Ernst May & a different story of modernism

[a longer version of a review published in ICON 106 March 2012]


It is significant that as we see practically a murder of public financing and social housing policies worldwide and the death of the idea of the welfare state, the more we get exhibitions and publications on the heroic age of modernism, which was encouraging all of them. The magnificent survey Ernst May 1886-1970 - accompanying a thorough exhibition that took place in Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt am Main last year, the place where Ernst May left his enduring landmark legacy in planning and building – perfectly inscribes into the trend for 21^st century-end of times nostalgia and neoliberal fatalism. May, with his immense scope, is one to go to when yearning for the function architecture once had, and lost. He reinvented decentralized city planning and a new type of dwelling – together with Bruno Taut and Hannes Meyer. The fact this is the first English-language book on May is a result of the complicated history of modernism. As someone who didn’t attend the crucial Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne in 1933, but went to work in Soviet Russia instead, he missed the proclaiming of the Athens Charter and a different idea of modernism by Le Corbusier, Giedion and Gropius, who went to work in America soon after. May, Taut, Meyer with their interest in collective, socially managed housing, were for years obliterated by the international style stripped of any ‘red’ complications that triumphed during the cold war.

Such commemorations emerge probably against growing misuse of modernism: either as an ideology that ‘failed’, as we’re told, or that has become a luxurious hobby for middle classes, who now live in privatised social housing. This son of a wealthy Protestant factory owner got his professional break in Britain, studying under town planner Raymond Unwin, then involved in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, the pioneering development founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard, father of the Garden City Movement. Despite similar examples of ‘Siedlungs’ (settlements) like Hellerau near Dresden and Falkenberg near Berlin, it was the British new ethos – of urban decentralization, ecological conservation, communal land ownership, and humane scale - that shaped him. His various realizations in German cities, including Breslau and New Frankfurt, realised between 1925 and 30, emerged as a part of the post-WWI reconstruction of society: enticing political stability, equality and stable workforce. Within 5 years New Frankfurt contained 15,000 houses, which won May international attention also in the Soviet Union, then in the middle of  its Five Year Plan.

Initially May shared early modernist humanist presumptions. His striving for modernity seemed something natural, characterizing himself as “culpably indifferent to political matters”, left simply with no other choice but to flee Nazi rule. He and his by then famous “Brigade” (among them Mart Stam)  left Germany in 1930 for the Soviet Union, to complete “the biggest task for an architect ever”: building the lands of “enthusiasm”, as Dziga Vertov called it, the new cities on the Siberian end of the world, masterplans for Magnitogorsk, Novokuznetsk, Tyrgan, Leninsk, Kemerovo, Danube Basin and Moscow and at least ten other places (here a fragment of his "City Building in the USSR" from 1931) – something firmly denied under Stalinism. Until the post-1956 Thaw, the investigation on May’s real role in the USSR, as well as a reassessment of his political positions was difficult. At some point his activities in Standartgorproekt (Standard City Project) between 1931/2 included being in charge of over 800 employees and a leader of important governmental organisations. Later he explained his decision through a fascination for the revolutionary Soviet avant-garde. The failure of modern style, or ‘Neues Bauen’ in Russia and its abandonment for the sake of classicism and historicism had more to do with the presence of a modernist faction in the government, which was subsequently purged, as Stalin expanded his power. The austere Siedlungs still remain scattered around Russia, badly kept, looking like messages from  a better future that never happened.

Siedlungs were innovatory not only because of their functional, simple, basic form, but equally importantly because of their rejection of ownership for the sake of rent. This is visible in the design itself, in the equality of the buildings and a huge amount of the communal spaces. “This architecture derived from the idea of living in solidarity, and its realization was based on non-profit housing cooperatives. The type of ownership and architecture formed an inseparable unity which is what accounts for the epochal achievement and value of these Siedlungen,” writes DW Dreysse in the book. After work in Kenya, where the conflict between the British Army and Mau Mau left him disillusioned in the social potential of architecture, he decided to go back to West Germany in 1954, unusually for German architect of his caliber. Here he continued his work in spectacular postwar urban reconstruction for the Wirtschaftswunder. He worked as chief planner for several cities, including Hamburg, Mainz, and Wiesbaden. This amazing life, spanning three very different regimes, is a new, unknown story of the modern movement. It demands to be studied.

The many returns of Socialist Realism

[slightly changed version of an essay that appeared on the Afterall.org online]

Whatever happened to the architecture of the Eastern Bloc? The shock therapy brought in 1989 to install capitalism economically meant a year zero between the past and the present, shattering all the previous networks between countries. What followed was the biggest decline since Great Depression. The late communist economy, a distant shadow of original socialist ideas, dragged down every other dimension of life, erasing also the way cities were planned. Urban and social planning disappeared for the sake of a so-called ‘freestyle’ in architecture, reflecting the new methods of the free market. Suddenly, many carefully planned cities in the ex-Bloc started to look like cheap, Third World versions of North American über-capitalist cities, with horrifically lumpen versions of skyscrapers and financial districts. This so-called ‘style’, characteristic of so many post-Soviet metropolises (most of all, Moscow) wasn’t exactly postmodernism, although it was similar to the stylistic mish-mash of bombastic forms, pastiche historicism and love for money that typified the roughly contemporaneous style in the West. Far more apt is the term coined by Bart Goldhoorn and Philip Meuser on their book about post-1989 Russian architecture, Capitalist Realism.[1] and cultural critic Mark Fisher in a book of the same title (Zero Books, 2009).

The term was actually coined on the occasion of an exhibition by the West German group of painters, like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke or Wolf Vostell in Dusseldorf in 1963, Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, where they took their name from. Young generation of artists reacted to growing consumerism and media-saturation, and though inspired by Pop art’s attitudes, the austerity of German painters never actually shared Pop’s affirmation of capitalism hidden behind irony.

Who was building these new edifices? Did the architects of the previous system disappear? In Poland often the very same architects, whose practices had been privatized, embraced the new reality, and designed Poland’s new parodies of New York and Chicago. Their ability to work in this idiom didn’t come from nowhere, but from the specific, complicated experiences that Polish architects endured in the 1960s and 70s. In that period, they were employed en masse by underdeveloped countries, most of all in the Middle East and North Africa, to work on building and city-planning projects. In recent years, architectural historian Lukasz Stanek and his collaborators at the ETH in Zurich have been working on a research on the interaction between the former Second and Third Worlds, telling a surprising story about development and “underdevelopment”.

