Cildo Meireles, Tate Modern

Cildo Meireles,
Tate Modern

‘Volatile’ is a mystery reserved for four people at a time. The final work in the Cildo Meireles retrospective at Tate Modern requires you to take off your shoes and socks and brave the step into darkness. What you find, when your eyes adjust, is Meireles’ work at its most dangerous and its most achingly beautiful.

Britain’s first comprehensive retrospective of this Brazilian artist’s work is an immersive, emotional and sensory experience. Down the river, the Turner Prize show is a mortuary of dry, sexless ideas in comparison. Meireles’ work, for me, approaches the apex of what Conceptual Art could and should be, leaping out at you in a shriek of red ink and ticking clocks. What he does, and what the Turner Prize has forgotten how to do, is to combine ideas with art to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, so that the artwork is not merely a symbol of an idea or a representation of a bone-dry essay, but a thing that stands on its own, inviting a variety of responses including, perhaps, a non-intellectual one.

In a nutshell, Meireles’ work pours cold water on our contemporary artistic fixations. His concept of Conceptual is not to re-present objects in a way that frames some clunky, inflexible academic idea, reducing it to a full stop at the end of a train of thought, but to open up our responses with something playful that nevertheless conceals a darker heart.

Dynamic narratives are created from everyday objects like Coke bottles, pennies, radios and rulers – personal objects we all own that are laden with symbolism. From these nuts and bolts he explores political corruption, time and space, the subversion of authority and the concept of infinity. ‘For me,’ Meireles has said, ‘the art object must be, despite everything else, instantly seductive.’

In ‘Mission/Missions (How To Build Cathedrals)’, a pool of copper pennies invites you to dip your hand and rake the shallows, evocative of blood drip-dripping from the mausoleum of bones above you. A string of communion wafers ascends towards some higher spirituality, ironically offering the body of Christ in a bid to eradicate the cannibalism of the indigenous people of Brazil. Many artists can do political, historical and subversive. But few do it so sensually or with such simple meditative intensity.

The viewer – or, more accurately, the participant – is required not just to think but to feel, to hear hundreds of radios whispering in your ear, or the sheer volume of a room where every object is red, or cold shivers down your neck as glass cracks beneath you. Some mysteries are best left unexplained.

Shearwater, St Giles-in-the-Fields, 22 November

Shearwater @ St Giles-in-the-Fields Church, 22^nd November

St Giles-in-the-Fields, nestled in the monolithic shadow of Centrepoint, imposes an attentive quietude on its congregation. Shearwater hold court as our hands and noses turn to ice and chasten our mouths into an awed silence.

Last time I was at St Giles, high priestess Patti Smith held a vigil for Saints Rimbaud and Hendrix, her religious imagery by turns blasphemous and sublime. Tonight, Shearwater scale down the lyrical content to songs for tiny sparrows (God’s most cared-for living thing, as you know), but scale up the sound, barging in on the freezing, silent air and crashing down in grand piano bashes, guitar squall, clattering percussion and, leading the charge, frontman Jonathan Meiburg’s mesmeric voice, mouse-quiet one moment and gale force ten the next.

The band, featuring upright bass, melting electronics and multi-instrumentalist dude Thor, also explores the quieter side of indie rock as originally intended by its two founder members, also of Austin, TX band Okkervil River. The evening ceremony is broadcast to our souls, clear and affecting in the pin-drop silence as we huddle together with scarves wrapped around ears and hands. We got that, loud and clear.

Hokaben, 93 Feet East, 7-8-9 November

Hokaben Festival @ 93 Feet East. 7-8-9 October

Culture casts a wide net these days. John Cage pulled off his 4’ 33” of silence all the way back in 1952, so in a sense extreme music has already been pushed as far as it can ever go. Equally, listeners tend to accept almost anything on a CD as music, even if they can’t stomach it or don’t understand it.

