AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, March 6, 2010.

WHAT Michelle Ussher: Luciende
WHERE Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran, 9510 2374, uplandsgallery.com

There’s an untethered quality to Michelle Ussher’s unobtrusive oils. Rendered in muted browns, greys, ambers and blues – sponged to create a watercolour-like texture – and punctuated by a cracked, seemingly weathered ceramic sculpture of a face, her works drift between reference and fiction, as if loosened from their subject. Apparently inspired by a Kurdish anecdote, in which a brother and sister cross the mountains toward Europe on horseback only to realise their faces have frozen over, Luciende offers a loose clutch of imagined scenes and evocations from the narrative, softened and blurred like a distant memory. It’s quietly stunning. Ussher’s work seems to suggest the malleability of story and imagination; the notion that once an event enters a narrative form it becomes nebulous and open. We’re left with a sense – a series of resonances – rather than a story. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–4pm, until March 20.

WHAT Tanya Dyhin: Sites of Accumulation
WHERE Gallerysmith, 170–174 Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne, 9329 1860, gallerysmith.com.au

Sydney artist Tanya Dyhin’s Sites of Accumulation engender a intriguing dichotomy of space and perspective. Running alongside Paula do Prado’s stunning textiles at Gallerysmith, her photo-media works document supposedly empty spaces, though her lens and use of various in-camera and Photoshop techniques portray the abandoned as a vessel rich in detail, memory and the evidence of change. Shot in and around the site of Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital in the months before its redevelopment, Dyhin’s works deftly abstract and manipulate planes of perspective. In the process, she managed to accentuate details of the photographic referent we might otherwise overlook. Perhaps the show’s strongest image, Sites of Accumulation #5 (pictured, above), sees an in inverted image of a decrepit room; its paint-peeled ceiling now an odd, textural base; a pile of discarded electrical tubing mirrored to create a symmetrical assemblage on what was once the room’s floor. It’s engrossing. Dyhin’s work leaves us second-guessing amid the evidence of what we thought we already knew. Thurs to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until April 3.

WHAT Riley Payne: a brief history of public sculpture from mon - fri
WHERE TCB art inc., Level 1, 12 Waratah Place, city, 9663 8233, tcbartinc.org.au

Much like the accumulated filth that often threatens to envelop the wonky TCB staircase, Riley Payne’s exquisitely rendered graphite-on-paper works find their grounding in the junk of the public domain. Indeed, the “public sculpture” to which the title of the Melbourne artist’s new show refers is one fashioned from wonderfully banal gutter debris and online flotsam and jetsam. Found objects, discarded photographs (of naked bottoms, no less), shower scene film stills, cute kittens, spectacularly crammed ashtrays, bananas and bad doodles of cigarette-smoking carrot men (you heard it) make their way into these positively odd, meticulously detailed and infinitely cheeky melanges. But there’s more at play within these works than nudie pics and bin contents. What makes Payne’s practice, honed during a half-decade stint in New York, so interesting is its multiple fields and layers of reference. Within a single image might be a drawing of an object, a drawing of drawing, and a drawing of a photograph (that has been drawn upon). In the process, he effectively recreates collage via graphite photorealism. It all points to a reverence of the circumstantial; the profundity and hilarity of what you might just find in public. Then again, to intellectualise Payne’s art might be missing the point. Sure, there’s plenty to them, but these might just be some sweet-ass drawings by a sweet-ass drawer. Sweet. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until March 13.

WHAT David Mutch: The Tourists
WHERE Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, seventhgallery.org

At first pass, David Mutch’s relatively small-scale, atmospheric prints appear a study of the interface between urbanity and nature. His architecturally minded photographs witness a river and dense, wet bushland, bordered by towering, symmetrical concrete arches, storm water drains and bridge undersides. It is only when we notice the tiny, distant human figures – one per photograph – that things begin to take a turn. Captured warily surveying the landscape, Mutch’s subjects seem alienated from their surroundings. They investigate their environs with what appears a combination trepidation and wonder. The allusion seems one of a post-urban future. Lost in a concrete metropolis for too long, Mutch’s Tourists are returning to city’s forgotten green underbelly. Tues to Sat noon–6pm, until March 13.

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DIRTY PROJECTORS - SEWING SEEDS
Published: Broadsheet, March 3, 2010.

