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 ...

The Sounds of Silence: Reflections on an Absence Part 1

Of all the things which vanished beneath the influx of Coronavirus in March, live music is the one I miss most of all. In the warmer months I can do without the stuffy interiors of London's pubs, to say nothing of their elevated prices and near ubiquitous bad taste in piped music.  In the 90s and early 2000s London was awash with what used to be called "stand-up drinking" bars. An apt description for bare rooms blasting out bottom drawer House and Garage as a soundtrack to high speed alcopop and cheap lager abuse. 

 

The premise was simple and still holds true, that if you deprive the punter of their capacity for discourse - principally somewhere to sit and the ability to converse with others without spittling directly into their ears - then they tend to fall back onto swigging whatever beverage they happen to be holding. This greatly increases both the house's revenue and work for the door staff and local constabulary. Those days are largely gone from the London area, but the tendency for pubs and bars to pump out garbage from their licensed speaker systems has sadly remained. Hence my frustration at the prospect of yet more months deprived of London's live music scene.

London's Astoria just prior to demolition

The shutdown came at a time when I was spending more of my unlaboured hours at London's music venues than ever before, with 2019 having been an especially memorable year for shows. Many of the city's larger and medium sized venues have gone the way of the dodo over the last 20 years, with rapacious developers, Crossrail and general mismanagement being the main causes. Of particular regret was the loss of the Astoria on the Charing Cross Road where I enjoyed many a sweaty night during the late 90s and early 2000s, watching bands like Pitchshifter, Katatonia and emo-cybergoth darlings VNV Nation. I'd never really enjoyed arena gigs, the sound always being such a disappointment. Repurposed warehouses like the thankfully demolished Docklands Arena and the O2 Arena (housed in Tony Blair's Great White Elephant the Millennium Dome) are little more than airy placeholders around which cluster the usual dour set of main-street eateries and overpriced corporate booze vendors.

 

It was only last year that I had my first experience of the latter as a venue for live music, having never before had occasion to fork out the entry price for an uncomfortable seat up in the Gods of the O2. Massive Attack's reprise of their truly classic album Mezzanine was what had me trekking round Greenwich Peninsular that mild February evening, past the concrete factory and recycling centre. And then, emerging out of the gloom, in the midst of all that dust and grime is a driving range, floodlights glaring out across the Thames towards Canary Wharf. Coming across its high boundary fence rising into the dark winter sky was most disorientating.  This is an area which symbolises the piecemeal way much of the East of London has been developed over the last few decades. During the 19th and much of the 20th century it was home to the Capital's heavy industry, including an asbestos plant and Europe's largest gas works. 

The O2 Arena

The opening of the Blackwall tunnel in 1897 connected the by then heavily contaminated soil of Bugsby's marshes with the docks on the north side of the Thames. Even with the arrival of the London Underground in 1999 it still has the feel of an isolated place to me, somewhere you put things out of way. Massive Attack's set, 150 yards ahead and below my position was a fug of incomprehensible bass and juddering percussion. All the finely crafted dynamics of their dark dub-rock masterpiece were lost in the acoustic illiteracy of that giant tent. Thankfully the shear sonic force needed to fill such large spaces naturally excluded a lot of the music I was getting into in my 20s. By my 30s I naturally tended towards the city's numerous intimate venues.

 

2019 had started auspiciously with a week-long festival at Cafe Oto dedicated to the music of the late French composer and electronic music pioneer Luc Ferrari. I've written about him before  where I talked about his capacity to craft sensual  - dare I say sexy - tape compositions, brimming with desire. The four shows I attended in the second week in February took in every facet of Ferrari's oeuvre, from his "anecdotal" tape compositions,  scored and improvised instrumental works and some of the wilder examples of his musical imagination. Now, Cafe Oto is one of those places that gets under your skin. It was opened in 2008 by Hamish Dunbar and his partner Keiko Yamamoto and has since then forged a deserved reputation as London's premier venue for experimental and improvised music. 

