Alexander McLuckie is one half of the fantastic photography website Holy Ghost. Look out for some very exciting future collaborations between us and them.

I.
A historical steam-roller has gone several times through a country . . . yet the poet emerges more energetic. – Czeslaw Milosz.

The Poles, with their 200 years’ experience of occupation, have a genius for independence of mind in intolerable circumstances. Every feeling, every gesture, every word, however personal, has its political resonance. – A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books.

II.
Poetry is in part to do with voice; it is the area of literature where voice mixes with the written word. Poetry’s pre-existence is in the verbal traditions of storytelling, coming out of the oral nature of the Epic poem and moving, with Gutenberg, into being printed on a page, and later in collections and anthologies. Early examples of poetry are as memories of forgotten cultures, being concerned with voice it is also inherently about finding an identity within and for that culture and recording its histories. Think of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Beowulf or the Baghvhad Gita.

Poetry can be roughly divided into two types, those that assay the culture as a whole and those that assay the individual within that culture. The first type leads onto the second, as we move from understanding the world around us to understanding our role in that world. Poland has a history of being divided, whether in military victory or defeat her borders are, more so than most other European nations, changeable, and have changed many times throughout her history. This naturally leads onto a certain questioning of national identity, and if we say that poetry is about finding identity through voice then the Polish poets who were writing in the second half of the twentieth century are re-engaged with the assaying of a culture, and the individual’s role within it. The momentous fractures and disasters that befell Poland between 1939 and 1945 led to a disassociation, which continued under Soviet rule, providing a block between this re-engagement, the strength of Polish poetry, and its uniqueness, lies in the way its poets deal with this.

III.
After the Second World War the scholars of Western Europe moved towards post-modern and existential theories and modes of thought. The victory of the Allies over the Third Reich had secured them their academic and intellectual freedom, they were liberated then to explore and attack, to write and say and think what they wanted; free to explore the struggles of the individual mind or the continuing importance and role of art in society. Poland though was under Communist rule, with the censorship and bureaucracy that it entails. Thus the options for intellectual attack and exploration are demarked by what the government deems acceptable. This caused two things to happen to Polish poetry; firstly, much of it is was not written in Poland and secondly the poets who were still working in their homeland where not able to say certain things explicitly, forcing their collective poetic voice to find and express itself in different and subtle ways, if they are to express itself at all. Political repression of a culture manifests itself on how that culture views itself. If in a culture you are not free to express yourself, then this will realise itself upon freedom of expression in poetry, like a chain of falling dominos, with slowly contracting circles of ‘acceptable’ ideas. So if political freedom is restricted, then freedom in poetics must come from the freedoms that are afforded to the poet by the line and form.

This political repression also creates the parallel tradition of the émigré poet, who to escape these repressions leaves his home, and begins commenting on a lost homeland from the outside. Post-war Polish poetry, in finding its own, new voice, is trying to find the voice of freedom, and it finds it in sweeping metaphysical conceits or in dreams of an apolitical pastoral scenes and idylls. This is a poetry with a formal and aesthetical unity to it that belies the fragmentary nature of Poland’s history, or maybe exists in spite of it.

IV.
Cszelaw Milosz was the pre-eminent figure of literary Poland in the 20th century; over a career spanning seventy years he wrote countless books of poetry, translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish and wrote two memoirs of his early life in Lithuania. He emigrated, first to Paris and then to America, where he became professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkley University, in California. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, he is memorialised at Yad Vashem as one of the ‘righteous of the nations’ and a poem of his is inscribed at a memorial for the protesting shipworkers who were killed in 1970 in Gdansk. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 Milosz returned to live in Krakow where he died in 2004, at the age of 93. Milosz’s life is inseparably tied up in a situation familiar to many Poles – he was not born within the borders of Poland (borders which shifted innumerably during that period) but viewed himself as Polish, he left his home because of the political situation and returned when it was possible.

When Milosz won the Nobel Prize he was in the strange situation where he was relatively unknown in Poland, with his works being censored and banned by the government. He was then a poet writing primarily for the Polish Diaspora. Some of his most interesting works though, were written during the Second World War, between 1943 and 1945 he produced three works of historical importance for assessing Poland and what it was going through; ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’, ‘A Song On The End World’ and ‘Dedication’. These are poems that examine the impact of total war and genocide on a people and their resistance, whether spiritual or actual, of the Polish people. ‘Dedication’ talks of a ‘broken city’ in ‘the valley of shallow Polish river’, but he tells us the aims of the young poet and how he sees poetry;

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards

Poetry, in dire historical situations, must examine them and find strength through resistance.

