058 It’s been over three decades since Massive Attack was born, and Robert Del Naja is preoccupied by power. That’s not to say he’s hungry for it – quite the opposite. He is fascinated by exploring ways to distribute it; of handing over editorial control in order to produce a musical experience befitting the creative democracy of the internet. The most recent output from the seminal trip-hop outfit (centred around Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall) was released via Fantom, their algorithmic sensory app that allowed users to remix material, from which Del Naja created February’s Ritual Spirit EP. More recently, Del Naja’s been touring and developing the visual elements of the live show. The show is the latest
iteration of a longstanding collaboration with London-based art practice United Visual Artists (UVA), a collective founded by Matthew Clark who specialise in the manipulation of light.
ART
Brought together by their shared attraction to minimal aesthetics, Del Naja and Clark have worked on the evolution of the show for several years. It has become an indispensable component of the Massive Attack experience. In essence, it involves the projection of data and headlines lifted from local and international media. Most of these statements are stark human
truths regarding socio-political crises. These are occasionally juxtaposed against headlines taken from celebrity gossip rags, speaking to our culture of distraction. If you’ve been to see Massive Attack in the last few years, you’re as likely to have been made aware that the Japanese military is on alert to shoot down a North Korean rocket as you are that Tiffany from Celebrity Big Brother has eyed up her housemate Scotty’s manhood in the shower and described it as ‘luscious’. When I catch up with Del Naja ahead of Massive Attack’s first Bristol show in 13 years – an enormous outdoor concert which included Skepta, Savages and Primal Scream as support acts – he is in a measured mood. His well-known humility is audible from the moment he picks up the phone, but there’s also a clarity and drive; you can almost hear the furrowed brow. As Del Naja explains, the show harvests information from the news cycle of a local destination at any given moment, but the technical components are months in the making. “The actual writing of the piece will normally start six months before rehearsals at least,” he explains. “I’ll sit down with Matt and [video designer] Icarus Wilson Wright and we’ll start to imagine it almost like a storyboard, and then there’s a period of programming. Ultimately you’re working with some seriously skilled code writers who are taking maybe a one-line concept on the back of a fag packet and turning it into a script that’s going to run a completely bespoke light show to suit a particular arrangement of LEDs for 90 minutes.” “Each iteration of the show is slightly different,” he continues. “We started off with quite a monolithic, single screen, but what’s in front of it is almost like a search bar, like you’d find on any web browser.” The addition of the search