 

I first started going around 2011, though I have no memory of what I saw on that occasion. What sticks in my mind from that evening was the shock at having boarded a London Overground train at Richmond to step out 45 minutes later at Dalston Kingsland into what looked like another city. This was prior to the shockwave of gentrification emanating from Hoxton and Shoreditch reaching that far up the A10. Whatever it was I saw that evening was the first of countless gigs I've attended at this most cherished of venues. Last year was a record at seventeen visits.

 

As the name indicates, Oto is a cafe during the day, a single low ceilinged room with no obvious stage, peppered with a few small marble-topped tables and distinctly uncomfortable wooden chairs. At one end is the bar and at the other the sound system, rigged up upon a gantry, hanging from the ceiling, speakers pointing out in three directions above an otherwise unremarkable area of concrete floor. At night the place is transformed. The little tables and chairs are arranged around the ostensible performance area, which can be anywhere in the room, not just between the speakers. Recently they've taken a leaf out of the Boiler Room's book and started having the more dance orientated acts perform at a table in the centre of the space, allowing the audience to surround them. Hiro Kone's set which I saw in November was run this way. 

 

Jenny Hval at Cafe Oto 2015 (picture - tim@encosion.com)

The first night of the Ferrari festival I witnessed had French turntable wizard ErikM deconstructing the late composer's concrete sound archive with help from Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and Thurston Moore; yes that Thurston Moore, who is apparently a denizen of Stoke Newington and makes the occasional appearance at Oto. He was around all week, owing to his involvement with a large compendium of Ferrari's scores and writing that was being published to coincide with the festival. Based on the recordings I'd heard I'd not expected ErikM's set to be quite so physical. He positively wrestled with his equipment, hurling out jagged fragments of sound like shrapnel. A looped phrase in French is sundered by a distorted slam like a boot on a metal panel. Pieces of incidental field recordings, animals, the rustling of leaves, morsels of glossolalia like half remembered thoughts ricochet between the speakers. Where Scanner chose to frame this hailstorm of sound against a gossamer of ambience, Moore amped it up further, intervening with waves of distortion from his electric guitar.

 

By far the most unusual and memorable of the four nights I spent that week amid the candlelight and craft beer of Cafe Oto was the third where I saw Aine O'Dwyer & Graham Lambkin perform one of Ferrari's most mysterious compositions, Unheimlich Schon (1971). The subtitle to this work - or is it in fact the score? - asks "how does a young woman breath when her mind is elsewhere?" There must have been something in the water in Paris that year as in 1971 Ferrari also completed Pornologos (of indeterminate duration, for private individuals or groups) for which he produced a score which he admitted was "almost unattainable". He also began work on one of his masterpieces, Danses Organiques (1971-1973) a remarkable expression of erotic power borne through the medium of tape manipulations, which follows two women - as the composer reveals in his notes - who meet for the first time and make love. Something of this erotic tension and mad attempt to fill the often sterile medium of concrete music with desire was present in the performance that night at Cafe Oto.

 

The realisation of the score of Unheimlich Schon is on the surface remarkably simple. It involves only microphones and a means of generating feedback on the signals they generate. The 1971 recording of the piece released in 1993 by the Metamkine label in France featured a single female voice repeating the title, her voice subjected to the most subtle of electronic manipulations and beneath which - sometimes around or above which - comes the breath which bears the erotic charge. This charge became a explosion in ultra slow motion in the hands of Aine O'Dwyer & Graham Lambkin, who, taking the basic premise, twist and turn this most pared back of performances into a tense shadow play of bodily and linguistic intensities. The key to the realisation was the use the duo made of mobile phones, which connected to each other allowed cunning use of feedback as the phone speakers were moved around the microphones, and when brought into proximity with each other. 

 

Luc Ferrari with his wife Brunhild

 

A delicate physical balance was on show where the repeated phrase of the title was joined by the question "how does a young woman breath when her mind is elsewhere?" This "elsewhere" was the unnameable void around which the two performers circled, entwining themselves and their equipment into an uncannily beautiful (which is a literal translation of the title) and perfectly poised display of erotic tension, which could actually be heard in the building of layers of controlled feedback between the human voice and its technological mediation. We, the audience sat in silence, voyeurs, captivated by this spectacle taking place a few feet in front of us. This is the magic of live music when experienced at a venue like Cafe Oto, where the intimate proximity between performers and audience can give rise to profound moments when the gap between the two seems to blur.