In the new capitalist architecture, the legacy of the socialist times was still visible, now expressed through the most grandiose and then-hated reminder of the old regime, Socialist Realism. Many tend to see Socialist and Capitalist Realisms as oppositional ideologies, which obscures how much they have in common. Traditionalism, nationalism, symmetries, grand scale – all that is reflected in both architectural styles. For example, the 90s and 00s skyscrapers of Moscow and Astana were directly modeled after those of late 40s and 50s Moscow and Warsaw, which in turn had been inspired by 1910s Chicago. What happened between Stalinist Socialist realism and Capitalist Realism were three decades of Modernism, mostly in the form of prefabricated social housing. The model for this actually came from pre-War experiences. Poland, for instance, had built Modernist, co-operative public housing estates in the 1920s and 30s. In USSR, Modernism ceased in the early 1930s when the General Plan for rebuilding Moscow demanded a new, Stalinist style termed ‘socialist in content and national in form’.[2]

The new socialist realist style, deployed after the Second World War, has effects that are still visible in all ebuilt Eastern Bloc cities. Those Polish cities, like Warsaw, that had been nearly completely destroyed by the Nazis, were reconstructed from scratch by the new, Moscow-controlled authorities. The Polish Six Year Plan (1950-1955) saw Warsaw spectacularly brought from the dead. Similarly, a building boom happened in the rest of Poland, with reconstructions of Gdańsk, Wrocław, Tychy, and the building of new towns like Nowa Huta – essentially - a steelworks colony, built by an outrageous effort between 1949 and 1954 in suburban Krakow in a grandiose Socialist Realist style, with boulevards wide enough to be able to host tanks in case of the Third World War. This was the reality of the Cold War – a constant competitiveness in all fields including technology, which the Soviet Bloc could mostly win only by propaganda. But where did the rest of the postcolonial world fit in this division?

In the ‘thaw’ of 1956 Boleslaw Bierut, the Communist Party of Poland, died, and was replaced during great turmoil by Władyslaw Gomułka, who criticized the period of Socialist Realism as “the era of errors and distortions”. This event opened a new chapter in Polish planning and architecture. What was from then state-supported was entirely opposed to the totalitarian opulence of the Stalinist Palaces of Culture - cheap, prefabricated blocks of flats. With a housing crisis still pervading society after the war, the quickly built, though initially well-planned estates started to fill the cities in the whole Bloc. Interestingly, this spectacular achievement put Eastern Bloc architects at the frontline of new ideas for housing solutions, as masterplanners and city constructors.

The success of this attracted ‘developing’ countries from outside the Eastern and Western Blocs to hire the cities’ planners and architects. Large state-owned national architectural practices like Miastoprojekt from Krakow or Energoprojekt from Belgrade started working for Middle Eastern and African countries who were members of the Non-Aligned Movement.[3] Miastoprojekt, the designers of Nowa Huta, won a prestigious competition for Baghdad’s master plan in 1967, a general housing programme for Iraq between 1976 and 1980. They continued to work in the Middle East until the 1980s.

The founding of and collaboration with the Non-Aligned Movement was part of the geo-political development of a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism. And there was a lot in between: the oil-rich Middle East, Africa emerging from colonial rule and Latin America. They were all underdeveloped and needed new kind of cities and housing. The fact that socialist Poland assisted in it was a source of prestige for urbanists, was seen as proof of the success of socialism, and thus expressed the Eastern Bloc’s political and economic support for the newly founded states. Through this, Functionalist urbanism became a global idiom in the 1960s at the hands of architects from the ‘socialist countries’. Master plans of Baghdad (1967) and Aleppo (from 1962), administrative buildings in Kabul, museums in Nigeria (from 1969), and the trade fair in Accra (1967), followed by governmental buildings in Ghana, were all drawn up by Polish architects, and were recently collected in the exhibition ‘PRL™ Export Architecture and Urbanism from Socialist Poland’[4] at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art in 2010. The exhibition showed conclusively how the USSR and its periphery, which had gone from being rural to industrial economies in rapid time, were considered by Non-Aligned countries to be a model for their own modernisation. During the 1970s this work abroad was increasingly economically motivated, as Poland had to pay off the loans taken in the 70s by the new leader Edward Gierek. As the crisis in Poland developed, it sparked a crisis of belief in ‘real socialism’ among its citizens. Polish architects were especially keen on exporting their work, as their task was completely subsumed under the requirements of the state building industry and bureaucratic apparatus.

Until a certain moment Polish skills and techniques were highly desirable. They stopped being so in the late 1970s, when imperialism moved into the Non-Aligned nations, forcibly shifting alignments: Indonesia faced a US-backed coup in the 1960s; Egypt reconciled itself to the USA after Sadat became president and in Iraq, Saddam Hussein similarly had the USA’s support. From being the forerunners of architectural planning, all of a sudden Poles had to learn and absorb a completely different architectural idiom – a more Americanised form of postmodern architecture and planning. And perhaps now that the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement were no longer neutral, they were no longer so keen to be associated with the Eastern Bloc.

Rather than being modern, from this point former Non-Aligned countries were keen to market themselves as tourist destinations and started to favour more traditional architectural styles, exoticising their otherness. Meanwhile, countries that became wealthy from oil in the 1970s soon had the wealthiest ruling class in the world. Thus they wanted to build aptly representational buildings, focusing less on housing and basic infrastructure and more on display. One can endlessly ask the question of what caused the rise of postmodernism, but it is clear that the reaction happened everywhere. Each country, in the First, Third and Second Worlds, had adopted modern architecture, so in the end an attack was made across the board on a style apparently boring, monolithic and monofunctional.

The replacement was a corporate and parodic aesthetic. Much of the criticism and pomo ideology came from the US, where the new architecture was already incorporating the elements of what was once-considered avant-garde modernism - collage, violent juxtapositions – and calling it new. Postmodern architecture’s leaders like Philip Johnson once created boring modern architecture, then decided to clad it pink and make jokes. At the same time, postmodernism was socially reactionary, stripping modernism of everything social: welfare state, equality, planning. A symptomatic case is The Iron Gate in Warsaw – a famous, Corbusian council estate built in the center of the city between 1965 and 1972, with micro-flats of 11 sq m per inhabitant. It is now overshadowed by tacky capitalist realist skyscrapers such as Atrium (built in 2001) by architects Kazimierski & Ryba, previously the designers of a ‘Sports-City’ in Latakia, Syria. The Iron Gate, criticized as “a good idea went bad”, was itself the subject of a recent film[5] - the interviews with inhabitants showed it is still often popular, with residents using the communal spaces provided in exactly in the way designers projected.





