Fact Live: 33EMYBW 180 Fact 2023-09-27 | Captured on the XR Stage at 180 Studios, Shanghai producer and visual artist 33EMYBW performs live ahead of her appearance in the A/W ’23 issue of Fact Magazine.33EMYBW, a fixture of the Shanghai-born, now Manchester-based label SVBKVLT, always likes to begin with a concept. On her 2019 album, Arthropods, she used the titular invertebrates as a means of unpacking the ideas around organic and synthetic life, animism and the nature of the soul she first touched upon on her debut, Golem. Appearing in the upcoming A/W ’23 issue of Fact Magazine in conversation with journalist Merilyn Chang, 33 has developed her post-humanist ideas even further. “The failure of evolution is not decisive,” she asserts, “it’s hard to say if evolution is progress or regress.”Featuring digital-analogue hybrid images from artist Furmaan Ahmed, the feature explores 33’s singular approach to sound design, her constant oscillation between the organic and the synthetic, as well as the music she has been working on over the last four years, Holes Of Sinian, which features contributions from Forrest Gander, Marina Herlop, Batu and writer oxi peng. During the shoot Fact was able to catch the artist jamming live on the XR Stage at 180 Studios, adapting elements of her current live show into a winding improvisation caught between a digital drum ritual and a club ceremony reminiscent of one of SVBKVLT’s legendary parties at the label’s now shuttered birthplace of Shelter Club, Shanghai.Set against Ahmed’s ethereal, post-humanist imagery, 33’s performance is testament to her commitment to concept, cycling through a patchwork of motifs and melodies that shift and lock together like a Rubik’s cube. It’s a methodology 33 applies to all of her live performances, as Chang notes, “she focuses on the continuity in the progression of music and will often design a theme or framework which she will build for club-goers to dance within.” Here, we’re given some insight into how 33EMYBW constructs these frameworks, a thrilling glimpse of the artist at her most generative.
Bianca Scout - Vanguard 180 Fact 2023-08-23 | On ‘Vanguard,’ multidisciplinary performer Bianca Scout channels the spirits of her “goth opera,” The Heart of the Anchoress, in a visual that shape-shifts between folk horror and documentary, directed by Elena Isolini. Blurring ballet dance into ecstatic rituals of supplication, Scout flashes through a choreography of possession, contorting the definition of the track’s title, ‘the forefront or action of a movement,’ into a primal physical language. “I’m weaponising my own body, seeing myself as a chamber, of secrets, layers, fortress, manipulated structures,” writes Scout in a text accompanying the film. “Like the religious map / wrap themselves in, to confinement. To break inside, upside down, other land, new territory, thinking about this land and hierarchy and the structures shifting in and outside of us.”“The video concept revolves around a spirit who is learning how to haunt,” explains director Elena Isolini. “I’ve always been drawn to split universes, this idea that there are two co-existing versions of ourselves. The spirit is searching for a purpose and home, and this video depicts that transitional state. Acceptance and resistance is a big theme for me, and there is a comfort in the void and fear in the familiarity. The disorientation of images mixed with POV is used to immerse the viewer in an interpretation of that horror.”“The movement work is about coalescing the parts of you, the disparate, and the close, and giving them all a platform to sing,” says movement director Malik Nashad Sharpe. “We use Scout’s prior training as a ballet dancer to construct a movement score that allows the multiples to harmonise – to do so with freedom, to do so as armour – as weaponry for new secrets, renewal.” Mapping the sacred space of the church, where the anchoress of the album’s title resides in solitude, onto her own body, Scout moves through the gauzy latticework of ‘Vanguard’s eerie organ drone, ASMR prayer and chopped and screwed chorus, flickering between holy ghost and folk horror apparition. “Even after you’re dead, the learning continues,” writes Scout. “Ghosts learn new skills. This ghost learning to ‘haunt’ is just evaporating what she remembers, what sticks.”“The apparitions and visitations of saint / souls / sinners in the confinements of an anchorite’s cell would be demonised,” concludes Scout, “books were written about these experiences that had to be kept on the down low, or published under a different name. If you talked about god or the spirit in relation to yourself in a way that was different from the monarchy, then you would be executed.” The whispers of Scout’s intonation throughout ‘Vanguard’ echo this threat, strobing between the blasphemy and ecstasy of moving within a sacred space which is also your own body.‘Vanguard’ is taken from The Heart of the Anchoress, which is out now on First Terrace Records. You can find Bianca Scout on Instagram.Vanguard Credits:Director & Editor – Elena IsoliniDirector Of Photography – Mark Gee1st AC – Kairo JonesGaffer – Declan DuffySteady-Cam – Simeon GeyerLighting – GLO Film LightingMovement Director – Malik Nashad SharpeHair & Make Up Artist – Cheryl Basko-HumphreysStylist – Michela IsoliniData Wrangler – Federico BarniGrade – John Lowe
CORIN - Lux Aeterna 180 Fact 2023-07-26 | Inspired in part by the proliferation of online performance and digital avatars during and in the wake of the pandemic, multidisciplinary artist CORIN wants to blur the boundaries between the virtual and the physical within her audiovisual practice. With Lux Aeterna, a collaboration with Malaysian/Australian multimedia artist Tristan Jalleh, real-time footage of the artist is enhanced with visual effects, transfiguring an iteration of CORIN’s live AV show into a digital environment that draws from the sci-fi worlds of Dune and Raised by Wolves. “Usually, everything we do is about developing the environment, building something that is cohesive and detailed and would function on its own,” explains Jalleh. “But once we filmed the performance we realised that it had to be the main focus.” Combining CORIN’s exploratory approach to keys and a costume influenced by Filipino mythology, designed by Filipinx performance artist Justin Shoulder and Anthony Aitch, the artists expand the performance into its own instance of world-building.“The main thing that stuck was the idea of a desert landscape – a futuristic world where machines are powered by the sun,” adds CORIN. “I was reading about ancient cultures that worshiped the sun and was interested to merge these ancient ideas with something futuristic. I was also researching the hydraulis – an early type of organ powered by water. Thinking about ancient musical instruments as spirits, sacred objects, extensions of our bodily existence, vessels or portals into another. How could we create an instrument that’s ancient and future at the same time – that was the core idea.” It’s this same urge that inspired CORIN to name her new album after 20th century composer György Ligeti’s choral piece, which was iconically used to give sound to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Using granular synthesis to update Ligeti’s use of micropolyphony in the age of machine learning, CORIN seeks to write sci-fi soundtracks for the present by imagining “a semi-utopic vision of the future whereby the remaining infrastructure of the earth is powered purely by natural resources.”Lux Aeterna is out now, on UIQ. You can find CORIN on Instagram.Lux Aeterna Credits:Creative Direction – Corin Ileto & Tristan JallehVideo Director & Visual FX – Tristan JallehCinematography – Goldie SoetiantoCamera & Lighting Assistant – Michael ThompsonCostume Design – Justin Shoulder & Willow DarlingHeaddress Design – Anthony AitchMake Up and Hair – Mat HornbyRigging – Finton Mahoney Production & Props – Corin IletoTitle Design – Wei HuangStudio – Super Freak MediaGreen screen footage filmed on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body
Fact and 180 Studios presents: Future Shock virtual experience by Weirdcore 180 Fact 2023-07-19 | In last year’s Future Shock exhibition, curated by Fact and 180 Studios, visitors explored a subterranean space that featured work from artists and collectives working at the cutting edge of digital technology. Now, with the help of one of the artists featured – Aphex Twin collaborator Weirdcore – anyone in the world can enjoy the exhibition for the first time thanks to a virtual interpretation of the show.Using material filmed, scanned and reconstructed from the original exhibition by Weirdcore, this playful, interactive site brings together all 16 works from the show, which featured Ryoichi Kurokawa, Caterina Barbieri, Actual Objects, United Visual Artists, GENER8ION (aka Romain Gavras and Surkin), Gaika, Tundra, Ben Kelly & Scanner, NONOTAK and object blue & Natalia Podgórska.Future Shock was originally staged at London’s 180 Studios from April to August 2022, and took its name from the seminal 1970s book by American futurologist Alvin Toffler, which predicted the ways in which the pace and scope of technological change could cause “shattering stress and disorientation.” The artists involved responded to this idea in a multitude of ways, from Weirdcore’s disorientating interpretation of lucid dreaming to Actual Objects’ immersive installation Vicky, which tells the story of a future disaster through multiple viewpoints.To explore the Future Shock virtual experience, visit the website: futureshock.180studios.comWe recommend using Google Chrome for the best possible experience.Weirdcore: http://weirdcore.tv
Not Waving - The Place Ive Been Missing 180 Fact 2023-07-13 | Alessio Natalizia, best known for his eclectic productions, emotive songwriting and exploratory collaborations as Not Waving, reunites with artists Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs for a meditative visual accompaniment to his stunning new record, The Place I’ve Been Missing. Drawing together the wide variety of styles and moods we have seen Natalizia touch on with his work with Romance, Spivak and the late, great Mark Lanegan, as well as in his role as visionary label head of the always wonderful Ecstatic, The Place I’ve Been Missing plays out as an intimate and fragile reflection on grief and transcience, floating between synth-pop reverie and avant-garde elegy.Amstad and Eknæs’ slow, cinematic assemblage picks out the contemplative qualities of Natalizia’s project, a structurally experimental response to a deeply personal statement that pulls focus on small moments of vitality and wonder. A spiritual successor to the “emotive collage of vérité lockdown footage” the artists pieced together for Natalizia’s debut album, How To Leave Your Body, The Place I’ve Been Missing unfolds like a tone poem, the film’s procession of imagery and digital manipulation serving as an elegant analogue for Natalizia’s own expansive and intuitive approach to composition.“It shows the fragility and ephemeral quality of nature and animals as sisters and brothers,” the artists explain. “Some of the footage is shot with a thermographic camera, which creates images through infrared radiation instead of visible light. This opens up a different window to our environment from what we can see with the human eye. The colour spectrum from blue, via pink, to light yellow traces the cold and the heat and highlights the changes of living energy.”The Place I’ve Been Missing is out now. You can find Not Waving on Instagram and at the Ecstatic Bandcamp.
Fact & Serpentine Arts Technologies Present: Gabriel Massan’s Third World: The Bottom Dimension 180 Fact 2023-07-07 | Serpentine Arts Technologies, 180 Studios and Fact present the XR online launch and playthrough of Third World: The Bottom Dimension, powered by Tezos.Join us live for the online launch and playthrough of Third World: The Bottom Dimension, a single player, multi-level game designed by Fact resident and cover star Gabriel Massan and collaborators. Hosted by Massan and Serpentine Arts Technologies Curator, Tamar Clarke-Brown, the launch will be livestreamed from 180 Studios’ XR Metaverse Studio London.Described by Massan as a “consciousness-raising game that explores Black-indigenous Brazilian experience,” Third World explores ignorance towards the outdated notion of the ‘third world’ while drawing from ideas of shared cultural memory, speculative and fictionalised archaeology and the construction of virtual ecologies around how we feel, rather than how we live or how we are represented.There will also be a special focus on the collaborative production team, and the game’s special NFT feature, powered by Tezos, that is available when playing the game at Serpentine Galleries in London until October 22nd, 2023.Third World: The Bottom Dimension is produced by Serpentine Arts Technologies. The exhibition runs from June, 23rd to October 22nd, 2023, at Serpentine North within London’s Hyde Park Kensington Gardens and is free to attend.Third World: The Bottom Dimension is available for download for Windows OS via Steam.You can find Gabriel Massan on Instagram.
