It’s pretty cold and grotty out there today. Why not bounce the sunshine off some of some paranoid silverpop? Golau Glau are a collective of musicians and photographers from Wales. We took a wrong turn in cyberspace and ended up at their website and we’re mighty pleased we did. If they let us we’ll be collaborating with them in the future, we like their mantra; they give away their music for free on their blog and last.fm. They’ve also remixed a bunch of top bands including previous bands from two previous installments of Off Modern: Crystal Fighters and Gyratory System. Enjoy!

[CLICK HERE TO LISTEN]

We have reached the 13th Installment of Off Modern and to celebrate this fact we are going all out!

Joining us just before they all jump on a plane to Texas for SWSX, we present to you:

DJANGO DJANGO
http://www.myspace.com/djangotime
It’s almost impossible to box this band in. In the trusted words of the guardian, Django Django are ” Psychedelic art pop at its brilliant best”. Pulsating percussion, fast rhythms, handclaps intertwined with a lot of whiskey, a burning hot sun and a mustang. They are sure to bring that much needed heat to a very icy Elephant & Castle.

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FRENCH KISSING
http://www.myspace.com/frenchkissingband
Another band to undoubtably take the winter chill away. French Kissing serve up a strong dose of sunbleached 60’s Harmonies and garage pop to go bonkers to. In the word’s of one blogger, French Kissing make Brian Wilson want to put on his speedoes and head back to the beach – enough said.

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BEATY HEART
http://www.myspace.com/beatyheart
This south London four piece will get you moving. With their own brand of b-more inspired loops, samples and frenetic tribal drumming Beaty Heart should not be missed.

DJ sets courtesy of:

Deadly Rhythm Sound-System
http://www.myspace.com/deadlyrhythmclub

Yo Mamma
http://www.myspace.com/yomamaldn

+ Off Modern Resident (Tomfoolery’s gone to Finland!)
Nasty McQuaid

ART:

This month Off Modern presents ‘Social Capital’ curated by Sally Hogarth & supported by IdeasTap.
Featuring new work from Kirsty Buchannan, Nisha Duggal, Philipp von Frankenberg, Sally Hogarth, Marnie Hollande, Leah Lovett, Sarah Walters, & more TBC

8pm-3am

FREE before 9pm / Five Pounds After

see http://www.OFFMODERN.com/ for more info

It’s always nice when things go to plan. For January’s Off Modern we invited a selection of our favorite zines along to show their publications. One of these publications was Popshot Magazine, a perennial pulp of excellence from the worlds of illustration and poetry which simply demands respect. It just so happens that its creator Jacob Denno is a true hero who, much to our excitement, will be contributing monthly musings on his field to the Off Modern blog. Here’s a quick interview introducing Popshot and its soon to be infamous creator…

OM: Hello dear boy, how are things at Popshot Towers? When’s the next issue due?

JD: It’s beautiful here. I just had my nasal hair clipped by the Stockholm Beach Volleyball team and I‘m about to open a bottle of 1876 Cristal. Aside from that, everything is pretty normal and the next issue should be arriving back from the printers at the end of March.

OM: Splendid. How did Popshot come about? What were your aims and/ or intentions for the magazine?

JD: It was born out of confusion, really. I didn’t quite understand how poetry had managed to maintain its musty image whilst all around it every other art form had effortlessly pulled itself into the 21st century. So I thought it was about time that changed and wanted to create a magazine that could make people view poetry in a different light, far away from the much resented school anthologies.

OM: Popshot is a hybrid of excellence from the worlds of poetry and illustration. Why did you choose to combine these two arts when creating Popshot?

JD: They were two art forms that in my mind come hand in hand. Children’s books have virtually always had stories/poems accompanied by illustrations and we grow up knowing and loving this. I felt illustration could make poetry more accessible by helping to tell the story of each poem. Words compliment pictures and pictures compliment words, it’s the best relationship I know of.

OM: What sort of people contribute to Popshot? I understand you have had a few big hitters, or scribblers, from the world of illustration helping to make Popshot what it is…

JD: Generally, most of the contributors are out and out heroes. They help to make the magazine what it is, far beyond the stuff that I do. Regarding big scribblers, we have had a few although I like to think that a spotty 16yr old pencil wielder stands as much chance of making it into the magazine as someone who’s part of the mighty Peepshow Collective.

OM: How do you collate the contributions to Popshot and bring them together into a cohesive and interesting format for people buying the magazine?

JD: We do a call for poetry submissions before each issue, always on a theme. 24 poems are chosen from that and then individually sent off to illustrators, to interpret as they see fit. As much as possible, I try to stay out of this process and allow the illustrators creative control although it doesn’t always work out. Design wise, we try and keep it stupidly simple - this hands the readers focus over to the poem, the illustration and nothing else. Hopefully, these two elements alone are enough to maintain the interest.

OM: Do you believe that combining diverse elements of culture can help to create an environment whereby creativity can develop? We’d like to think we do that at our Off Modern events… Did you enjoy January’s Off Modern and in particular, the zine fair? Manage to shift any Popshot copies?

