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Mark Hollis

Director's cut version of a piece originally published in The Wire 459, May 2022

Mark Hollis: A Perfect Silence

Ben Wardle

Rocket 88 hbk

Biography, as Ben Wardle admits in his introduction to the first full-length work on Mark Hollis, is of dubious value in considering his music. Avoiding interviews wherever possible, insisting his personable face not appear on album covers, pressing his idea of his work against resistance from labels and his own bandmates in Talk Talk, he appeared as a classic romantic aesthete. Not only are primary sources scarce – he was notoriously private and his family and close collaborators consistently refuse interviews – but Hollis himself felt his work was untouched by his life and opinions: “At the end of the day the record is what I have to say… I can’t add anything.” And yet, of course, he abandoned art for life. After his sole, self-titled solo album in 1998, he remained a stay-at-home dad until his death in 2019, living on the substantial proceeds of Talk Talk’s 1980s hits in Switzerland and the Netherlands. As Wardle outlines, Hollis was far from shy, but his ready, dry sense of humour and occasional manic intensity deflected from an armoured silence around his life and feelings.

Wardle, a former major-label A&R man, was able to convince a few figures – some, like Talk Talk manager Keith Aspden and keyboardist Simon Brenner, key to his success – to open up and fills in many of the blanks that Hollis left in his biographical record. The results are, inevitably, somewhat thin and textureless. We see Hollis entirely from without, through his often cryptic statements in music press interviews and the clashing perspectives of a handful of observers. Moreover, while Wardle is strong on the music biz politicking that went on around Talk Talk – such as Hollis’s quixotic sallies against his patient and indulgent bosses at EMI and Verve – and he’s able to shed a surprising amount of light on the increasingly idiosyncratic recording processes Hollis adopted from 1986’s The Colour Of Spring onwards, the music’s inner meaning and intent remains elusive.

This is, in some ways, fortunate. Opacity has been kind to Hollis, allowing legend and rumour – that he’d used heroin, that Spirit Of Eden had been recorded in an incense-filled abandoned church, among other stories Wardle debunks – to intensify his work’s effect. Nothing here, still, really explains how in five years he went from playing overwrought synth-pop on Saturday morning kids’ TV to composing Spirit of Eden, an album that combines music’s modern technological decomposition – atonality, free improvisation, studio-as-instrument – with the intense expression of an inscrutable private theology.

At its best, the colour Wardle adds only deepens that mystery and gives it amusing new facets. Growing up in Essex’s overspill towns, Hollis was a teenage hanger-on to the Canvey Island pub-rock scene. His older brother Ed emerges as a vivid figure who guided young Hollis: an encyclopaedic record collector, party animal and manager to Eddie And The Hot Rods, who Mark briefly roadied for, he succumbed to a worsening heroin addiction, dying in 1989 at just 37. Though Hollis lacked musical training, he had an incredible ear, a massive, detailed knowledge of music and a remarkable confidence from early on. (Journalists were frequently baffled and annoyed by his incessant references to Debussy and post-bop.) Apart from a few sympathetic collaborators – particularly Tim Friese-Greene, who masterminded the micro-collages of Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock – he frequently bullied and belittled musicians who couldn’t give him what he was fumbling for or weren’t his flavour of workaholic. (He often barracked Brenner with cautionary tales of his time working in a toilet-seat factory, a spell, according to Wardle, that in fact lasted just a few months.). Recording with Hollis after 1985 was slow and torturous; he had a habit of cultivating intense partnerships and then dropping people entirely, including his Talk Talk bandmates. As Aspden comments, “He needed other people, but he didn’t want other people.”

Hollis insisted in late interviews, somewhat implausibly, that the barely-there structures of Spirit Of Eden – the musics once called “jazz” or “punk” persisting only as half-erased fragments of the old world after the Biblical flood – were “where the first three albums were always heading”. Wardle is careful to show how their musical sophisticationand Hollis’s discontent with routine performance and promotion steadily grew in tandem. The increasing tension in his relationships with other performers, along with disappearing major-label largesse, seems to have been the all-too-human reason for his retreat. After his 1998 self-titled solo album he recognised he could only release new music in the independent sector, but had never learned to do without vast recording budgets or tolerant collaborators. That album’s setup of two room mics, a few session players and pre-written arrangements would have been standard for an experimental artist, but it ended up costing well over £100000. His particular obstinacy about music played a part too. As Wardle reveals, Hollis did in fact work on some projects after 1998 – including a bizarre offer to score Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) – but always encountered some personal sticking-point. By then he’d “had enough of that life” and had long since lost interest in contemporary music, only listening to older jazz and modern classical. What remains, rent between innocence and experience, flush with texture and pockmarked with silence, is among the strangest and most moving popular music of the century. It’s a music that reflects back on life, its tragic contingencies and intimations of immortality, but extends life’s vistas past the vanishing points of biography.

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Levon Vincent

Originally commissioned for The Wire, October 2019, previously unpublished.

Levon Vincent – World Order Music (Novel Sound DL/2xLP)

The bright, open chords of “Ratios III”, the seventh track on Berlin-based producer Levon Vincent’s third album, assemble themselves into raster patterns of what resembles tuned mallet instruments. While the uniform thud of the underlying kicks carve out air, the topline forms a surface covered in abstract curves, marking out a time that expands and contracts at will. While previous work has often seemed hermetic, concerned with its own limits of texture and rhythm, here that inward focus seems to have become a Zen acceptance of unforced complexity.

Vincent’s work is a perfect example of how autonomous electronic music and its apparatus of criticism and publicity have become from each other. Over a decade of odd, ornery 12” releases on his own labels built anticipation for his 2015 debut. That November, he made fairly offensive remarks on the aftermath of the Bataclan massacre (“people need to arm themselves”). Condemnation – rightly – followed, though much of it stemmed from an inability to fit Vincent’s crankishness into a schema of Politically Good and Bad music. On his 2017 follow-up For Paris, he openly and awkwardly did the “learning and growing” usually demanded of semi-public figures who commit such blunders, framing tracks with titles like “Only Good Things” and “If We Choose Peace”. Reviewers didn’t know what to make of it and the press for World Order Music emphasises its sources in New York house and 70s minimalism, as if to say nothing to see here but the music.

Which makes it even funnier that Vincent’s virtues have stayed the same throughout. (One track, hammering techno covered with a misty metallic sweep, even carries the title “And It Don’t Change”.) World… is less aggressive than previous entries, crafting plateaus of long-decaying rhythmic hits. But there’s a clear throughline from marimba meditation “Launch Ramp To Tha Sky” to “Ratios” or the obsessive organ vamps of “The Vampire Lestat”, which reconciles bone-headed techno minimalism and baroque detail. No-one in the music press believes – unlike their periodic and necessary “cancellations” – in the redemption story they fit up musicians for. And World Order Music has the decency to make that story’s redundancy obvious.

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Eastern Bloc Songs

First published in The Wire 418, December 2018. The curator, Wayne Burrows, responded on Twitter shortly after this was published that the exhibition catalogue included much of the contextual information missing in the show. Having perused the accompanying book, which is mostly reproductions of song lyrics, I can say that's absolutely not the case.

Eastern Bloc Songs

Centrala Space, Birmingham, UK

This archival show, curated by Nottingham-based writer Wayne Burrows, of audiovisual recordings, records and magazine facsimiles from the Eastern Bloc pop industry feels at once panoramic and curiously narrow. Burrows, who collected the material over a number of years, covers a huge time span, 1963 to 1988, but only three countries, with most of the material coming from the former Czechoslovakia around 1968. With very little contextual information and haphazard labelling, it forms a vast and sometimes bewildering info-dump, that would tell a very different narrative from that of the Anglophone canon of post-war Eastern European culture, if you could ever extract it from the accumulation of period detail.

A set of rather schematic assumptions still governs the reception of Eastern Bloc music. Dissident and samizdat culture is always somehow aesthetically higher than the products of state-supervised record labels like Czechoslovakia's Supraphon and Poland's Pronit, its creativity spurred by the official limits placed on what Cold Warriors used euphemistically to call “civil society”. The picture that emerges faced with at least some of that product is altogether stranger. A wall of photos of Polish and Czechoslovak stars – Marta Kubišová, Helena Vondráčková, Václav Neckář, Czeław Nieman – shows them in outfits that wouldn't be out of place in a 1964 Top Of The Pops episode. Three vitrines of sleeves show the evolution of records across the period: the early 60s models have the clean but stuffy contemporary design of EMI and Polydor. One of four screens shows Kubišová's 1969 film Proudy odnesou lasku, directed by Jan Nĕmec, whose 1966 satire A Report On The Party And Its Guests was banned in Czechoslovakia. Kubišová, who resembles Rita Tushingham if she'd taken a career in chanson, rides in a jeep through a bomb-site, surrounded by children in army jackets and later slithers around sets decorated with the kind of occult imagery later to turn up in Jaromil Jireš's Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (1970). On another screen, her contemporaries Hana and Petr Ulrychovi mount a controlled and ever-escalating prog assault with choirs and horn sections between guitar spray; Neckár and Golden Kids stretch The Electric Prunes' garage psych until it almost snaps. With the exception of a brief appearance from Plastic People Of The Universe, hardly anyone here is known in the West, underground or mainstream.