A-COLD-WALL* x Converse – Takuya Nakamura live set 180 Fact 2023-07-06 | Multi-instrumentalist Takuya Nakamura is renowned for playing the trumpet over live electronic sets, in which he blends elements of techno, reggae, dub, drum and bass, classical and jazz. Born in Japan and based in New York, Nakamura has been recording and performing across the past three decades, though his recent sets on Brooklyn’s Lot Radio have showcased his skills as a selector to fresh audience.In this exclusive live performance, recorded to launch the latest collaboration between British artist and designer Samuel Ross’s menswear label A-COLD-WALL* and Converse, Nakamura delivers an hour-long live set that harmonises with the Converse x A-COLD- WALL* aesthetic, meshing analog and digital instruments to create a forward-thinking sound.Based at 180 Studios in London, A-COLD-WALL* was launched in 2015 by Ross as a response to the British social climate to instigate a cultural conversation celebrating the energy of youth across a range of mediums, including clothing, film, music, literature and physical exhibitions.Takuya Nakamura: instagram.com/space_takA-COLD-WALL*: a-cold-wall.comConverse: converse.com
George Jasper Stone & Dark0 - Superstars (Part One) 180 Fact 2023-07-04 | Growing up in the Peak District, artist George Jasper Stone found formative inspiration in the psychogeographic rupture of the area’s mountainous expanses of natural beauty by the steady crawl of industrial development. The molten sparks given off by this clash between nature and technology ignited his maximal approach to CGI and digital design, a practice that has seen the artist splitting his talents between brands, such as Valentino and Converse, and artists, including Namasenda and Drake. “I have a fascination with the contrast of industrial technology and the natural environment creating a sense of poetic bleakness that resonates within me on a personal level,” Stone explains. “My interest in these spaces is a source of inspiration and meditation. I find beauty and meaning in their bleakness.”In the first part of Superstars, a collaboration with producer and sound designer Dark0, originally commissioned for an exhibition at Trauma Bar Und Kino, curated by The Fairest, Stone takes both a micro and macro view of a world in which this kind of rupture has spread to engulf all life. “I began making the film because I was interested in using motion capture to animate the virtual camera and digital sculptures,” he continues. “It gave a sense of realism and weight to the movements, which really helped to create a more human feel to the virtual worlds. It was a technique that felt powerful to me for bridging a gap between digital and physical spaces and creating this connection between the two.”As Stone glides through these interconnected environments, from a personal, through a technological and ultimately out into a planetary scale, Dark0’s score, lilting ambience shot through with geiger-counter clicks and foreboding low-end churn, hints at the fragility of the systems Stone visualises. “I do feel like the way I approach building virtual worlds can suggest anxiety and unease about the future and the direction of society to its impact on the natural world,” says Stone. “There’s a definite tension for me about the natural and industrial, past and future.”You can find George Jasper Stone on Instagram. You can find Dark0 on Instagram, SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Equip - Neurotrance 180 Fact 2023-06-26 | Multinational art collective Equip describe themselves as “an experiment in creating a neural playground for artists with solid identities, each operating between different micro-genres to expand a self-contained story.” Their second project, Neurotrance, draws together a stellar crew including director and editor Paris Seawell, artists Zeynep S. Schelling & Enes Güç and musician Nobuto Hauama, otherwise known as SVBKVLT producer Prettybwoy, into the blast radius of “a psychic carpet bomb, showing different layers of realities all connected by a mysterious transformative energy – an adrenal overdrive that doesn’t conform and doesn’t relent.”Mapping a near future world of surrealist sci-fi landscapes, terraforming colonies and densely packed cities using a maximalist collision of live-action filmmaking, crisp CGI animation and brain-scrambling VFX, Neurotrance is a multidimensional head trip soundtracked by Prettybwoy’s intricate club sonics.Hurtling at warp speed through a series of dreamlike vignettes: two fatigued organic research scientists mishandling psychotropic substances, a monstrous orchid blossoming out of the tongue muscle and sinew of an unsuspecting old man, a glitched-out consciousness projection through alternate dimensions, the film is a hyper-saturated reflection of a world in which multiple realities, virtual, physical and pharmacological, are stacked one on top of each other.“I personally wanted to give birth to a new reality that is hard to recognise or put into a specific category,” explains VFX Director Enes Güç. “To get there it needed many different approaches in its creation process, as well as many different techniques.” Featuring contributions from artists and filmmakers from London, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, Los Angeles and more, Neurotrance refracts multiple imaginations into a single kaleidoscopic vision.You can find Equip on Instagram.Neurotrance Credits:Cast – Domenico Caccamo, David Tarpey, Bradley Scott, Abigail Hamilton, MiddieDirector – Paris SeawellProducer – Tamas MesmerMusic – Prettybwoy / Nobuto HauamaDirector of Photography – Ruaraid Achilleos-SarllArt Director – Zeynep S. SchillingVFX Director – Enes GüçEditor – Paris SeawellSound Design and Mix – Will GolledgeAD – Jack BarrieSet Designer – Finn O’SullivanStyling & Costume – Detroit Law, Colette DryburghHair & make-up – Lisa ChauColorist – Gabe Sanchez, Roundhouse Post VFX Artists – Enes Güç, D P Ford, Paris SeawellTitle Design – Hao-Ting Chu1st AC – Ernest Tu2nd AC – Joel SpenceGaffer – Johnny Ho, Jerzy GudjonssonSpark – Lluc Mestre, Magdalena Maria VFX supervisor – Surhay Kılıç, Fuat Değirmenci Additional 3D modelling – Ezgi ŞiirRotoscoping & compositing – Akshay S RStudio manager – Corinna Luce, Studio LucerneProduction assistants – Piers Culpan, Shristi RaiAdditional footage – Johannes Tito-Göhlich, Paris SeawellSpecial Thanks to Tom Jenkins (Squarepusher) Andy James (Beatink) Quan, Matthew Chan (fmlik), Jaden, Liav Ben Tolila
Alexandra Koumantaki - Gaze 180 Fact 2023-06-15 | The work of Greek artist Alexandra Koumantaki is characterised by constructed interstices between both the natural and the technological and the present and the past. Site specific installations in uninhabited natural spaces see the Hyperlink curator drawing together synthetic material and geological phenomena, reaching back to the ancient cultures of Greece and Egypt that have shaped her native Crete and her current base of Athens, while gesturing towards speculative futures with sci-fi sculpture and artificial light. In Gaze, Koumantaki collaborates with Simon Kounovsky, also known as CGI artist, sculptor and filmmaker Axonbody, in a hybrid work inspired by ancient Hellenic tablets, video game aesthetics and J.G. Ballard’s foundational work of climate fiction, The Drowned World.Conceiving of a world in which humanity is long gone, yet their indelible mark remains in scraps of abandoned technology, Koumantaki and Axonbody reckon with the urgent reality of climate catastrophe using the signifiers of lost and virtual worlds, reconfiguring technology as contemporary mythology. Installed near the ancient sanctuary of Hera in the Corinthian Gulf, the artists flatten the freak weather and global warming of the present into ancient myth, illuminating the fragile scale of human history with orange alien light. “What divine trace of this omnipresent technology remains among the shimmering ash of urban rubble, the global desert of networked ruins, and the forsaken wreckage of the cloud’s ambient hyper-architectural infrastructure?” asked Deptford gallery Gossamer Fog in their text accompanying Koumantaki’s recent London show, Shimmering Ashes Whispered Twilight Tears.“What orphaned relics of divine computation persist like midnight sun? What numinous drone idles in submerged temples?” Flecked with salt spray, reflected in the wine dark waters of Corinth and refracted through squalls of eerie noise, courtesy of Morgan Hall and Koumantaki herself, the strange light of ‘Gaze’ shines as the residual essence of the god in the machine of industrial society, a technologically-mediated encounter with a new numinous, leaking through the cracks left behind by catastrophe. “The light installation symbolises computation and human creation,” notes Koumantaki. “The technology as godly epiphany where human mind overcame their nature. Technology as a trace that humanity existed.”For more information about Alexandra Koumantaki you can visit her website and follow her on Instagram. You can find Axonbody on Instagram.Gaze Credits:Alexandra KoumantakiGaze, HD video, 2:10’ 2023.Filmed by Simon KounovskyEdited by Thanos TrifonidisOriginal soundtrack by Morgan Hall and Alexandra Koumantaki
Fact Magazine S/S 2023 180 Fact 2023-06-06 | Gabriel Massan & LYZZA, Jon Rafman, Kali Malone and Gabriel Moses feature on the cover of Fact’s S/S 2023 print issue, which also focuses on the artists pushing video games into exciting, unexpected directions. Inside this issue of the freshly redesigned Fact is an original artistic contribution by Jon Rafman, whose computer-generated fever dream Minor Daemon recently exhibited at 180 Studios. This was also the setting for the cover photoshoot with Gabriel Massan and LYZZA, whose accompanying interview details Massan’s Third World, which they describe as a “consciousness-raising game that explores Black-indigenous Brazilian experience.”Elsewhere in Fact issue five, we shine a light on the absurd genius of Theo Triantafyllidis, whose works typically consist of immersive environments which double as humorous social commentary on the neoliberal forces shaping the internet today, and artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who discusses how her art investigates the ways in which digital media and technologies are an extension of our material existences.In addition, Hans Ulrich Obrist asks a range of artists what elements every good video game should have, and we take a retro-futurist look at our Future Shock exhibition as we prepare to launch a virtual version created by the artist Weirdcore. Beyond art and gaming, Fact’s new issue also celebrates the unique and diverse artistic visions of Kali Malone and Martine Syms, as well as Campbell Addy and Gabriel Moses, who recently held acclaimed solo exhibitions at 180 Studios.Fact’s S/S 2023 issue can be bought direct from The Vinyl Factory’s online shop, from Boutique Mags, the exhibitions at 180 Studios or from the stockists listed below.Music: LYZZA – 'Ressaca'The Vinyl Factory: thevinylfactory.com/shopBoutique Mags: boutiquemags.comStockists:180 The Strand, LondonArtwords, Broadway, London Artwords, Riv St, London Barbican News, London Charlotte St News, London Good News, London Magazine Brighton, Brighton MagCulture, London Magma, Covent Garden, London Magnum News, London Phonica Records, London Rainbow News, London Rare Mags, Stockport Stack Mags, London Unearthed Sounds, Poole Unique Magazines, Newcastle Village, Leeds Actual Source, Provo Amen, Madrid Athenaeum, Amsterdam Basheer Graphic, Singapore Eslite, Taiwan Garage, MoscowPodipisne, St Petersburg Gudberg Nerger, HamburgLMDS, Shanghai More More Artbook, Shanghai Odd Kiosk, Barcelona Papercut, Stockholm Post Nothing, Bogota Print Matters, Zurich Readallion, Kyiv Reading Room, Milan Rosa Wolf, Berlin Sendpoints, China Skylight Books, LA Smoke Signals, San Francisco Top Hat & Tales, Faversham Tonic UK, London Journals, Sydney Mag Nation, Melbourne IMS Stadsfeestzaal, Antwerp IMS Kaasrui, AntwerpIMS, Hasselt Megusta Utrecht, NetherlandsMagalleria, Bath Marsell Paradiso, MilanBarnes Noble (Various) USA Books a Million (Various) USAAllscript, Singapore
Fact Mix 910: Coby Sey & Rebecca Salvadori 180 Fact 2023-05-30 | Coby Sey and Rebecca Salvadori have uniquely intimate perspectives on each other’s work. The musician and MC has been collaborating with the artist and filmmaker since 2017 and throughout the course of their friendship Salvadori has captured the many different faces of the mercurial artist. Their Fact mix is a homage to this relationship, part visual mixtape, part experimental documentary. The work follows a conversation between the two that has been unfolding for years, serving as both a moving portrait of friendship and as an assemblage of scenes from two lives lived through art and music.“For me, Rebecca’s subtle uniqueness when approaching film and visual art always shows,” says Sey. “Rebecca is effortlessly inquisitive, always asking questions, sometimes direct and sometimes subtly. Rebecca knows the value of allowing things to breathe and take shape in filming. There’s a fly on the wall element to it, where documentation and magic is present or being summoned by the subjects we’re seeing through her lens; through her eyes, through her ears.”Over the last six years Sey has released several projects, including his first EP for AD93, 2020’s gorgeous River and his essential debut album, Conduit, has recorded and performed as part of Tirzah’s band, played alongside members of CURL, the sprawling community of musicians and artists he founded with Mica Levi and Brother May and participated in residencies with Tutto Questo Sentire, a collective featuring Salvadori herself, her sister and experimental vocalist Olivia Salvadori and cellist Sandro Mussida.Though extensive, this is only scratching the surface of Sey’s rich and varied practice, an ever-evolving process that Salvadori has consistently borne witness to as part of her own singular approach to filmmaking. “I’ve spent considerable amounts of time either working or socialising with Rebecca and chosen to make the tracks for this movie by simply thinking about those moments we’ve had together,” continues Sey. “I took a very instinctive approach to these pieces and took my time as I tend to do with my music. To let the feeling and memories of those times guide my playing and creation of these songs.”You can find Coby Sey on Instagram and Bandcamp. For more information about Rebecca Salvadori and her work, you can follow her on Instagram.
Susu Laroche - washing touch off 180 Fact 2023-05-23 | In Ursula K. Le Guin’s legendary high fantasy landmark the Earthsea Cycle, shadows are conceived as animate entities, presences that seek to inhabit a living body to turn it into a gebbeth. A gebbeth is a physical shell of a living being consumed by the power of shadow, taken over and transformed into an instrument of the shadow’s dark designs. On her album closer to the thing that fled, Susu Laroche explores this process, utilising her singular, fever dream vocals as an instrument to simulate this shadow, her writhing, reverb-laden dabke compositions representing her efforts to shrug off the darkness, to resist the transformation into a gebbeth.With washing touch off, Laroche visualises this process in a surreal movement sequence, smudged with luminous film grain. “After meeting Leila when we performed together at Nighthawks at Ormside Projects in December, 2022, the idea for this video was born,” Laroche explains. “I wanted to shoot something simple and kind of classic. Since I always like to work with handheld camera and movement shooting was really simple, as usual, I just shot on 16mm and my Bolex camera. We shot at Ormside with friend, boss, collaborator Mike Levitt assisting me, the pole was rented from the ethical stripper company.”“It feels nice to see the iconic Ormside decibel meter and sound system in some of the shots,” Laroche continues. “In those moments the video feels like it documents the breeding ground where these connections and sounds are born. I guess you don’t often get to see the club out of context like that.” Unspooling in a surreal haze, Laroche’s smeared framing of the dancer manifests the foreboding and dread that emanates from the sparseness of her sound, an uncertain document of a ceremony to shake off the shadow, to ward off the gebbeth.‘washing touch off’ is taken from closer to the thing that fled, which is out now on Accidental Meetings. You can find Susu Laroche on Instagram.
cktrl interview: Composing an immersive soundscape for I ♥ Campbell 180 Fact 2023-05-18 | cktrl is multi-instrumentalist and producer Bradley Miller, whose blend of electronics, saxophone, strings and vocals combine with elements of jazz, R&B and ambient music in a deeply personal style. His latest project was to create a soundscape for I ♥ Campbell, the new exhibition focusing on Miller’s friend and collaborator, London photographer Campbell Addy, currently showing at 180 Studios.“The exhibition is called I ♥ Campbell so I centred it around different feelings of love and not necessarily the usual narratives that we put around it,” Miller tells Fact. “So sometimes it’s the relationship of love with yourself, with others, also with your emotions and where you are at certain points. You love yourself differently depending on what mood you’re in.”In this interview, Miller discusses how he approached creating the soundscape for I ♥ Campbell, which was designed as an immersive experience alongside set designer Ibby Njoya, who curated the exhibition’s spatial design. I ♥ Campbell features 36 original pieces including photography, paintings and a new film shot in Ghana.I ❤ Campbell runs until 4 June, 2023. Tickets are available now from the 180 The Strand website: 180studios.com/i-love-campbell
Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings] 180 Fact 2023-05-16 | “I am a big advocate of entry points – when you end that circle you always reach the center point,” says London jazz visionary and band leader Shabaka Hutchings in (reed), a meditative portrait of the musician and treatise on ritual and creativity from filmmaker Aurélien Bernard. “The center point is a point of communality in the way that there is no sense of strain in the sound,” continues Hutchings. “It feels like it is a very direct connection between inhalation and exhalation.” The non-linear trajectory between the entry point and the centre, mapped out by the musician with the audience in tow in the moment of performance, is the space Bernard explores in (reed), tracing how a simple ritual, like preparing a saxophone’s reed, can serve as a window into som of the inexplicable power of sound.“Since sounds differ in their outer expression, this results in space stretching between function andexistence, between performance and effect,” explains Bernard. “It seems the deeper we explore the mystery of sound, the more we are able to trace what’s connecting them. These links are what the musician acknowledges as harmony, which asks how repetition and movements could impact, through rhythm and expression, the search for this harmony.” Though the path of this search might be uncertain, Hutchings’ ritualistic approach to performance enables an initial certainty, the first firm foothold of complex climb, something Bernard picks out in monochromatic close focus, foregrounding his his fingers, his lips and his throat.Setting Hutchings’ playing in counterpoint against the foggy ambience of Space Afrika‘s 2018 modern classic, Somewhere Decent To Live, Bernard exposes the process of finding solid forms within clouds of what the musician describes as “an undefined source of energy, or power, or knowledge, whatever you want to describe it as.” As though coaxing raw blasts of blistering saxophone from Space Afrika’s dubbed-out smudges, (reed) itself serves as a glimpse into Hutchings’ process, winding its way from words, the nascent sparks of inspiration, through measured inhalation into an urgent exhalation, a burst of sound that arrives through the musician’s ritual, from grounded reed to transcendent frequency.You can find Aurélien Bernard on Instagram. You can find Shabaka Hutchings on Instagram and his website. You can find Space Afrika on Instagram and at Bandcamp.
