11 to 21. Song as a Force of Social Transformation

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11 to 21

11 to 21

Song as a Force of Social Transformation

CAAC Issue 2 July–October 2011

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11 to 21

Song as a Force of Social Transformation

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporรกneo July-October 2011 Issue 2

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04 Political Pop: An Introduction Peio Aguirre 16 Album Covers, Sleeves, Labels, Boxes, Packages and Cases Pedro G. Romero 40 Annika Strรถm: Personal Delivery Jonathan Griffin 48 Ruth Ewan: Smash Hits Chris Fite-Wassilak 56 Alonso Gil: Libertarian Artist Raj Kuter 64 Matt Stokes: No Way Back Matthew Collin 71 The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity Will Hodgkinson 76 La Chanson: Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life Juan Antonio ร lvarez Reyes 98

Nocturama

108 CAAC Exhibitions Floor Plan 110 Credits

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Political Pop

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An Introduction Peio Aguirre

The “Political Pop” section of my blog emerged by chance.1 My first blurb about the Pet Shop Boys led to another and yet another, until I finally realized that writing about the music I like was a real possibility. Music is unique in the field of cultural production given its status as information, which has allowed it to become the object of financial speculation and ultimately the paradigmatic expression of mass culture. However, the very definition of mass culture has changed dramatically and now bears little resemblance to the description of the culture industry outlined by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. What then might have been defined as a homogenization of consumption, due to an increasing amount of leisure time, now has its own specialized critics, and of course we mustn’t overlook the multiple ramifications of individual emancipation that mass culture has generated for half a century.

Whatever the proper definition of political pop might be, the real issue here is the need for a politics of pop – a directorate for the changing forms of popular culture. At the heart of those globalizing market forms, there has always been a transformative critical potential. The ambivalence of pop music, like any other market product, stems from the fact that its fetishism simultaneously reinforces and threatens the system. And if there is one musical form that stands out as a shining example of peaceful coexistence with and within the system, it is pop music.

Pet Shop Boys is a case of selfconsciousness that oscillates between mass culture and authorial singularity. But for now let us examine the social message they enunciate. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe launch a frontal assault on Yes with the bonus track “This Used to Be the Future”, where the duo criticizes the social and urban utopias that were apparently constructed at some unspecified point in the past. The track features the voice of Philip Oakey from The Human League, a powerful beat that gives it an addictive quality, and lyrics with a message.

The alternating vocals of Tennant and Oakey are brilliantly accompanied by an authoritative robotic backup voice. The chorus is perfect, and so is the song. Is Pet Shop Boys a militant band?

Undoubtedly. Pop music’s policy of evasion, pleasure and enjoyment has never been at odds with social responsibility. Unlike other disco bands, PSB has always known that its engagement is not so much rooted in its proclamations, but that its radicalism stems from the band’s loyalty to electro-pop, a genre capable of combining the most personal desires with the most pressing problems. This critique of the projections of a half-planned, halfspeculative future does not hide what should be one of the missions of utopian thought: not to imagine a perfect, idyllic future, the product of a recreational positivistic effort, but to think of the possibilities by exploring its dialectical (or negative) side – in other words, through a kind of implosion of thought at its very root. Thus, the engagement with utopia is as ordinary as an exercise routine: “But that future was exciting / Science fiction made fact / Now all we have to look forward to / Is a sort of suicide pact / Was it the dear old future / That created the problems we face? / How do we deal with the fallout / Of the age we used to call space?”2 We can also trace a historical arc through this bonus track. It comes as no surprise that there is a nexus between brutality, government housing policies and socialist labour politics in the English-speaking world, where poor urban practices, the vicissitudes of class and subcultures are rewritten in a type of sociology where boredom is merely the lull that precedes the forward thrust of change (as in PSB’s “Being Boring”). As if that weren’t enough, the conflictfree future envisioned by neo-liberal consensus in the early 1990s, when socialism collapsed, has proven to be profoundly ideological. But the ambiguity of the song “This Used to Be the Future” lies in the fact that you can dance to it at a club, listen to it through your headphones while practicing psychogeography, or analyze it as a cultural critique; this multiplicity is an

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intrinsic quality of pop music. In the following paragraphs I will outline some of the characteristics of this music from the perspective of economics, ideology, style and form in order to highlight some of its inherent policies.

Once they have been made aware of the danger they pose to the status quo, musicians should know that it is not the contents of their songs that threaten to topple the established order but rather the manner of distribution.

Pop Economies Jacques Attali, an economist and former adviser to the Mitterrand administration, is credited with developing a political and economic theory of music. His work Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a theoretical reference of the first order whose primary claim to fame is that it proposes a new theory of noise (bruit).

According to this theory, the utopian nature of music acts as a sensor that detects future forms of society which have yet to emerge. In other words, the music of one era heralds the economic system of the next.3 This notion undoubtedly complicates the already tangled web of links between the economic base (a society’s productive mode) and the superstructure – in other words, the sphere where cultural and ideological products are consummated. It has traditionally been believed that the music of an era reflects the dynamics of its contemporary social system, acting like a mirror that reproduces or replicates those dynamics. According to this logic, the superstructure “expresses” the base; the latter

determines the former (as any Marxist manual will tell us). But according to Attali, this relationship can now be dialectically inverted, suggesting the possibility that a superstructure may actually anticipate historical developments and predict new economic and social formations. He sustains that music, the organization of noise, is prophecy. Attali’s theory invites us to peer into the future, as if gazing into a crystal ball; the music of any period is several decades ahead of that society’s social forms. This would explain why the political economy of music is premonitory.

Musicians are therefore heralds, messengers of a future yet to come. And Attali says, “Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. For this reason musicians, even when officially recognized, are dangerous, disturbing and subversive; for this reason it is impossible to separate their history from that of repression and surveillance.”4 Music is therefore inextricably linked to the appearance of what Althusser called “the ideological state apparatus”– in other words, ideology. Attali offers us a fertile new terrain to explore the subversive possibilities of music which, as intangible data that can be broken down into informational units, poses a threat to the dominant social and economic powersthat-be, for the issue at stake is an industry that moves billions of dollars each year.

We have only to consider the novelties that have emerged in the area of music distribution – radio, piped music, the transition from vinyl to digital, Napster and Spotify – to realize that the fight against illegal Internet downloads is actually a desperate struggle for the system’s survival, a war waged in the name of capitalism. Once they have been made aware

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of the danger they pose to the status quo, musicians should know that it is not the contents of their songs that threaten to topple the established order but rather the manner of distribution. Bands like Radiohead with legions of loyal fans have taken action in this arena, although the alternative bands who upload their songs on MySpace proclaim a different but more contemporary anarchy than the calls for social chaos issued by the “children of McLaren”. For example, one would be hardpressed to find a more explicit example of how this ideology works than the inquisitorial persecution, conducted in the name of the musicians and artists themselves, of hairdressers and shopkeepers who dare to play music in their places of business. Although the most outspoken criticism – not without a certain whiff of appropriative ambition – of Attali’s theories has been voiced by postSchoenberg advocates (the term noise practically invites it), the truly important thing is their extrapolation to whatever musical regime one wishes to address.

But music’s capacity to predict the future can now be traced by travelling to the past: we can listen to the Beatles and compare their music with our present, something that would be impossible without some kind of mediation system capable of reconnecting the intangibility of music with the material substratum of our constructed environment.

In its own modest way, this essay aims to provide some of that mediation. It is no coincidence that pop music is the genre that best lends itself to an analysis of its own economic structure, with its “Top Ten” formulas and other inventions that capitalism is capable of fuelling. Pop music is a form that has the ability to criticize the ideology of the hegemonic establishment while also rediscovering tender shoots of utopia in popular culture. The status of pop as the uncontested king of commercial music may point out some of the contradictions in that same mass culture. Pop music does not shriek;

It is no coincidence that pop music is the genre that best lends itself to an analysis of its own economic structure, with its “Top Ten” formulas and other inventions that capitalism is capable of fuelling.

Pop music is a form that has the ability to criticize the ideology of the hegemonic establishment while also rediscovering tender shoots of utopia in popular culture. it predicts a sweet future of pleasant melodies and is associated with the steady flow of a certain everyday monotony. More than any other commercial music genre, it represents and meshes perfectly with the market; in fact, it actually symbolizes the very idea of the market.

Pop is by definition commercial music, but it can be highly specific and tremendously sophisticated. So we must ask ourselves this: How can pop music, as a market product, serve a utopian purpose?

We should take a closer look at the idea that all musicians pose a potential threat to the system, something that, in the realm of pop, rarely takes the shape of a Messiah with the talent of Paddy McAloon, the heart and soul of the British band Prefab Sprout. After making it big in the 1980s with songs like “Cars and Girls” or “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” – tracks that pertain to the realm of pop imagery in their own right – Prefab Sprout released an LP in 1989 under the eloquent title Protest Songs, a reaffirmation of their social engagement. For McAloon, the redeeming power of pop is akin to that of religion, and its secular good news promises a communion between the tattered subjectivity of the individual and the world around him. However, Protest Songs (a slogan or statement) was a deliberate oxymoron of the

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We need new categories to define our period within the larger context of post-modernity. pop genre, finding its way to the top of the charts without losing its political facet. Protest Songs is as much a pop album as it is a critical and rather ironic commentary on the traditional protest song. But at this point no one would dare to question Paddy, with his blind faith in pop music as a vehicle for broadcasting profound messages – Paddy the saviour, who once claimed that he was a better composer than John Lennon. That sophistipop which floated so smoothly on the airwaves has become a legend of itself and, far from clinging to the pinnacle of success, it has evolved into a kind of music for fans, nostalgia junkies and other fans of the alternative. Not long ago, after battling several serious health problems and undergoing a secret confinement, we were reintroduced to an almost unrecognizable, hermit-like Paddy, sporting a look which has also had its epigonic influence (and there is the fake documentary on Joaquin Phoenix, I’m Still Here, to prove it). After driving the music journalists mad – quite literally – in 2009, Prefab Sprout released Let’s Change the World with Music, much to the delight of their fans. This new statement of intent contained “Let There Be Music”, an ode to the creative energy of music with more than a few transcendental if not openly religious reminiscences. But the most interesting thing is that the tracks on Let’s Change the World with Music were not new; they had all been composed in 1992 and immediately rejected by Sony. After almost two decades collecting dust in a trunk, the songs sound both contemporary and timeless. One wonders if the numerous allusions to God, for example in “God Watch over You”, might have made the producers leery. But one thing is clear: with his new anti-pop star appearance, McAloon now looks more dangerous than ever, and while

music journalists speculate about the vast amount of loot that Paddy might have in his treasure chest, we must wonder about the kind of futurity it holds.

The Sprouts defy the stereotypes of the genre, such as the perennial politically engagé protest song of the troubadour/singersongwriter – something that immediately brings to mind Adorno’s defence of the autonomy of art (or against the risk of a banal politicization of culture). But perhaps we should examine that other defining trait of pop, its contradictory nature as something that is both timeless and time-specific. Indie (or the new underground) music gives us the best examples of a postmodern culture that has made eternal revisitation its particular stronghold. This new underground infects pop and electronic music in equal measure and can no longer be understood from the logic of commercial music, nor from the secrecy of an exclusive community that worships a new secrecy. Now that highbrow culture has been abolished, and so-called mass culture is increasingly more sophisticated, we find ourselves at a juncture that we could aptly describe as the perpetual present (or Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past). What do we find in this present? Historicism, reference, citations, tributes and revivals galore. The majority of consumer products intended for a wide audience is growing more sophisticated by the day; they are neither highbrow nor lowbrow.

And indie culture, far from catering to a minority, is easily accessible.

We need new categories to define our period within the larger context of post-modernity.

The inexhaustible and enduring nature of pop music has made it a pervasive element of our culture (and has led some to invent theories that define our entire cultural system as the “after-pop” coined by Eloy Fernández Porta).5 Now we must determine whether the 1980s can be viewed as a kind of golden age or if it should be considered the decade of pop modernism.

What I am suggesting is the possibility that this modernism might be on a par with the early

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20th-century renewal that swept through the arts; we might think of it as a musical arsenal that could extend decades into the future, just as “classical” modernism was followed by late modernism and ultimately led to the postmodernism whose fundamental traits define our current global system. Post-punk, New Wave, disco and other trends took root in an era that is still sending out shock waves today.

Although electronic music, trip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass, house and other celebratory liquid fantasies flourished in the 1990s, their rapid extinction in the following decades reminds us that the agglutinating power of pop is limitless; and this without having to resort to the regressions and repetitions which are at the heart of the very definition of popular music or music for the masses. The legacy of the 1980s is the best example of that contradiction, an unmistakable periodizing capacity and a seemingly incompatible timelessness rolled into one.

There are two useful phenomena in this definition. The first has to do with form, and by this I mean the perfect song. The quest for “the perfect pop song” (to which the Sprouts contributed) was the primary concern of every aspiring pop band. The ingredients of the perfect pop song are common knowledge: schmaltzy tempo, catchy sound, regular sequence, between three and four minutes long… The song as a closed monad, a time-space capsule and a repeating loop whose distribution relies on that very repetition. In this respect, the “Top of the Top” is one of the greatest discoveries of consumer capitalism – the place, the precise frequency where the perfect pop song can be heard. The second phenomenon has to do with the experience of temporality and the emergence of trends. This is the theory of the 20Year Cycle, the idea that two decades must pass before the past can make a comeback as a nostalgia-trend. The appeal of regression associated with mass culture has managed the experience of temporality since at least the postwar period and up to the “end of history” swan

... but what is pop if not this?

Repetition comes with its own builtin antidote, for the easy-listening quality of the perfect pop song is occasionally sabotaged from within – for example, when bands seek to reward fans according to the effort they put into the listening experience by composing songs that at first might sound strange or seem to deviate from the pattern but, when played repeatedly, tend to grow on the listener. song intoned by Francis Fukuyama which played such an important role in establishing neoconservative ideology. The perpetual present is so closely associated with this “end of history” and with the temporal continuity of pop that what has now become imperative is a sacrilege – namely, using pop as an anti-aphrodisiac for its own internal instincts. This would be the equivalent of glimpsing utopian impulses in the mass media and mainstream culture, something quite unacceptable for Adorno, who held firmly to the idea that mass-marketed art could never be truly revolutionary. In the realm of pop, the dividing line between challenging the establishment and the more comfortable option of going with the flow is so thin as to be almost imperceptible. The theory of the 20-Year Cycle deals with the temporal categories of past, present and future, putting them together in every possible combination like a barman trying to come up with a new summer cocktail (past of the present, future of the past, etc.). This same recourse to the past-present-future sandwich is typical of pop, but we must remember that these semantic games do not suggest a utopian philosophy per se. On this topic, the latest album released by the Spanish band Astrud, Lo Nuevo,

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includes a track entitled “Lo popular” (The Popular) which says, “because the old is the new / and the sophisticated, popular”. With titles like these and other slogans, Astrud creates theory from practice, consolidating the 20-Year Cycle as one of the most universal and enduring laws.

Some may think this formulization = formalism of the perfect song rather hackneyed, a repetition of repetition of repetition, but what is pop if not this? Repetition comes with its own built-in antidote, for the easy-listening quality of the perfect pop song is occasionally sabotaged from within – for example, when bands seek to reward fans according to the effort they put into the listening experience by composing songs that at first might sound strange or seem to deviate from the pattern but, when played repeatedly, tend to grow on the listener. Many tracks and even entire albums were purposely designed this way, to act as genuine boomerangs (think, for example, of “Paranoid Android” and OK Computer by Radiohead). The listener must “understand” the music before s/he can savour it, in a reversal of the conventional easy-listening experience.

Rewarding diligent listeners is the secret weapon of ideology in music.

There is no need to bring up Adorno again and his essay on the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening – in other words, the idea that the repetition and manner of consuming “light music” (jazz for him, pop for us) induces a state that causes the listener to revert to a childlike way of listening.6 There is an infinite recycling which takes place where the superimposed layers sound like so many things at once that isolating each one would be a daunting archaeological undertaking. Nor must we forget that pop’s natural ability to produce icons goes hand in hand with their subsequent demystification: indie bands generate their own pop culture, consume it, recycle it and serve it as a reheated by-product that reminds us of everything which feeds and fuels their art. This kind of pop would not exist without its fetishes.

Pop Ideologies Of all the isms, miserablism is one of the richest in nuance. Postmodernism, post-colonialism, Marxism and now miserablism as well.

Obviously this word is not found in any dictionary, so what does it mean? The patent might be awarded once again to the Pet Shop Boys, whose double album Alternative (1995), which contains all their B-side tracks released up to that point, featured a song called “Miserablism”. The target was Morrissey, former lead singer of The Smiths, a band who experienced their artistic heyday in the early 1990s. The track is a satire on what it means to be a serious musician and how one must cultivate a certain pious look in order to project that appearance of seriousness. PSB ironically comments on the posturing of those who embrace self-conscious pessimism as a way of life. We might call it the exploitation of one’s own misery, something quite common in music.

It is, however, possible to delve into miserablism and come up with other origins.

What the French called misérabilisme in the late 19th century was a term associated with naturalism in literature. Naturalism followed the evolution of Realism (or the realist novel), and while the latter was based on the reflection of a certain class consciousness, that of the bourgeoisie, Naturalism revelled in the murky depths of the most disadvantaged social classes, the misery and poverty of the underworld, and found its milieu among the lumpenproletariat with its stereotyped characters (the neighbourhood criminal, the prostitute, and so on). This literature, this miserablism (exemplified in Zola), denounced the social order by criticizing a capitalist production system which viewed the proletariat as a force that threatened its very existence and reminding society of the potential consequences of an uprising by that same proletariat. For the average reader of naturalist literature, a middle-class citizen settled comfortably in his armchair, miserablism was a warning of the horrible things that could

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happen if the established order was ever altered. We should not bend over backwards trying to draw parallels between the miserablism of the Pet Shop Boys and its naturalist counterpart; rather we should recall the long tradition of miserablism, not in music and literature, but in the field of contemporary art, where it seems to find its most fertile soil.

But all this miserablism has an aesthetic background which we should now examine, for its postmodern version could only find shelter in cyber-punk and its dreams of an overpopulated metropolis à la Blade Runner where nocturnal rains, omnipresent mists and 1940s G-men trench coats take on new layers of meaning. This aesthetic brings us to one of the themes that has been largely ignored by pop music and yet was one of the most persistent motifs of the early 1980s: power. A good example which illustrates this Foucauldian Uturn taken by pop is the post-punk band Gang of Four. In 1983 they released Hard, a title which functions as a negation. Gang of Four is the quintessential intellectual band, revered for having combined a rock sound marked by Andy Gill’s staccato with lyrics that are obviously influenced by the Frankfurt School. With Hard, the band took a turn towards pop, towards a softer sound (hence the negation in the form of contradiction). The “hard vs. soft” dialectic is a constant in punk and post-punk; embracing the contradiction of Joy Division and New Order, or Gang of Four’s Entertainment! and Hard, is a trial by fire for fans, but that tension can also be seen as one of the cornerstones off which every rock and pop music theory rebounds. However, Hard is relevant for other reasons. The opening track, “It Is Love”, is a programmatic song about one of the issues that the band had deconstructed years before in the song “Anthrax”– namely, love, or love as raw material for the upbeat songs played on mainstream music radio: “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love / We just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery.”7

Just as Georg Lukács saw the great 19th-century realist novel as the paradigmatic form which described the bourgeoisie’s transition to a new class consciousness, so pop can be used by us, the archaeologists of the future, as a form that models the realist capitalism in which we are immersed.

However, the central theme of “It Is Love” is not the idealization of love but power: “The men who own the city make more sense than we do.”

The music video sums up the elements of a postmodern miserablist aesthetic; sunglasses, nocturnal setting, complicit glances and an architecture of personal relationships steeped in commerce and transactions involving goods, bodies and identities typical of a new neo-liberal awareness that begins to manifest itself in this look. “It Is Love” is the quintessence of the postmodern aesthetic, with its background vocals peppered with shouts, a black woman with an iconic hairdo singing “It’s all right!”, dancers dressed like hotel pages concluding the music video... The salient feature of this aesthetic is a geopolitical consciousness, a spatialization of interpersonal relationships and of the dialectics between the essence and appearance of materialism which is also found in other songs on the album, such as “Woman Town” and “A Man with a Good Car”.

Gang of Four, who had given up writing songs about love, oscillate between a critique of production relationships and another kind of criticism where (Foucauldian) power shifts from micro to macro and back again. A change of style always entails an alteration of the message. This tension between the polished pop-funk style and the subtle radicalism of the social and political messages embedded in the lyrics is also found in other post-punk bands like Scritti

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Politti, who sang, “I’m in love with a Jacques Derrida”. Over the decades, pop contaminates all musical styles, and the replacement of former drummer Hugo Burnham with a drum machine on Hard can be viewed as a technical and ideological substitution. Both the left-wing politicization of Gang of Four and Scritti Politti and their transition from rock to pop can be understood as symptoms of the coronation of a single form as the most appropriate for expressing a period or era. Just as Georg Lukács saw the great 19th-century realist novel as the paradigmatic form which described the bourgeoisie’s transition to a new class consciousness, so pop can be used by us, the archaeologists of the future, as a form that models the realist capitalism in which we are immersed.

Most people are unaware of the ways in which a critique of the dominant system can materialize. On this point, my theory is that an approach which sketches or defines a map of capitalism as a whole – an approach that “expresses” or depicts that undepictable condition of capitalism – is in itself a form of criticism, and more potent than most. Musically speaking, Gang of Four’s “It Is Love” meets the requirements of a post-Marxist, postmodern cultural critique. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has already pointed out that video, architecture and dance are the most privileged arts within the spatialization of postmodern culture, and all of these art forms are concentrated in the music video.8 The music video undoubtedly combined pop and postmodernism in a single form. The nostalgia mode and pastiche were two other items to add to Jameson’s list of tics that would ultimately define the dominant traits of culture.

However, music videos entered a downward spiral in the 1990s and today, when YouTube has effectively monopolized the extensive audiovisual archives of the past century, the music video is a struggling art form. It is no coincidence that the most mainstream artists (Lady Gaga) still produce music videos, but the

aesthetic has changed; narrative and invention are absent, and the display of technical skill and virtuosity, though still important, is not proportional to the creativity employed in the halcyon days. Yet the music video now presents a golden opportunity for alternative pop artists (such as Dorian or Sambassadeur), who see this medium as a way of creating a low-budget audiovisual production whose YouTubeization will reap not insignificant benefits on the international scene.

Pop Styles An album cover is an object that can convey complex semiotic ideas. The cover of Get Ready

by New Order is a work of apparent simplicity.

The photographs were taken in Thamesmead, an area that was the object of speculation and development plans in the 1960s and 70s and the backdrop for several scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The cover photo (taken by Jürgen Teller) shows a new Eve wearing a worn pair of denims stained with paint (similar to Helmut Lang’s jeans from the late 1990s) and a dark, shabby T-shirt with small tears about the neck – casual street wear with a hint of grunge.

The girl has access to technology. She looks at the camera while simultaneously recording with her handycam. The red strip on the bottom looks like it might read “REC”. This is a New Order cover, and the covers of both this band and Joy Division are virtual temples to applied graphic design. Peter Saville borrowed ideas from art (Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus) and other principles based on formal economics to create his style. The Savillian red tape is like a minimal label linking the present and past of NO & JD. A cut-out from Saville’s formal imagery and a symbol of what the definition of style can represent in fashion, design and music.

And what of fashion? What connections can we make between style and pop?

A time of sensuality and warmth in apparel.

Mid-1980s. Outskirts of Milan. The second Italian revolution in the fashion world. As

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simple as combining a baggy linen jacket with a pair of jeans or baggy trousers cinched at the ankle. Collarless shirts, jersey-knit polo shirts and naked torsos everywhere. A sign of masculinity and of belonging to the oppressed class. Slouched shoulders and hands in pockets.

A neo-Romantic touch. Casual elegance. A bit of prêt-à-porter and a lot of Armani. It is also a time when street brawls and left-wing intellectualism shift towards a new style of dress.

The feminization of men, the absence of the power symbols represented by the traditional three-piece suit. The masculinization of women, flat shoes, graceful double-breasted jackets, wide trousers and a degree of androgyny. And cardigans and coats lined in Afghan sheepskin.