If the structure of feeling of the various artistic New Waves of Eastern Europe – Andrzej Wajda, Miloš Forman, Miklós Jancsó and Věra Chytilová would be the golden names – formed a labyrinth of rage, irony, naivete, plain speaking and soiled glamour, it's no surprise that the pop of that period is racked by the same rich contradictions. But it's hard to tell where all of this fits. Is it just a corrective to the historical emphasis on Communist states' high-minded sponsorship of culture, as in Poland's PRES? Or to the coffee-table fetishisation of underground bands, when 'underground' required a very literal distance from official culture and its attendant police spies? How did the publics of the Eastern Bloc, caught between a socialist culture industry and a dissidence they may have no lived connection to, really feel about this music? The sometimes astounding sounds and visuals here give no answers, only the languid stares of semi-hippie cover girls, looking off to an unguessed future.

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Jarman (ii)

First published in Sight and Sound 24:2, March 2014

Derek Jarman's first Super 8 films, made as he worked designing sets for Ken Russell's rather more big-budget The Devils (1971) and Savage Messiah (1972), were shown to friends who would “come down to laugh at themselves and put on records behind them.” There is already here an intimation of Jarman's short career as a maker of pop videos, directing promos for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys: music as mere accompaniment, a separate but parallel atmosphere gliding alongside that of the image. His training as a painter, he emphasised in interviews, combined with a lack of interest in narrative, made him into an almost myopically visual filmmaker; sound, it often seems in his films, is something to be outsourced to the proper technicians and assembled like a mixtape at the dubbing stage: put a record on. (In the recently-published selection of his sketchbooks, there is no mention of music.) The appearance of a contemporary filmmaker whose work had music credits like those of Jarman's would smack of hip 'curation' – indeed, exactly such a charge was levelled at Morvern Callar, with its sequence of Pitchfork favourites, and Berberian Sound Studio, scored by Broadcast – but few such films would treat their own soundtracks with such erratic casualness.

The paradox here is that one of the factors in Jarman's ongoing acclaim is precisely his ability to put music from the margins of culture in the foreground of a potentially – though unstably – public cinema. The aspect of “making a nice party”, of making films partly to enjoy collaborative situations, spilled over into the soundtracks. Brian Eno, Simon Fisher Turner, Andy Gill (former guitarist with Marxist punk-funk group Gang of Four), Throbbing Gristle (who soundtracked In The Shadow of the Sun (1974)) and their successor band Psychic TV (for whom Jarman directed the promo-cum-artist's film Psychic Rally in Heaven), Coil, even Annie Lennox miming to her own version of 'Every Time We Say Goodbye' in Edward II: the list of glittering names, at least for fans of experimental music, is both mouth-watering and oddly numbing. In spite of the brilliance poured into his films, one would struggle to name a great 'music moment' among them – aside of course from the sunshower of Elizabeth Welch's 'Stormy Weather' at the end of The Tempest. Just as individual shots, characters and narrative fragments in Jarman's films ping, semi-maddeningly, out of their provisional contexts, forcing the viewer to reconceive the film's shape at every step, so the music often seems to disappear into its own game of reverie and seduction before momentarily touching the carnal vicissitudes of the image.

There is at least one film one can't watch with the soundtrack off. Critics generally hive off Jubilee (1978) from the rest of his work, partly for being his most narrative film, partly for keeping the visual effects to a minimum and partly, one suspects, out of a gut distaste for pop music. (Conversely, it produces the amusing spectacle of pop historians trying to sift out its merely documentary content.) The film's funhouse-mirror portrait of punk, with an abrasive young star (Adam Ant) ending up in the dissolute clutches of tycoon Borgia Ginz (Jack Birkett), give them plenty of ammunition. Jarman himself recognised the bitter overtones: “Had I betrayed Punk... Derek the Dull Little Middle-Class Wanker'? Or had punk betrayed itself?” The note of defensiveness here, in which he imagines himself “[s]ome aristo on a fallen estate” suggests some recognition of the way the film slipped out of his control, propelled by the contradictory cultural energies it tried to absorb, by the charge and flash of pop. Treating the music with a measure of undivided attention – including a lovely moment when, during Adam Ant's performance of 'Plastic Surgery', the camera's 360-degree pan reveals Jarman and crew watching next to Ginz – meant no longer being able to frame it as a semi-autonomous private joke or temporary delirium. The repeated emphasis in Jarman's films on recording and mediation – the radar dishes in The Angelic Conversation, Tilda Swinton's Hitlerian microphone in Edward II, the foregrounded grain of Super-8 projected and reshot or run through video – transforms from the relentless intimacy of his home videos, from a self-consciously minority art, to the precarious seizure of the means and powers of the spectacle (Malcolm McLaren's self-declared tactic). The social outcasts with whom Jarman identified had, in the persons of Jordan and Ant and the Sex Pistols and innumerable others, stepped out onto the stage, and the film recoiled and fractured with the image of ruination and vitality they represented.

Mark Sinker has most acutely characterised Jubilee as “an impasto of clashing symbol and mood and technique and sensibility: the perverse and deliberately bewildering fusion of past and present, art and politics, documentary and fiction, actors and non-actors, rubbish and beauty”. It shared this sensibility with the most brilliant pop music of the period: Borgia Ginz's mansion is twinned in my mind with the decadent bachelor pads of Bryan Ferry's narrators on For Your Pleasure (1974). And, though more uneasily, with the echoing hospital wards and headspaces of Blue – a 'musical' if ever there was one. Most of Simon Fisher Turner's score to Blue is possessed of a listing, immersive melancholy, filled with shimmering cymbals and singing bowls and echo-drowned brass and woodwinds, that aligns with Coil's soundtracks for Journey To Avebury and The Angelic Conversation. Blue's sound design's collaging of voices, music and field recordings, its outrageous transitions between passages of watery calm and juddering noise, between mourning and libidinous overload – as Coil's hallucinatory acid house 'Theme For Blue' revs into life – is the most radical of Jarman's career, an achievement to match his furious fluency with the image. But, like Jubilee, it is also the soundtrack that pays most attention to the image – to the blankness, ambiguity and multiple meanings of the static image of blue, to the sensuous folds and false depths the viewer perceives after staring for so long, and to the voiceover's descriptions of the brutal politics of the AIDS crisis, of ordinary intimacy, of remembered landscapes. Watching, I think of the blue and red montage of Jordan's make-up, that ferocious and contradictory statement of independence, in Jubilee, and of the music – the blues – that so fiercely laments the dangers and pleasures of a disappearing world.

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Jarman (i)

First published in The Wire 412, June 2018

Derek Jarman: Volume 1 (1972-86)

BFI 5 x Blu-Ray, 515 mins + extras

Music plays a dissonant role in Derek Jarman's films. It's been too easy to subsume the confluence of radical post-war sound and art in his work – the lingering 60s counterculture, punk, industrial music, experimental film, post-pop abstract painting – with the biographical whose memory the broadsheets hallow with every anniversary. The remarkable list of musicians who contributed to his films, which in any other context would read like someone flaunting their taste, was in one sense the effect of keeping what performance artist Andrew Logan, Jarman's neighbour at Butler's Wharf in South London in the 1970s, called his “little court”. But, as a new BFI box set of his work up to 1986's Caravaggio shows, the social, performative ethos of his films could not have had the power they did without the abstraction of music, which scrawls itself unstoppably across the image.

Trained as a painter and designer at the Slade School of Art in the early 1960s, the visual element in Jarman's films have an expressive prominence that often seems to either clash or wildly diverge with the soundtrack. In a 1989 interview, he describes screenings at his flats in Bankside and later Bermondsey, where he showed his early Super-8 films: their making and exhibition in the wastelands of post-industrial, pre-gentrification London were an excuse for friends to “come down to laugh at themselves and put on records behind them”. Music, like film, was for Jarman disposable, a material snatched for a moment from the culture industry: a span of time to be inhabited, transformed and left behind. When the Super-8 films reappeared in 1981, in the edited form of In The Shadow Of The Sun, it was with a soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle – recorded on the brink of their breakup – that unfolds in parallel to the gauzy, broken movement of the image track, regarding each other across an odd distance.

But that disposability, arbitrariness, lack of fit, was itself the conduit of an immense energy. His first emergence into the art world coincided with the apotheosis of British Pop Art; there was an extraordinary cross-fertilisation in these years between pop music, fine art, film and the underground. Think of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1963) and its influence on the tone of 'Swinging London' films, Kenneth Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle (1949-72), with its interpolations of homoerotic violence, abstract electronic music and Phil Spector, Keith Rowe's training as a painter leading him to pull distorted loops of The Beach Boys into AMM's early gigs, the meeting of Royal Academy alumnus Donald Cammell and Mick Jagger in Performance (1970). That confluence was clear in Jarman's early set designs, as seen in documentation of a 1968 “jazz ballet” he worked on, included on this box set: abstract curlicues that recall the fabrics of Sonia Delaunay and Peter Blake's paintings on shaped canvases a few years before. Pop expressed and enacted the devaluation of art, the collapse of the idea of organic structure and medium-specificity, even as it injected with the frictional energy of mass culture. Music pushes through Jarman's films with its own heedless motion, animating the image by a kind of sympathetic resonance or momentary dreaming between the two. There is no dichotomy in them between structure and ornament, only the aggregation of jagged, glittering detail. Music in Jarman's films is an excess without any containment; its improvised freedom of movement writes the shape that the narratives will take in time.