Síbín Vol. 1 feat. Mica Levi, Tirzah, Joe Armon-Jones and more 180 Fact 2023-05-11 | In the 50-minute visual made to accompany Síbín Vol. 1, a charity compilation featuring exclusive collaborations between artists including Mica Levi & Tirzah (as Taz & Meeks), Fatima & KwAkE and Joe Armon-Jones & Kofi Stone, AV artist Charlie Buckley-Benjamin (aka shauwdii) collages found footage, archive pieces and first-hand recordings, responding to the same question posed to the musicians that contributed to the album: What does identity mean to you?“When Anja (Ngozi, the project’s curator) proposed identity and culture as a theme for this project I had a think, and personally I have been interested more in ‘lack of definition’ and the attachments we have to these categories of self such as race/ class/ gender/sexuality etc,” Buckley-Benjamin explains. “I want my work as a whole to dismantle it a little, so I wanted to create visuals which present new possibilities from archives of the past – things that feel nostalgic but otherworldly like an in-between space.“My solace was music videos when I was young and I always had this idea of carefully obtaining and editing together some of the corniest and forced moments of intimacy I could find in the R&B genre to create a loop serving as examples of how the past taught us to love through movement.”The project was curated by Ngozi and supported by Lexy Morvaridi, both of whom worked on Lonely Table’s Untitled (18 Artists) project in 2019, to show the importance of community and collaboration. “As amazing as we are as individuals there’s also another power that comes from working together and acting from a community mindset,” Ngozi says.Síbín Vol. 1 is available on Bandcamp. Proceeds from the compilation will be split between The Black Curriculum, a UK-based social enterprise whose mission is to embed the teaching of Black British History within the national curriculum, and Blackfriars Settlement, a Southwark-based community organisation.Síbín Vol. 1 is available on Bandcamp: sibin.bandcamp.com/album/s-b-n-vol-1
Waterbaby - Spiral 180 Fact 2023-05-09 | For the recording of their debut album, 22º Halo, enigmatic South London sister act Waterbaby transformed the Peckham flat that they share into both a studio and a perpetual film set. “While creating the album and all its accompanying videos, we turned our attic flat into a makeshift film set and slept in it for 365 days,” they explain. “For ‘Spiral’, We created an imaginary circus where the artist swings to and from reality on a thread, conflicted by the internal struggle of the introvert vs. the performance, the spectacle vs. its creation, and backstage vs. the spotlight.”Combining saturated VHS footage, esoteric imagery and digital processing, the duo have manifested their ornate electronic pop blend of folk ballads, choral music and kosmische as splashes of vivid colour and pixellated grain. ‘Spiral’ pairs the stately stomp of a 4AD-indebted soundscape with peals of ethereal vocals that are equal parts Eartheater and Elizabeth Fraser, positioning Waterbaby in that fertile overlap between experimental electronics and melodramatic vocal pop expressionism.The sister’s singular aesthetic is expanded with No Subject Magazine, an experimental art publication produced by Waterbaby that collates selected stills from their video works, reproductions of lyrics from their songs, original photography and graphic design. Like a distorted transmission from somewhere out of time, Waterbaby serve as our conduits, lightning rods for pop music and art of a more mystical variety.‘Spiral’ is out now and is taken from 22º Halo, which arrives on May 12 via untitled (recs). You can find Waterbaby on Instagram, Bandcamp and at their website.
Cora Novoa & Bryte - Gogo Gaga 180 Fact 2023-05-04 | Spanish producer and DJ Cora Novoa joins forces with Ghanaian MC Bryte, a propulsive fusion of their energetic styles. Layering restless kicks and blizzards of noise against Bryte’s nimble delivery and irrepressible vibe, Cora Novoa matches the rapper’s vocal levity with bludgeoning weight and atmospheric dept, revealing yet another side to the multi-faceted MC.In the video, directed by Benova Studio, sees the duo bopping around some of Barcelona’s rave institutions, including Razzmatazz, the club wear brand SSSTUFFF headquarters and THEROOM concept store. Capturing a snapshot of Barcelona’s nightlife scene, ‘Gogo Gaga’ is a homage to these shared spaces.As part of the track’s release, Cora Novoa is launching a competition calling on producers to remix ‘Gogo Gaga’. Those interested in taking part mint a free NFT from Web3 community GUZZU, which will serve as the platform for release of the winning entry, selected by Cora Novoa herself.‘Gogo Gaga’ is out now. You can find Cora Novoa on Instagram and at her website. You can follow Bryte on Instagram.
MC Yallah x Debmaster - No One Seems To Bother [Feat. Lord Spikeheart] 180 Fact 2023-05-02 | East African rap veteran and force of nature MC Yallah enlists the lacerated vocals of Lord Spikeheart, one half of Nairobi’s foremost experimental metal eviscerators Duma, for No One Seems To Bother, a macabre call-to-arms featuring eerie, doom-laden production from frequent MC Yallah collaborator Debmaster. “This is a song where by we were expressing ourselves about how unfair life and people can be,” explains MC Yallah. “A lot of jealous people, so full of hate, killing one another, slaughtering their brethren like they are slaughtering chicken. One can sell the other for just 50 dollars, people don’t care at all, killing the innocent. Seeing all these things made me come up with this song.”Excavating cavernous space with brick tonne bass, ticking drums and ominous synthesis, Debmaster keeps Yallah’s urgent delivery front and centre, as the MC switches between Luganda, Luo, Kiswahili and English. “Where is the love?” she questions. “I believe if we had genuine love for ourselves and each other this world would be in a better place.” Trading bars with Lord Spikeheart’s distended growls and blood curdling screams, it’s clear that, despite her optimism, No One Seems To Bother is an uncompromising transmission direct from the heart of the strife that MC Yallah draws into her unflinching portrait of a broken world.“The video was shot in Uganda,” Yallah says of the tracks monochrome visual. “Of course, in the video you will see people drinking and smoking. Some times people smoke or drink so that they can forget about their problems for a minute, or an hour.” What we are presented with is a party at the end of the world, a defiant and dark euphoria in which visceral joy can be siphoned from hardcore expressions of difficult feelings. In the hands and on the tongues of MC Yallah and Lord Spikeheart, a terminal diagnosis of contemporary is elevated to an anthem of survival for those who struggle.‘No One Seems To Bother’ is taken from Yallah Beibe, which is out now on Hakuna Kulala. You can find MC Yallah on Instagram, and Lord Spikeheart on Instagram.
Patch Notes: Caterina Barbieri 180 Fact 2023-04-27 | For this episode of Patch Notes, we travelled with Caterina Barbieri to Sicily and recorded a session near the summit of Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Amidst bubbling lava flows, Barbieri performed live versions of ‘At Your Gamut’ and ‘Terminal Clock’, taken from her 2022 album, Spirit Exit.The session was filmed in as part of our recent documentary on Barbieri, which followed the Italian musician as she returned to live performance following the pandemic and debuted the light-years concept around Europe. “I like to think of sound as a spiral that connects the physical world with the metaphysical world,” she explains in the film.Barbieri’s music, which combines modular synthesis, vocals and other instrumentation, has evolved across several albums including Patterns of Consciousness and Ecstatic Computation. On 16 June, Barbieri will release a sister album to Spirit Exit titled Myuthafoo, which was largely written while touring with a process that responded to the “nomadic, interactive energy” of life on the road.Follow Caterina Barbieri on Instagram: instagram.com/cat_barbieriPre-order Myuthafoo here: caterinabarbieri.bandcamp.com/album/myuthafooCredits:Directed and produced by Pedro S. KüsterExtra footage by Sofia KüsterSound by Caterina BarbieriSpecial thanks to Parco dell’Etna, Regione Siciliana, Ministero dell’Ambiente, Federparchi, UNESCO, Daniela Pavone, Luciano Di Marco, Paride, Pippo and Ruben Spini
Lyra Valenza - Joy Divided 180 Fact 2023-04-25 | Lyra Valenza are back for the first time since their 2020 EP, Nightshade Edition, with ‘Joy Divided’, the first single from their debut album, Low Gear No Pressure. Working in collaboration with artist Signe Dige, the Danish duo bring the intricate club construction to life with a video exploring abandoned urban spaces using janky 3D scans. “I love ‘poor’ 3D scans,” explains Dige. “They have a sensitivity and vulnerability that you often don’t see in digital media. Everything can be adjusted and controlled when working digitally, so I truly adore these fractured copies of real places, as it maintains a kind of soul within its flaws.”“In big cities, we are surrounded by people, causing these urban places to exist in their function for us, Dige continues. “But when abandoned and taken out of their context, these places become a physical space of memories and time.” Winding our way through neglected streets, all crumbling concrete and lurid graffiti, Signe Dige patchworks together a glitched-out assemblage of 3D scans and CGI, following a suspended thread of fluid, as though the track’s glistening synths have manifested as material in virtual space.“Each space shares their abandonment and connection,” adds Dige, “while we follow a lead all the way up to the top of town, to a line of people waiting to enter a new beginning.” In this way, her patchwork of scans merges domestic environments – bedrooms with doors left ajar, the transient hallways of apartment buildings – into public space, with street-level entrances to subways twisting out into open-plan living rooms and tiled pavements. The result is part collapsing dreamscape, part broken metaverse, a breakbeat-assisted study of digital space and the ways we can inhabit it.‘Joy Divided’ is taken from the debut album from Lyra Valenza, Low Gear No Pressure, which arrives later this year on their label, Petrola 80. You can find Lyra Valenza on Instagram.
Gabriel Moses interview | Regina exhibition at 180 Studios until 30 April, 2023 180 Fact 2023-04-19 | In this interview, London-based photographer and filmmaker Gabriel Moses discusses his first exhibition, Regina, which is on now at London’s 180 Studios. “I’ve always wanted things to sit in the same world,” Moses says, “I see a photo and I almost want the video to look like a moving photo.”Regina features around 50 photographs from Moses’ career across fashion, music and sport, including never-before-seen images. The exhibition also includes the premiere of two new short films, including Ijó, commissioned by 180 Studios, that follows a group of young ballet dancers in Lagos, Nigeria.The second film shares its name with exhibition itself. “Essentially it’s my mind in the film,” Moses says. “It’s the things I see as beautiful, it’s moments I wanted to put on screen.”A self-taught photographer and filmmaker, Moses was offered his first directing role with Nike at the age of eighteen and went on to be the youngest photographer to shoot a cover for Dazed. He has collaborated with brands and designers including Adidas, Apple, Burberry and Virgil Abloh, and woked with musicians including Little Simz, Skepta and Pa Salieu.Tickets are available now from the 180 The Strand website: 180studios.com/gabriel-mosesGabriel Moses: Regina180 Studios180 The Strand London, WC2R 1EA5 April – 30 April 202310am – 7pm, Wednesday– Sunday
SØS Gunver Ryberg & Patrick Defasten - Out of the Shadows 180 Fact 2023-04-18 | “Out of the Shadows is about the potential to feel energised and empowered to act in order to address the challenges we face in our lives,” says Danish composer and sound designer SØS Gunver Ryberg of her latest collaboration with 3D artist Patrick Defasten. “The shadows represent a state of passivity or inaction, where we may feel overwhelmed or powerless in the face of challenges. However, the title implies that there is a way out of this state, a way to emerge from the shadows and into the light of possibility.” The track is taken from the composer’s new album, SPINE, a sustainable alternative to speculative futures marked by dystopia and catastrophe, a sci-fi vision spun from optimism and interconnectedness.“We’re thrown into this virtual, cybernetic space of organic, generative design in constant movement, rotating and spinning, with a saturated spectrum of colours driven by SØS Gunver Ryberg’s energetic music,” explains Defasten. “I’ve developed visuals featuring organism-like forms, exploring an inner universe that appears hypercomplex, unstable and reactive, but it’s really about witnessing the unrestrained power that exists within this meta-world. Discussing with SØS over a call about her album’s sonic concept, we felt this dynamic visual aesthetic should exude a kind of forward facing, positive futurism, like a new digital architecture to frame the sonic vision she’s established in her album SPINE.”“As humans continue to explore, we have the power to shape the future, taking into account our inner and outer worlds and the existential urgency of our time,” continues SØS Gunver Ryberg. “Creating asustainable future is not only a goal but a way of being, where we are in tune with ourselves and nature, recognising our interconnectedness with everything. I believe listening and connecting with our sensuous being is a way to reach this state and I hope SPINE will be part of opening up the listener and give space for imagination. Music can put us in a more curious connection with our surroundings and have the potential to raise awareness, create empathy and promote action to address challenges.” ‘Out of the Shadows’ is taken from SPINE, which is out now on SØS Gunver Ryberg’s own label, Arterial Recordings. You can find SØS Gunver Ryberg on Instagram and at her website. For more information about Patrick Defasten and his work, you can follow him on Instagram and visit his website.