All of these elements were part of a new “Made in Italy” focused on redefining genders through fashion and style and on a genealogical divestment of avant-garde strategies. In this context, outside the British hegemony of the identification of styles associated with youth subcultures, new cults and identities emerged from attitudes in fashion. Style had to be surreptitious. Elegance, dandyism and the game of sexual ambiguity marked the point of no return. Pop culture exerted an influence on fashion and style, and these in turn influenced music. In 1986, the Pet Shop Boys’ “Paninaro” picked up this scent, processed it and fed it back in a freshly stylized version. Today “Paninaro” has become a reminder of an ephemeral youth subculture. PSB captured the spirit behind the styles of dress that characterized this era. The first appearance of Armani suits as uniforms on the Italian coast prove that style is a value which unites different teen sub-groups. Style of dress is a subversive weapon for undermining the established orders and hierarchies. The “paninaro” movement can be traced back to Milan in the early 1980s. It was originally called paninari, for according to legend its birthplace was the Al Panino sandwich shop, where a group of young people began to feast on hamburgers and imitate certain traits of the American consumer culture. This hedonism

arrived at a time when Italy was recovering from the “Years of Lead”, a period marked by terrorism and political and social turmoil.

The politicization of Italian society gave way in the newborn decade to a growing indifference to politics and a shift towards consumerism that embraced the incipient signs of the financial deregulation launched by Reagan and Thatcher’s economic policies, which would later evolve into neo-liberalism. Without knowing it, the paninari were the heralds of neo-liberalism, with their Timberland boots and loafers, rolled-up jeans, checked shirts and puffy anoraks with no shortage of belts – preferably Moschino. The paninari found what they were looking for in Duran Duran, Depeche Mode or PSB by completely eradicating every difference between, for example, these three bands and embracing their stereotype as epicentres of 1980s pop music. The paninari subculture offers us a recycled version of what was formerly described as the capacity of mass culture to explain capitalism as a form.

Pop Forms If Adorno had lived long enough to witness the birth of the punk phenomenon with his own eyes, he would not have held his tongue or minced his words. He might have found something positive to say about post-punk and New Wave music, and we can imagine that he may have identified Vini Reilly as the principal champion of these movements. The fetishcharacter of consumer music stems from its status as a product, and Adorno advocated regressive listening as the solution to that fetishism. Reilly certainly deserves a place in this anti-fetishism. The Durutti Column emerged in 1978 as a pioneering band managed by Tony Wilson (Factory Records), at the same time as Joy Division. However, it is difficult to classify The Durutti Column as a rock band. In fact, from the outset Reilly deliberately dissociated himself from everything that rock ‘n’ roll stood for, and instead chose to embrace everything that the

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New Wave represented. In the post-punk integration of jazz, folk, classical and avantgarde music, there was also a place for rock.

Reilly’s guitar sound situated him in a no-man’s land where he still remains today. Vini Reilly is not a familiar name to the general public, despite the fact that he is one of the world’s best composers and guitarists. He couldn’t care less that Morrissey left him out of the credits on Viva Hate, the latter’s first solo album for which Reilly did more than a few arrangements. As early as 1981, during an interview in Belgium, Reilly spoke about Stockhausen and about music made for the mind. Eschewing all the usual rock paraphernalia, Reilly still practizes the old formula of proving what he can do before an audience with a guitar and an amplifier.

Perhaps this would be a good place to insert a meta-commentary on the reason for Adorno’s possible affiliation with post-punk. I think he would find it interesting because of this style’s deconstructive yet perfectly audible nature: fragments of jazz, krautrock, electronic and classical music combined with rock in a style that embraces the modern avant-garde practice of breaking with all that has gone before (the 1980s as modernity once again). Listening to The Durutti Column is like plunging into a process of formal self-questioning and emerging unscathed with your own style; it is more reminiscent of the live performance ritual of an orchestra or soloist playing classical music than it is of the exacerbated communion between a band and a typical punk/rock concert audience.

Knowing what Adorno would have thought is only possible in the realm of science fiction, but the important thing for us now is to observe the referential dynamics of shifting ideologies.

Post-punk, with its focus on the past that has little to do with the “no future” of punk, is an intrinsically periodizing category: late 1970s, early 1980s, perhaps between 1978 and 1985?

Once again, Saville’s design seems to hold the key to the interpretation of style; old emblems and labels combined with cold, elegant serif typefaces (see New Order, Movement, an obvious

adaptation of the futuristic Fortunato Depero, or Power, Corruption and Lies, with Fantin-Latour’s floral painting). This referential quality reveals the historicity of the period’s pop and post-punk bands, who in their devotion to the pinnacles of aesthetic modernism never cease to reproduce and reinforce the meaning of postmodernism.

Post-punk, as well as cyberpunk literature and nostalgia films, fits in perfectly with Jameson’s cultural diagnosis of post-modernity.

The Durutti Column’s historicist ties are not found in its direct reference to the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who organized the legendary “Durruti Column” to combat the Fascist uprising during the Spanish Civil War, but rather in the Situationist comic Le retour de la Colonne Durutti, a four-page publication created

by André Bertrand in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg. When the band released its debut album in 1980, they borrowed the title of Bertrand’s comic: The Return of the Durutti Column. When they were just starting out, they had already come back. This trait is very postpunk, by which I mean the über-awareness of the historicity of musical movements and the manipulation of clichés associated with trends as a basis for the subsequent deconstructive operation. Having said this, now we might even examine post-punk’s instinctual tendency to adapt names taken from the revolutionary left wing, and to deliberately or unknowingly alter their spelling in the process. For example, the name “Durruti” ended up gaining a “t” and losing an “r” in The Durutti Column, and Scritti Politti was a deliberate adaptation of the “Scritti Politici” (political writings) of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, which was changed to make the name sound more pop if not openly rock ‘n’ roll (in the “tutti frutti” tradition).

I imagine that these appropriative licences are exempted from inscription in the companies register under the name of pop. But in order to understand the true affiliations derived from post-punk and Situationism, we must look at another fundamental band that stands out conceptually as a dialectical exercise which

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combines theory and practice in a caustic, totalizing way: Stereolab. They undoubtedly represent a stage of production where history is given a solid form. Although Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier gracefully deflect the journalists’ questions about their influences, the answer is patent in their music: Situationism, Marxism, communism, etc. Stereolab does not represent the political; they are political, by which I mean that their music is a form of politics. Their sound drinks from the bottomless well of history. The band’s referentiality is not citational, nor is it a commentary on the infinite musical styles at the disposal of eclecticism (in a similar way to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who is not citational although he resorts to citation). Stereolab offers a historicity of form: a compression of all that went before them, synthesized in a new production marked by prolific output, countless collaborations, parallel and unfinished projects – in short, a unique production style. Godard once said that around 1965 there were 100,000 people in Paris who could view his films. After 1968, his entire global audience did not amount to that figure. And what can we say of Stereolab? In the 1990s this band could have gone in a more commercial direction, but instead they chose to stick to their characteristic mode of production.

Meanwhile, their lyrics speak of the class struggle and of emancipation. But this is the content, not the form. When Laetitia formed Monade in 1996, their first album was entitled Socialisme ou Barbarie. Statement of intent? And what of Tim Gane, that alchemist of ideology? The lyrics of “Ping Pong” are explicit enough: “It’s alright ’cos the historical pattern has shown / how the economical cycle tends to revolve / in a round of decades three stages stand out in a loop / a slump and war then peel back to square one and back for more / bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery / huger slump and greater wars and a shallower recovery.”9 And Stereolab has another great quality – it signifies a form of collectivism. This may well be the next category for a political pop. So should we continue with something by Belle and Sebastian?

... This referential quality reveals the historicity of the period’s pop and post-punk bands, who in their devotion to the pinnacles of aesthetic modernism never cease to reproduce and reinforce the meaning of postmodernism. Postpunk, as well as cyberpunk literature and nostalgia films, fits in perfectly with Jameson’s cultural diagnosis of post-modernity.

1. Criticism and Meta-Commentary: http://peioaguirre.blogspot.com 2. Pet Shop Boys. “This Used to Be the Future”. Yes, Pet Shop Boys etc., Parlophone.

3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

4. Ibid., p. 11.

5. Eloy Fernández Porta, Afterpop. La literatura de la implosión mediática. Córdoba: Berenice, 2007; Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010.

6. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Vol. 1. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1978.

7. Gang of Four. “Anthrax”. Entertainment!, EMI / Warner Bros.

8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

9. Stereolab. “Ping Pong”. Mars Audiac Quintet, Duophonic.

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Packages and Cases ...

Pedro G. Romero

Covers: Strategies Against Architecture In a recent debate a series of arguments came up that are relevant to the academic consideration of music as an abstract language. For example the work of Situaciones was raised, the Argentinean group that posed methodological questions about militant research along similar lines to those that Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry put on the table when it came to institutionalizing concrete music. In both instances it was a question of collecting sounds and afterwards understanding how they were emitted, of organizing them, with equal attention being paid to semantic questions and grammatical, phonetic and syntactic ones. “A voice which was saying nothing, but shaped the discourse without being in the least bit rhetorical”, or “the sounds of a street market that hide the words we wish to hear in the foreground, underlining them”: with these tracks they made Mal de altura,1 the book and the video in which the Argentineans approached the creating of new ways of understanding political constructs in Bolivia. Those of us who keep to these opinions are described as nothing Einstürzende Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture, 1984

less than economists and sociologists, thus distancing this line of debate from what ought to be central in questions of musical language.

The question of the political nature of music particularly offends those who defend its abstract formation. As formal language, any interdependence between society and music production is immediately denounced: “What you’re doing isn’t music, it’s sociology.” I’ve occasionally heard the opposite response, the sociologist who alludes to the specialist in statistics: “What you’re doing isn’t sociology, it’s music.” The incorporation of a single technological set of tools for both camps makes the similarities easier. Computers are constructing this similarity in such a way that the return to analogical music is also a return to the abstract cave. Obviously, this doesn’t mean adopting one of the two considerations so much as making this polemic productive.

“They’re the vestiges of a certain ‘Romantic’ sensibility”, Ivo Supicic2 and José Antonio Rodríguez Alcantud3 point out, “to which such approaches or explanations of some of the aspects of music are repugnant. There is a genuine fear that the artistic event, the musical event and its intrinsic value, might be devalued, a fear that the autonomy of creation of the musician might be restricted, and even that an analysis of this kind might reduce music to events or values of another kind. The opposition to sociopolitical reductionism has a strong Romantic component, a movement in the hierarchy of values of which ‘spirituality’ occupies the highest place. And whosoever says spirituality means inspiration and genius, in an anomic relationship that escapes conventional social structures. The creator, due to his own genius and his means of expression, would remain outside of social structures.”

The curious thing is that the Romantic argument that provided the basis for the spiritual nature of musical sounds had also contributed to the fact that in music there figure natural landscapes of the “view of snowy peaks in a storm” type or “huge waves violently

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lashing the coast”. Music, which appeared to be embodied as a mere aesthetic arrangement of the natural phenomenon, did not seek to domesticate the world, to make it legible in the same way science did, but to embody the very violence of the natural order in an aesthetic language.

It is these “figurations” that lead many writers to situate the end of pure music with Romanticism or with the appearance of figures like Wagner or Verdi. However much one might seek to take sound constructions from reality – from the cannon in military music to tracks on magnetic tape – the process of musical concretion has, in parallel to technological evolution, acted not so much as a “figural” or “representative” element but rather as a devastating tool of what those sounds were trying to simulate, a veritable demolition of the soundtrack of the real.

For that very reason, only on the basis of the incorporation of “other” real sounds in the sound spectrum of concrete music does this political possibility begin to appear for music.

The intention of the IRCAM laboratories was, rather, to do with demonstrating the abstract essence of any reality, capable of being captured in sound form. No type of semantic analogy may be established so profoundly that the listener could read the musical experience the way he was executing it while listening. The workings of the concrete – the identification of sounds, geographical or material allusions, musical quotes, etc. – were instead to serve as points of support for destroying any figuration the listener might come up with. Concrete music is aniconic, however much it might open the door to sounds being written, not only inscribed, in the real.

The crucial phenomenon for this conversion of music into something social is, of course, the industrialization of popular music. It is here that the phenomenon is produced of the social masses that incorporate, with the help of great technological diversity, music in the business of life itself; here music becomes necessarily political. How many times have we heard pop

singers or rock musicians say, in reference to their declamations and lyrics, that they, of course, are not being political when they perform, that everything is owed to the public or to art. This view usually depends on the level of audience and the status of the actual musician who speaks, firstly, to his faithful followers (the public) and, finally, directly with God (art).

William Washabaugh4 can help us pinpoint the urgency of the political when speaking of popular music: “A great many musical moments spanning the time from Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan remind us that music mediates politics and that popular music, in particular, has regularly been used to spin political wheels. However, debate persists about how, when, and toward what end any music style is tied in with a political agenda.

The answers to these questions may come easily where lyrics are obviously intended to incite political movements, e.g. songs for labour rallies or national anthems. But after one sets aside these easy cases, the arguments about the politics of popular music rapidly become dense and protracted. My support, in these arguments, inclines toward those who contend that the visible politics of popular music is minimally effective, and that the real potency of the music lies below the waterline, where power is managed through covert strategies and hidden tactics.”

The repertoire of gestures that go to form this understanding of music, the performative order that transpierces our living space, from the concert hall to music in the lift, from the polished tone of the guitar to the experience of the iPod, is the true political material with which music is made. It is essential to understand the experience of the musical, be it in so-called serious music – how do we understand the continuity of the Luigi Nono of Intolleranza 1960 and Hay que caminar soñando, otherwise? – or in so-called popular music – if not how do we understand the continuity in flamenco between the mythology of persecution and the protest lyrics and the way they fit into the most established notions of Spanishness? – since only the labels, the data, the

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track listings and the visual signs change, forming a single reference map.

In 1982 the German rock group Einstürzende Neubauten included the track “Gestohlenes Band (ORF)” on its Strategies Against Architecture.5 This is a recording taken from Austrian television, incorporated in the musical repertoire in a way similar to how laboratories of concrete music operated. A voice in Italian states that everything is political, that even when a musician refers to the fact that he makes music and not politics, he’s somehow involved in politics.

We are speaking of politics in the sense in which music constructs standards of life in the community, in the same way that, etymologically, politics makes us construct the city. In that same sense we are going to explore the functioning of the artefacts that are album covers, in relation to music, in relation to sound. Record shops, discotheques, music magazines, concert posters, flyers, gadgets, video clips, staging and so on – all these are album covers, the doors that, like track listings, shape what is going to be heard. How do the lyrics begin to articulate the voice? How does the image go on to regulate the sound? We are seeing, looking at, the covers we have before us, as yet without listening to the songs or sounds, without turning the record player on, far from the dangers of the music.

Gilles Deleuze warned about the “fascist” danger involved in all music experience, the fascination that music produces in us, the annulment of the critical sense to which sensual experience subjects us. This appraisal goes beyond the mass phenomenon of rock culture or the new kinds of electronic music. It has to do with the dangers of making language with time, keeping time. In collaboration with Félix Guattari he explored the figure of the refrain, or ritournelle, “Deterritorialized sound, the refrain is rhythm and melody territorialized”. The refrain embodies the music in our lives, our cities; it is what turns time into space. There is no community with refrain.

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A great many musical moments spanning the time from Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan remind us that music mediates politics and that popular music, in particular, has regularly been used to spin political wheels.

In that anchoring the refrain forms a precise machine for making politics. Here, we might reproduce a paragraph that is fundamental to our concerns; it comes from A Thousand Plateaus,6 the book in which Deleuze and Guattari – let’s grasp to the full the referents the two philosophers apply to music and painting – consider the refrain: “Our problem is more modest: comparing the powers or coefficients of deterritorialization of sonorous and visual components. It seems that when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more and more refined; it becomes specialized and autonomous. Colour clings more, not necessarily to the object, but to territoriality. When it deterritorializes, it tend to dissolve, to let itself be steered by other components. This is evident in phenomena of synaesthesia, which are not reducible to a single colour-sound correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and induce colours that are superposed upon the colours we see, lending them a properly sonorous rhythm and movement. Sound owes this power not to signifying or ‘communicational’ values (which would privilege light over sound), but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations, the

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We like the covers of albums as much as the facile, catchy songs that we can repeat and whistle in order to make a disappointment in love or the loss of a friend bearable. Of course, they have an obviously didactic function in relation to the sound of the record; they transmit information, related ideas, to us; they make the affirmation of a seemingly elusive musical whole concrete. They appear to us in a sort of institutional critique of the fascinating power of music, of sound. They territorialize music, articulate it politically. most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy and hypnosis. Colours do not move a people.

Flags can do nothing without trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. The refrain is sonorous par excellence, but it can as easily develop its force into a sickly sweet ditty as into the purest motif, or Vinteuil’s little phrase. And sometimes the two combine: Beethoven used as a ‘signature tune’. The potential fascism of music. Overall, we may say that music is plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure. That is why the musician has a different relation to the people, machines, and the established powers than does the painter. In particular, the established powers feel a keen need to control the distribution of black holes and lines of deterritorialization in this phylum of sounds, in order to ward off or appropriate the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at least as commonly portrayed, may be much more open socially, much more political, and less controlled from without and within. That is because each time they paint, they must create

or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on the basis of bodies of light and colour they themselves produce, whereas musicians have at their disposal a kind of germinal continuity, even if it is latent or indirect, on the basis of which they produce sound bodies. Two different movements of creation: one goes from soma to germen, and the other from germen to soma. The painter’s refrain is like the flipside of the musician’s, a negative of music.”

We can find these same theoretical oppositions in other sets of ideas. For example, they are in Derrida when he makes a difference between “gaze” and “voice”, situating the former in objects and the latter in the subject.

In that sense, “writing” appears as a condition of the voice that culturally marks the gaze, inscribing it; namely, inscribing it in the framework of subjective vision. Similarly, the voice is dragged by writing onto a terrain that is not purely sonorous, acoustic, speech-like: which is not subject. And to that image of dragging we ought to pay attention.

Slavoj Žižek has clearly explained the differences between Lacan and Derrida with regard to “gaze” and “voice”. All that is “interiorized” in Derridean writing is “exteriorized” in the Lacanian system. We can simplify things by saying that the trajectories of the “subject” are a nucleus and orbit for the atomic placement of the “voice” and the “gaze”.

What we want to focus on is this dragging.

When an electron bangs against the nucleus, a dragging and subsequent explosion is produced. If in Lacan it is the object that gazes at us, its displacement necessarily has musical, environmental consequences. The world we see also gazes at us and would overwhelm us were it sustained by our own gaze and thus subject to our bit of reality. As an example of this exterior, displaced gaze Žižek7 gives la voix acousmatique, which functions as the background music of two films: Brazil, by Terry Gilliam, and Lili Marleen, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In both, the background song invades reality in an overwhelming, totalitarian

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way before becoming the unique element that makes that same reality bearable. The same thing occurs in Fallen, a film in which a pop song by the Rolling Stones possesses the crowd, at once one and multiple, in body and voice.

As in the famous continuity of the old Spanish movie, María de la O, in which the whole community, in the diversity of its leisure and professional pursuits, sings the same song. As in the refrain, we once again have a description of music’s need to drag itself down to earth, to make itself real in our hands, far from the fears of the cacophony the world produces.

Let us observe for a moment the Goya capricho that bears the inscription “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”. The arrangement of the monsters in the visual nightmare is musical; they are the sounds of reason to which the artist, who was going deaf, gives an order. The same has been said of the musical representations of Bosch. Likewise, psychedelic painting.

Let us not detain ourselves further. What interests us most about album covers, about the illustrations which feature on their sleeves, that accompany our listening to them, that call for our hearing them, that is to say, the function of these images, of these bits of writing, has to do with dragging the music down to earth. To seize the sound, lower the volume of reality with which it overwhelms us to the point of making this bearable. We like the covers of albums as much as the facile, catchy songs that we can repeat and whistle in order to make a disappointment in love or the loss of a friend bearable. Of course, they have an obviously didactic function in relation to the sound of the record; they transmit information, related ideas, to us; they make the affirmation of a seemingly elusive musical whole concrete. They appear to us in a sort of institutional critique of the fascinating power of music, of sound. They territorialize music, articulate it politically.

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Covers: Albert Ayler Beginning in the 1920s and 30s, the industry was called on to invent different ways of presenting discs made of shellac. They were entering the regime of advertising, of course, but it was also a matter of identifying different forms of life in the records. Record labels, the circle of paper that centred the information on the record, marked this affiliation in graphic terms. Records of popular music immediately began to make these inscriptions more attractive, to differentiate themselves from those other kinds of music pertaining to the Western classical tradition, which seemed to get along self-referentially, given their exclusive musical status. Italian opera and German lieder, above all the ones put out in the United States, began doing things differently.

Band music, flamenco and jazz, in that order, also began to invent their own graphic labels. On the generic covers for records of popular music put out by Columbia in the 1930s, they were indiscriminately illustrated with images of flamenco and jazz. It was a question of selling, obviously, and so the evolving record industry issued serious music without covers and popular music covered in little drawings. The difference

Albert Ayler, New Grass, 1968

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The object of the singular record appears by way of avant-garde artistes.

Listening is singularized. The cover thus turns into information. was so definite that it persists today: for the former, generic company designs are employed, while the latter personalizes each release, each design, to the point that in the release of any disc it’s the graphic support that costs the money. It’s the image that makes the difference.

Alex Steinweiss8 was perhaps a pioneer: not only did he make the cardboard objects that would become album covers – he also contributed to giving an identity to the contents and the outside of the disc. The collections of popular music that were to be promoted followed his guidelines and codified their marks of identity. A collection of discs functioned like the music; it weakened our relationship to reality by inviting us to take pleasure in the sound alone. The object of the singular record appears by way of avant-garde artistes. Listening is singularized. The cover thus turns into information, clues, data in terms of concrete experience.

The Afro-American jazz musician Albert Ayler,9 falling within the free jazz tendency, was worried at the end of the 1960s by the excessive intellectualization of black jazz and insisted on the covers of his records being like those of rock music. He observed how the political identification of Afro-American music and culture was passing from jazz to rock and roll, although he considered that his music functioned in the same way as Jimmy Hendrix’s or Sly & The Family Stone’s. Little by little, he moved his concerts in the direction of the political effectiveness of the music, through being something that gives true meaning to a community. He changed the saxophone for the electric guitar and ended up working with marginal Afro-American communities in which the music became a genuine object of

communion. He never believed that there were differences between his jazz and the rock that excited the black community. He put the difference down to the image, the advertising, the fetishization of the record as an interchangeable cultural factor in the identity of different black societies. It was obvious that thanks to record company packaging the commercialization of music led to ever more merchandise, taking its lead from the image on the album cover, so that his intention was also to make his musical mark on that terrain, which he considered a form of continuity in terms of the political demands of the Afro-American community.

When one alludes to this commercialization of the pop, but not popular, music of the youth music industry, or to the fetishization and spectacularization of music, one might overlook a certain opposition between two terms that in a sense compensate for and complement one another. We could say that the fetish is the stone of the real that we hold in our hands in order not to let ourselves be dragged along by the spectacular alienation that musical fascination can exercise upon us, to the point of making reality unbearable. It is true that fetish and spectacle are connected, that they form a religious whole, a totality that would surely confirm, today, Walter Benjamin’s dictum that has capitalism as the new religion of the 20th century.

One of the renovations of that religious faith has encountered in the disc, in the world of the image that surrounds music, a way of perpetuating, paradoxically, so-called youth iconoclasm. In fact, on account of this the dictionary has had to change the definition of iconoclasm, and not only is the aggression against an image given this name but also the obscene and provocative presence of an image.

In other words, due to both disappearance and appearance, the image of the disc is iconoclastic, either in the formal clarity of the Wergo label, the publisher of John Cage and György Ligeti, or in Andy Warhol’s advertising campaigns for the Rolling Stones. The periodic renewal that

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One of the renovations of that religious faith has encountered in the disc, in the world of the image that surrounds music, a way of perpetuating, paradoxically, socalled youth iconoclasm. In fact, on account of this the dictionary has had to change the definition of iconoclasm, and not only is the aggression against an image given this name but also the obscene and provocative presence of an image. fashion and the market undertake of this iconoclasm, the extraordinary mobility these commodities have, their unquestionable alienating power – none of this gets in the way of considering album covers as a true comfort in the face of the overwhelming fascism of music and its potent technology in the construction and organization of ways of life of all kinds.

The massive consumption of music products is a direct result of the actual structure of music.

