DAVID MCCOMB - SHARING THE LOVE
Published: Rhythms, December 2009.

A new live album aims to help expound the legacy of the late, great David McComb. By Dan Rule.

When Jonathan Alley and Danielle Karalus set out to organise a concert tracing the songbook of legendary Triffids frontman David McComb, the intention was never to make a live record. It was to raise funds for their documentary on the great man Love in Bright Landscapes, to celebrate McComb’s life, to bring those who cared about the man and his work together at the same place, at the same time.

The rest, explains Alley, was a lovely piece of serendipity. “Our priority was to just get the gig to happen,” he says. “But it really just became one of those nights.”

“There was quite a sort of emotional atmosphere to the evening,” he recalls. “The Triffids had done their reunion shows in Sydney and that had been an unexpectedly emotional thing for both the band and the audience. But in Melbourne, apart from a concert that Paul Kelly played and a bunch of stuff in the immediate aftermath of Dave’s death in 1999, there sort of hadn’t been an event to remember him in quite some time.”

The Blackeyed Susans, Charles Jenkins, Shackleton, Diving Bell and The Mime Set all played sets that night at the Corner Hotel, recasting vintage Triffids material and unearthing some of McComb’s rarer works. It was only when Alley – a long-serving broadcaster with Melbourne’s Triple R and editor of music monthly Music Australia Guide – listened back to the unmixed recordings of the evening that he realised their potential.

“I have never been a fan of those really sterile, static live albums,” he says. “But the thing about this recording was that there was a great sense of atmosphere that came over and that’s why we ended up calling it Deep in a Dream: An Evening With the Songs of David McComb.”

“It has a nice flowing atmosphere where we’ve opened the doors, we’ve let you in, we’ve played the songs and off you go.”

Interestingly, Alley’s fascination with McComb didn’t grow via usual channels. “Most people who resonate with his work grew up with his music,” he says. “I didn’t – I discovered him completely backwards. I used to go and see him with The Blackeyed Susans; he issued a solo record and I got into that, and I met him when he released that.”

“I then went back to the Stockholm record – the live Triffids record – and then went backwards through all the material.”

“When Dave died, obviously I thought that was tragic, but it didn’t strike me as the death of an icon or anything.”

It was after reading an article centred on the reissue of Born Sandy Devotionalthat he began to realise the sheer scope of McComb’s oeuvre.

“It was just like, ‘God, what a story’, what an incredible journey to have gone on and for it to have petered out in such tragic circumstances, ‘Someone should make a film!’.”

“The further I explored David’s work, the more I realised just how timeless it is. It’s timeless because you can have an ever-evolving relationship with it. One song will make you feel one way one day and you will hear and feel things in that song one day which are not there at another time, and there’s another completely different set of emotional reactions and images that spring up.”

“Whether he was conscious of that gift or not, he applied in such a matter-of-fact way and I think the songs are incredibly Australian in their matter-of-factness. It’s almost kind of evocative reportage. There are things in there that you could recognise as being immediately Australian that could be clichés, but aren’t because of that ability.”

Tracked by Peter Frawley of Salt Studios and produced by Alley and Sam Lowe (also of Salt), the live record sees The Blackeyed Susans provide stirring renditions of classics like In the Pines and Ocean of You, as well what by all accounts is the debut live performance of Blackeyed Susan, while Charles Jenkins’ take on Raining Pleasure and Diving Bell’s version of Tender is the Night prove highlights among many.

“It still gets me that song,” says Alley. “Because it almost could be about David. When you read the lyric back and you listen to the way the Claudio Schneider sings that, the lyrics are by Dave but they could almost be about Dave, and he wrote them when he was only twenty-four or something.”

One of the record’s most engaging moments is its final track, a Blackeyed Susans rendition of The Good Life Never Ends, a song that McComb wrote shortly before his passing.

“That song was never released in any form,” muses Alley. “It was one of Dave’s last songs, so I’m really proud to have that on the record.”

Deep in a Dream: An Evening with the Songs of David McComb is out through Tornado Alley/Stomp

Proceeds from the sale of the record will contribute to the making of David McComb documentary Love in Bright Landscapes

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DOOM - ‘UNEXPECTED GUESTS’
Published: The Vine, November 29, 2009.

DOOM
Unexpected Guests
(Gold Dust/Inertia)

Despite his profuse two-decade-long recording career, Daniel Dumile (aka DOOM) has spent plenty of time in the creative wilderness. Between his early ’90s work with New York trio KMD as Zevlove X – including 1994’s notoriousBlack Bastards, which was pulled from most record stores soon after release – his 1999 debut as MF Doom Operation Doomsday, his definitive 2004 Madvillain collab with LA beat king Madlib and this year’s noise-skittled, positively bonkers Bukowski elegy Born Like This, the metal-masked couplet-crusher has spent ample time out of sight and out of mind.

New compile Unexpected Guests plots a clutch of DOOM’s guest appearances, re-workings, productions and collaborations from his relatively quiet times; many of which were in the four years between 2005’s Danger Doom project and Born Like This. It’s a telling concept, especially considering just how many verses such a master of MCing idiosyncrasies spits on non-DOOM projects. Indeed, while hardcore fans have probably come across this material in one form or another, a project like Unexpected Guests gives some kind of narrative to DOOM’s creative trajectory throughout otherwise quiet times.

