Review: Matias Aguayo & The Desdemonas - Sofarnopolis

Still from Cold Fever video, by Matías Aguayo and Céline Keller.


It's the 14th of September 2016, an unwelcoming Wednesday night in Edinburgh, and I've forced myself up from the comfort of my sofa to go and see Berlin's Matias Aguayo and The Desdemonas at Sneaky Pete's. "Is this how you dreamt it would be?" asks Aguayo at one point, between songs. It turns out to be the central lyric of the next number, in which he's seemingly talking about the dystopian future-present our childhood selves would find themselves living in today, but the question could equally apply to our expectations of the gig. Best known as figurehead of the flawlessly-cool Cómeme label, and as a producer making infectious, highly-imaginative, personality-filled house music, what drew me out tonight was the promise of hearing that creativity translated to a traditional rock band line-up. But in truth his band, The Desdemonas, create an even fuller, more complex sound than I had expected. The noirish edge I had anticipated is there, in the heavy b-movie creep of the basslines, and a guitarist ringing out reverb-spooked tremolo strums that would make Robert Rodriguez weep. As well as singing, Aguayo sometimes plays a bizarre-looking homemade keytar, or percussion. Another guy plays synths. Did I mention the synths. The unexpected element for me are the occasionally epic, teutonic synths, creating a collision between a cold wave front from Berlin, and the warmer atmospheres of Aguayo's Chilean heritage, the latin dance rhythms underpinning it all (the drummer is kept very busy).

Aesthetics aside, from track to track we're treated to a bewildering array of song types, from seductive sex jams to apocalyptic synth pop; it's hard to categorise at all. Fortunately this is not a weakness, as Aguayo himself is a natural performer, with the personality to hold something so potentially chaotic together. The venue is not very busy, and I find myself at the front of the stage, Aguayo, who has been dancing throughout, undulating sensuously before me. In tight trousers, smartly-heeled boots and a polkadot blouse, he looks for all the world like a ghost from the heyday of '80s or early-'90s indie. Entranced by his dancing, all of my feeble hetero passcodes are unlocked one by one, and within no time, I'm his. I'm by myself and he's close enough that it feels like he's dancing for me, with me. Fortunately, at this stage I've only had one beer.

Later, whilst performing the previously mentioned song about our dystopian present, he will body pop and footslide with some of the best dance moves I may have ever seen from a live performer. Admittedly, I've never seen Justin Timberlake live. Perhaps he would have been better. But in a small, intimate club on the Cowgate, in the gutter of the city, to watch something like this is just joyously incongruous and fantastical. I think these might really be some of the moments I live for: in a small, unassuming venue, seeing something genuinely not quite like anything I've seen before - the true wonder of pop music. It's still out there, somewhere, as we once dreamt of it, in naive childhood wonder, FM dreams beamed beneath duvets via walkman radios. In a gig that feels, at different times, like a bar band from an unknown, superior South American remake of The Lost Boys, or the first genuinely good band to play at the Bronze (apart from Cibo Matto, obvs), or Chris Isaak's little-known midlife breakdown post-punk vampire-biker-themed jam band, we find, finally, simply, transcendent pop wonder.

Fast forward to November 2017, and the album the Desdemonas were teasing last year (they toured it across Europe, without any of the material having been released) has now finally arrived. Is it how I had dreamt it would be? Not entirely - it features some mellower numbers, and ambient interludes, and perhaps more smoke machine than the gig did. It's dreamier, and darker, whlst simultaneously lighter in other places. If anything, it seems to show an even broader collision of influences, is even harder to adequately describe. And the song about the dreamt-of future seems to be missing. Perhaps it was me who dreamt it? Much like the gig, the album is entirely its own thing, not quite like anything else out there. Titled Sofarnopolis, it's apparently a conceptual narrative, with clues filled in by Aguayo's accompanying comic strip art. Perhaps it was never about what we dreamt it would be after all, but about Aguayo's dreams; and they seem to be wild, intriguing, oblique fantasies of a different, more exciting time. In this parallel world, perhaps a young Aguayo is laughing to himself as he foresees his future self on the cover of the NME and Melody Maker, the biggest latin-indie-synth-goth pop star of a decade that never was... whoever's dream it is, it's a future past that's a joy to visit.