The problem there now, is the light and space permanently taken by corporate high-rises built onto the parkland originally between the blocks. It’s an interesting example of how modernist zoning (the area was zoned solely for housing) was replaced and crowded by banks, office blocks and restaurants, that all belong not only to another ‘zone’, but another social class. When the influential American writer Jane Jacobs opposed zoning, she was opposing the tendency of spaces in estates to become bleak and abandoned. But what followed was the insistance on making places “vibrant”. In the case of the Iron Gate, this meant building around the monolithic, huge and identical Ville Radieuse-style blocks in green space a net of significantly higher, clad with an especially cheap and perishable material - trespa, speculation flats & and imposing office/retail developments like Atrium. Its architects even quote Socialist Realism as a source of inspiration: “It is the only contemporary style noticeable and consequently realized in Warsaw. In the arcades and cornices of Atrium we applied a pastiche of Socialist Realism, to which we added signs of our time”: atriums, elevators, facades etc.”[6]

Some of the new ideas came from Polish architects’ earlier adaptation of modernist rules to changing local conditions in their Non-Aligned clients. This is too easily read as an embrace of ‘freedom’. In fact, Middle East countries, such as Iraq or Kuwait were much more harsh and undemocratic than any Eastern Bloc country - they treated their political opponents in a much more brutal way than General Jaruzelski did after introducing Martial Law in Poland during 1981.

In 1991 Miastoprojekt Krakow transformed itself into a trade company, consisting of fifteen different offices coordinating the overall practice. The highlights of their practice include, for instance, the headquarters for Philip Morris in Krakow. The planners of cities first in Poland and then the Middle East have become the designers of malls, banks, conference centres, private villas and speculative offices. It’s this movement, from involvement in the Non-Aligned countries before 1989 and then new buildings in Poland after, in which the architects evoked Socialist Realism more often than Modernism, that forms the subject of the exhibition ‘Postmodernism Is Almost All Right’, held at the Warsaw School of Economics last autumn.

It would be interesting to more closely examine the strange recurrence of Socialist Realism, first, as the USSR’s equivalent of the capitalist architecture of the US, drawing at the same time on native Tsarist flamboyance, and then later rhyming with the Po-mo shift worldwide and after 1989, fitting so well within the demands of Capitalist Realism. The future of Socialist Realism is complex. In the West and the newly Westernised EU-members of Osteuropa, it is alternately rejected as a relic of the condemned past or unexpectedly embraced – the grand public spaces of Karl-Marx Allee in Berlin or the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw are now often liked by locals, although certainly no new buildings try and emulate them. In the East, sometimes a very far East indeed, the style unironically adorns undemocratic, turbo-capitalist regimes, from Ukraine to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and even extends to oil-garchies Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Mecca’s Abraj al Bait skyscraper closely evokes the Stalinist towers of the 1950s, with its grandiose historicist ornament, its axial symmetry and its lofty spire. With a sense of guilt for ‘exploitation’, this kitsch oligarchitecture is occasionally exposed in contemporary design magazines or exhibitions, but is seldom taken seriously. But is there really such a distance between the ‘high architecture’ of, say, cityscape of Dubai or Norman Foster’s sinister glass Pyramid of Peace for the Kazakh capital, and the ‘kitsch’ simulation of Stalinist styles in the same city’s Triumph Astana?

These recent projects and exhibitions on the many worldwide legacies of socialist architecture ask some pointed questions about where we might position the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. We find first, an authoritarian Socialist Realist style abandoned in the late ‘50s which is then evoked, stripped of its direct political associations in the new capitalist architecture of the 1990s; and when we try and find out where this evocation of demonized styles comes from, we find the experiences of architects forced to adapt to new trends from the west. Nothing is certain, nothing corresponds to the cliché of totally hostile rival Blocs. More than anything else, we find an era and an architecture that was struggling for alternative scenarios of modernity, rather than limiting itself to a familiar dichotomy between Empires East and West.

---

[1] Bart Goldhoorn and Philipp Meuser, Capitalist Realism: New Architecture in Russia, Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2006. (the book has parallel text in English, German and Russian)

[2] See Joseph Stalin’s Socialist Realist doctrine (1934), which is addressed in M.B. Mitin, 
M.D. Kammari, 
G.F. Aleksandrov, ‘The Contribution of J.V. Stalin to Marxism-Leninism’ (trans. unknown), http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv4n1/stalin70.htm

[3] The Non-Aligned Movement, like the similar Group of 77, was founded during a thaw in the Cold War in 1961 in Belgrade to unite the ‘Third World’ countries that were neither a part of the capitalist West nor the Eastern communist Bloc.)

[4] Exhibition carried out by ETH Zurich's Lukasz Stanek and Piotr Bujas http://www.south-of-eastwest.net/index.php?id=1

[5] Heidrun Holzfeind, Za Zelazna Brama (Behind the Iron Gate) http://www.heidrunholzfeind.com/ZZB.html

[6] Quoted from a leaflet of the exhibition.

The rise of the New Complicated

[review spiked from The Wire, written in September-October 2011]

Ayshay

WARN-U

12”

Water Borders

Harbored Mantras

CD

With a growing stable of intriguing artists, Tri-Angle is the 4AD of the 2010s, in the times when the latter publishes artists like Iron & Wine, St. Vincent or Beirut. For some reason, the 00s were marked by a shift from multidimensional projects like This Mortal Coil swiftly replaced by tedious, repetitive mutations of singer-songwriter. We have a problem with defining authenticity, which for many people must invariably mean a guy with a guitar singing wistfully covers of Sufjan Stevens in a pub basement. At the same time, anything too spooky, kitschy or ridiculous or just too ‘serious’ was a faux pas. But not all is lost. Suddenly artists are not ashamed of strangeness or mysticism even. Dark spaces of the internets, anonymity of modern music making bear a strange resemblance to the gothic spirit. Those connections are explored in depth by a doctoral thesis by Mark ”k-punk” Fisher, Flatline Conctructs. Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory Fiction, a 'Gothic Materialism' which has more in common with William S. Burroughs than Bram Stoker. Robin Carolan, the founder of Tri-Angle, consistently the spookiest of internet labels, who is not bothered by suspicion of kitsch - au contraire, pushing its esotericism to an extreme – at the same time is a fan of the lush sound of pop. What his artists, be it Balam Acab or How to Dress Well, have in common, is an interesting alternative to the default “poptimism” of chillwave, consistently penetrating grey areas.

