46 Stories
Block rockin’ beats
Music and architecture have often been seen as bedfellows, but how do the two disciplines really interact with each other in the modern world? Claire Hughes looks at the brutalist movement of the late 20th Century and wonders whether its legacy can be heard as well as seen
t was the German writer/philosopher Goethe who described architecture as “frozen music”. But there’s a British electronic music maker called Raiden who thinks it works the other way around. His debut album Béton Armé, an opus of dark, angular beats and harsh rhythms, is dedicated to, and inspired by, brutalist buildings from around the world. As a kid, Raiden, real name Chris Jarman, would be taken shopping by his mum to the Tricorn centre, an imposing, concrete structure that skulked in the centre of Portsmouth. The building, designed by architects Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon – the latter also designed the infamous Elephant & Castle shopping centre in London – was a modernist maze of gloomy alleyways scattered with entrances and exits, shop-fronts and the dank walkways leading to them. “It was such an insane building,” says 36-year-old Raiden, who’s been making music for over a decade. “The idea was that you could get everything you needed under one roof but because of the way it was designed, it attracted a lot of crime. It was menacing and a real inspiration because it was like another world, a city within a city.” When Raiden released Béton Armé last year, on his own Offkey Recordings label, Pippa Goldfinger, daughter of renowned architect and furniture designer Erno Goldfinger, tweeted about it. “She said how much she liked the tune I’d dedicated to Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower building [which appeared on the cover of Umbrella issue five] but I was really surprised she’d actually got to hear about it,” he says. “Pippa got wind of the tune from a couple of architecture blogs. In the same day, someone else tweeted that they thought it was tenuous to associate brutalist architecture with d ’n’ b. But I totally disagree with that. I think a lot of these buildings are a backdrop for this music.” British architect Ben Kelly, who designed the structural interior of Manchester’s Haçienda nightclub, agrees.
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“Buildings create a certain atmosphere that affects everything that surrounds them and goes on within the walls,” says Kelly, who helped create the recent British Design 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age at London’s V&A museum. “When Factory Records bought the Haçienda it was an empty, industrial building. It was such a big, interior space and, essentially, a massive blank canvas. To me, it was like making a gigantic piece of sculptural painting. I wanted it to be like a theatre so I put up fly bars, which were on pulley systems so we could suspend objects from them.” Rather than being a fixed, static space, Ben says he wanted the nowdemolished acid house temple to have a number of permutations. “The venue itself was vast, the ceiling were high, so it felt cathedrallike,” says Ben, who now runs BKD Architecture but started out his career designing album artwork for 1980s synthpop duo OMD. “There were big steel columns, holding up the roof. I wanted these to seem potentially hazardous, so I had them painted with yellow stripes.” When he was 12 years old, Raiden bought his first mix tapes – of old rave sets – from a record shop based in the Tricorn. He saw Carl Cox and Grooverider play for the first time there back in 1989. “It was amazing to me that all this could be going on in this huge, ugly, exciting building,” says Raiden. “A lot of the people who made d ’n’ b in the early 1990s grew up around brutalist architecture. These buildings were intricately constructed using heavy, strong materials. I think that’s where a lot of the inspiration for the whole UK urban music thing comes from.” Ben Kelly says the same applies to the Haçienda. “I do think the venue inspired the music and vice versa,” agrees Ben. “The way music sounded in the Haçienda created a kind of majestic, ethereal atmosphere that collided with the gritty, industrial feeling of the building. I think you can hear that in a lot of music that was made by a lot of the bands that played and spent time there.”
“A lot of people who made drum ’n’ bass in the ’90s grew up around brutalism”
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