Thus In The Shadow Of The Sun patents the use of music in his later narrative features. TG's soundtrack has all the psychedelic richness of their final performances, all blurry guitar notes, tape loops and a fog of tuned percussion. Jarman superimposes multiple layers of Super-8 footage: deep blazing oranges, purple and yellow, lens flare and light reflected in mirrors, figures crouching or standing in landscapes, as if enacting indecipherable rituals. The short TG: Psychic Rally In Heaven (1981), shot at a Throbbing Gristle gig at London's Heaven, emphasises the club's lurid lighting, layering extreme close-ups of the group's members, turning them and their instruments into slow-moving abstract shapes. Curiously, even though it is in theory a performance film of the sort that was a standard format for music videos, there's no necessary relation between what we hear and the playing that we see: punctuated by the same silences as Shadow, it renders both sound and music alien, denatured by turning the accidents of technology into a method.

In his narrative features, therefore, music is at once what increasingly undermines and buttresses their shaky fictional worlds. Brian Eno's cues for Sebastiane (1976) and Jubilee (1977), Jarman's first two feature-length narrative films, drift into what is otherwise a deeply naturalistic use of sound that recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini's early work: no music except for what's played onscreen. Filmed in Sardinia (standing in for North Africa), Sebastiane features long passages of sun-baked silence in which the film's web of homoerotic relationships unfold: as the jealous commander Severus (Barney James) prepares to martyr legionary and future saint Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio), a long shot watches a herd of goats with pealing bells, as if emphasising not only nature's indifference but its aesthetic congruence with noise itself. Jarman reserves Eno's momentary atmospheres for his most charged scenes: as Adrian (Ken Hicks) and Anthony (Janusz Romanov), the film's only example of happiness, frolic in an extreme slow-motion that, as Tony Rayns points out, parodies hetero love scenes of the 70s, Eno's pads glide across like radiant clouds. The Tempest (1979) does the same, this time with cues by the synth-prog duo Wavemaker, founded by ex-Radiophonic Workshop and White Noise member Brian Hodgson.

Those films' sonic austerity only underline by contrast the dense artificiality of The Angelic Conversation (1985). This left turn had already been signalled by setpieces in the preceding three films: the opening scene of Sebastiane, in which Lindsay Kemp (mime teacher to David Bowie) and his dance troupe cavort to traditional North African music played offscreen; Amyl Nitrate (Jordan, one of the most important figures in the punk set around Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren) miming and gyrating to a disco version of “Rule Britannia”; Elisabeth Welch, a veteran of African-American showbusiness, coming on to do “Stormy Weather” at the wedding of Miranda (Toyah Wilcox, who released her first single that year) and Ferdinand (David Meyer) singing “Stormy Weather”, performing the resolution traditional to Elizabethan comedies through the anachronistic melodies and dimmed glamour of mass culture. Jubilee's bitter satire of punk, with a young Adam Ant falling into the hands of media mogul Borgia Ginz (Jack Birkett), is mixed with a deep love for its investment in the fake and shoddy. Shot in silent Super-8 blown up to a hazy 35mm, the soundtrack of The Angelic Conversation braids together rather pro forma readings of Shakespeare's sonnets by Judi Dench and music by Coil at their most dark, listing and abstract. Metal percussion, which the industrial scene had turned into means of sonic violence, turn into a permanent background fog to scenes of two men carrying out obscure rituals; processed voices float in the wind between synth blasts and a distant, staticky recording of Benjamin Britten's Sea Interludes. At once minimal and hallucinatory in its excess of colour and noise, it forms Jarman's greatest celebration of queer love precisely in its distance from naturalism, breaking and dragging out time, refusing to foreground any one element as the soundtrack meditates in its own space.

These twin poles of sparseness and density resolve in Caravaggio, which set the template for his major late films (The Last Of England, Edward II, Blue), being also his first collaboration with Simon Fisher-Turner. Christopher Hobbs's production design bricolages grim 1980s bohemia and a budget imitation of the splendour of the Italian Baroque, empty rooms studded with flowers and ornate fabrics, rent boys – including Ranuccio, played by a pre-Hornblower Sean Bean – arranged in starkly lit tableaus of Caravaggio's most famous works. Fisher-Turner's score likewise meshes faux-Baroque lute music, dark strings, massed choral vocals, field recordings of bells, crickets and water. The music flows with extraordinary freedom through the film's spaces, bridging time as it leaps from Caravaggio's death to his childhood and combative adulthood. In behind-the-scenes footage included as an extra here, you can hear a harpsichord filtering through the fake-Italian sets knocked up in Limehouse Studios: sound as a decorative texture expanding through an endlessly artificial world. The yawning silences as Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) paints or Ranuccio and Lena (Tilda Swinton) wait in the sun seem simply to mutate out of the slow, intentless drift of Fisher-Turner's music and vice versa. It redeems the artificialities of punk about which Jubilee was so ambivalent. Jarman's gift to experimental music was to imagine a form of film and narrative time that moved through technology and the society of the spectacle as a fish in water, that found in the traps that the culture industry produced in the late 20th century the opportunity for endless formal renewal, a heterotopian space for love and freedom.

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Japan

Director’s cut version of a review originally published in The Wire 383, January 2016

Japan: A Foreign Place

Anthony Reynolds

Burning Shed Hbk 209pp

Anthony Reynolds's biography is the first book to treat Japan's career seriously and at length. For a long time the British music press saw the band as something of a joke. The solo works of former members – particularly David Sylvian – have at times overshadowed the output of their short lifetime. Reynolds does the worthwhile public service of bringing together a solid mass of facts, details and opinions that have not had a public airing before and fleshing out that history. In particular, he’s the first to marshall a detailed account of the shifting tensions within the band that led to their demise. Half-truths circulated for years about the clash of egos between Sylvian and bassist Mick Karn, ending with Karn's live-in girlfriend, photographer Yuka Fuijii, leaving him for Sylvian and sealing their fate; Reynolds gives us the facts and handles the dissonant perspectives of participants very deftly.

But whatever its qualities Reynolds' is still very much a generic rock biography, one that leaves the reader wondering whether it's the best form for the subject. Aside from a young Karn's dalliance with Angie Bowie and some standard-issue touring horror stories – even at the height of their fame the band travelled in a bus that smelled of “stale vomit” – there's very little sensational material in their story. The image of sophistication and decadence they projected disguised an isolated group of workaholic blokes from the south London working class. Sylvian “put work before everything else”, even sleep, aided by a short-lived coke habit. Groupies – “Princess Diana and Jerry Hall types”, as tour lighting manager Par Can put it, who stacked shelves at Tesco by day – weren't tolerated on tour. Lacking much life to latch onto, Reynolds's narrative boils down to a succession of recording dates and increasingly tiresome, claustrophobic jaunts. Meanwhile, as drummer Steve Jansen recounts, “we had buried our true selves within a public image, which was a vital form of expression, a liberation”, but also another kind of trap.

This disconnect Japan lived through, between experience and image, forms the kernel of their music of masks and disembodied voices, glamour and horror – the “dialectical image” of postmodernity and our own moment of endless simulacra. But in Reynolds's narrative life overrides art. He describes the fissure between reality and publicity – which gave the alienated emotion of their songs its positive and negative moments – without analysing its importance. The signifiers that drift through the group's great period – the initially meaningless choice of name, Tin Drum's détournement of Chinese kitsch, the purloining of Motown and Satie, the pop-futurist tradition of Kraftwerk inherited through Yellow Magic Orchestra – were to some extent arbitrary, pulled from their context by whim. But even the strange, unyielding spaces of Tin Drum aren't simply enigmas; some explanation is possible. Work tracing the ideas and images that came into the band's orbit and how they used and restructured them would have been invaluable, as Michael Bracewell's Remake/Remodel, on Japan's great progenitors Roxy Music, proved. It's good to get solid details about the band's sartorial evolution, including some delightful photos of the young Karn and Sylvian (including a better look at the Anthony Price jacket from the cover of Gentlemen Take Polaroids), but Reynolds' handling of fashion is far from sophisticated.

Neither is he all that compelling on the music itself. Describing Quiet Life, the album that began the band's path to the avant-garde dark heart of 80s pop, as “unique but recognisably palatable pop music” is a descent into Tony Blackburn territory. He is strong on the technical aspects of the band's changing studio practice – maybe a little too strong at times, as we get reams of detail about preferred instrument brands. But he still gives a coherent picture of a conventional group moving, via the laboratory of the studio, into a compositional form closer to Eno's ambient records or the great Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaborations: sound as rich and intentless as the currents of dream. The band formed a strange bridge between the studio craftsmanship of mid-70s pop – Todd Rundgren and Steely Dan were among their favourite artists – and the brief flourishing of New Pop, bypassing punk entirely. It was precisely such residual traditionalism, and the shelter of 70s-hippie label Virgin, that allowed the disturbing experiment of Tin Drum to proceed under the protective camouflage of chart success.

The great lacuna in this story is Sylvian. He declined to contribute to the book, although Reynolds draws on interviews Sylvian has given over the years. (Karn died in 2011, but published a memoir of Japan that Reynolds quotes extensively.) It would barely make a difference if he had: concealing himself in plain sight, the deep cover agent of pop and experimental music wouldn't do anything so vulgar as give himself away to a mere biographer, except perhaps to present another of the masks that he's hidden behind over his career – post-glam siren, New Romantic balladeer, cosmopolitan fourth-worlder, the Howard Hughes of UK improv. The portrait that emerges here – of the frontman as a vain, petulant control freak, but also an “ordinary guy” behind the shades – is intriguing but sketchy, an aspect that speaks to the real nature of the book’s incompleteness.

