Agamben was Right #1: Quotidian Life Under the Reign of Biosecurity

As the coronavirus pandemic extends into the colder months and once again Europe locks down against the rising tide of infections, what is clear is that this situation - which the naive had hoped would result in only temporary measures - is in fact ushering in a new era of political rationality which elsewhere has been termed Biosecurity.

As a preamble, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the choice between saving lives (itself a suspiciously unproblematic proposition) and saving the economy is a false choice, symbolic of a culture still seeing through the fogged glass of abstract and insufficient concepts. It is patently absurd to suggest that life - bare or qualified - can today be separated from the claims of economy, or that today we can think of an economy which does not concern itself with the management of human lives down to the smallest quanta. In the modern era, the two have become thoroughly inseparable, culminating today in the affective and big data economies which are transforming -  behind the backs of the great mass of the people - what it means to be human.

 

Nothing signifies this non-choice more starkly than the rates of suicide and attempted suicide that have been recorded during the pandemic period. The London Ambulance Service released figures this week showing call-outs to suicides had doubled between April and September, a revelation that is as tragic as it is unsurprising.

So enough with this false trade-off; this obfuscating "balance". The question about the meaning and implications of the pandemic cannot be sought within such a mundane horizon of thought. That being said, if the concept of Biosecurity, elevated by Giorgio Agamben and a few select others to the level of a political rationality (or governmentality to use Foucault's term), is to be properly characterised and distinguished from previous iterations of a similar kind, then it will be useful to furnish that thinking with some examples from the present crisis, some of which, do appear quite petty and mundane. That's what most of what follows consists of.

 

Making Space / Controlling Space

Already it is clear that many of the facilities brought in to minimise the spread of infection are here to stay, including the elimination of cash, the forcible shift to home working and the restriction of public assembly, not to mention an explosion in the requirement for individuals to surrender personal data in order to participate in a wide range of social activities. The complexities of these events and the legislative machinations which have enabled them demand an equally careful and detailed analysis. However, it is conspicuous that despite some resent cracks in the consensus, questioning voices  - especially those on the Left - have largely been absent.   

 

It’s essential to note that most, if not all these developments, have been on the way for some time prior to the current crisis, and that the pandemic has merely provided the occasional cause for pushing these trends to their natural fulfilment, at a moment when the demos has its guard down and public scrutiny has been similarly in absentia.

 

In many major cities across the developed world an increasing proportion of public space has already been given over to private ownership, allowing corporations and private security to restrict or regulate activities in these areas; in particular to outlaw protests of any kind. Think back to the Occupy movement in London, where the original target location for the camp, Paternoster square in the city of London, could not be reached owing to the fact that it was owned by a Japanese real-estate company and heavily protected by police.

 

More recently the large retail development around London’s Kings Cross Station has come under scrutiny due to its heavily securitised and monitored approach to public space, which includes restrictions on photography of any kind and enforcement by facial recognition cameras (now made somewhat redundant due to the prevalence of facial coverings). It would not be surprising to see this relatively crude method of recognition replaced by something more in line with the shift towards mobile phones, Wi-Fi and GPS tracking, systems already central to the notion of "smart cities". Why bother with installing and maintaining cameras when anyone entering the space can be monitored through their phone, perhaps also listening for potentially seditious or anti-consumerist sentiments.

 

Home working, which for many of us has come like a sudden exile, has similarly been on the rise for some time, coextensive with the growth of jobs which require only an internet connection and the advance of video networking facilities. It’s also been the case that with soaring rents in most European capitals many businesses have been looking to minimise their office footprint and make use of legal loopholes to convert permanent staff into precarious "gig economy entrepreneurs", who rarely, if ever, have to show face at an office. The mass unemployment being caused by coronavirus measures will provide an ample source for industries wanting to bolster their use of low paid "legal" casual labour.

 

Making Law / Making Money

Wherever we look we see the pandemic being used as an opportunity for forcing through changes that under normal circumstances would be contested or at least scrutinised or mitigated. From central government, down to local council level, provision of education, and businesses, life is becoming ever more closely managed, monitored and open to coercion; not to mention the growing alienation of people from each other, beneath the pall of a generic and ungraspable fear. The use of emergency legislation has been the driving force for much of this, but behind headline making primary legislation like the UK Coronavirus Act 2020, dozens of instances of secondary legislation have been enacted by governments without any legislative scrutiny whatsoever. In the UK this has taken the form of Statutory Instruments, many of which have been made under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 using an exemption which permits orders to be enacted without a draft even being submitted in writing to Parliament.