There are any number of highlights here. Dumile’s all over the spiralling hook of ‘Rock Co. Kane Flow’ – his guest spot on De La Soul’s 2004 Grind Date – eating “rappers like part of a complete breakfast / whose rhymes aren’t worth weight of their cheap necklaces”, where ‘Sniper Elite’, from the never-to-be DillaDOOMproject, has him spitting verbiage over the spacious guitar line and rocketing snare of a vintage Dilla hook. ‘?’, meanwhile, sees DOOM and Kurious trading razor-sharp verses atop a shimmering disco-funk chop.

It’s not all play; there is a hardness to the collection. Cuts like ‘All Outta Ale’ have the master villain at his brooding, booze-swilling best, replete with a lurking, bass-led dirge. ‘Bells of DOOM’ is a killer, with Dumile stringing a stomping beat and horn line through a diffuse field of church bells.

But while there are some great moments, Unexpected Guests tends to lack the kind of depth that Dumile owes both himself and his fans. We all know the swashbuckling super villain who can pull off such blips of rhyming peculiarity as “pure diamond” and “torn hymen”, “poor timin’” and “Paul Simon tourin’, I’m in”, but what makes DOOM such a master is his ability to drop vivid personal and political detail amongst the outward flippancy. Who can forget his vivid, blood-spattered renderings of a crooked legal system on ‘Absolutely’ or post-apocalyptic vistas on ‘Cellz’? And that’s just going back Born Like This. Listen toMadvillainy and you’ll witness an eccentric rap storyteller of the highest order.

As such, Unexpected Guests ends up occupying something of an uncomfortable middle ground. No doubt, it’ll give fans and fresh faces a good tickle. The problem is that it will only give them half the story.

DOOM may be in-demand for his madcap guest verses, but his best material resonates for its meticulous, slow-burn detail and mastery of the craft.

Dan Rule

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, November 28, 2009.

WHAT Sam Shmith: Synthetics
WHERE Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Lane, city, 9650 0589, arc1gallery.com

At a glance, the title of Sam Shmith’s new show at Arc One seems a misnomer. The rich, dramatic photographic landscapes and washed out desert vistas that comprise Synthetics veer so close to reality that they’re easily mistaken. But this is the precise terrain in which these striking works find their potency. Shmith frames his Synthetics in terms of “painting”; the fact that he renders his “paintings” using hundreds of cropped and digitally collaged photographs from his own collection barely seems to matter. It is he who is essentially creating and manipulating the image from scratch. But these highly constructed, meticulously finished works aren’t about the illusion perse. There are enough cues amid the glittering city lights of Synthetics #8, brooding mountainsides of Synthetics #4and #5, and the flat shadows and opaque desert skies of Synthetics #1 and #2 to point you in the right direction. Shmith seems interested in contextual slippage; his works drift somewhere between referent, reality and complete orchestration, and whether intentional or not, Synthetics leads us to question not just the aesthetics, but the ethics of photography. In a time where digital images proliferate, these hyper-real panoramas sweep us up, only to cast us down with a thud. Photography’s privilege as a “truth teller” has never been so shaky. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until December 5.

WHAT Arlene TextaQueen: Naked Landscapes of Victoria
WHERE Gallerysmith, 170–174 Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne, 9329 1860, gallerysmith.com.au

Melbourne’s resident texta-wielding superhero, Arlene TextaQueen, has been building on her TextaNudes series for the best part of a decade now. While the premise might have grown a little tired by now, the fact that the Melbourne-based artist has managed to continually develop and refine her subject matter and technique has kept her happily wonky portraits of friends and fellow artists vital and fresh. Her new Naked Landscapes of Victoria series, which sees her naked female models pose as “nude re-interpretations of Australian cultural and historical identities”, features some of her largest and most intricately detailed works yet. While there’s an underlying spectre of activism to most of these works – The True History of the Kelly Gang, featuring fellow Melbourne artist Salote Tawale dressed in a skimpy version of Kelly’s armour, is offered as a an ode to Australian women forgotten by formal historical accounts – its TextaQueen’s intimate familiarity with her subjects, their humour and cheek(s) that gives this show life. Thurs to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until December 12.

WHAT Oslo Davis: This Annoying Life
WHERE Lamington Drive, 86 George Street, Fitzroy, 8060 9745, lamingtondrive.com

The magic of Oslo Davis’s wonderfully economical ink-on-paper works is not just his ability summon the bizarre form the banal, but the inverse. The cult Melbourne cartoonist and illustrator’s debut solo exhibition, aptly titled This Annoying Life, takes in anything from warring couples at a ballroom dance – “Hey, this is OUR sexually transmitted disease!” growls one particularly disillusioned partner – to a series of Harry Potters in the Works, which sees the boy-wizard lumped with a series of increasingly unglamorous plot scenarios, such as Harry Potter Still on Dial-Up and Harry Potter in the Car while Dad get some Two-Stroke for the Mower. Featuring originals from various editorial commissions for The Age, New York Times, Meanjin and others, the exhibition not only reveals Davis’s development as an illustrator, but as a keenly perceptive humorist. A personal favourite – lifted from his famed Overheard column in M Magazine reveals a seemingly empty car park outside the Melbourne Zoo, save a blaring loudspeaker: “We’ve lost a boy here at the zoo. His name is Joseph, he’s four and is dressed as Gene Simmons (pause), from Kiss.” Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until December 23.