JD: Definitely. The classic is music and art - many artists take inspiration from music and vice versa. A highly overdone case and point would be Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground.
I really enjoyed January’s Off Modern, I couldn’t feel my own face by the end of it and got a £60 parking fine for being there but it was really good to see people’s reactions to the magazine as they picked it up. One kid picked up a copy and just said ‘what the fuck?’. I never found out why…

OM: What excites you about Modern poetry and, for that matter, illustration?

JD: I feel as though modern poetry and the poetry of days gone by is representative of the differences between us and our parents. Modern poetry is louder, harsher and pays more attention to the minute detail. The bigger subjects like love and death have already been covered repeatedly in the past, but contemporary poetry is more ready to find comparisons between Lao Tzu and ejaculation (wait for Issue 3).

OM: How has Popshot changed since you started it and what does the future hold?

JD: It gets more polished every time. The core ideals remain the same but the execution refines itself. I already have problems with Issue 2 that have been corrected for Issue 3. Hopefully this will continue. As for the future, I just want to keep the magazine expanding and growing, both in number and in quality. One day I would like to throw the most epic launch party ever but I might need a billionaire on board for it to happen. It might even involve the Stockholm Beach Volleyball team…

OM: Can you give us a sneaky peek of what or who to expect in your upcoming publication? Anyone new you are excited about working with or any Popshot favourites from the past?

JD: Expect poems about taking your clothes off, porn, prostitution, swimming and beating up the Dalai Lama (it’s metaphorical). Now that I recount it, it sounds more like a sex issue but it is actually ‘The Liberate Issue’. It seems that sex and liberation come very much hand in hand. We managed to get some amazing illustrators on board as well. To namedrop a few - James Dawe, Holly Wales, Dan Hillier and Paul Holland. For Off Modern eyes only, I can show you Dan Hillier’s epic illustration of the poem ‘Icarus’. (http://www.danhillier.com/blog/wp-content/temp/2010/02/icarus23.jpg). All the illustrators are talented souls we’ve never worked with before bar one - the rather tremendous Daniel Almeroth.

Joining the dots between disco, dancehall, tropical rhythms and bass, South London’s finest Nasty McQuaid & Mangno take a break from their roadblocked Off Modern art raves to deliver some grimey party music sunshine to your Thursday night. This month they’re joined by Top Nice supremo Louis Enchante who’ll be bringing his bag of italo treats and electro pop magic to woo your ears and feet…
Joining the dots between disco, dancehall, tropical rhythms and bass, South London’s finest Nasty McQuaid & Mangno take a break from their roadblocked Off Modern art raves to deliver some grimey party music sunshine to your Thursday night. This month they’re joined by Top Nice supremo Louis Enchante who’ll be bringing his bag of italo treats and electro pop magic to woo your ears and feet…

Click above to watch the brand new video for “I Like Triangles” by Hounds of Hate directed by Jayne Helliwell in collaboration with Yuri Pattison, Edited by Jayne Helliwell.

“I Like Triangles” is out on Back Yard Recordings imminently.
Keep an eye on www.myspace.com/houndsofhate for release details, further collaborations with Hype Williams and a US Tour in May.

In the early ’80s renowned photographer Mark Lebon launched ‘Reely’, a long-running and influential London film night and club. GETME! and DoBeDo resurrect the night as ‘Reely and Truly’.

Each month ‘Reely and Truly’ will open with an hour of short films curated by DoBeDo – featuring the work of both young filmmakers and some of the original ‘Reely’ contributors. Alongside this, photographers are invited each month to shoot and premier an exclusive slide show that will play as the visual accompaniment to GETME! DJs and monthly special guests.

Photo slideshow : NAIMA KARLSSON

Films curated by DoBeDo , detailed in the zine given out on the night.

DJS

THE HEATWAVE (RINSE FM)
YOUNG TURKS
TIM AND BARRY (DON’T WATCH THAT TV)
LIXO (GETME!)
OI YOU!
BLAISE BELLVILLE
P’ON (HONEST JOHNS)
MR MONEYBAGS (GETME!)

FREE ENTRY 7 - 2

FILMS AT 8PM. SHARP

http://www.thisisgetme.com

http://www.dobedo.co.uk

Sian Alice Group - Headline show from the London band ahead of their European Tour with Florence & The Machine. Sian alice have released two magical records through the Social Registry label and taken their beautiful, seductive sound on the road with Spiritualized and Gang Gang Dance often utilising the talents of members of booth these bands in recording.

Lonelady - The benchmark of interesting and eclectic music Warp records have just signed this mysterious Mancunian girl who seems to channel Wire like guitar strums with Grace Jones vocal rhythm. The dark side of pop.

Off Modern
Loud & Quiet

£5 adv Ticketweb. £6 door, 9pm 1am

I’m all for the celebration of failure, but celebrating waste is another matter.

Last year I started on an ambitious triptych, a painting made from a smooth, angled shards of wood, depicting a misty, ambiguous landscape, made from photographs of the lovely Peckham Rye common. I made the first piece, primed it, and experimented with some colours on it, then promptly abandoned the whole plan and started on something else.

Since then it has sat quietly in my studio, a non-entity, a third of a painting, never to be completed. So when I heard that Michael Landy was constructing an ‘art bin’ in the South London Gallery, right next door to my college studio, I knew my little failed painting had found its final calling.