 

The exemption's wording mirrors the vague form characteristic of exceptional powers, making provision for ministers to create law by fiat if they believe "by reason of urgency, it is necessary to make the order without a draft being so laid and approved". The function of Parliament in these cases is to rubber stamp legislation that is already a fait accompli. All of the recent changes to laws mandating face coverings, as well as the chaotic system of local lockdowns in England have been enacted in this way. Only recently, seven months into the pandemic have MPs threatened a revolt and pressurised Prime Minister Boris Johnson into some minor concessions on Parliament's oversight of how the pandemic response is being (mis)managed.

 

On a local level (and I did promise some mundane examples) councils in London and other major cities in England have been using emergency coronavirus powers to introduce what they have called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. In practice this has meant closing off large numbers of backstreets around the capital, often enforcing these closures using number plate recognition cameras, rather than physical barriers, to issue fines. In my own area three shorts streets connecting the two main arterial roads have been closed to through traffic. I say closed, but what has actually occurred is that cameras have been installed and signs placed at either end, forcing yet more traffic down to an already busy junction, while undoubtedly bolstering the enforcement revenues of Hounslow council.

 

Measures such as these have been introduced under the guise of providing space for cyclists and pedestrians during the pandemic. No problem, as a cyclist myself I'm all in favour of making streets safer for bikes; though one might wonder why when deaths of cyclists in London have been in the news for years that it took a pandemic for local councils to pull their collective fingers out. Under normal circumstances such closures, which merely shift the problem onto other streets as vehicles take alternative routes to avoid the restrictions, would have to involve local people in consultation. But under the emergency powers this democratic engagement has been entirely bypassed, thus mirroring central government's use of secondary legislation to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.  

Another example from the summer of how these emergency powers are being flagrantly misused occurred in Dorset in late June when the Liberal Democrat (a byword for opportunist flakery) council leader declared a Major Incident under the UK Civil Contingencies Act 2004. The event that precipitated this was the beach at Bournemouth becoming crowded, thus making social distancing potentially harder to achieve. Declaring this a Major Incident placed the crowded beach on the same level as a terrorist attack or some other imminent threat to the security of the UK. Visiting the beach was perfectly legal (I'd been there myself the week before) and it seemed not to cross the minds of the council leader Vikki Slade, or local constabulary that failing to either open the public toilets or provide sufficient waste bins on what was the hottest day of the year might create some aggravation. The lurch towards 'emergency measures' during 'unprecedented times' is symbolic of the loss of proportion and rise of arbitrariness under conditions of Biosecurity. Overnight camping suddenly becomes a national threat.

Fringe Voices and Silenced Voices

It's easy to dismiss lockdown protesters as "covidiots", not least when they include so many far Right activist and overt conspiracy theorists. Followers of the vile QAnon conspiracy, which indulges a bizarre oedipal fantasy casting Donald Trump as a crusader against deep state cannibal paedophiles,  join forces with the now familiar 5G paranoiacs and Anti-Vaxxer types, alongside folk carrying banners for the long thought defunct British Union of Fascists. As undoubted an insult to taste and good sense these people are, there is rarely a strategic virtue in allowing one's own position to be defined by the position of one's enemies, or fringe lunatics for that matter.

 

When we hear talk about totalitarianism or loss of freedom (often from the mouths of those same fringe lunatics) it is useful to think in terms of a State or other entity's capacity for interference, rather than fixating on the content of conspiracy theories. Doing this means we don’t have to find examples of police kicking doors down (though this happens often enough) or secret plans for forced vaccinations, and instead examine the legal, institutional and practical arrangements of power that may or may not enable such interference. The questions we should ask are, what would stop them? What keeps us free in a society, and towards what kind of world does this form of government by decree tend?

 

Thinking in this way should not distract us from highlighting overt authoritarianism and state violence, many examples of which can be found over previous months. In Australia several individuals have been arrested and charged with incitement to breach coronavirus laws after publicly criticising the government's restrictions, which are some of the most draconian in the world. They included Zoe-Lee Buhler, a pregnant 28 year old woman who was removed from her home in handcuffs in front of her partner and children for setting up a Facebook event called Freedom day, criticising the extent of the state of Victoria's lockdown restrictions. And in August a woman with a medical exemption was violently choked and arrested by police in Melbourne after she was found outside without a face covering.

 

These incidents follow on from the "detention directions" enforced in July upon a group of tower blocks in suburbs of Flemington and North Melbourne where over 3000 predominantly low income and ethnic minority residents were prevented from leaving their homes for any reason. Armed police guarded the exits to the blocks to enforce compliance of the order, which came without warning. Those familiar with Australia's use of offshore detention facilities, such as on Nauru will no doubt recognise some of the key features here in the state's treatment of its "internal" immigrant population. Indeed, one justification for the use of such offshore camps has been to prevent the spread of infectious disease onto the mainland; a better example of the paradigm of Biosecurity in nuce is hard to find.