In a year that has seen them covered by Solange Knowles, as well as collaborate with David Byrne and Bjork, Brooklyn ensemble Dirty Projectors have risen to join independent music’s highest coterie. In an exclusive interview, founder and creative logician Dave Longstreth unfurls his singular artistic vision. By Dan Rule

A conversation with Dave Longstreth proves a little spare for conventional adjectives or accepted musical phraseology. He speaks of music in terms of “nuance” and “collage”; he expounds his compositions as “little pieces of flowers”, as “intricate little patterns”; he sighs, digresses, laughs at random.

“I feel like words are just a set of bells or something,” he offers, falling quiet on the phone line in thought. “You end up harmonising them with the song in the same way that you harmonise the chords that you put under the melody or something like that. Finding the right set of words doesn’t just necessarily mean the ones that fit the contour of the line.”

If today’s loquacious encounter – let alone the three previous, failed attempts to meet in Longstreth’s current local neighbourhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn – is any indication, the 27-year-old’s impossibly intricate, deconstructive pop explorations as the vocalist, guitarist, songwriter and musical director of iconoclastic collective Dirty Projectors invoke an equally busy mind.

It’s little wonder. In a little less than a year, Dirty Projectors – lead vocalists Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, Nat Baldwin on bass, Brian McOmber on drums and third female vocalist Haley Dekle – have risen from a touring band barely known outside of their direct musical circles to one of the most acclaimed, in demand (not to mention hyped) acts on the planet. As if to illustrate the point, our telephone conversation takes place during a strict half-hour window of opportunity between rehearsals for a live, 15-piece chamber orchestra rendering of their 2005 opus The Getty Address at the Lincoln Centre in New York.

“We’ve been at it for the last month or so, learning how to play it, learning how to re-orchestrated it,” Longstreth explains, exhaling a lengthy sigh. “It’s been a challenge to configure and play live because it wasn’t conceived at all that way.”

Spend any amount of time with the Dirty Projectors’ music and you’ll discover a band whose sound palette extends far beyond that usually attributed to pop. Across six records – The Glad Fact (2003), Morning Better Last! (2003), Slaves’ Graves and Ballads (2004), The Getty Address (2005), Black Flag covers album Rise Above (2007) and Bitte Orca (2009) – Longstreth has defined his musical output on an intensely layered, interlocked and uncanny tapestry of styles, sounds and approaches.

The pop constructions of Bitte Orca, for one, comprise such a swathe of elaborate details it’s near impossible to trace how it all fits together. Voices, personalities and intonations clash and coalesce in full view. Perfect harmonies form from a rabble of shrill screeches and howls, flawless in their disarray.

“I love the idea that when you take out one element, the whole fucking thing falls apart,” urges Longstreth. “It’s that economical, you know? But it’s also that thing of if you add one more element it becomes lugubrious and over-orchestrated. It’s just awesome when music does that, when it pops in that way.”

In some ways, Longstreth’s widescreen musical vision doesn’t come as a surprise. Having grown up in New Haven, Connecticut, he began penning songs from the earliest of ages. “I wasn’t ever interested in knowing how to play music or play the guitar,” he says. “I had no interest in learning how to play All Apologies by Nirvana or anything like that. For me, it was always just about making a song.”

For Longstreth, music was about accumulating the tools to harness an innate will to create. “Before I knew a chord I remember making this song just with notes on the guitar and just writing linearly, I guess; writing melodies as opposed to chords. My brother played the guitar, so he eventually showed me how to play some basic chords and when I knew two chords I wrote a song with two chords and when I learned a third chord I wrote a song with three chords.

“It’s kind of always been like that for me. I was interested in learning about music so I could write more music, and I was interested in writing music that drew on what I didn’t necessarily already know.”

He went on to study composition at Yale, eventually dropping out to move to Portland, Oregon, and release his debut solo effort, 2002’s largely acoustic The Graceful Fallen Mango. It proved an important time in the development of his creative voice. “I totally hated any kind of remotely demonstrative instrument playing,” he recalls. “I thought it was completely indulgent and insincere and stupid.

“But that’s the thing,” he muses. “You start off with your intention of not wanting to know how to play anything, you know, and then that becomes a thing that has its own nuance or technique in itself.”

He soon returned to the eastern seaboard, where he assumed the Dirty Projectors moniker and began working with a rolling cast of musicians – including Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot frontman Wes Miles – many of whom would find Longstreth’s artistic directorship domineering. Indeed, former band member Larkin Grimm infamously described Dirty Projectors as “what happens when an egomaniac tries to control everyone”.

