken with the album’s cover, and would spend hours imagining what the lives of the two bohemians caught in its fish-eye lens might actually be like – chilling with magazines, cigarettes and a fiercely beautiful woman in a red dress struck me as the perfect way to live.

By the time I was twelve years old, I was ferociously attempting to play “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” on a small acoustic guitar, which my parents had brought me for Christmas (I still write with it now). Imagine their surprise to hear their young child’s voice singing, “From toy guns that spark, to flesh-coloured Christ’s that glow in the dark, it’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred …” I didn’t understand the profound nature of the writing, of course, but I truly loved the song, and, in his way, Dylan was beginning to shape my consciousness. That view of the world, with a strange sort of mysticism, has stuck. His music was leading me to a deeper reality, fuelling my reverie.

Fast-forward some years to studying in Cheltenham. It was at this point that the depths of the album were being revealed to me so much further. I was studying English and Philosophy, and it’s fair to say I had simultaneously discovered various somewhat chemical habits, so mine was a head full of dreams (and nightmares). At that time, my mother was ill with the cancer that would soon enough see her slip this mortal coil, and Dylan’s words were becoming ever more entrenched in me, speaking to the tristesse and despondency I was carrying inside. 

I have a crystal clear memory of sitting in a park in the regency town early one rainy morning, having been up for days (this was, after all, the early 90s – the ecstasy drug culture was in full swing), and, as I came down hard, struggling with my perception of the real, I listened to the “The Gates of Eden” on a pair of battered headphones. Dylan’s words floated into my brain like the light and gentle rain that was soaking through my clothes: “The kingdoms of experience, in a precious winds they rot / While paupers change possessions / Each one wishing for what the other has got / And the princess and the prince discuss what’s real and what is not / It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden …” Although I knew the song backwards, somehow it was a wholly new experience to me once more, and it hit me like a freight train. It opened floodgates of emotion inside of me, and, while it sounds somewhat dark, the experience was immensely healing. I wept like a baby. 

But, of course, Bringing It All Back Home is not an album solely of thoughtful reflection, it is also a record that contains an absurd and celebratory hedonism at its heart, and, to this day, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” can still put me in the mood to say fuck it all, up sticks, burn a credit card and take off for a new horizon, for better or worse. For those who are not initiated in its singular brilliance, the song documents a wildly surreal trip that says something to me about being solely devoted to the energy of the moment, and ricocheting through life, quite literally, like a rolling stone: “I decided to flip a coin / Like either heads or tails / Would let me know, if I should go / Back to ship or back to jail / So I, hocked my sailor suit / And I got a coin to flip / It came up tails, it rhymed with sails / So I made it back to the ship…”It’s also a wry comment on the foundation of America – a country I love, despite all of its evangelism and gun-toting right-wing kooks. 

There is so much more on the record than I can possibly get into here, but I hope I have given at least a glimmer of how much it has meant to me over the years. If I can say anything overall about Bringing it All Back Home, it’s that it made me fall in love with the outlaw archetype, because Dylan is, to me, the very epitome of an outlaw, and has obviously loved them all of his life. “I got my dark sunglasses / I’m carrying for good luck, my black tooth / Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’ / I just might tell you the truth,” he sings on the driving splendour of “Outlaw Blues”, which namechecks both Jesse James and his killer Robert Ford, encapsulating, as ever in his work, yin and yang, light and darkness. In short, I absolutely love Bringing It All Back Home and I always shall, perhaps in large part because this society will always need its outlaws – more often than not, it is the outsider who can show us the way to salvation. 

thesirensoftitanband.com

Kokoroko: “It’s not a sequel, it’s a different story”

With a new album on the near horizon, the eight-piece band shares insight into their journey and new sounds

Photography by Vicky Grout

Likely a familiar name to UK dwellers and even those living further afield, Kokoroko is an eight-piece London-based band that’s gone from strength to strength in recent years. Fitting the bill of the old saying “like music for my ears”, the band is indeed something that anyone will be happy to hear as it fuses Jazz and Afrobeat into a harmonious merging of rhythms, improv and honey-dripping melodies. Fronting the band is Sheila Maurice Grey – vocalist and trumpeter – who plays alongside her musical family: Yohan Kebede (synthesisers and keyboards), Cassie Kinoshi (alto sax and vocals), Onome Edgeworth (percussion), Tobi Adenaike-Johnson (guitar), Ayo Salawu (drums), Richie Seivwright (trombone and voals) and Duane Atherley (bass, synthesisers and keyboards). And honestly, it’s important to think of them that way – a group of kins who each share different interests and insights. Because when they come together, no matter their differences or likeness, the music is what binds them. Below, in anticipation of the launch of their new album Could We Me More, set to release in August, I chat to the band about their journey and what we can expect from their new sound.