Tadeusz Rozewicz also speaks of the resistance and sanctuary that poetry provides against the political world. In his poem ‘The Deposition of the Burden’ he says that ‘modern poetry / is a struggle for breath’, for both himself and Milosz poetry must be about defiance and struggling to breathe, and thus, it is also to speak, as speech is a continuation and natural extension of breathing. And so through the act of speaking we try to understand civilisation and our role in it. For these Polish writers then the act of speech is given political connotations, in its restriction by censorship. Poetry finds resistance by placing ones liberty or safety at risk because of the poetic compulsion to say something; these are poets that understand that the poet must find his voice, no matter what.

In Polish poetry, as is in much of the poetry and literature that came out of the Eastern Bloc between 1945 and 1989, we witness the conflation of narrative with history and symbolism as a way of circumnavigating the restrictions placed upon writers by the censors. Adam Wazyk, who died in 1982, was one of the finest poets to explore the historical significances of Poland’s role in World War Two. Let us look at his poem ‘Sketch for a Memoir’, which was written upon his return to Poland in 1944 with the Polish Communist Army as an officer. It deals with the experiences of growing up between the two wars and the realisation that the pastoral idylls of youth will soon be transformed into the conflicts of 1939;

We were waked up, people of not quite bad will,
or buried under the rubble of a house.
And many were waked up
to have their eyes sealed with the bandages of death
and to be put up against the wall in paper shirts.

The apolitical idylls of youth that Wazyk describes as being a time where one ‘swam in rivers’ and talked ‘under chestnut tress’ are transformed from the Edenic to horrific, where we will all ‘wake up and recognise your epoch’. Or there is his poem ‘A Pre-Columbine Sculpture’, which was written just after the loosening of censorship laws in 1956 and metaphysically relates the sculpture of a ‘cruel god’ seen in a museum with the ‘the sadness of a passer-by stripped of his face’. The poem presents history’s examples of butchery and violence as unchanging and continuous, the passer-by is stripped of his face, and thus his identity; ‘there I should have understood everything’, says Wayzk. What he alludes to have understood is that history is cruel, that it repeats itself, and Polish history isn’t an unusual one in this, it is only exceptional in the scale of butchery. Let us also look at Anna Swirszczynska, who was a nurse during the Warsaw uprising of 1944. It took her many years to form her experiences into the long poem, Building the Barricade. Unlike much of Polish poetry that deals with the war, its aftermaths and Communist rule, Swirszczynska doesn’t treat the issues through the use of symbols or metaphysical conceits, she instead focuses on the everyday sufferings and the effect war has on the ordinary citizens and their resistance to it;

Along a street swept clean of people
a tank rolls firing.
It executes
houses
smashes
barricades.

Out of the gateway leaps a kid
a bottle of gasoline in his fist.
Along a street swept clean of people
he runs
at a crouch
at the tank.

One of Poland’s modern poets who is also engaged in this discourse about Polish history is Adam Zagajewski, in 2004 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for literature, a prize seen by many as a precursor for the Nobel, born in 1945 his life span comes after the great fractures of Nazi occupation, invasion and Holocaust, his history is tied up then with Communism, and like Czeslaw Milosz, was also an émigré poet who lived in France and America. His poem ‘To Go To Lvov’ deals with the subject of emigration and forced disposition by ideological forces, and the dream of a homeland, something of symbolic importance to the millions of Poles in Diaspora;

in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

But Zagajewski, as the émigré looking back on Poland, is ‘enchanted by that legendary, defenseless country’ where one always knows ‘full well the meaning / of captivity.’ There is, for Zagajewski, something thrilling about looking back on a lost homeland; if for some poets the history of Poland is like a fracture that must be healed through poetic exploration in order for identity to be found, then Zagajewski treats this history like a symbol for his own identity, it reaches down to something deeper, more primordial, the displacement of a homeland, and yet it also deals with the outsider in a different society, trying to integrate but separated by this looming symbol, what Zagajewski calls the ‘reckless unicorn / feeding on the wool of tapestries / beautiful, week and impudent.’

V.
With Zagajewski we have moved from examining Poland’s history as fact to symbol, and thus it is truly absorbed by poetry, it finds its poetic voice, it is no longer a comment on the recent past, an exploration of something unknown, like it was for Milosz or Wayzk or Swirszczynska, but it is now firmly part of a poet like Zagajewski’s identity. The fractures in Polish history have been absorbed by time into part of the make-up of any poet wishing to call upon them for their work, with the fall of Communist rule in 1989, we move into a new chapter and consign the previous years to history.

Claire Baily, Champion, 2010.
Steel, brass, paint, cotton, ribbon.

For more please visit www.clairebaily.com

We launched our Journal on Thursday at the ICA, thanks to everyone who made it down and bought a copy. If you missed out you can now buy direct from us at the bottom of this post or from our new online shop. Be sure to keep an eye on the shop over the coming weeks for lots of new exciting products and we’ll also have an update on physical locations where you’ll be able to check out and buy the Journal in person.