The latest two: San Francisco Water Borders, a duo of producers Amitai Heller and Loric Sih, and Ayshay’s Fatima Al Qiadiri, Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised and now a New Yorker are very intriguing exercises in this new mysticism. They show us how we actually consume music: if we’re accepting the exotic, it is only in a certain highly conventionalized form of ‘folklore’. Their music can be qualified as an experiment in modern ‘world’ music, having nothing to do with any cliché of it you previously knew. Ayshay relies solely on various transformations of Al Qiadiri’s voice: her singing acapella reinterpretations of the traditional Islamic hymns, but the way you never thought of the Middle East music. Filtered to degrees of complete unrecognisability, stripped bare of any instruments, that would make it Qiadiri’s voice resemble an old man, a child and a young woman at the same time, layered together in one piercing drone, with a tribal beat in the background. Is it real religious devotion or pop travesty and does it matter? Sounding so intimate, we feel like we interrupted the artist in some private religious ritual.

In turn, the full length from Water Borders is a richly packed experiment at marrying the gothic and the exotic, engaging rich layers of Gamelan and African drums and industrial sensitivity. There’s something very post-punk about the way the seemingly incongruous styles are mixed here – the nearest memory is that of bands like This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Current 93 or even Dead Can Dance (sic!). It reminds us how industrial, dressed in radical politics, was actually another mutation of gothic – and on Harbored Matras romantic, gothic and exotic exist on equal rights. Industrial shared the gothic's obsession with technology, moral and civilizational decay, sexuality, exoticism, and above all, transgression. It is "religious" both in the sense of the old flirtation with occultism and with the transcendent, otherwordly, spiritual, celestial... According to Jon Savage, investigation of "cults, wars, psychological techniques of persuasion, unusual murders (especially by children and psychopaths), forensic pathology, venerology, concentration camp behavior, the history of uniforms and insignia" and Aleister Crowley's magick was present in Throbbing Gristle, but we can apply that to many others. Then it's passed onto Joy Division and PiL, whose marriage of cold and visceral influenced both popular goth post punk like Bauhaus and 4AD artists.

The reason This Mortal Coil records aged so well is in the end an effect of sheer prettiness – it’s beautifully recorded, romantic and dreamy material, a timeless Goth seduction soundtrack. In its beauty, its ritualistic, watered, dubbed out aquatic qualities, and its rich imagery, Harbored Mantras may have a similar future - I can easily imagine a contemporary Goth lightening candles and playing Water Borders as a seduction record. While the now rarely mentioned artist Muslimgauze was a music ethnographer whose findings were to serve the fight for Palestinian Autonomy, Ayshay and Water Borders are clearly pop. Their goal is making beautifully recorded music with a timeless sound.

UPDATE: a few months after I wrote this review, Simon Reynolds has published a post on "the new exquisite", which was a confirmation of my intuitions that the New Complicated (to this I'd also count Julia Holter or Cold Cave) is being born somewhere in the intersection of seemingly incongrous contemporary musics and esthetics.

Julia Holter, Ekstasis

[longer version of a review first published in The Wire #338]

Julia Holter

Ekstasis

RNVG CD/LP/DL

Not long ago Julia Holter smitten us with the enigmatic and eccentric Tragedy, one of those records you can’t predict until they happen, a samples and distortions-made vehicle for some really moving vulnerability. Now it turns out simultaneously with those tormented cantilenas she was working on a far sunnier record, though, fittingly with her Greek tragedy fascination, she called it Ekstasis. Well, don’t expect ecstasy in an…ecstatic, climactic way. It’s a rather playful and poppy record, where tremors and anxiety of Tragedy has been calmed by serenity. It is largely due to Holter’s fresh and girly soprano voice, which is far from operatic force, yet manages to express a palette of emotions. Main emotion here is bliss and a mature understanding, what bliss is. There’s nothing that seem to menace this sense of joy, even if, like on Marienbad or In the same room, it can assume at moments quite dramatic form. In the former, playing with her harpsichords and keyboards, she intuitively associated the jumbled construction of the Resnais’ film with the way she puts together fragments of different songs, some upbeat and percussive and some otherworldly and droney, which collapse into each other, just as layers of time and space, people and sculptures collided in the film. Holter displays here remarkable compositional talent and capacity with sound techniques, with virtuosic sound distortions, sampling, and lines of clear voice, which comes in and out. Mostly it’s difficult to work out what’s played and what’s sampled.

I can hear here both the vocal experiments of modern composition and of outré pop, from Salvatore Sciarrino to Laurie Anderson’s pranks with vocoder, but they never come out as second-fresh. It’s because Holter also has a feeling for pop, especially her native California: think the Beach Boys' idea of multilayered pop and candy-like production, a sunny, but flawed Neverland; or Fennesz's Endless Summer - cheerful surf-pop broken with 21^st century melancholy. But think also this Scandinavian melancholy cliché, Stina Nordenstam singing on the wind, who nevertheless took modern composition classes, or even "worse", this supposed queen of kitsch, Enya - the latter seem to have a huge, unannounced comeback, at least as an unlikely inspiration for many "good taste" records. It’s also a very dream-pop record, full of long beatless stretches, like the airy, spacey Boy on the Moon, where Harold Budd-like drones encompass Holter’s soprano. What is also intriguing in singer’s approach is her lack of flirtation, delicacy – although it also may limit her palette, because you can’t expect her to go all of a sudden Diamanda Galas or Karen Dalton. On the last track, This is Ekstasis, she puts layers of her voice with brusque drums, reminiscent of  Roxy Music’s Bogus Man, and the displaced random sounds of a saxophone (sic!). Ekstasis is full of such undermining moments, though free of the intentional kitsch that characterises so much contemporary production.

Elodie + Eyvind Kang in concert

[longer version of a review first published in The Wire #338]


Elodie + Eyvind Kang & Jessica Kenney


Cafe Oto, London, UK


Eyvind Kang’s latest project and LP, The Narrow Garden, reaches for early French troubadour poetry or non-western poetry from Persia and Far East, which challenged a lot my training in modern Western poetry. We think metaphors are something to decipher, put into set of cultural references, and forget the contemplative & epiphanic meaning that poetry used to have in pre-modern times and which even someone so devoted to classic erudition as TS Eliot could still appreciate in religious, pre-romantic approaches of his favorite Dante & Cavalcanti. But given the circumstances, I’m sure the reception both Kang and Elodie wish for is non-academic. Elodie started this two-act gig in a completely packed Cafe Oto on the first night of snow this winter. It was organised as the first of a Stephen O’Malley-curated series, helping to promote two new works by some rarely seen musicians of the contemporary experimental scene. Such a chamber-like event demands absolute silence and focus, and one could feel the crowd, only seconds ago occupied by chat and gossip, melting minute by minute under the spell of Andrew Chalk’s tipping of the guitar and his Belgian collaborator Timo van Luyk’s flute. Their methods of effecting sound out of their instruments seem just as elusive and delicate as extremely modern in recalling 20th C avant-gardes – preparation, tipping and touching, suppressing the air in the van Luyk’s flute especially, so that shimmers and air flows are equal with the conventional “sound” itself, or even so that there was nothing such as an “orthodox” sound. The texture gets this way complicated in a way we didn’t predict – and the palette escapes any easy search for a melody or sound progression.