I’d love to hear about how you all met.

We all met at different times and in different places. Clearly we all met for a reason, though! That reason is something we’re still exploring.

To those who haven’t heard your music before, how would you describe it?

Dopamine. 

What are you all like as individuals, do you all share the same music interests and taste? 

We all have different music interests and taste, I think that’s the special thing about the band – it’s taking the things that make us individuals and marrying them together as a celebration of who we all are and where we come from.

As an eight-piece, what’s it like being part of such a big group? What’s the dynamic like?

It’s amazing. When you find one person jarring, there’s another seven people to talk to, ha. Working and playing in a big group is amazing, but it also has its challenges. This includes learning how to allow space for others as well as figuring out where you fit into the equation of a song. It sharpens you as a musician, and forces you to simplify and revisit the essence of the craft, which is songwriting.

You’re currently on tour, which sounds incredible! Where did you play, are you teasing out your new album?

We just finished an incredible run in the Netherlands and Belgium, with highlights being two sold out shows at Paradiso in Amsterdam and Ancienne Belgique in Belgium! We appreciate the love we get shown all over Europe and we’re looking forward to the France leg of tour next week! We might play a new song here and there.

We’ve been teasing bits of the new album and reworking some classics that kind of tell the story of why and how a band like us exists. 

Speaking of, can you share some details about your new album? What can we expect to hear, and how does it compare to your previous releases?

Our album is a reflection of where we are at in our creative process; it’s an honest album in every sense of the word. Expect to hear mistakes that capture the essence of the song better than perfection could. 

The album is a moment of time captured, similar to our first EP. It’s hard to compare them – they’re from a very different time and a very different place. I think we would all encourage people to try to be present when listening to the album or any album, rather than listening comparatively. It’s not a sequel, it’s a different story.

Can you pick out a couple of favourite moments from the new album and talk me through them?

We Give Thanks was special; it’s a song that really captures the energy of the band. It was amazing to watch Sheila step out of her comfort zone, being adventurous with the way she sang while also paying homage to the 70s and 80s Afro rock/psychedelic bands that paved the way. Another moment is the outro to Somethings Going On; it was the last thing we all recorded together in the studio and the energy in it perfectly sums up the weeks we spent together writing and recording the album. I think a favourite track might be Good Times, I’m torn between that one and Home.

Is there a certain feeling or emotion you’re hoping to evoke from the new album?

There is no specific feeling or emotion we are trying to evoke, we just want people to connect with our stories. Different people will connect with different things and that’s something we’ve learned from each other. That’s the exciting thing about creating something – it kind of takes on its own life as soon as you let it go. We all have different favourites!

What’s next for the band?

Hopefully to start working on another album, a film maybe; some people want to delve deeper into fashion. We are quite ambitious as a collective ha, but basically whichever medium allows us to express ourselves in the best and most fulfilling way.

Music is a Vehicle for Perceiving

The author, poet and curator Anaïs Duplan shares a thoughtful insight into his recent essay, explaining how he strives to create community and understanding through his work

Photography by Ally Caple

How did you get to where you are today?

I was born in Haiti, i came to the Unites States around H3 and, besides a three-year stint living with my mother in Havana, Cuba, I’ve mostly been on the East Coast, between Boston and Brooklyn. I went to school as an undergrad at Bennington College, which is where I teach now, and I studied poetry and socio linguistics. Then I went to grad school for poetry at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was working for visual artists before I went to Bennington, and I transferred from there to RISD art school, and realised that I preferred working for artists than making art myself. 

Even though I’ve worked mostly as an arts worker at different arts organisations, I draw a lot of inspiration from visual artists – Black digital media artists both within visual arts but also music. I had a music journalism period, and I draw inspiration from that in my teaching. I’m a post-colonial literary professor at Bennington, and it’s pretty cool to be teaching where I went to school. It’s a cool way to incorporate some of my background as an artist worker.

What inspired you to become an author, poet and curator? Do you remember the first thing you ever wrote?

I do not remember the first thing I ever wrote, but I will say that, because I transferred to Bennington from another school, I was loafing around for a while between disciplines. Bennington  doesn’t really have majors – you can create your own course of study. So I left the visual arts, so to speak, or realistically it just wasn’t what i wanted to do. I was doing sociology and anthropology and realised I had an interest in language and those areas, so I was hovering around socio linguistics and discourse studies for a while. It was in that moment that I took a poetry class on a whim, and to get into class you had to apply with a packet of poems and I remember scrounging around on my computer trying to see if anything looked remotely poem-like. I found some old diaristic journal writing and put it into some stanzas and I got in. I was surprised to find my professor Michael Dumanis, who I teach alongside at Bennington, saw potential in my work and encouraged me to pursue poetry. I thought it was crazy, but here we are.