HforSpirit & Nick Hadfield - UnTyMe 180 Fact 2023-04-04 | Back during the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic composer and musician HforSpirit and photographer Nick Hadfield were, like the rest of us, longing for escape. They conceived of this an opportunity, not only to extract themselves from the psychic torment of months spent in quarantine, but also to rewrite the blueprint for more magical acts of celebration, separated from the commodified hedonism of London’s club scene they had both long grown weary of. Drawing together a shared interest in tracing the potency of the ritual energy of rave, connecting it back to pagan practices excavated from Anglo-Celtic folklore, the collaborators planned a retreat into the hills, to the post-industrial setting of Skull Quarry alongside a gathering of artists and friends. A short film, part documentary, part contemporary folklore, emerged.“UnTyMe revealed a collective intention to find a new sense of belonging,” writes Nick Hadfield. “Prompted by feelings of dissociation from contemporary club culture, we sought out the ancient rhythms of the land. The making of this film became an exploration of ritual movement, symbols, and silhouettes inspired by the ancestral myths of Britain.” Working in collaboration with HforSpirit as first-time filmmakers, Hadfield captures their escape with the lush saturation of folk horror and the hazy blur of ’90s rave archives, positioning the film’s ravers as a band of modern pilgrims, bearing their sound system aloft like a sacred totem.“Much like the old Irish adage it takes its name from, UnTyMe is a collaborative multimedia project that unravels further meanings with each reading,” says HforSpirit, who stars in the film and contributes its visceral, electro-acoustic score. “It has given rise to an exhibition series at The White Hotel, THEE BIRTH, exploring ritual participation and rave cults, as well as a forthcoming physical release of the music on Toothgrinder Press containing artefacts used in the film.” He continues, “the film itself is a fly on the wall of an invitation to dance – an overture that cadences with an unhinged crescendo into the action of life.”You can find Nick Hadfield on Instagram. For more information about HforSpirit and their work, you can find them on Instagram.UnTyMe Credits:Director, Photography – Nick HadfieldDirector, Music – HforSpiritWords – Edwin Bennett, Zoe BedeauxCostume – Olubiyi ThomasMovement – Salome PressacDesign – Jonathan Castro, Delphine LejeuneSupport from Emulsion MagazineFeaturing – HforSpirit, Salome Pressac, Jet Sweeney, Olivia Stewart, Olubiyi ThomasProducer – Scarlett AndersonDirector of Photography – Milo BelgroveEditing – Nick Hadfield, HforSpiritArt Director – Molly Martinez HackneyArt Assistant – Eleanor JeffreyStyling Assistant – Olivia StewartHair – Chloe FriedaMake Up – Siti HavalCatering – Hayett Belarbi McCarthyPercussion – James LarterFemale vocals – Zoe BedeauxRecording – Luke Gardner at The Studi/o, ManchesterSound mix – HforSpirit, Bitter Gold, Alexander Green Mastering – Tony Cousins at Metropolis Studios, LondonCreative direction assistant – Mikey Opie O’Grady Title – Jonathan CastroTitle animation – Ali Raybould
Caterina Barbieri: light-years 180 Fact 2023-03-30 | Over the past 10 years, Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has created transcendent musical experiences, combining modular synthesis with vocals and other forms of instrumentation to create a distinctively emotive musical signature, most notably on her albums Patterns of Consciousness and Ecstatic Computation.For Barbieri, music is the meeting point of the material and the immaterial. “I like to think of sound as a spiral that connects the physical world with the metaphysical world,” she tells Fact in our new film exploring her performance and practice. “In that sense sound really brings you outside of your ego and your physical boundaries.”Following the isolation of the pandemic, Barbieri found herself craving shared artistic experiences. She launched a new platform and live concept called light-years and released an album, Spirit Exit, all of which had musical collaboration at their heart. In this film, shot by Fact as Barbieri returned to live performance and debuted the light-years concept around Europe, the artist shares her innermost thoughts on music, sound, composition and collaboration amidst exclusive live footage shot at Berlin’s Metabolic Rift, London’s Southbank Centre, Italy’s Nextones Festival and the volcanic environment of Mount Etna in Sicily.Credits:Directed and produced by Pedro S. KüsterFilmed bySven GutjahrLaima LeytonSofia KusterLive Sound Engineering byBridget FerrillSound byPedro S. KüsterMusic:'Fantas Variation for Voices' a rework by Evelyn Saylor of Caterina Barbieri's composition 'Fantas'. Performed by Evelyn Saylor, Sara Persico, Michelle Cheung, Lydia Saylor at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London.'Magma' (working title) written and performed by Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske at Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk and Nextones, Val D'Ossola.'At your Gamut' written and performed by Caterina Barbieri at Mount Etna, Sicily.'Arrows of Time' written by Caterina Barbieri. Performed by Caterina Barbieri, UCC Harlo, Evelyn Saylor at Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk.'Perennial Fantas' written and performed by Caterina Barbieri Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk.Light design by MFO.Thanks to Bendik Giske, Nkisi, MFO, Evelyn Saylor, Michelle Cheung, Sara Persico, Lydia Saylor for their participation to the light-years shows.
Ale Hop & Laura Robles - Son de los diablos 180 Fact 2023-03-28 | With ‘Son de los diablos’, Berlin-based, Peruvian musicians Ale Hop and Laura Robles enlist the talents of filmmaker Lauren Pringle to manifest their mutant reimagining of traditional Afro-Peruvian music. Taken from their debut album, Agua Dulce, named after the most popular beach in Lima, the city in which both artists grew up, ‘Son de los diablos,’ is an apocalyptic concoction of electric guitar, electronics and a self-built electric cajón, a percussion instrument originating from coastal Peru that was created from wooden fruit boxes by Black slaves as a response to the banning of foot drums during the end of the Spanish colonial era in the 19th century.“For many years I have played Afro-Peruvian rhythms such as Landó, Festejo, Tondero or Son de los diablos. As some of the elements of this traditional music made me uncomfortable, such as the typical costumes, the slightly macho choreographies or the forced smile gestures of the artists, I have always tried to adapt them to a form that was closer to my personal tastes, informed by improvised music, jazz and the use of effects in my sound,” explains Laura Robles. “These rhythms have become ossified nowadays,” Ale Hop continues, “heard in Peruvian folklore shows, and on the ‘global music’ circuit, but our desire is to experiment and do something more radical with them, connecting to the instruments more radical past.”“We were lucky to have worked with Natisa Exocé Kasongo, an incredible performance artist who made the video jump, shout and flow with fire and grace. The drum became our process of focus and we looked at the roots of the track linking to Afro-Peruvian history and dance,” says Lauren Pringle of the atmospheric visual. “I knew we didn’t want the video to be set in any particular space but rather a future dystopian space where we combine past and future realities. For me, I also could relate this to a contemporary world where technological artefacts suppress the spirit.”‘Son de los diablos’ is taken from Agua Dulce, which will be released via Buh Records on April 7. You can find Ale Hop on Instagram, Bandcamp and at her website. You can find Laura Robles on Instagram.Son de los diablos Credits:Music – Ale Hop & Laura RoblesDirector – Lauren PringleDOP – Tebbe SchoeninghPerformer – Natisa Exocé KasongoSet Design – Marcel SchonEditor – Ilja SiebertColour Grade – Maxime DemartinCostume Design – Diane EsnaultProducer – Kiki Ramos Sörvik
Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby - south florida sky (Excerpt) 180 Fact 2023-03-27 | In the latest work from artists Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby, the swamp emerges as a particularly fertile space for exploring collaboration. south florida sky, a composite video work featuring hand-drawn animation from Alice Bloomfield, GAN animation made in collaboration with Elliot Elder and sound design from Jennifer Walton, was a central work in their most recent show, not yet, which took place at London’s San Mei Gallery earlier this year. Drawing influence from queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s essential book Cruising Utopia, in which he models queerness as an inherently future-facing, utopian mode, Majid and Newby find slimy potency in the swamp as a site of relational intensity and exchange, in which everything slithers in and through everything else. “The swamp can really question and challenge the essentialized and stable identity of the individual, which is valued and celebrated more than ever in 2022,” the artists assert. “The swamp as a facilitator of collaboration and the construction of polyphonic artistic voices feels more politically urgent than ever.” Existing, fittingly, in relation to and of the same matter as the curational group art project Most Dismal Swamp, the most recent iteration of which, MUSH, Majid contributed to, the swamp is rendered as both a space and entity, existing across different media, both virtual and devirtualized, into which context, form and discipline are submerged. Within this hybrid space Majid and Newby explore the peripheries of aesthetic and linguistic expression, probing the slippery limits of image, language and sound that is not yet, liminal forms bursting with transformative and transitional potential.This potential is personified in Swamp Thing, around which south florida sky is situated. Taking the iconic DC comic hero’s legendary characterization by Alan Moore, an eco-superhero and centuries old sentient plant suffused with the consciousness, memories and emotions of a man, Majid and Newby code Swamp Thing as “a vessel for disidentification,” enacting “a queered process of recycling the encoded meaning of a cultural object, and making a new space for the queer or minoritarian subject, one usually peripheral to mainstream narratives.” To this end the entity is represented in counterpoint with itself, initially wrought in the intricate lines of Alice Bloomfield’s stunning animation, in which twists of tree branch and folds of damp rock are captured in sensual curves that threaten to engulf Swamp Thing’s hunched form. As burnt orange swamp flowers blossom from its’ veins, garbled voices sound in polyphony, the voice of Swamp Thing and the voices of the swamp projected as symbiotes of the same organism. This speech, inspired by the visceral subjectivity of New Narrative literature and adapted from found phrases by Majid and Newby, lends lyrical physicality and sensuousness to Bloomfield’s representation of the character, her illustration itself a reworking of a panel from the Swamp Thing comics, an artistic corruption in which the still image is injected with renewed expression, made animate in the primordial ooze of the swamp. From the painstaking lines of Bloomfield’s animation we are confronted with the synthetic blur of Elliot Elder’s GAN animation, the result of a neural network glutted with hundreds of images of various versions of Swamp Thing across different media, as well as swamps, slime molds and mycelium.For more information about Laila Majid and her work you can visit her website and follow her on Instagram. For more information about Louis Blue Newby and his work you can follow him on Instagram. They are currently represented by Xxijra Hii gallery.