Recent years have seen a shift. While still very much in control, Longstreth surrendered his work to interpretation and collaboration more than ever before. Indeed, prior to Bitte Orca’s June 2009 release, the band joined forces with the legendary David Byrne to cut a track for the Dark Was the Night compilation, before being invited to perform one of Longstreth’s compositions with Bjork at a homeless benefit concert in New York.

When Solange Knowles released a melting RnB cover of Bitte Orca’s future-soul infused single Stillness is the Move (sung entirely by Amber Coffman), Longstreth embraced it with open arms. “I think Amber had actually heard it before me and was like ‘Dude, you have to fucking check this out’ and we just blasted it,” he urges. “It was just awesome. I think she fucking nailed it!”

Indeed, the sensibility that most characterises Bitte Orca is its stunning, ornate tangle of personalities and voices – from the serrated vocal gymnastics and guitar phrases of Cannibal Resource or the perfectly clumsy finger-picked guitar motif and lush orchestration of Angel Deladoorian’s solo track Two Doves, to the acrobatic guitars and underlaid groove of No Intention and the gorgeous maelstrom of Useful Chamber.

“I write all the arrangements and all the harmonies, but with this album one of the things I wanted to do was really make it feel like a band,” Longstreth says. “I really wanted it to have this sense of different personalities warring against each other or complementing each other.”

Longstreth may not have relinquished control, but his band is now at the foreground of his wild musical imaginings. “With Led Zeppelin or The Beatles, you hear these different personalities in conversation or equilibrium,” he says. “Writing for Amber and Angel – these two very strong, very different female voices – was kind of like imagining them standing in a garden full of flowers that complemented their colours.

“This band is like a family,” he pauses. “It would be depressing to me, and not really honouring the idea of playing music together, if it all just sounded like me.”

Dirty Projectors play the sold out Golden Plains festival on March 6-8 and The HiFi on March 9. $46 www.thehifi.com.au

Bitte Orca is available through Domino/EMI

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CHEEK POLITICS
Published: Australian Book Review #319, March 2010.

How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti & Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia by Iain McIntyre (Breakdown Press)

Poor communication has long proven activism’s Achilles heel. Engaging the wider populace and influencing opinion, one might argue, often relies on the effective, relatable delivery of a message as much the ideas or events that inform it. We may be loathed to admit it, but intelligent PR can aid any pursuit – advocatory, activist or otherwise.

It’s within this schema that expansive new publication How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti & Mischief-Making takes its cues. Compiled and written by Melbourne writer, zine-maker and community radio presenter Iain McIntyre, the vividly illustrated volume attempts to document not only an unofficial history of Australian protest, activism and all-round cheek, but the connections between political troublemaking and its ability to influence the dogmas of the mainstream. It succeeds for most part.

Comprising countless compact, dated, encyclopaedic entries, a wealth of photographs and illustrations, plus fourteen expanded ‘Conversations’ with Australian troublemakers – including John Safran, anti-Apartheid activist Meredith Bergmann and anti-uranium activist and Arabunna elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott – there are several perspectives at play within How to Make Trouble …. While McIntyre has his own agenda and seems at pains to cast Australian political mischief-making as part of meaningful cultural lineage, ‘informed by a commonly held belief on the Left that social progress does not emanate from … “enlightened” politicians, but instead derives from grassroots resistance’, to his great credit, he is willing to allow the volume’s many voices and interviewees to diffuse his own editorialising.

The question-and-answer ‘Conversations’ are by far the volume’s strongest and most insightful component. McIntyre draws on broad sweep of troublemakers, from public political artists like the Buga-Up collective, who made a name ‘revising’ advertising billboards and disrupting tobacco-sponsored events throughout the 1980s and 1990s, to activist performers such as the John Howard Ladies’ Auxiliary Fan Club and drag satirist Pauline Pantsdown. Interviews with John Safran and The Chaser’s Chris Taylor make for a fascinating read. While detailing the logistics behind some of their most infamous pranks – including The Chaser’s APEC Summit security breach – interestingly, both Taylor and Safran refute the suggestion that their work holds activist implications, instead framing it in terms of entertainment and method acting.