 

In Myanmar, garment workers have been arrested and police have violently broken up strikes under laws designed to minimise the spread of the virus. The workers were protesting against factory conditions which have deteriorated during the pandemic, demanding better protection against getting infected. Actions such as these are the most visible signs of repression, but it is often the more subtle techniques that have the greatest effect. The use of fines to stifle government opposition has been a technique successfully deployed by Singapore for decades and has contributed to the microstate's reputation as a benign dictatorship which was much admired by the then chairman of the Chinese Communist party Deng Xiaoping.

 

£10,000 fines are now being issued to organisers of protests in the UK. In August one such fine was issued to Piers Corbyn, brother of the former Labour party leader, after organising an anti-lockdown protest, which as a political protest was exempt from the regulations. In a sign that coronavirus legislation is already being used to stifle legitimate protest of all kinds, the climate change campaign group Extinction Rebellion cancelled planned events in the Spring after being threatened with similar fines. When they did go ahead with actions in late summer many organisers and activists were pre-emptively arrested and the protests placed under restrictions using coronavirus laws which made them practically impossible.

 

At the same time professional psychopath and nominal UK Home Secretary Priti Patel was attempting to have XR classified as an organised crime group, claiming in a speech to the Police Superintendents Association that the environmental campaigners were "attacking our way of life". That way of life, it's worth remembering, is leading us to planetary extinction. Since the system of tiered restrictions have been introduced the number of fines issued have dramatically increased, with minorities being disproportionately targeted, and gatherings in private homes frequently falling foul of regulations, which even regional police and crime commissioners seem not to understand.

 

Tracking and Tracing from Serco to Xinjiang

In case you haven't noticed, digital apartheid is here. For those of us not terrified to leave our homes entrance to many venues is now dependent on downloading apps and using smart phones to book or access services and to register on test and trace. Having an up-to-date smart phone and submitting to the reign of total surveillance will increasingly become a prerequisite for accessing any public or private service, from transport and council facilities, to accessing concert and theatre venues, to simply entering a pub or bar. Those who cannot or will not maintain their digital passport will effectively be frozen out of society. And those who do comply will be under the permanent gaze of ubiquitous surveillance technologies and data harvesting, which in turn are used to produce tailored advertising and political messaging.

 

In China, Korea and Singapore, citizens have no right to privacy or data protection from government surveillance. In China, technologies developed to monitor Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang province have been rolled out nationwide to enforce lockdowns and other coronavirus measures. They include systems on public transport which can detect whether a person is wearing their face mask correctly. The lack of democratic oversight and normalisation of surveillance technologies is however not limited to illiberal East Asian countries. Across Europe few limitations have been placed on the use of track and trace data accumulated through mobile phones and other methods.

 

In the UK which has had several faltering attempts to introduce a centralised system, track and trace data is not comprehensively covered by the UK Data Protection Act. This has meant that developers of apps downloaded onto phones for the purpose of "checking-in" to venues, cafes, cinemas and restaurants have been able to sell on databases of contact details as well as additional metadata harvested from the user's phone. There has been a spate of scam track and trace calls where the scammer attempts to obtain bank account details by claiming they're needed to allow the person to book a coronavirus test. The UK government's test and trace system is being marketed as an NHS service, but is in fact being run by Serco staff. The outsourcing firm has come under pressure as the time taken to get test results and trace contacts have ballooned, along with the cost of running the service.

 

Staying the UK, a particularly egregious example of intentional mismanagement for financial gain has been the return of students to UK university campuses, a move very much pushed by both the government and the universities themselves. No sooner than student halls of residence were full than the government ended its relaxation of the restrictions and began imposing local lockdowns. Students lured away from home found themselves under house arrest after being conned into handing over cash for university accommodation which they were now being prevented by security from leaving. Trinity college Cambridge has forced students to sign tenancy agreements which say they can be evicted at short notice and instructed them only to bring the bare minimum of belongings. Teaching is now predictably all remote. A trend which is likely to be permanent for many courses.

Wither Opposition?

As the above litany demonstrates, the pandemic is being used opportunistically from top to bottom.  It is regrettable that opposition to the current regime of arbitrary restrictions is predominantly coming from the conspiracist fringes and far Right. The Left for the most part has walked in lockstep with every government measure, save only where they demanded that restrictions should go further, as has recently occurred with Labour leader Kier Starmer's demand for a circuit breaker lockdown in the UK. Giorgio Agamben in one of his numerous interventions during the pandemic has pointed out the “paradox of organizations of the left, traditionally in the habit of claiming rights and denouncing violations of the constitution, accepting limitations on liberty made by ministerial decree devoid of any legal basis and which even fascism couldn’t dream of imposing”.