 

Dalson has no shortage of independent venues. During the year I visited two others within a few hundred meters of Cafe Oto, different in their own ways but similarly catering for more off the beaten track musical experiences. Evolutionary Arts Hackney (EartH) opened a couple of years ago, taking over the derelict site of the Hackney Savoy Cinema; a sumptuous venue  that includes two performance spaces and a kitchen. It was in May that I visited for the first time, passing up through the renovated, modern and rather spartan dining area before emerging out into what was formerly the large cinema auditorium. From the street you'd have no idea that such a gem of a place existed, as the bulk of the building lies behind a discrete entrance on Stoke Newington road flanked by Turkish restaurants and a barber shop.

Little has been done to bring it into the 21st century aside from making the space safe. The splendid sense of dilapidation, with bare masonry, peeling paintwork and decayed art deco fixtures is wonderfully atmospheric.  The former cinema is mostly all standing now, though on this occasion a few rows of chairs had been set up precariously along the front two wooden terraces; a concession to the more relaxed and cerebral atmosphere anticipated for the night's performers, The Necks. If Dalston were to have an in-house jazz band then it would be Australia's The Necks. The trio's regular residencies at Cafe Oto have become the stuff of legend;  a perfect place to showcase their unique blend of improvisation. Always oversubscribed a move to the larger auditorium up the street made sense. Ostensibly a classic jazz trio of Lloyd Swanson on double bass, Chris Abrahams on piano and Tony Buck on drums, their live and recorded output belies any preconception about what such trios should sound like. Each "song" ranges from twenty minutes to over an hour, often building up from quietly probing melodic lines from Abrahams piano or plucked strings from Swanson's bass. They've been variously described as ambient jazz, drone jazz or minimal electro-acoustic jazz. So there's jazz there, that we can be sure of. 

The Necks taking the applause

Whether or not they agree beforehand some direction for their live performances the result is always a unique and powerful expression of three musicians entirely in tune with each other. Long passages of raga like melodies can be followed by wild percussive interludes, droning improvisations with Abrahams scraping the strings of the piano, or Swanson firmly redirecting the piece with carefully placed interventions with his bass. All of this somehow comes back round to finish, often where they started, with those beautiful phrases from the piano. The acoustics at EartH were divine, and in the decayed splendour of the art deco cinema a different concept of time seemed at work. Moments were stretched or compressed according to the logic of The Necks. A single bass note could last an age, only to be followed by passages so full of musical life that you'd be convinced you were experiencing them at high speed. The distinctly unmodernised interior of EartH only added to the sense of being somewhere else, somewhere better.

 

A little further East from Cafe Oto, along Dalston Lane and you'll find a very different type of venue. SET Dalston is part of a multifaceted arts and community organisation with sites around the city. Visually it resembles a converted cafe or small restaurant with a performance space to one side. The roster of events is resolutely DIY with nights dedicated to poetry, modern folk, free improvisation and electronic experimentation, often featuring local artists. In October myself and a friend - admittedly "three sheets to the winds" enjoyed the wild sounds of the Chinabot label; a pioneering imprint, who in their own words are attempting to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music. Their roster includes artists based in Thailand, South Korea, India, and China itself, as well as a "digital diaspora community" based in Western countries, combining the sounds of traditional Asian music with European experimental styles.

Ohyung

 My memory of the night is a little hazy but the standout act for me was New York based Ohyung who performed an energetic set of noisy trap and synthesizer variants held together by witty socially conscious rapping, often touching on themes of racial injustice and the historical experience of the Asian diaspora in the United States. His track Park Slope is a case in point, with the repeated refrain of "Park Slope moms got black babysitters. Park Slope moms got yellow babysitters", highlighting the cosseted life and double standards of the liberal middle class in one of Brooklyn's most hipster districts. Playing to the crowd he called out for suggestions for a similarly 'BoBo' neighbourhood in London. He seemed surprised that most thought Dalston itself most fit the mould, but he happily swapped out the lyrics as my friend and I listened from a sofa in a darkened corner, close to where an upright piano had been stored out of sight beneath a black sheet. At some point during his set I began accompanying Ohyung with a few hammered low notes from out of the dark. The craft beer flows in these places.