WHAT John Olsen: Paintings & Drawings 2009
WHERE Metro Gallery, 1214 High Street, Armadale, 9500 8511, metrogallery.com.au

At 81 years young, John Olsen is one of Australia’s greats. This show of new works at Metro Gallery, which concludes tomorrow, suggests he still has plenty more to give. Comprising vivid large-scale oils (Dirt Roads is one of the picks), watercolours (see the stunning Wet Season) and kinetic mixed media sketches and portraits, these new works brim with Olsen’s singular perceptivity and almost explosive expressiveness. Nonetheless, it’s Olsen’s more unassuming pieces that really resonate here. His charcoal and crayon Studio Cat series and compact, muted, mixed media landscapes, including Floods Toward Lake Eyre II(pictured), are a joy. As ever, Olsen manages to capture so much with just a few strokes and squiggles. Today and tomorrow, 11am–5pm.

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AKIRA KOSEMURA - ‘POLAROID PIANO’
Published: The Age, A2, 48 Hours, November 28, 2009.

Akira Kosemura
Polaroid Piano
(Someone Good/Vitamin)

The title of this lulling piano miniature from Akira Kosemura is no mistake. Polaroid Piano draws as much on hazy, soft-lens atmosphere as petite piano phraseology. Across 10 compact sketches, the young composer weaves delicate threads of melody through textural undercurrents of field recordings – courtesy of Brisbane sound artist Lawrence English – and the hushed shuffle and clunk of the piano’s mechanism. The results are quietly stunning. Part of a generation of Japanese artists blurring the boundaries between contemporary classical and minimalist, understated pop music, Kosemura’s work doesn’t fixate on technique, clarity or minor details. Its resonance is one of whispered evocation, feeling and place.

DAN RULE

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HEATHER WOODS BRODERICK - ‘FROM THE GROUND’
Published: The Big Issue #343, November/December 2009.

From the Ground
Heather Woods Broderick
****

It may creep and echo, whisper and lilt, but From the Ground is a nonetheless prominent achievement from Portland, Oregon singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Heather Woods Broderick. The further it unfolds, the more this ostensibly skeletal folk-pop outing changes its spots.

Drawing on a clutch of fragile instrumentation (piano, guitar, celeste, flute, mandolin, glockenspiel and breath-like field recordings), not to mention the production smarts of Broderick’s brother and collaborator Peter, this record assumes shifting atmospheres, tonality and textures as much as it does traditional folk tropes. There’s a resonance and attention to production detail in vignettes like ‘Misty’ – with its processed cello and glittering, backlit vocal tones – that takes this record in far more evocative, almost cinematic directions.

The yearning strings of ‘Back Room’ and the glacial piano of ‘Left’ distil atmosphere, presence and place; ‘Cottonwood Bay’ is a stunning reflection on childhood, memory and connection to landscape.

Broderick’s voice is something of rare gift on its own. Luckily for us, her compositional vision has allowed for a record that will grow and complicate with every listen. From the Ground may be quiet and fleeting, but its shadow will remain.

Dan Rule

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FROM TEHRAN WITH LOVE
Published: The Age, A2, November 21, 2009.

With design embedded in the Persian psyche, a vibrant visual culture thrives amid political upheaval and dogged censorship. Dan Rule meets some of those putting Iran in the picture.

A cloud of crudely printed, long-blade knives hangs ominously atop the cover of new monograph Morteza Momayez: Graphic Design, Photography, Painting, 1957–2005. They are poised to rain down, tips first.

The source of the image is a 1976 installation by the late Iranian artist – known in his homeland as “the father of Iranian graphic design” – in which a cluster of knives hangs, suspended, above an arrangement of pots, themselves sprouting steel blades. The implied violence of the cloud above, it seems, cultivates more of the same from below.

Over a career that stretched almost half a century before his death as a 70-year-old in 2005, Momayez created an often highly-political body of work either side of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Practicing across illustration, etching, painting and photography, his work was indicative of a visual culture in flux, channelling both the West and more traditional Persian aesthetic values.

“Iranian graphic design could be divided in two periods: before and after Morteza Momayez,” says Mahmoud Bahmanpour, founder of Nazar Art Publications, the small Tehran publishing house responsible for the Momayez and countless other Iranian monographs.

Such was Momayez’s influence that both pre and post 1979 governments commissioned his designs and expressed admiration for his contribution to culture. “He added new characters to Iranian visual elements and decreased the existing gap between the superior group of society and the common people,” Bahmanpour continues, speaking via his assistant and translator Fatemeh Kavandi. “He went his own way and he never gave any special endorsement to anybody.”