Fact Residency: Gabriel Massan 180 Fact 2023-03-23 | In their rendering of emotional experience as the raw material for their work, digital artist Gabriel Massan takes cues from writer and academic Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘critical fabulation,’ a practice of including fictional detail alongside factual material to fill in the blanks left in the archival and historical record of Black history. “I don’t know how many digital sculptures I’ve made,” they admit, “but it all feels like archeological research.” Seeking to align their experiences growing up in Rio de Janeiro, coming of age in Sao Paulo and relocating to Europe, Massan excavates a virtual space in which to more closely examine the political and cultural structures within which they are entangled, without having to use their physical identity as a lens.In this way, Massan’s practice of world building can be understood, in Hartman’s terms, as “a way of naming our time, thinking our present and envisioning the past which has created it.” Over the three episodes of the artist’s online residency at Fact, Unbonded on a Bonded Domain, the artist explores a virtual ecosystem untethered both from their own identity and the physical and conceptual limitations of the human body, performing speculative scenarios to investigate how queer club culture, systemic violence and virtual identities can help us map out the material world and our relationships with it.“I think it comes from an understanding that all of the things that my family and I went through in my life were part of a wave, or part of an ecosystem,” Massan says of their approach. “When I took my individuality out of this process, I could better understand how my identity, even though it clashed with that ecosystem, had another self, or another consciousness, that was more related to my feelings and my personal emotions, not only to my background.” By looking past the human, to entities sculpted to fill in the blanks left in the disconnection of Massan’s experience with socio-political systems built without them in mind, the artist invites us to share in that experience, to contribute to the worlds they continue to build.You can find Gabriel Massan on Instagram.Unbonded on a Bonded Domain Credits:Concept, Director, Lead Artist – Gabriel MassanAnimator, Unreal Developer – Carlos MinozziSound Designer, Music – Agazero
Gabriel Massan Presents: Unbonded On A Bonded Domain (Part Three) 180 Fact 2023-03-21 | Encountering the work of digital artist Gabriel Massan can be comparable to getting lost in a particularly intense nightclub, a multi-sensory overload of disorientating overstimulation that can leave you questioning not only where, but who, you really are. “I think it’s because there’s no hierarchy between the senses, they’re all at the same level, sharing the same animation techniques,” they explain. “Sometimes you can perceive them moving within the same direction, getting mixed with the same colours, even though you can see there’s an object there.”This is absolutely by design. Queer club culture is an essential part of Massan’s practice, a space from which they have always drawn vital influence, both before and after their relocation to Europe. “Seeing the difference between Berlin and Sao Paulo made me realise how these two cities are connected in the way creating space for freedom, for people to investigate and formulate their own identities, but at the same time, they are so different,” they assert.It’s here, in a space both furtive and fertile, caught in a clash between cultures, that we find ourselves in the third and final part of Massan’s online residency at Fact. Having graduated from from the bright intimacy of the first episode’s cyberpunk bar to a darker, more cavernous spaces – from Panorama Bar down into the throng of Berghain’s main room – the artist’s virtual golems are locked into the rhythm of another party, another chance to discover themselves.In this alternate reality Massan is free to question how we can conceive of freedom, whether social, political or sexual, detached from the human body. As a biomechanical angel descends past monolithic, mycelial speaker stacks, shaped from the same glistening organic matter as the ravers they tower over, we are incited to question what it actually is we might be celebrating, what is the precarious bubble that is always at risk of bursting.You can find Gabriel Massan on Instagram.Unbonded on a Bonded Domain Credits:Concept, Director, Lead Artist – Gabriel MassanAnimator, Unreal Developer – Carlos MinozziSound Designer, Music – Agazero
Gabriel Massan Presents: Unbonded On A Bonded Domain (Part Two) 180 Fact 2023-03-17 | A large part of Gabriel Massan‘s art practice has centred around mapping the systemic structures of violence and inequality they have observed and experienced throughout their lives, from their birthplace of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, to their current bases of Berlin and Paris. “When I started I wanted to create situations and scenarios that were close to me. I wanted to talk about violence without using the same old images of violence, I wanted to talk about race, or racism, without forcing the topic,” they explain.“At that time I was always talking about topics that were much bigger than me, trying to represent the other’s perspective, but I realised that I just want to tell my own story without needing to call it out for everyone, that I’m not everyone’s saviour,” they continue. “Now, I really want to create beings and objects without a strong connection with humankind, or even signs and symbols that we use as a society. It’s a way to tell stories without leading with prejudice.”In the second part of their online residency at Fact, the virtual entities from the first episode are reincarnated within a dream of an existential, biomecha fighting game, spectated and narrated by another character who has seemingly lost their previous identity. “The image that is generated, the sensation that is generated, is influenced by the signs stored in you,” they assert. “Unbridled violence is a choice, but not in your world.”As the biomechanical brawl spins out into a hard dance battle, soundtracked by producer Agazero, Massan underlines the powerful potential of gamifying difficult experiences, allowing their audience to feel through complexity on their own terms. “You expect them to act as you would act,” the commentator observes, “but then you disregard the multiplicity of their experiences.” In this way this “clash stuck in time” serves both as a reflection on Massan’s relationship to representation in art and as a comment on the messy process of navigating a world that wasn’t built with you in mind.You can find Gabriel Massan on Instagram.Unbonded on a Bonded Domain Credits:Concept, Director, Lead Artist – Gabriel MassanAnimator, Unreal Developer – Carlos MinozziSound Designer, Music – Agazero
Gabriel Massan Presents: Unbonded On A Bonded Domain (Part One) 180 Fact 2023-03-15 | Gabriel Massan describes themselves as a ‘3RD WORLDBUILDER’, but really, we don’t have a name for the kinds of worlds they want to build. Over the last few years the artist has defined a discipline of CGI sculpture, drawing from a vast, digitally-mediated latticework of video game and anime references to create visceral work with a physicality that reflects their experiences growing up in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, as well as their immersion in the queer club culture of the latter and in their current bases of Berlin and Paris.Driven by a desire to map their emotional experiences of systemic political and cultural structures onto ecosystems untethered from physical representation and the body, these digital sculptures have blossomed into a fully-fledged world building practice, work which the artist has shown at the X Museum in Beijing and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Dusseldorf. Their approach culminates in the upcoming Third World, a “consciousness-raising game that explores Black-indigenous Brazilian experience,” commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies and featuring Web3 integrations built on the Tezos Blockchain.In ‘Unbonded on a Bonded Domain (Part One),’ the first of a three-part series Massan will present during their online residency at Fact, we find ourselves in a biomechanical nightclub, an alternate reality mutation of Cyberia, the cyberpunk haven for underage ravers and disillusioned hackers from cult 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain. Trapped in a Beckettian back-and-forth of drug-induced small talk and existential angst, a group of digital entities question the nature of their environment and their place within it.By transplanting a familiar scenario into an entirely fictionalised context, Massan creates space for a complexity of expression without the need to offer up too much of themselves in the process. “Dismembering my body from my mind gives those bodies and those different identities a way of flirting with my concepts without really giving them any traces of me,” they explain. “Imagine if I was able to give those different identities a voice, if they could speak, how would they speak, what would they say to each other?”You can find Gabriel Massan on Instagram.Unbonded on a Bonded Domain Credits:Concept, Director, Lead Artist – Gabriel MassanAnimator, Unreal Developer – Carlos MinozziSound Designer, Music – Agazero
London photographer Gabriel Moses debuts first exhibition at 180 Studios 180 Fact 2023-03-09 | London-based photographer and filmmaker Gabriel Moses, who has previously worked with musicians including Skepta, Little Simz and Pa Salieu, will hold his first exhibition at 180 Studios this April. The exhibition features around 50 photographs from his career across fashion, music and sport, including never-before-seen images.The exhibition will also see the premiere of two new short films, including Ijó, commissioned by 180 Studios, that follows a group of young ballet dancers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring common themes within Moses’ work through the intersections of art, family and culture.Inspired at a young age by black and white ancestral photography, identity and community has continuously shaped Moses’ aesthetic, which draws on both his South London roots and Nigerian heritage, as well as images by acclaimed artists such as Gordon Parks and Malick Sidibé.A self-taught photographer, Moses was offered his first directing role with Nike at the age of eighteen and went on to be the youngest photographer to shoot a cover for Dazed. He has collaborated with brands and designers including Adidas, Beats by Dre, Dior, Moncler, Supreme, Apple, Burberry, Virgil Abloh and Pharrell.He has also photographed artists including Skepta and Pa Salieu, and last year directed a short film for Little Simz’ No Thank You album, which can be watched above.Tickets are available now from the 180 The Strand website: 180thestrand.com/gabriel-moses
Nene H - Hold Ud, Skat! 180 Fact 2023-02-28 | On her recent EP for Live From Earth Klub, Trifecta, Nene H offers up three tributes to cities that hold special significance in her life, reflecting on the places that have shaped and inspired her as an artist. Having channeled her deep love for Istanbul into an homage to Sirän, a rave collective for cultural exchanged she co-founded last year, with ‘Ring the Sirän’, and sent up the self-serious European techno scene in her current base of Berlin with ‘Fukken Lie’, here, with ‘Hold Ud, Skat!’, she opens her heart to Copenhagen, a city she feels accepted her at a time when she felt most lost.“The last of these three videos is dedicated to Copenhagen, where I found so many brown, queer sisters that inspired me so much, living their own truth, creating their own spaces, reality and culture in Europe, with experiences that are peculiar to our existence in Western European countries and thriving because of it, nevertheless,” she explains. “It became a very powerful visual language surrounding this EP and this became such a personal and important project for me.”The story is about how we as POCs often find ourselves away from our origins and experience the world through a westernised perspective,” adds director Noah Kanber. “We see our history in stolen and sold objects seen through museum glasses. The community we create is not only for survival but also for understanding. We see each other and we help each other to find the lost pieces in ourselves, reclaiming the relics’ cultural heritage and creating the new history of our culture.”Set against an urgent technoid charge, we see in small moments of joy between friends the texture of everyday solidarity within their community, yet the process by which this is made into a spectacle for those of us in the audience is not lost on anyone. Throughout, the camera is turned back on us, a subversive act of confrontation that connects the colonial practises of the museum with the Eurocentric standards of the art scenes within which Nene H thrives regardless.Hold Ud, Skat! Credits:Director - Noah Umur KanberDOP - Cat P ColemanProducer - Benjamin MuasyaEditor - Ribka M. Pattinama ColemanColorist - Ribka M. Pattinama ColemanSteadicam - Lars NoerlundFocus puller - Neffi KristensenProduction assistant - JosvaCast:Nene HSahar JamilDJ Nah CareSofia SkirShamKimia FarhadianThank you – Davids Samling, Diamond Rice
Charlie Osborne - Bury-Man-Lane 180 Fact 2023-02-21 | “Aisha, I get so bored like, like I’m internally beating myself up.” These are the first words we hear from Charlie Osborne, a multidisciplinary artist, musician and performer who makes work on the presumption that “the internet is a genre and protection can be found in objects, mascots, easter eggs and symbols.” What follows lands somewhere between an urgent threat and morbid fantasy, free association tripping towards destruction: “I swear to god one day I’ll grab the perfume, you know, not the liquid kind, the aerosol kind, and I’ll grab a lighter, you know, a Clippers, the shiny ones, and I’ll go up in smoke.” It’s this space in-between, a liminality conjured out of performance anxiety and contemporary malaise, that Osborne moves through in her short film Bury-Man-Lane, a portrait at once personal and phantasmic. “Although my writing style is based in magical realism, I kept weaving in real life events,” she says of the film’s stark opening. “There’s a scene where myself and close friend Aisha share dark fantasies in the back of a car. It’s based off this time when a girl at my school did go up in flames in the playground after dousing herself in Lynx and a boy flicking a lighter at her. It was only for a split moment and so she was by miracle un-harmed. I’m always drawn to these ‘close calls’ lucky escapes and this idea of mischief. It’s like a bleak form of entertainment.” Apocryphal tales, intimate myths and surreal, domestic lore proliferate the world of Bury-Man-Lane, in which the mysterious power of an enigmatic talent show, which seems to take place outside of time, in a limbo that may or may not be haunted, generates a gravitational pull through which the film’s characters orbit. “I wanted all my characters to seem like they are in search for something hopeful and that in the fog there’s something good out there for all of us,” Osborne continues. “I wanted there to be a common thread that ties all the characters together and so I chose an event. TV talent shows, music videos and performing for social media became a key reference when thinking about what this ‘event’ in the story of Bury-Man-Lane would be.”“It was a real pleasure to work with all the cast whom for most was their first time in a film,” Osborne continues. “When directing I was always craving for it to look slightly contrived, like their emotions were wrapped in plastic. I wanted to story-tell through the choreography as much as the dialogue, so I collaborated with artist Gulliver Whitby to create a twitchy, bird like movement. This image of a flock of birds and a flyer moving across the screen wouldn’t leave my mind. It opened up the idea that somehow my characters are subconsciously dictating one another from scene to scene, through this choreography.” Though at times disconnected, it’s clear that the characters of Bury-Man-Lane are dancing to the same beat, disaffected by the material conditions of their existence yet steadfast in their faith in each other, drawn by the irresistible pull of the show, a stage on which to be seen. It’s in this way that Charlie Osborne’s performance rips back through the sequence of signs, sigils and spells of the world observed through her eyes, her band’s frazzled anthem the flicked lighter that sets the perfumed flame of Bury-Man-Lane ablaze.Cast – Charlie Osborne, Aisha Kacie, Annastasia Mikhailova, Isabella Pinto, Tara Strange, Theadora Sutherland, Hemi Shannon, Cosmo Conway, Jude Woodhead, Amon, Sammy Neale, Travis Barton, Brandon Westly, Esme Ashley Smith, Kurtis Lincoln, Morgan Lee Johnson, Ines Sacof, Nathaniel David Trevor Bailey, Ratiba Ayadi, In Tongues (Tara Cunningham, Sam Bates & Pike Ogilvy)‘Metal Detector’ written and performed by In Tongues & Charlie OsborneIn Tongues are Tara Cunningham, Sam Bates, Pike OgilvyDirector – Charlie OsborneWriter – Charlie OsborneProducer – Charlie OsborneDirector of Photography – Jack CullisEditor – Dominic EnglandComposer – Reuben JosephCostume Designer – Gulia Galiberti3D Effects Supervisor – Finn DoveFirst AD – Teddy SkinnerFirst AC – Edward MelbourneSecond AC – Ruben NeviazskyMovement Director – Gulliver WhitbySound Designer – Reuben JosephSound Recordist – Zak FergusonGaffer – Marcus KartalSpark – Charlie Ring, Marc MilayProps Handler – Miriam Aston-HetheringtonPhotographer – Bella SantucciMake-Up Artist – Eve LytteltonColourist – Chris PooleRunner – Kitty Drury, Jack WhitbySpecial Thanks to Dominic England, Reuben Robinson, Gulliver Whitby
Spekki Webu & Matti Vilho - Signal Transmutations 180 Fact 2023-02-14 | Spekki Webu has been transporting the Dutch underground electronic music scene to alternate dimensions for over 15 years. Probing the lysergic spaces in-between techno, trance and ambient, the DJ and producer conjures immersive sonic worlds with a preternatural ear for dense, narcotic compositions drenched with propulsive tension and extraterrestrial atmosphere. Between his legendary sets, his own productions and his influential label, Mirror Zone, Spekki Webu has demonstrated a direct line of contact with these worlds, enabling audiences to tune in to their strange frequencies and share in their transformative potential. With Optic Portal, a multidisciplinary imprint refracted straight from the Mirror Zone, he seeks to shed light on these exploratory transmissions, working with audiovisual artists to make these sounds visible. It’s this urge that lies of the heart of Signal Transmutations, a collaboration with visual artist Matti Vilho, orchestrated by Joni Stanely of Veli Studio, one of the co-founders of Post Bar and one of the minds behind Solstice Festival, where Spekki Webu played live for the very first time. “I’m fascinated about the interconnectedness of audio signals and digital real-time image generation,” explains Vilho. “Signal Transmutations for me is about the birth, death and rebirth of digital signals affecting each other with every cycle. It’s like a metaphor for our lives.” In the excerpt presented above, Spekki Webu and Matti Vilho give us a glimpse of their new, live AV show, which they will be debuting later this year.“When the time has come to go for us humans and we have learned enough over the course of life, we join the new dimension and enter the light. Signal Transmutations is our perspective on this take,” adds Spekki Webu. “I see the experience of Signal Transmutations as a meditative journey which you can dive deep into and zone out. You don’t need to understand everything, the emotions that arise are most important,” continues Vilho. Spekki Webu spirals through an atmospheric assemblage of gas leak ambience, submerged skitter and possessed drum programming, swirling viscous globules of reverb through oozing loops of found sound, riding a constant creeping tension between organic and synthetic textures that is reflected back in Vilho’s cyclical landscape, the rebirth loop manifested in the time signatures of the music and the space of the virtual world. Screens are submerged in swamp water as far future technological interfaces hover and rotate, glowing fiberoptic cables drape from an enormous cluster of fungus, wires wound tightly into its mycelium. “The combination of alien and mundane has always been present in my work,” says Vilho. “The giant fungus-like tree is an abstraction of the Tree of Life, connecting the past and present in a continuous fluid cycle.” Trance-inducing sound flows between smudges of hallucinogenic colour, organic matter and alien hardware, all captured through the imprint’s namesake ‘optic portal’. “The fun thing is that Matti hasn’t been sending out any visuals to get my music going,” notes Spekki Webu. “I started developing sketches of sound and shared this with him. The visual world building took off organically from there. It’s a mutual bond of trust we built over time.”“When performing my music, I am always trying to transmit a set of emotions,” he continues. “This live performance is a journey into the next realm, balancing in between the various stages of life and death.” As is evidenced in his mind-expanding Fact mix, which saw the artist utilising a hybrid live set up, allowing him to layer rhythms, ambience and sound design on the fly, Spekki Webu’s approach to live performance allows him the freedom to delve deeper into the Mirror Zone, to coax out irresistible groove and vertigo-inducing depth. “Going live allows me to take full control of the audience,” he expands. “I can narrate my story down to perfection and translate every detail, taking people along on this introspective journey. I have always been a keen listener of ambient, experimental electronics, noise, and avant-garde music. Signal Transmutations is a spiritual approach on these types of music, it really feels like I am entering a next step within my career as an artist.” This renewed focus on the more esoteric corners of his sonic vocabulary serves as the impetus for Vilho’s visual response, as he accentuates its intoxicating blend of technicality and spirituality. “The music of Spekki Webu is so much aligned with my taste that it was really natural right from the beginning to explore the ideas together,” he concludes. “The whole technical aspect is also in the theme of the show: cycle and rebirth. Each software we use discusses with each other and affects each other.”