From the first it was understood that rhythms, sequences, refrains and so on, contributed like no other inducement to repetition in the consumption of music. It was unnecessary to introduce subliminal messages. The actual sequence of the images of a collection implied this monetary repetition. It’s like in Spain with music in English: nobody understands the lyrics, but the “hit” is repeated just the same, the musicians repeat the tune whatever the storyline. It’s the same, too, with art images: nobody understands what they mean, but the artists repeat gestures and styles so that things “look familiar”. A consumer product with a standard of consumption within, a bit like the caption “Coca-Cola gets you hooked”, but theorized in the 1940s in the hypotheses of Adorno.

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Well, against this surge in buying and selling, as a consummate contradiction, there appears the brake of the fetish-object, singled out, constructed so as to narcissistically repeat itself.

Even the greatest market inflationists have recourse to its specificity in order to fight music piracy in the illegal market! The self-referential condition of the fetish leads pathologically to an anomaly in the ordered world of the commodity.

Walter Benjamin differentiated between the collector of fetishes and the collector of commodities. In the first, as if it were an inclination of the personality, the collector’s drive was thrown into confusion, randomly remodelling questions of value and price, buying and selling. The sentimental education of the adolescent artist is realized today, and following Benjamin, in these two models of character and fate. The second are given over to an alienated consumption whose only solace is in repeating the act of consumption itself.

Aimed at them are the new MP3 downloading models, the iPod, productive repetition. The first, alienated in character, resist in the iconoclastic brand name, in the differentiation of products. The market has separated them into spectators and artists.

Sleeves: Tamarán In 1974 a Milan publisher launched Tamarán,10

by Canary Islands musician Juan Hidalgo. This is a sort of minimal conceptual music that draws inspiration from Cage, but on the sleeve there’s the illustration of three bodybuilders in the middle of exhibiting their biceps and triceps, silhouetted against the outline of Gran Canaria island, the mythological Tamarán, pioneer of sexual tourism, the cult of the body and beach boys. A close listening to the trickle of harmonics the piece has recourse to over its forty minutes forgoes poetry of any kind. Let us allow Juan Hidalgo11 himself to comment on his work: “Let’s talk now about Tamarán, Gotas de esperma para 12 pianos de cola. [Tamarán,

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Drops of Sperm for 12 Grand Pianos]. Tamarán is a composition 40 minutes long, plus a final 15 seconds of resonance on its own for harmonious sounds produced by twelve pianists on twelve grand pianos. Tamarán is an open work. The pianists are told numerically how many harmonics they have to produce, but not which ones. The temporal structure is fixed, however, as in the case of Música en cinta determinada, although not in centimetres this time, but chronometrically. The unit of time is the minute, subdivided in turn into different fractions of a second. For that reason the pianists make use of normal chronometers instead of being guided by the usual metronomic beat. We will not analyze the method used for the composition of this work here, but will speak of the spatial problems it poses. In order to perform this piece publicly it is essential to have a big space available, preferably circular, where we can put the public and place, at an appropriate distance, the twelve grand pianos. Located at the centre of it, the public will be surrounded by the pianos, which will be set out in a circle like the numbers engraved on a clock face. If the space possesses the optimum acoustic conditions, it will not be necessary to use any amplification. If not, the amplification of each piano with absolute independence of the others will be essential. If amplification is necessary, each of the sources of sound will be positioned between the piano which amplifies and the public. In this way one has the rain of harmonics produced by the twelve pianos bombard the listener, thus creating a sound pattern of maximum effectiveness.”

In actual fact, we have the description of an orgy before us: as in the final circus of a pornographic film, all the partenaires come on the body of the main protagonist, situated strategically at the centre of the circle. The drops of sperm, as the subtitle points out, refer to the harmonics that literally bathe the expectant public. As in the final scene in Behind the Green Door, a classic of porn cinema by the Mitchell brothers, the rain of sperm is in slow motion. Let

Juan Hidalgo, Tamarán, 1974

us read the subtitle in Italian: “Gocce di sperma per dodici pianoforti”. The humorous displacements are obvious: the pianoforte of the bodybuilders, the sperm of the white key, the enjoyment of the harmonics. Could we have arrived at this “pleasure” without the explicit references that appear on the cover?

Dominique Fernandez12 proposes the death of music with the disappearance of Bellini and Rossini, just before the appearance of Wagner and Verdi, just before the irruption of the refrain and the political. As Deleuze has pointed out,13 a tragic disappearance is involved: “Bellini will die in circumstances that remain unclear, maybe from an illness unknown in his time, maybe from some more sombre story, and Rossini is about suddenly stopping. That musician of genius who, at the height of his success, decides to stop: now he will devote himself to cooking. He’d always had two loves, music and cooking; he was a great cook, and he went mad. Fernandez comes out with a statement of this type: music stops with Bellini and Rossini. I don’t mean to say he’s right because I don’t think he is. That said, what is it that makes such a statement possible? He can only mean to say one thing: something that

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pertains essentially to music will no longer exist after Rossini and Bellini, the two last musicians.

What, even indirectly, does the disappearance of Rossini and Bellini entail? What is the new music around 1830? It is the advent of Verdi and of Wagner. This means that Wagner and Verdi have made music impossible. Fernandez goes as far as to say they are fascists – it’s not the first time this is said of Wagner. What is it that, being essential to music, inseparable from music, they have suppressed, according to Fernandez? (...)

Fernandez states that, as he sees it, music has always been riven by a content that was a very intimate part of it: the upsurge or the outstripping of the difference of the sexes. And so, since in spite of not being an analyst he does not forget his analytic training, he says that music is always and essentially a restoration of the androgynous.”

“Evviva il coltello, il benedetto coltello” – the Neapolitans protested against the Napoleonic laws that forbade the practice of the knife in barbers’ shop, namely the castration of boys intended to produce sublime singers, the castrati. This is the reason why Rossini, composer of The Barber of Seville, abandons music. This is what he confessed to Wagner in their famous meeting in Paris. The disappearance of the castrati renders the continuity of music, of bel canto, impossible.

Víctor Gómez Pin14 has posed some apposite questions about these events: “What need is there to fill stages by recourse to mutilation, if today, the brutal extirpation being banished, it is possible to experience in lyrical theatre the persistence of voices that provoke identical emotion? The economy of this argument is that perfect beauty can exist without more than the ‘spiritual’ pole of the human condition being in play. But one might ask: what sustains such a benefit? If the shock is salva veritate comparable, why does the matrix have to be asymmetrical? Is it really possible to imagine that the work of art (a recreation of the wound that, at the heart of animality, sets man apart, namely the impossibility of making links

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without suffering) can be established at low cost? And if the eventuality of such an economy is rejected, wouldn’t it be possible to put forward the hypothesis that mutilation, that particular mutilation, the physiological castration as enacted, was instead a symptom or symbol that causes the wound, the genuine cause managing to recreate or announce itself in another symptom, in another symbol, each time a modality of artistic creation reappears?”

What these readings make clear transcends the biopolitical violence exercised in the realm of art. The technologies that construct us have their model in musical violence and the mutilations continue without the need for quiffs and makeup, tattoos or piercings. Mutilation is connected with the economy of the fetish in such a way that the object which points to that fetish category can only be considered a riven one. The ability to politically territorialize that the fetish has is comparable to the one described

by Deleuze and Guattari in the refrain: “The refrain emerges in the black hole, the child intones his tra-la-la in the dark because he’s afraid”.

Dominique Fernandez ends up blaming the end of music on capitalism: the division of labour, the predominant role of man in the economy, his role in the factory replacing his role in war, the Taylorist assembly line, and so on. And yet he praises The Beatles and David Bowie. While he cannot stand the English counter-tenor, he praises the ambiguous falsetto of English pop singers. After the Second World War capitalism enters into another configuration: the division of labour is dynamited by the demands of the feminists, the predominant role of consumption again situates women at the centre of the economy, the assembly line gives way to post-Fordist models.

One of the collaborations between Andy Warhol and The Rolling Stones, perhaps the boldest, occurs in 1971 with Sticky Fingers, which presents a zipper ready to zipped down in the fly of a tight pair of jeans. Obviously, it wasn’t a sticky finger that was hopefully to be removed

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from this crotch. In Spain and many other countries the sleeve was censored. As a substitute we were presented with a more or less Warholian tin of food, half-open, from which there emerged some treacly mutilated fingers, what the aficionado used to know as “dicks in vinegar”. The repressed always returns.

Veneno, Veneno, 1977

Labels: Veneno Music’s capacity for figuration has to do with appearances. The relationship of an album cover to its content is a guide, an invocation of what ought to appear. The graphic design that dominates in popular music has to do with these indications, the why and the wherefore of all imagination. In that sense the fragmentary, miniature, micro-historical quality of the sleeve prevents us from constructing an idea of totality, an absolute world, with it. Here are the programmatic groups, fan clubs, urban tribes, creators of style, lines in tailoring, the aesthetic – in short, everything collides with the disc.

Misunderstandings are the creators of album covers and they construct duly anti-totalitarian

ways of seeing the world, since there is no totality or project which sustains them. In 1977 the censors stopped the cover of Veneno’s record from coming out. A block of hashish was presented in the middle of its tin-foil wrapping; burnt into the block was the word Veneno (poison). The name of the group came from a flamenco song: “In a little room, poison you’d give me, poison I’d take”. Censorship called for the photo to be blown up and the block of hashish now appeared more abstract, displaying its earthen composition and gritty texture, and also the mark of the letters of Veneno. The capacity for abstraction, we know, is one of the qualities of censorship. Cultural Mudejarism is characterized by this need for disguise, to foreground contents that seemingly move through another appearance. The debates between fans about which is the best sleeve do little to exhaust this visual strategy. If the cover has to make exact figurations appear in order for the music to sound a particular way, there is nothing better than misunderstandings.

The group that made Veneno – endlessly cited as the best record in the history of rock in Spain – basically consisted of the brothers Rafael and Raimundo Amador, afterwards Pata Negra, and Kiko Veneno. They went into the studio full of Bob Dylan, psychedelia and flamenco, and ended up making a flamenco-style punk record – the punk of the subalterns was never wholly electric – in concert with the spirit of the age. I have to say that my first live concert in 1979, in the Aracena bullring, was of the as yet unnamed Pata Negra, and that their version of “La muchachita”, the second track on the record, was memorable. Those two gypsies with the flamenco guitars invoked the stroll of the “teenage girl with cheeks as fresh as cookies” with the filthy intensity and adolescent impudence of a girl from Ipanema. While they were performing the song, they made continual pleas to the audience, calling for the “teenage girl” to appear, and that, singing the song in unison, we’d get to see her physically. They couldn’t accuse us of being paedophiles because

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we were equally as young. The sexual turmoil and the intensity of the music clearly marked the beginning of an emotional education. Afterwards, I got the record, that cover, and the song, “La muchachita”, followed by the impossible subtitle “Canción nacionalista zamorana”, which led me to the seminal book by Agustín García Calvo that inspired the instrumental and had the stroll of the fresh teenager come to an end on the cobblestones of the May ’68 revolt in Paris.

Another misunderstanding, of course, and although the track brought the two themes together, they had nothing to do with each other, at least up until that time; afterwards they did, the record had a life of its own.

That imprint was a biographical milestone comparable, probably, to Nietzsche’s impressions upon hearing Bizet’s Carmen, the passage of the habanera that had transferred Iradier’s El arreglito to the language of high opera, an erratic fragment with which to demolish the totalitarian edifice being constructed by Wagner, much admired by the German philosopher until a short while ago. Ángel González García reminds us of the sentence Nietzsche pronounced against the overture of Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Here begins the twilight of opera”. This is odd, since it was on that note of musical violence that Georges Bataille and his accomplices on Acéphale kicked off their plans to demolish that same fascism “with the strains that opened Don Juan sounding on the gramophone in the kitchen, while Masson was cooking mongetas in blood on the stove”.

However, it was with Carmen that Nietzsche honed his diatribes against Wagner, against the totalitarian model of the world as machine that, as put forward by Susan Buck-Morss – we’ll expand on this later – was in consonance with the conception of society as an enormous factory, the fascism of the total work of art.

The second fragment of The Case of Wagner15 says this, and it is worth quoting at length: “Bizet’s work also saves; Wagner is not the only ‘Saviour’. With it one bids farewell to the damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian

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ideal. Even the action in itself delivers us from these things. From Merimée it has this logic even in passion, from him it has the direct line, ‘inexorable’ necessity, but what it has above all else is that which belongs to sub-tropical zones – that dryness of atmosphere, that limpidezza of the air. Here in every respect the climate is altered. Here another kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness and another kind of cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay, but not in a French or German way. Its gaiety is African; fate hangs over it, its happiness is short, sudden, without reprieve. I envy Bizet for having had the courage of this sensitiveness, which hitherto in the cultured music of Europe has found no means of expression – of this southern, tawny, sunburnt sensitiveness… What a joy the golden afternoon of its happiness is to us! When we look out, with this music in our minds, we wonder whether we have ever seen the sea so ‘calm’. And how soothing is this Moorish dancing! How, for once, even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious melancholy! And finally love, love translated back into ‘Nature’! Not the love of a ‘cultured girl!’ – no Senta-sentimentality.

But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel – and precisely in this way ‘Nature’! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the ‘mortal hatred’ between the sexes! (…) Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one work of art from among a thousand others. For, as a rule, artists are no better than the rest of the world, they are even worse – they ‘misunderstand’ love.

Even Wagner misunderstood it. They imagine that they are selfless in it because they appear to be seeking the advantage of another creature often to their own disadvantage. But in return they want to ‘possess’ the other creature. Even God is no exception to this rule.”

Let us momentarily identify – for it exactly represented this – the suggestions of popular music with lo español (Spanishness), what is later called lo flamenco. Because that is the emergence Nietzsche is capable of announcing through Spanish music, the emergence of the

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The group of French artists, 4taxis, were in Seville at the end of the 1980s.

Their guide to getting to know the city was that same record by Veneno.

Among other qualities, they admired its ability to portray a subaltern world – gypsies and hippies, drug addicts and drop-outs, prostitutes and delinquents – without collapsing into miserablism. There is always a sense of dignity. subaltern. And from here, from Nietzsche, there is ignited the pathway of lo español, the journey of the moderns along the anti-modern southern route. That represents lo español; that is the function of lo flamenco in the modern imagination. And we don’t know the extent to which this passion gets people’s backs up. The extent to which these aficionados of lo flamenco also meant a crisis, a calling into question, an interference. Erik Satie was well aware of this, tired as he was of the “fashion for Spain”, a “pestilence” among French composers of his time, to whom he dedicated the short piece Espagnagna. Its score is accompanied by these parodic lines: “A kind of waltz / Beneath the pomegranate trees / As in Seville / The beautiful Carmen and the hairdresser / Porte Maillot / This good Rodríguez / Isn’t he the mayor? / Place Clichy / Rue de Madrid / The women cigar makers / At your service.”

Humour for humour’s sake, but at the cusp the frivolous play on words, the joke, the tongue twister, onomatopoeia, parody, the sainete, nonsense, the gag. Nietzsche says it himself: “You must not take what I say about Bizet seriously. As sure as I exist, Bizet – I say it time and again – does not interest me, but he acts strongly as an ironical antithesis to Wagner.”

This is the modern imposture. Joy! Joy! A levity that kills. Gags, boring jokes that are blindingly

obvious. Clement Rosset,16 perhaps the presentday philosopher who best understands Nietzsche, summarizes things: “That the intensity of joy is directly proportional to the cruelty of knowledge is, without doubt, a general sort of truth. All the same, to underline here that in Spain this truth encounters a privileged field of expression, especially in cante flamenco, and is so precisely because it is always accompanied by the lustre given to it a contrario by the cruel sentiment of the derisory typical of all existence, that which shelters it from all complacency or compromise… Exalting the joy of living, it does not forget that this will never be more than a miraculous resistance to death.”

But Nietzsche doesn’t stop there. After seeing La Gran Vía, the zarzuela by Federico Chueca, a masterwork that announces the entire musical politics of the 20th century, he says: “An important extension of the concept – the Spanish operetta La Gran Vía, which I’ve heard twice, a Madrilenean event of prime importance.

Something that simply cannot be imported; one would have to be a rogue and the very Devil, a fellow who was instinctive and solemn at the same time… A trio of three solemn, old and immense villains is the strongest thing I’ve seen and heard… even in music: genius cannot be formulated. Let us take as an example Rossini, whose work – eight of his operas – I know quite well and let us choose our favourite, La Cenerentola, for comparison: well, when confronted with the Spanish works it’s a thousand times more innocent. Only a complete scoundrel could conceive the actual plot itself; the way in which the villains appear like lightning on stage seems like a conjuring trick.”

In Chueca’s work the German philosopher recognized the antithesis of the musical drama that he had been seeking since his traumatic break with Wagner. He managed to appreciate the anti-operatic rhythm and the malice of numbers like the Jota de los ratas, which undermines the most deep-rooted aesthetic and social mantras by recourse to an extremely

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penetrating theatricality and musical irony, as the critics have recognized. And all that business about “It’s when authority / pursues us / that as calm as you like / we swindle more” might be sung as a hymn. We shall not meet the exalting of delinquency as a logical resistance to capitalism again until Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera.

Pive Amador, who went around at the time with the group who made up Veneno, remarked that, “It was an unrepeatable time, with Franco dead, we political fugitives and criminals were living as comrades, the Veneno song grows out of that, there was no greater political freedom than the freedom of that moment, freedom doesn’t only have to do with the police, Los delincuentes speaks about that moment”. The COPEL, antipsychiatry and libertarianism – everything resounds in that song, in fact; these are the words the Spanish Transition should have had.

“Afterwards”, continues Pive, “came the Constitution and that, at the time, was something else, better perhaps, but redundancy isn’t always a good thing.”

The group of French artists, 4taxis, were in Seville at the end of the 1980s. Their guide to getting to know the city was that same record by Veneno. Among other qualities, they admired its ability to portray a subaltern world – gypsies and hippies, drug addicts and drop-outs, prostitutes and delinquents – without collapsing into miserablism. There is always a sense of dignity.

“One doesn’t do a portrait in black of the beggar, he’s always your equal, one is never saying all that about you’re in my song, but I’m the artist.

An equality such as we’ve never seen, which has to do with who we are, our income and so on.

But also in how we look at each other. We’d like to learn to look that way.” They attribute the work of this gaze to Murillo; their project on The Angels’ Kitchen by Murillo prefigures many of the things Jacques Rancière17 says about the films of Pedro Costa: “Let us take the example of the films made with the inhabitants of the shantytown neighbourhood of Fontainhas on the outskirts of

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Lisbon. There, a political will exists to bear witness to the reality of dispossession. Also the practice of making a film with the inhabitants, including those whose behaviour in front of the camera is unpredictable. There are two main aesthetic positions: one is to blur the distinction between fiction and documentary; the other is to film, not the misery of the people, but the palpable richness of their decor in the light and the richness of their experience of life, in order to restore it.”

Boxes: Commercial Album A map of the colonial world in the mid-19th century will provide us with the economic clues as to how the different styles of popular music have been formed in the 20th century. It is easy to understand the musical basis of reggae, even of flamenco, in this way. If we trace this map back to the dawn of modernity we can also understand the dawn of so-called serious music in the West, which was clearly popular, local and national music as well. What interests us right now is to underline the renovation of the

The Residents, Commercial Album, 1980

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economic map that is produced on the basis of recorded music, that is to say of the discs conveniently slotted into their sleeves. It is a fact that autochthonous musics reinforced their identity by releasing their music creations themselves in the ample commercial fabric of the record industry. The “versions” typical of Mexican or Indian music were reinforced by the characteristic treatment given to the covers of such albums. The reinforcement of musical identity, the underlining of signs like those of primitivism or exoticism, was mainly done through the presentation of the records, while the music content often escaped the straitjacket of the images and functioned as a ragbag in which the modern coexisted with the traditional, autochthonous quaintness with international fashion. Hence, the construction of an invented identity has, in the album cover, the finest and most efficient tool for the subcultures of urban peripheries throughout the world. The collections of Latin American album covers that the Colombian artist Raimon Chávez presents or the collections of flamenco album covers presented in the exhibition Vivir en Sevilla at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville are prime examples.

These are often marginal productions, peripheral situations of industrial production that have their raison d’être in subaltern, illegal economies. This economy of expenditure and extravagance is intrinsically linked to the construction of record imagery in pop music throughout the world. The attention Georges Bataille18 paid to flamenco and jazz was endorsed by a whole series of subaltern graphic elements that had still to blossom into the images on album covers. The notation made by Bataille19 stresses how these signs of poverty are presented with all the pretension of the luxury object. The baroque rhetoric, the kitsch, the abuses of ornamentation, and so on, help draw attention to that need for loss, for economic waste for musics like the blues, son, reggae, bossa, flamenco, tango and many more besides.

The economy of the spending and wastage of

abundance – “It is not need but its opposite, abundance, that poses the basic problems for living matter and for man”, wrote Bataille – are, paradoxically, the tools of survival and resistance of subaltern economies – peripheral, poor and disregarded by various powers – in the face of the general colonization by capitalism which we now call globalization. This opposition has its entire logic in the “general economy” of which Bataille spoke, providing a different concept of subjectivity, human rationality and its communitarian ties. The need to acquire and accumulate is not what uniquely or principally moves human beings, but the desire to give and to squander. As Antonio Campillo20 has pointed out, “In opposition to interested egoistic calculation, generous and disinterested squandering”.

This cultural logic directly inspired some of the more radical applications of the artistic avant-garde to the world of music and sound. The Cabaret Voltaire that the Dadaists mounted in Zurich in the 1910s parodied, in the most original sense of the word, these primitivist practices. They practiced what Eric Hobsbawm21 has called an “invented tradition”, in the same way that jazz musicians or flamenco performers invented their own tradition.

Hugo Ball,22 who never got to experience the commercial blossoming of album covers, referred to the paintings, objects and photographs of the Zurich period as “boxes” containing the sound, fury and noise of those years of wartime oppressiveness.

It is obvious that in the era of consumer capitalism we might, parodying the classic Max Weber title, say something like we have entered a Catholic phase of capitalism itself, in which ritual, fetish and spending acquire another kind of usefulness for the general religion of the economy.

In that sense, the publicizing and wastage of images of massive commercialization seem to get together in pursuit of the circulation of commodities. Never has so much been bought and sold. As we said before: today the record industry spends much of its production money in the interests of the image of the artiste, to the point that when we buy a record – from the records of Morton Feldman to the latest CDs of Falete – we

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What interests us right now is to underline the renovation of the economic map that is produced on the basis of recorded music, that is to say of the discs conveniently slotted into their sleeves. It is a fact that autochthonous musics reinforced their identity by releasing their music creations themselves in the ample commercial fabric of the record industry. pay more for the graphic elements of industrial production than for the actual music content.

This rule is also applied to the general representation of any music production; even on the street, in the illegal market, the graphic copy of the disc is more expensive for the pirate than its musical support.

In San Francisco in the 1970s there appeared an obscure music group called The Residents, in principle a “marginal” group, which dynamited all the rules of the business with a new and exemplary trajectory and music. We take these notes from their own publicity handout,23 but all of them correspond to reality. And in case there is any question of their self-production, let us come to the conclusion that they sell records, that their promotion is meticulous and studied to the highest degree. Whereas show business requires stars, people to be adored and offered on a plate to the ecstatic masses, The Residents only appear wearing masks. Indeed, the American group – with a legend that its members include Frank Zappa and Paul Macharty, Andy Warhol and Kiss – is mainly made up of designers and art students from Louisiana – straight from the New Orleans carnival – and began to work on popular and classical music using visual concepts – photomontage, scratching, solarization, and so on – applied to the circulation of music and its selling as popular music. In 1980 they released

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their Commercial Album,24 a collection of forty songs of a minute each that function as sinister advertising jingles, their personal vision of what commercial music ought to be, to wit: “To our music we’ve been able to apply the concepts we apply to our visual imagery, and when the music circulates without images these tunes can function as the covers of our future albums”.

Sleeves: Goma The unexpected hit record by Los Payasos de la Tele, Gaby, Fofó and Miliki, made so much money for the Movieplay label that they decided to start a music label that would address, in a grown-up sort of way, the new musical impetus they detected in the moribund Spain of General Franco. In April 1975 they talked to the novice producer from Seville, Gonzalo García Pelayo, who had created successful radio and TV programmes for the “new youth”, as it was called, to whom Gonzalo explained his methodology: “I don’t know if I can make a good record, but if you let me make ten I can guarantee one will be a hit”. Thus was born

Goma, 14 abril, 1975

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Movieplay’s Gong label,25 with the intention of making room for underground and experimental music, Andalusian rock and the wilder kind of flamenco, new singer-songwriters and progressive music, Cuban nueva trova and Sevillanas. “Quantity for quality” was the motto and out of this there came records by Goma, Triana, Lole y Manuel, Dieguito de Morón, José el Negro, Joselero, Pau Riba, Vainica Doble, Amancio Prada, Luis Eduardo Aute, María Jiménez, Benito Moreno, Carlos Cano, Azahar, Elisa Serna, Carrete, Granada, Gente del Pueblo, Gualberto, Agujetas, Hilario Camacho, Inti-Illimani, Labordeta, El Lele, Luis Pastor, Manuel Gerena, Pablo Guerrero, Eduardo Polonio, Olga Manzano y Manuel Picón, Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, Quilapayún, La Susi, Victor Jara, etcetera.