Sofarnopolis by Matias Aguayo is out now, via Crammed Discs.

Welcome to the Tarot Drome

Marisa Carnesky (Photo by Manuel Vasson)

On Saturday morning, I caught the train from the sunny idyll of Dorset up to London and, alighting at Waterloo Station, I felt the cold reality of the dirty, rushing metropolitan life of the city blow towards me down the platform. Nearing the ticket barrier, I looked down onto the small section of track between the front of the train and the buffer stops, as I always reflexively do. I was taken aback to see a large dead bird there, and, surprised, it took me a second to assimilate that it was in fact an owl. I've seen plenty of flat dead birds in my time, but never an owl. It felt very strange, seeing this majestic creature that one would normally only see on television, or in captivity, bereft not only of the cover of night, its secrecy and mystery, but also of its life. Its wings spread wide, it was nearly completely flat. I wondered how it had got there.

I was only in London for a day, and was therefore very pleased to find that the short run of Marisa Canesky's new immersive theatre thing, Carnesky's Tarot Drome, coincided with my visit. I'd heard about her Ghost Train a few years back, and had thought it sounded fantastic, but had been unable to get to it. This new show features an eclectic cast of multi-disciplined performers each portraying a card from the major arcana of the tarot, which is one of my favourite books ever (as well as something I've been exploring in my artwork for the past five years)!

So it was that I found myself, along with a few friends, leaving the surface world behind Waterloo Station to descend into the graffiti-illuminated catacombs beneath, where, through a fire-door or two, we would experience the Tarot Drome show.

In the blue corner - The Moon.

Once within the atmospheric, vault-like arches of the Old Vic Tunnels, the evening began with an introduction from Marisa Carnesky, holding court in a full-sized wrestling ring. The first two cards were drawn, and then the audience was directed into a series of adjoining rooms, where they were then free to wander between the various performers. This cleverly introduced a random element akin to a real tarot reading - it was up to the audience to decide which performers they watched or interacted with, a selection process further complicated by some cards being harder to find (The Hermit) or attracting large crowds or queues (The High Priestess).

There was no pressure to interact directly with any of the performers, and there was more than enough impressive imagery, costume, set design and performance on show to keep a politely-detached audience member perfectly satisfied - Nina Felia's Death immediately drew a large crowd with her gracefully balletic contortions before a fan of skulls and bones. However, I can't help feeling that a more direct interaction with the performers and their prescribed rituals was essential for a fully satisfactory divinatory experience.

Rhyannon Styles as The Chariot

One of the golden rules of tarot readings (according to my copy of Tarot For Beginners) is that the subject must freely choose to have the reading, without any kind of coercion. I don't see this as based in superstition, along the lines of evil spirits only being allowed to enter a house by invitation, so much as a simple acknowledgement of the fact that someone who is not interested in engaging with and exploring the symbolism of the tarot in relation to their self is far less likely to get anything from it. In this respect, I suspect this element of the show was potentially quite challenging for some.

On entering the first room (different parts of the audience began in different rooms), we passed through a curtain of VHS tape. Just that morning on the train, I had been developing a story which has been growing from a song I wrote a few months ago, in which doors made of hair feature prominently (don't ask), and the tape immediately made me think of this. Just beyond this, the first performer we came to was Strength (performed by Hellen Burrough aka Traumata), who was sitting in a bed of hair, and engaging in a ritual with audience members which also involved hair. Now, although hair has obvious symbolic associations with strength, to draw a first card that had such immediate (same day) personal resonance was a bit surprising, so I resolved that I should try to interact with her. However, with many fellow audience members also wanting to interact with any given performer, finding the right moment was less easy, and, in this case, I found myself feeling awkward the longer I stood watching others have their wrists braided. Being Strength, the initiative to interact was mostly hers, with audience members invited forward with a hand gesture, and, missing selection a couple of times, I quickly felt discouraged - last to be picked for the team yet again! La Force inverted?

This is what I feel may have been a challenging part of the show for some less forward people. For me, it was less about a reticence to engage with the performers, rather than a consciousness of so many others wishing to do the same, and thus an inevitable polite stiff-upper-lip resignation to letting others get on with it. I don't know, perhaps that's just me, as someone who is monotonously bad at getting served at bars, or ordering food in a restaurant without entering into a state of panic! But so it was that I found myself wandering further around the room, choosing not to engage with any of the performers but simply enjoying their performances from a safe distance.