Female Pentimento & Axonbody - Zugunruhe 180 Fact 2023-02-07 | Though often drawing from personal pain, the work of Female Pentimento shines divine light on a world full of wonder. In his music, organ drones are layered with visceral sound design, ASMR whispers and lacerated noise to amplify a constant tension between transcendent beauty and cathartic horror. In the same way his imagery, intricate composites of photography and digital composition, conjures moments of beauty so surreal they constantly threaten to tip over into the sublime. Through the eyes of Female Pentimento, our world is teeming with apparitions, Ignes Fatui, Brocken spectres, luminous glories and Heiligenschein, natural phenomena that come the closest to manifestations of the miraculous. “I grew up in the Methodist church and I think subconsciously a lot of traditional, Christian symbolism has been embedded in my psyche and made its way into my work; light being one element,” the artist told Coeval Magazine. “Its ability to transmute the physical and speak to a more beautiful, inner world withstands the cliches and religious connotations for me.” Eschewing depictions of human beings for alternate realities inhabited by alternate forms of energy, Female Pentimento seeks to transform the world as means of exploring our place within it, a biospiritualist practice that finds divine inspiration within nature. Digital visionary Axonbody shares a similarly metaphysical approach to image making, blurring the natural with the synthetic until they are indistinguishable from each other, collapsing all matter into vibrant material, bursting with potential energy. The two share such common ground that their collaboration feels destined, the meeting of two minds dedicated to both inner and outer discovery. It’s fitting, then, that the two come together for Zugunruhe, a searing hymn to turmoil and transformation, exposing a spirit in crisis.“In the video we use the motif of birds to speak directly to this idea of ‘zugunruhe’, which is a term that refers to the instinctive restlessness that many migratory birds experience,” explains Female Pentimento. “I think as a concept it’s an interesting metaphor for the liminal phase of a healing process, that is, wanting to change your physical or mental state but not knowing how and feeling lost amidst the desire.” Stroboscopic flares, storm clouds swollen with electricity and warped murmurations of birds depict states of continual flux, perched on a knife edge between change and destruction. Artificial light penetrates grey rock formations while ancient stones burn with pale fire, the natural world ruptured by unnatural forces. “The notions of cycles and rebirths is something that has always been very central in my work,” continues Axonbody. “What is left after a form of energy ascends from one layer of reality to another? Can some of it stay left behind, and what would it look like? I think I connected very closely to ‘Zugunruhe’ because of that. The friction between the whispered voices and the screams in the vocals feels like a very raw depiction of this state of confusion someone can feel when being on the verge of big changes, or transformation, this feeling of fear and attraction towards that next layer of reality, the next stage in your life.” Female Pentimento describes the track as “a response to my own desire to heal from abuse but not having the tools or know-how to do so,” and alternates between tender spoken word, ethereal harmonies, strangled song and eviscerated howls, lending clarity to catharsis. “I wanted to capture the longing and chaos of that process,” the artist continues. “I was interested in exploring different sonic temperatures, so there are parts of the song that are quite cold and barren, while other moments feel a bit warmer and soothing. I think this reflects the emotional ups and downs that can come with the journey to mend one’s heart.”
Fact Mix 893: KMRU & Aho Ssan & Sevi Iko Dømochevsky 180 Fact 2023-01-30 | Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru, otherwise known as KMRU, and Aho Ssan, the French producer and composer born Désiré Niamké, are two of of contemporary electronic music’s most fascinating and vital figures. While the former artist’s prolific experiments with field recording have seen him develop an approach to ambient composition that emerges from and through the listener’s relationship with the sounds of their physical environment, the latter artist uses the infamously byzantine programming language Max/MSP to delve deep into the infinite possibilities of synthetic sound. Across his catalogue, on records such as Peel, Jar and Imperceptible Perceptible, KMRU emphasises the importance of listening to what you might usually miss, using patchworks of field recordings, foley and processing to bring small details into sharp focus. In contrast, Aho Ssan operates in more speculative and expressionist space, on the one hand contorting synthesis in unexpected directions while with the other simulating sounds previously unheard. On his 2020 album, Simulacrum, Niamké created Max/MSP patches to simulate The Mensah Imaginary Band, a synthesised ensemble inspired by his grandfather Mensah Anthony, a trumpet player who in the ’50s led a Ghanaian band across the Ivory Coast and acted as a conductor at the country’s famed Abissa Festival. Having never met his grandfather, as well as never having heard any recordings of his music, the artist created The Mensah Imaginary Band as a means of connecting with the music of his heritage, making sounds lost to memory material. Though perhaps counterintuitive, KMRU and Aho Ssan find immense, crackling potential energy in the contrast between their approaches, embracing chaos and cacophony and for their astounding collaborative work, which has seen both artists eschewing the minimalism of previous solo projects in favour of an intoxicating hybrid form of ferocious digital maximalism.“I never made something so extreme,” Niamké says of his first recording with KMRU, a brooding composition made up of dense swarms of noise, groaning low-end and heart-wrenching synth improvisations, proof incarnate that, in the right hands, ambient, far from floating off in the background, has the all-consuming power to engulf entire rooms, volcanic eruptions of sound channeled into a deeply resonant collaborative expression. Commissioned by Berlin Atonal for their Metabolic Rift event, that first recording would grow and develop to eventually bloom into Limen, the duo’s 2020 album for Subtext. Here, driven by the internal and external pressure of the pandemic, the collaborators explored the dichotomy of their partnership further, taking cyclical processes of destruction and creation as a leaping off point to record an album structured around duality in sound, concept and execution. The result, in the words of Subtext founder James Ginzburg, unfolds as a soundtrack for “deconstructing history as it detonates around us.” It’s amongst the rubble of this detonation that we find ourselves for KMRU and Aho Ssan’s latest project, an audiovisual mix created alongside visual artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, who plunges us through the smog of a post-apocalypse, gliding through ruined environments and ecosystems like a reality warping ghost haunting a dead planet. “The approach of the mix was quite seamless,” explains Kamaru. “It’s evident how both of our works juxtapose onto each other and the mix feels like an antiphony between our sonic worlds. I began the mix with subtle tones and tracks currently unreleased and Désiré did the same with a more abrasive ending, an alternating response to the first half of the mix, which imbues an attunement to the reality through stillness, chaos and regeneration in a dialog between both of us.”KMRU – ‘Till Hurricane Bisect’KMRU – ‘Slowed Cities’The Orielles – ‘Beam/s (Space Africa Remix)KMRU – ‘Dissolution Grip’KMRU – ‘Motley’Aho Ssan & Josèfa Ntjam – ‘Dislocations’ (Extract, 2022)Ego Death – ‘Ego Death (Excerpt)’, Live @ Unsound 2022
180 Studios presents UK premiere of Jon Rafman’s Minor Daemon 180 Fact 2023-01-25 | 180 Studios will present the UK premiere of Minor Daemon (2022), a new film by Canadian artist and filmmaker Jon Rafman, from 2 February – 25 March 2023. Set in a surreal dystopia, Minor Daemon: Volume 1 is a feature film that tells the story of two young men who share an extraordinary gift for virtual reality gaming that could secure their freedom as they journey through a Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape. Rafman, whose work explores the relationship between digital technology and the communities it creates, is also known for collaborating with Oneohtrix Point Never on his video game-like narrative feature, Dream Journal (2016-19). Minor Daemon picks up where the striking Dream Journal left off, utilising consumer animation technology to raise aesthetic questions about computer-generated moving images, projecting the anxieties of 21st century techno-society into 3D motion. Building on the often disquieting qualities of Rafman’s earlier works, Minor Daemon presents a computer-generated fever-dream universe, drawing on the landscapes of online worlds to examine the relationship between technology and social consciousness. The presentation at 180 Studios coincides with a solo exhibition of Jon Rafman’s work at Sprüth Magers, London (3 February – 25 March 2023). Buy tickets now: 180thestrand.com/minor-daemonJon Rafman: Minor Daemon180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA2 February – 25 March 202310am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday
Andrew Broder - These Seas [Feat. serpentwithfeet & Kazu Makino] 180 Fact 2023-01-17 | Back in 2020 the Minneapolis producer and multi-talented musician Andrew Broder was tapped for the soundtrack for The Show, a fantasy neo-noir film written by legendary comic book writer and national treasure Alan Moore. Having previously worked with Moore on the score for the authors semi-autobiographical, audio novella Unearthing, Broder jumped at the chance, crafting a suite of evocative compositions channelled from the dreamscapes of Moore’s script, which follows a detective searching for a mysterious artefact around Moore’s birthplace of Northampton. The Show Original Soundtrack sees Broder revisiting the score, remixing and re-contextualising his own sounds with the help of a stellar cast of collaborators, including Moor Mother, Billy Woods, Denzel Curry and Haleek Maul. For ‘These Seas,’ Broder enlisted the talents of serpentwithfeet and Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead to spin the surging instrumental into an urgent anthem for dreamers, weaving an interpolation of Eurythmics ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’ together with hiccuping samples, synthetic squelches and propulsive percussion. “It was a cool opportunity and challenge to make a track around Alan Moore’s lyrics, to hit his reference points and underlying thematic narrative,” explains Broder. “Serpent and Kazu both have such unique and different approaches to singing, so transportive and perfect for a song about living and dying in dreamworld. This is a track for the scary and exciting club in one’s dreams.” For the track’s surreal visual movement artist Holly Blakey reunites with dancer and actor Nandi Bhebhe, who Blakey captured in the “gum chewing, colour changing portrait” Wrath – presented by Fact as part of Holly Blakey’s stunning Fact Residency. Translating Broder’s pulsating synth swarms into visceral, instinctive movement, Blakey and Bhebhe draw the dream in close to the body, spinning between sexual tension and violent release.Opting for eerie monochrome and low resolution infrared, Blakey plays with the internal spectacle of dream space, bleaching the colour from much of the visual, drawing attention away from aesthetic detail and pulling focus on the brutal simplicity of her stage and the rawness of Bhebhe’s movements. When Blakey does introduce colour into the frame it is as an obscuring gesture, rather than adding more detail she takes it away, with pixellated, high-contrast footage invoking the visual language of surveillance, a dancer trapped in a dream, as opposed to moving freely through it. With the introduction of another dancer the scene strays further from our initial understanding, leaving us questioning whether what we have witnessed was a dance or a possession, the prelude to a demonstration of intense physical intimacy or a violent exchange. This ambiguity is central to the project, both in Broder’s music and in Alan Moore’s wider writing practice. “Alan Moore is such an inspiring writer, thinker and social critic – uncompromising in his artistic vision,” concludes Broder. “I wanted this record to pay tribute to those qualities and step out of my own character a bit, work with some new friends and make something dark and mysterious but also confidently physical, with a lot of momentum. I am moving into more focused exploration of electronic music now, away from my time as a songwriter. I want to approach music with little adherence to genre, and a universal outlook, dwelling less on the self and more about painting with sound. Like Moore, trying to find some threads to weave together the cosmic, psychedelic realm with the more human and vulnerable melodic sense, something that still aches.”