What drives your writing? Are there any specific elements, moment or experiences that influence you to pick up a pen and paper?

When I first started writing, it was a lot about having the space to say and think about things that I felt like I didn’t have in the rest of my life – in particular thinking about family dynamics, selfhood, relationships, gender, sexuality and all of that. Later on, I became really interested in writing about work that other artists and writers in my community were doing and my arts worker career path joined with my writer path.

What compelled you to write your essay, Music is a Vehicle for Perceiving (Or, a Foundation for Artful Intervention). What narratives are you hoping to share?

I became interested in writing work in conversation with my community. With the essay Music is a Vehicle for Perceiving, the piece’s statement is in the title; it’s an essay that I hope folks will try to read musically rather than try to read intellectually. By that I mean there’s a body and lineage of Black writers – Édourard Glissant, Fred Moten, Simone Wright to name a few – there’s a bunch who are in this space between poetry and theory. When we’re the space of the poem, we expect to read for affect and emotion; how does this part make me feel? But then, when we get into the world of theory or prose paragraphs, we switch into this way that we’ve been tried to read, which is more of a white, western hierarchal form of knowledge production where there are experts and people who don’t know. If instead we operate through this idea from Glissant, “to consent not to be a single being”, then we’re starting from a plan of already being in a community and already being understanding of one another. Then the writing is just an opportunity to perceive one another and to be together, like a relationality. The essay was about trying to write in a way that was inspired by those writers who I saw doing more affect-driven theoretical writing. 

What’s your personal relationship to music like?

I love music – I don’t make it and I’ve never really tried to make it, except I had an acoustic guitar in high school. I respect music and musicians a lot, and I’m very sensitive to sound which serves the practice of poetry. I hope that the audience will respond to the essay by reading musically, perhaps feeling a sense of relationality, community or finding resonance with the piece – in particular feeling a sense of permission for affect and emotion rather than reading with the mind.

How do you hope your audience will respond to this essay, what can they learn or feel? 

A main goal of mine as a writer is to try to write work that gives people permission to operate through the intelligence of the emotions. I don’t write fiction, I wish I could; I have a lot of respect for fiction writers. But in terms of poetry and essay, and the space in between – which I’ve been playing with lately – I would definitely say that’s a prime space for exploring what it means to understand information through the emotions rather than through the mind.

What’s next for you, any upcoming plans or projects?

Coming up next, I am writing a book for an academic press on the history of Black experimental documents. It’s my first time writing a book for an academic press, so I’m excited to try to explore the tension in the space, staying true to my poetry background but also writing prose that will work for a more academic audience.

 

An extract of Music is a Vehicle for Perceiving can be read here.

Radio Ballads

In a new show at Serpentine, four artists reveal a three-year collaboration with social workers, carers, organisers and communities to share impactful stories of labour and care

Rory Pilgrim, _RAFTS_, Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance, Production Still, 2021. Photo: Matthew Ritson.

“What keeps us connected? What do we need to repair? How do we listen and how do we hold each other?” This questions are posed by Amal Khalaf, curator and artist who’s currently director of programmes at Cubitt and civic curator at the Serpentine Galleries. Exploring stories about labour and care – plus the important act of how we care – Amal alongside the wider gallery team have embedded these questions into a new exhibition named Radio Ballads, currently on show at Serpentine and running until 29 May 2022. The show is also simultaneously running across the London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham from 2-17 April, headed by the council’s New Town Culture programme. 

Over three years, artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim and Ilona Sagar were asked to collaborate with social workers, carers, communities and organisers. Radio Ballads is the culmination of this and features long-term projects spanning film, drawing, mixed-media, song and music. It’s an impactful exhibition that shares experiences with mental health, domestic abuse, terminal illness, grief and end of life care. It’s also created in response to 12 years of austerity and the demise of the UK care sector – from privatisation and immigration policies to racism and lack of access to services. All of which is conceived through the voices of social care workers and those giving or receiving care. 

Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Sonia Boyce, Yes, I Hear You, 2022 Photo: George Darrell.

Even the title, Radio Ballads, is rich in personal meaning. It takes its name from the original Radio Ballads broadcast on the BBC from 1957-64; it also looks at the form of a ballad – the poems and narratives set to a song or assortment of sounds – and how the framework centres the voices of people. Artists and musicians spend time “listening to people who were rarely represented in the media and often violently erased form history – centring their voices and words on their own term was a revelation to me,” explains Amal.