Nazar’s volumes on Momayez and his contemporaries offer a very different perspective to a country rarely considered for its visual communication.  While mainstream Western discourses on Iran seldom shift beyond speculation surrounding the Ahmadinejad administration’s international policy objectives, the Tehran publisher has effectively forged an entrance to a side of Iran barely seen by those outside the country.

“We are the only publisher with a contemporary art tendency in Iran that has predestined and clear plan.” says the 44-year-old Bahmanpour. “We hope that we can introduce our artists and graphic designers to the world and that their efforts can be seen.”

Indeed. Founded in 1996, Nazar has issued upward of 150 titles covering design, contemporary art, photography and architecture, and become one of the defining international voices for the country’s rich visual culture. Recent titles to have been released in Australia via Amsterdam-based distributor IDEA Books include the aforementioned Momayez collection; a selection of posters by veteran graphic designer and art director Ghobad Shiva, titled From Years Ago up to the Present Time; a monograph on cutting edge designer, artist and filmmaker Ali Vazirian, which goes by the somewhat dry title of A Selection of Graphic Design by Ali Vazirian; and an extensive volume on Iranian type, Iranian Typography: 50 Years of Calligraphy and Typography in Iranian Graphic Design.

“I believe that every professional publisher that pursues art or literature has to be aggressively up-to-date,” offers Bahmanpour.

It’s a fair assertion. Perhaps the most immediately apparent quality that emerges from Nazar’s various collections is the multiplicity of aesthetic orientations. Indeed, those looking for a singular, staid Iranian vision will instead discover a palette characterised by cultural and stylistic slippage.

While the bold, flat colours and strong textual motifs of much of Momayez’s work displays a strong Western influence – his paintings and illustrations seem to reference elements of both Cubism and Abstract Expressionism – many of Ghobad Shiva’s designs invoke the fine detail and elaborate, flourishing colouration that Western eyes might attribute to the Persian Miniature.

Shiva, 68, describes a design culture that finds its roots “deep in the Persian psyche” and draws on anything from the Miniature to Persian carpet design and architecture. “Contemporary editorial illustration is a creation of the Western world that arrived in Iran with printing press technology,” he says.

“Naturally, I was influenced by this during the earlier stages of my development, but in time I recognised the vast reservoir of our tradition in visual arts, which allowed me to create works that reflected this.”

The veteran designer, who has garnered particular acclaim for his music posters, points to the revolution and the resurgence of national identity as a catalyst for a more Iranian-minded interpretation of the graphic. “Following the revolution of 1979, the general populace became more aware of the art of graphic design, with the nation’s young generation showing a stronger desire to learn and study graphic design,” he posits.

“With the weakening of Western cultures’ influence on Persian graphic design, the artistic circles gravitated to the Persian influence.”

Vazirian (pictured), 48, is one of the key protagonists of a younger generation Iranian designers who have only worked in the post 1979 environment. His work resonates with fine, hand-painted detail and texture and strong contemporary typefaces and colour configurations.

“Graphic works are not created to be confined to stay in geographical boundaries or a single room,” he says. “The artist’s job is his awareness of his native culture and protection of it. We must not ignore the fact that the global movement, in the meantime, is irresistible and indivisible.”

While Vazirian’s work shows a strong national slant – his publisher Bahmanpour prefaces our conversation by describing Vazirian as a “radical revolutionary” who couldn’t bear the presence of Momayez and his like in tertiary institutions because of their more Western artistic tendencies – he understands his work as transcending political orientation.

“Political personalities can keep their thoughts hidden from people – say something and do something else – but the artist cannot act this way.”

That said, keeping oneself removed from the political sphere isn’t always subject for discussion. As Bahmanpour suggests, graphic design is hardly immune from the country’s stringent censorship laws.

“Difficulties exist in every kind of work and every country, but here, the biggest problem is censures,” he says. “Not only in text but also in images! We cannot publish most of the paintings and photographs in our books because of the rules that say they are unlawful.”

Nonetheless, Iranian graphic design is at a healthy stage of development. Five tertiary institutions – including Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts – and six art schools offer courses in graphic design, while the influential Iranian Graphic Designers Society boasts a membership in the thousands.

“The graphic art belongs to the public,” offers Vazirian. “Not to elites.”

Adds Shiva: “From my youth I loved painting and art,” he says. “But in Iran, as in many other countries, art has usually been monopolised by a select minority.”

“When I realised that through graphic design I could communicate more directly with people, I was strongly drawn to it.”

For Bahmanpour, the challenges of publishing in Iran remain great, though that hardly acts as a disincentive. “Activity in publication ground in Iran is the same as walking in darkness!” he jokes. “But I love working in this ground. There is always the possibility of having new and interesting discoveries and experiences.”

—

Nazar publications are available in select bookstores via IDEA Books.

nazarpub.com
ideabooks.nl

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BUTTERING UP HUDSON MOHAWKE
Published: UHH, November 21, 2009.

- words DAN RULE

Glaswegian lad and latest Warp Records glamour boy Hudson Mohawke (aka Rodd Birchard) has emerged as one of the key protagonists in the trans-Atlantic beat scene. Sharing stages and secrets with LA future hip-hop kids like Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing and neo-soul funk-freak DaM Funk – as well as his own art collective LuckyMe – the 23-year-old savant is making some of the most crowded, skewed and thoroughly demented beats we’ve heard in some time.