McIntyre’s conversation with activist Dave Burgess, who along with friend Will Saunders made international headlines when they emblazoned the slogan ‘NO WAR’ in red paint on the Sydney Opera House in March 2003, makes for perhaps the most engaging passage in the book. Aside from the thrilling story of scaling the Opera House sails, the dialogue puts a very rational and human face to a deed subject to such histrionics in the mainstream press. Importantly, the conversation also considers the action’s influence and scope of the public’s response.

Any issues with How to Make Trouble … rest with the main body of text; the historical listings and brief descriptions of uprisings, protests, pranks and the like. There are plenty of inspiring, elucidatory and positively hilarious accounts here. The tale of four activists preventing a huge US military aircraft from landing at Alice Springs by riding their bicycles into the runway path, not to mention Magistrate David Heilpern’s dismissal of a charge against dancing activist group the Tranny Cops for impersonating police on the grounds of a ‘Village People-style defence’ are fine examples. That said, the collection could have done with some serious culling. While the anecdotal qualities of the texts give the book its gritty flare, many of the entries take a guise closer to that of undergraduate hearsay, detailing only the mischievous or seditious acts whilst neglecting to contend a meaningful purpose or potential sphere of influence. Entries like that of ‘An imaginative shoplifter’ seem petty examples of sticking it to ‘the man’ ahead anything else, and chance alienating the volume’s potential wider readership.

The book’s foreword, by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen, echoes the crucial dichotomy between creative and non-creative activism. Protestors ‘who scream … and chuck rocks and smash stuff … will have a hard time changing the average person’s mind,’ he writes. ‘That’s where imaginative, inspiring troublemaking can help.’

While not all of How to Make Trouble and Influence People lives up to both its contended ambitions, the moments that do offer a feisty, perceptive refreshingly rational dialogue on our diverse history of rebelliousness.

Dan Rule is an arts and music writer who has contributed to a host of publications, including The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Big Issue, Dazed & Confused, Oyster and Cyclic Defrost. He writes the weekly ‘Around the galleries’ column in The Age, is the senior writer for Music Australia Guide and is a co-founder of independent art publishers And Collective.

(Photo credit: “One Perfect Day” graffiti, Newcastle 1998. Photographer: Ian Sweeney)

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, February 27, 2010.

WHAT Ron Mueck
WHERE National Gallery of Victoria, 180 St Kilda Road, city, 8620 2222, ngv.vic.gov.au

Wandering among Ron Mueck’s remarkable silicon and fibreglass sculptures is transportive in the extreme. Either gigantic or elfin in dimension, the Melbourne-born artist’s incredibly realistic renderings of the human form give that impression that it is we who have been rescaled. As if on a parallel plane, we can observe seemingly without rebuke. We can follow the contours of pallid, naked skin; study the blemishes of a newborn five times our size; trace thickets of unkempt body hair. Though voyeurism is never without consequence. Isolated and removed from context, Mueck’s works are exemplars of human fragility, anxiety, awkwardness and condition. We don’t merely observe them, but feel them. Surprisingly, it’s the diminutive works that seem the most affecting. There’s something terribly moving about Old Woman in Bed – a gaunt, sleeping figure beneath a crumpled white blanket – her diminutive scale only amplifies our sense of isolation, of vulnerability. Ultimately, at the end of it all, we alone. Nonethless, Mueck’s show is anything but a dirge. Ahead of all else, his works urge us to remember each other – to appreciate one another – for other’s lives are so easily forgotten or misplaced. Adult $15 / Concession $12 / Children $7.50. 10am–5pm (closed Tuesday), until April 18.

WHAT Lida Abdul: Ruins: Stories of Awakening
WHERE Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 6131, annaschwartzgallery.com

There is both a confronting political dimension and a rich poeticism to Lida Abdul’s new collection of works. Across three videos and a series of photographic stills that comprise Ruins: Stories of Awakening, the Kabul artist examines war not just as the destruction of lives and buildings and political regimes, but as personal and cultural memory. In the striking Once upon Awakening (pictured, above), young men in black robes haul at white ropes tied to huge, bombed out ruins (apparently the former Kabul Presidential Palace). Despite their frenzied efforts, the towering shell remains. Their dogged attempts to erase – to forget, to start afresh – are mutely and stubbornly denied. Dome, which plays out in the rear of the space, gives an entirely different vantage. Abdul’s camera dizzily follows a boy, spinning and twirling and dancing amid ruins. His eyes are closed, his face to the sky, the deafening resonance of overhead planes echoing about the space. His dance is both simple and incredibly complex. It is naivety and innocence and childish reverie in the face of unthinkable tragedy and danger. It is also a pure, indelibly human act of defiance. Tues to Fri noon–6pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until April 10.