Aufgehoben do their damndest to push that concept to its limits. Two drums engage in a perpetual clatter-battle backed by a guitar tricked out to deliver notes as white noise, and behind them chirrups and ambient sighs are teased from a tabletop of buttons and boxes. People are standing very still, earplugs safely installed. Concentrate. Concentrate! This is art! This is avant garde!

Aufgehoben aren’t the only band this weekend to pose the very open question: music, art or noise? Hokaben is billed as bringing the weirdest, heaviest and craziest bands together with, in their words, “not a foppish indie band or yawnsome postrock band in sight.” There are beards, there are moustaches, and there are males - lots of them. An asexual politeness pervades proceedings, almost extending into a tolerance rather than an appreciation of the bands, only a handful of which are well-known. The rest may have consigned themselves by default to a fringe existence: Bilgepump, Chops, Arabrot. Not top 40 stuff, on the whole.

Hokaben challenges the accepted boundaries of music, so much so that during another set of ear-warping heaviness the thought creeps in: is it possible that not all the bands playing are even supposed to be good? Guys like Trencher and DJ Scotch Egg tinker knowingly on the divide between music and noise, staying just on the right side of listenable. Occasionally though, the line-up veers into wildly different territory, forcing you to think a bit harder about what is and is not music. Illegal Seagull ‘curate’ the Gallery Bar on Saturday, and it’s basically a disaster. Looking like they got lost on the way to Bar Music Hall doesn’t really get the beardies onside, and their music is pure trash – garbled shouts over tacky backing tracks. Most take one look and leave, but you can’t help wondering if this was a Hokaben joke, pitting noise against noise and exposing the prejudice of one ‘alternative’ crowd against another. The Shoreditch kids and the beardos may like to pretend the other doesn’t exist, but in a sense they have the same ideas and ambitions for their art, driven by concepts of confrontation and alienation.

As a three-dayer, Hokaben is a weird one. By removing any trace of corporate sponsorship and branding, the Plan B magazine organisers have created a unique space for the audience to engage with music, art and noise. Playing different kinds of experimentalism off against each other, Hokaben exposes a rich seam of adventurism and artistry situated well and truly on the fringes.

Fashion V Sport, V&A Museum

Fashion V Sport
V&A Museum

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been sartorially bamboozled by fishing. Hunting and shooting are easy peasy of course - jodhpurs for the first, a chic quilted Barbour for the second, and always pearl earrings. But riverside elegance has me stumped, and the fashion section of the Angling Times is hopeless. Thank god Chanel has come up with its own luxury fishing bag, with classic leather-and-chain straps, a monochrome reel and a separate clutch to carry the flies, bearing the double-C logo on each tiny wing. Now that’s luxury, baby.

Chanel’s fishing kit, looking decidedly pre-credit crunch now, is perhaps the ultimate expression of fashion versus sport. Luxury brand meets practical functionality in a tasteless collision powered by green dollar signs in Karl Lagerfeld’s eyes, and ironically enough, the end result is a product that’s not especially fashionable or sporty.

As attitudes to dress have relaxed over the past hundred years, we have adopted sports clothing as everyday wear, from polo shirts to running shoes to oversized hoodies. Sportswear also has close ties with the parallel fashion world of streetwear, and the boundaries between street, sport and couture are continually traversed as Chanel creates wetsuits while Nike launches a line of high heels and Dries Van Noten mimics skater style.

In Fashion V Sport, the V&A has put the spotlight on our voracious consumption of sports goods and the desires and obsessions that lurk behind our shopping habits. The items on display are extreme examples, certainly, but what is it that makes a man collect thousands of pairs of trainers, designed to be durable, comfortable and performance-enhancing, and not even put them on his feet? Kish has been collecting sports shoes since 1982, and a small sample of his vast catalogue is on display here. The sight of dozens of pristine shoes in neat rows and columns, virginal and brightly coloured, is a horrifying distillation of late twentieth century consumerism. At least Carrie Bradshaw wears her Manolos – this ostentatious display is showy and yet impotent. What does Kish do if he actually likes a pair? Does he buy two, one for his collection and one for his feet?