 

I'd originally been turned onto Chinabot after researching around the work of Lawrence Lek, the filmmaker and multimedia artist whose remarkable Geomancer film I'd seen at the Bomb Factory near Archway earlier in the year. It's symbolic of London's dynamic underground arts scene that Lek later turned up at Cafe Oto playing guitar and electronics while operating his "open-world" game 2065, as it was projected onto the back wall of the performance space. The concept on the "game," like much of Lek's oeuvre, draws on themes around big-data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence to imagine a world where digital technologies have eliminated work, leaving people free to play video games all day. His films are startling CGI generated worlds which combine the artist's formal education in architecture with a gamers sensibility for space and possibility; all bound up with a vaguely apocalyptic and dystopian atmosphere. 

 

The night's performance included a walk through a virtual reality Dalston, complete with Cafe Oto rendered as a post Brexit war torn landscape. In November I saw Lek pull a similar trick at Somerset house using the room's neoclassical features as a canvas to mash together footage of Extinction Rebellion's London actions with his futuristic post-work urban environments. There seemed to be an implied criticism of UK arts institutions for their close financial relationships with major fossil fuel companies such as Shell, who under pressure from activists had earlier in the year ended their relationship with the Southbank Centre. The British Museum and Tate Galleries have come under similar pressure in relation to some of their major sponsors.

From the Corona of a Fading Star: Lockdown Musings

The other day I was sitting in my living room reading. It was hot and I had the windows open on two sides. Cool clean air blew in, bringing with it a slight scent of the cedar trees at the front of the building.  I was reading The Mirror and the Light, the concluding part to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. Unlike the first two volumes, which are very much historical "blockbusters", this third part is a more modernist affair; serpentine and elusive in its depiction of the last years of Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII. Nevertheless I was making good headway and the lockdown had given me an excuse to spend more time on the sofa immersed in the world of the 16th century expertly conjured by Mantel.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I never usually do that, have the big front window open for any length of time, and especially when I'm trying to concentrate on something. It opens out onto the main road and is directly in line with the aircraft that until recently would fly only a few hundred feet over my home as they come in to land at Heathrow. But these days are unlike any we've seen in living memory, certainly not since the planes started making their descent over West London, forcing a significant proportion of the capital's population to endure near permanent roaring noise from early morning through to late evening.

The other thing I noticed was the presence of many little birds in the garden. I'd heard their distinctive twittering, which contrasts with the irritating noise made by the green parakeets which like to hang out in the cherry blossom tree directly next to my bedroom window. It's as if the absence of those great mechanical birds of human invention has encouraged the more meek and attractive of London's flying creatures out of wherever they've been cowering all these years.

Even though West London is very green compared to other parts of the city I rarely see much wildlife, apart from the deer in Richmond park, urban foxes and the occasional heron. No stoats in the hedgerows. No minke whale gliding down the Thames past Old Isleworth. I've only ever seen a badger in the wild once in my life and it was running along the grass next to the A316, seemingly heading for a night out in Twickenham. I thought someone had spiked my drink. I'm an incurably urban person and still feel anxious if I happen to end up in a field with cows or horses.

I've been very lucky in lockdown. I'm on the first floor of a small block, not two dozen floors up, shut into a little box where the windows don't open and the lift is always broken. I'm able bodied and can exercise every day if I want. And most of all I'm still working, and in a relatively safe environment. More than that I'm contributing towards the development of a vaccine for coronavirus (or SARS Cov-2 as it is listed on our technical documents). It's an odd experience in the midst of this world historical event to hear projects you're involved with discussed on the radio. To hear that arrogant right wing blowhard Nick Ferrari interview someone whose name you've seen on internal emails. I don't envy people shut into their homes all day with only a short trip to the shops or local walk to break up the monotony. In truth the weekday routine between work and home is monotonous enough. Without trips out into the city it's all blurring into grey on grey.