Interested in using art to “build political power, create life-sustaining relationships, and enact community and systems change”, says Amal, Radio Ballads is provoking, resilient and brave through its documentation of how social care services and artists can work together. Helen Cammock – former social worker and long-term artist – is deeply aware of the responsibilities that social workers bare for others, and the impact this can have on their lives. In her work with Bass Notes and SiteLines, Helen explores the connection between text, voice and body in order to present resistance and strength. Through sessions with people receiving care and those offering it through an organisation called Pause, Helen’s contribution – spanning film, meditation exercises, group drawings and a live performance – sees a series of artistic workshops come to life, all in all reflecting on the connections made through music and lyric writing to express anger, pain, joy and care. Below, Helen tells me more about her prodigious work at Radio Ballads. 

Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.

Tell me about your work involved in the show, what stories are you hoping to share?

There are a number of different elements to the show. These elements somehow give a ‘way in’ to the project process, and discuss in different forms the ideas that we were talking about in the project. This included a discussion in its widest sense about care using different activities to find ways for the conversation. We looked at how the body can be a site for resilience and the voice a site for resistance. 

The show includes a film (which weaves together refections from social workers and women who access care that take sung and spoken form, and also texts from people who have written about both voice and care). There is a large fabric banner, a triptych of screen-prints, a series of small line drawings and three larger line drawings made by contributors in the workshop process, a research table full of books that somehow speak about the idea of care and its relationship to body and sound, and a booklet that includes text I’ve written, drawings, images and a project playlist. Most of the works are made by me but some (the line drawings) come from activities on the project. There will also be two performances of a song Listening In Your Silence that I’ve written made up of words, phrases and stories that have come out of the workshop discussions. This will be a group performance of the song that we have been rehearsing together for eight weeks. We will be joined by a small choir from Brighton and Hove who have also been rehearsing the song for the past month.  

Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.

You worked with social workers, carers and communities for three years. What was this like for you, and what did you learn from them? Can you tell me more about your findings and the conversations you had?

It was a period that involved the lockdown so it included ‘in person’ and online workshops/conversations. This meant changes in participants/collaborators and the way that we could be together. This felt a little de-stabilising and was hard work in a way – when we were trying to be together. We worked with different social work practitioners (from different areas of care services) and with one project where both practitioners and the women who received support came together. A range of different activities were used in order to develop the space for discussion and trust to be built. We used drawing, led meditation to music, creative writing, photography, discursive activities and singing – all as ways to have conversations about care and self care and the relationship between voice and body, and resistance and resilience. We tested some of this out through what we ‘did’ together. We discussed what music means to us, what it feels like to speak and be heard, we used our voices to sing and our bodies to form shapes and gestures to articulate different emotions and states to further these conversations. This forms a foundation of the material in the film.

Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.

Can you share any stories or anecdotes from working with them?

There is no one story – it was a process of exchange. Each person has many stories and experiences. A process of trust building was key. In order for us to discuss what it means to use your voice (metaphorically or physically) it was important to create structures for those conversations. We had moments of sadness and moments of laughter, moments of connection and situations where conversations were difficult. There was negotiation and deal-making sometimes when asking people to try something new – or something that felt unfamiliar. There were women who felt uncomfortable singing in a group and for others; singing in a choir represented something difficult from their past. This sharing was important and informed how we approached each activity. Some social workers spoke about the power of being vulnerable in certain ways alongside the women they work with in the sessions and how this brought particular benefit to their working relationship. 

What response do you hope you’ll receive from this work?

I often say that I want people to respond both emotionally and intellectually to the work, and that this is about being able to connect to others and their stories but also to one’s own. We all have moments where we feel our voices and our bodies enable us to survive, to resist, to care… the process of this project is ‘the work’, if you like. The exhibition is made up of glimpses of this process. It is a way to touch or be touched by the process, but the process was where the work took its form; the site of the work. 

Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.

In what ways can art improve social care and community? How is your work contributing to that?

I am an artist; I am interested in dialogue and in the transformative nature of art to transform the form, shape or sound of stories and ideas. I want to create something new – ideas, sensation and thought through the work. This has a social function, a political function and an artistic function. It isn’t social work. This isn’t my aim here. But any relationships we form with people – individually or collectively – can have a role that supports, invigorates, validates, challenges and this can be seen as a form of labour, in contributing to a way of seeing, changing or interrogating the social fabric. 