While the chopped vocal samples and cutie-pie kiddie-hop of his debut EPPolyfolk Dance had anyone from Sa Ra, Goldie and Rihanna singing his praises, his first full-length Butter – released last week – has Hud Mo rocking anything from sex-charged neo-soul and glossy 90s RnB, to stuttered, synth-driven electronics.

But the affable Hud Mo frames his work in much simpler terms. On the eve of his inaugural Australian tour with the Stereosonic Festival, he reveals that his penchant isn’t for highbrow obscurity. In something of an affront to previous generations, he sees the mainstream as hive creative potential.

UHH – Polyfolk Dance, but to me Butter has a really different sensibility. It has a much harder edge thanPolyfolk Dance, which had a real innocence and sweetness to it in a way.
HUD MO – Yeah, I think they definitely are different. I think the album is a bit more considered, whereas with the EP it was more just a one-off kind of introduction. Some of the tracks had already been finished and it was like a combination of older tracks and it wasn’t really made to be listened to start-to-finish. It was just a collection of tracks really.

But I think the album has been much more considered and just the overall vibe of it has been more thought-out.

UHH – Did most of these songs come out of a similar period in time? Were they sort of purpose-written or did they come from a collection of material that you had sort of set aside to use later on?
HUD MO – It was a bit of both, really. Most of it was done in the same period of time – between when Polyfolk Dance came out and about August this year. I think altogether, the majority of the tracks were put together in eight or nine months, but I had started already a while before that. But yeah, most of it was done in that period and it was just about trying to bring it all together and give it a bit more of a feel that it was one piece.

UHH – I don’t know if I’m reading too much into the promo cover art, but this record really feels like it’s got more of a sexuality to it, especially with the Olivier DaySoul and DaM Funk collabs. But yeah, the promo cover, with those weird, headless hip-hop girls…
HUD MO – Yeah, with the promo artwork we kind of consciously worked on giving it a kind of more romantic edge, I guess (laughs). I didn’t want to use it for the finished record, because I thought that it was an element of the record, but not the full picture basically. So with the final artwork on the gatefold vinyl, the front is just a kind of fantasy landscape, and I thought that that was one of the main kind of themes in the music – this fantasy, psychedelic, childlike kind of thing – but when you open the gatefold it’s just a mass of arse really (laughs). So I was tapering the inner snake in order to bring the romantic edge back into it (more laughter).

UHH – More like arse-mantic…
HUD MO – Yeah, that’s true! But yeah, it just sort of brought it all together. The promo artwork was cool, but it really wasn’t the full picture and I wanted to make it more fantasy basically. It could still have the kind of sexier edge to it, but I just wanted to make it more psychedelic basically.

UHH – Tell me a bit about the title Butter.
HUD MO – It came from a few places. Basically, a lot of it came from that word being used in a lot of, like, 90s hip-hop and RnB – this very sort of smooth sound – but it also came from the contrast between a block of butter and the idea of butter taking on different forms and melting and becoming an ingredient for any number of things. Also, just coming from Glasgow, which is just such a traditionally not very smooth or hip-hop place, again the contrast between a block of butter, which is kind of untreated and uncultured in a certain way, and melting and transforming into the music that I’m trying to make.

UHH – That’s a kind of cool metaphor, because with your work, it’s so sort of layered and insanely busy – it’s kind of rhythmically cluttered and there are lots of things going on – and I’ve always wondered where these tracks begin for you. What is the trigger or the guide that takes you through them?
HUD MO – Yeah, I never put it together with the aim of being difficult. I actually think it’s quite simple to me basically. It’s just that if I’m making music, I get bored if I can’t go off on these tangents and explore these other places. Like, just I hate making loop-based tracks and that’s also why a lot of the tracks are so short, because I get pissed off if I have to repeat myself. I like just going off in one direction for two or three minutes and then just letting it finish.

I don’t know, it’s just what comes out of my head basically. It doesn’t seem complicated to me, but I understand – and I’ve been told by many, many people – that it does come across as quite complicated. But it’s not supposed to be like IDM or anything like that. It was meant to be, consciously, a bit simpler than that.

UHH – There’s a lot going on, but at their core, the songs are really melodic and accessible. I guess there’s just a heap of data banging around in there.
HUD MO – Yeah, for sure.

UHH – How did the collabs with Olivier and DaM Funk come about?
HUD MO – Olivier has just been a friend of mine for a couple of years. He’s originally from Washington DC, but now he actually works as a scientist at Oxford University, so he’s a bit of a mad scientist character. I was introduced to him by a friend of mine – an MC called Odyssey – and we basically started to do some work together. He was more of a traditional sort of neo-soul kind of singer, but he also does these crazier – almost like Outkast – style tracks and I wanted to see how much further in that direction we could go. So we started doing that and we’ve got a lot more stuff on the go as well; a lot more stuff that’s going to be coming around before too long.

Then with DaM Funk it was just being a fan of him basically and then just getting in touch with him and finding out that he was a fan of mine as well, and just doing it basically. I’d been in touch with some of the Stones Throw guys for a while because we’d been talking about the possibility of me doing a release with them or something like that, so they put me in touch with him and just did it. I’m not sure yet, but I think we’re going to be doing some touring together early next year as well.