Chalk, immersed completely in the guitar, demonstrated some gripping focus on his instrument, with cymbal-like tapping, making shimmers, sounding like movements of the air as it was moving between the flute and the strings. In his review in The Wire 337, Nick Richardson aptly compares Elodie to Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, in that both are sacrificed to contemplation of exquisite patterns of the smallest gestures, as if stroking glass, like glissandos of a harmonica. Their latest record is called La Lumière Parfumée – something as delicate as the sound they’re making, seemingly contained in repetitive arrangements, but in fact happening in the light equation between the two musicians, so well placed together that it seemed nothing could interrupt their mutual alchemy.


The second part of the evening brought the pitch-perfect soprano of Jessica Kenney together with Kang’s musicianship. It started with Kenney walking across the room, between the crowd, who parted to let her in, and Kang following, with her singing single high notes, as if she was examining or mapping the resonance of the place. With that gesture, one could feel they absorbed the whole space into their performance. Kang and Kenney resurrected the spirit of the early medieval music without sounding anything like ethnographers or some society of Early Music. I’m quite sure that we were closer to the originals because both are capable of ‘thinking’ troubadour or Eastern music spirit, and not just mechanically rendering them. The effect was stunning. Kenney has one of the most beautiful and at the same time non-intimidating voices I’ve ever heard: sweet, multifaceted, deep and youthful, capable of capturing all the drama of her Persian or Provençal masochistic lovers, unhappy widows and loners. Kang was her perfect partner, masterfully rendering melodies in various musical scales on violin, guitars, flute, charmingly multi-layered by delays, echoes and feedbacks, creating complex musical patterns, cantilenas, drones and polyphonies. It seemed even too pure and indeed this evening was a test asking whether we are still capable of listening, of experiencing something so delicate, of such unknown beauty, such incredible austerity, at times clinically cold, otherworldly and distant. Something that seems to have nothing to do with the way we live our lives now, but that seems to matter, here and now; that brings us back to ourselves, to our bored and tired bodies, refreshes and renews them and the spirit that inhabits them.

The Prose of the Trans-Siberian

[I keep thinking of late of this poem and of Cendrars, who started and discarded so many styles and ideas in this one piece of poetry (and compelled Apollinaire to write Zone). Mainly, because I find myself thinking on and on of Soviet avant-garde and the way they transformed artistic worldview. In his much mythologised autobiography, Cendrars, who chosen and perhaps even pioneered this work-as-life style, then plaguing beatniks etc., completely invented his transsiberian journey. He's never been to China, but he did escape from home to go to St Petersburg and Moscow around 1904, because he was dong badly at school. He was a Swiss, who lived in Russia and US (1911-12), and lived only for 1 year in France, when he published Prose and subsequently took part in the 1st world war. In 1911 he changed his name, Frédéric-Louis Sauser, to Blaise Cendrars, incorporating into his identity the words “Blaze” and “Ashes”. Still, together with Apollinaire, a son of a Polish aristocrate, also a cosmopolitan to the bone, he's considered a French poet. The subtitle to Prose was "poemes, couleurs simultanees de tirage atteignant la hauteur de la Tour Eiffel: 150 exemplaires numerotés et signes", because it was initially published in a fabulous project by Sonia Terk-Delaunay, as a single sheet of apper, divided down the centre which was to unfold like an accordion through 22 panels to a lenghth of almost 7 feet. 150 copies lined up would made the height of Tour Eiffel. Marjorie Perloff is very good on this in her book on Futurism. I keep thinking of this metaphor of a train, so multifaceted in the early avant-garde (agit trains!) and something that until today may inspire imagination, as something embodying and aggregating every aspect of revolutionary art and spirit of modernity. And although Trotsky said (via Marx and Kautsky) that "Revolution is a locomotive of history", this concept of history and revolution - as a constant successful and ruthless progress, was then famously criticised by Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, where he challenged this positive image of history as a constant movement forward, that moves with you, arguing instead that history is something, that must be moved. Also, you know that something is wrong with a country, if a ticket to a city 70m distant costs 40 quid. Long live countries with cheap and efficient railway systems!]



The Prose of the Trans-siberian and of Little Jeanne of France

Dedicated to the musicians


Back then I was still young
I was barely sixteen but my childhood memories were gone
I was 48,000 miles away from where I was born
I was in Moscow, city of a thousand and three bell towers and seven
train stations
And the thousand and three towers and seven stations weren't enough
for me
Because I was such a hot and crazy teenager
That my heart was burning like the Temple of Ephesus or like Red
Square in Moscow
At sunset
And my eyes were shining down those old roads
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn't know how to take it all the way.

The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake
Iced with gold
With big blanched-almond cathedrals
And the honey gold of the bells . . .
An old monk was reading me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then all at once the pigeons of the Holy Ghost flew up over the square
And my hands flew up too, sounding like an albatross taking off
And, well, that's the last I remember of the last day
Of the very last trip
And of the sea.

Still, I was a really bad poet.
I didn't know how to take it all the way.
I was hungry
And all those days and all those women in all those cafes and all those
glasses
I wanted to drink them down and break them
And all those windows and all those streets
And all those houses and all those lives
And all those carriage wheels raising swirls from the broken pavement
I would have liked to have rammed them into a roaring furnace
And I would have liked to have ground up all their bones
And ripped out all those tongues
And liquefied all those big bodies naked and strange under clothes that
drive me mad . . .
I foresaw the coming of the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution . . .
And the sun was an ugly sore
Splitting apart like a red-hot coal.

Back then I was still quite young
I was barely sixteen but I'd already forgotten about where I was born
I was in Moscow wanting to wolf down flames
And there weren't enough of those towers and stations sparkling in
my eyes
In Siberia the artillery rumbled -- it was war
Hunger cold plague cholera
And the muddy waters of the Amur carrying along millions of corpses
In every station I watched the last trains leave
That's all: they weren't selling any more tickets
And the soldiers would far rather have stayed . . .
An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod.