WHAT Tai Snaith: The Wild Chorus
WHERE Helen Gory Galerie, 25 St Edmonds Road, Prahran, 9525 2808, helengory.com

Tai Snaith has a thing for bits and bobs. Her unassuming watercolour, pencil and gouache paintings are paragons of bric-a-brac recontextualised. Her world is one where a Kermit the Frog soft toy reclines in a silver stiletto heal, where a horse made from carrots and wooden skewers perches atop a pile of aging hardbacks, where a pair of reindeer ornaments stare blankly into space, as if wondering: ‘What next?’. Indeed, there is a lot more to Snaith’s The Wild Chorus than op-shop kitsch. Running alongside Amanda Read-Forsythe’s Missed Sighting, her work not only documents odd, lost and found objects but employs them as a trigger point for a plethora potential narratives. We not only marvel smilingly at the unsmiling, suffocatingly ordinary portrait on the cover of Ars Camera magazine, we wonder where it was found, who had owned it before and just how the hell the magazine’s art directors kept their jobs. An object can tell a thousand stories and Snaith’s Wild Chorus offers an entry point. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until March 6.

WHAT Jonathan Chong: Modern Extinctions
WHERE Kick Gallery, 239 High Street, Northcote, 0412 243 818, kickgallery.com

Something of a tech fetishist, graphic designer and multimedia artist Jonathan Chong’s wonderfully executed illustrations of obsolete gaming consoles, first generation camcorders, Polaroid cameras and Commodore 64’s are as reverential as they are reflective. Combining intricate line drawing and vivid, digital colouration to capture the electronics of his pre-teens, Chong’s work pays homage to both the aesthetics and the ambition behind these once ‘modern’ devices. In an age where technology and functionality assumes an increasingly virtual form, Modern Extinctions takes giddy delight in the cult of the object. Wed to Fri 11am–7pm, Sat noon–5pm, until March 6.

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STRONG ARM STEADY - ‘IN SEARCH OF STONEY JACKSON’
Published: The Age, A2, 48 Hours, February 27, 2010.

Strong Arm Steady
In Search of Stoney Jackson
(Stones Throw/Fuse)

Thanks to its hideous mainstream counterpart, it would be an understatement to suggest that, almost four decades since its birth, hip-hop is still hopelessly misunderstood in wider listening circles. If you were looking for an entry point into genuine, contemporary, street-level rap, In Search of Stoney Jackson might just be the record. The second longplayer from South Central Los Angeles collective Strong Arm Steady does a lot of things right in its vivid snapshot of life on LA’s grittier side. Underlaid by producer Madlib’s wonky hooks, buried soul samples and world music obscura, the group’s three MCs and various guests broach themes as diverse as the financial crisis, romance and street violence. But like the best of the genre (cue Nas’s 1994 masterpiece Illmatic), In Search of Stoney Jackson doesn’t attempt to project an intellectualised, moral stance. Rather, it offers an unapologetic reflection of a specific time, environment and otherwise muted black, urban perspective.

DAN RULE

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BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #73, February 2010.

Fourtet
There is Love in You
****1/2

There’s a wondrous duality to There is Love in You. The fifth longplayer from Keiran Hebden thrives on both the architectural and undefined; the intricately structural and intimately human. It’s a quality what gives this stunningly rendered set of songs its strength. In many ways, Hebden has returned to his 2003 masterwork Rounds here. Where recent efforts – 2008’s extended EP Ringer included – represented exciting, though unrealised explorations into rhythmic and structural experimentation, this is all about the intermeshing of details. Shimmering textures, melodies and acoustics ricochet through pulsing, expanded dance rhythms. Colour explodes into the sky. It’s ecstatic, affecting, disarmingly beautiful stuff. Believe.

Domino/EMI

Georgia Anne Muldrow
Early
****

Since floating into the consciousness with her 2006 avant-soul masterpiece Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, LA vocalist, producer and multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow’s prodigious talents have been clear for all to see. Her unlikely, self-sung harmonies, sticky, groove-soaked productions and highly personal, spiritual lyrical tangents have revealed an artist on her own plane. As it’s title suggests, Early charts a collection of Muldrow’s previously unreleased material. In fact, she recorded and produced this fascinating 10-track album when only 17. It’s stunning. The sun-drenched soul and dense funk groove of Run Away and swooping harmonies of is neo-soul classic in the making.