I miss the technicolor of Soho and Dalston, of the crowds in the West End, hipsters and un-hipsters, even the tourists at the Tate and British museum. I even miss the smells of public transport. Isn't that strange? I'd never thought about how the underground smells before, but now I haven't been on it for nearly seven weeks I'm struck by the absence of that sooty, metallic, vaguely burning smell which mixes with the odours of the people who you squeeze up against; eyes fixed to floor, ceiling or phone. Never risk meeting the gaze of the Other, not in-between stations anyway. There are undoubtedly people in this city for whom the daily commute forms the most intimate experience of their lives. I wonder if they miss it the way separated couples yearn for each other's bodies?

London as tropical paradise, Battersea Park, April 2020

Cycling out West I reach the river at Hampton and head out towards Chertsey. It's striking how the character of the built environment changes once you get beyond Hampton Court, as if it functions as some ancient boundary marker or invisible checkpoint. On one side metropolitanism, on the other, "Gammon country". It's also Ballard country. Weybridge, Addlestone and Chertsey, Byfleet and New Haw; a network of satellite towns around the Western expanse of the M25 where JG Ballard set his final novel Kingdom Come. Brooklands, where the doyen of dystopian fiction located the shopping mall around which much of the novel's action happens is a real place and home to a large retail park. That's as far as the similarities go however, as the book's evocation of "St George's shirt" wearing street gangs, sports obsessives, and race riots is fanciful in the extreme to anyone who has visited these places.

Ballard actually makes this dullest of suburban enclaves sound far more multicultural than it actually is. Cycling through Weybridge or Shepperton (where Ballard lived in a non descript semi-detached house) you'd be fortunate to see any non-white faces on the street. As I cycled over Chertsey bridge a middle aged white man, his face partially covered with a scarf was standing at the kerb wagging his finger furiously at the few cyclists who were passing. "You're only allowed out for an hour, yeah!" This was his admonishment to the lycra clad hordes surging over into Surrey like Visigoths in homeopathic concentrations that Sunday morning. He looked like he'd been there a while.

There's a libidinal economy at work in following rules, a rather sad pleasure in submitting yourself to the other's demands, regardless of whether the other is really bothered or not. The psychoanalysts know this well. Masochism is an extreme variant; the self flagellating monk always gave a couple more thwacks of the whip than was strictly required by the demands of penance. Stalinism and modern managerialism continue the tradition in their own ways; fluffing up the superego, garlanding the cop inside your head. It's a matter of anticipating the other's demand and then punishing yourself a little more.  

Since the lockdown this tendency has become a real dividing line between people. You can quickly gauge which side of it a person is on as you pass them in the street. Two meters just isn't enough. I've seen people trying to squeeze themselves into cracks in the walls at twelve paces away. I see large anxious men out jogging, suffocating beneath dust masks while they work off the effects of a 24hour Pringles binge. Out in the suburbs I observed quieter streets, fewer people exercising, more obedience, and a heightened feeling of being watched. Lockdown has validated tendencies that are quintessentially "little England". The edgelands of West London are a natural breeding ground for radical curtain twitchers; people who call radio shows to demand the army shoot sunbathers in Hyde park.

NHS/Key Worker tribute Barnes, May 2020

During the first two weeks of the lockdown I seriously contemplating putting in a request to be furloughed from my job. Even though I was employed I felt obsolete, cocooned in a routine that was a little too close to normal but without any of the things which break up "normal" and render it tolerable, i.e. the excesses. Most of all those excesses shared with others. I had in mind to volunteer as a porter at West Middlesex hospital. I'd been a porter a Kings College Hospital, Lambeth (where I was born) for several months before I went to university. I remember it as a rather rewarding occupation; dashing around delivering pharmaceuticals to wards; roaming the hospital's vast Victorian basement and running up six flights of stairs carrying twenty kilos of intravenous fluids to the liver failure unit. That was a grim place, high throughput.