The Journal contains a mixture of art writing, fiction, theory, illustration, collage and photography representing the work of Off Modern and its immediate circle of collaborators over the last six months.

The work ranges from the SECOND OM MANIFESTO and NO NEW AVANT GARDES, by Off Modern, detailing the future ideas of the group. WILL SHUTES gives us his vision of a future literature in A NOTE ON NEWNESS and the photography collective, HOLY GHOST, present an illuminating report on the TEMPORARY SCHOOL OF THOUGHT, a group of squatters who founded a school based on the free exchange of knowledge. Fictional work comes from the satirical EXCERPTS FROM THE DIARY OF LEWIS KLEJSTAN by WILLIAM HUNT, detailing the life of a failing artist and GORDON MACRAE’s lingering evocation of Americana in ONE OH ONE.

Photography is supplied by the likes of GUY GORMLEY, with his haunting images of vacant spaces, and PATRICK BARRETT, who continues in his ongoing project of documenting the crumbling Brutalist masterpieces of the 60s. Also featuring is YURI PATTISON, who includes two sets of images; one of the movements of art works at last years Frieze art fair and two evocative half frame images of silent London landscapes. The journal is beautifully illustrated by our favourite young artists and designers working at the moment. JAYNE HELLIWELL produces a work of trademark brilliance whilst TOM REES and CHARLIE GIBSON show their dark senses of humour quite perfectly in their intricate collage work.

The Off Modern Journal is 68 pages long and was printed by Ditto Press on Munken Pure 100gsm paper with a 150gsm cover. Each copy is individually numbered from 001 to 300.

[CLICK HERE TO BUY]

“I am conscious of the ball, but I am also conscious that I am not the ball. I desire to possess the ball. My project is to become a for-itself-in-itself a synthesis of self and non- self, in other words, God.” – Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

After a prolonged fallow period in my teenage years, I now find myself attending two football matches in the space of a week, for the first time in ten years. Rather than attributing this spell of sporting malaise to any particular choice or disengagement, I see this as a natural progression through the various stages of my maturation.

Our formative years bring about many swings both in mood and purpose, but aimed largely towards one goal, contextualising the self apropos to our concept of the other. In early childhood this takes on a simplistic form, as we begin to explore the basic concepts of what it means to be a unique human being in our environment. It is only at the halfway point through our first decade that we start to conceive ourselves in direct opposition to other people.

To use a much-misquoted phrase, Bill Shankly in 1981 claimed, “Someone said ‘football is more important than life and death to you’ and I said ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’. That the phrase has been trotted out again and again over the past decades does not detract from an important point we can draw from it: that football is no mere pastime, and its juvenile partisanship shares much in common with a religious upbringing.

The football fan is forever shaped by these boundaries placed on them within early years, clearly defining the parameters of ‘us and them’, such that any later life revision of these principles becomes near impossible. For a child who is finding his way in the world, what could be clearer than the primary opposition of reds versus blues, hoops versus stripes, us against the world?

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre says that, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.” It is in our formative years that this rejection of being in-itself is most apparent, when each of us has the clearest opportunity to experiment with lifestyle choices without fear of reprisal or failure. As a young child the simplistic allure of following a particular football team is akin to the safety of the homestead or the comfort of a favourite meal, but as a young adult this life pursuit becomes one of binary opposition.

~

Sartre once claimed: “In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team”. This perfectly encapsulates the idea of the football fan not existing conceptually for-itself but only within a realm of intersubjectivity, whereby tension between the same-subject and opposing viewpoint can be fully realized. To complicate an issue means to introduce more than one viewpoint for consideration, and football as the ultimate pastime of ‘us-and-them’ is therefore rooted in this complication. Conversely however, to simplify the subjective on a personal level requires one to understand that there is more than one available view and to actively decide which side one is on; ergo, to define oneself.

When I was nine-years-old, I recall clearly, after moving schools, the interrogation of other pupils as to where my footballing loyalties lay. Upon my disclosure, I could tell that my choice was not a popular one, but that I felt no sense of shame at being ‘the other’, and certainly no embarrassment at my team’s many failings in contrast to my peers’ respective clubs.

It is this, which convinces me that the decision to follow a particular club in most cases is not a decision at all, but a characteristic with which every football fan allows himself to be defined by others. I recall no stage in my upbringing where I had the chance to make the choice, and yet it is a choice which undoubtedly I have and will continue to defend as surely as if I had made it myself.

The decisions one must take to define oneself in teenage years: those concerning fashion, the opposite sex and employment for example, are not akin to this footballing non-decision, in that they must be made entirely of one’s own volition. As such any slight or critique of these decisions must be borne with the accompanying shame at its failure.

Jacques Derrida said, “beyond the Touchline is nothing”, and this perfectly describes the upsurging football fan, whose one defining characteristic is taken boldly and in deference to no one. These later teenage decisions, in contrast, are based entirely on uncertainties, and it is for this reason that the football fan so often sidelines that which is ‘certain’ in order to define the nascent parts of himself.