 

A very charitable reading might wonder whether leftist demands for a second national lockdown in the UK are designed precisely to precipitate the kind of economic collapse upon which a new post-capitalist form of social order could arise. Could Starmer yet be a deep cover Corbynista agent? In all seriousness, it has come to something when we have to rely on “disaster nationalists” like arch Brexiteer Steven Baker MP to make the case for liberty and oversight in Parliament.

 

These are some of the day to day realities of living under Biosecurity measures. With no end in sight we can expect the kinds of societal changes I've highlighted above to become more deeply entrenched. Anyone who believes that the emergency powers and Biosecurity legislation brought in will disappear after the pandemic should think back to the months immediately after September 11th 2001 and the raft of draconian powers brought in during the War on Terror. The majority of those powers, such as the US Patriot Act 2001 and the UK Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001) are still on the statute books. Many have been extended over the years, adapting to new possibilities afforded by developments in digital technologies. Power does not let a crisis go to waste, and a crisis combined with a fearful population does not bode well for the health of democracy.

A Note on the Sacredness of Veils

 

On the eve of yet another round of rule changes and legislation to bring in new nationwide restrictions, it is time for a statement of the obvious. The mandating of face masks in public places has been a complete failure as an attempt to prevent a second wave of Coronavirus infections across Europe. The question remains as to why masks have become such a shibboleth for so many people; so politically symbolic and socially divisive.

 

I, like the majority of the population have gone along with the requirements as they have evolved over the last few months; from first having to mask-up on public transport, then in shops, and finally the somewhat absurd ritual of wearing them when standing up in a restaurant or pub between my table, the door and the toilet. But let me be clear, I have gone along with this not because I thought that I was contributing to the general “fight against the virus” or that I believed mass mask wearing would prevent a second wave of infections. I did this principally to avoid confrontation, to avoid explaining myself and being treated like a leper. I prefer a quiet life moving across the city rather than having to fight my way from East to West with my face uncovered. I have my suspicion that many other people are similarly motivated.

 

The mass psychology of mask wearing is something that will furnish many a thesis in the years to come. “But the science shows” … enough! There is no more science in the wearing of masks than when your grandmother told you to cover your mouth when coughing. The difference is that until now no one proposed making her advice the subject of legislation which could lead to financially ruinous fines or incarceration. Many things can be speculated about the mass wearing of masks and we should remember that until the beginning of the summer the general tilt of that speculation was towards the “don’t know” or “probably won't make much difference” camp. Indeed the World Health Organisation has never claimed that masks in themselves have a role in significantly reducing infection rates when mandated for the general population, nor as yet has there been evidence to the contrary. This was good honest advice and after all, what exactly would such evidence look like and where would it come from?

 

The basic proposition that a covering over one’s face reduces the spread of infectious agents into the surrounding air is obvious and clearly doesn't need any major research studies to demonstrate. As I said, even your grandmother knew this. The problem is that there is so little data and practically no way of modelling the effects of masked vs mask-less approaches in different settings during a pandemic situation. One of the reasons for this, as should be plain from the ever changing pronouncements on rates of infection, is that the hot spots are constantly changing. One week it’s transmission in the home between households, the next it’s between groups of friends in pubs, then it’s students in halls of residence. None of these pronouncements, backed up by data which is at best opaque and at worst dubious, is able to tie in how mandated mask wearing has succeeded or failed in each case.

 

To put it bluntly the entire discourse around masks is hyperbolic, and while “common sense” tells us - just like your grandmother used to - COVER YOUR MOUTH!, the reality is that it has made no demonstrable impact in preventing the virus getting out of control across Europe once again. And we should remember that many countries introduced mask wearing in public places earlier than the UK. It didn’t save them, it isn’t saving us. You might well object and claim that “if it weren’t for the masks our infection rate would be even higher!” That may be true, but it’s only speculation, and we’re being “led by the science” yeah? The bottom line is that the basic claim that mass mask wearing would control the infection rate and help prevent another national lockdown has proved to be false. And yet the discourse around masks, on TV, radio and on the street would have you believe that they are still the only thing between us and total oblivion. How did we get to this point?

 

In the face of such a counterintuitive response there is only one conclusion; masks have become a collective comfort blanket.

 

This shouldn’t surprise anyone that was paying attention to the rhetoric around masks back when their introduction was mandated at the beginning of the summer. In his speech of the 5^th of June World health Organisation director general Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus summarised the issue in these five points:

 

-People can potentially infect themselves if they use contaminated hands to adjust a mask, or to repeatedly take it off and put it on, without cleaning hands in between.