Animatedcartunes/Fuse

Monkey Marc
As the Market Crashed
***1/2

There are some intriguing moments on As the Market Crashed, the solo debut from Melbourne-based producer, environmental activist and Combat Wombat soldier Monkey Marc. Recorded in his solar-powered studio, the record fuses eerie dub frequencies with Sub-Continental textures and classic, Headz-era downbeat. There are plenty of highlights. The stabbing Eastern strings and menacing bass underlays of The Evening Sun and the dubstep pressure of We’ve Really Fucked Up this Time are fine examples. That said, some of these cuts feel as though they’ve been tempered for the sake of consistency and balance. It makes for a rock-solid album, but one that could have done with a little more flare.

Omelette/Rocket

Eric La Casa
Zone Sensible 2/Dundee 2
****

French composer and sound recordist Eric La Casa has built a reputation as one of the country’s most accomplished purveyors of contemporary musique-concrete. Whilst turning his ear to various everyday phenomena, he expounds sound-worlds so dense, so vast and so immersive that it’s almost impossible to believe that their source material is occurring right beneath our earlobes. This body of work sees La Casa formulate some of his most engaging, downright beguiling work yet. The interwoven drones and buzzing netherworld of the 26-minute Zone Sensible 2 is composed entirely from recordings lifted from beehives. The three-part Dundee 2 is an unnerving study of city space. Enthralling stuff.

Room40/Vitamin

Rakim
The Seventh Seal
**1/2

The problem with Rakim’s long-awaited comeback isn’t with his flow. From he opening stanza of The Seventh Seal, one of hip hop’s greatest MCs is still on top of the craft. What he isn’t across is his beat selection. Like Nas has illustrated so many times, genius rhymes don’t always translate to genius records, and Rakim’s production team let him down here. The Seventh Seal was billed as a new vision for a troubled form and Rakim holds up his end of the deal; he’s as effortless as ever, spitting an electric stream of couplets without even breaking sweat. The inconsistent beats, synthetic hooks and glossy production values, however, totally miss the point.

SMC/Shock

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THE ICON - GIL SCOTT-HERON
Published: Music Australia Guide #73, February 2010.

In The Icon we profile those who change music. This month, Dan Rule explores the canon of soul poet, spoken word activist and hip hop forefather Gil Scott-Heron.

The scope of Gil Scott-Heron’s influence can’t be measured via his contributions to the music alone. In a career that has spanned four decades and over a dozen studio albums, the 61-year-old poet and master lyricist not only foreran one of contemporary music’s most significant and revolutionary movements, but was a key voice of black American activism throughout the 70s. His social critique catch call of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” – from his 1970 debut Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, recorded by legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele – has entered the vernacular.

Scott-Heron’s life has revolved around the word. Born Gilbert Scott-Heron in 1949 in Chicago, he spent his early years in Tennessee before moving to the Bronx with his mother during his early teen years. His experience of the decaying, poverty and crime-choked New York borough changed him irrevocably. He began putting pen to paper, recording the palpitating rhythms of the street in raw, agile phraseology. He wrote his first collection of poetry at 13 and released his infamous debut novel The Vulture in 1968 as a 19-year-old.

Considered one of jazz and soul’s most important figures, Scott-Heron worked with some of America’s greats. But while his longstanding collaboration with composer, producer and pianist Brian Jackson produced several popular records throughout the 70s – including Free Will (1972), Winter in America (1974), The First Minute of a New Day (1975) – and his work with producer/composer Malcolm Cecil and Nile Rodgers (of legendary disco band Chic) took him to the top of the RnB charts in the 80s, Scott-Herron was never interested in commercial recognition. His work represents a proclamation from the street, a call to action and empowerment, a pithy reflection of black life in a white America; it is the progenitor and catalyst for political rap. Hip hop would not exist in its contemporary form without him.

Whilst a brilliant mind, recent decades have revealed a troubled man. Having virtually disappeared from the music scene following his 1994 album Spirits, Scott-Heron was gaoled in 2001 and later in 2007 for cocaine-related offences. Rumours that he is HIV-positive have circulated but remain unconfirmed.