~

The football fan bears the weight upon his shoulders of a decision he did not make, nor will likely ever consider revising. However, we must not confuse the decision to be a fan of a particular club with the decision to be a fan of football itself. While a particular club allegiance is rarely questioned, it is simple to choose to not follow the world of football altogether.

In my life, I fell out of love with football in my early teens, only choosing to return to it as my teenage years were waning, and it is precisely this ‘choice’ which places football fanaticism under its proper scrutiny. While the young football fan is first a fan of his club and secondarily a fan of the game, the reverse is true of the adult who chooses for-itself this life pursuit.

The adult football fan takes on both parts of this decision, the a priori given-definition of himself as a member of a particular football allegiance, and the a posteriori self-definition as one who chooses to validate this decision made in his absence.

The immutability of our first love must be countered so that we can reclaim this bold decision as one of our own, and with it suffer the ups and downs that any important decision should rightly confer upon us.

We must stand up and say that we have both encountered ourselves as a football fan and later defined ourselves equally as such, rather than been content to accept solely the former.

For one cannot be proud of what he did not himself create.

“There are scientists who will tell you that spirit, because it can’t be measured, doesn’t exist. Bollocks. It does exist” - Sam Allardyce

By Germaine Arnold.

You might remember that a while ago we did a post about a band called Among The Bones (myspace), which is our good friend Misha’s project. They are excellent; dark, droney shoegaze music that sounds like a hangover in heaven or something. SO he is finally getting round to putting out his debut EP, its called The Chosen Sons of Snakes and will be coming out on Clan Destine Records pretty soon. To celebrate this lovely bit of news (we’ve been waiting for this to drop for what seems like forever) Misha has made a mixtape which you can download here. Its pretty amazing.

track lisiting

1. Bethlehem - Tagebuch Einer Totgeburt
2. l’Acephale - Psalm Of Misery
3. Peste Noire - Dueil Angoisseus (Christine De Pisan, 1362-1431)
4. Behexen - Born In The Serpent Of The Abyss
5. Watain - Legions Of The Black Light
6. Wolfmangler - Dirge For A Viking Asshole
7. Ascend - V O G
8. Thou - Tyrant
9. Vertigo - Two Lives
10. Harvey Milk - What I Want
11. Neil Young - Danger Bird
12. Bruce Springsteen - Racing In The Street
13. Hawkwind - We Took The Wrong Steps Years Ago
14. Death In June - Kameradschaft
15. Gong - Master Builder
16. Earth - An Inquest Concerning Teeth

So, a month or so in club music has rushed on by since I last did the round up, and, woeful Haiti relief records aside, things are looking up.

In the world of Hip Hop it’s been all about big guns with Pharrell, Snoop and Rihanna all putting out interesting tracks-

Have It All, Pharrell’s track with everyone’s favourite jailbird Gucci Mane is, for my money, the best track from the Neptunes stable since ooohhhhhh, like 2002 or something. It’s a sugar sweet return to Frontin’ territory with lyrics that feel like they were carved on a school desk on a sunny day. At one point Pharrell and Gucci even start singing ‘Wheeee’ in the manner of 12 year olds riding a round-a-bout made of candy and goodness. To cap it, the beat has this magical little tic-tocking that puts me in mind of Oompa Loompa’s covering MJs ‘The Girl Is Mine’ whilst churning out Scrumpdiddlyumptious Bars, (without the funny voices and dwarfism, obviously). The other collabo between the two, Soldier, is back over on the rough side of things, being one of the rave bass grind outs that the Neptunes used to toss willy nilly onto erupting dance floors. Both great tracks.

Meanwhile Snoop’s getting plays with Check Yo Self –and whoops! He’s only gone and covered a remix of an Ice Cube song that itself uses the beat from Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’. Cripes! Is that the sound of hip hop munching upon it’s own bloated, face down, rat gnawed corpse? Or is this merely a knowing self referential jam-that-bangs? Jesus I don’t know. Personally I quite like it. The beat is a killer, and fairs fair, The Message came out in the Stone Age so no one’s ever heard it anyway. (I heard Pixie Lott describe Take That as ‘old skool’ the other day, Lord help us). Snoop still sounds good, and all in all this is alright. Maybe a touch irrelevant but, hey the man’s got a mansion to maintain.