-Masks can also create a false sense of security, leading people to neglect measures such as hand hygiene and physical distancing.

-I cannot say this clearly enough: masks alone will not protect you from COVID-19.

-Masks are not a replacement for physical distancing, hand hygiene and other public health measures.

-Masks are only of benefit as part of a comprehensive approach in the fight against COVID-19.

 

As the summer sneaked in and lockdown measures were relaxed there was a general push across Europe and America to get people back to work and the economy up and running again. Both these aims required that people return to workplaces, use public transport and visit restaurant and hospitality businesses. Here we should absolutely note the second of the Director General’s points, that masks can create a false sense of security. A sense of security? False, perhaps, but from the perspective of politicians wanting to get the economy up and running, absolutely desirable. During the summer we were bombarded with positive rhetoric about “Covid security”, all the while playing up the role of masks in both “keeping you safe”  - still in contradiction to the WHO advice - and preventing another lockdown. Could it be that this rhetoric which has metastasised into yet another front in the Culture War was cynically deployed as part of a strategy of providing false security and getting the economy up and running again?  

 

A second related effect of the obsession with face masks is that it conveniently deflects criticism of the government’s handling of the pandemic onto “selfish anti-maskers”, or “Covid deniers”. We find ourselves projecting all our anger and fears onto that stranger huddled in the corner of the train carriage, furtively pulling down his mask below his nose. All the tens of thousands of deaths and disruption to our daily lives is suddenly heaped upon his shoulders, and we sit fuming hoping that the weight will crush him to a bloody puddle before our eyes. Nothing is more useful to an incompetent government than a public ready to scapegoat anyone but it for the situation we find ourselves in.

 

I’m not proposing mass disobedience to the mask regulations. I have my justification for complying and in many instances there is little enforcement anyway. Masks, and the pathological rhetoric around them are irritating and a pointless locus for staging a protest. By blaming each other for non-compliance and wanting to “kill my grandparents” we avoid the real battleground which is the accelerating destruction of democratic life and its replacement with a totalitarian digital dystopia which every day is tightening its grip. The question that few are seriously posing is what kind of world do you wish to survive into? Moving “beyond the mask” means (metaphorically at least) casting off the comfort blanket and looking reality in the face.

 

The Sounds of Silence: Reflections on an Absence Part 2

I have an ambivalent relationship with the Southbank centre, which functions a little like the other side of a Yin and Yang relationship with Cafe Oto. In comparison with the cosy familiarity of Oto, the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and surrounding panoply of chain shops, bars and restaurants can seem paradigmatic of corporate saturated arts entertainment. I don't think this is an inaccurate description, but never-the-less I've undoubtedly had some of my most cherished live music experiences at the Southbank going back over 15 years. Also, as an aside, my university graduation ceremony was held at the Royal Festival Hall in 2003.

One of my earliest memories there was being blown away by a long weekend of performances of the music of Iannis Xenakis - hardcore modernist and erstwhile Greek resistance fighter (against the British I might add) - in 2004. A lightshow accompanied the electro-acoustic dissonances of his long-form tape piece La Legende d'eer, and I witnessed the most physical piano playing I've ever seen for Eonta; an example of the composer's "stochastic" music, with a score incorporating mathematical probabilities worked out by an IBM 7090 computer. In my mid-20s that stretch of the Thames was practically a second home and I'd spend sometimes two days a week roaming between London Bridge and Ralph Downes' post-war Brutalist edifices at the Southbank centre.

It was a more chilled out place back then, a place you could linger with a book and a coffee. Since the refurbishment project in the mid 2000s the area around the RFH has gradually seen the introduction of more chain restaurants, bars and faceless entertainment tat. A near permanent "street food" market is installed along the river promenade and wherever you look there are a dozen ways to be relieved of your cash. The area is now what they call a "destination". So much, so London.

The question I ponder is whether I would have been able to see such a mind blowing event as Karlheinz Stockhausen's opera Donnerstag aus licht, which I did in May last year, if it weren't for all the money undoubtedly generated by the "destination" industry. Who knows, but it's difficult to hold a grudge when you're treated to a such a feast of drama, humour, cosmic energy and maniacal genius. The opera is just one out of seven parts that make up the German composer's vast Licht cycle,  each corresponding to a day of the week and which loosely explore the history of humanity as a cosmic saga. Mostly though Donnerstag (Thursday) is an autobiographical piece of almost unfathomable egoism which casts the composer himself as a semi divine figure on a quest to redeem the world through music.