Professional wrestler Phil Bedwell as The Emperor.

I found a spot near a wall where I had a good view of all five performers in the first room. To be honest, perhaps too good a view at times - unsurprisingly, Carnesky's tarot went deep into the id, with a strong bias toward a psychosexual reading, and more than once, stood between Nina Felia's slow-motion contortions and Rowan Fae's Temperance, circling a tank of water in a gold bikini, I had to reflexively lower my camera as I found myself confronted by bums on all fronts. Which is not to say it was at all seedy, the erotic edge in no way detracted from the performances themselves, in fact fitting very naturally with the wholly surreal atmosphere (although my sister did apparently feel compelled to drag her boyfriend away from Death's semi-naked clay-pasted form!).

By now, having executed some impressively gymnastic poses above the mouth of the tank, Temperance was in the water, performing an inversion of her exploration of the tank exterior at the start of her piece. From the gloom, a man stepped forward slightly and suggested I go up to the tank and touch it. I hesitantly did so, feeling a bit daft and self-conscious. There was no response from inside the tank. "Sometimes she doesn't notice you," the man shrugged. Now, there is only so much stiffness anyone's upper lip can take, and following on from the Strength debacle, I now felt really determined to interact with a performer, and so, emboldened by the "sometimes", I decided to try again. Wandering around to the other side of the tank, I again put my hand to it, and this time Temperance responded, following my hand with her hand, and then her face, as she moved around inside the tank. It was quite an odd experience - I felt very self-conscious, and conscious of now being a part of the performance, and interacting with a strange lady in a bikini writhing in a tank. Despite being surrounded by watching people, and interacting with a player performing a predetermined role, it was nonetheless an inescapably intimate moment. I suppose it's a bit like being invited onstage by a magician and suddenly finding yourself not in the audience, but somewhere between the smoke and the mirrors. At essence, a human interaction, no matter how staged or theatrical, is still a human interaction, and in an odd atmosphere like the one at this show, that felt quite surreal and charged.

There were still many performers to see after that, and I got a fortune cookie note from The High Priestess (performed by Vicky Butterfly) that was freakily prescient to current life concerns, despite the fact that the theatrical intimacy got the better of me that time (somewhat to her righteous disdain) - it was a very solemn ritual but, alas, I can't have someone stare at me ominously from close range and still keep a straight face, as disrespectful to a High Priestess as that might be (sorry!).

Roller cards.

There was much, much more, and I left the first part of the show feeling that I could easily see the show again a couple of times and have an entirely different experience. But there was only time left to quickly grab a rushed autograph from The Chariot, as superficial and fleeting a celebrity meeting as one could hope for, before the audience was called back to the central room.

Everyone returned to the ringside for an impressively choreographed(?) pitched battle between Strength and The Emperor, before entering a final room where the performers took to the stage on roller skates to deliver a gloriously incomprehensible rock operatic reading of the final cards, complete with full band (Rasp Thorn & The Briars) and theremin solos, and a visual and musical colour that suggested an imagined '60s hippy musical.

I had a massive grin on my face throughout the entire finale, but my sister and her partner apparently found its wide-eyed optimism a little too intense, and so it was that, once Carnesky had finally disappeared with a twinkle, arse-into-spotlight, and all the performers had emerged to take a bow, I found them already in the bar area nursing double rum and cokes. I thought it had been really interesting how the interactive elements of the show dissolved the traditional barriers between performers and audience, albeit in a theatrically-mediated way, and, perhaps partly inspired by this, I felt an urge to go and offer a brief personal thanks to the performers who were beginning to gather in the bar area. My companions, however, were keen to leave the dim (and slightly damp) subconscious world and head to the South Bank to throw themselves around on horrific-looking fairground rides, and so the opportunity swiftly passed.

Two hours later, I was still feeling nauseous after a three minute ride on the deceptively mini-looking mini rollercoaster, despite having had explicit foreknowledge that I would not enjoy it at all, and I was still thinking about the likely meaning of my "reading", and how this had perhaps already been forgotten by the time we reached the bar. Sometimes there are things that we simply never learn - but there's no harm in the occasional refresher lesson.