You’ve already heard Rude Boy by RnB ‘singer’ Rihanna, (you may have even heard my sketchy jungle remix of it if you were at last months Off Modern…) and…. well, I always thought Rihanna was rubbish to be honest. I don’t care, Umbrella is OK. Just OK. Face it. Stick Crazy In Love and Umbrella in a tiny boxing ring surrounded by baying hood rats and who’s going to emerge the bloody, staggering victor? And don’t even get me started on the wailing dirge that is ‘Take A Bow’. However I think only the most cloth eared of haters could deny that this track is brilliant. It’s all the things I love about pop; it’s nonsensical, euphoric, sparse, repetitive, sleazy, and cat aids catchy. I love the steel drums married to Tiesto trance. I love the way that seeing as Rihanna can barely sing, the old trout just raps away, vaguely having a stab at a melody. I can’t help but think how bad this could have been in the hands of a grade A warbler (say, Mariah)—the whole production is more than emotive enough to require any vocal pyrotechnics.

And talking of suspect-singer-releasing-good-song-shocker, well didn’t Ellie Goulding do well out of Jakwob’s mix of Starry Eyed? Whilst Goulding is some kind of horse-jawed Home Counties Salome prancing around blogosphere flourishing the severed head of Music on a platter made of money and hate, Jakwob it would appear, isn’t. He tethered a warheads worth of sublow wub wub to the nag, drenched her vocals in reverb, gave it a load of ocean deep drops, and somehow came up from the shit fields smelling of daisies. Fair play. It seems that since then the remix work has been coming in for the lad thick and fast, so let’s see how long he can milk it for by producing essentially the same track again and again and again.

Other big dubstep releases came from Dub Police and new boys Erba Records.

The 5 track label sampler doing the rounds from Dub Police gives a fairly accurate overview of where the scene’s at, coupling, as it does, exciting forward looking club music with leaden tedious crap. Caspa has decided to represent with an immensely dull track that he quite possibly wanked out whilst catching a five-minute breather from killing troglodytes on World of Warcraft. Emalkay, who may be forever stuck in the shadow of ‘When I Look At You’, continues in similarly depressing vein and the whole affair was looking to be pretty desperate until The Others showed up with their big bag of zany rave riffs and – Jesus Christ – fresh approaches to the sound. Their track ‘Quantum Leap’ fizzes and leaps about whilst maintaining suitable levels of dubbed out menace and the requisite face pummelling go slow beats. From then on it’s all plain sailing, Subscape come up with a vile and insistent breakstep growler that sounds like a pitbull wolfing a cat made of Pentium chips, if the cat was singing through the mutt’s mouth whilst being eaten alive – and D1 come up with some sort of ace pinging futuristic dance music that takes the wood pigeon sounds of ‘Night’ and whacks them over some high speed house and bass.

The Erba release Gangsta Nuh Play came across as the soundtrack to dancehall don Mavado’s murder and subsequent descent into hell, dragged by Lucifer’s chattering child demons (if it helps, imagine Willy Lopez’s death in the fine Patrick Swayze classic Ghost.) It’s got all the swagger and terror of the finest the genre has to offer and Mavado’s speaker rattling, mournful baritone proves himself once more to have one the strongest voices in dubstep. The flipside has a somewhat jollier Afrikan Boy sampling UK funky track, which continued the blurring between funky and dub that has been so prominent over the last few months.

More funky came from Sony who produced the excellent and aptly titled Sugar Rush, a mix of old skool garage keys and vocals combined with the sound of a hundred drums being battered in a broadly rhythmical fashion. At some point in the track a Sunny D glugging hyperactive bassline splurges out all sweaty and grinning like a mug and it sounds like perhaps everything’s not going to be so bad after all.

Roska has also come up trumps with Time Stamp. I was listening to it whilst walking the dog last week and I came across quite an unsettling sight. A murder (which is a great collective noun eh, like a parliament of owls, or a pride of lions) of screeching crows had gathered together by one of the footpaths in London Fields. They were jabbering frantically at each other and tugging at something in the middle of the circle they had formed. As I got closer I could see that the thing they were obsessing over was a dead one of their own. One crow would grab the limp bird’s wing while another crow would grab at its tail feathers, pulling the corpse into weird and unpleasant shapes. The others would screech and cackle, and it seemed that some sort of judgement had been passed. After a few minutes of this a mongrel dog came bounding through their midst and snatched up the body in its jaws. The crows scattered to the sky. They circled and screamed, flapping the air black with feathers and noise. As they whirled up to the clouds the nervy synths and whip crack snares of ‘Time Stamp’ blasted into my ears and the jittery excitement of it all was quite special. Roska is great.

Unfortunately the song finished to be replaced by David Guetta & Kid Cudi which I honestly swear is only on my iPod for review purposes. Guetta, a man as French as rudeness and sheep burning, is on some kind of one man mission to besmirch the careers of hip hop’s biggest names with his generic abysmal euro cack. First up he sorted out Kelly Rowland and Akon, both massive arseholes in their own right (fond as I am of an Akon sing-along, he owns a fucking diamond mine therefore = evil). Now Dave’s moving onto more credible artists, recently gifting Kelis with the worst song she’s ever released, before turning to stroke his fudgy production fingers all over man of the moment Kid Cudi. There’s no place for this music anywhere. You already know what it sounds like. It could possibly be played to a club full of moneyed tone deaf inbreds, lurching to its ‘uplifting’ beat in between paying £30 for a tumbler of peasant spit and incompetently planning a coup of an Equatorial Guinea. So, big in Bungalow 8 I dare say. To give an alternative review of this track, here’s a comment from the youtube video:

“Stoner song, party song, get away from life song. Kick ass song”

So what do I know, eh?