I also had this image of Ludwig Wittgenstein working as a porter at Guys Hospital, London Bridge during the blitz. It was typical of the man, who during his military service in WW1 would demand to be sent to the most dangerous and disease ridden posts on the Western and Russian fronts, despite apparently being eligible for a medical exemption that would have kept him away from the action entirely.  He evidently felt a desperate need to test himself, to find out if he was worthy of living. It's an ethic I deeply admire. There's a blue plaque at Guys (at the part that's now Kings College Student Union), close to the statue of John Keats, which commemorates the Austrian philosopher's contribution. I've felt a bit more useful since I've been working on vaccines for the present pandemic. Essential work, but behind the front lines.

I've been reading a lot of "down and out" literature during lockdown; Knut Hamsun, Charles Bukowski. It's the OUT part that's attractive right now. A great deal of Hamsun's Hunger takes place on the streets of his fictional city Kristiania. I find myself envious of characters in novels who enjoy chance encounters while out Flâneuring. It's an experience which the surrealist André Breton called The Marvellous. Right now there is little marvellous about being around other people out of doors. They cower, shrink and avoid eye contact. Either that or they ostentatiously barge through sending the fearful scurrying into corners. The great surge of public feeling towards health workers is not mirrored in the everyday experience of shopping for groceries. At the supermarket - which is now marked out like a cross between a military exercise and a Japanese gameshow - people do not speak, nor do they linger to peruse the inessential items on the shelves that once captivated them. Alcohol is an essential item, especially alcohol.

Face coverings are becoming more common and with them an increasing sense of distance and alienation. Seeing the faces of other people is closely linked to a feeling of shared ethical experience, as Levinas teaches: "the facing position, opposition par excellence, can be only as a moral summons. [...] The epiphany of the face is ethical". Combine this creeping 'covering-up' with the suspicion that what lurks beneath the veil is contamination and potential death for you and your loved ones, then the suggestion that the pandemic will lead to the rediscovery of "real life" encounters away from digital mediations sounds like fools hope.

Hammersmith, April 2020

I don't suffer from the agoraphobia that has taken hold of otherwise reasonable people lately. While I follow the guidance for social distancing I bend the stick where my sanity and sense of autonomy require. Exercise once a day? No problem, how's an 18 mile walk to Battersea and back sound to you?; how's 50km on the bike up to Finsbury park and back? Throw in a loop around Kensington for good measure. London streets are rarely this empty and safe, so why pass up the opportunity? In the long run stick bending is better for your health than cowering under the bedclothes with the miasmas. One's immediate response to the imposition of a rule - especially when that rule comes from government - should not be to obey but to interpret. We are all jurists in the court of our own reason. Improvising around rules, as opposed to blind obedience, is what distinguishes adults from children. It's also what makes jazz great.

A friend of mine told me that his sister and their family had taken to building dens out of tree branches in their garden. He'd been led to believe this was an "on-trend" activity among the "gardened" classes under lockdown. I thought of the characters at the end of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, hurriedly building just such a symbolic shelter, as the vast form of the green planet hurtling towards them envelopes the horizon before annihilating everything in a firestorm. In the film, building the den was preferred to the suggestion made by Charlotte Gainsbourg's character to drink wine on the veranda. I'm yet to grasp the sentiment, so am still occasionally drinking beer in the park, sans shelter.

Melancholia highlights another prescient phenomena, that of the thriving lockdown depressive. The reasoning has it that persons of a depressive or pessimistic outlook find less has changed in the world relative to their expectations and so find it easier to adapt. This has been termed depressive realism, which broadly supposes that non-depressed people hold a “positivity bias” which colours their general outlook, whereas the supposed “negativity bias” of the depressive actually gives a more realistic appraisal of the world. Research has yet to bear this out, but right now who can argue with them?

60% of people in a recent poll would feel uncomfortable going outside even if the government lifted lockdown restrictions. Whether this is irrational fear of the outdoors or rational fear that the government is lying to them about it being safe is unclear. The truth is that long before the fateful meeting between a bat and pangolin in a Wuhan wet market, the nation's collective mental state had been none too robust. Incidentally, throw in a Catholic priest to the above ensemble and you've got the set-up for the best joke of 2020.