Named as Michael in the libretto, the composer is shown at three stages of life, from his childhood in the 1930s, during which time his mother is committed to an asylum and later murdered by the Nazi's; through his formative years as an aspiring composer and "world traveller" in Reise um die Erde, though to a redemptive final act in which threefold Michael - seemingly evoking the archangel of that name - does battle with Lucifer, variously appearing as a sort of goblin, a dragon, and a tap dancing trombonist. The last of these three is forced to the floor by the sound of Michael's trumpet and plays the rest of his part from a prostrate position. All of this could come across as a little vaudeville, and there were some genuinely funny moments, but the overall feeling was one of uncommon dramatic and musical force.

This was especially so in the stunning last act where a lightshow involving lasers and giant mystical symbols projected round the hall combined with a fivefold choir distributed above the main stage. The orchestra too was similarly split-up around the performance space. Together this arrangement perfectly showcased Stockhausen's theories of musical spacial dynamics, rhythm and timbre, as Maxime Pascal conducted the choral and orchestral parts into waves of sound, which from the centre of the hall appeared to sweep across the space, combine, articulate and disarticulate in the most mind boggling ways. As I walked out, euphoric, into the warm Spring air, surrounded by tourists and Saturday night revellers, I thought of the strange duality of venues like the Southbank centre, where almost transcendent works of art can be situated within a general atmosphere of stultifying banality and mass consumerism. For how long this tension can continue is anyone's guess.

I should caveat that comment by noting that in few weeks later in July I saw a showcase of the small, independent label Village Green at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the RFH's little sister venue) which despite being on a much lower budget managed to put on a memorable night of electronically inflected modern classical music. Ben Chatwin's set, drawing on his two albums from 2018, was a masterclass in integrating live electronics with classical instrumentation. The composer/musician orchestrated things from behind his large modular synthesizer in duet with a single cellist seated centre stage. The perfectly pitched dramatic and filmic soundscapes, in combination with a tasteful light show accompaniment brought to mind the best of Hans Zimmer or the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. Despite this seemingly stripped down arrangement the music easily filled out the Purcell concert space.  Much appreciation went to the efficient air conditioning system at the venue, which did fine work on what was the hottest day of the year.

Since I'm covering the better known and funded of London's arts venues I should give a mention to the Barbican centre which I would contend in general has a broader and more radical program of performances compared to the Southbank, and 2019 was no exception. All but one of my four visits were in the last three months of the year and took in Alessandro Cortini and Suzanne Ciani's trippy modular synthesizer music as well as elegiac piano improvisation from Nik Bärtsch. The Bärtsch show, part of the London Jazz festival and titled When the Clouds Clear, was a collaboration with artist Sophie Clements, who created a very Zen performance space within the Barbican's main hall, requiring the Swiss pianist to cross a small bridge across a pool of water to reach his piano stool.

I'd seen Bärtsch at the Barbican some years before fronting his "Zen funk" band Ronin; all complex polyrhythms and nods towards playful Reichian minimalism. Here, alone at the keys, a more expansive, less formally constrained pianist emerged. As a shaft of light projected from above passed slowly across the water surrounding the piano, Bärtsch is leaning inside the instrument, scraping, tapping and plucking at the wires. Passages of free improvisation like this break out into slowly developing rhythmic excursions, vaguely following the images projected behind him. A drifting melodic improvisation accompanies scenes of endless sunlit seas, which as the weather turns stormy transform into a maelstrom of repeated percussive strikes on the keys. These shifts from melodic to atonal and rhythmic playing were particularly affective, never more so as the storm clouds cleared and the light shining down upon Bärtsch's watery performance space was mirrored by an equally bright shift in tone colour and accent.

There was an undoubted romance to some of these scenes of nautical and environmental strife, and Bärtsch's response to them; as if the studied and metaphysically restrained form of his other groups had to be resolutely left behind and something of the human in raw confrontation with nature made to appear. I'd taken the risk of bringing a new partner to the show, perhaps half-knowingly as a test. Though not a regular concert goer or aficionado of the byways of jazz and classical music, she was moved by the uncommon mix of pathos and brute nature that was brought into conjunction during that all too brief hour.

The other performance of note, bringing together two brilliant black multidisciplinary artists and electronic musicians was Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa), who headlined a show accompanied by the London contemporary orchestra and supported by fellow traveller Klein. The former brought to the Barbican's Milton Court Concert Hall an eerie visual and sonic incantation titled The Great Bailout (a reference to compensation paid to slave owners) which the venue described as a free verse poem that acts as a non-linear word map about colonialism, slavery and commerce in Great Britain and the commonwealth. Backed by a giant LED light union jack and flanked by an heterodox ensemble of percussion, strings, and piano, Ayewa riffs on the words to the English national anthem, which in her hands becomes a post-apocalyptic funeral dirge in remembrance of the victims of British and European colonialism in African and the Caribbean. "Has the Queen been saved? Have her plantations been saved?" she intones as short bursts of martial drums cut across string glissandi. 