And while I’m on the subject of dumb music for morons Don Diablo & Sidney Sampson have blessed us with Monster and Rise Up this month. Lest we forget, Don Diablo has a big Anarchy ‘A’ in his logo which shows that he’s a totally crazy guy. Sidney Sampson had the word ‘motherfucker’ featuring prominently in his last hit (‘Riverside’ for those of you to apathetic to keep up) suggesting that he too, is pretty darn crazy. No prizes for guessing what happened when these too scallywags got together, yep, hot diggedy, lock up your daughters because we are gonna go super ! mega ! bananas ! batshit ! CEEERAZY !! whoop !! whoop !! etc.

So bonkers, in fact, that this Dutch headbang house tagteam haven’t been able to contain their megalithic nonsense to just one piece. Instead we get one track that has some clown shouting ‘Rise Up NIGGERS’ (I know this may be off the point a bit, but whenever I think of Dutch people getting together to say nigger, I think of Steven Biko getting his head kicked in. Still, no reason why that should stop the party) until an Ed Banger jocking bass grinds out over the Prodigyesque – if that’s a word these days – drum break outs. The other track bangs along with a guy going ‘whoop’ in the background and some loud noises and stuff. If you want to feel a bit rebellious, then I can say that these truly are tunes that ‘your mother wouldn’t like’ (well, my mum wouldn’t anyway) but I suspect that might be because there a bit shit.

For a better representation of 4/4 music, it’s worth noting that DFA have come back guns blazing with 4 releases in as many weeks, all worth a listen. My favourite is Shit Robot – I Got A Feeling. As with all the other recent releases it’s a little bit disco, a little bit techno and a heaving great church full of house. After 4 punchy minutes of bleeps, bass lines and jack, the bloke from House Of House shows up with a sack full of 92 rave pianos he’s pinched from Detroit and starts emoting all over the place, working the track into what is generally considered epic territory. As with the greatest releases on DFA there’s an excellent sense of pacing at play—the stripped down opening half feels essential rather than noodling, and when the piano and vocals do kick in it’s less everything stepping up a notch, more everything falling into place.

I think there’s time for a mention of the SNES remix of Gorrilaz track Stylo. Put together by new boy Labyrinth, it’s a Mario bothering 8 bit epic with all the shimmering arpeggios, crunchy byte explosions and mushroom munching power up widges that this sort of carry on demands. Tinie Tempah shows up somewhere along the way sounding better than he did on his own chart assaulting single, Albarn’s voice sounds as haunting as ever over the video game hubbub and really, only the most curmudgeonly of fantasy Nintendo plumbers could hate this.

Oh, and while I remember, honourable mentions should go to both Hounds of Hate and Beaty Heart for having amazing tracks out, but seeing as everyone who reads this goes to Off Modern, you know that already. Still, good to have some of the most exciting music in England to be springing up from S. London eh… pip pip x

These reviews are edited from Nasty McQuaid’s weekly round ups which can be found at http://theransomnote.co.uk/

On March 25th, we are launching our new publishing project, its a collection of writing, fiction, interviews, photography and illustration, representing the work of Off Modern and our collaborators over the last six months or so. It’d be a pleasure to celebrate the event with you all, its completely free, and is running for 7pm till 12am at the ICA. We’d like to thank Tate Etc for their support in realising the project. Music on the night is coming from Off Modern resident Nasty McQuaid, Real Gold’s Ronojoy Dam, Zineswap and Fervent Moon.

Off Modern are heading over to Fabric for an all out spectacular featuring almost all of our best friends collected for a massive and impersonal Farringdon based superclub spectacular. A load of people who’ve graced our little corner of Elephant & Castle in the past year and a half will be there, including Fiction, Gyratory System, A Grave With No Name, No Pain In Pop, Get Me, Sexbeat, Louie Enchante, Deadly Rhythm, Is Tropical and Crispin Dior. Its running from 9pm till 4am, and costs between £5 and £12 to get in.

Tribal drums and looping, shiny samples, South East London foursome Beaty Heart are making a welcome appearance at Off Modern on the 4th of March. We caught up with drummer/samplist/vocalist Charlie Rotberg to see how it’s all coming along, and swipe an exclusive new track from him.

O/M
Hello Charlie, can you give me a tiny wee description of Beaty Heart and the sonic delights that you make with them?