Adidas has embarked on dozens of collaborative projects with fashion designers including Stella McCartney, Yohji Yamamoto and Jeremy Scott, and even artists like Keith Haring (posthumously, but even so). With expensive high fashion goods, you pay for the technical skill, labour and quality materials that go into the product, as well as the brand itself. In sportswear though, the manufacturing process is designed to be as cheap as possible, with value added only once the label is stitched on. So the only way to hike up the price and create a feel of exclusivity to match that of couture is to limit production, knowing that demand will outstrip supply.

The Adidas 35^th anniversary Superstar trainers, made in collaboration with Japanese streetwear brand Neighborhood, are on display here. They’re pretty ordinary, although made with leather and rubber. But only 200 pairs have ever been made, making them one of the most desirable Adidas items around. Kish would be salivating at the thought. Adidas relies on collectors to pay over the odds for ‘exclusive’ trainers, and in turn encourages them by creating these collectable products. It’s a bizarre concept, but one that we barely question.

Fashion V Sport’s visitors are a mix of design students, families and young males getting far too excited over a pair of anaconda skin Nike Air Force Ones. They all browse around, skimming the clothes until their eye lands on this or that. “Weird,” they say at the hood of an Aitor Throup jacket, designed to look like an elephant with flappy ears and two limp jersey trunks. “I hate those,” says one mum as she spots the Vivienne Westwood ultra-low crotch sweatpants. Museum-goers seem to adopt a depressingly consumerist mindset at fashion exhibitions. They scan the displays as though they’re racks, shopping for things that appeal instantly and reacting by ‘”loving this” or “hating that”, failing to register clothes as design, art, or artefact.

It’s a somewhat inevitable problem, but as fashion in museums is becoming more popular and more academically acceptable, it’s really the curator’s responsibility to aid the visitors’ understanding. Fashion V Sport has something profound and alarming to say about our society, but it can slip away all too easily when baubles are displayed as art, and art as baubles.

Concrete and Glass festival, Shoreditch 2-3/10/2008

Concrete and Glass festival
2-3 October
Various venues, Shoreditch
co-written with E. Ali

Thursday

In the corner by the stage there is either: a) a medieval weapon, like a catapult but with measly firepower; b) a loom; or c) an instrument. Turns out Owl Project is a kind of musicians’ woodworking club, and the rickety frame is a homemade lathe. Logs are chopped and wood is sawn, and slowly, slowly, the pieces slot together. Humming, sawing, scraping sounds grow organically as rhythms are picked up, looped and extended through a laptop. A dial-up connection bursts in and beats shuffle together and fall apart as tradition meets technology. It’s way cool, and it’s a perfect introduction to the Concrete and Glass festival, a new multi-venue event in East London featuring art across dozens of venues and a choice selection of music from the experimental (Owl Project definitely falling into this category) to the, er, experimental and more famous (TV On The Radio, Errors).

A fusion of Clash skanking, funeral marching and gypsy dancing isn’t so special these days, but how many bands do it in the same song? Quite a few probably, but Bodies Of Water have such an elegant way with splicing that when the ideas hit you all at once its neither contrived nor slapdash. Their DIY baroque is utterly beguiling, especially during a guitar-violin duel which gives the front row a solid drenching of perfect feedback. Your new favourite band.

Rounding off Thursday, Glaswegian foursome Errors are definitely on to a winning formula with their oddball blend of acid house and post-rock causing a mass migration to the upstairs of The Old Blue Last. There’s barely space to breathe, let alone dance, but the driving percussion and shower of bleeps proves hard to resist for most of the audience.