UHH – Do you feel a real kinship with the current LA scene? That Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing, Gaslamp Killer kind of community are always name-checked in relation to you. Do you feel a creative connection personally?
HUD MO – Yeah, definitely. A lot of those guys are good friends of mine and, you know, I’ve been over there three times in the last year doing gigs and just hanging out over there. My dad’s actually from LA originally, but yeah, I hadn’t been there for years and years up until about a year ago. But yeah, anytime any of those guys are over this way we’ll always see each other, or I’ll go and see them over there and do gigs together.

I think it’s nice because even though their music is actually quite different, I think it still kind of comes from the same standpoint and that’s what’s sort of quite fresh about this scene that people keep talking about. Everybody’s kind of coming from the same mentality, but the music is completely different and everybody’s angle on it is completely different. I don’t think there are that many musical styles or genres where that’s the case. Generally, with electronic music, a scene is a bunch of people making the same music at the same temple with the same kind of sounds.

I think we’ve completely sort of branched away from that. I’m not really keen to be put in any sort of scene bracket, but I’m kind of happy to be put in with that because it’s completely undefined. Anybody could do anything; there are no rules about what the music has to be. It’s a pretty fresh angle on it really.

UHH – Yeah, it seems far more like a philosophical understanding rather than a stylistic lineage or whatever.
HUD MO – Yeah, totally.

UHH – When I spoke to Fly Lo last year, he was kind of speaking about being really unafraid of commercial music and how he kind of sees no delineation. It seems to me that your record and your music has a real kind of sheen and gloss to it that seems very much informed by mainstream music…
HUD MO – I agree and it’s basically because I don’t see a gap between commercial and underground music, especially in the UK, where we’ve had dubstep tracks in the top 40 and where the pop producers really look to the underground for inspiration and the production in the pop music – if you actually listen to it – is far more complex and the arrangements are far more well thought out than in most of what’s considered underground music.

So it’s an interesting avenue to explore, I think, because you can go in any direction you want and it opens up a whole new audience. I just don’t really see any great advantage these days in limiting yourself to being a strictly underground artist. I could see how there was an advantage to doing that maybe ten years ago or something like that, but these days I think everything is so intertwined, from the guys who are at the top of the charts, all the way down. Like, one of the guys from Warp was telling me last week about Jay-Z coming to a Grizzly Bear gig and Beyonce’s sister singing over a Boards of Canada track.

UHH – Nice…
HUD MO – Yeah, there just isn’t that gap anymore and it’s not necessary to emphasise a gap between two things when it’s not really all that relevant anymore.

UHH – On another topic, your music is very much deconstructive at its core. What originally opened your ears to working in that fashion, as opposed to using instruments and so forth?
HUD MO – Well, before I was really focussing on production I was really into turntablism, which is obviously scratching and beat-juggling and so on, and the whole thing is about dissecting tracks and taking an original track and seeing what you can mould it into by just using your hands and a cross-fader.

I think a lot of my music is really chopped up, but it’s not very process-heavy and not really laden with effects. It’s more sort of manually deconstructed, as you said, and I think it definitely comes from the turntablism background. I think that’s where the sort of more erratic sample chopping comes from.

UHH – So it really comes from that physical aspect of turntablism?
HUD MO – Yeah, I guess it’s just based on rhythms that I’ve been creating with my hands on cross-fader for years before I’d been chopping up samples in a sampler or a computer. I think those rhythms have sort of rubbed off into the production.

SOME MATTERS OF INTEREST

Butter is out now via Warp/Inertia

Hudson Mohawke tours Australia with the Stereosonic Festival later this month:
Sydney - Sun 29 Nov @ Stereosonic
Perth - Mon 30 Nov @ Stereosonic
Melbourne - Sun 6 Dec @ Stereosonic
Adelaide - Sun 6 Dec @ Stereosonic
Brisbane - Mon 7 Dec @ Stereosonic

stereosonic.com.au

hudsonmohawke.com

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, November 21, 2009.

WHAT Simryn Gill: Inland
WHERE Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy, 9417 1549, ccp.org.au

The work of Malaysian-Australian artist Simryn Gill toes a line between presence and absence, intimacy and emptiness. Across a number of the bodies of work that comprise this extensive survey at CCP, she ascribes significance and meaning to what might otherwise seem mundane domestica. In 260-strong 2001 seriesDalam and her 2003 artist book Distance, she photographs the nondescript interiors – countless lounge rooms and living spaces in Dalam and the inside of her Marrickville home in Distance – while new series Inland features piles of loose photographs that take in Australian homes and their humble surrounds. Gill’s work seems about imprint and identity. The majority of her photographs may be void of the human form, but the mark is unavoidable. Personalities, lives, habits, tastes and routines are evidenced in these spaces. They are anything but empty. Wed to Sat 11am–6pm, Sun 1pm–5pm, until December 13.