The last two years of Brexit chaos have resulted in huge levels of political fatigue and generalised social angst. In the autumn last year, leading up to the general election there were times - usually after some divisive outburst from Boris or one of his "disaster nationalist" minions - that I could feel the tension and discontent in the train carriages as I travelled into Waterloo. A frequent smell of strong booze and an equally strong feeling that given half a chance things could seriously kick off. It's hardly surprising considering the degree of cognitive dissonance we've been subjected to over the last few years that many people would rather shelter at home regardless of what the government says. Coronavirus could be fake news or Godzilla in invisible form. Either way it's safer in the toilet roll igloo, with the box sets and free porn. 

Walking the city is a delight. Whenever I've spent substantial time walking across London previously I've always ended up with a layer of grime to wash off myself at my destination (that's pollution not UK Hip-hop). I can't usually wear contact lenses for more than a few hours in the city centre because of all the airborne filth. But on the walks I've taken into zone 1 over the last month it's undeniable how much clearer and fresh the air is. Roads are quiet, frequented now by an increasing number of families who go out cycling in unison. Some of them could do with a bit of practice, but it's preferable I think to dodging shark-eyed and over caffeinated commuters on their racing bikes trying to beat their personal best from Bank to Putney. If this crisis does lead to an increase in cycling in the capital I hope it looks more like cycling in the centre of towns in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. There it's almost exclusively inexpensive hybrids people use, and the roads are restricted to cars in a variety of ways to make cycling safer for people of all ages. And you see them, grandmothers and students all together without a "performance jersey" in sight.

Cafe Oto boarded up, Dalston April 2020

The square mile is especially ghostly right now. Cycling east through Chiswick I reach Hyde park and head along South Carriage Drive until I cross the A4 and pass underneath the Wellington arch, upon which sits the monumental bronze quadriga carrying the goddess Nike, resplendent astride her chariot. In Shoreditch and Elephant and Castle local artists have painted murals depicting NHS nurses in PPE. They stare out like images of saints and revolutionaries seen on the sides of buildings in Latin America. Saints is perhaps more apt, the presence of the mask there to remind us of the risks frontline healthcare workers are taking for our salvation. But salvation to what? 

I had the idea - an awful liberal compromise of course - that Labour should press for legislation to write the NHS as a universal, publicly funded and free at point of use health service, into the British constitution. Perhaps as part of the Royal demesne? The most attractive part of this plan is that in keeping with a long standing tradition, any attempt to sell the health service off would be deemed treasonable, as it assails the property of Crown. And who would pass up the opportunity to see the intestines of certain Conservative politicians pulled out at Tower Hill? Currently the opposition are doing little but acting like an echo chamber for the government. But hey, Starmer is "electable" and that's all that matters right?

Iain Sinclair talks about the "captured" city as a way of describing the wholesale handing over of large swaths of London to developers and the subsequent destruction of community life. Previously public spaces are privatised and securitised. The city is rendered "unnavigable" to walkers, to those who seek occluded histories buried beneath the rising towers of glass and steel. Several square kilometres around Kings Cross station have been turned into a testing ground for facial recognition technology designed by Google, whose UK headquarters sits at its heart. Fail to comply with mandated forms of consumption and you'll quickly be confronted by private security advising you to move on, the features of your visage forever consigned to the Great Memory.

The infrastructure for the kinds of technology being mooted, and in some cases rolled out, across the globe as a way to track people suspected of carrying coronavirus is already in place across much of the UK. There is a frightening similarity between the asymptomatic carrier of coronavirus who must shun physical proximity with others for the sake of potential contagion, and the logic of the security apparatus of modern states, for which all citizens are potential terrorists/subversives; a logic which time and again is used to justify increases in surveillance and mass gathering of data from the public. The present crisis will see unprecedented use of such technologies and possibly even the sharing of medical records with big data monopolies like, you guessed it, Google.