Scott-Heron continues to be creatively active nonetheless. After being approached by producer and XL Recordings owner Richard Russell whilst imprisoned, Scott-Heron and Russell went onto record the brilliant, grit-scarred new album I’m New Here. Speaking to MAG of the experience, Russell described working with Scott-Heron as nothing short of inspirational.

“Gil has always been a radical and his music has always been radical and pushed the boundaries,” he said. “I feel like this record continues that tradition.”

“The thing with Gil is that while there has been a long hiatus between records, he’s never made a bad record. A lot of artists can get a bit corny as they get older; the edges go. But that’s never, ever happened to him.”

I’m Here Now is out now via XL/Remote Control

Visit: gilscottheron.net

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, February 20, 2010.

WHAT Peter Hennessey: My Hell’s Gate
WHERE Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, 9419 3406, gertrude.org.au

In a detour from his vast, balsa and plywood recreations of space-race machinery, Melbourne artist Peter Hennessey’s latest installation at GCAS sets its sights firmly on the explosion. In what could only be described as a brave move, on behalf of both the artist and the gallery, Hennessey has restaged and documented an albeit downscaled version of the infamous detonation of rock formations in New York’s East River in 1885; a large-scale detonation that is thought to be largest planned explosion until the atomic bomb and effectively ushered in the explosive era. Hennessey detonated a plaster casting submerged in a tonne of water (encased in a reinforced perspex cube) and documented the blast via two videos and various still images. The results are striking. While the slow motion videos and large-scale photographs evidence the explosion as aesthetic spectacle, the cube – which rests mutely in the centre of the gallery, shattered plaster lining its base – acts as an ominous, sobering past tense. It’s this dualistic quality that comes to define the show. My Hell’s Gate resonates with unsettling beauty and outright brutality; the stuff of the big screen and modern militarism. Hennessey confers the explosive status as both cultural artefact and the epitome of dehumanised violence. Runs alongside Jesse Jones’ superb filmic work Mahogany. Tues to Fri 11am–5.30pm, Sat 11am–4.30pm, until February 27.

WHAT Rhys Lee: New York – Peru
WHERE Block Projects, Level 4, 289 Flinders Land, city, 9662 9148, blockprojects.com

The title of Rhys Lee’s expansive new body of work may insinuate notions of place and travel, but Lee’s journey seems as deeply psychological, even metaphysical, as it does geographical. Across 96 arcane, wonky, ghoulish ink-on-paper works – created during stints in New York and South America – the Brisbane raised artist merges the diaristic with the summoning of corrupted souls. A sketch of a sleeping dog sits in the midst of hellish portraits; hollow eye sockets and hungry, dangerous mouths offset splay-legged monster-femmes and mutant faux-porn. More cute dogs and puppies pop up here and there, as does an erection from a headless male torso. It’s disturbing, crazy and droll. Lee’s vision may be dystopic, but it’s never so bleak to be suffocating. Deranged souls, it seems, can also prove devilishly engaging. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until February 27.

WHAT Ede Horton: Perspective, Ian Bunn: Spinning Pop
WHERE Shifted, Level 1, 15 Albert Street, Richmond, 9421 0884, shifted.net.au

Each of these very much distinct shows finds its grounding in a particular sense reinterpretation. Created after a four-month residency in Berlin, the petite, finely detailed black and white glass sculptures that comprise Ede Horton’s [start italic]Perspective[end italic] suggest that nothing is quite as it seems. A pair of still-life ‘talking hands’ are re-imagined with vivid blue eyes perched on the knuckle of each index finger; a human foot sports eyes, a mouth and elfin ears. The implication seems one of inherent human complexity. Horton offers the body not as an endpoint, but as a vessel for infinite layers and memories and histories. In the adjoining gallery, meanwhile, Ian Bunn’s loud, pigmented ink-on-paper works recast pop art’s whim for mass media imagery in the context of the contemporary proliferation of digital content. Rather than offering a bold repetition of a one-off consumer icon, Bunn’s works are vividly distractive, drawing on innumerable fractured images and points of reference. While Bunn’s allusion to digital noise is nothing new, his comparison to pop gives something of a fresh take. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until February 27.