This was a multi-layered piece of experimental theatre which was of a high enough quality to be enjoyed at face-value, but also, like the tarot itself, rewarded interaction and a deeper personal consideration. This was my first time experiencing a piece like this, and it was a total joy; I will very much look forward to whatever comes next from Mrs. Carnesky and her acolytes. There are many better photos than the bad ones I took on the Carnesky Productions Facebook page, but should anyone read this and decide to go to the show this week (and you should if you can!), I'd suggest resisting the temptation to look and allowing yourself to be surprised.

Personally, I was a little surprised at the total lack of owls in the show, given that they featured heavily in the promo photos.. but on reflection, I'm happy enough for them to stay in the safety of the shadows.

You Dooze, You Lose

There's currently a Fraggle Rock 30th Anniversary t-shirt/poster design competition happening on Talenthouse. I'd hoped to enter, but, alas, diazepam had other ideas.

Anyway, the idea of approaching such beloved characters in my own style had really appealed to me, and it's for this same reason that it's so nice to see the personal twists some of the competing artists have put on the Fraggles.

There are tons of entries, and I'm sure I will have missed some good ones, but these are the ones that appealed to my tastes and caught my eye. Click through on the artists' names to vote if you like 'em!

By Laura Paton.
Definitely one of the more imaginative designs, compositionally, and a nice colour-scheme.

By Fabio Sabatini.
Some nicely-now pixelated Fraggles! Great simple-but-effective concept too. A clear fave that would look fantastic on a t-shirt.

By Javier Rosell.
Probably my favourite design. Captures the mystery and dark edge of the show in a beautiful illustration. I would buy this on a t-shirt!

By Pupi Hererra.
Again, a more imaginative and dynamic take on the subject than some of the other entries, distinctively rendered.

By Lukasz Majewski.
This is the sort of thing I had hoped to see, the Fraggles rendered in a refreshingly personal style. A classy Jim Flora feel to this one.

By Jeanne Vocke.
I like this one because it looks like a cool French comic. Something about the colours and the character attitudes!

By Seva Vyvodtsev.
And finally, another clear favourite. R. Crumb does Fraggle Rock?? More of this man's Fraggle madness here!




You can see all of the entries here - only a few days to vote. The winning entry gets made into official 30th Anniversary merch!

Art Is Hard Pizza Club

I've had a couple of pretty special-looking LPs and tapes in the post recently, but I thought this release particularly deserved a good blogging.

Art Is Hard is a South Coast label, mainly promoting South Coast bands, but with the odd one or two from further afield. I heard of them a while back, when they put out their first compilation, as a t-shirt with download, which featured some great now-defunct Bournemouth bands like Dutch Husband and True Swamp Neglect, as well as the much-more-currently-active likes of Colours and Kinnie The Explorer.

And then, whenever I saw Lee Dutch, he would inevitably be wearing the t-shirt, so it was kind of hard to forget about them!

Now, it's 2012, and they seem to have not gone away yet, and are seemingly boasting an ever-more impressive roster (Yrrs and Black Tambourines currently doing it for these ears).

Over at their Bandcamp, they've been running the Art Is Hard Biweekly 5" Pizza Club for a few weeks now. Basically, every second Friday, they put up a track for free download, with only one physical copy available to buy, at 1pm on the day. I somehow managed to snag a recent one, and so was the lucky recipient of a tasty-looking burrito pizza CDR, carefully packaged in this amazing (and much bigger than I'd expected!) pizza box.

The CD is My Teen Idol by Perfect Hair Forever, apparently from New Zealand. It's some of that retro recorded-on-a-lolly-stick surf sound that all the cool kids dig. You can hear that, and the other pizza club tunes, at the Art Is Hard Bandcamp. But I'd recommend also visiting the Perfect Hair Bandcamp, and checking out the whole EP that the tune comes from - beautiful stuff!

Art Is Hard, well, they're on Facebook too. Yeah?

Thank you Art Is Hard.


YUM.