Me, the bad poet who wanted to go nowhere, I could go anywhere
And of course the businessmen still had enough money
To go out and seek their fortunes.
Their train left every Friday morning.
It sounded like a lot of people were dying.
One guy took along a hundred cases of alarm clocks and cuckoo clocks
from the Black Forest
Another took hatboxes, stovepipes, and an assortment of Sheffield
corkscrews
Another, coffins from Malmo filled with canned goods and sardines
in oil
And there were a lot of women
Women with vacant thighs for hire
Who could also serve
Coffins
They were all licensed
It sounded like a lot of people were dying out there
The women traveled at a reduced fare
And they all had bank accounts.

Now, one Friday morning it was my turn to go
It was in December
And I left too, with a traveling jewel merchant on his way to Harbin
We had two compartments on the express and 34 boxes of jewelry from
Pforzheim
German junk "Made in Germany"
He had bought me some new clothes and I had lost a button getting on
the train
-- I remember, I remember, I've often thought about it since --
I slept on the jewels and felt great playing with the nickel-plated
Browning he had given me
I was very happy and careless

It was like Cops and Robbers
We had stolen the treasure of Golconda
And we were taking it on the Trans-Siberian to hide it on the other side
of the world
I had to guard it from the thieves in the Urals who had attacked the
circus caravan in Jules Verne
From the Khunkhuz, the Boxers of China
And the angry little Mongols of the Great Lama
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
And the followers of the terrible Old Man of the Mountain
And worst of all, the most modern
The cat burglars
And the specialists of the international express.
And still, and still
I was as sad as a little boy
The rhythms of the train
What American psychiatrists call "railroad nerves"
The noise of doors voices axles screeching along frozen rails
The golden thread of my future
My Browning the piano the swearing of the card players in the next
compartment
The terrific presence of Jeanne
The man in blue glasses nervously pacing up and down the corridor
and glancing in at me
Swishing of women
And the whistle blowing
And the eternal sound of the wheels wildly rolling along ruts in the sky
The windows frosted over
No nature!
And out there the Siberian plains the low sky the big shadows of the
Taciturns rising and falling
I'm asleep in a tartan
Plaid
Like my life
With my life keeping me no warmer than this Scotch
Shawl
And all of Europe seen through the wind-cutter of an express at top
speed
No richer than my life
My poor life
This shawl
Frayed on strongboxes full of gold
I roll along with
Dream
And smoke
And the only flame in the universe
Is a poor thought . . .

Tears rise from the bottom of my heart
If I think, O Love, of my mistress;
She is but a child, whom I found, so pale
And pure, in the back of a bordel.

She is but a fair child who laughs,
Is sad, doesn't smile, and never cries;
But the poet's flower, the silver lily, trembles
When she lets you see it in the depths of her eyes.

She is sweet, says nothing you can hear,
With a long, slow trembling when you draw near;
But when I come to her, from here, from there,
She takes a step and shuts her eyes -- and takes a step.

For she is my love and other women
Are but big bodies of flame sheathed in gold,
My poor friend is so alone
She is stark naked, has no body -- she's too poor.

She is but an innocent flower, all thin and delicate,
The poet's flower, a pathetic silver lily,
So cold, so alone, and so wilted now
That tears rise if I think of her heart.

And this night is like a hundred thousand others when a train slips
through the night
-- Comets fall --
And a man and a woman, no matter how young, enjoy making love.

The sky is like the torn tent of a rundown circus in a little fishing village
In Flanders
The sun like a smoking lamp
And way up on the trapeze a woman does a crescent moon
The clarinet the trumpet a shrill flute a beat-up drum
And here is my cradle
My cradle
It was always near the piano when my mother, like Madame Bovary,
played Beethoven's sonatas
I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon
Playing hooky, following the trains as they pulled out of the stations
Now I've made the trains follow me
Basel-Timbuktu
I've played the horses at tracks like Auteuil and Longchamps
Paris-New York
Now the trains run alongside me
Madrid-Stockholm
Lost it all at the gay pari-mutuel
Patagonia is what's left, Patagonia, which befits my immense sadness,
Patagonia and a trip to the South Seas
I'm on the road
I've always been on the road
I'm on the road with little Jeanne of France
The train does a somersault and lands on all fours
The train lands on its wheels
The train always lands on all its wheels

"Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

A long way, Jeanne, you've been rolling along for seven days
You're a long way from Montmartre, from the Butte that brought you
up, from the Sacré-Coeur you snuggled up to
Paris has disappeared with its enormous blaze
Everything gone except cinders flying back
The rain falling
The peat bogs swelling
Siberia turning
Heavy sheets of snow piling up
And the bell of madness that jingles like a final desire in the bluish air
The train throbs at the heart of the leaden horizon
And your desolation snickers . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Troubles
Forget your troubles
All the cracked and leaning stations along the way
The telegraph lines they hang from
The grimacing poles that reach out to strangle them
The world stretches out elongates and snaps back like an accordion in
the hands of a raging sadist
Wild locomotives fly through rips in the sky
And in the holes
The dizzying wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misery that bark at our heels
The demons are unleashed
Scrap iron
Everything clanks
Slightly off
The clickety-clack of the wheels
Lurches
Jerks
We are a storm in the skull of a deaf man . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Of course we are, stop bothering me, you know we are, a long way
An overheated madness bellows in the locomotive
Plague and cholera rise like burning embers around us
We disappear right into a tunnel of war
Hunger, that whore, clutches the clouds scattered across the sky and
craps on the battlefield piles of stinking corpses
Do what it does, do your job . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Yes, we are, we are
All the scapegoats have swollen up and collapsed in this desert
Listen to the cowbells of this mangy troop
Tomsk Chelyabinsk Kansk Ob' Tayshet Verkne-Udinsk Kurgan Samara
Penza-Tulun
Death in Manchuria
Is where we get off is our last stop
This trip is terrible
Yesterday morning
Ivan Ulitch's hair turned white
And Kolia Nikolai Ivanovitch has been biting his fingers for two
weeks . . .
Do what Death and Famine do, do your job
It costs one hundred sous -- in Trans-Siberian that's one hundred rubles
Fire up the seats and blush under the table
The devil is at the keyboard
His knotty fingers thrill all the women
Instinct
OK gals
Do your job
Until we get to Harbin . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

No, hey . . . Stop bothering me . . . Leave me alone
Your pelvis sticks out
Your belly's sour and you have the clap
The only thing Paris laid in your lap
And there's a little soul . . . because you're unhappy
I feel sorry for you come here to my heart
The wheels are windmills in the land of Cockaigne
And the windmills are crutches a beggar whirls over his head
We are the amputees of space
We move on our four wounds
Our wings have been clipped
The wings of our seven sins
And the trains are all the devil's toys
Chicken coop
The modern world
Speed is of no use
The modern world
The distances are too far away
And at the end of a trip it's horrible to be a man with a woman . . .

"Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

I feel so sorry for you come here I'm going to tell you a story
Come get in my bed
Put your head on my shoulder
I'm going to tell you a story . . .

Oh come on!

It's always spring in the Fijis
You lay around
The lovers swoon in the high grass and hot syphilis drifts among the
banana trees
Come to the lost islands of the Pacific!
Names like Phoenix, the Marquesas
Borneo and Java
And Celebes shaped like a cat

We can't go to Japan
Come to Mexico!
Tulip trees flourish on the high plateaus
Clinging vines hang down like hair from the sun
It's as if the brushes and palette of a painter
Had used colors stunning as gongs--
Rousseau was there
It dazzled him forever
It's a great bird country
The bird of paradise the lyre bird
The toucan the mockingbird
And the hummingbird nests in the heart of the black lily
Come!
We'll love each other in the majestic ruins of an Aztec temple
You'll be my idol
Splashed with color childish slightly ugly and really weird
Oh come!

If you want we'll take a plane and fly over the land of the thousand lakes
The nights there are outrageously long
The sound of the engine will scare our prehistoric ancestors
I'll land
And build a hangar out of mammoth fossils
The primitive fire will rekindle our poor love
Samovar
And we'll settle down like ordinary folks near the pole
Oh come!

Jeanne Jeannette my pet my pot my poot
My me mama poopoo Peru
Peepee cuckoo
Ding ding my dong
Sweet pea sweet flea sweet bumblebee
Chickadee beddy-bye
Little dove my love
Little cookie-nookie
Asleep.

She's asleep
And she hasn't taken in a thing the whole way
All those faces glimpsed in the stations
All the clocks
Paris time Berlin time Saint Petersburg time all those stations' times
And at Ufa the bloody face of the cannoneer
And the absurdly luminous dial at Grodno
And the train moving forward endlessly
Every morning you set your watch ahead
The train moves forward and the sun loses time It's no use! I hear the bells
The big bell at Notre-Dame
The sharp bell at the Louvre that rang on Saint Bartholomew's Day
The rusty carillons of Bruges-the-Dead
The electric bells of the New York Public Library
The campaniles of Venice
And the bells of Moscow ringing, the clock at Red Gate that kept time
for me when I was working in an office
And my memories
The train thunders into the roundhouse
The train rolls along
A gramophone blurts out a tinny Bohemian march
And the world, like the hands of the clock in the Jewish section of
Prague, turns wildly backwards.

Cast caution to the winds
Now the storm is raging
And the trains storm over tangled tracks
Infernal toys
There are trains that never meet
Others just get lost
The stationmasters play chess
Backgammon
Shoot pool
Carom shots
Parabolas
The railway system is a new geometry
Syracuse
Archimedes
And the soldiers who butchered him
And the galleys
And the warships
And the astounding engines he invented
And all that killing
Ancient history
Modern history
Vortex
Shipwreck
Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper
So many associations images I can't get into my poem
Because I'm still such a really bad poet
Because the universe rushes over me
And I didn't bother to insure myself against train wreck
Because I don't know how to take it all the way
And I'm scared.

I'm scared
I don't know how to take it all the way.
Like my friend Chagall I could do a series of irrational paintings
But I didn't take notes
"Forgive my ignorance
Pardon my forgetting how to play the ancient game of Verse"
As Guillaume Apollinaire says
If you want to know anything about the war read Kuropotkin's Memoirs
Or the Japanese newspapers with their ghastly illustrations
But why compile a bibliography
I give up
Bounce back into my leaping memory . . .

At Irkutsk the trip suddenly slows down
Really drags
We were the first train to wind around Lake Baikal
The locomotive was decked out with flags and lanterns
And we had left the station to the sad sound of "God Save the Czar."
If I were a painter I would splash lots of red and yellow over the end of
this trip
Because I think we were all slightly crazy
And that an overwhelming delirium brought blood to the exhausted
faces of my traveling companions
As we came closer to Mongolia
Which roared like a forest fire.
The train had slowed down
And in the perpetual screeching of wheels I heard
The insane sobbing and screaming
Of an eternal liturgy

I saw
I saw the silent trains the black trains returning from the Far East and
going by like phantoms
And my eyes, like taillights, are still trailing along behind those trains
At Talga 100,000 wounded were dying with no help coming
I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk
And at Khilok we met a long convoy of soldiers gone insane
I saw in quarantine gaping sores and wounds with blood gushing out
And the amputated limbs danced around or flew up in the raw air
Fire was in their faces and in their hearts
Idiot fingers drumming on all the windowpanes
And under the pressure of fear an expression would burst like an abcess
In all the stations they had set fire to all the cars
And I saw
I saw trains with 60 locomotives streaking away chased by hot horizons
and desperate crows
Disappearing
In the direction of Port Arthur.

At Chita we had a few days' rest
A five-day stop while they cleared the tracks
We stayed with Mr. Iankelevitch who wanted me to marry his only
daughter
Then it was time to go.
Now I was the one playing the piano and I had a toothache
And when I want I can see it all again those quiet rooms the store and
the eyes of the daughter who slept with me every night
Mussorgsky
And the lieder of Hugo Wolf
And the sands of the Gobi Desert
And at Khailar a caravan of white camels
I'd swear I was drunk for over 300 miles
But I was playing the piano -- it's all I saw
You should close your eyes on a trip
And sleep
I was dying to sleep

With my eyes closed I can smell what country I'm in
And I can hear what kind of train is going by
European trains are in 4/4 while the Asian ones are 5/4 or 7/4
Others go humming along are like lullabies
And there are some whose wheels' monotone reminds me of the heavy
prose of Maeterlinck
I deciphered all the garbled texts of the wheels and united the scattered
elements of a violent beauty
Which I possess
And which drives me

Tsitsihar and Harbin
That's as far as I go
The last station
I stepped off the train at Harbin a minute after they had set fire to the
Red Cross office.