This was my second encounter of the year with the London Contemporary Orchestra, after a baffling experience in May watching Robert Ames conducting an interpretation of Stockhausen's Welt-Parlament with contributions from avant-techno explorer Actress and his AI project Young Paint. The AI's contribution, apart from fidgeting on a screen to the right of the stage, was little more than firing off the occasional random spoken phrase based on Stockhausen's admitted quite barmy score which uses a choir to stage an imaginary world parliament debating the nature of love (always with the big ideas that man). Young Paint continues the trend of artificial intelligence appearing either terrifying or shit; there appears to be no middle ground. The players performing with Moor Mother raised themselves to the task of improvising around her jittery electronics and powerful poetry, with only the occasional shoehorning of an ascending piano scale sounding a touch out of place amid Ayewa's smouldering and primarily atonal sturm and drang.

Larger concert halls such as these carry with them the risk of audience disengagement. That you are often at a considerable distance from the performers can lead to torpor or estrangement; the mind can wander, and not every audio/visual show can adequately fill such spaces as they have at the Barbican and Southbank. There was something a little forlorn about Alessandro Cortini behind his little table at the centre of that huge stage, hands busy with Buchla synthesizer and sundry audio processing devices. Conversely the small venue or club space remains the heartland of live electronics. There's some music that just doesn't feel right experienced sitting down in the comfy seats. There were no such thing in April last year at Aures, a relatively new space built into an arch buried below Waterloo station next to the famous "Banksy tunnel". What took the Royal Festival hall a hundred musicians and an extensive audio/visual set-up, required just a sound system, a smoke machine and some blue UV lights for Roly Porter.

Porter is an interesting guy whose music came out of the aggressively highbrow post-dubstep of Vex'd in the mid-2000s. Over several albums - mostly released on Subtext Recordings - Porter has patented a lead-heavy form of bass centred electro-acoustic music, something like Xenakis might have made if he'd been brought up on Jungle rather than serialism. The comparison isn't entirely fatuous, both composers have a penchant for grand themes; in 2013 Porter released an album titled Life cycle of a Massive Star, attempting to soundtrack just that, and his latest is inspired by Neolithic burial sites and features vocalists specialising in early Medieval music. The performance I saw was of material drawn from Third Law, his 2016 album on Tri Angle records, which seemed to function almost as a work-out for the venue's immersive 360^o sound system.

Roly Porter at Aures

Earlier we'd been treated to Vaporwave outlier Bruised Skies frying our brains with bass heavy drone music which was like being inside the biggest church organ on earth while a giant played all the pipes at once. Porter's music had more light and shade, well it had different shades anyway. Passages of rolling industrial noise open out into processed choral and ambient electronic sound. There are hints of the sharper edges of Musique Concrete and electro-acoustic music; strings rise up out of the seething mass of low end reverberations only to be crushed by an incoming wave of metallic rhythm. With all the smoke, blue light and pummelling audio tectonics you'd be forgiven for believing yourself part of some military backed psychological experiment in sensory overload.

Round the corner is another small alternative venue to the Southbank, where no such brute displays of multi-sensory muscle are on show. Iklectic is part of a community space which includes an urban farm, a theatre and a couple of tech start-ups. Essentially a reclaimed shed, in April I saw Dave Knight and Steven Thrower's post-industrial psych outfit Unicazurn put on a suitably trippy performance of boiled electronics and saxophone improvisation. Thrower spent a number of years as a member of Coil, perhaps the most celebrated and cultishly adored of the 2nd wave of industrial acts. Their quasi-mystical and often quite subversive music drew heavily on the English esoteric tradition from Aleister Crowley to William Blake. It was a nice coincidence that opposite Iklectic is Centaur Street which has been decked out in mosaics replicating some of Blake's images from works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Europe: A Prophecy.

The street is located near to the former site of The Hercules buildings (nice for the modern street to continue the theme of mythical figures), where Blake and his wife Catherine lived from 1790 to 1800. I can in some tangential way thank Blake for introducing me to Coil in the late 90s after discovering Norwegian avant-black metal band Ulver's album Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Scandinavian group were Coil fanboys, drawing similar inspiration from the English poet and engraver as a symbol for an alternative notion of England to that which developed out of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian age. It's a countercultural aesthetic that remains very close to my heart.