A basic consideration for Gong were the covers of their albums; in fact Gong is the first Spanish label that stipulates that their sleeves had to be as important as the music. Máximo Moreno was the art director of the collection and he directly produced masterpieces like Lole y Manuel’s first record, with those two impressive photographic registers, or the first two records

by Triana, El patio and Hijos del Agobio, with designs that are a combination of psychedelia and social critique. There are other collaborators: the Rafa Díaz cover for A la vida, al dolor by Gualberto is masterly, as is the one for Vericuetos with paintings by Jessica Jones.

Also Iván Zulueta’s for the Vainica Doble masterpiece Contracorriente or for Licors by Pau Riba with a design by Ana Carmona. Even so, what is most interesting is the project, the assumption of the visual contribution of the covers in relation to the product, to the music, to the figuration of the world projected therein. A whole economy of art applied to record design, with a basic idea of narration, the need to tell a story with each of them, and, moreover, the material armature of the covers, their physical quality as objects. This poetics of “cardboard recycling” was defined by Gonzalo as a matter of duration: “We were at the crucial move from the culture of the single to that of the LP and the

records had to be cheap, the playing time was not only to be a matter of minutes, the cardboard cover, the photography, the weight of the object, all this had to count for something, had to do with those the music was meant to feature. Later on, Gong came to an end and it ended when that way of understanding music fell apart; not the records, though, the way of understanding music.”

The album cover project comes face to face, then, with an artistic dimension which, more than aestheticizing the lives of various generations, has, of course, helped make them more artistic. The utopia of technical reproduction, an object printable thousands of times, which circulates in all shapes and sizes, an object without qualities but with great symbolic meaning – all this served to fulfil the objectives of the most radical economies of art.

Moreover, the narrative possibilities, the capacity for figuration and abstraction that were established in relation to the music, endowed the object with possibilities that complied with information and expression as maxims of a certain way art works. In relation to the music, the record thus fulfilled a number of minimum requisites of plasticity, at the frontier of the figurable, of the art object, of the book, of vital experience. It almost, we might say, functioned like the transformational masks of the Northwest American Indians, as described by Claude LéviStrauss. Designed and elaborated as mediation, the object of use has the capacity to become autonomous and in that particular journey to be transformed with its own laws, being returned to us with conditions that now forever condition listening to the music, the visual experience of the surroundings and the project of a form of life. Finally, how many works of art aspire to just such a moment of autonomous profanation?

Let us look at a concrete example. García Pelayo had an all-embracing obsession with transforming political hymns into intense love songs. This was no coincidence. In his film Vivir en Sevilla one of the characters says it clearly: “He listened to those songs of combat and

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struggle with a lover’s desperation, songs of forever falling in and out of love”, while the young man listened time and again to the record of “Hasta siempre comandante” dedicated to Ché Guevara by Carlos Puebla y Los Tradicionales. He performed the experiment on various occasions – I’m thinking of “Como tú” performed by La Susi – but in none did it work as radically as in Silvio Rodríguez’s “Te doy una canción”, a revolutionary theme dedicated to Cuba and its revolution, sung by María Jiménez.

She was a jovial flamenco-style nightclub singer, whose nickname La pipa, given to her by journalist Emilio Romero in praise of her sexual power, had to be both promoted and parried.

The cover of her first record had to combine those two worlds with little more than a photograph. The record was to be full of versions of Latin American themes, a common practice in flamenco bulerías and rumbas at the time, but in this instance another type of projection was involved. The Máximo Moreno photograph presented the cuplé singer as a sort of committed singer-songwriter, and the whole force of the photograph bursts forth in that impossibility. But there is no meaning – that is to say, if you don’t listen to the rumbita there is nothing, a forgotten dusty record, with something of the nondescript object about it.

But that was the intention: to lead to melancholy and not to deception. It wasn’t even necessary to consider the subject matter; the important thing is that when recalling the theme, when walking along the street humming it you would think of María Jiménez: “I give you a song and I say my country”, and there appears the infinite promise of pleasure, that dubious thing we sometimes call happiness.

“All of you have, like me, been visited, I’m sure, been obsessed to the point of nausea, possessed to the point of exhaustion by one of those ‘catchy’ melodies, one of those songs heard by chance, that is to say of necessity, on the radio, in cafes, in the supermarket. One of those ‘big hits’ that henceforth never leave us, that are on our lips when we awake, that lend rhythm to our

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A basic consideration for Gong were the covers of their albums; in fact Gong is the first Spanish label that stipulates that their sleeves had to be as important as the music. steps when we walk down the street or that often manage to upset, without us knowing why, a chain of thought, of intimate reverie.”

Thus Peter Szendy begins his masterly treatise Tubes, La Philosophie dans le juke-box,26 an attempt at thinking, in tune with Walter Benjamin, about the things that make up the world and mark our everyday life. Of course, read in accordance with these notes, record covers turn into the mediating factor devised by those big hits in order to be in the world. When Szendy brings us nearer to the relationship of these ditties to money, to their capacity for mediation, what else can we hold on to?

Following, in a literal way, the reading Szendy makes of Marx’s famous text “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”,27 it is obvious to think, instead of songs on record, of album covers. “A commodity appears, at first sight”, writes Marx, “a very trivial thing, and easily understood.” It is a thing that is used to satisfy certain needs, and as such seems to have nothing “mysterious” about it. But endowed, among other things, with this “use value”, the commodity as such behaves in a special way: as Marx argues, taking a table as an example, as a commodity, “this indulges in whims that are even more extravagant than if it had proceeded to dance”. Because like all commodities, the table-commodity is not only something useful: it consists of, sums up or embodies, “a definite social relation between men”; that is, a type of relationship among those who produce it with their work. The commodity, for example, is the product or expression of a certain labour time and of a certain organization of that labour.

However, this social relation, deposited, so to

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speak, in the commodity, is forgotten: for men it is “the fantastic form of a relation between things”. And the power products have to “appear as independent beings” is the power Marx calls “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour”: “(…) the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things”. In the exchange market the commodity lives, in effect, from its exchange value, which seems “to truly belong to it”, as a property that it would possess naturally, thanks to a forgetting of the relations of production that have caused it to be born. It appears to have an autonomous movement and a rationale when it circulates from exchange to exchange. Like a real fetish, the commodity seems henceforth to be endowed with a psyche, that “soul of the commodity” Marx ironically alludes to. And, in order to demonstrate its illusory quality, Marx makes this soul speak: “Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values.” Just as in these famous pages of Marx’s, album covers also lend their voice to musical commodities in general, in order to make them speak and sing about their nature as fetishes: what we might call the musical self and the lyrical self of the song would be, then, the voice of the actual commodity that is talking about itself. Because in effect it is the phantasmagoria which appears as an album cover: the song as a musical commodity understands or recognizes itself; it enters into a relation with another song, which is nothing short of a new version of itself, with which it enters into an exchange.

The first Gong record had to fulfil the condition of “being money”. The job was entrusted to Alberto Corazón who, happily, had

still not made a distinction between his activity as an artist and a designer. Linked politically to Seville, at the time his works were habitual in the cultural life of the city: his poster for Alfonso Jiménez’s Quejío, put on by La Cuadra, or the book La vida en el Barrio for the Pro-Sevilla group, are a couple of exemplary instances. The group gathered around Seville’s M-11 art centre, with Quico Rivas and Diego Carrasco among their number, served as a link for the work in hand. Rehearsals took place in the gallery and the record had that artistic ambition from the first.

Goma was the name of the group, with musicians who came from the mythical Smash or from an even stranger group, Chicle, pipas y caramelos.

Their music took off from experimental jazzrock, and lo andaluz, the typically Andalusian, was vaguely invoked. 14 abril was the title of the record, a subversive date in 1975 since it invoked the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931.

The lyrics got past the censor by recourse to tongue twisters and absurd meanings: “A new April, without salt, hindering and without heat, possession and shrewd, like the look of a balloon”. What did not pass was the purple of the Republican flag which was meant to feature on the cover. The whole design revolved around the icon of the dollar, the Masonic pyramid, the eye of God and its repetition ad infinitum. The illustration of money, like the illustration of the record and like the illustration of the sleeve, were all meant to revolve hypnotically, like a gyroscope. The graphic elements were assembled

by Miguel Gómez, who resolved things with the censors. These visual fragments were used afterwards by Pive Amador, the group’s manager at the time, on dozens of posters that announced other luckier groups and musicians like Pata Negra, Imán, Kiko Veneno and Silvio. “We used to call it a sleeve back then. The record didn’t work, but its sleeve did, becoming an identifying mark of both the label and a way of understanding the music.”

Among others, Corominas28 identifies the following definitions for his etymology of carátula (cover): “mask”, “the histrionic profession”. From

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the ancient carátula, “witchcraft”, and this from the Latin character, in the sense of a “magic sign”. It arrived at its modern meaning by proceeding from the paint-daubed face of wizards and magicians; and at the American meaning of a “book cover” through comparison with the mask covering the face.

Covers: The White Album It is obvious that the maximum refutation of the Walter Benjamin essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”29 is found in the work of Andy Warhol. Let us remind ourselves of the ending of the essay: “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” Well, capitalism has embodied this dichotomy between art and aesthetics in order to create its politics. Hence, the converting of aura into “credit” has enabled the serial pictures of Warhol to apply for the “art standard” with the same intensity with which our Visas or Mastercards function in terms of the gold standard. The linguistic effectiveness of his work operates by encountering, in these financial transformations of the political sphere, areas of exploitation for marginal cultures, autonomous ways of life and minority identities. One does not usually speak, in Warhol, of aura but of glamour, yet capitalism’s mechanism of “technologies of the self” remain its most effective tool of social assimilation in our societies. This is why Warhol’s works for the covers of pop industry musicians from The Velvet Underground to Miguel Bosé function paradigmatically when one attempts to draw a map of the visual arts and music.

The value of the image in the era in which the technological copy enables it to reach greater circulation was the subject of wide debate in the period in which Walter Benjamin wrote his essay. In Spain a fin de siècle writer like Silverio Lanza – the mentor, among others, of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, to the point that Jorge Luis

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Borges himself confused the work of the two writers – noted down the occasional interesting idea in that respect. Corpus Barga recounts it: “Ricardo Baroja, Valle Inclán and the young painters close to them were arguing about the values of great painters and masterpieces.

Silverio Lanza began outlining his proposition by attributing it to a young stockbroker and student of homeopathy, of anarchist medicine.

If a painting by Velázquez, El Greco, Tintoretto, Titian, Raphael or Leonardo, whoever it is, I’m citing the names you cite, the one each of you chooses, finds a viewer, the one that each of you has chosen, the maximum rapport will occur, one and the same, the first and most complete, but if a bad print finds a viewer, who goes with it to the same extent as the one before in terms of the masterpiece, the same view will also prevail. 100,000 billion divided by 100,000 billion is the same as one divided by one – it’s always one. The stockbroker with aesthetic as well as stock market values was right. He was right, the rightness of geometric progression, which in aesthetic proportions is the unit, democratic and individualist. The young libertarian was right.”30

The Beatles, The Beatles, 1968

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The periodic critical waves that shake the relations of representation in the field of art, from punk to institutional critique, help to create a stenography that ends up strengthening the corridors of power they are fighting.

The simplicity with which Lanza resolves the troublesome issue of technical reproduction and the work of art, the famous aura that Benjamin saw being lost, can only proceed from a real understanding of the economic laws of capitalism that define the identity of art. A clarity akin to that of Karl Marx’s text on “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”31 that we cited above. The Jewish angels that frightened Benjamin had served, years before, to make Marx’s vision more acute: “A ‘commodity’ appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the ‘product’ of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth ‘as a commodity’, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, that are even more extravagant than if it had proceeded to dance.”

It is obvious that Marx describes a table like those that began dancing around in spiritualist

séances. In our own time that table is the dj’s and the connotation in the form of the dance would include the social mass as a whole.

Silverio Lanza saw it clearly – it is a pity that only a few of his Economic Tales have come down to us – and not without a certain humour, and with a certain sarcasm, even: “The value of the image is a merely economic value”. His thinking was not far from the imperative Giorgio Agamben32 read in the work of the Situationists: “The ‘becoming-image’ of capital is nothing more than the commodity’s last metamorphosis, in which exchange value has completely eclipsed use value and can now achieve the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over life in its entirety, after having falsified the entire social production. (…) The first duty the Situationists assigned themselves was to wake up from this nightmare.”

Conscious of the role their productions play in the design of the current system, visual constructions only need to act accordingly. They can feel themselves to be privileged because from the outset their activity was a parallel model to the strategies of capital and would turn into the best placebo for the latter. It seems quite difficult for visual productions to be able to renounce the founding characteristics of their own activity, but if the predominance of exchange value leaves us in a dead end, it is in the recovery of use value that a critical relation with the real may be rediscovered. In that sense album covers provide the work of art with an exceptional vehicle for releasing the tensions between fetish and commodity, luxury object and democratic merchandise, that spreads ways of handling and understanding life, codes of identity, in short political narrations, throughout the community.

If factors of abundance, spending and wastage have served to turn the cover into a privileged tool for the democratic circulation of the work of art, what is the use value of that which seeks to establish itself beyond all use? If, as Bataille wished, the value of art is related to the concept of abundance, engenders

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abundance in some way, the potlatch would have to be carried out with greater assiduousness. We ought to give in to destruction more bravely. One is prepared to get just as emotional about the baroque imagery in a procession as about churches in flames. This would be one of the constants in the renewal of the modern. The records of the Sex Pistols coexist with the reappearance of Gregorian chant. Does it not seem excessive that while this doubt persists, while this debate about the use values of art is maintained, there exists such a degree of unanimity in attributing a rising exchange value to them?

In the meantime let us stick to the evaluation of the stock exchange. It is all very well to turn shit into gold, but it is not something exclusive to artists or musicians. They are the best instructors, of course, but right now this is the basis of the world economy. The artistic principle transposed to the social dynamic has provided a few solutions, but it is also responsible for the current status quo. The periodic critical waves that shake the relations of representation in the field of art, from punk to institutional critique, help to create a stenography that ends up strengthening the corridors of power they are fighting. The closed circularity and self-satisfaction that occurs in the many worlds of the field of the visual arts and music, prevents the transference of the undoubted political achievements attained – in autonomy, representation, and so forth – to the rest of society. The marginal ways of life that are constructed around reggae or electronic dance music, experimentation in the languages of concrete music, and their instrumentalization in everyday usage, are just a few examples of the loss of political energy in a society that tries to keep the diverse spheres of production separate.

As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out,33 the factory was the contrast to the opera house in the world of work, a sort of counterphantasmagoria based on the principle of fragmentation, not on the illusion of totality.

Marx’s Capital, written in the 1860s and

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therefore contemporary with the operas of Wagner, describes the factory as a total environment: “Every organ of sense is injured in an equal degree by artificial elevation of the temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life and limb among the thickly crowded machinery, which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues its list of the killed and wounded in the industrial battle.” Wagner’s “total work of art”, intimately related to the disenchantment of the world, is an attempt to produce an instrumentally totalizing metaphysic by using every available technical means. This is true for dramatic representation and for musical style. In Bayreuth the orchestra, the means of production of the musical effects, is hidden from the public by constructing the orchestra pit below the eyeline of the audience.

Supposedly interested in “integrating the individual arts”, continues the reading by BuckMorss of Adorno’s Wagner, “the execution of Wagner’s operas finally attains a division of labour without precedent in the history of music”.

Accordingly, in Critique of the German Intelligentsia,34 Hugo Ball again contrasts a life that persists in the grandeur of the German music of Wagner to a life that is endured with a programme like the ones handed out in the Cabaret Voltaire. Corresponding to the BuckMorss image, the part confronts the whole: the fragmentary as a weapon of reconstruction of a total economy of presenting the world. Ball’s proposal works in a simple way, in absolute opposition to Wagnerian “totalitarianism”. As

If factors of abundance, spending and wastage have served to turn the cover into a privileged tool for the democratic circulation of the work of art, what is the use value of that which seeks to establish itself beyond all use?

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The cover of the record did not function, now, in relation to the music, but in relation to the other record sleeves that came out during that year and in relation to the general iconography prevailing in pop culture. against the absolute model of society that seeks to cleanly represent the social whole as a mirror, it is proposed to work in different kinds of noise, in the tensions of the violin bow, in in-between spaces, in the dirtiness of the world. And in music, against the location in which an absolute scene is built in order to represent the world, there is pitted the warmth of a simple album cover, the vinyl broken, without even giving us the chance to listen to it.

When Paolo Virno35 puts forward the social virtuosity of pianist Glenn Gould as a model, which virtue have we to consider? The peerless genius, capable of constructing absolute worlds on the basis of his interpretation of, for example, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or the same genius of social destruction who in Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser leads his closest colleague to suicide and the other friend to the lowest form of writing? Or is it a question, instead, of that other Glenn Gould, who managed to value the awkward nature of his dexterity, the damage his fingers caused to the democracy of technique, and who abandoned the space of representation of the concert hall in order to transmit his music, technology and craftsmanship being indiscernible, through recordings alone?

In actual fact, it wasn’t just a matter of making use of the symbolic potential of the record, of taking the relationship between democratic circulation and a marvellous fetish for increasing audiences as exemplary, or even of abusing, as has been abused, the political potential of such a popular element and of introducing slogans and propaganda for good

causes. All that was involved, of course, but also contributing rigorous language, critical interweaving, a questioning of work itself, a political event. Were it not so, what meaning would it have to put a collection of album covers together at precisely the moment these supports, the covers of LPs, cassettes and CDs, are beginning to disappear? What example of a tool would they now be, when with these supports a thing of the past, the task shifts to other shared forms of relating and communicating? Faced with the museum that contains collections of junk of all kinds, it is hard not to repeat Mairena’s dictum, “We praise what we lose”.

In 1968 Richard Hamilton designed the sleeve of the double LP The Beatles, known as The White Album36 on account of its plain white image. He was contacted through gallery owner Robert Fraser – the same person who appears in police custody with Mick Jagger in another famous work by Hamilton – who had previously convinced Peter Blake and Jann Haworth to put together the famous cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.

Hamilton had it easy, since he already knew the commercial workings and iconic expansion involved in the Lonely Hearts Club Band record.

In this instance it wasn’t a question of operating with the music – such as the contamination between psychedelia, carnival and image denoted in Blake’s work – since the operational framework had already been transcended. The cover of the record did not function, now, in relation to the music, but in relation to the other record sleeves that came out during that year and in relation to the general iconography prevailing in pop culture. Thus, this image without an image – the first design proposed the mark left by a coffee cup, later on by the stains of apple pulp – the white record identified by just its serial number, would again drag the ethereal music – a set of songs without any relationship to each other, since the group had ceased to exist – towards the concrete, taking it in the direction of the iconic artefact that had ceased to be. Hamilton didn’t even listen to the record

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before proposing his cover. Its visual impact even contributed to the legend of Charles Manson and his demented crimes. As it is, The White Album is the album of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-LaDa”, but also of “Helter Skelter”, “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9”.

17. Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008.

This text is an enlarged version of the one published in Diedrich Diederichsen, Jean-Ives Bosseur, Mark Jamieson and Pedro G. Romero, Vinil. So i col.leccionisme. Barcelona: MACBA / Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2006.

20. Antonio Campillo, Contra la economía. Granada: Comares, 2001.

1. Colectivo Situaciones, Mal de Altura. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón/UNIA, 2005.

2. Ivo Supicic, “Sociología musical e historia social de la música”, Papers, no. 29, Barcelona, 1988.

3. José Antonio González Alcantud, El rapto del arte.

Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002.

4. William Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg, 1996.

5. Einstürzende Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture.

Herne: Mute Records, 1983.

6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

7. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991.

8. Jorge García, Jazz gráfico. Valencia: IVAM, 1999.

9. Albert Ayler and others, and Michael Snow, 1016 New York Eye and Ear Control. New York: ESP-Disk, 1966.

10. Juan Hidalgo and Antonio de Gregorio, Tamarán. Milan: Cramps Records, 1974.

11. Juan Hidalgo, De Juan Hidalgo, 1957-1997. Gran Canaria: CAAM, 1997.

12. Dominique Fernandez, La Rose des Tudor. Paris: Julliard, 1976.

13. Gilles Deleuze, Derrames, entre el capitalismo y la esquizofrenia. Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2005.

14. Víctor Gómez Pin, La escuela más sobria de vida.

Madrid: Espasa, 2002.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner. Edinburgh & London: T.N. Foulis, 1911.

16. Clément Rosset, Le Principe de cruauté. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988.

18. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

19. Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology 1937-39.

Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

21. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

22. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. New York: Viking Press, 1974.

23. Adolfo Marín, La nueva música. Barcelona: Teorema, 1984.

24. The Residents-Pore Know Graficcs&Rex Ray, Commercial Album. San Francisco: The Cryptic Corporation, 1980.

25. Félix J. Santana, Un paso atrás por la serie Gong de Movieplay. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2001.

26. Peter Szendy, Tubes. La Philosophie dans le juke-box.

Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008.

27. Karl Marx, Capital. Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 35.

London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996.

28. Joan Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos, 1961.

29. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

30. Corpus Barga, Los pasos contados. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1986.

31. Karl Marx, Capital. Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 35.

London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996.

32. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics.

Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

33. Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin, escritor revolucionario. Buenos Aires: Inter.zona, 2005.

34. Hugo Ball, Critique of the German Intelligentsia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

35. Paolo Virno, Virtuosismo y revolución. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2003.

36. The Beatles-Richard Hamilton, The White Album.

London: Apple Records, 1968.

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Annika Strรถm

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Personal Delivery

Jonathan Griffin

Guitar slung low, legs spread wide apart, neck craning up towards the microphone, the young man screws his features into an expression that looks like something between grief and sexual ecstasy. He sings:

“I - will be - the one - to turn you on!

On the bed I - will be - the one - tonight.”

Between the assembled bar crowd and the shallow, six-inch high stage, in front of clusters of people clutching bottles of beer and raising their voices to the ears of their friends, in front of other people who stare expressionlessly at the singer, surrounded by movement and noise, stands the singer’s mother, holding a video camera which she points at her son for the whole duration of his performance.

No one seems to find this strange, or embarrassing, or worthy of comment.

This was a small concert that I saw just two weeks ago, but I’ve wondered many times before: what is it about the special zone of performance that allows us to observe such extraordinary heights of emotion and vulnerability in strangers – or even, sometimes, in our loved ones – without flinching or turning away in shame and embarrassment? Normal rules of privacy and discretion no longer seem to apply. The peculiarly distancing effect of a stage, and of the dissipation into a crowded room of words that, anywhere else, would be troubling or provocative, is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon. It has become so normalized in our culture, however, that most people no longer even notice it. In its contemporary form, it is a structure that rises from the popular music of the past half-century, but it also has foundations in theatre, in Spoken Word Poetry, Live Comedy and Conceptual art. Annika Ström makes art that exploits our familiarity with its conventions in order to thrive on its strangeness.

Annika Ström, Ten New Love Songs, 1999

Sometimes she sings songs. The songs are not dissimilar to many pop songs, in that they are mostly delivered in the first person and are addressed to an unspecified “you”. Whatever their lyrical content – “It’s my fault”, “I get so sad”, or “I didn’t do anything wrong”, for instance – we cannot help, because of their form and because of what we know about songs that start with “I” and end in “you”, interpreting them as being about relationships.

In other ways they are nothing like pop songs. Ström does not perform these songs with a band, but accompanies her own voice with the preset chords and rhythms of a small electronic keyboard. She rarely occupies a stage, preferring instead to stand on the same floor as her audience, and she usually finds herself singing in art galleries. Sometimes people don’t even notice her at first; at one particularly busy private view, Ström recalls, only the security guard heard her while everybody else continued chatting. The minimalist delivery of these songs is, in part, due to the fact that Ström does not consider herself – nor has any ambition to be – a musician. Her musicianship is aggressively amateur, not in a punk way but more akin to the intimate tradition of folk songs. But it is also shaped by the formal conventions of Conceptual art, which, by and large, is less concerned with technical virtuosity than resourceful autodidacticism.