Landy’s enormous glassy, classy skip fills the single roomed (though soon to be greatly expanded) SLG totally, acting as a very pleasing sculpture in itself. Steel frame and plexiglass windows rise from the ground in satisfying diagonals, and a grand staircase at the far end of the bin ends at the rim; it is from here that my painting is to be flung.

By the time I get to the gallery, the bin is already loaded with a mixture of stretchers, drawings in smashed frames, sculptures, casts and frabrics. Looking in I can pick out some things that are immediately recognisable. I catch the glinting print of a large crystal skull and littered on top are some scratchy prints, depicting crudely etched genitals and cryptic, lovelorn messages. Hirst and Emin are joined by, among others, Gary Hume, Landy himself and Julian Opie, who seems to have thrown out about half his studio.

Landy spends most of the time sat in the corner of the gallery, he alone has the power to judge what is allowed to be cast into the bin. I lean my painting against the wall, and ask if I can just throw it in. Landy takes a look at it and asks me to explain why it is a failure. I talk about its aborted brothers and he agrees that it I have indeed failed. It’s a strange experience and I can feel myself going red as I show him my work. I mean, I’m showing an artist I admire a shit painting I made, and he’s in accord that it is shit. Anyway, as we are both in agreement, in it goes. I climb up the stairs and from the top, the bin looks far emptier, a large pile directly below the drop off point, with the detritus petering out towards the other end. I pause and enjoy this view, and then throw mine in, where it makes a satisfying loud bang, and slides underneath one of Landy’s own framed drawings.

I don’t feel that great about it really. In fact I’m glad that my piece of crap is now partly obscured by Landy’s work, which is considerably less crap than mine. I’d imagined though that our experiences of tossing our work in would be very different. This is where Landy’s art bin gets problematic for me. While I was throwing a genuine piece of tut into the bin, Landy and the other famous, successful artists were throwing money away. There’s potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds wrapped up in Hirst, Emin and Opie’s rejected work. In this way, the bin to some extent proves artistic integrity, while also insulting younger, more struggling artists. There’s an arrogance to Hirst et al (obviously) casually throwing thousands of pounds into the bin, and for what real reason? To make themselves feel better? Maybe I’m missing the point, but imagine if all the money currently lying in the bin was given to charity instead. 100 yards from the gallery entrance lies Peckham town centre, not only one of the poorest and most dilapidated areas of London, but one filled with these aforementioned young, struggling artists. Imagine if these failed art works were put to good use, raising money for youth art projects in the area, or failing that, raising money for Oxfam, or a children’s home, anything. As someone with art world aspirations myself, and with the full knowledge that the likelihood of me throwing away prints worth thousands of pounds in the future is slim, I feel this is all a little insensitive.

Also, the age of the bloated London art market is most definitely over. The art world has been crippled by the recession just as everyone else has, and so Landy’s comment on the true worth of art is somewhat diluted. There’s people being made redundant every day in the UK, millions unemployed, and Hirst, Emin and Landy are publicly throwing away tens of thousands of pounds? They can fuck off. I’m not saying that these artists have an obligation to sell their work and give the money away, but such frivolous and public celebration of waste makes me sick. There’s a reason it’s frowned upon to go through people’s rubbish. What people throw away can be private, embarrassing and fantastically wasteful. Landy claims that in the bin, all the artists are equal, but for me and my fellow poor students graduating this year, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Landy’s work just doesn’t seem relevant in this current artistic, and environmental climate. Just like his worldly possessions after his 2001 piece Break Down, all the art in the bin will end up in a landfill, with a few unbroken frames and stretchers being donated to Camberwell College of Art (thanks). Aren’t landfills full enough without artists purposefully adding to them? Granted much of this failed work may have ended up there eventually anyway, but surely there’s a more appropriate way of disposing of this stuff. Most of the work being either wood, paper or canvas anyway, I propose an enormous elaborate bonfire in Burgess Park, with Landy supplying free sparklers.

As I leave the gallery, I watch another Camberwell student, Samuel Craven, throw hundreds of pieces of A4 paper into the bin. Printed on each piece is photocopied fifty pound note. I don’t know the original intention of Sam’s work in this case, but it seems a fitting piece for the bin, showing what’s really in there, the money that could be used for something truly worthy.

I now regret throwing my painting in to Landy’s bin. What I throw away is my business, just as what Damien Hirst throws away is his. I’m in favor of admitting and (to an extent) celebrating failure, it’s a part of how all artists work. But really, I think we should all dispose of our waste in private.

By Tom Harrad

[CLICK TO READ ARTICLE]

The Romantic period of the arts, from roughly the second half of the 18th Century into the early 19th, was a reaction against the Classicist philosophical model put forward by the Enlightenment. Romanticism prized individualism and emotion in the artist, over the rational and logical artist of the neo-classical period. It is from the Romantics that we get the notion of the struggling artist, working in his garret on his masterpiece, ignored by the world, he is probably syphilitic and drunk on red wine. The Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Geothe in poetry, Mozart in music, Delacroix, Goya and Turner in painting), are primarily men of the industrial revolution, they are the interpreters for civilization of a world freed from the constrictions of serfdom. This manifests itself in the idea of individualism; the French and American Revolutions are Romantic in their nature, America is still unnaturally in thrall to the individualist notion summed up in its constitution, as too, unfortunately, are the arts.