I believe all situations in life can benefit from art and social work, and work within and between communities is absolutely one of them. It is a way to express and communicate on different levels and through different forms. It is a way to create channels for communication – say difficult things – and process difficult experiences. Not outside of therapeutic approaches or other structures of care, but alongside or in dialogue with. 

Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Ilona Sagar, The Body Blow, 2022 Photo: George Darrell.

Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS, Green Shoes Arts, Production Still. Photo: Jessica Emovon.

Rory Pilgrim, Sketch Book. Courtesy of andriesse-eyck galerie.

Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Helen Cammock, Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience, 2022 Photo: George Darrell.

Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS, 2022 Photo: George Darrell.

Ilona Sagar, The Body Blow, Film Still, 2022.

Ilona Sagar, The Body Blow, Film Still, 2022.

Anaïs Duplan on Music

The poet, curator and artist shares an extract from his essay Music is a Vehicle for Perceiving (Or, a Foundation for Artful Intervention). An interview with the author will be released in the coming weeks

Photography by Ally Caple

Music is a vehicle for perceiving. We demand music. The music of the soul connotes the body, thought, intervention, silence. We can’t be the speakers of our bodies; we’re already spoken for. We instead tune into, smile upon, the parcels of ourselves that are beaten up by historicity. To live, thrive, we don’t demand to not be beaten up. Instead we wield our beaten selves in the arms of the rest of our bodies. Sit up proud, happy. We made it here today. Go on. 

Wow, it’s incredible to be drawn-out, to read ourselves from outside within the art of peace, freedom. If we embrace living in clarity and knowledge, then it behooves us to receive our social landscape more fully. What attributes do we project onto experience? Do we perceive that being alive is embraceable? Do we take refuge in what we know, using this refuge as a free space from which to receive each other? Is there a suggestion, here, that others might not see that we come from what we know? That others might not even see how we come from what we know?

Romantic encounters create a self-reflective sense. Our lovers have a Blackness we ourselves would like to have, actively strive toward. Further lovers embody the Blackness of ours we’ve tried to repress. In either case, our encounters with romance bring us into intimate contact with our joining, susceptibility. Submission and dominance get played out in different arrangements, depending on our relationship with our sexual partners. The reflexive meaning of submission and dominance: what it means to be dominated changes depending on our relationship with our partners: our relationship with their position, who they channel down through the centuries, their position in relation to us. Submitting to our lovers is submission to their Blackness. We reconcile to let those attributes take precedence over our own. We reconcile, to be dominated by our ancestors and, in a consensual sexual relationship, embrace being dominated by them. Or, we dominate our partners, and our own Blackness prevails. 

What materialises when our lover has attributes that shuffle us into vulnerability? Vulnerability is complete and presents us with the momentum needed to receive. We have those defence mechanisms, our angels. We try to save ourselves from insult. Our defence mechanisms are sophisticated, useful. It isn’t wretched to try to recover our bodies from harm—it’s smart! But the mechanisms we use to cover ourselves are often outdated, causing us harm. We’re sabotaging our bodies. We don’t know when we’re doing it. We can’t be honest. 

Our orientation to life is to the detriment of our unvoiced desires. Soul is an appearance, a glimmer, a smile. If we’re patient, we get to its essence. Our souls bring revelations to the surface in order to foreground information they deem primary to our survival. Do we have the nerve to listen? Are we ready to drive with trouble? The negative emotions are there to talk with us. Their negativity is what signals that we should pull inwardly, into slowness. So far as negativity gives positivity meaning, the negative emotions are not wretched, not to be resisted. On the contrary, resisting negativity proliferates it by authorising it to go undealt with. Unprocessed pain manifests through unconscious behaviour. Resisting negativity, refusing to perceive it, means it proliferates. It’s been authorised to go undealt with. It transforms, phase-changes, metamorphoses, joining the ecosystem of our life, though remaining mysterious, even alien, to us. Do we ever think about why we dream of controlling our bodies? Do we think through what we’re afraid of: resurgence, uncontrollable stories passed through, seated in us, or do we think through unrequited love? 

We’ve never understood what myths really are. We know what a story is. We know a story is told across cultures, temporalities (and inside a culture, across its generations). But what moves a myth, generates the scale of its reach? How does it generate meaning for a culture as a whole? The men, the myth, the legends? There’s no style or method of walking around that will not pull out some sort of ancestral translation from our bodies. I walked down to the parking garage and it was cold. I had washed my skin with cold water that morning.

We can get aroused by art. Art as Blackness, as recreation. Is valuing Blackness the parallel of possessing it? We possess Blackness in greater or lesser degrees. To the extent to which we value those Blacknesses, we voice our ancestors. 