Charlie
Fruity Roy Orbison with bangra beatz. In your face up your batty. We try and create an organic, percussive sound clash, with collage of samples and loops, whoops and tiny bum hoops.

O/M
That’s wonderful. You chaps certainly love ‘percussive sound clash’. Who’s the best at it? And how do you go about creating such complicated rhythmic duets?

Charlie
Probably James, he’s well tight. I think the patterns we play are often pretty simple. Its more the layering up of the simple patterns that helps create an interesting beat. We get a lot of inspiration from Afro Caribbean and latin drums, which often involves group percussion and several parts. Three of us were drummers originally so yeah, its pretty key to us.

O/M
Could you shed some light on your track COLA, and are there any more plans to record in the future?

Charlie
Well it was recorded in James’ bedroom with one microphone, kind of spur of the moment thing really. Its a relatively new track, and one that we thought would translate well when recorded. We plan to record some more tracks, hopefully one in the next week. Its gunna be well rammo.

O/M
Faves?

Charlie
I think we’re all a bit out of the loop (bar Lou Bega. Mumbo number five). How ever several guilty pleasures such as Lady Gaga, Akon, Girls Aloud, Alicia Keys etc. There is this really great band actually called “Select Funk”, they’re on Bebo, check em out.

O/M
Worsties?

Charlie
We unanimously like “SmashMouth”.

O/M
That’s it, so long

EXCLUSIVE DOWNLOAD OF ‘COLA’

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Beaty Heart play Off Modern 13 on March 4th at Corsica Studios, and are curating their own evening of music at the Camberwell Crypt on March 18th with music from themselves, New Yoga, and Jam City. Check out www.myspace.com/beatyheart for more info.

It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires. Chtcheglov, 1953.

They put Chtcheglov in an asylum for five years because he wanted to deconstruct the Eiffel Tower. Unknown, 2008.

I.

The first idea that we come across when discussing the idea of a new city, and the idea looms so large that it is not ignorable, is that of psychogeography. Traditional geography is the study of how human activity is influenced by, or has an effect upon, the earth’s surface; it generally focuses on patterns of human trade and commerce as these patterns form the basis for all human interactions. Psychogeography is a study of how a human’s environment, specifically sites of economic interaction, has an effect upon the psychological self. It is a study of the banking quarter, the market place and your trip to the corner shop to buy a paper or a packet of cigarettes. Unfortunately as psychogeography is an analysis of these phenomena of economic alienation or inclusion it is also prone to developing a thesis that will inevitably deal with proposing a new theory of how we ought to want to live; that is to say its findings are usually ideological in nature. Through its study of how we react when communing with the wider economic society it tells us that we should modify our behaviour to suit the predisposed new realities that it offers as an alternative. We then propose that all old psychogeographical interpretations and readings of the world have proven their own absurdity through their ideological bias. This is not to say that the methods laid out by DeBord, Beaudelaire and Chtcheglov are wrong though, but instead we, the Off Modern, proffer our own new interpretations and theoretical experiments to counteract the outdated models of the flâneur and its specificity to Parisian locales.

The first movement must be a return to the origin, where all creation starts, to look at how the future of the city and society has been viewed and how these visions remained only visions. These revelations are all in part retro futures, but whereas most retro futures spy visions only of consumer-techno-utopias, the retro futures of the Off Modern are not afraid of new technology. Let us take as our first divulgence, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis. In the film Lang makes conspicuous use of technology as a psychogeographical emblem, the M and Heart machines are monstrous and unexplainable, serving little purpose but to enslave the underclass who work at them. For Lang, new technology plays out on the future as a harbinger of doom, creating Babel-like visions that disconnect and alienate us from one another; whereas our modern technological way of life places the emphasis on communication, via the internet, it is also engaged with moving areas of economic commerce and trade into the realm of the unreal, non-place of the internet. Metropolis doesn’t show a technological advancement as the creation of new modes of communication or new spaces for trade, instead the proletariat are presented as chained to these advances for the good of the few. Technology works only for the overclass and they harness it and withhold its benefits from the masses. The old spaces of economic interaction as presented in a Marxist model of capitalist life have driven the proletariat into an even more economically alienating situation because of the rise of the new technologies.

Many retro futures take original portents of doom and turn them into dreams of utopia. Much of the imagery that Lang coined in the production survives, second hand, in the work of the retro futurists, who use his art deco inspired images of an overclass, but instead these images are transposed onto a society as a whole. This barrage of images of a whole society in utopian harmony are altogether unrealistic, and like other arguments developed from the work of psychogeographical experiments, are furthering an involuntarily ideological mode of living. The idea of this retro futurist utopia is that everyone will be part of this technological overclass, in Metropolis this overclass literally live in the sky above the city of the massed workers, free to ignore the reality of the world they are subjugating. But in the retro futurist utopia everyone is forcibly part of this perfect overclass, with no one subjugated to the M Machine, everyone is king or queen or prince and no-one is forced into the indignity of leaking blood into a factory for someone else’s benefit.