What we've totally lost over these past weeks is something that's been slowly seeping out of urban life for years; the spontaneity, the "Marvelous", the unscripted and digitally unmediated encounter. Things get worse but they don't get more interesting. That's the problem for me; an empire in decay can be an aesthetically pleasing thing, but there's nothing in the infantilised drudgery of our ever more digitally mediated dystopia to get the blood flowing, to return the witness to life more violently (to paraphrase the painter Francis Bacon). The city as an imminent space of social life is the mortal enemy of cyberspace. Perhaps, but who has time for imminence anymore? Who bothers to look up at the sky or take notice as their city is transformed into a vast gated foreign investment portfolio? What sort of metropolis of "managed flows" and "regulated exchanges" do we have to look forward to in the wake of the pandemic? What will people put up with?

Isleworth, May 2020

The seemingly opposed imperatives of preserving the economy and of preserving public health are in fact predicated on the same form of governance; the former is geared towards managing populations towards maximising capital accumulation, encouraging appropriate market behaviour, etc; while the latter strips the concept of economy (oikonomia) back to its bare bones by directing the management of people and things solely towards the preservation of biological existence. Both are quintessentially "economical" in foundation, born of a total surrender of individual and collective agency to technocratic management and sham politics. The phrase "being led by the science" is a child of the latter.

Economics presupposes a neutral domain from which it can govern. There is no such thing. Economic "science" places the burden of neutrality onto the scientific advice to which planners and politicians choose to listen. And it is resolutely a choice.  Isn't it all very convenient? In a week that the government announces its strategy for easing the lockdown, Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor whose predictions of mass death led to the lockdown in the first place, is captured by the Tory supporting Telegraph newspaper receiving his "married lover" (notice the appeal to the ever present Victorian moral sensibility there) at his home against his own advice. It's almost as if they felt they had given him too much credibility and needed to remove him from the picture to open the way for a new strategy. Discrediting him as a "lockdown hypocrite" delegitimizes in advance any criticisms he might make of the government's management of the crisis.

I mentioned the Giorgio Agamben controversy in brief in one of my previous "plague" pieces. It's a measure of the unthinking "will-to-cancel" that is so common now among apparently educated people that a philosopher who has done more than most to spell out the ever present dangers of sovereign power is cast into the proverbial pit with the conspiraloons and MAGA hat wearing neck beards. Along the fault line separating high anxiety from depressive accommodation sit those for whom any concern for a liveable future beyond the corona-horizon is tantamount to desiring mass cremation pits for the over 70s.  It's symptomatic of the reflexive impotence that grips our epoch that anyone who wants to think beyond the present crisis, to safeguard a world worth living in, are dismissed as death cultists or even Trump supporters.

It's a great shame for the Left that the open veneration of life (that is of course a "doing" word) and liberty is now most frequently articulated by the worst elements of the Right. Put aside the denialism and conspiracy theories and there are other non-Stoic, non-economic arguments against prolonging the lockdown longer than is necessary. The explosion of domestic violence and the forcing of millions of people into penury chiefly among them. I trust the mind that always questions government demands over the one that complies by default. I know who would be more likely to denounce me to the Gestapo. It is not a virtue to readily accommodate oneself to the loss of human intimacy, to allowing people to die alone, to be buried or burned without ceremony. Agamben is spot on in his observation that at no time in the history of our species have these things been forcibly prohibited by governments.

There were hopes that all this spare time might give people the opportunity to consider what is important for them in life. This is another fools hope assumption, that when bad things happen people necessarily start questioning themselves. What actually happens in the face of a major loss of control over our lives is that people often further narrow their horizons. Thinking is after all the hardest thing to do, made all the harder when a state of necessity prevails that deactivates all critical thought in favour of pure bodily survival. Constant inertia does not breed vitality of mind. There were poets in the trenches, there are none in the toilet roll igloo.

All of which makes it likely that any post crisis reinvigoration of social values will occur in an atmosphere of greater social atomisation. Whatever the next few weeks hold as the government attempts to bluster its way out of lockdown, the only certainty is that things will be different, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be better.