Reynolds makes some effort to pencil in the details of Sylvian and younger brother Jansen's childhood in South London, but clearly cannot find the sort of apparently revealing detail that biography thrives on. He emphasises how deeply ordinary – how dull, even by the local standards of 1970s Catford – their background was. Their father was a bricklayer and the family struggled to remain in the respectable fraction of the working class. Sylvian would later make the paradoxical suggestion that “there was a survivalist element” to his self-fashioning in the matrix of art, androgyny and apparent vulnerability. (As detailed in Fred and Judie Vermorel's Starlust, such signs made Sylvian into a fertile fantasy-figure for the group's fans, to the exclusion of other members.) Is this, as Mark Fisher has suggested, what Sylvian and Japan were hiding from, the “ghosts of my life” that turn success sour – the spectres of class trauma in a society where subculture would soon be rendered extinct? A real exploration of the band would need to pore deeply through these contradictions of pop at the cusp of neoliberalism, but Reynolds's is a nice provisional start.

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Silence

First published in The Wire 354 (August 2013).

Silence

Pat Collins (director)

Harvest Films/South Wind Blows 2012, 84 mins

In The Aran Islands (1907) the playwright and folklorist J.M. Synge describes the sound of winter on Aranmoor: “There is one plaintive note which [seabirds] take up in the middle of their usual babble with extraordinary effect, and pass on from one to another along the cliff with a sort of an inarticulate wail, as if they remembered for an instant the horror of the mist.... it is only in the intonation of a few sentences or some old fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island, for in general the men sit together and talk with endless iteration of the tides and fish“. At the beginning of the 20th century the Arans were one of the few areas where Gaelic was still the first language of the majority of the population. For Irish nationalists, the islanders were the closest to a primitive ideal of Irishness, sound inscribing an organic unity of nature, social organisation and national essence that stretches back into historical origins. Synge is not deaf to the strains of lack here, of sound and its memory not as eternal continuity but suffering and its recurrence. This fraught dialectic of fullness and loss impels the first feature by documentarian Pat Collins.

A field recordist (Eoghan MacGiolla Bhríde), having lived in Berlin for the last 15 years, returns to Donegal, in northwest Ireland, “for work”. He is there, he tells locals who ask, to record landscapes free of man-made sounds, looking for “quietness”. This is not quite the same thing as silence. He may wish to hear the opposite of Berlin, where flitting voices and metallic loops pulse at the edge of the soundtrack, but here locals still talk, even on heathland only visited by the wind. He records in woodland, in the limestone moonscape of the Burren, around the mountains and lakes of Connemara and finally on islands of the coast of Donegal.

Bhríde is a very restrained actor, embodying the whole character in a soft voice, hunched concentration and a certain fiddly dexterity with tape machines. Indeed, he verges on being a cipher, a device for letting the audience listen, for putting listening onscreen as it were, and to facilitate the conversations and voiceovers that float through the soundtrack. The lack of narrative or developmental tension helps keep the film away from pseudo-Cageian platitude: the protagonist doesn't learn to hear the richness of his uncosmopolitan origins. It seems rather to give itself over to cinematic seeing and listening, the mere mesmerising passage of mediated life, in a way that recalls early actuality films, even down to the frequent static shots. The results are almost luxurious in their combination of grand sweep and detail; the sound in particular (with additional work by Chris Watson) is dense, clear and lush.

For this immersive flow language represents not just pleasures but difficulties and interruptions. “Legends heaped on legends,” muses Patrick O'Connor on the voiceover, “lore heaped upon lore, names heaped upon names.” Words create a congruence of humanity and landscape, but they also dramatise the wound of their real separation. The film begins with a woman's voice singing an air set against a black screen, that fades in to show it playing on a reel-to-reel. Numerous times, passages of environmental sound that seem to accompany images of sharp hills or sea cliffs are shown, by an edit, to be from somewhere else, playing back on headphones. Discussing folk songs with a rambler he meets on the moor, he recites in a low voice a lament sung by his grandfather. One is reminded by those piercing and bent notes that the Gaelic repertoire includes many imitations of birdsong, but also of the ageing and torn photographs that Collins inserts into the film, of boys in flat caps carrying boats or bundles and desultory Teddy boys hanging around in pubs. They recall in turn the tramps of Synge's plays, drifting through the west of Ireland in the long wake of famine, colonial violence and economic collapse, alternately silent and garrulous reproaches to the existing and coming orders. These mute images become the background silence against which the soundtrack articulates its song of history and nature's long and bloody entanglement.

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Souvenir

Director’s cut version of a piece first published in The Wire 453, November 2021

Souvenir: London, 1979-1986

Michael Bracewell

White Rabbit Hbk 124pp

Souvenir is an unexpected and unclassifiable book. Michael Bracewell’s two major non-fiction works – England Is Mine (1997), on English “pop life”, and Remake/Remodel (2007), on the prehistory of Roxy Music – included vivid evocations of landscapes and moments, but these have tended to be swept away by the movement of (sometimes erratic) argument or lost amid pile-ups of facts. His novels and writings on art and (increasingly infrequently) music have given a vivid sense of a structure of feeling rooted in his experiences as a lower-middle class crypto-intellectual who went through the experiences of post-punk and 80s style culture: obsessed with the in-between categories of the British class system and its psychic toxicity, with suburb and city, greyness and glamour, conceptual excess and pub abjection. In Souvenir, these tendencies find their purest expression, unanchored to any wider narrative or argument. It forms a portrait of the primal scene of Bracewell’s aesthetics, where the subcultures that inhabited London’s crumbling centre nurtured strange but commodifiable new looks and forms.

And yet, while it clearly draws its material from his own life, he avoids the expected – perhaps even preferable – move of revealing the quote-unquote real emotions behind the controlled and elegant prose of previous work. Souvenir scrupulously erases any indicators of autobiographical truth-telling. ‘I’ appears nowhere, ‘he’ or ‘she’ rarely. Memory here has been reduced and fragmented: each section, headed by cryptic and allusive phrases, enters without preamble into description of streets, images or sounds, that slalom into passages of essayistic prose or long, quicksilver lists. Its perspective is that of a passionate observer – both flush with romanticism and frozen with impersonal distance. The long first section, which begins in early 1982, drifts in time and space – up Tottenham Court Road, through the south London suburbs, down into Mayfair’s Roxy club; back to the Blitz Club, the explosion of punk (‘the aftermath of the overload of the electric Mass Age’) and further back to T Rex’s March 1972 Wembley Stadium show, then forward to a moment when punk is already the object of nostalgia, ‘such a comparatively trivial event…’ The much shorter second and third sections cover the period from early 1983 – ‘what could seem like the beginnings of a fantastical spring’ – to the waning days of 1986, a glimpse of a woman pressing herself against the ‘Deep Space Industrial’ surfaces of Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building.

Bracewell evokes the much of the mood and texture of the time through analyses of music and art, as if conceding that his memories are not really his own.  He’s particularly concerned with the transition from post-punk’s ‘post-industrial Winterreise’ to new pop’s ‘time of serious play’ in 1982-3 – ‘Music made of winter replaced by music made of violet springtime.’ The split structure of feeling of that transitional period can be seen in the opening pages, where the old vestiges of the Victorian West End – Gothic hotels, forgotten restaurants, a dandy dressed in the fashions of 1910 entering an ancient gentleman’s outfitters in Holborn – butt up against the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics of Tottenham Court Road tube and the video wall in Virgin Megastore blasting Soft Cell’s ‘What?’, the microcosm of a new digital universe where the Synclavier and Linn syndrum foreshadow an everyday life rendered vivid and exotic. With a few exceptions, Bracewell is clearly a new pop partisan, rubbishing the devotees of ‘the art of the seedy, needy, desperate, violent, voyeuristic, agonised, sexual, abject and politically angry’. And yet his choices of privileged object are, let’s say, idiosyncratic: no Associates or Scritti Politti, but Thick Pigeon, Suburban Lawns, early Prefab Sprout, almost as if he didn’t want any music’s strength and quality to get in the way of his prose. Oddly, the passage where the style seems most perfectly to mesh analysis and memory concerns one of the bleakest post-punk records, Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box: ‘plutonium heavy, each track a length of shorn-off girder, and cold, cold... a vengeful De Profundis from a place of abandoned allotments and overhead cables, metal-fenced electricity substations, dripping urban undergrowth, buddleia and brambles, isolated Gothic Revival houses’.