Friday

Sky Larkin’s new arrangement as a trio seems to have worked out, ‘cos their track ‘Antibodies’ is on 6Music every seven minutes, by my estimates. Sadly their new material is short on ideas and suffers from stodgy drumming that drowns out Katie’s voice and subtle guitarwork. Next at 93 Feet East though, Port O’Brien showcase their thoughtful folk-rock featuring banjo, pots and pans and sea shanty chants. Live, the songs have a stripped down, raw edge, with singer Van Pierszalowski’s impassioned and fragile vocals recalling Daniel Johnston.

It’s a simple idea but Bass Clef got there first – dubstep meets trombone, they make beautiful music babies together. The live experience in the basement of Zigfrid’s features heavy, heavy dread sounds and reverb brass from outer space, so it’s a must-see, really.

A massive crowd packs The Old Blue in anticipation of the stupidly talented 21 year old Micachu, who has already had one of her compositions performed by the London Philharmonic. Her early success is obviously deserved as she shows off her sneeringly clever songs in which genres merge together in a colourful, cerebral, beautiful mess.

Finally, after queueing for an hour, we make it into Plastic People where James Holden rounds off the night with a DJ set of the warmest, glitchiest minimal techno you could ask for on a Friday night in Shoreditch. Well played, C&G.

The House of Viktor & Rolf

The House of Viktor & Rolf

Barbican Art Gallery

Viktor & Rolf are artists. They just happen to make clothes. Their first pieces, and in fact, a large proportion of all their pieces, are not exactly made to be worn. An early collection consisted of puffed out golden costumes, empty of a wearer and suspended above the ground casting ‘shadows’ of black organza shapes below. Wouldn’t fit too fabulously with your new Office pumps, probably.

Their art is all about the concept. Where most designers and shoppers want to have the prettiest, the sexiest, the most luxurious, V&R make no excuses for the challenges they pose to conventional beauty and the factory-farm fashion industry. Since their first meeting as fashion students at Arnhem art academy, Viktor & Rolf have struggled to come to terms with their own position within the industry.

Early collections saw the pair refuse to show at all, instead stationing models across Paris armed with placards: Viktor & Rolf on strike. At once in love and in hate with the glossy fashion cocoon that has showered praise on them from the start (even when, in doing so, it acknowledges the criticisms levelled at it), V&R seem to be obsessed with opposites.

Seeing the pair’s chronological progression in this career retrospective at the Barbican, it’s striking how they are so keen to abandon the sentiment of each previous collection while retaining a solid identity, obvious even in early prototypes. And that identity, that V&R essence, is like a controlled madness – the giddy whimsy of the Flowerbomb collection, complete with crimped afro hair pieces, saccharine florals and models dancing down the aisles, contrasts violently with the Black collection, featuring models painted a dusty charcoal on every inch of skin and parading the darkest of dark clothes from head to toe.

Elsewhere – because this show is really more of a gallery of separate installations than a list of past collections – the Blue collection uses chromakey technology to project clouds, cityscapes and helicopters onto exquisitely detailed outfits of purest Yves Klein blue, creating a surprisingly haunting, even poignant effect. Yet the centrepiece of the exhibition is a giant three storey doll’s house populated with miniature porcelain dolls wearing exact copies of V&R’s most iconic and memorable pieces, right down to the Tilda Swinton doll with slicked back flaming red hair and ten collars piled high on top of each other.

The fashion equivalent of a fondant fancy, it’s oversized, preening and playful against the seriousness of the Blue and Black collections. Head-to-toe black one season, purest white the next. Masculine tailoring meets the feminine goddess head-on in a floor-length chiffon dress the colour of marshmallow, one half of which is tucked into a single slim grey trouser leg. Opposites clash but always complement.

Viktor & Rolf recognise the inherent triviality and superficiality of fashion with its constantly changing trends and demands, but rather than shouting back in an overtly political way à la Katharine Hamnett (she of the 80s slogan t-shirt ‘CHOOSE LIFE’), they revel in its glossy vapidity. Marketing a perfume that doesn’t open as well as others that do, showing their clothes on mannequins with porcelain dolls’ heads - it’s a dressing up game with a childish appeal, and yet the ideas propping up the V&R show are entirely adult.

