While Lucrecia Dalt’s body of work doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s also not the kind of art that invites obvious comparisons. Her latest record, No Era sólida, is concerned with the interstitial zones between opaque and ethereal, tangible and lost, the silence of corridors and the howl of closed spaces.
Continue reading at The Quietus
Ever since Hugo’s head fell off and his teeth spilled across the stage, Sarah Angliss has been hesitant about bringing him on tour. The experimental musician has worked with a variety of collaborators over the years – as I speak to her on the phone, she’s building up to a performance at Supersonic festival, where she’ll be appearing as a trio with Sarah Gabriel (vocals) and Stephen Hiscock (percussion) – but her 1930s ventriloquist dummy head on a stick may not make the journey this time. “I worried that no one would enjoy the show without him,” she confesses, an anxiety belying the fact that her entire live show is extraordinary beyond Hugo.
Continue reading at The Quietus
The yggdrasil is the great tree of Norse mythology that connects all of the Nine Worlds, the supreme unifier between heaven and ash and everything in between. The term essentially translates as ‘Odin’s horse’, though various hair-splitting etymologies delineate its importance as either a symbol of the gallows or a dread call to Ragnarök, the succession of natural disasters and grand battles that ultimately purge the planet of humanity, the better to purify its scorched earth once more. It is part-way through a discussion of this concept with Daniel Higgs that he turns his ire to CD-ROMs.
“So you get a tool user’s manual, and then you gotta watch a movie about it before you can go use it, you know? It makes me uneasy,” he tells me down the phone from Washington, DC. To be in conversation with Higgs, the former frontman of legendary post-hardcore band Lungfish, is to be frequently drawn down such rabbit holes – only to be dragged sideways at the last moment, a fresh excavation each time. If it sounds exhausting, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s an invigorating seventy minutes.
Continue reading at The Quietus
If we enjoy mirroring the sex, sadness or fear of the bodies we see on the screen – if we imagine ourselves in their bodies, experiencing their orgasms and heartbreak – what emotional value do we acquire from some of the more openly distressing scenes that these kind of films portray? Is it sheer curiosity at the vicarious participation in something transgressive? “Yeah, definitely,” Appelqvist says. “That’s a strong idea in the piece: that the role of art should be to provide an experimental playground where you can basically do anything, since it’s not hurting anyone. Like Visitor Q: it puts all these wrong, immoral, terrible things into this film universe, and we get a chance to explore our feelings towards them.”
At the end of Have You Ever Seen Visitor Q? little has been resolved, though Peter’s mentality appears to have shifted. The key distinction, Appelqvist suggests, is that transgressive art can be a positive, exhilarating experience when it’s done right. It doesn’t have to be an ordeal. “There are no traumas in my life that I need to work through. I don’t need therapeutic help from art in that way. So for me it’s about entertainment: let’s just put these ideas together and see what happens.” Most of all, art should remain a vehicle for pushing ideas in a way that keeps opening audience’s minds, to relocate our gaze toward the gaps of light that emerge between our fingers, still anxiously shielding our eyes from the world’s horrors. “It should be playful, that’s the whole thing. You should have fun with your body and mind, talk to people, have sex with people. Enjoy it.”
Continue reading at The Quietus
The capitulations of the body form the basis for every Baths record, a foreign field eternally compromised by grand massacres and little deaths. At the time of Will Wiesenfeld’s last outing, the dark heaven that was 2013’s Obsidian, his body had just begun to recover from its loudest rejection yet: a fierce bout of E. coli that left the artist barely able to eat or sleep for any length of time. That album, like Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz three years prior, was less a joyous celebration of new health than a post-mortem at the body’s point of failure. This was billed in interviews as Baths’ “weird version of a pop record” at the time which, even as a qualifying statement, may have been a stretch; its most urgent highlight (‘No Eyes’) found the artist pleading to be fucked, with or without sincerity. On Romaplasm, Wiesenfeld seems to have finally made something that could pass as a pop record, exuberant in both its content and execution.
Continue reading at The Quietus
Matthew Neale 