Another strand of Ström’s artistic output, her text works, fit more squarely into the aesthetic category of Conceptual art. They consist of phrases, normally no more than a few words, transcribed in a neat, sans-serif font onto sheets of paper or, occasionally, onto a wall. She rarely uses punctuation or capital letters except for the word “I”. Although their words are different to Ström’s songs, they often have the feeling of song titles or lyrics. Please help me. All your dreams have come true. I love to live but not with me. What these phrases share with pop songs in general is their combination of emotional directness and impersonal ambiguity. For instance, when the text says “I”, does that mean

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Annika? If so, when she sings “you”, does she mean us? We hope not, but the possibility for such intimate personal address is troubling and elevates the work beyond the cerebral chilliness of the art that it formally resembles.

Ström’s text works are also comparable to the idiom of the pop song (though perhaps not Ström’s own songs) because of the distance that their formal constraints – their font, their size, their concision – place between them and us, the audience. The hot words are insulated by their cool presentation, not unlike the cordon sanitaire where the stage meets the auditorium in a performance venue. However, in her texts this membrane is only partially effective. In certain pieces, Ström uses humour to punch little holes in it, as with a modest-sized text that announces itself to be a “major work”, or the one that says Excuse me but I need to lie down here and think about my next piece of art. In this case and in many others, she uses the text to talk about itself, and to undermine the surety of its own pronouncements.

A performance or an artwork grows extremely powerful when it acknowledges the limits of its own frame. If it allows its subject to talk about itself objectively – from outside the frame, as it were – it effectively appears to remove that frame altogether. For instance, when Kanye West raps “I’m on TV talkin’ like it’s just you and me” he implies that now it is just us and him. Sometimes this objectivity can become the subject of the work itself: Ström has made a video of people talking about other videos by her that they have either been in or cut out of, and a sound piece in which she describes other exhibitions she has made. Where, really, is the artist in all this?

In a recent work, Ström disappears from view, and dissolves the distancing structure of the stage – real or metaphorical – altogether. The Upset Man was a performance devised for her exhibition From the Community Hall, in Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin, 2010. For the exhibition, Ström had built a stage, or rather a life-sized sculpture of a stage, on which she had displayed

some of her work and Swedish textiles, and on the back of which was written the script of a heated conversation between a couple. At an unannounced moment in the exhibition, an actor began to speak into his phone, becoming more obviously distraught as the conversation went on. He was performing the script written behind the stage, but he did not ever venture onto the stage itself. The man appeared not to acknowledge the boundaries of his performance at all; despite the quietness of the gallery visitors around him, he loudly continued his conversation as if completely oblivious to his surroundings.

The effect for the confused members of the audience was profoundly embarrassing. At first, it was embarrassing because the man (who they assumed to be a regular gallery visitor) had become a performer unintentionally; a private exchange was being enacted in public, and the man was so engrossed in his personal situation that he ceased to be aware of his context. The failure to see oneself objectively (like when you have food on your chin or your trouser flies are undone) is embarrassing for those around you, precisely because it is not for you. As the performance continued, and people realized that the man was in fact an actor (perhaps when they remembered the script on the back of the stage), it remained uncomfortable because the normal conventions of performance were not being followed. Gradually, an unspoken consensus formed that it was appropriate to be silent and still, and to listen to the conversation, but the man still refused to acknowledge his proper role as a performer. When he finally hung up the phone, the crowd clapped to re-establish their distance from the proceedings, and to put space between themselves and him.

Ström has said that all her art, whatever its nature, is embarrassing in one way or another.

She doesn’t say for whom, but it is clear that the embarrassment of the performer and of the audience is closely intertwined. Ten Embarrassed Men was the title of a work Ström made for the 2010 Frieze Art Fair, in London. It seems strange

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Annika Strรถm working on This is a song for you, for you, but you will never hear it. CAAC, 2011. Photo: Guillermo Mendo

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Jonathan Griffin. Reflexiรณn personal a propรณsito de la obra de Annika Strรถm

Annika Strรถm, I Am in Love, 2004

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to call it a performance, although that is what it was, for the men were actors and they were playing to an audience, even through (especially through) pretending not to. A group of ten identically, blandly dressed men shuffled in a tight group through the bustling crowds of the art fair. Some stared at the floor; others hid their faces behind their hands; all generally avoided eye contact with passers-by who looked intently at everything, many of whom were also hoping to be looked at themselves.

An art fair is not a place for the scopophobic.

Things fight for visual attention on all sides – not just pictures and objects but faces and bodies.

Equivalents between finance, power and (the predominantly male) pleasure in looking are easy to draw. That heterosexual male collectors enjoy having images of female bodies on their walls is no secret, and art fairs are always packed with work explicitly catering for male taste. A comparable dynamic also plays out in traditional modes of performance – theatre and cinema, but music too – in fact whenever an audience is permitted to watch other people on stage from the security of a darkened auditorium. Sigmund Freud, in his essay “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), asserted that voyeurism is unhealthy because the scopophilic does not admit the object of his desire into his sexual satisfaction; he is insulated against intimacy, and takes only the image of the other person (through looking) against her will.

Voyeurism does not map quite so neatly onto the kinds of performance I’m discussing, however. After all, performers, whether singers, actors, comedians or athletes, not only submit to the gaze of the audience but actively thrive upon it. Typically, their exhibitionism nullifies the unpleasanter associations of their being watched. Ström’s work, however, tends to distort and invert these dynamics in order to disrupt the comfort of the conventional viewing space. In The Upset Man, for instance, the actor is seeking the attention of the audience before they even realize they are an audience; instead, they believe (at least at first) that they are observing

this deeply personal and traumatic scenario without the man’s consent. And that is both captivating and shaming for them. Something similar happens with Ten Embarrassed Men, except that in this case the actors seem actively to want to evade the attention of those people around them. That in itself makes them an object of curiosity, especially in an art fair.

When Ström records herself singing for the soundtracks to her videos, as with Ten New Love Songs (1999), she sounds as if she’s singing to herself. It’s not the first time that a performer has pretended not to be performing at all, as we’ve just seen. But it does confuse any associations we might make between the singer and the extrovert impulse. The problem with extroverts, generally speaking, is that they are insincere; they will say or do something just to get a reaction, rather than because they mean it.

In order for a singer such as Ström to convey the sincerity of her words, she must deliver them in a way that is emphatically introverted. Is then this quietness, this modest way of sharing, also an act? The answer must be that yes, in a way it is.

But it makes no sense to describe Ström as insincere, any more than we would call a Method actor a faker. (In fact she herself jokingly admits that she takes the stereotype of the tormented artist suffering in her studio to ridiculous lengths.) The opposite is true: Ström is concerned with finding ways to make her sincerity conveyable to a deeply cynical audience. Perhaps it is most valuable to think of Ström’s art as being about sincerity. Pushing this thought further, it seems that throughout her work, one is, in every instance, made aware of the vehicle for such sincerity: language. It is the problems of communication, and of the inadequacies of language in conveying personal experience, which Ström’s work brings into the light.

It is never wise to dwell too much on biography, but it is worth noting that Ström is a Swedish artist who has lived outside the country of her birth for the last twenty years. This displacement places her at a remove from both her native tongue and her adopted, second

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language (English – which, like many people around the world, she first encountered through the lyrics of pop songs). Sometimes, her texts handle language awkwardly, and sometimes Ström’s foreignness becomes a strategy of confusion, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

(She has noted that when she showed people her text piece This work refers to Joseph Kosutt, she sensed them wondering whether she knew she’d spelt his name wrong.)

Central to her experience as a non-native speaker, however, is her vivid awareness of those things that cannot be said. Often this is for linguistic reasons; All my dreams have come true (2004) is a video of her parents struggling with the translation of the work’s title into English, a

Annika Ström, Dirk the Stand In, 1997

phrase that is apparently not so commonly used in Sweden. In other cases, the untranslatability of words is down to cultural or social factors.

Ström notes that, while the English words “I love you” are bandied about so often that now they are almost meaningless, in Sweden, to say “jag älskar dig” is almost forbiddingly heavy (the phrase is still relatively unscathed by popular culture, and so is hesitatingly used even in the most intimate circumstances).

When I first saw Ström’s pink and orange text piece Wait, I need to think about these words, I took it for a clever, ironic comment about voids, about the facileness of most artistic products and the pressures of creativity. Now I realize that it is absolutely sincere.

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Ruth Ewan

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Smash Hits

Chris Fite-Wassilak I met Fang when I was looking for buskers. I went to an event at the Southbank where I spotted him and went up to him as I thought he looked quite interesting. He took part in Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, and during that I got to know him a bit.

For his audition he came in and sang Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”, it was amazing. He thinks the Fang Sang project turned him into a local celebrity, but he was already a celebrity, he’d done that for himself. He’d taken this name Fang, actually changing his name to Fang by deed poll, it says it on his bank cards and stuff. He’s created this amazing identity for himself, wearing a set of false teeth in his ear, and incredibly rude things on his t-shirt. He was a front man in a band for ages and used to wear ladies underwear on stage. He says the gods named him Fang before time existed. I don’t know when he changed his name, he’d never give you a straight answer on something like that, he doesn’t tell people how old he is or what his real name is.

We did an open mic night after the Fang Sang project; some students from the Byam Shaw School of Art sang, and Fang sang the tune of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” mixed with the lyrics of “Anarchy in the U.K.”, so it was “Craving Anarchy”, and it just did something really weird, it was so much better than any of these mash-up remixes, it was really beautiful. We were packing up when one of the young librarians said, “I’d like to sing a song.” He sang “Ain’t No Sunshine”, it was really surprising in such an unlikely situation. Some of Fang’s old bandmates came as well, he hadn’t seen them in 20 years, they performed together.1

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Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007.

Photo: Thierry Bal

“Wurlitzer really smashes them!” the advertisement exclaims exuberantly, while a man hefts a sledgehammer over his head down on the splintered shards of what used to be a jukebox. In an action and a forthright promise almost unthinkable today, the company gleefully make this guarantee, to “enable Wurlitzer Music Merchant everywhere to make more money”. In 1938, the emphasis was the future, on inventions, innovations and improvements imminently arriving; part of their self-perception of integrity was to simply destroy any jukebox models that had been superseded. They openly promote their violent destruction of the past; today, it seems taunting and ludicrous to willingly erase these cultural artefacts. Their clerical decision tells the story they want to present: that every Wurlitzer you encounter will be a new one, the latest model to the highest standards. They happily disclose the mechanisms through which they enforce the narrative. But behind that is the sound of thousands of destroyed jukeboxes.

“Conscious tinkering and remaking is only a small part of the shaping of the past. When we look closely at the construction of past time, we find the process has very little to do with the past at all and everything to do with the present. Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They make other areas show finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kinds of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds.”2 It is the “noisy silences” that help inform Ruth Ewan’s practice. Hidden corners, suppressed figures, and forgotten facts from the past make some of the starting points for her work. These cultural moments are reanimated and re-placed in the present, often as a series of actions, events and performances,

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which then curiously branch in two diverging but interrelated directions. On one hand, they work on an impersonal, historical level. Dealing with archives and records, her practice seems to work against the grain, throwing up the incongruous and unexpected, things unfamiliar to us in the present. Not so much about explicit suppression or subversion, there is more the sense of things that could or should have been better remembered, or might have had more importance. This is the strongly historiographic element to her work, her research which informs a broad structural critique. It exposes a similarly violent, but quieter, version of Wurlitzer’s operations. In seeing these forgotten words and marginalized figures, we can become aware of the forces of institutional amnesia, of the undisclosed mechanisms that allow us to see these things in the first place. Exposing these structures, this aspect of Ewan’s practice questions how dominant histories are created, and how other stories are both actively and passively allowed to be forgotten.

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Wurlitzer advertisement, 1938

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One of the buskers was called Anna-Maria Tkacz, an IT programmer who had been a junior accordion champion as a kid. When she won, she was like, “Well, what do I do now?” She put her accordion away in the attic. When she saw the advert asking for buskers, she said she’d always wanted to busk but she’d never had the confidence. So she decided to do it, and she got her accordion out. She hadn’t touched it for 15-20 years. She told me a bit about the history of it; it has such an odd place, a completely anachronistic thing. It’s mentioned in literature placed in the wrong time period; it wasn’t actually patented until late 19th century, but it appears in things like “Pirates of the Caribbean”, which is supposed to be set in the 18th century. My mum told me, after I’d completed the busking project, that she’d found out that her uncles, who were Italian immigrants to Scotland, busked on the streets of Glasgow with accordions. That’s how they made their money.

Loads of the buskers who took part in Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? still sing the “Ballad of Accounting” song. One of them said, “I only know three songs, this is number four!”

Rachel from Artangel, who commissioned and managed the project, was at a squat party in Camden a few months ago, an open mic event, and someone had said, “I was involved in this project a few years ago...”, gave this little introduction and then played the song, so it’s still germinating. Some natural collaborations came up as well on the rehearsal days. There’s no busker’s organization where people can come together, loads of buskers are quiet loner types anyway. Even on the underground network, the buskers don’t know each other even though some have been playing on the underground for thirty years. Then, all of a sudden, they’re in this one room together, so they started performing together. There was an amazing African drummer and this young vocalist who got together to do their version of the song and they got offered a gig when they were out performing.

Working in ambiguous opposition to the broad historical sweep of Ewan’s work is the punctuation of irrevocably intimate moments.

Her carefully researched and constructed actions and installations stop at some point, to give way to melodies that stir up rousing emotions, or coincidences of accidental discovery. The utopian, socialist dream might be at the heart of many of the figures and historical moments she explores, but in being replaced in the present their political force is left open and ambiguous. If she creates structures within which to re-release these moments from the past, they are only activated and made living by moments of personal insight by those who participate and experience the projects. It is these personal moments of insight, connection, and reverberation that lie within each of her works, numerous but often hidden and unrecorded. It is a few of these moments I have collected and tried to let them be heard here.

“Thus the presences and absences embedded in sources (artefacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral nor natural.

They are created. As such, they are not mere presences or absences, but mentions or silences of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one “silences” a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing.

Mentions and silences are thus the active dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.”3 ---

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It is at the back of the Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, or maybe at the very front, that we find the song of “The Cutty Wren”.

Though its origins are unknown for certain, it is the song dated back the furthest in the Jukebox’s catalogue. The story, which has innumerable variations on its lyrics, tells of two men on their way to hunt for the diminutive wren, also known as the “king of birds”. It has become known as the first protest song, sung in association with the peasant’s revolt of June 1381. But like the song, the origins of this claim are elusive, themselves mythologized. In a pamphlet published in 1944, A.L. Lloyd, a writer and singer central to the folk revival of the 1950s, gave a brief history of folk protest music. “The Cutty Wren” is the very first song he mentions. With a dramatic and quite cinematic backdrop to the song, he says, “The outbreak of lawlessness which followed the dislocation of town and country life, with its consequent labour troubles, filled the green woods with outlaws and rebels. It was about this time that people began singing a song called ‘The Cutty Wren’... Pretty certainly this was originally a magic song, a totem song, which about this time took a strong revolutionary meaning.”4

I’ve known Fred for six years, he was only four when I met him. Fred and I spoke about the content of the song “The Cutty Wren”, and did some research into the Peasant’s Revolt. It was oddly appropriate, because Richard II, the King at that point, was fourteen years old and that’s one of the reasons the revolt happened. His tax men were trying to take control of things from this kid. Fred went off and did his own research, and got on with it. The day before the royal wedding in April, his primary school was having a “royal” party, and he said to his mother, “I don’t want to go to it, because I’m anti-monarchist”.

So he made a placard, and wore his ripped jeans as an act of rebellion. I spoke with him about the wren, what the symbol of the wren is, and how there’s some disagreement about what it means. He said he thought it represented the King.

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Ruth Ewan, A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, 2003 (ongoing project)

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I bought the first jukebox from a pub in Sunderland.

All the ones I’ve got from pubs really stink, of smoke.

You open them up and this smell just hits you. The jukebox in Seville, it’s the same, or a very similar model, to the one that’s in the Rover’s Return pub in the television soap-opera, Coronation Street. It’s a very British jukebox; when people from other countries see it, they say it looks like a cigarette machine. The thing with CD jukeboxes is that they actually don’t hold that much material, so I constantly have to edit. I could convert it to mp3, a digital jukebox, but then it’s changing the form. I quite like it being sort of in between technologies, it’s such an uncomfortable proposition, the CD. It’s like the digital and analogue joining up together. Sound Leisure from Leeds make the oddest models, they’ve not gone for that Americana diner bubble jukebox, they just do quite wild designs in their own way, or at least they did for a period in the 1980s-1990s. They’re still producing, but they do these digital jukeboxes that are centrally controlled and you can’t just add your own homebrew. That’s what someone called my CDs, “homebrew” CDs. At the New Museum the staff – particularly the security and cleaning staff – really enjoyed listening to it and all had their own favourite tracks. It was their piece of work, and when the museum opened really early in the morning the cleaners were cleaning the shop space and they’d turn it on to listen to it in the background. The New Museum kept it on after the Younger Than Jesus exhibition for another 6 months or so for the staff, because people at the front desk, and the security guys were like, “Yeah, Tool’s on there!” There was a whole section of songs about “Work”, so I hoped they’d be listening to union songs but they were probably just listening to Beyoncé.

In Escape the Overcode, Brian Holmes states that, “when a territory of possibility emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood, or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is simple denial, pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the landscape of mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions.”5 Within Ewan’s layered releases, resoundings, and reverberations, what comes forward is the attempt to give sound to these silences, to play them out loud so that these elaborations, differentiations, and breakthroughs might occur. Her work asks what we make of the potential when we quietly catch a few lyrics, humming words that carry something for us privately; can this moment also have a wider meaning? Ewan reposes the paradox of how a song can potentially mean something both historically and personally, on how it can resonate on both levels at the same time. It is at this juncture Ewan makes the space for a series of individual moments that gather to the possibility of an active, aggregate cultural meaning in the present.

1. All quotes in bold come from an interview between the artist and the author conducted on 2 May 2011.

2. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 69-70.

3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, quoted in Charlotte Line, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 196-7.

4. A.L. Lloyd, The Singing Englishman. London: Workers Music Association Ltd., 1944, pp. 7-8.

5. Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2009, p. 14.

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Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007

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Alonso Gil

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Libertarian Artist

Raj Kuter

I have no desire to usurp a title that is not my own, that of the art critic, even if this role can essentially be boiled down to “an honest exercise of the profession of seeing”, as Quico Rivas said in one of his deprecations back in the 1980s. I am here to speak of Loncho – or the artist Alonso Gil, if you prefer – and of his work, and what I have seen in it from the perspective of affinity. We have shared various artistic and libertarian adventures, no doubt all the more thrilling since Quico was there to complicate them: from the Salón del Carbón to Copilandia and Archivo Q., the free practice of art and the free circulation of ideas have been their primary common denominators. At the same time, I will also unravel the skein of a relationship that has a bearing on my chosen subject: that of art and flamenco as manifestations of an openly libertarian expressivity.

As in art, what is sung in flamenco music is a reconstruction of life – an unorganized life, with no agenda or message, that leaves traces and intuitions in its wake. Art has more to do with a process than with the usual objects we find hanging on walls or lying in dust-free display cases. For anarchy, too, the creative process, the quest, has always been more important than the end result,1 the finished work which, because it is finished, denies all the richness of its potential, all that it could have been and no longer is. With regard to flamenco, everyone knows that no two songs are alike and that a flamenco singer never sings the same copla in an identical manner. Flamenco song defies systematization and notation; traditional sheet music is technically incapable of capturing its nuances. Ever versatile, it is not repetitive and refuses to settle for mimesis, although for some time now the term improvisation has been missing from its vocabulary.

However, we can speak of experimentation and search. Loncho began his quest back in the 1980s, setting out on journeys of initiation to explore the Old Continent with his inseparable companions, the artists Federico Guzmán and Victoria Gil. His first German foray took him to

Hamburg and Munich; from there he moved on to Venice and then, accompanied by Esther Reguira, jumped across the pond to New York, where the two lived from 1994 to 1998.

“At the time, Robin Kahn and Kirby Gookin were working on the Disappearing Act project, thus called because all the works were ephemeral, they could be eaten and drunk." Loncho recalls.

“They also invited me to disappear, so they produced my alarm clock concert which I had originally presented in Ceuta in ‘97 as part of the Almadraba project. In New York I did it at the Bound&Unbound Gallery (...) I used two hundred speaking clocks that announced the time out loud... every hour, all in a display case and with visiting hours, so people could go hear the concert whenever it was convenient for them: Symphony of the American Dream.”

Later, in Mexico (between 1999 and 2001), Loncho experimented with magic mushrooms because he was interested in their ability to heighten perception and expand the senses.

He related his experiences in a text entitled Los Santitos y el ocio personalizado (The Little Saints and Personalized Recreation), which opened with the following words: “Journeys have always opened doors to new ways of seeing the world. (...) When you take a drug-induced trip, such as I took with magic mushrooms, the journey becomes an expedition and takes you to another place where perceptions differ from those found in the sphere of the experience of reality. / The best part is that those perceptions heighten the senses, and we begin to understand reality with other parameters. (…)

Because of this ability to create new and different images of the world… I decided to investigate with hallucinogens…”

His pupils grew more sensitive on these trips, with the probing capacity of one who intuits that reality has many facets. “The possible is part of the real”, as Rafael Barrett, that lost boy of the Generation of 1898 who became an anarchist in the Americas and embraced the struggle of the disinherited to reclaim their freedom, once said.

And he added, “Sooner or later, time will bring

Alonso Gil, Flasheados – Cree en las ruinas; pronto serán ruinas pintorescas (Flashed – Believe in the Ruins; Soon They Will Be Picturesque Ruins), 2003

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us the possible, and perhaps the impossible.”

“Art and anarchy all day long” is the formula proposed by Loncho, which can be summed up in: daily contact with the artistic act, noncompetitive games, presiding over or enriching every event in life.

Art operates in a similar way, through searching, combining and crystallizing, as a process that unveils hidden realities. And the artist is one who reveals the different possibilities.

Rimbaud granted poets the capacity to translate mystery into will (after freeing themselves of reason), but it was Isidore Ducasse, Count of Lautréamont – of whom Loncho painted a magnificent portrait which he showcased in the exhibition 6 asaltos 6 (6 Rounds 6) at the Suffix Gallery in Triana, Seville, in 2008, converted into a boxing ring for a pictorial combat with Miguel Cabeza – who understood that art is not the exclusive property of the artist but that it is made for everyone. The widespread rumour of flamenco is nothing less than the shared life of humanity, and the sole task of the singer (or the artist) is to pass it on to those who have not already heard.

Loncho says, “I, like many of you, am an artist who works 24 hours a day; I work even when I sleep”. Art is not a 9-to-5 job where one can clock in and out. The artist’s workday never ends. And although anyone who creates by inventing is theoretically an artist, art requires a constant sensibility and observation, a profound appreciation of things with finely-tuned perceptive skills – concentration in dispersion, centrifugation.

In a text about Alonso Gil written on the occasion of his impressive 2006 exhibition/ installation La celda grande (The Big Cell) at the MEIAC in Badajoz, rich in libertarian irradiations, Quico Rivas accurately described Loncho as “a worker who paints (...) with the attitude of an alchemist: the artifex who, in the esoteric tradition, is both demiurge (creator) and technites (manual labourer)”. And Quico called upon Arturo Schwarz, friend and cataloguer of Marcel Duchamp, to remind us of the four convergent paths – Surrealism, tantra, alchemy

and anarchism – which are found combined in Alonso Gil’s working method: “The alchemist, like the artist, is the archetype of the rebel not only because he seeks the youth of the gods and their power to create, but because he has understood that youth is a creator, and hence that revolution and youth are two aspects of the same matter. Just as the mind is the most evolved form of matter, so revolution is the most evolved form of youth. Revolution is man’s youth...”

I believe that Loncho, the libertarian artist, knows that youth is not necessarily diminished by the degradation of matter. Since boyhood he has worked to pass that revolutionary, critical, playful, effective and gratuitous creative activity on to others. And he sings as he works, as my readers will soon discover.

The Singing Artist Some artists, though not musicians themselves, research and work with sound as just one more component of their work, attempting to place it in a new aesthetic dimension. Some of Alonso Gil’s projects fit this description, although I would not say that he is a “sound artist” in the usual sense of the term. He is also interested in the latest artistic trends that seek to create multisensory effects. However, from my perspective I would venture to say that he is more an artist who can be heard – in other words, a singing artist.