Let us look at Homer, and the problems that biography pose for us when we do, there are many suppositions about who Homer was, but they must all remain suppositions barring some fantastical archeological discovery. What we deal with, in our discussion of the idea of biography in art, is fact, and fact is troublesome, especially in the area of historical fact. E.H Carr, is his work What Is History? asks us to reexamine our conception of the historical fact. Our image of the past is clouded, not just by the bias of the person recording, but also because of the reason for something being recorded. What we know of ancient Greece, comes from a select few people, mainly in Athens, we know very little of what it was like to be a Spartan, or a Theban, so even beyond examining an historical supposition with a eye trained to look for personal bias, we must also look for the huge gaps in our knowledge of history. The biography of Homer is recorded, but not truthfully, we have records from Lucian, but he is a satirist, not an historian, we know how certain groups perceived Homer, but we have no historical facts relating directly to Homer, we only have historical interpretations of Homer. Our own ideas about Homer are no more than suppositions, and for future scholars they will be little more than historical interpretations, our contemporary classical scholars can only make judgments on and conflations of previous historical interpretations, but, and here is the rub, these investigations can add nothing to the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey, the true areas of importance in our study of Homer. Like Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter who Homer was, it only matters what was written, and if they were written by someone else or through conflation of different sources, it doesn’t really make much difference. Would Hamlet somehow become a different text if Shakespeare were actually a woman? No. It is interesting that we know little to nothing about who wrote some of the best literary texts, but we will argue amongst ourselves about why Van Gogh cut his ear off. It should be enough to admire the work.

The reason for further eliminating the biographical reading of art works, whether that is in poetry, novels, paintings, etc, is expounded again by E.H. Carr. His example comes from Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister for the Weimar Republic; upon Stresemann’s death in 1929 he left behind a pile of papers, which have come to the English reader in the form of Gustav Streseman, His Diaries, Letters and Papers. What we must consider in our discussion of the fallacy of biography is how these mass of documents that Stresemann left behind, became the book that we must use to judge his time in office. Working backwards then, the book the English-speaking world has is different from the original in German, it is a selection of the papers and memos most pertinent to English readers. This original book is itself a selection of Stresemann’s full papers, it mainly focuses on the areas of foreign policy in which Stresemann was particularly successful; his dealings with Western Europe, his negotiation of Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations etc, it glosses over his relative failings in his policies with the USSR. So, with each step backwards that we take we move nearer to a complete picture of Stresemann. Except when we get to the actual papers themselves (which were salvaged in 1945 by the English Army), what we see is not a number of historical facts, but merely autobiography. Each of us writes himself, and all biography is first and foremost based upon autobiography, we create our own images for future consumption. In Stresemann’s personal memos, papers, files and diaries he is engaged in the creation of a mirrored self for future posterity, it is impossible to read Stresemann as a man because our interpretations of him are clouded by his own historical bias towards himself. E.H. Carr tells us as much,The documents do not tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think, had happened.
To make an autobiographical reading of a text we are engaged in reading into hearsay to illuminate the fact of a work. To read Stresemann’s documents to form a picture of him, as historical fact, is impossible. If we read On The Road by Jack Kerouac as a semi-autobiographical account of his own years spent on the road we are forced, by Kerouac himself, to accept not just the merits of the text, but what he went through to write it. We cloud our judgment of a novel through childish admiration of what the author’s biography can represent. Kerouac engages himself in the creation of autobiography in his text, this enables the novel to gain a veneer of reality that for large portions lacks much verve, suspense or insight.

Kerouac relies on substandard strands of our schooling that teaches us to see the artist as a grand struggling individualist creating his grand work of art, like Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; part of any discussion about a work in class focuses on the person who wrote it. The work must stand alone to be truly democratic. Contemporary art criticism places much emphasis on the work being propped up by the artist; the artist must somehow become a figure of great magnitude for his work to also be of great magnitude. The reality is that we are not in an age of figures of great magnitude. Ezra Pound implored us to ‘make it new’, this was Modernism, more or less, but isn’t it funny how the art world has taken it to mean, ‘find us someone new’. The Art Industry relies on money to survive, true novelty is unsellable because the industry doesn’t know how to sell it, a creative industry does not really rely on creativity, what it relies on is more of the same. Let’s take Four Weddings and a Funeral as an example, this film does well, Hugh Grant gets good audience reactions as a bumbling English stereotype, then we get to see more of Hugh Grant in new films, which are generally the same, because the Industry knows how to sell them. Look at film posters, they have set signs for what kind of film they are, the red lettering on white background with enlarged faces and a smattering of out of context ‘praise’. Or for another example let us take Grunge, when Nirvana went stratospheric in 1991 we have hordes of A&R men moving to Seattle like locusts to get another Nirvana on their hands, so they can make money. It is because the Industry knows how to sell this, they can sell Nirvana as music for disenfranchised teens suffering rebellion because they can create this idea of Kurt Cobain as biographically apt for them, they can sell Hugh Grant to middle-aged housewives because he plays the part of the charming stereotypical Englishman. Biography is parasitically attached to an artwork in order for it to become sellable. The art industry relies on the same premise, what we have is not ‘new’ art, but new artists who make old art, the YBAs were not ‘new’, merely successfully sold as ‘new’, and their work over the past fifteen years atones to the fact that Damien Hirst is nothing more than a coffee shop existentialist ripping off ideas that have been floating around for about a hundred years. The newness we may really speak of in contemporary art is not in the art itself but in the Industry, so to truly make something new we would have to get rid of the idea of artistic industry, as it exists now, and so it follows that the next new development in art must be to create a new kind of art industry, not a new kind of art.