The text’s sense of being suspended in time, lingering on moments where nothing stirs and light rests like ‘a photocopied sheet of radiance, a grey mist with a band of whiteness’, maps the ambiguity and split tendencies of the period onto the work of memory, seeing the culture of the early 1980s at once as irretrievably past and full of intimations of our present. There is at moments a note of chagrin or shame when Bracewell notes the ‘burgeoning sensibility’ of ironic neoliberalism into which the new pop sensibility curdled, all ‘style impresarios and analysts; branded product as art multiple and design as individualism… Lunch at L’Escargot, Braganza and Orso’. That aesthetic was the correlate of the political calamity of the early 1980s – Thatcherism’s destruction of the remaining fabric of post-war life – that happens here almost entirely offstage. And while the text contains some intimations of the dismal future it would lead to, its curious tense - a retrospective present - freezes politics with intoxicating style. As if in compensation, he emphasises the fragments of anachronistic modernism in the period that both post-punk and the new proto-corporate subversion drew from. His West End is full of the ghosts of Eliot and Pound, down to the Vorticist abstractions of the Blitz Kids’ make-up. But while punk echoes for Bracewell ‘[t]he writings and stances, audacities, scandals and acceleration of modernism’, postmodernism is somehow modernist too, a ‘new avant-garde: cultish, audacious and declamatory’, in line with the 60s-modernist insistence on ‘clean living in difficult circumstances’. To have it both ways in this manner means that Bracewell loses the sense of the tragedy of modernity’s disappearance – an inevitable disappearance that was also a deliberate and politicised catastrophe, one that has wreaked destruction on memory itself. A souvenir indeed: an artificial ornament from somewhere we can never return, condensing atmosphere and associations into a fragment of a recent past otherwise lost to myth. Complex, rich and near-perfect in its management of its peculiar tone, it’s one of the most remarkable works on pop history in recent memory.

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Excavate!

Director’s cut version of a piece first published in The Wire 447, May 2021

Excavate! The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall

Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley (editors)

Faber & Faber 360pp hbk

John Peel’s oft-repeated description of The Fall as “always different, always the same” has covered for a multitude of interpretative sins. They were a phenomenon unparalleled in modern British music, a project covering 40 years filled with textual puzzles, obscure narrative byways, apocrypha, swollen vulgarity, articulated through a form of technically scarred, lobotomised rock, welding together the registers of modernist high art and low pulp culture into a single pop gesamtkunstwerk. Paradoxically their sheer idiosyncracy was easy for the press to turn, through Mark E Smith’s longevity and endless release schedule, into the safety of an “alternative national treasure” – a process that Smith, with what the editors of Excavate! call his “stock character of ‘northern pub bloke’”, no doubt acquiesced to. Maintaining a “prole art threat” in the face of a music press as posh and anti-intellectual as Britain’s would always be an uphill battle. Better perhaps to cast music, which in the moment after punk had looked like a route to a revolution of everyday life, as a steady and thankless job. This was especially ironic in Manchester, which deindustrialisation was turning into a land populated by Smith’s favourite targets – students, yuppies, clout-chasers – while an obsolete workforce wasted away in exurbs like his native Prestwich.

Excavate! aims to cut through the accumulated cliché to get at what made The Fall’s achievement so particular and remarkable: “how they subtly taught us how to be us.” The volume combines reproductions of Fall ephemera – fanzines, beer mats endorsed by early band manager Caroll Kay, fanclub newsletters, notes by Smith on his work for theatre and ballet – with reprinted key texts on the band and several choice new essays. As the editors suggest, the band can’t be seen properly head-on, such that “we need to understand everything else that surrounds the band”. More than most bands, The Fall wrote themselves into a vast labyrinth of meanings outside of just the music: Smith’s lyrics and artwork drag in ghost stories, local lore, philosophy and 70s TV comedy, while their fan community pored endlessly over his mythos and the relative merits of different live bootlegs. The results make for a dazzling set of glimpses of the band, but one that often lacks coherence and organisation. Most moving out of the recovered artifacts are early gig flyers and letters from Smith, in his boxy, sprawling handwriting, to fans and well-wishers, including the secretary of the Arthur Machen Society, to whom he complains about his 2008 memoir’s ghostwriter. A series of pieces contextualise The Fall in Lancashire’s sense of place and history. Architectural historian Elain Harwood looks at Smith’s surroundings, shaped by the spatial effects of the Industrial Revolution on Manchester: Prestwich, in whose pubs Smith recruited most of the band’s members, was never hip but also hardly the stuff of kitchen-sink realism, a place where rural folklore was close at hand but living amid abandoned mills. Bob Stanley discusses the culture of amateur and semi-professional football Smith grew up with, noting the band’s aversion to “professionalism” and dilletantism alike – he modelled himself after Manchester City goalkeeper Harry Dowd, a part-time plumber, with whom he used to chat about “washers and copper joints” mid-match. Ian Penman, in an essay that unfortunately lacks his usual visionary flair, situates the band in the mental climate of the North, defined by historical repetition and anachronism, with Smith as a man caught in a fugue state – at once Blakean seer and “a model of hard-knocks wisdom and decidedly non-corporate, plain-spoken sanity”.

At the volume’s centre is Mark Fisher’s 2006 essay ‘Memorex For The Krakens: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism’, an often unacknowledged touchstone for the most productive subsequent Fall criticism. (Indispensable as it is, given the piece is easily available elsewhere it isn’t clear why it was included when key 1980s Smith interviews weren’t.) In his reading of the band’s 1979-1982 run, Fisher argues that Smith not only should be seen in the company of Joyce, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, but undermines and inverts their patronising dependence on working-class speech for autonomous art. He sees Smith’s appropriation of the horror stories of MR James and HP Lovecraft as a piece of artistic class revenge, identifying with the unlettered rural idiots and grotesque phantoms of James’s tales, which precipitate an ontological breakdown: in The Fall’s music, as in Lovecraft’s work, “there is no world. What we call the world is a local-consensus hallucination, a shared dream.” Pop becomes the vehicle of a scrambled avant-garde idiolect and wrenching, ambivalent psychodramas of class struggle, as on ‘Middle Mass’ and ‘Leave The Capitol’. It’s a reading whose audacity matches The Fall’s own work, but as so often with Fisher it can be frustrating, how tightly it intertwines close attention to sonic detail with insistent wrenching of the music into his own steel-trap framework. Mark Sinker, in his own thorough, winding reading of Smith’s engagement with horror and class, weaves through the neglected ambivalence in Fisher’s argument, seeing Smith “catching at the phrases that caught at him and casting them back at us changed and changing, his attitude endlessly unreadable.”

The blurb describes the book as a “vivid, definitive record”. It’s appropriate that it should fall short of the latter adjective, trailing off in its final pages. Smith’s death in January 2018, 6 months after a new and lacklustre Fall album, left the Fall story without closure. Far from it: as novelist Adelle Stripe’s seemingly anomalous piece on the 2015 London exhibition Luxury Complex suggests, Smith’s spirit is very much still abroad, its antagonisms very much unresolved – least of all by The Fall’s music, which dwindled in its final years into ever fainter copies of itself. The subject has already piled up much in the way of memoirs and analyses, as if in an attempt to exhaust and deflate it. Excavate! is testament to the power such an effort sets out to rationalise, domesticate and destroy, placing The Fall at the hidden heart of art in the final quarter of the 20th century.

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Arca

Director’s cut of a review that first appeared in The Wire 438

Arca – KiCk I (XL CD/DL/LP)

The evolution of Alejandra Ghersi’s work since her first releases as Arca can be seen as the emergence of a field of genuine aesthetic tensions out of the monolithic unity of high technology in its self-celebration. The impenetrable, fine-tuned and one-note harshness of those early works was, as Britt Brown noted astutely in these pages (Wire 369), identical to a “software demonstration”. 2017’s Arca, her first release for XL, carved up that self-closure into plateaus of silence from which her sparse electronics and self-consciously operatic vocals emerged. The 12 tracks of KiCk I recombine the possibilities that act of fragmentation threw up into new experiments.

The most striking thing about KiCk I isn’t the strident, gender-anarchic persona set by lead single and opener “Nonbinary” and its video – Ghersi, pregnant with a translucent prosthetic belly, being worked on by robot surgeons – but the tension between her obsessive sound design, treating pitches as abstract volumes in space, musique concréte style, and the use of the vernacular rhythms of reggaeton, dancehall and ballroom house. Each track is pulled towards one or the other pole: “Mequetrefe” is android reggaeton, blasted into soft ripples of gabber snares and contrails of placeless tone in its breakdown; “Afterwards”, lead by guest and past collaborator Björk, is an empty, widescreen canvas for vocal pyrotechnics and isolated arcs of burning digital synth. The results are never less than deeply impressive, as Ghersi warps the non-Euclidean architecture of her productions around the affects of the best tracks: “La Chiqui”, featuring producer and vocalist SOPHIE, strings together seemingly random clusters of vocal spray and machine-gunning drums into something oddly resembling a blunted love song; closer “No Queda Nada” prepares a minimal, fragmented set of pads and snare triplets for an aria of longing.

Negotiating these kinds of tensions between sonic abstraction and rhythm, making them into structure, was once the function of that antique thing called songwriting, which KiCk I curiously lacks. Many tracks feature gaping longeurs or tail off, as if Ghersi didn’t know quite what to do with a loop or felt the need to divert a song into robotic crunching for its own sake. (The shattered, brutal forms of the tracks Ghersi contributed to on Kanye’s Yeezus show that she’s more than capable of applying structure more thoroughly, to great effect.) “Calor”, “Riquiqui” and “Time” feel oddly pointless or dull, caught in an oscillation between using percussion and bass as a tool to mark out time in more complex or anarchic ways and using it as a sort of high-tech ornamentation. This may be related to Ghersi’s vision of gender as a cyborg recombination of traits once separated by binaries. Far from representing some playful and utopian unity of opposites – male/female, form/content, technology/emotion and others – KiCk I suggests that Ghersi is still experimenting and sometimes failing, with the bold self-assurance of “Nonbinary” (“I don’t give a fuck what you think/You don’t know me/You might owe me”) left over as marketing or a vision of things to come.