Among folks in public, who have nothing to do with each other, somehow, small synchronicities, repetitions, are materialising. They are echoing each other, mirroring, and bonding. We are the joint apparatus of our bodies, labouring in tandem to keep us free, to help us survive. When we’ve built up a reservoir inside our bodies of mutual perceiving, we are able to tolerate the sense of being wrong ourselves. We don’t fight what is materialising in us; we consent to our situation first. We labor to enrich our situation from a place of mutual aspiration. 

Peace proceeds from contentment; trust that the desired result does arise. We’d like to be replete immediately, to get rid of what we hold to be our negative attributes. We can’t get along with being flawed; we can’t bear the view/idea that we can’t fix our flaws right this moment. We’re not who we dreamed to be. We don’t authorise the cycle of undergoing: checking our bodies with judgment, rush, and anger. Can we tolerate the vision of our own failure? Be careful of smoothing over what is the field of failure, meaning, the place of unimaginability, and beyondness. Inside our bodies is the source of our creativity, rooted in the field of failure. 

We serve our bodies with a clear, kind, wet, responsive disposition. If we’re impatient, we should practice not having views. If we’re too startled, we should practice acting on our views. Do we have to be successful when we struggle? The puzzle of it all is when we “get what we dreamed of”; it doesn’t seem satisfying. What we dreamed of is much more complicated. 

Art is the way we proceed across time, the puzzles we read in each other. What does it take to shuffle, to forge a soulful connection? Are situations of conflict driven by personality flaws? By the inner intervention of personality flaws within each? By the resistance of Blackness to a kind of Blackness which it deems nonconsensual? By the drive to cover up what reads as not okay, incomplete—that’s to say, the ideological? Be a reinforcement or re-embodiment of the Blackness we wish to read reified in experience. This is, after all, a Blackness that gathers around itself. 

We continue to feed the myth of our bodies to our bodies in order to survive. Who are we? We can get closer to the answer to this question when we hear out what drives our hurt. 

This text is an extract taken from Music is a Vehicle for Perceiving (Or, a Foundation for Artful Intervention), written by Anaïs Duplan and published on Topical Cream on 1 December 2021

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

The eponymous British photographer’s new book provides a nostalgic snapshot of 90s club culture

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

Conjure up an image of a club goer – the type who sways, dances, gropes, kisses and sleeps without a care in the world – and it will most likely be one of Ewen Spencer’s. Synonymous with exposing the antics of British nightlife, the photographer and filmmaker has carved a reputable name for his work documenting (and revealing) youth, fashion, music and subculture, particularly that which depicts a time when smoking in clubs was allowed and people were a lot less tied to their phones. In fact, phones weren’t really a thing back then. Could anything be more nostalgic?

While studying at Brighton School of Art in the 90s, Ewen began photographing topics in tune with society – snapping people having a 20-minute break at a service station on the M4, for example. This is where his interest in subcultures arose and, having attended Northern Soul all-nighters at the time, he decided to start bringing his camera in tow. It was the perfect subject matter. Then, upon graduating in 1997, Ewen took his imagery to Shoreditch-based Sleazenation magazine and launched his career capturing nightclub moments for the publication. He proceeded to document the UK’s garage and grime scenes and worked with NME, The Face, Dazed, Nike, Apple among others – he also took the inner liner photographs for The Streets’ album Original Pirate Material, and has released a handful of books including Open Mic, UKG, Open Mic Vol.2 and Young Love.

A flourishing career so far, it seems only right for the photographer to look back at his archive. Doing just that in his new publication titled While You Were Sleeping, these very pictures – featuring those previously unseen – are an enjoyable reminder of a bygone era, a time when clubbing and clubbers were oblivious to the photographer’s lens. Will nightlife and club photography ever be the same again? Below, Ewen tells me about these prolific pictures. 

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

What inspired you to start photographing nightlife, and why make this book now?

I began making pictures around youth scenes out of my own interests. I was involved in the northern soul scene and the many off-shoots from that: modern soul, rare groove, house and garage throughout the late 80s and 90s. I just began to apply what I’d been researching and testing out while studying photography in those places that I loved. It blossomed into a visual language that made sense to me and discussed a myriad of social and perhaps political concerns and considerations at a time, when that was still conceivable in a club or around a dance floor.

Who caught your eye back then?