Hypothetically, if there were to be a new type of art industry, one that wasn’t so much an ‘industry’, a word carrying connotation of pure economics and the processing of raw materials, via labour, into goods. A Marxist interpretation of the flaws of the art industry in very easy to concoct (although it is not the subject of this essay), but what we should be concerned with is a new way of presenting the reality of art, on a democratic level, whereby figures and money are unimportant. The word hobby isn’t palatable to the art industry, the true hobbyist is the person who does something for the love of it, it presupposes a love that is beyond profitability. A new art industry would place the hobbyist as its king. Once money becomes involved in matters of artistic creation it takes the onus off of creativity and places it on sellability, and one way that the art industry has of ensuring sellability of its product is by creating a fallacy of biography around its product. If you can convince people that the person creating a work has the biographical prerequisites necessary for them to be great you can ensure that work will sell regardless of its merits.

Images by Ted Williams

For Nail The Cross music festival. Poster designs by Off Modern, Patrick Barrett and Charlie Gibson.

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A convincing lie needs to have facts; if you don’t know any your story falls flat. To distract from the feeling that I’m incapable of retaining knowledge or have any real imagination enough to even create facts I hit random on Wikipedia and focus on being able to see the connection between random events to make a story. Logic dictates that if it’s made of parts of truth, the lie, the story, will be all the more convincing. You choose a standpoint and view every fact from one angle, bending information the way you need it to bend, and a story appears. You just have to believe it, that’s all you need to do.

By Jennifer Calleja.

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1. Pospishil

Passage was taken in the arched left-hand ’61 Greyhound, a Pickard teacup out of the Gracie Mansion
in the backseat catching a ride. It was cocooned in a shiny article by Mary K. Trigg from a Fall publication of American National Biography; a good article, but unhinged in places. I had wanted to look up Simone, a relative of Alasdair MacColla, killed at Knochanuss, and send it to her, discovering she had slipped off to Dobârceni commune in Romania, rendering her semi-unerreichbar. Two months after I used the article to protect my cup she was found drowned in the Her-Vif in Garonne. I didn’t wonder why she’d left for Southern France, falling on the thought that she’d at least avoided a demise in the Hers-Mort. Since my evacuation from Plymouth, I hadn’t returned to Montserrat, I just felt it was finished with. My first stop had been to visit Pospishil to put forward a critique of his privately published Die Rechtsstellung des Patriarchen der Serbischen Kirche in der Kirchenverfassung von 1931-1947; it had been niggling at me forever, and now I had plenty of time to hunt the old priest down.

He’d seen the last timeless Test match played in South Africa in 1939, and had been writing a prose poem on it the afternoon I phoned from a Wataniya Telecom sponsored box five blocks from his house in Old Bridge, New Jersey. I’d somehow picked up a live program out of Sweden of something the Norrland Opera had booked on the Greyhound’s radio. Apparently an old drunkard, the presenter tiredly cleared up, was booming the traditional eighteenth century drinking ballad ‘Gubben Noach’ unbearably close to a musician’s microphone, drowning out the rock band, subduing even the singer’s modern shrieks. An awesome polyphony. Pospishil had also been called by Steven L. Kent by mistake, so was suspicious of me from the off. I explained that I wasn’t a video-game journalist, and that I wanted to have a fine conversation with him. I felt as Mowgli did, wandering from cosmopolitan jungle orphaned from the home flattened by a volcano, into the lupine arms of Akela, for a while at least. I ate a samosa over my Buckeyes record in the car before the call, felt enlivened knowing I would leave spicy breath on the receiver. The box was solidly attached to the exterior brickwork of a Mexican diner, a film, I think Confesión a Laura stuttered on a miniscule screen at the bar between whiskey and gin bottles. A man sat repeating persistently that he was waiting for Contacto Deportivo to come on, though the barman laughed manically that it didn’t start until past midnight.

2. The Binding Reach

I own Joe Bethancourt’s first banjo, the old S. S. Stewart his grandfather gave him at the age of nine in Phoenix. I am Bethancourt’s nephew, Tom Purtill. Bethancourt picked up the banjo after hearing his grandmother, C. H. Burnett, play the fiddle. I’ve never played the banjo, except strumming at his in time with the lunging steps of Li Ling the Chinese shot-putter during his winning throw in Osaka across my television screen in two-thousand and seven. Scratching at the strings was a remote distraction, something to ride on my mental hopes that he would somehow fall or fail. He got nineteen point thirty-eight metres.