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Twin Peaks: The Return

Originally published in The Wire 405, November 2017

“Listen to the sounds”, the Giant (Carel Struycken) tells Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in the first moments of Twin Peaks: The Return. A scratching like an oversized cricket or a malfunctioning electric motor stirs in the horn of an old Victrola. A hum at the very edges of the stereo picture. “It is in our house now.” Eighteen hours later, two of the protagonists stand outside a house: lights burn and gutter as a scream overwhelms the Foley track. The soundtrack tells a story that the actions the characters live through can't straightforwardly propose, because it isn't one that can be neatly resolved: you can't go home again.

It's a critical commonplace that Lynch directs like a musician: as cinematographer Peter Deming put it, in Lynch's work 'adding sound to picture is one plus one equals five'. But his evolution as a director and sound designer seems to have involved overturning the rules that fence in even such 'visual music'. The first two seasons of Twin Peaks used the technical limitations of television, with its tinny, imprecise sound, as part of their poisoned charm: Angelo Badalamenti's score, which ran through every form of deep artificiality from dark to seraphic, plastered over each crack in screentime, made lustrous its aesthetic borrowings from primetime soaps like Dynasty. Lynch gave his own sonic signature to the episodes he directed, most obviously in the backwards speech that punctuated the bottled silences of the Red Room that sits in an alternate dimension to the town of Twin Peaks. But these were additions to a fabric increasingly pre-made by the ABC execs.

The difference of The Return is clear in Anthology Resource Vol. 1, the album of cues and effects from the series by Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley released this August. The themes resemble nothing so much as excerpts from the catalogues of Kevin Drumm or Failing Lights, AMM or Chris Watson, Grouper or Graham Lambkin: enormous gouts of static, high atonal strings processed into a layered blur, a one-chord blues played beyond an impenetrable wall, warping drones whose timbre and spatial placement is hard to hold in mind from one second to the next. Behind all of this is the sound of electricity, which becomes in Hurley and Lynch's hands a passage between nature and technology: following on from Fire Walk With Me, all of the series's world seems to participate in the buzzing, hissing, interference and migraine-halo hums they represent it with. Sound technology becomes the conduit of Lynch's bleak pantheism: every sound, instrumental or natural, flows into and back out of this immaterial background.

The effacement of any difference between music and sound correlates to a breakdown of distinction between fiction and its storytelling techniques. The viewer can never be sure whether what they're hearing belongs to Twin Peaks's fictional world. This too was a principle of experimental music from Luigi Russolo onwards, which brought the noise of the 'real world' of machines, telecommunications and urban life into the concert hall. Hurley and Lynch's sound is an elaborated version of the excessive room tone that Philip Brophy calls 'the sound of nothingness', omnipresent in Lynch's films going back to his experiments with composer and sound designer Alan Splet on Eraserhead (1980).

The refusal to distinguish between diegetic sound and soundtrack isn't new, even in prestige TV. The Sopranos, for example, followed Martin Scorsese's 1970s dramas in making its soundtrack the instrument of fantasy, dream and psychosis. But Lynch pushes it to an unprecedented extreme. Apart from the heavily demarcated performances at the Roadhouse at each episode's end, there's nothing but the fluctuations of a fictional world at once darkly unstable and utterly banal. The thrumming, purling drones, inexplicable echoes, backward notes that crowd around the image like noxious fog suggest that the fiction before us is disintegrating, even as it gives it a fatal unity. The strange porous spaces that frame the series's cosmology, through which Cooper make his metaphysical journeys, overlap with dank alleys and basements with poor wiring and strange acoustics, sometimes too echoey, sometimes unnvervingly dry. It was this full, variegated, deeply cryptic sense of space that Michel Chion identified in Lynch's work, using the physical heft of Dolby sound hardware to concentrate 'not only on the very large but also the very small… effects close to silence', repeating the 'low, sinister, held notes which link up the different worlds edited in parallel' in Wild At Heart (1990).

These passages of sound burning eternally at the threshold of attention across the series's eighteen-hour span are a counterpoint to the sonic cataclysms that blast its fabric. Lynch has always disavowed any interest in underground music – the drones, as with many aspects of his oeuvre, allegedly come from his time living in the factory districts of 70s Philadelphia – but episode 8 is structured around Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima (1960). Just as Lynch's 80s and 90s films absorbed the aesthetic of perfume adverts, so his late films seem to incorporate both the high-concept music video and, in parodic form, the nexus of avant-garde film and modernist represented by Maya Deren or Jordan Belson. The swarms of abstract imagery that fill the screen for the next 10 minutes are the apotheosis of the uses of recorded music in his films, with its burden of strange nostalgia, from Dean Stockwell miming to Roy Orbison's “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet (1986) to the apocalyptic karaoke video set to Nina Simone's “Sinnerman” that closes Inland Empire (2007). When, late in the episode, The Platters's “My Prayer” breaks into the soundtrack, only to be replaced by the scratching of a stylus against a turntable, it feels like the most visceral dramatisation of Twin Peaks's use of the artificial to confront the viewer with the primal, and vice versa. If – no spoilers! – Lynch's series is ultimately a tragedy, it still articulates the pleasures and horrors of its bewildering, pliable stretch of time through perhaps the most extreme sonic experiments ever let loose on television.

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Ghost Box and the sound of horror

Originally published in Sight and Sound, December 2015

In Roy Ward Baker's 1967 Hammer remake of the BBC serial Quatermass And The Pit, the undead consciousness of insectoid Martians haunting a Tube station appears first as noise. Tristram Cary's soundtrack renders the powers responsible for centuries of demonic sightings – humanity's own forgotten ancestors – as squealing electronic tones and echoing pulses that fold into a granular rumbling as Sladden (Duncan Lamont), possessed by their “spiritual evil”, collapses in a graveyard, the earth writhing under him. Horror – and here Cary and sound editor Roy Hyde work a perceptive variation on the sonic structure of horror film going back to the 1930s – is that which is unseen but whose very absence is visible; imagination, working from the image-bank of primal and forgotten fears, supplies the rest.

That was the principle that underpinned The Seance At Hobs Lane, by Mount Vernon Arts Lab, the project of Glaswegian musician and geographer Drew Mulholland. When it was reissued in 2007 by the Ghost Box label, it marked an evolution in what was already one of the most fascinating British audiovisual projects of the 2000s. The very fact that, despite not having originally released the 53 minutes of abstract, crepuscular rumbling that Mulholland teases from Quatermass, it fit perfectly into their catalogue suggests what is unique about the label: that they have, over the last decade, built up a world as heterogeneous, perplexing and coherent in its illusionism as the best of British horror film.

The label has just celebrated its first decade with a new 2-disc compilation, In A Moment… Ghost Box. It's hard to recapture how strange and opaque the first Ghost Box releases seemed, and the puzzling mix of elements that made up its aesthetic. As Simon Reynolds suggests in his sleevenotes, much of it came from the film and television of the post-war childhoods of co-founders Julian House and Jim Jupp (who record as The Focus Group and Belbury Poly respectively): tense pastoral horrors like The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General, disturbing avant-garde children's serials turned out by Granada and the BBC like The Changes, Children Of The Stones and The Tomorrow People, ropey pop music shows, Public Information Films that lingered on death and mishap, soundtracked by flutes and lilting synthesisers. (The label's very name evokes audiovisual media – the TV that brought these unheimlich spectres into the heart of the home – rather than just music.) The paternalist modernism of BBC Schools programs and Pelican paperbacks – which influenced House's sleeve designs – became braided with the time-warp eeriness that pervades horror of this period and the innovative electronic soundtracks that – as has now become almost a cliché in horror scholarship – flowed through them. Behind the jaunty-but-queasy collages of The Focus Group's We Are All Pan's People – whose sleeve recasts the Top Of The Pops dance troupe as occult bacchantes – or Belbury Poly's The Owl's Map lie not only, say, Daphne Oram's soundtrack for The Innocents (1961), Desmond Briscoe's cues for The Stone Tape (1972), Krzysztof Komeda's work on Roman Polanski's 60s films, or any number of perturbing moments produced by members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but the hermetic, inescapable fictional worlds they constituted. It was never just spooky music background but an audiovisual intervention into the archive of horror cinema.

Much of the commentary on the early Ghost Box releases emphasised their status as “sonic fictions”, to use Mark Fisher's phrase. This wasn't, in retrospect, quite right. Out of sparse visual and sonic traces scattered across the records, House and Jupp created an entire mythology. They seemed like the lounge music of an alternative timeline where the post-war consensus never ended, or even changed, as eerily persistent as the buried presence of the Martians in Quatermass.... Their power was formal – the uneven, unstable conjunction of sound and vision – rather than purely deriving from their eerie content. They sounded not just like soundtracks to imagined films, but revelations of the power of film sound itself to construct and twist the apparent naturalness of the world. The modernist grids of House's sleeve designs mapped on to the disruptive edits that organised the sampled fragments of The Focus Group's tracks. They mapped in turn onto 70s horror's use of sound design to suture the spectator into a shifting world of terrifying suggestion. The strange shifts of The Advisory Circle's Other Channels – perhaps the label's best release – in which distant footsteps turn suddenly into up-close synthesiser noise, in which sampled dialogue switches into distorted screams, could be compared with the razor edits and dreamy sound design, at once dense and spacey, of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Lizard In A Woman's Skin (1971).