It’s bafflingly good, and likely to surprise and impress even the most hardcore of existing V&R fans. This is a design team who see the catwalk as their canvas, as a venue for a happening, as a place to protest and pout in equal measure. Though V&R have a ready-to-wear line, not to mention a high street collaboration with H&M two years ago, it still takes a certain woman to wear a cocktail dress filled with helium balloons. Polarising stuff.

These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid

These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid
Domino

Like an agitated teenager adrift from the early 80s, Jack Barnett, the spindly frontman of These New Puritans, has one foot in our digitised urban jungle of tarmac and grime (in the physical and musical senses) and the other in parallel realms of occultist mantras, astrology and mythology. Beat Pyramid, the debut from the malnourished Southend four-piece, is a scatterbrain collection of urgent guitars, drone-fuzz bass, looping textures and wild tangents, veering from danceable post-punk to whirring soundscape interludes, all peppered with an ironic deadpan that makes no bones about its debt to Mark E Smith. The lyrics are both intensely cryptic and laughably banal; a bizarre reference to Michael Barrymore on ‘MKK3’ and the profound emptiness of the repeated “0800, 0800” on ‘Elvis’ place the record in a fantasy galaxy, floating alongside the magickal space-age of Myths Of The Near Future but with its roots in a very British melancholia.

For a debut record it’s an astonishing achievement. An ode to pre-Socratic philosophers on the sparse and fantastically grimy ‘Infinity Ytinifni’ rubs up against the playground punk of ‘Numerology AKA Numbers’ - but it’s obvious that this is a juvenile effort, in the best possible sense. The sheer volume of ideas and influences here could contribute to a truly classic album a few years down the line when they’ve grown out of their ADD mindsets and started drinking grown-up beer. Like when a four year old stops drawing stick-men and progresses to wobbly arms and googly eyes: TNP are way ahead of their peers, but Beat Pyramid ain’t their Mona Lisa. This really is a band that needs to be nurtured properly and not just shoved off the roundabout of indie fame when ‘the new New Puritans’ pop up in about, ooh, three weeks?

26/01/2008

The Horrors NME Awards Show @ Astoria, 16/02/2008

The Horrors + Crystal Castles + These New Puritans + Ulterior
NME Awards Show @ Astoria, 16^th February

Welcome to one of the few genuinely decent line-ups on the never-ending Wagnerian nightmare that is the NME Awards Shows, the most ridiculous, turgid, self-serving piece of marketing guff since, well, the NME Awards. Sadly, Ulterior’s performance will be omitted from this review because nobody will ever convince me that the phrase ‘doors open at 5.30pm’ displays any grasp of logical reasoning. This is a real shame, because Ulterior’s Suicide-shagging-William-Reid industrial noise-drone is far too exciting to miss. Four hours of adverts for Shockwaves, Skins and Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong (a pox on that band for eating into my word count) is more than any creature equipped with opposable thumbs can bear.

These New Puritans capitalise on what must be their biggest show to date, their sound becoming truly enormous propelled by those hip hop drums and nauseating low-frequency basslines. Jack Barnett has apparently come dressed as a Norman swan in chainmail tunic of plastic feathers, his bowl cut balanced precariously on a bird-like neck. A genuinely beguiling frontman, he at least seems to be having fun – Sophie sullenly pokes around on synths, scratching her neck and fighting to stay awake through their grimy, angular onslaught. It’s genius.

The Astoria ain’t quite right for Crystal Castles dirrrty club aesthetic, but that doesn’t stop the half-term rave kids’ sugar rush as they go batshit crazy for Alice’s winged-insect-trapped-in-a-bottle stage moves. Still, the deliciously warped malignancy of ‘Alice Practice’ and fizzing sodapop electro of ‘Air War’ stand out a mile above the samey bleeps of the non-singles, which doesn’t bode well for their upcoming album.