Perfect Hair Forever - My Teen Idol by Art Is Hard Records

R. Stevie Moore / / Live in Bournemouth ! ! !

David Shrigley represents for R. Stevie Moore

Some years back, I was briefly playing "inaudible banjo" and "keyboards played with my feet" in a band called Skitanja. At a rehearsal back in about 2006, the band's twisted mastermind, Steve Potatoes, had introduced me to the wonderful music of R. Stevie Moore. I can still vividly remember being stood by his computer, listening to I Like To Stay Home streaming through the interubes. Incredible stuff, I thought! Crucial work, really!





Fast forward to earlier this year, and I happened to find myself sharing a flat with Mr. Potatoes. So it was that I heard first-hand when the simply incredible happened - Potatoes (possibly whilst drunk) had booked R. Stevie to come and play in Bournemouth! It's little understatement to suggest that, for myself and many of my friends, this incredible booking coup represented the most exciting thing to happen in Bournemouth possibly ever! R. Stevie was touring outside the US for the first time in his forty year career, and was not only coming to the UK, but to Bournemouth!


Celebrate the news!


An overlarge supporting bill was arranged, posters and flyers were printed, and the mayor was informed.. and so it was that, on an uncharacteristically hot British summer's day, R. Stevie arrived in Bomo. (Now, don't ask complicated questions, but suffice it to say that he arrived from the continent, driven by one Steve Potatoes..)

Recently-opened superior record-purchasing emporium Rose Red hosted an afternoon acoustic session, with a relaxed R. Stevie playing a raft of lesser-heard (but genius) songs to an appreciative crowd, on the shop's wonderfully airy and light lower floor. As a fan, it was an unbelievable treat to experience R. Stevie playing so casually, in such an intimate environment. Really magical stuff.


In Rose Red Records

With hellos said to R. Stevie, and the instore cola supplies drunk dry, there was some aimless wandering in sunny Boscombe (something about a Sleeping Dog Lying test, the so-called woof response, on the counter in Richer Sounds?), before I headed to the venue for the evening show, Champions, with Martin and Ed.

Some of the area's best weirdo bands were also playing: Martin's ever-incredible Powdered Cows, plus a hastily reassembled but on-skronk Skitanja, featuring the afore-mentioned Ed, along with Martin, Potatoes and Inspector D. I. Signs. I played a Hardsparrow set too, but there you go. Nothing is perfect.


Powdered Cows



Pretty soon, it was nearing time for the R. Stevie main course. He seemed a bit distant and unsettled, compared to the earlier show. It's not hard to wonder what it must seem like to a seasoned musician like R. Stevie, to be in a foreign country and arrive in a venue like Champions, which is, quite frankly, a bit of a weird place at the best of times (part venue, part Overlook Hotel, despite great improvements and the best efforts of the owners to revamp it.) The stifling warmth of one of the hotter days of the year was probably not helping much either.


SkitanjaI Like To Stay Home (R. Stevie Moore) by Skitanja


Nonetheless, the gig was great. Following fantastic sets from Skitanja and the Powdered Cows, R. Stevie's touring backing band, Tropical Ooze, played a set which was worth the price of entry alone.

Then R. Stevie played. Despite his seemingly unsettled mood, and the oddness of seeing a legend like RSM in a local venue that I'm not hugely keen on, it was fantastic to get to jump around to the actual R. Stevie Moore, playing the actual hits, backed by a solid band, surrounded by friends. Two of these friends, Rich and Lucy, had travelled down from London for the evening, just to see R. Stevie. The band swung into the sublime Play Myself Some Music, and all was wonderful with the world. The whole day was really such a special event.


The man, the legend


The set began to draw to a close earlier than I had expected, with a bit of an awkward stand-off developing between RSM onstage, and a slightly confused audience. Eventually, temporarily placated with a bottle of wine, the set continued for a short while longer, before finally ending with his celebrated solo rendition of the Popeye theme.

After the gig, I got R. Stevie to re-sign the back of my i-Pod (he'd actually done it earlier in the day, but it had rubbed off in the sweat-pit of the gig), rechristening it an R-Pod, in acknowledgement of the huge amount of the prolific musician's material that has made it on there.


The R-pod


By and by, it would turn out that I'd lost my wallet (and train tickets) in the venue, presumably whilst pogoing to I Like To Stay Home, and so it was that I had to wake myself at 6am to return to the venue, to try to recover it before catching the train back to Scotland. Did I say train? Well, I ended up having to change to the overnight coach in London, travelling on for some ten hours to Dundee, arriving in the early hours of Monday morning having had precious little sleep - it was a somewhat hellish journey, much of which was spent with the guy next to me, Bobby from Bulgaria, either talking incessantly, or asleep, crushing me like a long-suffering wife. And then I had to go straight into work.