Back then, as I had done for many years previously, I enjoyed driving around making faces at on-coming drivers, stretched wide-eyed smiles, dramatic and painful frowns, screaming mouths, that kind of thing. I didn’t bother doing this on my way into college, Bryn Mawr. I was always feeling drained of mischief in the morning and early afternoons after nights away in the city minutely adding to the spreading tattoo on my stomach at Roy Chamb’s, or laying around on my ex-girlfriend’s bathroom floor reading out-of-date photography magazines while she had four-hour baths. My mother was from Abra de Ilog in Occidental Mindoro. She left to study the genus of moth called Melgona, in spite of her simple family’s assurances that this would only end in trouble. Within months of landing in America she starred in Maxwell Anderson’s play Valley Forge, playing George Washington’s wife. She could play any nationality, so long as she didn’t have many lines. It was her particularly sublime features, beautiful in how striking she was, that detracted from a question of nation. Only mother could help me when I murdered Stefan Ekberg. Murdered him from my past. Stefan had returned from the motorcycle speedway championships in Great Britain having won in the Premier League that season. He came to me, me in my shabby smooth suit and flat shoes, him in his bad skin, to tell me he was leaving me for Herbert Kraus’s grandson, Thomas. Mother and I took this as a personal familial insult, us being cousins of the Oehler Brothers, the true masters of Nietzchean scholarship, unlike the disgraced Herbert Kraus, a weakminded Joo-sympathiser. I completed my studies full of rage and insecurity, and became junior head of Remote Surgery at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, New Jersey. To think I’d only gone into telepresence purely because of the Lindbergh Operation, the first remote surgical procedure, which I read about in the newspaper. Dr. Jacques Marescaux removed the gallbladder of a man in Strasbourg from New York in two-thousand and one.

I kept a copy of the opera, or rather drama per musica, Scandebeg in the second drawer of my desk. I was consumed by how much the picture of Vivaldi on the inside cover looked like both my old lover and my mother. I couldn’t read the actual opera very well. Vivaldi’s white hair didn’t so much grow from or seem even attached to his scalp, but sat on top in obvious wig-status; floating and emitting a yellow-grey light from his young-man-old-woman face.

My first operation would be on Adam Silverman. Silverman. Silverman. It wasn’t successful, this silvery man, he went the colour of money. Someone in Atlanta brought him back to life, mistaking my smile on the videoscreen for mild hysteria at my remote robotic hands subtle fuck up. I kissed my own hands post-op. I’d read up on this man. He’d written an opera, found on the same shelf i’d accidently come across Scandebeg: Korczak’s Orphans. Janusz Korczak, or Henryk Goldszmit, supervised orphans in the Warsaw ghetto, his death march with the two hundred young Jews was seen by Wladyslaw Szpilman himself. An opera for a martyr-Jew? And a Theaterstück inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita? I shook my head in sorrow. Four months after the operation, Adam Silverman stood in the foyer of my apartment building, seven floor’s below me, while I watched The White Tower, drawn in by Alida Valli, counting out her ancestry in tears.

South Rakkas Crew – The Stimulus Package
It may be a couple of weeks late, but this entirely free album from the lazy Santas at South Rakkas still stakes a claim to be my favourite Christmas present of the year. Tracks explode all over the shop with an digi dancehall sound that comes on like The Bug making Benny Benassi electro bass without any trace of dank English misery, or indeed, irony. It’s a big dumb party with guests and genres popping up, smashing together, and staggering off to the dancefloor, limbs and pigeon holes all akimbo. Vocalists include Toddla T cohort Serocee, bashment legend Capleton and, somewhat bizarrely, indescribable San Fran freakniks Deerhoof. The tracks range from the undisputed dancefloor smash ‘Double Up Riddim’ to the dubstep meets Under Mi Sensi bass bubbling of ‘Rise’ to ‘Hands Up’s pure classic techno chords and steppas baile funk. Listened to in one sitting, the full set can be a bit wearying in its relentless party action, and personally it all gets a bit too much for me on stinking Mylo riddim -can you guess which Mylo track gets sampled …?— but the exuberance of the other songs on here more than make up for this, and the sheer fucking weirdness of the Deerhoof collaborations is worth the (free) entry alone. Download here — http://maddecent.com/stimulus/

SCNDL – Need To Know
I’ve got a super soft spot for gay US dark house anthems with a sarky queen talking over the top. Bam Bam’s ‘Where Is Your Child’, The Horrorist’s ‘One Night In New York City’, bangers every time. This track is carrying on this proud tradition, and does a fine job to. Creepy descending acidy riffs, piano break downs, grinding nasty bass lines and crucially, a big queen asking if ‘you wanna get in’. It’s all a bit Berlin sex dungeon and, to be fair, conjures up the image of a sweaty middle aged pervert with a very very serious face wearing a leather apron and dancing with an accountant who’s told his wife he’s out watching ‘the match’. Kind of. But that’s not a criticism.