WHAT Locust Jones
WHERE Karen Woodbury Gallery, 4 Albert Street Richmond, 9421 2500, kwgallery.com

In some ways, New Zealand born artist Locust Jones’ striking, lithe aesthetic recalls the mid-career work of American artists like Phil Frost. Unlike much of the post-graffiti works of that era, however, Jones’ sprawling, loose, nonetheless meticulously detailed ink-on-paper compositions pulse with an explicit political electricity that transcends mere sloganeering. The meld of faces, figuration, cityscape and text that comprise the vast works of his current show at Karen Woodbury unfurl like a stream-of-consciousness newswire. Works like [start italic]Michael Jackson’s heart attack and the Tehran riots[end italic] writhe amid a sea of faces, placards, political leaders, text and bodies, while [start italic]Climate Change 2[end italic] sees a map of the world rupturing at the seams, spilling blood-like lava every which way. Jones’ works are dire, but no more so, one might argue, than the world we live in. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until February 27.

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5 THINGS - PIKELET’S NEW FLAVOUR
Published: Music Australia Guide #73, February 2010.

Known for her looped, multi-instrumental solo work, prodigious Melbourne pop talent Pikelet (aka Evelyn Morris) has released an album of expansive full-band recordings. By Dan Rule

1. Years of touring solo afforded Morris the piece of mind to work with a band.
“I find touring by myself really healthy. I’ve had to learn to not worry too much about the fuck-ups or the shows that don’t go so well, and that’s how I became capable of giving my songs to other people and not being so precious. It’s taken all that time of going solo to figure out how to be in a band.”

2. Morris is fascinated by the malleability of creative process.
“Song-writing can kind of be like religion or science. Religion is where you have an end result and you have to write backwards from that, because the answers are there. With science, on the other hand, you have no idea what’s going to go on and you’re just enquiring and enquiring and enquiring and getting answers as you go along.”

3. New record Stem may have risen from a more conventional band set-up, but Morris insured it was more challenging than ever.
“I was a little bit self-conscious about the fact that I might just get a band and then start writing really straight-up pop songs. I’m really interested in walking that fine line between pop and experimental music. I definitely wanted to lull people into a false sense of security, then throw something weird at them.”

4. Morris’s lyrics have assumed an introspective, almost philosophical, quality.
“Death is a bit of a recurring theme for me. I’m fascinated by it. A lot of my songs kind of work as responses to religion. There are so many songs about going to heaven and believing in stuff like that, so I’m interested in what I can write about in place of that, because I don’t believe in that stuff.”

5. One of her songs takes an anthropological bent, invoking the image of an endurance hunter, stalking his prey.
“Endurance hunters are these people who chase their prey until the prey is exhausted. When they eventually catch the animal, they have a ceremony in which they free the animal’s spirit before taking it home to feed their family. All the parts of the song represent different parts of the chase.”

Stem is available via Love & Mercy/Shock
Visit: myspace.com/ovalyn

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MASSIVE ATTACK - ‘HELIGOLAND’
Published: Music Australia Guide #73, February 2010.

Massive Attack
Heligoland
****
(Virgin/EMI)

To suggest that Massive Attack’s 2003 comeback, 100th Window, arrived with baggage would prove quite the understatement. The once trio’s fracture and disconnect was there for all to see in the wake of 1998’s seminal Mezzanine. Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowels walked out on the band citing creative differences, while Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall went on indefinite sabbatical, which effectively left Robert ‘3D’ del Naja the new project’s lone pilot. If 100th Window’s serviceable, nonetheless gloom-ridden tropes showed anything, it was that group’s fraught personal and creative dynamics added a hue that del Naja couldn’t capture alone. Seven years on, and with Marshall back on deck, Heligoland arrests the slide. From lurking piano phrasing and euphoric resolution of Pray For Rain (featuring TVOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe), Heligoland feels nothing if not revitalised. All the hallmarks are here – the suffocating atmospheres, the menacing subterranean tones – but this collection really shines in its unlikely counterpoints. Cuts like Splitting the Atom (with Horace Andy) shrouds an ostensibly kitsch piece of dub-pop with epic, spectral atmospheres, while Psyche sees Martina Topley-Bird morph a busy, dominating acoustic guitar lick into an unfeasibly spacious sketch. Flat of the Blade’s shuddering static anaemic vocals (courtesy of Guy Garvey) are unlike anything Massive Attack have done before. It doesn’t all work – Rush Minute and Paradise Circus prove unconvincing – but what Heligoland does is illustrate that Massive Attack have a lot more to give. This may not be their third classic, but it suggests that del Naja and Marshall have definitely got it left in them.

DAN RULE

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