Holodec - Dog / Just U 180 Fact 2023-01-11 | Holodec met Kelman Duran outside the old Chinatown studio of NTS in Los Angeles. “He had the show before mine,” he explains. “We were both out in the alley smoking, just chopping it up and it all grew from that, here we are now.” Where we are now is still Los Angeles, yet viewed through through many different lenses at once, superimposing the contemporary experiences of diasporic communities with reflections on the sociopolitical conditions of America in the ’90s and ’00s, as well as more universal themes of immigrant identity, upbringing and existence. Such is the setting for All Dogs Come From Wolves, an album encompassing Holodec’s irresistibly narcotic sonic palette, low-lit sounds for blissed-out ravers, as well as a statement, a reminder that you need to understand where you’re from before you can know where you’re going. Released on Scorpio Red, the label run by multidisciplinary artist Ans M and Duran and home to essential projects from ONY, LC & Charles Verni and Duran himself, All Dogs Come From Wolves is described by Holodec as “an album about one and their environment, their thoughts, feelings, sounds, textures, smells, conversations. The things one hears in the distance, what one sees in the distance. An album for the city – any city, your city, where you are from, where you are at. Stylistically speaking, the sum of all my influences, a convergence.” He continues: “The album is constructed as scenes, sequenced out. Not entirely linear but nonetheless connected, coexisting. Think of it as a someone’s photo album. If you found a random photo album on the side of the street, looked at it from cover to cover, you can probably get a good idea of that person’s world. There’s a sincerity you can’t replicate.”‘Dog’ and ‘Just U,’ two highlights from the album, unfurl as twin snapshots of the same space, the smudged, reverberant keys and synthetic murmur of the former track’s ambient interlude winding up into the restless, 2-step skip, pining synth line and smoked-out, pitch shifted vocals of the latter, the pulse of the city felt with a full heart. Director Allek Bien‘s hyper-saturated visuals reveal a dog’s eye view of LA at night, dust particle tracers dissolving into technicolor powder, ghostly graffiti blurred into a single, continuous texture, the city’s subway tunnels stretched into infinity. Holodec’s words surface fleetingly amidst the city lights, like phrases momentarily glimpsed from a moving car: “sound of city / sounds of cities in which I formed / sounds of cities in which I survive.” Picking out an instinctive poetry from the humming polyphony of their home, Holodec and Bien paint a portrait in superimposition, the continual condition of the streets they grew up on. As shaky pet cam footage is layered on top of itself, the artists depict a city both past and present, a gesture which is both a “statement” and a “toast,” a sentiment which leads back to the potency of the album’s title, an affirmation that looking back will show you the way forward. “Past lives become this life, this life becomes the next life,” says Holodec. “The title speaks to the spectrum of one’s evolution. Remember where you came from. Savour the present. Build the future.” Though transmitted from the complexity of immigrant identity within the cursed history of contemporary America, Holodec’s message pulls focus on the kinds of optimism one can find in solidarity, “a toast / all dogs come from wolves / we survive together.” Dog / Just U Credits:Music – HolodecDirector & Editor – Allek BienSpecial thanks to Cash and Minji
Fact Mix 889: Tim Reaper & Jack Anderson 180 Fact 2022-12-26 | Tim Reaper is one of contemporary dance music’s most prodigious talents, a wildly prolific producer and life-long jungle devotee balancing revivalist rigor and bleeding edge innovation, all with an era-defining grace and intimidating skill. Between his label Future Retro, Globex Corp, the Simpsons-themed, 7th Storey Projects sub-label he runs with friend and collaborator Dwarde, a steady stream of solo releases over the course of a decade and the hard-won, well-deserved ascendency he has experienced over the last few years, Reaper has emerged as an essential bridge between the jungle die-hards and the scenes that surround them, splicing the old-school ’90s sound with elements of techno and drum and bass while maintaining both the hardcore spirit and a preternatural ear for the future of the sound. A dedicated digger and obsessive trawler of jungle and d&b forums and message boards ever since he picked up an Andy C mix CD that came free with a copy of Mixmag he was using for his Media Studies GCSE, Reaper is both a devoted student and one of the key technicians of jungle’s current iteration. While wielding an encyclopaedic knowledge and profound respect for the old-school styles developed at institutional London jungle parties Rupture, Jungle Syndicate and Technicality with one hand, Reaper is able to tweak and re-tool his productions with the other, deftly expanding jungle’s horizons while staying true to the discipline of the pioneers that came before him. Yet his overarching project is one in service of the scene, paying dues to the old heads while shifting focus to the new guard: artists brought together for his legendary run of Meeting Of The Minds compilations, collaborators Dwarde, Sully and Kloke, as well as Future Retro regulars Kid Lib and Phineus II. Never one to hitch himself to the hype that surrounds him, Tim Reaper plays by the same rules he always has.Jack Anderson similarly blurs the line between artist and technician, having developed a multi-disciplinary digital practice that has seen him create visuals for DJ Python, Anthony Naples, Simo Cell and Lil Uzi Vert, 3D design for Mugler, direct and VJ at Draaimolen Festival and produce stunning music videos for xl.iks, Elise Massoni and Huerco S. Anderson is also just as at home in the rave as he is behind the laptop screen, DJing as Jek and dropping killer mixes for the likes of down2earth, The Lot Radio and Juanita’s Mix. A longtime fan of Tim Reaper, here, Anderson blends live 360-degree footage with audio-reactive effects and live improvisations to bring his singular vision to a lethal transmission of Reaper’s own productions, some unreleased exclusives, classic remixes and contemporary heat, pitching even further into the future than Reaper has done previously. “This video is inspired by my relationship with jungle music and travel/transit,” Anderson says of the visuals. “I wanted to visually interpret how Jungle can separate the mind from the body, in a way teleporting you to another world. I focused on the energy of the mix using the complex drum breaks to drive the distortion of footage, and more moody parts to create interesting forms in the generative system I used. This mix is incredibly technical and I wanted the visuals to match Tim’s pure skill and track selection. I used a 360 camera to film hours of commuting and then ran the video through Touch Designer to apply the audio-reactive effect. I then mapped a MIDI controller to certain parameters and jammed over the mix.”
Alan Johnson - Stillness 180 Fact 2022-12-12 | “In the stillness of the night and the clamour of the day, Count Ossie’s wise poetic words ring true in every single way. Long live his legacy.” This homage opens the latest project from Alan Johnson, the dub-drenched alias of producers Tom Neilan and Gareth Kirby. Arriving in the same year as the 50th anniversary of Grounation, the ground-breaking album from Count Ossie’s foundational group, The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, ‘Stillness’ serves as both timeless monument to and urgent invocation of the spirit of the legendary drummer, band leader and essential figure to many Rastafari. Shaping deadly bass weight and minimal percussion around words taken from Ossie’s track ‘Poem’, Neilan and Kirby trace the origins of their reverberant sound while offering a singular statement on their own sound, drawing from the deep well of earth energy tapped into by Ossie’s words. “This is a track that initially came together fairly quickly in the studio in Bristol, some time back in 2020, mainly due to the fact that it had clear direction and strong narrative for us,” explain the duo. “We think visual representation can be as strong in its effect on the senses as any audio output, in creating an entirely different dynamic in delivery of an idea. Working with Liam Higgins on the visual side of this project really provided us with the ability to journey creatively along paths rarely travelled within this type of music, from an audio visual perspective. Providing the opportunity to explore creativity instinctively and collaboratively on a visual level within a unique project for both of us, we really wanted to deliver something unique and personal.”“We had similar interpretations on theme and it felt right to take it to a moody, frantic at times and eventually paranoid, place,” they continue. “We think the hybrid direction of both live and still images works well in the context of the musical message.” Snatches of shadowboxing set against fast approaching dusk, lonely rooms framed in black and red montage, monolithic residential buildings piercing dim skies, each eerie image captures the swirling tension and creeping paranoia of ‘Stillness,’ steeped in the uneasy balance between dread stasis and sudden explosions of sound and movement. “Ever since I was a youth / I’ve always been searching for the truth / But having been told so many lies / Life, like good music, never dies,” intones Count Ossie, at once prophetic and cautionary, a diagnosis of contemporary struggle as well as a gesture towards a means of overcoming it. “A man is a sufferer of no mean order / I must die one day you’ll all hear people say / Storing up wealth, ignoring their health / But a tree is known by its fruits.” Directing us back to the earth, the ground and the power that resides in it, both Count Ossie and Alan Johnson are aligned in their grasp of the physical, Ossie in his magical realist proclamations, Neilan and Kirby in the heft of their deep bass excavations, the surge of smoke-filled air rushing from hulking sound system. Designed to be amplified loud in the dark, ‘Stillness’ zeroes in on the introspective potency of dub step, illuminating internal caverns with their sound, allowing Count Ossie’s words the space their weight demands.‘Stillness’ is taken from the EP of the same name, out now on Sneaker Social Club. You can find Alan Johnson on Instagram and Liam Higgins on Instagram and at his website.
Chris Golden & Ross Ross - Psychic Magic 180 Fact 2022-12-06 | “It’s about the rebirth of a new reality,” says artist Chris Golden of his new film, Psychic Magic. Working in Unreal Engine and Cinema 4D, Golden seeks to connect objects, colour and form across digital and physical planes, developing his practice around the belief that a consistent energy flows through the natural and the virtual world, a belief which allows him to explore both the real and the unreal. “The film starts in this rocky desert space where we come across this summoning sculpture,” explains Golden. “The sculpture awakens the spirit of nature and the world is reborn.” Setting esoteric imagery – an alabaster horse head balancing on a stone pine cone, a bed of flickering candle stubs – against a gently euphoric score from Ross Ross, the artist lends cinematic weight to a tableau brimming with hidden meaning, an abandoned ceremony of a lost civilisation, the release of an earthly power long forgotten. “Psychic magic focuses on exploring the essence of reality,” continues Golden, “spiritually influenced and sharing alternative states of being.” As plucked MIDI strings and a chorus of synthesis mark a shift in perspective, the process of rebirth begins in flashes of blue light, snatches of voice marking the start of a new world, the natural reborn inside the digital.“I see this spirit of nature as a manifestation of our true essence,” says Golden. “In my own practice, escaping into nature allows me to re-centre myself and allows myself to connect to an alternate perspective that I can bring into my life to spark creativity and inspiration. Bringing the need of balance into my life is so important to continue to grow and expand continuously, so the film is inspired by this point of view.” Golden’s new reality exists in this balance, blossoming from the overlap between natural forms and 3D render, caught in the interplay between photorealism and uncanny digital textures. We are presented with a sequence of scenarios that challenge our perception of reality and unreality: an open flower with a metallic stamen, tree bark dappled with impossible blue light, dense foliage frozen in time. What is reborn in these images is our own grasp of reality, each a manifestation of the natural and the digital in superimposition, existing across multiple planes of existence, coursing with psychic magic.
An Trinse - Humic Acid Regress 180 Fact 2022-11-29 | As An Trinse, Northern Irish audiovisual artist Stephen McLaughlin reckons with the cultural history of Ireland with sound and image, mapping what he describes as “the uneasy atmospheres and silences left in the Irish psyche in the aftermath of colonial and religious repression, using archaeology and ancient history as a conduit.” Of particular interest to McLaughlin are bog fossils, specifically, the incredible preservative effects that the anaerobic environment of bogs can have in relation to natural tannic acids that result from the natural degrading of peat moss. “Bogs themselves contain a unique environment free of oxygen which prevents the growth of bacteria which would normally decompose flesh,” explains McLaughlin. “In their place are a species which degrades peat moss to form humic acid, which acts as a natural embalming environment similar to the process used when tanning leather.” This process can result in the perfect conditions for preservation, with ancient artefacts including bog wood, barrels of bog butter, entire farming landscapes enveloped by blanket bogs and bog bodies, with skin, hair and internal organs intact, having been found in incredible condition up to 5000 years after they were submerged in the wetlands. “There is a general mystery surrounding these artefacts,” continues McLaughlin, “and it is unknown whether the bodies were the result of human sacrifice, a punishment for a crime worthy of shame or honour, but they have captivated artists and thinkers as diverse and Joseph Beuys, Seamus Heaney, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung whose feud over the meaning of these bodies inspired my earlier work, Corpses From the North. “They emerge as what Karin Sanders calls: ‘corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we know about the past. By restoring them to the roster of cultural phenomena that force us to confront our ethical and aesthetic boundaries…excavates anew the question of what it means to be human.'”It is within this frame that An Trinse explores Ireland’s violent history of colonial and religious oppression, incorporating iconography and the fossilised prehistoric culture of Ireland into his abstract excavations of cultural memory. It was during research completed as part of a collaboration with Sardinian artist Il Santo Bevitore, the same collaboration that served as the starting point for the above audiovisual work, that McLaughlin made the discovery that some of the oldest human remains unearthed in present day Northern Ireland, which date back about 5000 years, share close ancestral relatives with native Sardinians. “It is hard for the archaeological imagination not to run with this,” continues McLaughlin, “given the similar myths of giants, megalithic constructions and the concentric rings that run through both cultures’ artwork, which has been found as far away as the USA, and imagine there was some ancient network running between these cultures. Maybe it was simply through the slow process of cultural transfer, but perhaps a more mystical technology.” It’s these twin secret histories of ancient technology that McLaughlin explores in Humic Acid Regress, setting a swirling soundscape of hypnotic drones, tumbling synthesis, passages of uncanny ambience and double bass, courtesy of Maxwell Sterling, against stroboscopic fragments of 3D renderings of prehistoric sites, grainy, monochromatic fractals stamped with ancient glyphs and science fiction schematics. Mechanised, filtered footage of abandoned human settlements, as though plucked from an archive for extraterrestrial research, is superimposed with a self-generating, organic user interface, as though the artist has recovered the advanced communications technology of a lost civilisation from unknown depths, dripping with bog acid.“The piece itself was developed as the end of the current An Trinse live show that has been showing this year,” continues McLaughlin. “The backbone has remained, but what has gone over the top has been in flux, so I only recently had the idea of having Maxwell to provide strings to add some humanity to the chasms of noise.” You can catch Maxwell Sterling performing live with Stephen McLaughlin, who will provide live visuals, at Cafe Oto on December 6.An Trinse will perform live at [ADSR]4, an experimental music event showcasing new and international sonic artists. Ticket are available now.You can find An Trinse on Instagram and Bandcamp.