Allow me to explain. My first impression of Loncho’s painting was that it sings – and how.

I am not saying that Loncho has ever deliberately attempted to “toot his own horn”. Often combined with photo printing techniques, his painting, with its amalgamated waves of flowing hues (garden greens, bellicose pinks, aquamarines, turquoises and sky blues) or explosive, dazzling, unheard-of colours (new pigments and phosphorescent tones), sing with remarkable joy while also encouraging us to view the world critically. Happily, the artist has long since ceased to be that dark figure tormented by

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his inner demons, and creation is no longer torture. His friend Federico Guzmán “mentioned a picture [by Loncho] in which the sprites seem to ooze from every pore; the portrait of Silvio, painted like a glowing ember. (...) Oranges, greys, greens, yellows and the colours of plant-fuelled fire, alight and radiating warmth like a blazing hearth”. And then we have the large-format graffiti series dedicated to the familiar iconography of our popular culture, Graffiti Celestial (Heavenly Graffiti, 2008), featuring the faces of Camarón, Vicente Amigo and Fosforito which, because they were created on the streets of Córdoba’s working-class neighbourhoods, also suggested other ways of articulating everyday experiences.

Music and songs whose magic stimulates growth, a magic that can never be entirely extinguished. In theory, we do not have any tool for associating a sound or tone with a specific colour. But other underground traditions tell us of synesthetic relationships and analogies. If music is, as Langer asserted, is “a tonal analogy of emotive life”,2 then the same is true of painting.

However, we belong to a generation (or whatever you want to call it) that grew up to the rhythm of pop, punk and techno music, and many of us formed bands of an inventive and experimental (but not commercial) nature, blending vibrations with theatrics, imbued with rock animalism and happening-esque gesturality in equal measure as an antidote against the overspecialization of a society that categorizes, delimits task and channels preoccupations (and whose prototype is the expert in his most aberrant disciplinary specialization). Many have dismissed this activity as a mere hobby or even an extravagance, arguing that the artist could only really shine or be a true artist in one facet of his life. It seems to me that the artist has many facets, and although he may invest more time in one – or even two or three – they are all complementary. This comes as no surprise to Loncho, who is skilled at using what we might basically call tools.

Alonso Gil, Silvio, 2008

In all of this there is a large element of fun, which is nothing to sniff at; if we didn’t have fun, what would become of us in this life? As Nietzsche warned us, in our world the “spirit of gravity” has progressively displaced the “gay science” – in other words, fun science. Laughter as a critical form of direct action, as Quico Rivas proposed, is found in many of Loncho Gil’s works. In a performative line we have the example of Chigate, a masked band of musicians and deejays which, according to Loncho, was primarily an amusement: we turned the machines up as high as they would go, we recorded the interminable sessions, and then we performed for a live audience. The whole idea was to make noise and use the environment.

A very different kind of distortion takes us to the urban intervention that Loncho and Francis Gomila presented at Madrid Abierto in 2007 under the title Guantanamera. The work has resurfaced in his show at the Carthusian Monastery in Seville this year, which offers a

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Alonso Gil and Francis Gomila, Guantanamera, 2007

selection of past creations and new productions.

With an evident social and political preoccupation, the artist reflects here on the use of music as an instrument of torture. The title refers to the maximum-security prison at Guantanamo, a place not of this world that operates outside the framework of international law. His next intervention in the public space, the more kitsch and convention-defying Tunning cofrade (2008), was a mobile project that involved driving around the city of Seville in a tuned car – a car modified to the user’s liking and equipped with a powerful sound system which he used to blast recordings by the different bands of the religious Holy Week brotherhoods that had been remixed and spun together with flamenco, electronic music, punk, rock and techno.

Montage is undoubtedly the great invention of the 20th century, used in every field from film and photography to visual and sound art. Much of the best contemporary art is based on

transformations and distortions. The artist uses a variety of media (paint, video, etc.) and mixes them up, experimenting with the formal possibilities to achieve a broader expressivity.

Imbued with an irremediable social engagement, Alonso Gil understands that these media are weapons. Painting like a man entering the ring, with boxing gloves or the handled palette knife of the working-class artist, the artifex... Loncho engages in many different games of equivalency with an attitude that is halfway between ludic and Luddite. Swinging back and forth between formal research, the modes and manners of unveiling, and its function as a “social sensor”, art acts as an antidote against the common place; it has a liberating power of inertia. So does flamenco, in the sense that it overflows with a contagious creative rhythm that is caught by all who see or hear it. Music in its tribal sense, an expression of collective merrymaking. And what is a party without music? I’d really like to know.

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Flamenco and the Visual Arts Throughout the two centuries of its existence, flamenco’s relationship with the visual arts has been less intense and productive than most people think. Painting, engraving, poster art and photography saw flamenco primarily as a theme that they could use to their own ends, recreating characters, scenes and stages. Street musicians and travelling flamenco artists were the protagonists of the drawings that Doré produced on his trip to Spain in 1862. There are many other examples of this folksy illustration, which began when flamenco song moved from the neighbourhood greengrocers’ to the taverns, and from there to the cabarets, eventually spreading across the peninsula and throughout the world.

From the moment Alonso Gil first settled in Seville, his eye was drawn to the figure of the flamenco hustler or street performer, and this curiosity was re-modernized in a dual sense.

Born in the province of Badajoz, one of the natural boundaries of flamenco territory, Loncho’s interest in capturing the intangible aspect of this atmosphere was more of an innate characteristic than something acquired over time. This was not the Romantic quest for exoticism – conveniently staged with background and props – that so appealed to European travellers. On the contrary, Loncho was determined to invert the traditional perspective.

In Flasheados (Cree en las ruinas; pronto serán ruinas pintorescas) (Flashed [Believe in the Ruins; Soon They Will Be Picturesque Ruins]), a video shot in 2003 in Seville, stigmatized and stereotyped as the prototypical tourist town, he revealed the contrast between this “collective” of foreigners – the tourists – and other kinds of foreign presences in our cities, such as immigrants, refugees or exiles.

While the quintessential predator that is the tourist entertains himself by consuming a standardized cultural difference, Loncho turns his attention to both the foreigners and to the displaced natives, those who have been overlooked or forgotten. These have lost their

exotic appeal and ability to spark curiosity, and despite their authenticity they are an endangered species because there is no room for them in the spectacle of the cultural industry. I am referring to the outskirts, the marginalized, far removed from fashion circles and the international art world. Other set-ups. If flamenco is a vital exhalation before the blinding spotlights of the stage, then Loncho is determined to explore its ordinary, everyday space, particularly the part we call making a living – earning one’s breadand-butter is such a tiresome, tricky thing.

Seville has seen its share of these ways of life, or of joyful survival in an increasingly hostile and precarious world, of this back-alley scheming.

On its way through the Puerta de la Carne, a traditional gathering place for rogues, rascals and beggars since the days of Cervantes, now gentrified thanks to urban renewal plans tainted by the inevitable suspicion of speculation and overrun by the hordes of tourist terrorism, the “Orchestra of Miracles” and its daily shining moments provide ample proof of this.

In this vein, An Error Occurred (2001) offers us a video recording of the performances of several street musicians who present their “expertise” to anyone who wants to listen (though most would rather shut them up). It is generally assumed that music “aims for the ear” – well, this kind aims for the pocket. “The Orchestra of Miracles,” writes Quico Rivas, “is made of up of those musicians whom we often give a few pence, not so that they will play but so that they will go away, not so that they will sing but so that they will be quiet, for the specular vision they offer us is often quite unbearable.”

“The gypsies have always gotten I-don’tknow-how-much from I-don’t-know-what, this from that”, say Jorge Cano and Carlos Simón, the heartland friends who broadcast La Voz de tus Muertos each week, a very jondo flamenco radio show. Flamenco song must be inspired; the important thing is for the song to come out as it is. When flamenco is sung to please an audience, it becomes entertainment. When it is sung to lighten the workload, balancing out a physical

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activity with an emotional one, it is a situational art form, the product of life experience rather than of performance. Ruskin defined art as the expression of man’s joy in his work, and this is precisely what La felicidad en el trabajo (Joy in Work, 2008) is all about. As its title indicates, this documentary-style video installation addresses the idea of finding joy in work through flamenco song. This work, produced in Andalusia and Extremadura, shows (on eight monitors with simultaneous images but independent soundtracks) people in various professions who sing as they go about their work. The song grows fainter as the muscles concentrate on the task at hand. The song’s rhythm matches that of the manual labour; the power conveyed by the former drives the latter.

It is to this spontaneously emerging rhythmic beat of language and labour, where creation is constancy, tradition born in the fluctuating memory of what has already been seen and practiced, that Loncho dedicates these “‘flamenco video songs’, these (visual) essays of air and beat” in the words of Pisco Lira, who reminded us that the unpremeditated simplicity of the gesture in work and its shadow are by no means unfamiliar to the artist. At the same time, Loncho invites us to notice “the diverse ruses of subversion, the different methods of fending off discouragement”.3

Appearances and Disappearances: Nomadic wanderings that take us back to the beginning, constant reinvention The time of art can be compared to that of life as a journey. A process that the artist pursues in solitude – in the studio, in the lab, at the workshop – and in solidarity – on the street, on the road, out of doors – to the ebb and flow of encounters, needs and loves. A time that has more to do with the wanderings of the nomad than with the regulated intervals of the stopwatch.

A time on camelback. A very different kind, because it is imposed, is the frozen time in which

Los abandonados (The Abandoned Ones) hope to come into focus once more. This photographic series created by Alonso Gil for PHotoEspaña’09 was a product of the time he spent with the Sahrawi people at the refugee camps of the Algerian Hamada in Tindouf, after participating in the Artifariti International Art Encounters in the Free Zone of the Western Sahara. To produce these almost ghostly photographs, Gil wreaked havoc on the chemical developing process, tinkering with the liquids and making sure to do a sloppy job on the fixation, in order to achieve fading and disappearing effects in the images. In a paradoxical and metaphorical way, this technique highlighted the disappearance of conflicts that make the power-that-be uncomfortable in the mass media.

Upon his return, Federico Guzmán, Loncho’s travelling companion on the sandy paths of the

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Sahara together with his sister and fellow artist Victoria Gil (who, by the way, is now presenting her portraits of Sahrawi friends sketched against a bright yellow background), said, “The trip [to the Sahrawi camps] was like moving towards a mirage that showed us a warped reflection of our society of ostentation, waste and ignorance. We passed through it and found among the Sahrawi people a joy, generosity and endurance in the face of adversity that we have long since forgotten. I am beginning to realize the value of the lesson that the Sahrawi taught us, and to understand that the road to freedom for the Sahara is the road to our own freedom.”

Flamenco, with its rich legacy, also speaks to us of the need to assert that those dead are not really dead, that they populate and inhabit, and that without them we would be a wasteland of plastic and shopping-centre glitz.

Loncho has just opened a new studio on a back street in the old Jewish quarter, very near the Puerta de la Carne where he lives and works.

After a long period spent shifting, coming, going and sharing on necessary nomadic wanderings that took him to the desert, it seems that the time has come to combine what he brought back from his latest travels and experiences, rediscovering his facet as an alchemist. Now we must look forward to discovering his developing process.

1. Quico Rivas, “Alonso Gil: El alquimista en su celda”.

Grazalema, Seville, Paris, December 2006 / January 2007.

2. S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner & Sons, 1953.

3. Francisco Lira, “La felicidad en el trabajo. El cante y los oficios: Quien canta su mal espanta. Sobre algunos tientos visuales de Loncho Gil”. Seville, La Carbonería, August 2008.

Alonso Gil, La felicidad en el trabajo (Joy in Work), 2008

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Matt Stokes

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No Way Back

Matthew Collin

Nervous, pure nervous. A twilit Victorian street in the Lace Market district of Nottingham, at that time still dour and ill-used, a few years away from gentrification. Fear and anticipation.

One of us is holding a couple of bottles of cheap supermarket champagne, the other, a small bag of white pills. A siren wails in the distance: we hold still for a second or two, then hurry across the road to the photographic studio in a disused textile factory where we’re about to hold our first illegal party. The summer of 1990, only a few days after parliament adopted new legislation to clamp down on outlaw raves.

Good timing...

Inside, a sweet surge of electronic noise as the needle falls on the first record – “LFO” by LFO – and when the bassline drops hard, shuddering through the white room, a feeling of relief and rising joy: it’s going to be alright. This is how it started, how it would always start.

The photo studio was a rather conventional venue by the standards of the time. After the Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene began to sweep through Britain in 1988 – “acid house”, we called it then, before it became known as the “rave scene” and then simply “dance culture” – people began to search for ever more outlandish places in which to hold illegal parties where they would not be bound by the strictures of Britain’s World War One-era licensing laws, which at that time dictated that most nightclubs must close by 2am. So they occupied derelict warehouses, farmers’ fields, aircraft hangars, film studios – anywhere to establish a temporary autonomous zone where time would be suspended in a blissful frenzy of noise, light and writhing bodies. In the case of the outlaw ravers documented in Matt Stokes’ Real Arcadia, a cave in the Lake District was transformed into a nocturnal Wonderland, something that one of them called “a nightclub in a mountain”, but which was so much more than that to many of those whose lives it touched.

Rave culture moved into spaces abandoned during the recession of the 1980s, when Britain’s manufacturing industries were devastated.

Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia (Archive), 2003 (ongoing)

Industrial towns in decline became techno meccas, like Blackburn, the focus of the illegal party scene in the North West due to its abundance of disused factories in which a sound system and lights could be quickly and cheaply installed. Locks cracked, power on, people in; and then in the morning a quick escape into the breaking daylight as if nothing had ever happened. The illegality was part of the thrill, and it felt like some kind of victory when the flash of blue lights didn’t bring the music to an untimely end.

Media reports in the late 1980s likened the M25 motorway which encircles London, to a kind of carousel of oblivion, a merry-go-round from which ravers would spin off, hurtling down country lanes, towards parties deep in the Home Counties, only discovering the secret location at the last minute through frantic calls to the organizers from roadside telephone boxes (at that time, mobile phones were relatively new, expensive and rare). It was hard to match the experience of rolling to the peak of some rural hill, to see lasers strafing the darkened skyline and hear the soft thunder of sub-bass rhythms; a fairground big wheel spinning its glow through the darkness, behind it the black tower of speakers already pulsing with sound… and the promise of a long night’s journey into dawn…

But while the huge, spectacular events, with their “top DJs”, “blinding lasers” and “turbo sound systems” (as the technicolor flyers used to say) were staged close to Britain’s biggest cities, people were doing things for themselves on a much more personal and altruistic level all around Britain, putting on small parties which were often free, or subsidized by drug sales. Like the Cave Raves, they didn’t achieve national notoriety, although they became a vital focus for emerging alternative cultures in their areas. They were products of sheer enthusiasm, attempts to democratize metropolitan bohemia by taking electronic music and psychedelic drug culture into the heartland of the “beer monster” and the ritzy discotheque. Or so many thought at the time.

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Yet more parties took place in far less glamorous surroundings: the back rooms of pubs or high street nightclubs whose tacky décor and dodgy names still reflected their origins in pre-Ecstasy, six-pints-and-a-Bacardi-and-coke nightlife. When the Cave Crew weren’t raving in the quarry, they frequented the rather more traditional surroundings of places like the Stag’s Head pub in Bowness-on-Windermere. This was hardly unusual. People would drive for miles around the Midlands and the North West to pack into a glitzy discotheque called Shelleys in Stoke-on-Trent; a venue called The Osbourne in Manchester which looked like a working men’s club and became a notorious techno sweatbox known as The Thunderdome; even the first acid house club in Britain, The Project, was held at an unremarkable suburban “nitespot” in an unfashionable district of south London. In between the rave spectaculars, the party had to go on. Intoxicated by the moment, nobody wanted the music to stop – it felt somehow as necessary as a heartbeat, and just about anywhere would do. There seemed to be, as Hunter S. Thompson once said about 1960s California, madness at any hour, in any direction.

It was a time of profound optimism, and profound derangement. The names of some of the raves tell the story: Sunrise, Live the Dream, Fantazia, The Trip, Apocalypse Now. Normal rules seemed to be suspended – an impression heightened by drugs, youthful innocence and the sense of belonging to some kind of secret society. Stokes’ interviews for Real Arcadia capture comments which could have been made by so many others over the decade: “You know like when you were a kid and you go up to someone in the playground and you’d say ‘alright mate, what’s your name, what do you do, where do you come from...’ And that’s what it was like. There were no inhibitions whatsoever... everyone was on the same level, and everyone was really happy...” It was a feeling that many thought would last forever – although of course it could not and did not.

Rave culture was rooted in new technologies – musical and chemical – but it also sampled and remixed ideas, as well as sounds, from a variety of pop-cult sources: the Saturday Night Fever traditions of gay disco and the Amphetaminefuelled northern soul scene, the do-it-yourself ethics of punk, and vague hippy philosophies handed down from 1960s psychedelia (although cut loose from the protest politics of that era).

However, it could not help but reflect the time of its birth, at the high watermark of Thatcherite free-market materialism: this was an entrepreneurial culture which was energized by the small-time business activities of party promoters, record producers and drug dealers.

And yet while the rave scene enthusiastically embraced Margaret Thatcher’s urge to entrepreneurialism, it implicitly rejected her assertion that there was “no such thing as society”. It was driven by a deep and powerful desire not only for transcendence, but also for community: to be part of something greater, a feeling amplified by the empathyenhancing effects of Ecstasy. There was also a widespread desire for it to “mean something”, although nobody could really give a convincing explanation of exactly what it meant, and the search for meaning was in some cases little more than a human need to rationalize what seemed to be such a momentous experience. Hence some of the myths that grew up around Ecstasy, like the suggestion that it ended the football violence of the 1980s when loved-up hooligans from opposing teams began to hug each other at raves instead of slashing each other with razorblades, or the belief that it promoted multi-cultural tolerance.

Effectively, in the absence of any ideological gurus, people brought their own beliefs to the party, and saw the rave scene in terms of those beliefs. So it became home to some dedicated anarchists who believed it was part of a rebel crusade against the capitalist system, and to a few intrepid young Conservatives who saw it as an expression of radical libertarianism – as well as to many more who would speak vaguely about “sharing” and “togetherness” and “love”, about celebrating as one, beyond the British divides of

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Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia, 2003 (ongoing). Exhibition view

class, race and regional origins. However, perhaps for the majority of those involved, there was no attempt at analysis or any need for it: this was simply the most exciting thing that had happened to them in their young lives.

The spectacular rise of this new youth culture was hard to ignore, and inevitably the backlash started almost as quickly as the scene itself, with the first shock-horror newspaper headlines and reports of police raids appearing towards the end of 1988, only a year after the first acid house parties were held. After that, the outrage flowed in consecutive waves, following the traditional sequence of moral panics about renegade cults corrupting the minds of Britain’s youth. First the scandalized press despatches

and the calls for “something to be done”, followed by police action and government legislation. But it turned out that much of the agitated media coverage simply acted as an advertisement. All-night dancing, hypnotic rhythms, mind-warping chemicals: many found such sweet but forbidden fruits tempting indeed.

The police were initially caught unprepared by the strange stirrings in the countryside, but eventually they set up specially-equipped units to combat what they prosaically referred to as “pay parties”. The experience of the Cave Crew in the Lake District was not unusual: concerned reports in local newspapers and on regional television about the threat to young people’s

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safety, then the erection of police roadblocks – “We are not killjoys, we are trying to preserve life”, the words of the local police chief, were typical of the time – and finally the suggestion that the caves should be dynamited to put a stop to the madness. By 1997, parliament had passed three separate pieces of legislation aimed at curbing the wilder excesses of the rave scene.

When combined with the introduction of more liberal licensing laws, they contributed to both the ultimate commercialization of the scene as well as the radicalization of a small but dedicated outlaw fringe who even now continue to travel the roads staging illegal parties – although none of the new laws would halt the irrepressible growth of Britain’s drug culture.

And it was inevitable that any culture based on illegal drug use would have even more serious repercussions – legal, medical and psychological. Many people ended up with criminal records; everyone knew someone who had been arrested after being caught with a bag of pills, and those who thought they were simply helping friends to have a good night out soon realized that the law regarded them as drug dealers like any others. The fact that Ecstasy was illegal also attracted those who could organize large-scale imports of the drug: serious criminals, men with weapons and few scruples, and – as in the case of the Cave Raves – low-life thugs wielding baseball bats who wanted to make a little easy cash by using their muscle to “tax” illicit parties. Yet few wanted to talk about the criminal empires which were being built upon their pleasures.

The drug itself had its own complications too; although Ecstasy wasn’t addictive, for some people it represented an introduction to the wider world of recreational chemistry. Some ravers who chased the buzz a little too hard developed psychological problems – “lost it”, to use the slang of the time – and a few, endlessly seeking the next rush, became addicted to Heroin.

But then there was worse: some time around the start of the 1990s, it became clear that small but significant numbers of people were dying

after taking Ecstasy, mainly people in their teens or early twenties who thought they were about to have the time of their lives but ended up in the ground. Many ravers were reluctant to blame their beloved, life-affirming “happy pills”, pointing out that most of those who died had expired through heatstroke after not drinking enough water. But the fact remained that if they hadn’t gone out and taken Ecstasy, they would probably still be alive. Year by year, a little more innocence was lost. The story of the Cave Raves, again, serves as a kind of parable for these times: some of the people connected with the Lake District party crew have since served prison time. One is dead.

The dance scene reached its peak as a mass movement sometime in the mid-1990s. But apart from fuelling a mass drug culture in Britain which continued to grow even afterwards, its legacy remains hazy and difficult to assess, particularly for those who were involved. There is the music, of course, captured in hundreds of wonderful recordings and thousands more dreadful ones. There are the careers in pop culture and media which grew out of the scene. There was the development of computer-aided do-it-yourself creativity and spontaneous, ad hoc networking which fed into the obsessions of the internet age, while the technology used by outlaw raves was deployed with more serious intent by the environmental road-protest movement of the 1990s.

And yet even now, two decades after the first acid house record sounded its urgent call to action, the lingering question –“so what did it all mean?” – still evades an answer. “They were special times, really special times”, one of the Cave Crew says – but was that all that they were?

Many people went through life-changing experiences – they are the ones who still glow with nostalgia while talking about how they discovered new ways of seeing the world, found routes out of dead-end jobs, forged new friendships and relationships. But others will speak of mental illness, prison and death, and it’s no surprise that some of the people who

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Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia (Archive), 2003 (ongoing)

Stokes tried to contact for Real Arcadia simply didn’t want to talk about those times again: for whatever reason, they didn’t want to remember.

And then there are those who say it was nothing more than youthful hedonism, a necessarily limited period of liberty before entering the adult world of responsibilities and obligations.

But perhaps what it really “meant” can never be captured in words – and to do so would only devalue the intensity of that indefinable feeling.

Perhaps it was no more than a moment of pure communal abandon, lost in the music with no way back, transported into raptures beyond rational thought. Perhaps that, in itself, was more than we ever could have hoped for. © Matthew Collin 2007. Originally published in Matt Stokes: Lost in the Rhythm. Edinburgh: Collective Gallery and Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2007.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

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Matt Stokes, The Gainsborough Packet, 2009

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The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity

Will Hodgkinson

Humanity’s desire for spiritual meaning is so strong that, in the absence of religion, the prosaic aspects of life become sacred. One of these is folk music. Depending on your viewpoint, folk in Britain is either a tradition (ancient ballads from a pre-industrial past, rarely written down and passed on through oral history), a social purpose (the communion of singing songs and making music together) or a style (acoustic guitars, real ale, dysfunctional men with bladder issues). But folk music takes on a religious significance in a way that, say, Crazy In Love by Beyoncé doesn’t. I suspect this is because deep appreciation of it requires a leap of faith, which then leads to the application of dogma.

Having not been brought up in the Church, I’ve often wondered if today’s Christians really do believe that Mary was a virgin and that Jesus died, came down to Earth, danced around a bit and then went back up to Heaven again. You are asked to believe something rational thought tells you is entirely impossible. Empires are built and wars are fought defending such unbelievable beliefs. The folk world rarely reaches such levels, although the guitarist Bert Jansch did get chucked out of folk overlord Ewan MacColl’s Singers Club in the early 60s for playing an instrumental called Anji, but it can be similarly strident in defending what, essentially, doesn’t exist: authenticity.