Skepta – Bad Boy
Ridculously Tiesto sized massiveness. I know progress is good and everything but when did Skepta decide to turn into Haddaway ? I literally don’t understand, I do not understand. How do we find ourselves a decade away from the birth of grime stuck with this nonsense ? Skepta has been responsible for some bonafide classics- Duppy and Too Many Men spring to mind, but shitting hell he can pull out some strange old decisions when we wants to. This little number kind of lifts the chorus from Underworld’s Born Slippy and that’s basically all you need to know. If you think Skepta doing that sounds like it’s going to be a good thing you may like this. If, like me, you find the staggeringly woeful creative blind alley that half of this countries formerly great MCs have leadenly pranced down a sad and depressing event it’s probably best to steer clear. I guess it’s catchy enough and the track isn’t irredeemably bad, but then again, neither, necessarily, is the Cheeky V, the cocktail Charlotte Church invented containing 3 bottles of Blue WKD and a shit load of port. It is however, very pikey.

Fiction – To Stick To
Fiction are 4 piece based in South London. They channel a bit of Postcard records with elements of Orange Juice and Josef K coming through the jangling guitars and fey vocals, and this year promises to be a big one for them. This track has dreamlike whispery vocals with a hint of celebrity racist Morrissey creeping into the languid swoops of lines such as “When you last checked you didn’t like the taste// Hunger could persuade you// Since it was suggested I was taking shape// A shape will take you”. The backing ‘aaaahs’ and tambourine hits add to a sensation of a cosy, particularly English forlornness, making this an ideal piece to listen to whilst pressed against the radiator, drinking a milky cuppa and staring out at the white expanse that has swept January.
Download here: http://offmodern.com/news/index.php/fictiontostickto/

Maxwell D - Blackberry Hype
Finally getting a full release after knocking around on the underground for half a year now,
this is the former Pay As You Go MCs official entry into the brave new world of UK Funky,
and while he may have pissed off Lil Silva by riding one of his beats unbidden, and while the
lyrics are bollocks nonsense about phones most hoodrats had 5 years ago, this definately works.
After the skank craze of 2009 vocal funky is here to stay and a splash of personality on a genre that skates the big bottomless rink of deep house is a breathe of fresh air. It’s not big or clever but it bangs in the club, and if what the kids think counts for anything I had 15 teenagers request it this week alone.

Joensuu 1685 - Im On Fire
Big throbbing mother ship drums. squeals and drones and retro future synths . Mary Chain vocals swoop in a cathedral of gaze and it’s kind of like Muse if they werent a four letter word. This band have a stupid name and a great sound, somewhere between the stadium and the underground, prog in a good way, and beholden to single notes of bass playing skunkbucket riffs for heavy heads nodding until the levy breaks and guitars crash in. Best seen live, the vinyl, sick as it is, just whets the appitite for the show. A joy, pressed in 300 copies. Buy it now and feel smug hating em when they get massive

http://www.myspace.com/joensuu1685

Miike Snow - Silvia
The new single from Swedish Britney Spears producers Miike Snow opens with a very serious, very portentious piano line, and continues in the same poe faced manner throughout. Hyper polished and anemically epic, this has drivetime anthem written all over- big synth arpeggios, marching drums, and insipid lyrics combine to make, well, nothing much really. Perhaps a faint impression of a neatly made wet bed. Onto the remixes then, and it seems Sinden’s managed to perform the finest turd sprucing with a skippy carnival mix that avoids his more clownish tendencies and delivers a hypnotic bass line underpinning choice vocal cuts and nice touchs of melancholy. Emalkay hands in a dubstep mix that can only disappoint after the might of recent killer ‘When I Look At You’. Here he just whacks a load of sub under the original to make the kind of palatable dubstep, one eye coldly cocked towards daytime radio, that has been flooding out since Skream’s La Roux rework. And finally, Felix Da Housecat comes along like its 2003 with a big electro rock banger which would probably sound great changed off your nut in a Miami mega club, but just sounds annoying on a freezing afternoon in Blighty.

Lindstrom & Christabelle - Lovesick
With bass and horns lifted straight from Bobby Byrd’s 70s rarity ‘Headquarters’ Lindstrom’s new project sees him putting the space disco to one side and instead focusing his considerable studio chops on remodelling squelchy electro funk. Opening with breathy spoken vocals, Lovesick benefits from the Norwegian producers’ understanding of the importance of space, with the track being given plenty of room to do it’s thing without ever being swamped by uneccessary fussiness. The signature disco guitar chugs along carrying the beat, pianos stab in and out and Christabelle’s vocals fit in perfectly. Cruically ‘Lovesick’ pulls off the tricky maneouveur of wearing it’s influences proudly on it’s sleeve without becoming a pale imitation of them, managing to sound both retro and relevent. On this form the album should be a winner.

These New Puritans – We Want War
God bless you Puritans. The most under rated band in England have returned to the fray with a 7 and-a-bit minute claustrophobic neo classical opus the likes of which these ears haven’t heard since Radiohead’s misery opera heyday. We Want War kicks off all grimey DavincHe style discordant brass, marching gulf war drums, mutant voices and vicious little whispers before switching half way through to a sprawling choral freefall. Veering between the towering and terrifying, this tune has you wondering why more doom laden orchestral epics don’t pepper their epiphanies with sword drawing sound effects, because they’re pretty fucking amazing sounding here.