If you have an interest in people I think you probably gravitate towards interesting characters. In the late 90s, I was going into spaces that would hold no more than 200 people in some instances – in a basement in Brixton, let’s say. I’d look for characters interacting together, begin working around them and at times integrate myself with them to the extent where we’d have a drink and become friendly. I might stay with these people for a while and then work around the room; I might stay a couple of hours and shoot 10 rolls of film, and then move onto the next place. Unless it was a bigger club, or somewhere I was particularly interested in hearing a DJ or a particular sound, I’d stay and work all night and maybe know a few people in there. Sonic Mook Experiment was a place where I knew folks who were working in fashion, music and art. I photographed Jerry Dammers, DJ-ing here for Sleazenation in 1998.

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

The photos are an incredible record of the past, where smoking in clubs was legal, people wouldn’t be glued to their phones; everyone seems less aware of themselves. How does it feel looking back on a time like this through your imagery? And has your process changed now that people are more self-conscious?

I think it all depends on where you go. I was at Guttering last weekend in Bermondsey and the folks were really up for the evening, dancing hard, mixing it up with one another. I love to see it; there were some real faces in there. 

I’m always surprised by kids approaching me who know my pictures and are maybe more sussed to the dynamic, and that is in someway making the act of shooting around scenes a little more performative, in that the consent seems quite immediate. I had a few acknowledgments of satisfaction from people I’d photographed and a few kids came up and shared their pictures they’d been working on… Photography is obviously far more accessible and democratic now. However I’m not encouraging people to come and show me your pictures at parties, thanks x

Ewen Spencer’s While You Were Sleeping is published by Damiani at £40

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

Ewen Spencer: While You Were Sleeping

Philipp Mueller: 120 bpm

Relive the Swiss techno scene of the 90s in a new book published by Edition Patrick Frey

As the world continues to grapple with the pandemic, more so do we yearn for moments from the past, nightlife being one of them. Here in the UK, we had a blissful and somewhat wary few months reliving the sweaty, body-to-body movements only found in the dark and bassy depths of a club. But the potential for these nights to be put on hold, yet again, still looms. So for now, the easier days of dancing can be experienced in a more 2D (yet still utterly dynamic) form through the pages of Philipp Mueller’s latest book, 120 bpm – a comprehensive documentation of the rise of the Swiss techno scene in the 90s.

Published by Edition Patrick Frey, the Swiss photographer looks at the magnanimous impact that Switzerland’s techno scene has had on clubs, dance music and nightlife over the years. Rebellious and free, we see the dawn of Zürich’s street parades and the synonymous underground raves and parties, housed amongst warehouses or private venues. The flash-lit shots of party-goers are paired with archival clippings from rave magazines and fanzines, giving the book an almost allegorical feel and one that can stand the test of time. The book’s name, too, is given a musical stamp of approval as it denotes the average number of beats per minute on a club track, luring you in to the succinct and heart-racing photo sequences found within. Below, I chat to Philipp to find out more.

What inspired you to start working on a project about the Swiss techno scene?

I wasn’t part of a rave scene to begin with, and it didn’t start as a project. What you can discover in the photographs, which grow through the years, is that I was involved in the nightlife scene in Zürich, and that I got hired by independent magazines to cover parties, fashion shows and of course rave and techno events.

First, I have to tell you that all the material for this book was in my archive for a very long time. I almost forgot about it until I rediscovered it, picture by picture. This means I looked at them as if was seeing them for the first time. 

I pulled a presentation in a PDF together and started to show it to my friends in London, Paris and Zürich. I was testing if those photographs were of any interest for people outside of Switzerland. My friends were surprised of the vibrant scene in Zürich, they thought I took the pictures in London or Paris. They were even more surprised when I told them that the photographs are over 20 years’ old. My agent encouraged my to send it to Editions Patrick Frey, and I was pleased the publisher wanted to work together on this book.

Talk me through your photography featured in the book, what did you seek to include?

My photography always reflects on the zeitgeist of society. Therefore, the book shows my perspective of the 90s; it was a free time where everyone could express themselves. It includes photographs of my friends, models, drag queens, musicians, rave kids and other creatures of the night. 

You’ve also incorporated a mix of clippings from magazines and fanzines, what does this add to the narrative and structure of the work?

Those magazines were my first clients. They didn’t pay me, but the freedom in creativity was priceless. They are like a time capsule, representing what was going on in society and culture at this time. They formed the very foundation of my work until today.

Can you pick out a couple of favourite images and talk me through them?

The cover with the girl sticking her tongue out is my first choice. It has an iconic and rebellious touch. Then, a little further back in the book, there’s the gay couple shot (the guy with short hair and the guy/drag queen with long black hair). Love is love – that is it what it means. And there are so many more.

Any particular message you’re trying to convey in the work?

It was never meant to be a memory lane book. I hope I will inspire people to live free, be creative and tolerant.

