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’ HERE OR LISTEN ABOVE.

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.

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.

It’s pretty cold and grotty out there today. Why not bounce the sunshine off 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!

Golau Glau - A Better Drinker

Golau Glau - Summer Games

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.

+

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.

+

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…

Here’s 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