Reclaimed spaces like Iklectic are very much in vogue, often following in the wake of gentrification. It's unsurprising then that East London has more than it's fair share, repurposing the area's manufacturing and industrial heritage as a playground for Home Counties parvenus, whose taste for all things twee and "local" disguises an aggressive tendency towards exclusion. Next time a white middle class person heralding from Oxfordshire tells you how "up and coming" Leyton or Forest Gate have become, ask yourself 'who is it that is being moved on to make this happen?' This is the dark side of all this chirpy hipster fun and games I've been describing. Iain Sinclair calls London the captured city; captured that is not by this or that corporation or shadowy group, but by the forces of finance, of  "development" itself. Never did so plain a word harbour such significant consequences for those subjected to its irresistible advance.

 

Few boroughs have experienced more of this than Hackney. The Pickle factory, close to the Bethnal Green gas holders, is another reclaimed space now operating as part of a multipurpose arts/entertainment/commerce venture, which in addition to the ubiquitous cafe also includes corporate events space and a creative co-working space for enterprising gig economy types. Demand for the latter seems likely to suffer post-covid (the new PC). In late June I experienced a lovely evening of immersive ambient music headlined by Rod Modell's Deepchord and The Chi Factory (Hanyo van Oosterom) all whilst reclining on pillows distributed around the stage. All these kinds of places are rustic and basic in what they offer; a pop-up bar, little by way of seating, but also the chance to get up close and personal with the artists; that's the sell, that's why I go.

A mile north as the crow flies from the Pickle Factory is the rechristened Victorian public house The Glove That Fits. Another new venture of the last three years, turning what must have been a humdrum boozer into yet another edgy arts venue. Truth be told the sound system is great and the atmosphere in the dank basement (dank in the conventional way) is a tight, improbably shaped space to experience more of the Capital's cutting edge electronic music. I was there to see a fairly unique line-up of "post vaporwave" artists associated in one way or another with the Dream Catalogue label, fronted by alternative scouse rapper and enfant terrible of the "Dreampunk" scene David Russo (otherwise known as HKE, Air Japan, DARKPYRAMID, Martin Smith, Future City Love Stories, Henry Moonchild and at least two dozen other monikers).

 

For an ostensibly internet based music scene the turnout wasn't bad. The music, which takes influences from pathos soaked variants on ambient techno, to trap, dubstep and even Kpop, wasn't bad either and had the crowd of mostly lone hoodie wearing white males dancing along. You couldn't imagine a gig like this happening in any other part of the UK. For better or worse London, and the East End in particular has become a global Mecca for the cutting edge of electronic music, second only perhaps to Berlin.

Practically all the experiences and anecdotes above involve significant proximity to other gig goers. That's part of the fun. A sparsely populated gig is rarely a good one and at least part of the joy of live music is experiencing it  alongside other people as enraptured with it as you are. As long as coronavirus legislation is active then the kinds of intimate venues described above will remain closed. After all, intimacy itself has more or less been banned. Music venues as sites of mingling, where individuals and bodies loosen their boundaries, allowing something of the other to enter are thus under serious threat. Modern power has an innate fear of the kinds of scenes one witnesses at a rave,  rock concert or intimate live performance. From a certain perspective those bodies tightly packed-in, losing themselves in the sights and sounds of the show, are analogous to political protests, the gathered multitude. These are events of noise, crowds, and a certain release, if only temporary from our lives of possessive individualism.

The doors of music venues across London and indeed Europe have been closed for half a year. The larger ones, the Barbicans and Southbanks and Royal Albert Halls of this world may well have the resources and cash reserves to survive, though almost certainly not without shedding a large number of the their staff; a process which is well underway across the arts sector. Smaller venues like those I've described above may very well not survive at all. Many are run on a shoe string, leveraging the good will of volunteers while building links with their local community.

While the government has prioritised getting shops, pubs and restaurants back open, next to nothing has been done to safeguard the arts sector, least of all proposing some way music venues and theatres can reopen their doors. With no end in sight, and indeed a second wave of the pandemic seemingly on the way, the prospects looks bleak. Live music in London is a shining beacon in what can otherwise be a very alienating and unfriendly place. More than that it's an activity that can break down the doors of perception, allowing an escape from the everyday and opening people up to new sensations beyond what is spoon fed to us by the culture industry.  That culture industry - the counterpart to the world of finance and "development" - would not mourn the loss of London's small independent venues. Unless the tide turns and the arts sector is either supported or allowed to reopen then we may emerge with a very different and lamentable live arts landscape.

... the corporate muzak echoing through socially distanced covid-secure bars drowns out the sound of silence from London's once vibrant live music scene ...