What distinguishes Ghost Box from the numerous rip-offs that have followed – the risible Public Service Broadcasting, Richard Littler's unfunny online project Scarfolk, or even Mordant Music's underwhelming Misinformation (2011) – is this audiovisual ability to summon the uncanny resonance from a few talismanic traces and techniques. As Reynolds emphasises – though perhaps not strongly enough – the best Ghost Box releases evoke atmosphere, the indeterminate Proustian memory-traces that reanimate a lost world. The threat is always melting back into the greenwood, back into media. In the Ghost Box universe there are no campy, Iconic vampires; we ourselves are the monsters, living in an age when, as Ian Penman writes, “[t]echnology (from psychoanalysis to surveillance) has made us all ghosts… contaminated by other people's memories.”

When Ghost Box began, such films were the preserve of fastidious cults defined by their modernist opposition to good taste. Fast forward ten years and they're everyone's property. Horror scholarship has caught up with the British achievement in the 1970s. As has the nostalgia industry – witness Neil LaBute's 2006 remake of The Wicker Man. After Christopher Lee's recent death, the TV tributes endlessly unspooled his Hammer roles and his turn as Lord Summerisle, now trapped in the aspic of the Iconic. The mournful retro-modernism to which the label gave a shape has become big business. Hammer has been revived and now produces meta-riffs on its own filmography, as in last year's The Quiet Ones. Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) – for which House designed the title sequence of the giallo on which Toby Jones's sound engineer is working – suggested that the archival trajectory Ghost Box initiated had run its course: a horror film haunted primarily by horror film sound itself, the unstable and too-real world it created, and the repressed history it invoked – the first post-hauntological horror flick. The note of elegy that Strickland sounded – for the horror genre itself and the extremities and subtleties of modernist expression it permitted – suggests what Ghost Box's celebratory mood can't quite admit: that perhaps now the ghosts are all fled in the blinding light of commerce.

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Dean Blunt

Originally published in The Wire 369, November 2014

Dean Blunt – Black Metal (Rough Trade CD/DL/2xLP)

When Dean Blunt's voice emerges out of the glowering late Tangerine Dream synths and strangled soprano sax of “GRADE”, it's to announce “You're not a re-run”. His fastidious enunciation, the near-growl that elsewhere drifts into a watery croon, forms an impenetrable mask even when, as on the two Narcissist albums, he sings about what sounds like the mess of emotional turbulence and its chemical salves (“Molly water flowing in my dome”). Life as a reincarnation of cultural detritus suits him.

More so than on last year's The Redeemer, the incomplete, at times primitive quality of these songs seems deliberate, a function of Blunt's composing with the sampler; although tracks like “LUSH” and “BLOW” take up the instrumental palette of 80s indie pop and court its moments of melodic grace – Jonny Marr on “Reel Around The Fountain”, Camera Obscura, Orange Juice's “Falling And Laughing” – they lack their classically resolved structures, revolving through the obsessive loops of Hype Williams. Though indie spoke the first time round in a language of dream and languor – a failed romance set against the Thatcherite ideology of success – there's nothing dreamy about Black Metal, recorded in more HD resolution than previous releases. At the same time, the rhythmic undercarriage reaches back to the primal history of hip hop: gated snares and ticking hi-hats on “FOREVER”, the most rudimentary of 4/4 on “LUSH”. The result is, even more than Blunt's previous work, an enigmatic emotional tenor. Not just numbness, purloined from Drake and Kanye, nor the woozy blankness of Hype Williams' best and worst work, but perhaps of sorrows buried in invention, melancholy burning itself out in contrails of “Baker Street” sax on “Forever”.

There's the mocking opacity of that cover, Malevich's Black Square with an insolent Parental Advisory logo, that promises and withholds a surfeit of meaning. Notably it conjures both Metallica's career sales peak, the so-called Black Album, and Prince's ill-fated 1994 attempt at a rapprochement with hip hop (same name, same cover). Blunt has lamented in these pages (Wire #367) the lack of a black popular audience for his work; and, not to get all Cultural Studies about it, this harking back to the moment of a seismic shift in the nature of black pop's global reach seems to turn Black Metal into a memorial to a failed ambition. Even Kanye and Rihanna have to make do with virtual dominion these days, lives counted in Youtube and Spotify hits. Perhaps not surprising that the 13-minute “Forever” carries memories of Julius Eastman's minimalist piano cascades, the work of another fugitive black artist who inhabited and upset the categories of pop and avant-garde: Black Metal is the work of a mole in the social and sentimental economy of pop.

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Colin Newman

Originally published in The Wire 393, November 2016

Colin Newman – A-Z

Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish

Not To (all Sentient Sonics 2xCD/LP)

A few years older than the movement's main protagonists and more thoroughly a product of the experimental art schools of the 1970s, Wire were always in an odd relation to the “year zero” of punk. They needed its venomous concision, its momentary consensus of sarcasm and permanent formal revolution, but just as easily disregarded it. Already on Pink Flag vocalist Colin Newman seemed to enclose every snarled utterance seemed like a parody of punk. Their combination of the brutal, fractured and streamlined soon filtered on the one hand into melody, on the other into the kinds of textural experiment that post-punk would make its currency.

The four solo albums Newman released between 154 (1979) and Wire's reunion on The Ideal Copy (1987), the first three of which are reissued here on his own label, enact this dialectic between tunes and see-what-sticks exploration, from their aggregate feel to wild individual structures. Among all the bonkers moments of A-Z (1980) the suspicion lingers that under the layers of time-warp FX, dense mixing and multitracked vocals are pieces of songwriting that could have come from The Pretenders or The Cars. The studio and home demos collected on the bonus CD here confirm it: “Life On Deck” is perpetually shocked and distorted by grating synth riffs and vocodered voice, hemmed in by background vocals like a terrace chant, ripped apart by dark guitars; the demo version reveals a steely, sparky, headlong-rushing piece of new wave that patents The Jam's “Town Called Malice” two years ahead of time. Desmond Simmons's bass and the drums of Wire percussionist Robert Gotobed drive on with an efficiency even their main project rarely matched. There's something of the “magic eye” optical illusion about tracks like “I've Waited Ages”, “But No” and “Seconds To Last”, with swathes of arresting, nagging individual elements – biting guitars, manic vocal loops, roiling breakdowns for piano and synth – suddenly, in a certain hazy focus, coalesce into astonishing songs.

On 1981's Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish the pendulum had swung back towards experiment. With Newman handling all instrumental duties (except Gotobed's contribution on drums on the breakneck “Fish 9”), these mostly voiceless tracks can be compared with the asymmetrical, disintegrated, private work of Robert Rental, Flaming Tunes or General Strike. Newman conceived of them as “imaginary soundtrack pieces” in the vein of Eno's real film scores, but whilst there's something recessed and almost anonymous about these tracks, it's hard to think what sort of footage the cyclical vocodered yowls and small-instrument patchwork of “Fish 7” would accompany. (Although given A-Z's “Alone” did indeed follow Jonathan Demme's camera through a serial killer's pad in Silence Of The Lambs, who knows really.) But they also include perhaps the most genuinely lovely passages of Newman's career, with the sliding dissonances of “Fish 11” and the barroom Gymnopedies of “Fish 12”, topped by one of the most insouciant whistled melodies of the 80s, matching the mood and measured effect of anything on Eno's own epochal solo records.

Newman returned to a cleaner, more melodic style on the next year's Not To, whose reissued form essentially presents two albums: the original and, on the bonus CD, the home demos for an entire follow-up album he never recorded. (The title of his eventual fourth solo release, 1986's Commercial Suicide, may give some clue as to why.) Reunited with Gotobed and Simmons (who passes bass duties on to Simon Gilham), their relatively conventional structures of melodic post-punk, which more or less blueprints the work of early REM and much of what would be called “jangle pop”, only underline the strangeness embedded in these songs' depths. Even the most foursquare arrangements are stalked by a queasy sense of menace, longing and deadpan blankness. The oneiric feeling of division in “Truculent Yet” between mushy vocals pressed close to the front of the mix, liquid guitars and crisp hi-hats, rimshots and bass makes Newman's nonsense – “Orange savage baskets laid/Rain simple slide, exemplary blue” – seem like gnostic utterances. The echo that saturates the album lends a glistening grandeur to the stern “Remove For Improvement”, itself followed by a bizarre version of The Beatles' “Blue Jay Way” that floats on backwards tape loops and tablas. If ultimately the album feels as a whole solid but not quite revelatory, it's perhaps down to the sense that, in restraining the production, Newman has abandoned some of the impulses that found expression in Wire's most confrontational work and the tension that came with them. (The less polished demo versions of several album tracks, though less satisfying, suggest the other directions they could have gone.) And if there aren't really any lost classics among the unreleased material here, tracks like “If Time Had Been”, the eerie “Lunaris” and “But Either Way” show that Newman's songwriting never lost its grip on the dialectic.

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Holly Herndon

Originally published in The Wire 375, May 2015

Holly Herndon – Platform (4AD/RVNG Intl CD/DL/2xLP)

The press release for Holly Herndon's second album lists its genre as “Future / Protest / Paradisic”. On “Unequal” choral vocals erupt like a memory of Thomas Tallis's works of massed voices, their structures mirrors of the imagined order of medieval society and its counterpart in the celestial sphere. Art as nexus between present discontent and coming utopia: it's an image that's travelled with culture from Malevich to... well, maybe to Jonathan Ive's hermitage-cum-studio at Apple. That trajectory itself gives some indication of what's good and bad about Platform.