What’s next for you?

I have 30 years’ worth of photography work from new wave and punk, shot in Paris and London, as well as parties, fashion and celebrities. Some stuff has never seen the light of day, such as Hugh Hefner’s birthday party in Paris and John Galliano’s legendary cardboard fashion for Dior, shot backstage to be precise. Maybe there will be another book….

All photography courtesy of the photographer

120 bpm is published by Edition Patrick Frey and available here

Music for climate change

100 cities threatened by rising seas can listen to a piece composed by Cecilia Damström, played by the Lahti symphony orchestra and conducted by Dalia Stasevksa

The Finnish tabloid Helsingin Sanomat once referred to Cecilia Damström as the Greta Thunberg of music, and quite frankly, there is no better description. The Helsinki-born composer, who grew up in a German-Scottish-Finnish family, has so far written four chamber operas, music for orchestra, choir and chamber music plus a host of other solo works. Her most recent piece, however, confirms her essence – the drive, spirit and temper – of her career entirely. In collaboration with the carbon-neutral symphony orchestra of Finnish city Lahti, Cecilia has crafted a 10-minute piece entitled ICE. 

Conducted by Dalia Stasevksa, the music is available only to 100 cities worldwide that are endangered by climate change and its consequent rising sea levels. Artistically strict, upon landing on ICE’s very own homepage, users are given the option to input their city to test out whether or not their lands are threatened. Myself in London, I popped the data in and therein flashed a harsh yet necessary statement: that the city is under threat from rising sea levels. The only positive of this message, though, is that I’m now able to listen to Cecilia’s composition of playful and peaceful melodies that rashly intensify as it strives to replicate the impending danger of our world. “The piece begins with depicting beautiful ice scenes,” says Cecilia. “Every chord is a symmetrical chord consisting of six notes, because when water freezes it always becomes a symmetrical hexagon.” The first three or so minutes, in this sense, depicts a “normal” winter period before “alarm signals” begin to change the pace, “and the winds that grow ever louder every time the winter shortens.” 

“At around five minutes,” she continues, “you can hear ecosystems starting to collapse and the strings playing frantic rhythmic repetition, how time is ticking away. While at six and a half minutes, we will again hear alarm signals, like when a big vehicle is trying to reverse. The alarms begin to ring out clearly SOS (three short, three long and three short signals). Soon after we can hear ‘total’ collapse, the heart’s irregular beat in a duet with a bicycle bell, also signalling SOS. The bicycle bell is a symbol for how human (personal) action can impact and make a change, and make things turn around. We hear a fast speed rewind of the collapse from about eight minutes until we are finally back at the beginning, back to normal winters at around nine minutes. The bicycle bell is also the last thing we hear, human action is the note of hope for the future.”

Lahti Symphony, Sibelius Festival 2019. Photo by Maarit Kytöharju

ICE is an apt example of how music can be employed as a tool for steering change, particularly when it comes to addressing the impact of our warming world. And cities, like Lahti, are at the forefront of this: consuming less resources; making urban areas more sustainable; consciously encouraging sustainable urban planning like transportation; and actively sourcing renewable energy are a few instances. Leading the way and setting an example for all, Lathi has been coal-free since 2016 and will be a zero-waste, carbon-neutral city by 2025. It’s also proud to state that 99% of its household waste is received and recycled, and has plans to protect 8% of its nature and resources by 2030.

If urgent action isn’t taken now, then disastrous effects will be brought to the surface, quite literally, by the end of the century. No city will be unaffected by the climate crisis. “Together with Lathi,” says Cecilia, “I wanted to draw attention to the alarming state of these coastal cities by highlighting them and bringing together the people who live in these areas, and share the concern about the future. On the one hand, we are asking the questions about what unique things will be lost if we lose these areas, and on the other hand, we wanted to focus the piece’s message of hope and prompt action on the endangered areas.”

Photo by Marthe Veian

The cities declared under this powerful merging of music and activism have been chosen based on reports and findings by the Urban Climate Change Research Network, The World Economic Forum, OECD and Climate Central. Along with London, these other locations include Copenhagen, Dakar, Istanbul, New York, Buenos Aires, Shenzhen, Venice, Melbourne, Tokyo, Faro, Liverpool, Amsterdam and many more. According the project’s research, rising sea levels are set to threaten several coastal cities by 2050 and 2100. “I hope we can raise awareness of the acute situation of the glaciers and get people to act on the behalf of nature,” she says of her impactful messaging. So what does Cecilia hope for the future? “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and from those engaging, at least 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change. My hope is that we can be part of those who bring about the changes needed for stopping climate change.”