What we should be seeking then is a different type of retro future, one that doesn’t see new technology as a portent of human enslavement or debasement. If retro futurism takes old images of the future as its starting point, then an Off Modern retro future will instead explore a forgotten image or history of the past as its starting point, and it is through the combination of this retro futurism and a non-ideological psychogeography that we can formulate a new idea of the city. The Off Modern metropolis will be a space to finally fulfil all images and ideas of a mythical unrealisable future.

II.

Before we outline our vision of the future metropolis it would be pertinent to stop for a moment and examine the failings of the modern city, to get a better grasp on the scale of the theoretical task that we have set for ourselves and also to elucidate on the problems that need to be solved.

we were promised impossible futures ; skyscrapers of indeterminable height; new economic palaces of steel and glass; high technology clothing that will regulate your bodily temperatures and shield you from heat, cold and external damage; economic superstructures of equality; technocratic political systems based purely on knowledge; homes in the clouds and bases on Mars; ray guns, atomic endgames and mass annihilation; cyborgs built of metal and flesh, attributes like strength, vision, intelligence and speed heightened like a band of new Grecian heroes; extended life and health care systems that would ward off mortality and the effects of ageing on the human mind and body; teleportation, or at the very least, super fast travel between distant points. the twenty first century will be one long hangover from the dreams of the twentieth.

The cities that we are instead habiting are crumbling; clumsily inserted monolithic skyscrapers bordering precocious still-standing 15th Century relics.
The cities that we are instead habiting are compromises with human nature and lack of vision. We are loath to see radical development of a metropolis and cling religiously onto 15th Century relics, and yet we surround them with the impenetrable and alienating institutions of finance. The vision of life in the future as predicted by the past was irreconcilable with some certain fundamental traits of humanity as exhibited in its mythical and actual histories. We cling onto a relic as a symbol of our history and yet allow its incremental and creeping destruction. We allow the creation of endless skyscrapers because they represent a moneyed future, one of prosperity in a new high tech city. But the modern metropolis is engaged in the insertion of new technology into the gaping holes left behind by the failures of older technology; the modern metropolis is then engaged in stunting its own growth. Take the claustrophobic asphyxiation of London and the sprawling paradoxes of Americana in Los Angeles as two examples in the Western World.

The lack of correlation between what the past promised us and what it actually delivered should naturally lead onto the conclusion that we must now formulate new proposals, for an entirely new city, as well as learning from the mistakes of the past, and salvaging that which is of interest and has never been realised or has now been forgotten.

III.

The Off Modern Metropolis will have nothing to do with the vast, unending and everchanging spaces dreamt of by DeBord and Beaudelaire, but instead it will be made of the broken through dead ends of history; it is a city built upon the shifting foundations of nostalgia and built out of the unremembered, forgotten and unrealised memories of things never to have happened. Thus the Off Modern is a city, not made of real, definable and finite spaces but out of memory and imagination. Every avenue or boulevard is delineated not by what activity occurs there but what hypothetical action it could facilitate, or has facilitated in its previous lives.

To reiterate for a moment; psychogeographical experiments often end with preconceived ideological notions that further the ideas of a group about how they feel we ought to want to live. The Off Modern Metropolis would instead be an experiment in how people could be living, open to myriad interpretations of spaces.

Part of the explanation is rooted in the idea of the collage. With the rise of Stalin and his promotion of Socialist Realism over the early Russian revolutionary art movements like Futurism and Constuctivism. Stalin wrote these movements out of Soviet history, and in doing so he condemned them to never be fully realised and irresolvable. What happened to them next is that these germinal aesthetical ideas formed historical collages across Capitalist Europe in the works of De Stijl, Le Corbusier and Brutalism. The aesthetical principles of Constructivism were then subjugated to the market forces that enable building projects to take place; the idea of the proposal, cost effectiveness, material, labour, etc. With the architectural schools of Soviet Russia in exile their Leninist visions of the Utopian metropolis are warped, from here on in a Modernist Utopian vision is nothing more than an ideal unreal place.

If we are to talk of a new city as being an Off Modern metropolis then we must reconcile it with its impossibility to build, and so it is founded in the ridiculous, the physically impractically, the mentally obtuse. It is only through this that we can truly achieve the idea of a psychological new city. It is a city of perception, repetition, ghosts, historical monuments and demolished buildings; this nightclub is in fact a cinema and that bingo hall is in fact a museum, that museum is in fact an old apartment complex and the train station used to be a graveyard. This Off Modern metropolis is then in fact a type of utopian collage, made up of everything, stuck together, moments of history, forgotten artistic movements, forgotten buildings, empires and revolutions.