WHAT Matthew Johnson: Auroral
WHERE Block Projects, Level 4, 289 Flinders Lane, city, 9662 9148, blockprojects.com

The title of Matthew Johnson’s alluring new series of paintings at Block Projects is no mistake. Auroral sees the Melbourne-based artist deal in the currency of sheer luminosity, colour and hue. Across a series of 10 large canvasses, he explores grid-like formations of softened squares of colour, effecting light and darkness. Where much of his previous work sees undulating patterns and ripples of field, Auroral possesses a distinctly horizon-like quality. His symmetrical configurations of pigment shift from blurred, darkened foreground, to a vivid, almost modular middle distance, to the shimmering, hazy white of what might be taken as a distant sky. Whilst non-figurative, Johnson’s work has a strong resonance to ocean and landscape – an Australianness – but any reference would be amiss. Johnson has deconstructed light and tonality into its building blocks; its shimmering pixels of coalescing colour. Wed to Fri, 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until November 28.

WHAT Reductive
WHERE ACGA Gallery, The Atrium, Federation Square, city, 9662 2209, acga.com.au

While its premise might be a little dry, this group show in the compact ACGA space offers plenty of highlights. Concisely curated by Dickerson Gallery’s David Hagger, Reductive offers a survey of artists stripping their practice to its core elements. While some of the more spatially oriented works – Louise Blyton’s right-angled canvas The Most Secret Heart, which connects the wall and floor of the space, and Giles Ryder’s multileveled, mirrored perspex work Here Comes the Sound of Colours – would have benefited from a larger gallery space, the smaller and medium sized canvasses and flat-panel works prove the strongest in this context. Justin Andrews’ tangled, geometric shards of colour – Acid Yellow #4 (pictured) – recalls early 2000s UK digital artists like Alex Rutterford, while David Milne’s The Golden Glow… has an almost totemic quality. A fascinating piece is Alex Spremberg’s CPS Painting No.4, in which the artist has poured paint directly into the centre of the canvas, resulting in a highly organic and fluid bloom of whites an greys on glossy black. Tues to Sun 10am–5pm, until November 29.

WHAT Interiors
WHERE Anna Pappas Gallery, 2-4 Carlton Street, Prahran, 8598 9915, annapappasgallery.com

Curated by Simon Gregg of Gippsland Art Gallery, this six-artist-strong show takes a dualistic glimpse at the notion of the interior, attributing the idea with both a physical and psychological significance. While it’s a joy to see works from photo-artist Clare Rae’s Climbing the Walls and Other Actions series (previously covered in this column) in the ground floor space – not to mention a pair of stunning, elegiac video works by British artist Eloise Calandre – the two standouts here use text as their foil. In her Little Histories series, Jane Dyer reappropriates and recasts yellowed pages of books via collage, elegantly imposing her own personalised, internal narrative onto the found texts. Anna Gilby’s equally fragile and imposing sculptural work, on the other hand, offers something of a spatial and perceptive dichotomy. Comprises a huge, parachute-like structure sewn from the pages of books, her Inflated work (pictured)  has both architectural and physiological qualities, as it literally breathes and reacts the changing conditions of the gallery space. Tues to Fri 10am–6pm, Sat noon–6pm, until November 28.

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INTERVIEW - CURSE OV DIALECT
Published: The Vine, November 17, 2009.

Multifarious Melbourne posse Curse Ov Dialect are a genuine oddity in the Australian music community. Over a decade and three albums, the quintet – rapper mouthpiece Raceless (Adam Gauci), rapidfire MC Volk Makedonski (Borce Markovski), vocalists August the 2nd (Daryl Rabel), Atarungi (Earle Stewart) and DJ extraordinaire Paso Bionic (Shehab Tariq) – have merged wild theatricality with an urgent street politic, raw cultural expression with collagist, first generation hip-hop aesthetics, surrealism with activism.

But whilst records like the 2003’s abrasive Lost in the Real Sky – the first Australian hip-hop release to be released by a US label, in celebrated experimental imprint Mush Records – and 2006’s kaleidoscopic Wooden Tongues have brought them rapturous acclaim and extensive tour opportunities throughout Europe, North America and Japan, they’ve also alienated them from an Australian hip-hop community too often bound by narrow definitions of the craft.

With their brilliant fourth album Crisis Tales, however, Curse may have turned over a new local leaf. Enthusiastically released by Melbourne indie darlings Mistletone, the record is set to redefine the group’s local presence. We spoke to the ever-effervescent Raceless about growing old, nude French fans and sampling Siberian shaman alongside, black metal, Vietnamese karaoke and Chinese opera.

Adam, I’d love you to tell me a little about this notion of Crisis Tales.

The actual name came from the track on the album called ‘Colossus’, which is the posse track. One of the guys on that track named Abstral Compost, a Swiss guy, mentioned “crisis tales” and when we heard that, it was just perfect.

Just in the context of world issues and the stuff we always talk about – political issues and so forth – it became this combination of the socially aware content and also the personal struggles we’re all going through as adults. I think being an adult rapper instead of being a teenage rapper, there are different things happening in your life and you have to see things in a broader context. Hip-hop, in general, is seen as a youth thing, but we’ve brought it into our later years now.