But, you know what? It was all worth it. So totally worth it. For the legend that is R. Stevie Moore.

Thank you R. Stevie!

And thank you, Steve Potatoes!


Poster Potato-style!


Interested parties might make first departure into the Outer Mooresphere here: THE R. STEVIE MOORE CASSETTE CLUB

And check out this essential documentary: TAPE TO DISC

R. STEVIE MOORE & TROPICAL OOZE are on tour NOW!

The Rock Charmer

On Wednesday I was privileged - along with locals, families and friends, and the odd bat conservationist - to attend the preview night of The Rock Charmer, a collaboration between The Paper Cinema and accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen, commissioned for the Inside Out festival.
Set in the impressive surrounds of the Winspit quarry, with the constant whisper of the waves behind us, and a clear star-filled sky above, we watched as The Paper Cinema's hand-manipulated paper puppets and scenery acted out a mysterious narrative, projected some 40 feet high on the bare cliff face.




This was accompanied by Kimmo Pohjonen's animated and often theatrical performance, with industrial sounds and looped and echoing primal wails and tongue clicks taking their place alongside the more familiar sounds of his accordion. And, to be fair, the less familiar sounds of his accordion too, when he either struck it to create rhythms, or amplified the clicks and wheezes of its bare mechanical processes.




The Paper Cinema's projections fitted the music neatly, with images of robot arms carrying squared blocks of stone, suggesting they were building on (or quarrying from) the cliff face itself. This gave way to more familiar Paper Cinema territory, with grizzled sailors, fierce oceans, and mysterious cities upon ships all taking their place (and sea beasties, hot-air balloons, and giant heads too, quite naturally).




Including the pleasant, cow-filled walk to the site from the nearby pub, and an installation in part of the local caves of The Paper Cinema's shadow-casting sculptures of atavistic beasties, it was a tremendous evening, truly making the most of a remarkable location, and a wholly memorable experience. Grand stuff indeed!



Behind any wizard's curtain, there is almost always a man with a beard.*



Walking back to the Square & Compass by lamplight.



*With an unbearded female assistant holding everything together (not pictured).

Shogun Kunitoki in Helsinki

3/4/09: After the Chip Tune workshop, I headed back to the centre of Helsinki to meet some friends, to go to the Get Busy club event that spanned the Tavastia and Semifinal venues. We saw a great set by Vuk, who had the coolest stoner-metal dude drummer any of us had ever seen. Caught a few other bands too, before Ed Banger's Busy P played a theatrical, crowd-pleasing DJ set, and the weaker few amongst us fled into the night to catch the 03:00 bus back to Lahti (the dozing Irish next to me sleep-cursing the whole way). But earlier in the evening, I slipped away to the Pixelache clubnight at nearby Dubrovnik, to catch an amazing set by Fonal Record's Shogun Kunitoki. They play determinedly analogue music, hypnotic, propulsive, dreamy psych-kraut. And I may not have seen the aurora borealis whilst in Finland, but I'm pretty sure I heard some slow-falling whistlers during their set. The percussionist was also responsible for a Super-8 projector, which created a small intense square of scratchy, blurry focus on the rear wall, the projector's beam carving an elegant arc through the darkness. It was actually incredible just to watch the looped film spinning on the projector, apparently hovering, only just held there by its speed and buffeted by the hot air from the machine. As the music reached its climax, the loop was jammed, causing a brilliant burn-hole to bubble and grow from the centre of the image, a beautiful end to an unforgettable set.


                     

Fever Ray in Helsinki

A few days ago I was lucky enough to catch Fever Ray playing at Tavastia in Helsinki. The album is incredible, and the four-piece band actually managed to make it sound as good, if not better, live.
Towards the end of the set there was a heart-stopping moment when Karin sang a cover of Vashti Bunyan's Here Before, and I suddenly felt deliriously happy to be stood in that spot, surrounded by strangers, so far from my home, with the words falling towards my face like cool rain in a heatwave.