The Horrors return to headline the Astoria barely a year after their opening slot on the Rock’n’Roll Riot Tour, another steaming delight from the NME featuring The Dykeenies, The Maccabees and The Fratellis. Christ. Tighter and louder than ever before (both sartorially and musically), they’ve come a long way since then - this set almost makes the 45 minute mark, and Faris’ inter-song banter is becoming increasingly absurd: “sing for your supper,” he snarls into the mic, cracking himself up in the process. A handful of new songs are previewed, more experimental and less obviously derived from their garage rock bread and butter, and they certainly take themselves a lot less seriously than precocious fellow Southenders TNP or the notoriously snarky Crystal Castles.

At 9.30pm the whole shebang is brought to an untimely close. The crowd scratch their heads. It’s unsettling, but at least there’s time for a pint before the tube closes.

20/02/2008

Les Savy Fav, Let's Stay Friends

Les Savy Fav, Let’s Stay Friends
Wichita Records

It’s been six years since the last release from Les Savy Fav, a dumb move considering that their brand of noisy art-punk seriously came back in vogue in that time. No matter, with Let’s Stay Friends the Rhode Islanders are back to capitalise on their matchless live reputation with an album that’s without doubt the sharpest they’ve ever sounded. Opener ‘Pots & Pans’ is a pounding titan of a track, hinting at classic Flaming Lips; after seizing you by the earlobes it then collapses into the clattering Hives-a-like punk of ‘The Equestrian’, super-tight but with buckets of genuine DIY enthusiasm. Next, you’re plunged into the menacing cold water of ‘The Year Before The Year 2000’, a chic slice of post-punk with Gang Of Four guitars and a breakneck ending chanting the pseudo-mantra “1999! 1999’s alright!”

The real standout here though is ‘Patty Lee’, a veritable odyssey of miscellaneous brilliance taking in their trademark minimal guitars and pounding drums, funky falsetto vocals, a screeching solo and a bizarre Cure impression of hollow, reverb-soaked guitars, topped off with the dancefloor-ready shout-along, “Patty Lee turn your lights on please/ this party’s gettin’ outta hand!” Download this if nothing else.

Along with other standouts like ‘Raging In The Plague Age’ (featuring Tim Harrington’s musings on medieval sovereignty: “Being the king was pretty cool/ I'd have to say that ruling ruled”), Let’s Stay Friends may be the record that can finally equal Les Savy Fav’s thrilling live show.

12/09/2007

Adam Green @ Koko, 08/04/2008

Adam Green + Noah And The Whale @ Koko
8^th April 2008

Call me crazy, but I’ve never had Adam Green down as ‘twee’. Sure, The Moldy Peaches were cutesy teens in animal costumes with lyrics by turn sickly sweet and childishly vulgar. But his solo career has seen him explore far beyond the DIY sounds and in-jokeyness of his former band, bringing in strings and organs and now, on fifth solo record Sixes And Sevens, panpipes and gospel singers. In the meantime his voice has matured into a rich and mellow baritone (which may not be to everyone’s taste, especially those Juno-come-lately fans who’ve discovered his work via the soundtrack to the recent flick).

Still, someone decided that Noah And The Whale would be the perfect anti-folk style support slot for this UK tour. And to some extent they are – kitted out in blue and yellow like earnest little Ikea workers, they have a fantastic violin player who actually gets melody parts rather than the usual mournful backing bits they’re allocated. There’s a song that’s suspiciously like ‘Brimful Of Asha’, but the rest are excellent despite the odd banal lyrical tweeism. This undeniably British folk bears little resemblance to Adam Green though – the US anti-folk scene has its roots in entirely different soil. Still, they go down well with the crowd of bespectacled kids who already know all the words.

Wearing a t-shirt adorned with the letter A and white fringing flowing from his sleeves, Adam Green is nothing less than charming throughout, even while singing about herpes, crack and ‘genital outlaws’. A ramshackle but effortless performance, he’s truly the bizarre gem in the NY folk scene’s crown. Moldy who?