There are two Holy Grails of authenticity in folk music. The first is the ancient ballad, written by nobody and fashioned from the elements. In reality, the ballads were the pop songs of their day and were written to entertain and make money, and have only become sacred as they gained the patina of age. They might carry gossip about a murder or an unwanted pregnancy in the village, eulogize heroes of the Napoleonic wars, or tell tales of ghost stories and supernatural happenings. Many started life on broadsides, the 16th to mid-19th century precursors to newspapers. The best have survived into the present because of the strength of their melodies and the beauty of

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their words, but not because they have any particular authenticity. One could guess that a great modern-day pop song like Rehab by Amy Winehouse will be a traditional ballad of the 22nd century because it gives a representation of our contemporary reality. These are the songs that, according to the great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, “lived in the minds of unlettered country men, who unknown to the squire and the parson were singing their own songs”.

The second Holy Grail is the traditional singer. This is the man or woman, ideally elderly, low born and living in the countryside, with a repertoire of ballads they learned at their parents’ knee. They might be farm-workers or gypsies and few will make any money out of singing, which is a natural outlet for daily expression. The argument is that someone like the late Shropshire stone-waller Fred Jordan is a traditional singer, while Maddy Prior of medieval folk-rock minstrels Steeleye Span is not – even if they sing the same songs – because the first is the real thing and the second is an entertainer.

This is a fantasy, albeit an attractive one.

Fred Jordan was a great entertainer, hence his appeal. The Scottish traveller Jeannie Robertson was one of the great ballad singers, frequently recorded by the BBC after the folklorist Hamish Henderson discovered her in Aberdeen in the late 50s, but her singing style got ever more theatrical as her fame grew. There’s an amazing depth of feeling to the way the mid-60s singer Anne Briggs approaches old tunes like Blackwaterside and She Moves Through the Fair, and the fact that she was a revival singer who didn’t grow up with these songs but discovered them in her late teens in no way lessens the power of her voice. There is no such thing as authenticity, and the folk world is full of rules about what you can and cannot do, in an attempt to preserve something that never existed in the first place.

The idea of folk music as a genre or culture really started in the mid to late 19th and early

20th century, when academics and classically trained musicians like Francis Child, Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams sought to save the songs of pre-industrial, rural Britain from extinction by notating them, using their melodies for classical compositions and encouraging their use in schools. Cecil Sharp in particular wound his way through pubs, vicarages and farms in Somerset in search of songs passed down through oral history that captured the land and its people.

Sharp had passed 40 before he discovered there even was such a thing as folk music. On 22 August 1903, he was visiting the vicarage of his friend Charles Marson in the village of Hambridge in Somerset. Marson’s gardener, a labourer’s son from the neighbouring village of Westport called John England, was singing a song called The Seeds of Love. England probably learned the song, which has pretty words about gathering up the seeds of love in the springtime as small birds sweetly sing, when he was labouring in Dorset as a young man, and didn’t think too hard on it. To Sharp it was a revelation. Over the next two years he collected 1,500 songs in Somerset alone, which he then published in the five-volume edition Somerset Folk Songs. In 1911 he founded The English Folk Dance Society, which remains in operation in Camden, North London to this day, continuing Sharp’s goal of preserving the sword dances, morris dances, folk tunes and ancient pagan traditions of England that had, until Sharp and fellow Victorian collectors came along, often existed only in the shared memory of the people that performed them.

Sharp came with an agenda, though. He did want to preserve the folk music of rural Britain, but only in a version that could be taught in schools without fear of reprisals from outraged parents or churchmen – and a song like The Seeds of Love is quite obviously about sex.

“When every English child is, as a matter of course, made acquainted with the folk songs of his country then, from whatever class, the musician of the future may spring in the

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Will Hodgkinson / The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity

Matt Stokes, The Gainsborough Packet, 2009

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national musical idiom”, he writes in English Folk Songs, but he could hardly offer a traditional Somerset ballad like The Keeper, which celebrates rape, to the music teachers of primary schools the country over in the hope of getting their young wards to perform it at the end of term pageant. So he sanitized the words, turning what was once organic into something refined and fashioned, and sharpened up the melodies which, having previously only existed in the oral tradition, changed according to the person singing them. But by notating English folk songs and writing piano parts he created a body of national music for schoolchildren to learn, thereby strengthening the artistry and identity of England itself. He was also adapting the songs to reflect his own contemporary reality, which the malleability of folk song allows for.

Cecil Sharp and his ilk believed that they had found the authentic voice of Britain. Half a century later a new generation upheld traditional music as the authentic voice of the working people. While the American folklorist Alan Lomax travelled throughout Britain making field recordings of traditional singers, hard-line communists such as the journalist and broadcaster A.L. Lloyd and the actor, playwright and singer Ewan MacColl began to lay down rules on how folk music had to be approached. Together they formed Centre 42, a touring arts festival that aimed to ensure folk music was performed throughout the working class towns of Britain. MacColl and his wife Peggy Seeger started The Singer’s Club in London, where performers were only meant to sing songs from the place they came from; a joke, considering MacColl was from Salford but sang in a Scottish accent in honour of his ancestral roots.

It seems that folk music, like religion, is forever about rules, but the great appeal is that it has something that cannot be tamed. The best ballads and the best singers contain a spirit that can be compared to the Holy Ghost: impossible to get a hold of and only there if you feel it. That

spirit can take any form and withstand the vicissitudes of time while remaining essentially the same. It’s actually impossible to define since it really comes down to a personal reaction you might have. When I hear the Yorkshire singer Mike Waterson singing the supernatural love story Tamlyn in his really weird and frankly totally out of tune nasal way, for example, it never fails to make me shiver.

There are other versions of that same song that make me long for the excitement of filling out my tax return, but to say that one is more authentic than the other because of my own personal reaction to it is meaningless.

Shirley Collins’s 1970 rendition of the tragic loneliness song Are You Going To Leave Me has a heartbreaking power – and the fact that Collins had just been left by her husband at the time of recording has something to do with that. Applying rules to something as anarchic and haphazard as folk music is pointless. It’s only that feeling we are left with.

One of the most important aspects of the old ballads of Britain is that they are there to serve you. Nobody owns them, and although plenty of people have tried, nobody has the right to tell anyone else how to approach them.

One argument in the folk world is that to sing these songs in ways that veer away from what has gone before is to show disrespect to the traditional singers whose notated or recorded versions introduced them to the world at large in the first place. This is totally spurious. Alan Lomax’s field recordings from the 50s and 60s, which are now often used as the guidelines on how to approach the old ballads, were the result of chance encounters, usually in pubs, and the songs came out the way they did because the people singing them were frequently drunk out of their minds. If you look through the traditional material Vaughan Williams collected, you will find ten different versions of the same song. Nobody knows which the original one is.

There is no such thing as a definitive version.

Over the spring and summer of 2008 I undertook a mission to travel through Britain

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Will Hodgkinson / The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity

and make field recordings myself, in an attempt to discover if there was such a thing as folk music in the age of mass communication. And what I found was that as long as you ignore the old ideas of authenticity, folk music has never been healthier. Everywhere I went I found diversity and a musical connection to the land and its past, but an expression of a present reality too.

One encounter sticks in the memory in particular. In the heart of Bradford’s Muslim neighbourhood I met a shy, quietly spoken 21year-old woman called Stephanie Hladowski.

The daughter of Polish immigrants, Stephanie discovered that she loved singing after landing the role of Dorothy in a school production of The Wizard of Oz. A few years later she heard the folk-rock group Pentangle’s version of Willie O’ Winsbury and was transfixed by the sad, lilting melody and the strange story this ancient Scottish ballad tells – on discovering his daughter is pregnant the king says he’ll hang the rake she slept with, but when Willie O’ Winsbury is brought to the court the king is so struck by the young man’s beauty that not only does he give his blessing; he even wishes Willie were a woman so that he might lay him too.

Stephanie was living with her mum and dad, unemployed and thinking about becoming a teaching assistant. She had no particular connection with folk music. Her boyfriend was into dub reggae. She felt a greater kinship with Polish than English culture. And yet something happened when she sang the old ballads.

“There’s a quality about these songs that does stir up an ancient memory”, she said, before embarking on the most spine-chilling version of Willie O’ Winsbury I have ever heard.

Is folk music still relevant? I would say that it most certainly is, as long as it is accepted as an organic, ever-changing form that cannot be contained within the strictures of dogma.

There’s nothing better than standing in a pub with people singing all around you, and the real value of the music is its egalitarianism: there’s a strong feeling of community that comes from

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singing songs that stretch deep into the past and that, with their universal themes of love, betrayal, hardship and mystery, belong to the present – and to all of us.

To some extent, folk music does belong to a subculture. It remains outside of the mainstream and has its own community, although perhaps not the one of popular cliché (bearded men smelling faintly of wee). And its great strength is the fact that it can’t be captured. It’s rather like a butterfly. It is only beautiful, it only has value, when it is flying free. Pin it down and you render it lifeless.

Originally published in Matt Stokes: The Gainsborough Packet &c. London: Zabludowicz Collection, 2009.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

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La Chanson John Baldessari, Jérôme Bel, Johanna Billing, Phil Collins, Discoteca Flaming Star, Alonso Gil, Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto, Douglas Gordon, Jeleton, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Susan Philipsz, Mathias Poledna, Paul Rooney, Mika Taanila

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Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life

Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes

Why, one might ask, was this group exhibition given the title La Chanson? The show, which features a variety of visual and sound installations, takes its name from the French music movement of the 1950s and 60s spearheaded by Édith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré, among others. It was not chosen in an attempt to draw parallels between past and present, but rather to highlight something essential to most of the protagonists of the chanson movement: the juxtaposition of opposing elements which they used quite naturally in their songs. For example: the use of irony combined with melodrama; a wholehearted dedication to romantic themes without ever forgetting their political counterparts; simplicity and directness in conjunction with theatricality and metaphor; and an intense interest in personal emotions accompanied by an equally intense concern for social issues. These conflicting elements, combined with apparent ease by the chanson movement, are the focal point of this collective exhibition. Like its companion shows in the session dedicated to song as a force of social transformation, this exhibition attempts to analyze the often catalytic role that pop music has played in recent decades, triggering major changes at both the individual and collective levels.

While the influence of rock music on contemporary art has already been evaluated in several exhibitions – most notably Sympathy for the Devil, a title borrowed from Godard’s film about the Rolling Stones, at the Chicago MCA in 2007 – this show aims to reassess the crucial influence of pop music movements, and of song in particular, on the changes that took place in the second half of the 20th century. These changes were cultural, affecting individual and group customs, ways of expressing sexuality, of dressing, of relating to others, and of thinking and sharing certain moments, as well as sociopolitical (inspiring or associated with certain labour movements and collective protests, for

example) and socioeconomic (the birth and expansion of what for years was the most powerful cultural industry in the world, responsible for the rise and subsequent propagation of intangible capitalism).

Consequently, as a collective exhibition La Chanson attempts to reveal how the personal and the political can be combined in a single musical format – the melodic song – reused as a medium by countless contemporary artists who see it as a way to challenge pop culture using a cultural format that is deeply ingrained in our everyday lives and has effected numerous changes in both the private and public realms.

Not only does the chanson proclaim, like the feminist movement, that the personal (including love) is political, but it also tells us that life brings these apparently antithetical themes together in a perfectly natural way. The song, the chanson, the melodious tune, pop music, or what you will, has comprised the soundtrack of our lives for years, but it has also aided and abetted profound changes in our mentality and way of life on countless occasions.

Even now, in the midst of a sector-wide crisis and the loss of its hegemony as the leading cultural industry, pop music continues to appeal to contemporary artists as a powerful tool of communication, propaganda and transformation. This group exhibition features several such artists, creators who in recent years have addressed the theme of the song from different perspectives and using different aesthetic and conceptual approaches.

The work entitled Concierto para puño alzado (Concert for a Raised Fist, 2007) by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa is about a choir, a rather monotonic ensemble of deep male voices.

Seeking inspiration in the musical traditions of his native Basque Country, the artist worked with an ochote (vocal octet) which performed a number of popular Spanish and Basque tunes whose lyrics had been altered. The artist changed the words in order to alter the meaning of the songs: the audiences recognized the melody but not the lyrics. The strangeness of the

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experience was accentuated by the fact that the new lyrics were actually quotes from the works of French materialist philosophers like Jacques Lacan. This new protest song about revolution and authority bears a certain similarity to John Baldessari’s 1972 recording entitled Baldessari Sings LeWitt. In this performance recorded on video, Baldessari made a modification that produces a sense of defamiliarization when it is watched again. In his day, Baldessari also changed the words to well-known American songs – including the national anthem – and replaced them with a series of pronouncements on art made by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. In this specific recording, the new lyrics were sung

by John Baldessari himself, with the stated intention of making LeWitt’s maxims easier to understand; however, despite its apparent seriousness, the piece has an undercurrent of irony and mockery that is also present in the work by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa. Another contemporary artist with ties to Baldessari’s historic creation is Annika Ström – whose work is featured in an individual exhibition at the CAAC – and her concomitance with the conceptual. However, Ström’s manner of relating the song to conceptualism is probably the opposite of Baldessari’s approach. The decision to extract repetitive maxims and interpret them melodically stems from sentimental rather than philosophical reasons; indeed, it is only when they are removed from that context that they acquire a philosophical or conceptual value.

Pop music is a constant part of our life, even before we are born. This is what British artist Douglas Gordon seems to say in his 1994 installation Something between My Mouth and Your Ear, which invites us to interact with a selection of songs that his mother probably listened to while pregnant with him in the year 1966. Although Douglas Gordon is primarily known for his film-related works and cinematographic installations, this piece from his early years reveals pop music as just one of the many influences – together with inherited and social traits – that determined his particular

way of seeing and experiencing the world.

Jérôme Bel also appropriates all kinds of songs – tunes that we have heard throughout our lives, willingly or unwillingly, accepting them or hating them as a gift or a curse from the music industry. Bel’s background is in contemporary dance, and his approach to pop music focuses on how this music is perceived and received by its audiences. The Show Must Go On is one of his best-known works and has been performed around the world. In this exhibition, visitors will be able to view certain moments of the performance, which in its entirety includes a DJ spinning famous songs (from Queen to David Bowie), a group of actors/dancers on stage, and the audience who identifies with them and becomes emotionally involved, as we all have some kind of reaction to music that we’ve heard a thousand times before. Meanwhile, Mika Taanila investigates the world of piped music – specifically focusing on an American company called Muzak which specializes in this field – and how it has been used to achieve certain goals, primarily of an economic nature, and especially to boost productivity on the job or stimulate consumerism. In other words, what Taanila analyzes is the use of something we have grown so accustomed to that we barely notice it but which is deliberately designed to modify our behaviour. Taanila’s projects have to do with the retro-future: something that was designed for the world of tomorrow but is now the archaeological ruin of what could have been and only was in part, or at least not in the way that its designers had planned. Gordon, Bel and Taanila all plunge into the murky depths of the music industry, attempting to shed light on how music influences and changes us in a rather subliminal way.

Songs can also be reinterpreted and take on new meaning depending on who sings them and how, as well as on where the voice is coming from or the area to which it has spread. This is the case of Susan Philipsz and Johanna Billing, who both prefer to resurrect songs written by others. Every space has connotations derived

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Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes / La Chanson: Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life

from its past – or the memory of an event associated with it – and present, as well as from other less obvious sources. Susan Philipsz has put this fact to good use, exploring the darkest corners of memory, of our own memory, of the history of a place and of that which persists in the form of melancholy, nostalgia or longing, that which is present by virtue of its absence.

It is there where the political references in some of her works become visible: through the poetics of the place, the sound intervention, the song chosen and performed, the intention, or all these things at once. In contrast, Johanna Billing prefers not to use her own voice; instead, she asks others to sing pre-existing songs in many of her works. In this case, the song is from 1968 and its significance varies depending on the physical location of the artist, the performers and the listeners. In any event, the song speaks of a time of transition and change, whether political or personal. The experiment we see here took place in Zagreb in the aftermath of the Balkan conflict, at an old cultural centre from the communist era. Melancholy and defamiliarization are two powerful tools for exploring signifiers of transformation.

In a different way, we might say that karaoke is the common thread linking the works presented by Phil Collins, Discoteca Flaming Star and Jeleton in La Chanson. The first is a karaoke experience in the literal sense organized by Phil Collins, who decided to invite fans of the legendary British band The Smiths to perform a song from the album The World Won’t Listen before the camera on a set decorated in the style of the 80s, when Morrissey’s group was in its heyday. A call for volunteers was issued in three rather complicated cities (Bogota, Istanbul and Jakarta), allowing participants to become their idol for a brief moment while simultaneously revealing the global expansion of the British music industry and how a group that was considered a cult band in its day can expand its sphere of influence and fame thanks to the ubiquitous nature of music and the phenomenon of globalization. Meanwhile,

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Discoteca Flaming Star homes in on issues related to music and songs in particular, as well as to the concept of reinterpretation.

Consequently, the term “hardcore karaoke” which some have used to describe their style is not only fitting but also an eloquent summarization of how they craft and later distribute their creations. In any event, film, sound and performance all converge in their installations, which serve as memory banks of process-based and collaborative projects. They brought this project to life at the Stock Exchange in Valparaíso, Chile, combining the energy of the location itself with the convulsions of the local and global financial markets. The project has been condensed in a workshop and a performance piece involving various elements which ultimately channel the abstraction of the set design into bodies and finance. Finally, the two members of Jeleton (Gelen Alcántara and Jesús Arpal) tackled the task of teaching themselves to play an instrument (drums and guitar, respectively) as a performance project for a residency in Paris. The result was, among other things, a video which shows them attempting to play French music as part of that learning process. Inspired by Dan Graham’s famous Rock My Religion, they also produced a publication which attempted to combine pop music and conceptual art, thus joining the path blazed by John Baldessari and followed by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa in the exhibition La Chanson, and also taken by Annika Ström in her solo show. Thus, in this case karaoke is a means rather than an end.

A quality that most of the artists featured in La Chanson undoubtedly share is their amateur approach to pop music, an approach that has its consequences even when they take a step towards composition. This may well be the case of Paul Rooney and the duo comprising Marta de Gonzalo and Publio Pérez Prieto. Both produce projects/songs in which the writing and audiovisual presentation of the lyrics are fundamental, as is their shared concern about labour situations in the era of late capitalism.

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Paul Rooney presents a creation that defines his relationship with song, always tinged with a hint of melancholy (as is the work of Susan Philipsz and Johanna Billing) but also with the hope implicit in the dreams and aspirations of those who perform essential yet undervalued jobs in the service industry. The repetitive, monotonous nature of their tasks contrasts with the workers’ desires, which are illustrated based on their descriptions. In this respect, a museum whose programme explores the transforming power of song cannot avoid this theme, for some of the members of its staff may identify with what Rooney describes. Marta de Gonzalo and Publio Pérez Prieto also focus on a very specific group of people, a collective that often seems invisible yet without whom the experience of visiting and viewing a museum (or of using and inhabiting any other public or private space) would be very different and even distressing. But this reference to the ranks of cleaning professionals, to whom the song is partially dedicated, segues into a more general commentary on the asepsis that permeates every aspect of life in contemporary societies; our zealous endeavours to hide the pollution and filth that is a by-product of the social organization typical of late capitalism reflect a desire to keep up appearances and eradicate any trace of what lies beneath.

The last two works included in La Chanson have to do with recording, at least in part. The piece by Mathias Poledna quite obviously revolves around this theme, for he focuses on a specific space, a legendary California recording studio from the 1960s that is still virtually intact.

Any traces that the voices and sounds of the past might have left behind are in the recordings, not in the soundproofed rooms of United Western Recorders. However, in Poledna’s exercise in recreation, the past lives on in the present thanks to a new rendering of the 1969 song “City Life” by Harry Nilsson. With new singer and a similar aesthetic, the countless different shots remind us of the ubiquity and timelessness of music thanks to the possibility of re-performing and reproducing it. In addition to his solo show,

Alonso Gil is represented in La Chanson by a work from the CAAC Collection, in line with our efforts to create dialogues between our own pieces and guest works and to contextualize the works in the museum’s collection. In this case, Gil’s decision to record what goes on in the streets, the things that happen around us every day, was not motivated by a desire to portray survival or create a Decalogue of various musical aptitudes in which a virtue is made of necessity; rather, the choice to record reveals a yearning for the endurance of life experiences, and therefore an affirmation of life itself and of the capacity for survival.

As a result, La Chanson oscillates between the personal and the social, exploring recording, amateur composition, karaoke and the possibilities of performance, and the melancholy and strange, but also the underhanded efforts of the music industry to maintain the status quo and the conceptual alteration that some artists have chosen to make.

The difference between La Chanson and the two previous exhibition sessions at the CAAC (featured in issues 0 and 1 of this magazine), where the group shows attempted to reinforce the significance and coherence of the other solo exhibitions, is that in this case it is the individual shows (Annika Ström, Ruth Ewan, Matt Stokes and Alonso Gil) that set the tone – halfway between political and sentimental – of the entire programme. La Chanson, the group exhibition of this session, merely provides the background vocals for the soloists, thus broadening the tonal range and creating a richer polyphony.

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81. Annika Ström, Danke (Thanks), 2003 82-83. Matt Stokes, Cantata Profana, 2010 Courtesy of the artist, Lüttgenmeijer (Berlin, Germany), Workplace Gallery (Gateshead, UK) and ZieherSmith (New York, USA)

84-85. Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007 P. 84, Copyright Gaultier Deblonde. P. 85, Photo: Thierry Bal

86-87. Alonso Gil, La orquesta de los milagros (The Orchestra of Miracles), 2004 88-89. Discoteca Flaming Star, Silver Banner, 2010, and video still from El valor del Gallo Negro, 2010 Courtesy of the artists and Freymond-Guth Fine Arts Ltd., Zurich

90-91. Susan Philipsz, Stay With Me, 2005 Installation view at Malmö Konsthall. Photo: Eoghan McTigue

92-93. Mathias Poledna, Western Recording, 2003 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

94 up. Paul Rooney, Around and Between the Gallery Song, 2001 Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London

94 down. Jeleton, Rock My Religion Annoté (publication) detail of the installation Répétitions anotado, 2010 Photo: CA2M

95 up. Johanna Billing, Magical World, 2005 Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens

95 down. Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto, Canción de la armonía y el mundo (Song of Harmony and the World), 2004 96. Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Concierto para puño alzado (Concert for a Raised Fist), 1997

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DATE

BAND

Thursday, June 30

Basia Bulat

Wednesday, July 6

Rainbow Arabia

Thursday, July 7

Depedro

Wednesday, July 13

Binary Audio Misfits

Thursday, July 14

Lacrosse + guest band: Los Alimentos

Wednesday, July 20

Pelle Carlberg

Thursday, July 21

Hidrogenesse

Wednesday, July 27

Micah P. Hinson & The Pioneer Saboteurs vs. Trompe le monde by the Pixies + guest band: Falso Cabaret

Thursday, July 28

Lonely Drifter Karen

Saturday, July 30

The School + guest band: Motel 3

Wednesday, August 3

Alondra Bentley

Thursday, August 4

Triángulo de Amor Bizarro

Wednesday, August 10

Klaus & Kinski

Thursday, August 11

Arizona Baby

Wednesday, August 17

Christina Rosenvinge

Thursday, August 18

Fiera

Wednesday, August 24

Francisco Nixon

Thursday, August 25

Julio de la Rosa

Wednesday, August 31

Coque Malla

Thursday, September 1

Maga

Concerts at 10 pm. Tickets: 5 €

Nocturama, Hello Cuca’s concert, 2009. Photo: Juan Francisco Angulo López

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OPENING CONCERT

JULY

Thursday, June 30

Wednesday, July 6

Thursday, July 7

Basia Bulat

Rainbow Arabia

Depedro

As the daughter of a piano teacher, Basia grew up surrounded by musical instruments (she plays the guitar, the sitar, the flute, the piano, the ukulele, the saxophone, the banjo…) in a home where only the oldies were played (Motown, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Sam Cooke, etc.). From the time she was a small girl, her brother Bobby accompanied her on the drums just as he does today. In 2007 this youthful Canadian singer and songwriter released her debut album on the Rough Trade label, Oh My Darling, a collection of beautiful, fantastically arranged tracks performed by a prodigious voice.

Now she has presented her second LP, Heart of My Own, where we discover an even more selfconfident Bulat, with a voice that is just as comfortable and exhilarating when the songs swell to their most epic proportions as when they plunge into intimacy and melancholy. Her compositions verge on traditional folk music with hints of other styles (jazz, soul, pop, etc.).