Hot Chip – One Life Stand
One time back when the internet consisted of a single big computer called HAL 57 and the only people who had mobile phones were dickheads or criminals, we tried to put Hot Chip on in a small pub in New Cross. They didn’t show up because the drummer had the flesh eating disease that everyone got for a week in 2002, and as a result the fairly ropey band I was flailing away in headlined, getting to play to hordes of screaming girls and sweaty palmed teenage boys. Since then I’ve always loved the ‘Chip, so I’m happy to say that this tune, even though it’s not really as big as Ready For the Floor and certainly won’t have the same all conqueringness as Over & Over, is still 87% brilliant, with skanking bass, warping carnival steel drums and the inevitable heart-rending chorus where Alexis Taylor sings so mournfully and so beautifully that you realise that Hot Chip are a genuine national treasure whom we should all cherise forevermore.

The Count & Sinden – Strange Things (Remixes)
My wife hates drum n bass in all its forms and she would definitely hate this record. I however am an ORIGINAL JUNGLIST and go fucking mental for it. Therefore, whilst the original of Strange Things is kind of a shit reimagining of ’98 dull and bass, the High Rankin remix is a massive and ridiculous amen feast that’s making me bounce up and down in my (junglist) swivel chair. It’s got a dubsteppy speeding up breakdown half way through and loads of ragga shouting and stooopid snares and sounds like High Rankin genuinely loves Congo Natty and Remarc and probably knows all the words to Original Nuttah, including the indecipherable ones UK Apache made up when he was taking a break from inventing jungle.

Chelley – Took The Night
‘Sassy’ is an unfortunate word. Does anyone actively want to be described as sassy ? To be honest I thought no one ever really, truly wanted to describe themselves as ‘bonkers’ but ooo-eeee it turns out I was wrong on that count. So I’m going to say that this is sassy. Its got a kids playground chanty vocal and an RnB beat at a house tempo similar to the type Pitbull likes to deliver his wisdom over. It starts off with some haters bitching in a manner not heard since ‘Baby Got Back’ then kicks in with the big club drums and general sass. And it really really gets stuck in your head which isn’t either a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just a thing.

Eminem – Drop The Bomb On ‘Em
I’ve never understood why Sting’s ridiculous Jamaican accent has been allowed to pass entirely unmolested. It’s the great unspoken shame of a nation. For example: “Giant steps are what I take // Walkin on de moon” What was he thinking ? And how has he slipped it under the radar for so long ? Richard Madeley does one shonky Ali G impersonation and is hounded from our screens. Sting builds a career out of an ability to pronounce ‘bacon’ as ‘beer can’ and makes millions. Bewildering. Still, it seems Eminem was taking notes, as he kicks off this new banger with a few stinking cod dancehall “bambaclaarts” before thankfully sacking off the crap accent and settling down to prove that he’s still one of the illest MCs alive. The beat is one of the standard piano chuggers that Dre could knock out in a coma, but it allows Em room to lyrically dance over the bars, tossing out references to a host of his favourite fictional characters, from Freddy Kruger to Stringer Bell via “Captain America on a ferris wheel”. Tis good to have him back.

Gramaphonedzie – Why Don’t You
If you’ve been looking for that elusive bridge that’ll link your love of burlesque (you naughty devil) with your propensity to ‘get on one’ down Shoreditch of a Saturday night, then this slickly produced bag of shit ensures you need look no further. Coming from a fine lineage of songs that cock about with a 40s swing band sample and some pointless house beats, this is essentially ‘Doop’ for a new decade, and set to be just as huge. I don’t know, maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. No. Hold on, I’ve just listened again and it’s total gash. Possibly a number one come the new year. Jesus. The bloke who’s responsible also wrote the theme for Serbian Big Brother, which makes him the Balkan Paul Oakenfold. Make of that that you will.

POPO – Knife Iz Yung
Pallet cleansing garage punk that makes everything better and lasts for 1 minute and 27 seconds. The twinned vocals swoop lysergically up and down, the guitars explode, sound scratchy and broke, and the whole thing is brilliant and grimy and melodic and then over. It’d be weird if this review took longer to read than the song does to listen, so I’ll just mention that Mad Decent are putting out POPO’s album sometime early 2010 and leave it at that.

Nouveau Yorican – Boriqua
OK, well this came out a week or so ago, so I’ve slept on it a touch– pretty dumb on my part seeing as it’s come from the Sound Pelligrino, the label responsible for a mini tsunami of tropical fresh dancefloor hits throughout ’09. This time the increasingly omnipresent Laidback Luke joins forces with Gina Turner (who I’ve honestly never heard of) to turn out the JACK. Between them they offer up an ace slice of bompty house conceived in a sweatsticky warehouse located some mythical place between noughties Holland and eighties Chicago. The tune doesn’t piss about too much, instead staying nice and tracky, riding on a pitch perfect 303 bassline that wobbles along just fine until the synth stabs leap out of nowhere in a dirty great popper rush that’s 8 parts hands-in-the-air; 2 parts pull-a-techno-face. The whole thing pulls off the tricky task of sounding like classic house with all the shit bits taken out, like watching Stephen King’s It but without the bit where Pennywise turns into a cretinous 70 foot formica cockroach. Oh, and extra marks to the Harvard Bass mix for stripping the track down to a sinuous, jerking bass skeleton…