Hannah Rose Stewart & Blackhaine Present: MIASMA (Excerpt) 180 Fact 2022-11-24 | In an original commission from Trauma Bar Und Kino and Fact Magazine, concept artist and 3D designer Hannah Rose Stewart and musician and performance artist Blackhaine present MIASMA, a haunted world of lost souls, abandoned spaces and egregores.An ‘egregore’ can be defined in various ways. An occult concept dating back to the 16th-century Enochian magic of John Dee and Edward Kelley, egregores were understood to be angelic beings, watchers of earthbound civilisations and the ancestors of the Nephilim, mysterious beings of gigantic stature that are written about in the Hebrew Bible. An egregore can also be understood as a non-physical entity, or thought-form, created by the conscious or unconscious will of a group or community, whose emotional and energetic focus imbues the entity with autonomy and the power to influence. Defined variously as an energised astral form, the result of communal will and visualisation and as a symbolic pattern, the concept of the egregore lends itself eerily well to the hyperstitional meme magic of our contemporary multi-platform mire, a strategy for thinking through the increasingly esoteric and atomised communities, complete with their own multi-user shared hallucinations, that break off as the result of the dispersion and entropy of the platforms we once mistook for a digital commons. For Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine, the egregore is also the spectre which haunts and is embodied by MIASMA, their ambitious and enigmatic multi-disciplinary collaboration stretching from Berlin’s foremost exploratory art space, Trauma Bar Und Kino, to the algorithmically compressed space of the screen. At once a visceral live production and an intricate digital environment and performance space built in Unreal Engine, MIASMA is enveloped by what Stewart describes as “socially imbued feelings of loss, ghosts, magical realism and the uncanny in post-industrial society,” chasing an egregore formed from the “architecture, ephemera and history of the working class in the North,” as well as death drone, the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh and abandoned urban simulation as seen through the eyes of philosophical horror writer Thomas Ligotti.“Through the virtual and the choreographic, MIASMA autopsies the post-industrial urban corpse, carves out and meditates on its wounds in unparalleled catharsis,” says Stewart, “an embrace with a dark simulacrum that’s intimate, melancholic and abrasive.” Parsing through the entrails of this non-place, one of many sites of the most egregious hollowing out via the tentacles of capital, we can catch glimpses of its true nature, shards of mirrored glass protruding from internal organs, glinting back the familiar from within the abject flesh of the haunted. “We must also recognise the extent to which the capitalist dystopia of 21st Century culture is not something that was simply imposed on us,” writes Mark Fisher. “It was built out of our captured desires.” From a now empty chest cavity there springs a new entity, an intoxicating miasma, a cold and empty portrait of our captured desires shone back at us, presented as abandoned architecture for us to chase ourselves through. In this contemporary Gothic mode the present is irrevocably ruptured by the eternal creep of the past, all signs of life extracted, leaving Hannah Rose Stewart to map its ruined landscape and Blackhaine the only one left alive to speak its name.MIASMA was originally performed at and commissioned by Trauma Bar Und Kino, curated by Madalina Stanescu and featuring music from Rainy Miller and Croww. The above excerpt is a new commission from Fact, elements of which were presented in Issue 04 of Fact Magazine alongside original poetry from Blackhaine.For more information about Hannah Rose Stewart and her work you can visit her website and follow her on Instagram. You can find Blackhaine on Instagram and Bandcamp.MIASMA Credits:Video, installation, & performance Presented at Trauma Bar Und Kino on October 12, 2022.Curated by Madalina StanescuCredits – Hannah Rose Stewart & BlackhainePhoto Credit – LenguaPrincipal Filmography, Production UE5 – Filip SetmanukEditor – Marco StoltzeMotion Capture – Samuel CappsMOCAP Cleanup – Anastasia Holumbovska3D Asset Creation – Lucas HadjamLighting Design – Felix WardMusic Production – Rainy MillerMusic Production – CrowwChoreographic Performance – Louis EllisGraphic Design – Jordi ThelerSpecial thanks to Kyle Van Horn & The Trauma Bar Und Kino team
Grand River - Human 180 Fact 2022-11-22 | On ‘Human,’ a stunning assemblage of acoustic instrumentation and elegant synthesis from the Berlin-based, Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, better known as Grand River, a restrained tension between fleeting moments of corporeal beauty and a devastating wave of synthetic sublimity pervades. Gently stuttering samples, looping vocal chatter and choral peals drift between the heart-breaking vibration of resonant piano and artist Marco Ciceri‘s imagery, heavy mist draped over the rocks around a waterfall, the sounds of unseen voices reverberating around sheer rock. Starting as little more than a flutter, the rising surge of driving bass synth begins to clear the air, the arrival of a silent, monochromatic torrent, billowing clouds of foam and spray signalling a change in the emotional tide of the track. While constantly threatening to overwhelm the fleeting mortal beauty of voice and struck string in this electronic deluge, we’re never totally submerged, never subjected to the crushing weight of the waterfall’s base, as ornate glimmers echo in the distant, the ever-present piano and ethereal haze of choirs and voice continue to swirl through the lethal current, captured as an infinitely repeating, slow motion cascade.Taken from Portioli’s third album as Grand River, All Above, ‘Human’ is indicative of the expansive scope of the record, which sees the artist building voices, strings, organs, guitars and synthesis around acoustic piano compositions, which resonates at the heart of each. It is the emotional heft of the piano that Portioli seeks to channel throughout the record, which seeks explore the guiding forces behind our internal drives and urges, mapping different instruments onto different moods, using arrangements to chart progression through different states of being. Drawing from her training as a linguist, this sonic vernacular is conceived as an emotional language transcendent of cultural constraints, eschewing visual metaphor and imagery for non-verbal forms of self-expression. With his visual for ‘Human,’ Marco Ciceri achieves something similar, never showing us the source of the water, instead pulling focus on the unstoppable force of the waterfall’s terminal velocity and the roiling river underneath. What we are left with is an image of natural sublimity abstracted, with Grand River’s composition ringing in our ears.‘Human’ is taken from All Above, which arrives on February 24, 2023, via Editions Mego. The album is dedicated to the memory of legendary experimental musician and Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, who died suddenly last year at the age of 53.For more information about Grand River and her work you can find her on Instagram and visit her website. You can find Marco Ciceri on Instagram and at his website.
Eden Samara & Natalia Podgorska - Rough Night 180 Fact 2022-11-15 | Rough Night, self-described as “a tragicomedy in seven scenes and an interlude,” is the sound of singer, writer and producer Eden Samara working things out. Pulling focus on an irresistible club pop sound, threaded through with contributions from the best and brightest in contemporary dance music, including Call Super, Shanti Celeste, TSVI and Loraine James, Samara’s debut album is at once a coming of age story and an intimate testament to the challenges of drawing from such personal places. “I think well into our adulthood we still go through cycles of losing ourselves and finding ourselves again, so the album encompasses a cycle of growing pains, then coming out the other end where one might appear the same but inside something has shifted,” the artist explains. “I wanted the album as a whole to sound a bit unpolished, like real people making music with little to no equipment and a lot of heart.” Bounding from cosmic introspection on ‘Ultimatum’ and ‘Interlude’ to the sun-dappled skip and sensual stumble of ‘The Local’ and ‘Growing Into Your New Skin,’ weaving between bittersweet torch songs and near-future sex jams on ‘Sophie,’ ‘D4M,’ and title track ‘Rough Night,’ all the while whipping up an anthem for emotional complexity in the shape of ‘Madonna,’ Samara explores her internal worlds with openness and generosity, bringing us along for the ride no matter how raw and real. It is this exploratory quality of Rough Night that formed the primary inspiration for Samara’s collaboration with friend, artist and animator Natalia Podgorska, a hallucinatory game world modelled around each track from the album.“Rough Night is a journey through internal change and growth, and we wanted to reflect that in the visuals – every song is a different scene that visually represents my internal world,” explains Samara. “The record documents a four year period at the end of my twenties where I totally changed as a person. Some people call it a Saturn return. It was like growing pains – when we grow, we go through all these feelings that are a progressive experience.” Podgorska takes the record’s eight tracks and constructs an intricate ecosystem around each of them, through which a virtual avatar of Samara is free to explore, manifesting her soul-searching into an expansive virtual odyssey. “I loved the idea of having a collection of visual pieces that tie together through music within an album that’s also very coherent,” says Podgorska. “It’s growing pains, it’s growth. I love having something that ties it all together visually. Technically it was a fun challenge to work with music I already had and I could create this world where certain elements of the game engine are reactive to the music, so watching the album video you can spot elements that are not just animated for your pleasure, but respond to beats and certain frequencies.” Starting out in a central hub area that invokes the warm memory of the Toronto neighbourhood bar that ‘The Local’ takes its name from, the titular Rough Night unfolds through landscapes of alien flora and fauna, iridescent bubbles and tentacular speaker stacks, flitting between outer and inner space. In one moment Samara floats through a shoal of richly textured sheets of fabric, rippling in zero gravity, while the next sees her strolling across a rainbow bridge, stepping past neon tracers of jubilant ravers, the spirit of letting loose picked out in shimmering light.Rough Night is out now, on Local Action. edensamara.bandcamp.com/album/rough-nightYou can find Eden Samara on Instagram, Bandcamp, and catch her performing tracks from Rough Night live for the first time on Wednesday, November 16, in support of Bodysync. Tickets are available now. https://dice.fm/event/rlnov-bodysync-16th-nov-the-pickle-factory-london-tickets?lng=enFor more information about Natalia Podgorska and her work, follow her on Instagram and visit her website.
Solveig Settemsdal & Melkeveien - the i sea 180 Fact 2022-11-10 | the i sea, the newest video work from London-based artist Solveig Settemsdal, owes its existence to one of the first verses of 14th century poet Dante Alighieri’s epic poem Inferno: “in the midway of this our mortal life I found myself on a darkened path, astray.” Working in response to what Settemsdal terms “a great flattening,” the artist takes aim at conventional, materialist theories of the observable universe, looking towards speculative fiction, alternate models of understanding and the contemporary condition of the image at a time in which reality can be said to be unfolding in both virtual and physical space simultaneously, for a new way to look at the world from a position of emotional and literal entanglement. “It’s about knowing, for a fact, that at most points in the past, in the place into which I was born, I would have been burnt as a witch,” says Settemsdal about the film. “It’s about quantum physics, but most of all and most importantly, it’s about relationships, how we see and are seen, how we change and are changed. And I don’t think you need to know about any of these things when you watch it.” Drawing particular influence from Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s recent book Helgoland, which details his thoughts on quantum mechanics and relational interpretation, first developed by Werner Heisenberg while secluded on the titular island in the North Sea in 1925, the i sea develops Rovelli’s desire to move away from “naive materialism,” instead working towards, in the physicists own words: “a theory that accounts for a structure of the universe that clarifies what it is to be an observer in the universe – not a theory that makes the universe depend on me.”Within the world of the i sea, the silence of the sea is filled with a constantly mutating score by Kristian Møller Johansen, the producer known as Melkeveien, whom Settemsdal at art school in Oslo back in 2005 which throbs between eerie low-end ambience and shuffling synthetic beat science, as though flickering between two conflicting perspectives of the same scene, created using analog drum machines, organismic and monophonic synthesisers and recordings of electromagnetism, including recordings of fluorescent lighting from elevators and phone booths. Muddled in-between these perspectives on the world, we are presented with a literal eye, restlessly gazing back at the viewer, a mirrored image of the participatory observation we as the audience are ourselves entangled within as we view Settemsdal’s work. In this way, the artist shines a light on what she perceives as a lack of empathy for both the viewer and the viewed, illuminating a greater significance on both the roles of the observer and the observed as active shapers of the universe, collapsing the distinction between artist and audience, between reader and writer in a defiant move against the dissolving of the materialist world into content. “There is a great flattening happening, with all human experience compressed onto screens, all things condensed into language and human culture, everything becoming second, third hand experience,” asserts Settemsdal. “We are told, we don’t feel. We don’t play. We are so tempted to escape into a clean digital future fantasy, which seems increasingly unsustainable as we struggle to keep the lights on.” In response, the artist posits a different way to think and feel through the world, to operate from a point of view inextricably entangled within the world.As her sculptures rotate, are submerged in primordial ooze and burnt to cinders, it is our entanglement with those objects, both Settemsdal’s and our own, that lend them their presence. “Looking IS changing something,” concludes Settemsdal. “What does nature care whether or not something is being observed? We could see the world being reflected in the observer and not the other way around. The only way to learn about something is to get entangled with it. The cat is yawning.”
Maelstrom & Louisahhh x William Guillon & Maison Mouton Noir - Anatomy Of Chaos 180 Fact 2022-11-08 | Anatomy Of Chaos is a dark and visceral portrait of Bordelais designer and art director William Guillon, whose visceral sculptural practice is captured by filmmaker Benjamin Juhel, of Maison Mouton Noir. Working in collaboration with dancer Nicole Muratov of L’Opera National de Bordeaux and longtime production partners Maelstrom and Louisahhh, Guillon achieves a multidisciplinary extension of his singular style, which amplifies beauty in unconventional forms. Primarily working in cast bronze, a process documented in Anatomy Of Chaos, Guillon seeks to push past the limits of the material, crafting textural and complex works that seemingly draw as much influence form the natural world as they do from more esoteric and macabre places, forging towards a kind of contemporary gothic sculpture, part functional art, part alchemical instrument. His process is translated into movement by Muratov, whose twisted, instinctual physicality follows the gnarled, imperfect forms of Guillon’s sculpture. Putting the artist’s concept of functional art into haunting context, Guillon’s objects are revealed as part of some grander, transformative ritual, the result of his alchemical experimentation.As though channeling the dark energy emanating from Guillon’s work, producers Maelstrom and Louisahhh lend their new track ‘If I Could Hold’ to Juhel and Guillon’s vision, which serves as the lead single for the collaborators’ long-awaited debut album, Sustained Resistance. A jagged reflection on the excruciating pains of the deepest love, ‘If I Could Hold’ sees Maelstrom and Louisahhh contorting their “punk for techno heads, techno for punks” sound into impassioned and foreboding new forms, invoking the frustration and paranoia of post-pandemic disillusionment. “It was a happy accident that the audio-visual universes collide so seamlessly, with both sonic and aesthetic teams sharing an appreciation of process, a relationship with the instinctual and divine work that is channeling and manifesting creation,” the duo explain. “The film explores the method, both in terms of metaphorical ‘chasing the muse’ (as represented by Nicole Muratov of L’Opera National de Bordeaux) and also literal: the carving, casting and shaping of raw materials that make up Guillon’s celebrated sculptural work. It is always a great pleasure when art creates more art, and it feels like the synergy between our music and William’s sculpture (as captured in this video) has created a new and thrilling ‘third thing’ that is almost unintentional, and therefore more magical.”They continue. “We are really humbled to have gotten to work on this project, and the fact that the themes of ‘hunting the muse’, or the chaotic, ecstatic, sometimes painful act of creation are so dear to us and so present here mean a lot when it comes to a visual representation of our sound, and the announcement of this record.” Sustained Resistance arrives as the culmination of a creative partnership that dates back to 2013, when Louisahhh first visited Maelstrom in his base of Nantes. Following four collaborative EPs for Bromance Records and the start of their own label, RAAR, their debut album sees Maelstrom and Louisahhh and their most brutal at most beautiful, taking rage at broken systems of governance, grief for those lost over the last few turbulent years and determination to find new ways of thinking and being as the raw material for a loud and urgent testimony. Sustained Resistance is the sound of fighting back, at once a prescient diagnosis and a battle cry for the future.‘If I Could Hold’ is taken from Sustained Resistance, which arrives via RAAR on February 10, 2023. You can find both Louisahhh and Maelstrom on Instagram.For more information about William Guillon and his work, you can find him on Instagram and check out his website.Anatomy Of Chaos Credits:A Project By William GuillonDirector – Maison Mouton NoirMusic – Maelstrom & LouisahhhChoreography & Dance – Nicole MuratovSound Design – Into The Wave StudioSpecial Thanks – YNDO Hotel, Fonderie Des Cyclops, Ateliers Arquié, Undercover, Mairie De Saint Emilion, Foundation Banque Populaire