Herndon is very articulate about the political imperatives of her work – the social impact of data, the body's relationship with computing – and the ten laptop compositions of Platform are brilliant, thrilling articulations of many of her ideas. While the balletic techno of 2012's Movement wrought riches out of limited means, there was always the possibility that, in moving to a larger canvas in which her conceptual elements had greater emphasis, Herndon would falter – that Platform would be either a dry experiment or the Silicon Valley equivalent of Red Wedge. That neither has happened is thanks to the skilled songwriting sense that accompanies her experimental curiosity.

The integration of club forms and procedural-driven content is smoother than on Movement. “Chorus”, made from audio collected during Herndon's web browsing by software written by her partner, digital artist Mat Dryhurst, bursts with irregular vocal pulses that form both the melodic topline and crisscrossing rhythmic counterpoints while the bass drives irresistibly on. “Morning Sun” takes the clipped rave stabs and raindrop percussion of footwork and squeezes gorgeous, multi-layered vocal fragments into their interstices. “DAO” and “Home” have formal roots in the jittery, deconstructed rhythms of microhouse, their intensely-worked moment-to-moment shifts not just a display of programming virtuosity but a lovingly calibrated kaleidoscopic rhythm. The latter starts to sound like an x-ray of the invisible processes of searching and surveillance that intrigue Herndon: its central monologue is that of an intelligence agent addressing the internet user on whom they are spying.

But while Herndon puts her immense facility into the work's textural appeal, it's still all Apollonian control, no Dionysian sweat. Given that technology has become the main conduit of contemporary politics and sex it's perhaps reasonable to wish for a bit of libidinal charge here. The contradictory undercurrents of darkness and strangeness within many of the most powerful works in the tradition of computer music, even at its most apparently scientific and programmatic – from Laurie Spiegel to Alva Noto – seem lost here. The most overtly political lyrics – “An Exit” asks, “Why stay apart when we could be together?” – have an air of church singalong platitudes. The utopian visions in Platform just aren't quite attractive; they form eerie doubles of the utopias of the tech sector's elite, in which technological ingenuity and tasteful design can somehow banish class antagonism and the materiality of history falls away. It's hard not to think that what is most living in Platform is quite distant from what is most politically important in Herndon's ideas.

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Charlotte Prodger

First published in The Wire 378, August 2015

Charlotte Prodger's work suspends fragments from the history of technology, avant-garde film, music, queer subculture, industrial sculpture and the internet between and among media and subjectivities. Compression Fern Face/Percussion Biface, a two-channel video mounted on an old-fashioned aluminium stand, included in a new Contemporary Projects display, at Tate Britain, opposes what appears to be an early digital video, showing two rotating shapes like akimbo legs, accompanied by the artist's voice reading descriptions of videos documenting performances by the late conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim, to a ripped Youtube video of a craftsman making a flint axe. microsphaeric howard hughes heaven movie, performed last year at Glasgow's Tramway, juxtaposed a DVD monitor, 16mm projection and a boombox, with spoken texts moving between the stereo and the theatre soundsystem.

Her installations, the form to which the artist has increasingly turned after a period working primarily with 16mm film, compose themselves like rave tracks, decontextualised bits of material returning in elliptical loops, with multiple visual and narrative rhythms sparking against each other. In Percussion Biface 1-13, a work for two monitors some of whose elements reappear in Fern..., video ripped from a sneaker fetishist's Youtube channel showing him scrambling up and down a dirt slope in vintage white Adidas is soundtracked by Prodger's descriptions of the flint tool-making video, philosopher Bernard Stiegler's speculations about the emergence of tool use and language in the Paleolithic era and a woman's description of her experiences dealing with volume in nightclubs. Using the one-shot format of structural film rather than complex editing, it braids together multiple temporalities: prehistoric time, the time of the digital archive, the sonic time of language, the bodily time of craft or eroticism. On the other monitor, in what looks like a demonstration video, a massive boombox pumps out trance builds.

Born in Bournemouth in 1974, Prodger trained at Goldsmiths College and Glasgow School of Art, before settling in Glasgow, where she had her first solo shows. On the soundtrack to :+*, a two-channel film first presented at Glasgow's CCA, a narrator, voiced by the artist, remembers listening to house and techno on a Walkman in the woods. These references, she says, “talk about a particular formative moment in the evolution of my queer identity as an adolescent in Aberdeen, when I stopped going to the progressive house/minimalist techno clubs which played amazing music with amazing drugs but were totally hetero, and started going to a provincial gay bar that played trashy vocal garage. It was like I had to take a step backward in one way to take a step forward in another... In my work I think about this moment in relation to wider historical movements and the tension between Minimalism and language.”

Prodger uses sound to change the quality of material, from the Godardian technique of tearing apart film and soundtrack to spatially redistributing a piece's sound. Thus, in Fern..., only one monitor features sound, on headphones, and the spectator can only view screen one at once. The fact that the flint axe video plays out in silence lends the action a mysterious quality, telescoping together the fetishistic character of a Lumière short with primal and digital-era temporalities. In other works, sound is split between headphones and speakers. This separation “brings something anthropomorphic to the technology. It allows me to think of each object as characters in the room, and play with relationships between them.” Thus, in :+*, videos from two trainer fetishists who are also sexual partners play on separate monitors, “[b]ut just their hands and feet. My voice is on the boombox across the room. And so are the voices of two male friends of mine. And they're speaking other people's words.”

At a moment when much post-internet art presents its flatness as a means of mystification – witness the rise of PC Music – Prodger's work resurrects much more fruitful historical trajectories through sonic media. “With YouTube, the endlessness of online content is becoming flatter and flatter. The body is changing. From a queer perspective this excites me”, she says. “With the internet you can simultaneously feel the absolute vastness of it and then these moments of minute close-up. I enjoy that feeling of vastness turning into extreme intimacy.”

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Scott Walker + Sunn 0)))

Originally published in The Wire 368, October 2014

Scott Walker + Sunn O))) – Soused (4AD CD/DL/2xLP)

First, I'm disappointed no enterprising soul in Scott's entourage did more with the logo: I envisaged intertwined golden S's like the Chanel double-C. The tone of unrelieved dourness that accompanies this release – sleeve of roiling clouds, band shots in all-black, with Scott in ever-present peaked cap and aviators, the Hemingway machismo of that title – are all set to play up to the dullest expectations of all parties. The first, wracking chords and bullwhip cracks that follow the intro to opener “Brando” threaten to confirm them. But those hoping for a group sulk from experimental song's popes of mope should prepare to be both pleased and disappointed.

The thunderous deconstructed rock that formed the skeleton of last year's Bisch Bosch, a mode prototyped on The Drift's “Cossacks Are”, is at first sight simply reinforced by the presence of the Sunn duo. Soused seems most of the time not to follow the usual naive ideal of the supergroup: the combination of every collaborator's best qualities. Much of it sounds, rather, like late Scott, only less so. Sunn O)))'s participation seems like a way of circumventing Walker's painstaking compositional method, detailed in the documentary 30th Century Man; the result lacks some of the swarming, piercing detail and vertiginous shifts that give so much shattering and subtle drama to late Scott. At the same time, it mostly does away with the worry that haunts latter-day songs like “Clara” and “Jesse”, that the music, like the stage pointers of Wagner's leitmotifs, is merely illustrative of the libretto. (The strings and bowed percussion that start “Fetish”, with its opening gambit of “red blade-points knife the air”, still raise an ironic smile, sounding straight out of the shower scene in Psycho.)

What Sunn O))) bring to the music, instead, is a new, painterly emphasis on the weight and texture of sound: the exact grain and thrust of a riff or a sustained rumble of guitar, the nerve-chafing ripple of tuned percussion. It's a sensibility that flashes up at the most exquisite moments of Walker's catalogue – from Wally Stott's string arrangement on “Montague Terrace In Blue”, warm with tears, to the Penderecki clouds that open “It's Raining Today”, to the calibrated presence and attack of the flesh-thumps on “Clara” – and is here magnified and spread across whole songs. The alternately fractured and ecstatic abstraction achieved on Sunn's Monoliths & Dimensions invests the most thrilling moments here: the nightmare of “Lullaby”, where nails-on-blackboard treble and a scrawling pulse-riff form the room that Scott sounds like he's trying to escape from; “Fetish”, which crawls along from its beginning in a tense process of accretion and dissolution of tingling, rattling, groaning noises, with breakouts of stentorian rock, until O'Malley's growling blast enters at the halfway mark.

The famous voice itself – starting to defy its reputation as an instrument in a velvet-lined box, not taken out too often – seems even more blunted, less expressive, than on Bisch Bosch. In moments of exertion – as in the vocal leaps that open “Brando” – there is an almost parodic quality, as if we were listening to a cabaret singer's impression of Walker; the surrealist violence of the opening to “Bull” is delivered with the insolent flatness of an Oi lyric: “Woke up nailed to cross/Bump the beaky!/Could not give toss”. Walker's confession that he never relistens to his past work – with its notoriously elongated gestation periods, that he now seems to be leaving behind him – becomes, with the assistance of metal's abrasive palette, a more general iconoclasm. In “Herod 2014”, escaping children – an image invested with real terror in the wake of ISIS – “refuse to be blinded/By Rubens or Poussin”. Art, it turns out, makes nothing happen; Scott and Sunn O))) make that nothing happening real and audible.