The husband-and-wife team formed by Danny and Tiffany Preston created Rainbow Arabia, inspired by the sounds of the Middle East. After their debut EP, The Basta, was received with great critical acclaim in 2008, and after touring with Gang Gang Dance, they released the 7” Omar K and the EP Kabukimono, in which African and Caribbean rhythms were added to their sound palette.

Now they’ve come to Seville to offer us their first LP, Boys and Diamonds, a dazzling blend of dub punk and world pop, AfroCaribbean beats and synth-pop, hip-hop and electronic music.

This perfectly assembled puzzle is sure to delight fans of MIA, Santigold or even Vampire Weekend.

Jairo Zavala, former lead singer of La Vacazul, presents his second solo album under the Depedro alias. The tracks on Nubes de Papel were written between shows while touring with Calexico, a band in which he has played guitar for the last four years, and while travelling around the world to promote his debut album. Nubes de Papel features two tracks recorded with Joey Burns, John Convertino and Jacob Valenzuela from Calexico, and Vetusta Morla.

When listening to Depedro, we can hear echoes of John Barry’s soundtracks, frontier tunes, African guitars, a pinch of Brazilian music, a dollop of The Beatles from the “Let It Be” era, Vainica Doble and M. Ward.

www.basiabulat.com

www.rainbowarabia.com

www.depedro.net

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Wednesday, July 13

Thursday, July 14

Wednesday, July 20

Binary Audio Misfits

Lacrosse

Pelle Carlberg

Binary Audio Misfits was created when two highly original bands from different cultures and continents found each other on MySpace. In the winter of 2007, the French rock band Expérience, an old acquaintance of Spanish audiences, contacted the Texan hip-hop group The Word Association to ask if they would be willing to participate in a track for the album that Expérience was working on at the time. After the recording session, the two bands were thrilled with the end product and decided to work on a few more songs together. The result was B.A.M! LP, the first album of the Binary Audio Misfits, a head-on collision between belligerent hiphop and prickly rock.

This band’s debut album, This New Year Will Be for You and Me, inspired critics to use words like “euphoric”, “upbeat” and “sunshine pop”. It was named album of the week by Rough Trade and received stellar reviews across Europe. Bandages for the Heart, a second album with the same euphoria but a much sharper edge, confirmed Lacrosse’s talent and took them on a lengthy European tour where they earned a reputation for explosive live performances.

Two vocalists with amazing energy, incredibly mellow guitars and dazzling melodies are the band’s weapons of choice. Barely restrained madness hides behind the appearance of a fundamentally upbeat pop style.

www.myspace.com/ binaryaudiomisfits

www.lacrosse.nu

Pelle Carlberg has been making music since 1985, playing with bands on the Swedish scene like Amanda om natten and Edson, with which he recorded three albums.

In 2005 he embarked on a solo career and has since released three albums, two of them on the prestigious Labrador label.

His influences are varied, ranging from Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, ABBA and The Beatles to Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian, The Velvet Underground, The Beautiful South, Doktor Kosmos, Jens Lekman and Suburban Kids with Biblical Names.

And although it’s hard to believe, his music has a lot of each of them; his compositions are pop songs with an undercurrent that is surreal in some cases and hermetic in others, but almost always luminous.

Photo: Sebastian Tim

www.pellecarlberg.se

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Thursday, July 21

Wednesday, July 27

Thursday, July 28

Hidrogenesse

Micah P. Hinson & The Pioneer Saboteurs vs. Trompe le Monde by the Pixies

Lonely Drifter Karen

As the band’s own website proclaims, Hidrogenesse is an “electronic art-rock duo, composers of populist pop songs, producers of romantic-sexual mantras, authors of Situationist dance tunes, performers of the mystical-comic genre…

Hidrogenesse is Carlos Ballesteros and Genís Segarra. Since the end of the last century, they have released a number of albums, including Así se baila el siglo XX, Eres PC/Eres Mac, Gimnàstica passiva and Animalitos”.

Carlos and Genís are currently participating in an exhibition at Fundació Joan Miró with an installation entitled Moix, for which they have recorded a new track. www.myspace.com/hidrogenesse

At “We Used to Party” concerts, a well-known solo artist or band performs all the tracks on an album by an artist or artists whose music has been a special source of inspiration and pleasure for them.

In this case, Micah P. Hinson, who has become a kind of icon among Spanish indie and not-so-indie audiences, is coming to Nocturama to perform his version of one of the best alternative rock albums ever released, Trompe le Monde, which signalled the end of the Pixies’ recording career in 1991. This adoptive Texan (born in Memphis) will become Black Francis for an evening to belt out classic anthems like “Planet Sound”, “Head On” and “The Sad Punk”, accompanied by the Zaragoza-based band Tachenko. www.micahphinson.com

The person hiding behind the pseudonym of Lonely Drifter Karen is Tanja Frinta, born in Vienna in 1979 and currently living in Barcelona. This album, named after a character in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, features the tinkling ivories of Majorcan pianist Marc Melià.

Marc is a fan of Jacques Brel and the chanson, whereas Frinta prefers German cabaret and Kurt Weill, but all of these disparate influences come together in music full of evocative melodies and sinuous arrangements.

The band's debut album, Grass Is Singing, was released in 2008, and last year they presented their second project, Fall of Spring. www.myspace.com/lonelydrifterkaren Photo: Sandrine Derselle

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AUGUST Saturday, July 30

Wednesday, August 3

Thursday, August 4

The School

Alondra Bentley

Triángulo de Amor Bizarro

Combining a love of indie pop and the most brilliant music of the 1960s, The School’s style is a British version of sunshine pop that blends light and shadow to produce a contagious, ultra-melodic pop sound that you can dance and cry to simultaneously. Their sophisticated, upbeat tracks with a hint of melancholy are inspired

by The Beach Boys (and the fantastic American Spring produced

by Brian Wilson), The Beatles, Phil Spector and 60s girl bands.

Not to mention, of course, other more modern groups who share similar roots and also wrap their dulcet melodies in marvellous string and keyboard arrangements, such as Belle & Sebastian, Saturday Looks Good to Me, Camera Obscura or Lucky Soul.

Alondra Bentley, a Spanish singersongwriter of English extraction, burst onto the music scene in 2006 with a handful of songs written in her mother tongue which quickly became a hot topic of conversation among professionals of the Spanish music industry. That same year, her demo was chosen as one of the season’s best by the Disco Grande show on Spanish National Radio, hosted by the prestigious music critic and journalist Julio Ruiz.

After this promising beginning, in 2009 Bentley released her first album, Ashfield Avenue, which confirmed Alondra’s success with music journalists and listeners alike.

Listening to Ashfield Avenue brings to mind the great women of music history, evoking artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone, but it also reminds us of male vocalists like Nick Drake.

Thanks to the success of her debut album, Alondra set out on a tour which has continued for nearly two years now, and she was invited to perform at some of the most important music events in Spain and England, including the Benicassim International Festival, Primavera Sound, Sonorama and La Mar de Músicas.

The prehistory of the then-quintet began with the making of the demo Salud y belleza in 2004, an explosive device wrapped in teddybear plush that earned them a spot among the finalists in Proyecto Demo. Even before the release, word-of-mouth had made it one of the most anxiously awaited debuts of 2007. The band’s war cry – “Now the free world wants a blazing fire” – struck a chord with their audiences: this trio from the country set the online forums on fire and rattled music pundits with their live songs, deafening sound and powerful lyrics. Before the year was out El hombre del siglo V was released, an album that ended up becoming a compilation of oddities and included tracks from their early demos, new recordings and a few songs that no one had heard before.

Confirmed as the most important new Spanish band of the year on every music ranking, they continued to give non-stop performances throughout 2008.

Año santo was released in May of 2010, and even with the handicap of a debut that topped every list of the decade’s best Spanish albums, the press unanimously acclaimed it as their best work yet.

www.myspace.com/alondrabentley

www.articapro.com/artistas/triangulo -de-amor-bizarro

www.theschoolband.co.uk

Photo: Blanca Galindo

Photo: Thomas Carret

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Wednesday, August 10

Thursday, August 11

Wednesday, August 17

Klaus & Kinski

Arizona Baby

Christina Rosenvinge

The first line in the story of Klaus & Kinski was written almost by chance, when Alejandro convinced Marina to sing a Beatles cover so that he could test the home sound studio he had set up, way back in the summer of 2005. Five years later, Klaus & Kinski have two albums under their belt, a large fan base and the respect of the music critics. Those who know Alex best say that he belongs to the new generation of young people who have been abducted by technology, which is quite true; however, it is equally true that he has proven to be one of the most talented composers of the Spanish indie music scene to emerge from that same generation. His well-known proficiency on the guitar and his wise choice of travelling companions are two additional factors that helped make Klaus & Kinski the sensation of the 2008-09 season.

In April 2010 the duo released their fantastic second album entitled Tierra, trágalos, which was enthusiastically received by both audiences and critics, and since then they have been busy presenting their latest work on stages throughout Spain and at events like Festival do Norte, Contempopranea, Sonorama, Lemon Pop, etc.

The biggest surprise of the year shoots off acoustic bullets and basic philosophy. They are Arizona Baby, a trio that has shaken up the Spanish music scene with an irresistible adventure of desert epics and evocative fantasies called Second to None. Barely five weeks after its release, this album of dustcoated beauty and Spartan austerity was already being identified by the majority of national journalists, from the most mainstream to the most indie, as one of the top three albums of the year. From Mondo Sonoro to Rolling Stone, Arizona Baby’s recordings and live performances have rocketed to the top of every best-of-the-year list. They’ve also received several national awards in the best new band category and the UFI (Independent Phonographic Union) Special MySpace Band of the Year Award. Arizona Baby is an acoustic rock trio capable of making even the best electric band quake in their boots, with a look that’s appealing and impressive.

They hail from Valladolid and have been playing together since 2004.

The female vocalist par excellence of the Spanish indie scene started out as one-half of the duo Alex & Christina and later as lead singer of the rock band Los Subterráneos, two projects which made her tremendously popular in Spain and South America in the 1990s. In 2000 the artist moved to New York, where she launched a solo career with three albums recorded entirely in English. After returning to Spain, she began writing lyrics in Spanish again and released Verano Fatal, an album co-composed with the Asturian singer-songwriter Nacho Vegas. One year later, Christina conquered all and sundry with her sublime Tu labio superior (Warner, 2009), whose songs kept her hopping from one Spanish stage to the next for nearly two years, after which she set out on a South American tour of Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico.

Her latest album, La joven Dolores, was released by Warner in January of this year.

www.myspace.com/klausandkinski

http://arizonababyrocks. blogspot.com Photo: Ricardo F. Otazo

www.christinarosenvinge.com

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Thursday, August 18

Wednesday, August 24

Thursday, August 25

Fiera

Francisco Nixon

Julio de la Rosa

Fiera is a band comprising Pablo Peña, Daniel Alonso, Darío del Moral and Javier Rivera (members of Pony Bravo). Their most immediate influences are postpunk bands like The Fall, PIL, Suicide, Liquid Liquid, Pere Ubu and Palais Schaumburg, and Spanish groups such as Derribos Arias and Parálisis Permanente.

They also looked to now-legendary bands like Einstürzende Neubauten when choosing the combination of instruments that produce Fiera’s unique sound.

Fiera made their first appearance at Nocturama (CAAC, Seville) in August 2008, where the audience heard the first versions of the songs composed by Pablo Peña, the band’s vocalist, bassist and lead writer.

After years of hard work, Fiera finally cut their first LP, which was recorded by Raúl Pérez at his La Mina Studio. Déjese llevar (2010) was released by El Rancho Casa de Discos, a company created by the members of Pony Bravo to handle their professional activities. Like everything that El Rancho produces, Déjese llevar was released under a Creative Commons licence and can be downloaded free of charge from the band’s website.

Francisco Nixon is the stage name used by Fran Fernández (Gijón, 1971), former singer and songwriter for two iconic Spanish indie bands, Australian Blonde and La Costa Brava.

Since launching his solo career as Francisco Nixon in 2006, he has released three titles on the Siesta label: Es Perfecta, El perro es mío and the mini LP Gloria y la belleza sureña, aided by his regular guitarist of choice, Ricardo Vicente, formerly of La Costa Brava.

Like all of Fran’s previous undertakings, Nixon has become a fixture on the Spanish music scene.

His name regularly appears on the bills of Spain’s most important music festivals, and he is considered one of the best Spanish pop songwriters. His “Erasmus Borrachas” was named the Best Song of 2009 at the Independent Music Awards organized by Unión Fonográfica Independiente (UFI).

Julio de la Rosa made his first appearance on the cover of one of his studio albums, La Herida Universal, the first to be co-released on the national indie labels Ernie and King of Patio, and the fourth of his career since his band, El Hombre Burbuja, broke up.

Julio has inhaled and perspired Jerez, Seville, Manchester, Istanbul, New York, Barcelona and Madrid, observing, creating and sharing, writing part of his musical and personal history in the ebb and flow of these cities. His poetry is like his vision, like his entire life – real, incisive, stimulating, cynical and romantic. His music is unique, playing with time, sound and silence. Julio de la Rosa has known love in myriad forms: true love, mirror love, reflected love, brotherly love, generous love, devastating love, labyrinthine love… all of which he had to experience so that today we, the listeners, can feel, hold our breath, float, and dance with a secret smile or howling with laughter. Julio de la Rosa is one of the most genuine musicians we have, and La Herida Universal is his best album yet – probably just because it’s the latest one he’s given us.

www.fierafierafiera.com

www.myspace.com/frannixon Photo: Estudio Syx

www.juliodelarosa.com

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CLOSING CONCERT Wednesday, August 31

Thursday, September 1

Coque Malla

Maga

On his latest album, Termonuclear, Coque Malla has revealed his tremendous talent for writing music.

“The songs on Termonuclear are inspired by true experiences, but they fortunately become fiction, they turn into how you’d like things to be or how you wish they could have been.” And it is there, in the writing, that the great composer emerges, the talent of one who knows how to handle sensitive, personal material and turn it into a universal creation, one we can all identify with in equal measure. The album was recorded in analogue format, on “tape” like the great classic albums, with a trio playing live in the studio: Coque on acoustic guitar, the former “Ronaldo” Ricardo Moreno on drums, and Nico Nieto, the album’s co-producer (and Coque’s crucial ally during the thermonuclear year), on bass. Then came the recordings for enhancing the tracks: delicate strings to underscore certain sections with their chamber-music sound, and splendid tonalities contributed by pop’s most timeless (and now quite rare) wind instruments.

Special concert/surprise celebration of the band’s 10th anniversary.

Maga are back. The trio has closed the book on one era (with three albums, a couple of EPs and tracks on various compilations) and begun a new one at Mushroom Pillow with the band’s own experience and that shared with Germán Coppini on their joint project, with Sr. Chinarro (the rhythm section is the same featured on Antonio Luque’s last two albums), with Deluxe (Miguel participated in Reconstrucción) and with Tote King.

Jordi Gil was responsible for the production of A la hora del sol, an addictive, timeless album marked by the personality of a voice that is unrivalled in Spanish-language pop.

The album was recorded at Sputnik Studios in Seville with Jordi Gil, who also produced El mundo según and Ronroneando by Sr. Chinarro. The band was accompanied during the recording sessions by Israel Diezma (lap steel guitar on “Último mar”), Joaquín Calderón (violin on “La Balsa” and lead guitar on “Garagato”), Manolo Solo (backup vocals and lyrics for “Sí, pero no lo soy”), Javier Centeno (trumpet on “Garagato”), Germán Coppini (lyrics for “Garagato”) and César Díaz (keyboard), who also joins the group in their live performances.

http://www.coquemalla.es Photo: María Vázquez

www.articapro.com/artistas/maga Photo: Jopo/Emerre

This information has been extracted by Green Ufos and La Suite from specialized web sites.

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Nocturama, Lloyd Cole’s concert, 2010. Photo: Javier Agreda

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Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo

Avda. Descubrimientos entrance

Education Workshop

D

Workshops

A E

C

A

A

B

Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico

Library

Entrance Ombú

F A Universidad Internacional de Andalucía

A Avda. Américo Vespucio entrance

CAAC Exhibitions 2011 Song as a Force of Social Transformation A. La Chanson. From July 21 through November 13 B. Matt Stokes. Nuestro tiempo (Our Time). From July 21 through November 6 C. Alonso Gil. Cantando mi mal espanto (Singing My Troubles Away). From July 21 through November 6 D. Ruth Ewan. Del pasado efímero (The Ephemeral Past). From June 30 through October 16 E. Annika Ström. Songs by Annika Ström. From May 26 through September 11 F. Nocturama. From June 30 through September 1

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www.caac.es Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas 41092 Seville Entrances: Avda. Américo Vespucio, 2 Camino de los Descubrimientos (no number) Bus routes: C-1, C-2 phone: (34) 955 03 70 70, fax: (34) 955 03 70 52 e-mail: informacion.caac@juntadeandalucia.es OPENING HOURS Tuesday-Saturday: 11 to 21 h Sunday and public holidays: 11 to 15 h FREE ADMISSION Tuesday-Friday: from 19 to 21 h Saturday: from 11 to 21 h ENTRANCE PRICE 1.80 euros: Visit to the monument or to the temporary exhibitions 3.01 euros: Complete visit 12.02 euros: Annual pass Disabled Access: Museum facilities are accessible and adapted to people with disabilities LIBRARY, Videoteque, Photo Library and Archives Monday: from 9 to 14 h Tuesday-Friday: from 11 to 14 h / from 15 to 18 h August closed

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EXHIBITIONS Annika Ström. Songs by Annika Ström May 26 – September 11, 2011 Coordination Yolanda Torrubia Installation BGL Ingeniería audiovisual Signs Fotocromía Lineal Subtitles Desenfoque Assistance to wall paintings María José Sánchez Barrera

Ruth Ewan. Del pasado efímero (The Ephemeral Past) June – October 16, 2011 Coordination Yolanda Torrubia Installation Museographia Shipping HDArte Woodwork Carpintería Olivera Instalaciones Martínez Subtitles Desenfoque Graphic design for Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? project newspaper and Fang Sang project poster The 2 Group Translation of Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? newspaper and Fang Sang poster África Vidal Transcription of Fang Sang audio Miguel Ángel Álvarez Highfield Translations for Six Signs project Okodia - Grupo Traductor Signs and production of Six Signs project Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Acknowledgements Galería Ancient&Modern, Rob Tufnell Gallery, and to all the people who collaborated with the songs of A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World

Alonso Gil. Cantando mi mal espanto (Singing My Troubles Away) July 21 – November 6, 2011 Coordination Raquel López Installation BNV Audiovisual installation Bienvenido Gil Painting Manuel Jesús Cruz Woodwork Carpintería Olivera Signs Fotocromía Lineal Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Assistance to wall paintings Pedro Delgado Israel Díaz Iglesia Acknowledgements Colección Cajasol Ricardo Garrido

Matt Stokes. Nuestro tiempo (Our Time) July 21 – November 6, 2011 Coordination Luisa Espino Installation Grupo 956

Shipping HD arte Kortmann Art Packers & Shippers (APS) Acknowledgements Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Workplace Gallery, Susanna Koenig, Andrea Linnenkohl

La Chanson July 21 – November 13, 2011 Coordination Alberto Figueroa Audiovisual installation Salas Painting Manuel Jesús Cruz Woodwork BNV Signs Fotocromía Lineal Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Acknowledgements Galería Meyer Kainer, Video Data Bank, María-Ángeles Alcántara-Sánchez, Jesús Arpal, Martina Aschbacher, Lindsay Bosch, Marta de Gonzalo, Sandro Grando, Amber Hickey, Gil Leung, Sue MacDiarmid, Erin Manns, Publio Pérez Prieto, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Glòria Pou, Paul Rooney, Bert Ross, Mike Sperlinger, Mika Taanila

Audiovisual installation Simeon Corless Anna Nesbit Acoustic installation INASEL Translation of The Gainsborough Packet poster and of Real Arcadia subtitles África Vidal Signs Fotocromía Lineal Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Woodwork Carpintería Olivera Painting Halcón

Curatorial Projects Management: Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes. Consultancy and General Coordination: Luisa López Moreno. Conservation Restoration: José Carlos Roldán, Lluvia Vega. Installation Coordination: Faustino Escobar. Assistance to installation: Jesús Muñoz. Graphic Design: Luis Durán. Press: Marta Carrasco. Documentation: Eduardo Camacho. Education: Felipa Giráldez, Mar Martín, María Felisa Sierra. Technical Assistance: Dámaso Cabrera. Administrative Officer: José Antonio Guzmán

The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo would like to express its deepest gratitude to the artists participating in these exhibitions, as well as to all those that have contributed to their production.

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PUBLICATION AUTHORS

Images:

Peio Aguirre is an art critic and independent curator.

Of Matt Stokes’ works: Courtesy of the artist, Lüttgenmeijer (Berlin, Germany), Workplace Gallery (Gateshead, UK) and ZieherSmith (New York, USA)

Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes is Director of the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, art critic and independent curator.

Matthew Collin is a journalist and writer currently based in Georgia. He has worked as a foreign correspondent, broadcast journalist, magazine editor and features writer for publications such as the Big Issue, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Moscow Times, Face and Mojo. His previous books include This is Serbia Calling, The Time of the Rebels and Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House.

Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer and curator based in London. www.growgnome.com Pedro G. Romero is an artist.

Jonathan Griffin is a British writer and editor living in Los Angeles. He contributes to Frieze, Art Review, Mousse, Flash Art and other publications.

Will Hodgkinson is the author of Guitar Man, Song Man and The Ballad of Britain, and writes on music and culture for The Guardian, The Times, Mojo and Vogue.

Raj Kuter is a graphic artist, writer and editor of the literary magazine Vacaciones en Polonia.

The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the individual authors and should not be attributed to 11 to 21.

Views at CAAC on p. 93: Guillermo Mendo Inside cover page, from left to right, up and down: Basia Bulat / Rainbow Arabia / Depedro / Binary Audio Misfits / Lacrosse (photo: Sebastian Tim) / Pelle Carlberg / Hidrogenesse (photo: Darío Peña) / Micah P. Hinson & The Pioneer Saboteurs / Lonely Drifter Karen (photo: Sandrine Derselle) / The School Inside back page, from left to right, up and down: Alondra Bentley (photo: Blanca Galindo) / Triángulo de Amor Bizarro (photo: Thomas Carret) / Klaus & Kinski / Arizona Baby (photo: Ricardo F. Otazo) / Christina Rosenvinge / Fiera / Francisco Nixon (photo: Estudio Syx) / Julio de la Rosa / Coque Malla (photo: María Vázquez) / Maga (photo: Jopo/Emerre)

Published by JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA Consejería de Cultura Publisher Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes Deputy Editor Luisa López Moreno Editorial Coordinator Luisa Espino Editorial Assistants Alberto Figueroa, Raquel López, Yolanda Torrubia Copy-editor Fernando Quincoces Texts translation Paul Hammond: Spanish to English: Pedro G. Romero.

Deirdre B. Jerry: Spanish to English: Peio Aguirre, Raj Kuter, Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, Nocturama 2011.

Design and Layout Florencia Grassi, www.elvivero.es Printing erasOnze Artes Gráficas Photomechanics Margen

Acknowledgements: To María José Rodríguez Bisquert and all the artists and authors of the texts and images.

Binding José Luis Sanz

© This Edition: JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA. Consejería de Cultura © Texts: The Authors © Photographs: The Artists and their Agents DL: M-26788-2011 ISSN: 2173-8203 Printed on Igloo Offset 90 g/m2, 100% post-consumer recycled paper, distributed by Torraspapel Distribución

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JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA Consejero de Cultura Paulino Plata Viceconsejera de Cultura Dolores Carmen Fernández Carmona Secretario General de Políticas Culturales Bartolomé Ruiz González

CENTRO ANDALUZ DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO Director Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes Direction Secretary Ana M. Contreras Head of Administration Luis Arranz Hernán Chief Curator Luisa López Moreno Exhibitions Faustino Escobar Luisa Espino Alberto Figueroa Raquel López Yolanda Torrubia Press Marta Carrasco Graphic Design Luis Durán Education Felipa Giráldez Mar Martín María Felisa Sierra Collection Isabel Pichardo María Paz García Vellido Library and Documentation Eduardo Camacho Elodia Huelva María Isabel Montero Inés Romero Conservation Dámaso Cabrera Isabel Vargas Restauration José Carlos Roldán Lluvia Vega

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Song as a Force of Social Transformation

CAAC Issue 2 July–October 2011