O Paris
Great warm hearth with the intersecting embers of your streets and your
old houses leaning over them for warmth
Like grandmothers
And here are posters in red in green all colors like my past in a word
yellow
Yellow the proud color of the novels of France
In big cities I like to rub elbows with the buses as they go by
Those of the Saint-Germain-Montmartre line that carry me to the
assault of the Butte
The motors bellow like golden bulls
The cows of dusk graze on Sacré-Coeur
O Paris
Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness
Now only the paint store has a little light on its door
The International Pullman and Great European Express Company has
sent me its brochure
It's the most beautiful church in the world
I have friends who surround me like guardrails
They're afraid that when I leave I'll never come back

All the women I've ever known appear around me on the horizon
Holding out their arms and looking like sad lighthouses in the rain
Bella, Agnes, Catherine, and the mother of my son in Italy
And she who is the mother of my love in America
Sometimes the cry of a whistle tears me apart
Over in Manchuria a belly is still heaving, as if giving birth
I wish
I wish I'd never started traveling
Tonight a great love is driving me out of my mind
And I can't help thinking about little Jeanne of France.
It's through a sad night that I've written this poem in her honor
Jeanne
The little prostitute
I'm sad so sad
I'm going to the Lapin Agile to remember my lost youth again
Have a few drinks
And come back home alone

Paris

City of the incomparable Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel

Paris, 1913




Translated by Ron Padgett

RON PADGETT’s books include the poetry collections How Long, How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, Great Balls of Fire, and New & Selected Poems, as well as three memoirs, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan; Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers; and Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. Padgett is also the editor of The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms and World Poets. His translations include Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems (buy it here), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Poet Assassinated, Valery Larbaud’s Poems of A. O. Barnabooth (with Bill Zavatsky), and Flash Cards by Yu Jian (with Wang Ping). He has collaborated with artists such as Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Joe Brainard. Padgett has received Fulbright, NEA, Guggenheim, and Civitella Ranieri grants and fellowships, and was named Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2008 he was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He also received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com.

Don't take the magic away....

[unedited version of a gig review published in The Wire 335 January 2012 issue]

Maria Minerva, Gary War, John Maus
Tufnell Park Dome
London

Tufnell Park Dome looks like a strange combination of a provincial ballroom, with all its kitschy firemen’s ball lights and stage ready for a brass band, and a former site of political rallying. These days the only crowd it attracts is a good looking, fringed, oh-so-ironic faux-fur and moustache wearing eloquent youth from East London. When I arrive, a long queue of black-wearing tousle-haired youngsters wait resigned outside, because tonight’s show is a sold-out: no wonder, given the line up, that would sex up even an agriculture show in Carpathian village: electrifying songstress Maria Minerva and Ph.D. sex god John Maus. Putting Californian freaks and Ariel Pink associate, Gary War, in the middle, seemed like a gesture of disrupting this too safe hipness of the show consisting of the most-liked acts of this year.

When I come inside, the loud talking of the crowd nearly prevents me from noticing that Maria Minerva already started her set: conceived as half karaoke, half live show, the sound quality is actually so low, that I can barely hear, whas she’s singing. Here’s lo-fi for you. I was preparing myself for something like this. But instead of the usual sexy dressRT and spreading the aura of Eastern European woman-child, she stood there in an oversized hoodie, with newly blond-dyed hair (crisis of personality?), right from Lisbon, where she lives. She seemed tired and insecure, and unnecessarily spoiled the effect of perhaps the most beautiful songs recorded in 2011, there were only two or three songs from Cabaret Cixous, including Soo High, whose chorus Baby baby baby/ You make me so high/ When I'm around you/ Time just flies by sung in a half desperate false note, was all the more painful for someone, who, like me admires her work. Ok, on records she also frequently pays with the notion of detuned/badly recorded/brittly analogue, but here, deprived of some of her sonic toys, stripped bare voice couldn’t deliver the vocal subtleties of the record. Looking detached, she stared at the monitor, which seems to be these days a popular manner of many electronic performers live. What the fuck? Why do I have to ruin hipster spectacle for myself, whenever I turn up? It's insufficient that beer costs 4 L and you have to queue half an hour being pushed and elbowed, you just don't wish to be young anymore. Thing is also, that we don't really interact with each other. At hipster gigs I frequently have this feeling everybody create some kind of network. I know I'm an outsider there, these are not my networks or gigs & they'd run away screaming seeing where I live, but funnily enough - they'd kill for my gig. Was Maria just reading the lyrics? Hard to say, but seems that fresh to scene performances, she must yet negotiate the way she presents herself to the crowd - or get a better soundman. “Half freaky, half Britney”, she was more on the freaky side this time. Otherwise, are we to believe this poor performance like from a coked-up house party, with bored crowd pottering sheepishly from one end of the room to another, is supposed to be a new peak of “I-don’t-care” made in Hackney cool? And to think 2 hours before I got back on a plane from Zagreb, where Maria's idol from Goldsmiths, k-punk, was talking to the hopeful lefties about the importance of Starbucks as a degenerated, fallen public space and radical chic. Here, my EEuropean hope didnt give a fuck about my expectations and wore Fila.

In turn, solitary member of Gary War turned the sleepy crowd onto some serious dancing. Derived half from Ariel Pink’s all-over-the-place sound, mixing the sound of old records, early Animal Collective psychedelia and Cali-punk into a blissed out sound candy, he was equipped only with a guitar, delivering “invisible” drums by a pedal, making it uncanny where the whole wall of sound was coming from. It was an intriguing performance, acting like a manifesto for the whole scene: faceless, with copious curly hair purposely covering the whole face, with lyrics, if any, unrecognizable in the sonic magma, this music has in a sense, nothing to say, if not only to communicate us its playfulness and narcotic flash, id-like death drive joy of astral destruction.

When John Maus got finally on scene, it was obvious, who the public came here for. Must say I feel ambivalent about the whole carefully invented, yet based on “authenticism” Maus persona, who, in spastic, hysterical, nervous-breakdown movements delivers his message to the world - here there are at least lyrics to ponder. There’s perhaps nothing more exciting than a very handsome professor of philosophy and Deleuze specialist doing crazy disco performances, and this is what part of his craze comes from. Starting from Quantum Leap from his album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, he raved the public, and kept them like this for the next 40 minutes too exhausted to continue. Having seen another Maus performance, it’s hard not to believe in the truth of his stage acting-out, as if by his movements he wanted to take out, react to all the conformity and smugness of his public. Giving his madness away (Maniac!) so cheaply, for only 10 L, he must all along realise the hopelessness of the whole project. I’m trying to take Maus seriously, just as he’s taking seriously things he deals with love, pain, beauty. But where is a real suffering or drama of the artist? Is it a sheer attempt at intellectualizing the otherwise quite obvious and banal (music to dance to) object? I can’t find the real drama in Maus, and that stops me maybe from fully enjoying his ecstatic, diverse music. In the end, it’s just too cool for me. Coming back on to Woolwich, I’ve come across yet another Londoner, talking loudly to himself. ‘Care in the community’ they call it. Real madness is no fun, I’m telling you.