All of you guys are over 30 now. Is it a real challenge continuing to be a rapper and a hip-hop guy when you get to this age? No matter where you fit into wider culture, there are always going to be different expectations of you in your thirties…

Yeah, you do feel that, but it’s other people’s expectations and not your own. Other people wonder when you’re getting married and wonder when you’re getting a job or whatever. I mean, I think being older and having more responsibilities makes things harder. I think life changes and I don’t know, you’ve got to change the way you exist somewhat.

How does that relate to this album? What did you want to do with it?

Well, one thing was that we wanted to sample things that we hadn’t sampled on any other record, and you know, we’ve sampled a lot of things in the past (laughs). So we were trying to tackle vibes that we hadn’t before and allow the influences to be as broad as we could. We’ve still got a lot of the old flavour, but there are also a lot of new things on the new record and our sound has really progressed. And it’s probably progressed because we’ve all travelled the world together and seen a lot of stuff and matured a lot as people. So in that sense, we’ve probably allowed our influences to become even broader.

I remember for the last record Daryl mentioned a really interesting point in an interview, in that the difference between when you had started and where you are now was first-person experience. Early in your career you were talking about international issues without having travelled so much, yet with the later material you had seen a lot more of the world and been able to re-contextualise your work.

I personally think is that when you’re of European descent or white or whatever is that you rethink your perspectives on culture and race. One thing that I feel that I’ve learned now is that you shouldn’t exoticise culture too much because then you end up sounding like a white liberal, and that’s not what we are. We’re not university arts students who are trying to be open minded and exploring other ethnic cultures.

I think a lot of the tracks touch base on that. As a group, we form all these cultures and grew up with other cultures from day one. So a lot of the lyrics tackle liberal attitudes and people who exoticise culture as well as issues racism.

That’s really evident in Borce’s continued engagement with issues surrounding Macedonia and Greece. It isn’t a popular or fashionable issue. It’s an issue affecting his culture and he’s not going to sleep on it, and each of his tracks on the issue seem to be getting more and more militant.

For sure. He uses the medium and he makes sure that every album has his own solo track so he can do that. The good thing about this record is that I’ve got a solo track and Earle’s got one too.

To me, this record really sounds like the most concise you’ve done. While it takes all these tangents in terms style and sample sources, I think the beats really tie it all in. There’s a denseness and consistency to the actual rhythmic component.

They’re very fat beats. Daniel San, the DJ from Koolism, we’re really friendly with him and we worked with him on that. He wanted to give it more of a boom-bap feel. The other records were a little more electronically based, but us personally, we’ve always been more into the hard beats and the scratching. Shehab does a lot of scratching on this record and I’m really happy with that, because it harks back to the golden age of hip-hop and that kind of sound. So I think we’ve gone back there in a sense, but still with the very different samples. Then there are some tracks like ‘Media Moguls’ where there’s no beat at all, and that’s more about just riding on the bass line. And ‘bH’ is like musique-concrete sounds and has no beats at all. Earle produced that one as well.

I loved that electro-pop track…

Oh ‘Paradigm’! That’s completely different. It’s very weird; it’s electro but it’s got Chinese singing in there too, so I don’t know what that track is.

Everyone in the band was into doing something different; no one wanted to cover old ground and we made a conscious effort to try and make a record that was different to the last two. We wanted it to be basically nothing like Wooden Tongues. We were into bringing back the darkness, because we got really light onWooden Tongues. We wanted that real roughness, like some of the stuff on Lost in the Real Sky, we miss that.

Tell me about the actual process of putting the tracks together?

Well one of us might of the initial idea on computer, then transfer it to another computer and someone else will work on it, the transfer it to another and so on until we find the best combinations of stuff and what works. Curse’s style is produced by Curse Ov Dialect, you know. Paso is still the brain behind most of it, but everyone else has got their direct input.

What about the shift to Mistletone?

I’m really glad that we got on Mistletone and I kind of feel like it’s the right label for us. I’m really excited about being on it and it’s the first time we’ve been on a label in Melbourne as well. It’s being released in Europe and America as well through that label Staubgold, so we’re not doing the Mush thing anymore.

Your record and Mistletone just work so well to me. It seems a really good match.

I was thinking that people might think it was a bit weird, but you know…

Going back to this notion of Crisis Tales, especially the socio-political aspect of the idea, do find it almost disappointing that four albums and over 10 years into your career you’re still forced to talk about this stuff? That all these issues still exist?

I think the whole idea of Curse, in the beginning, was to tackle those issues and a new time brings new ways of looking at it. But yeah, if there was nothing to fight for, I don’t know what I’d write about. I’d probably write more surreal lyrics. But there’s always going to be something to talk about and I’m always going to want to hear hip-hop with something to say, because we’re still up against a massive wall of ignorant hip-hop and wack, non-hip-hop gangsta, which I don’t call hip-hop at all anymore. We’re still up against that wall and when we were in Europe we saw a lot of bands, and a lot of bands that we played with, that got up onstage and did this faux, ironic gangsta rap. There’s this whole thing going on in Europe at the moment of taking the piss out of gangsta rap by taking on that gangsta rap aesthetic, which not everybody gets and understands. It just sounds so cheesy and wack and it’s just white dudes doing it and to me it’s just disgusting.

They’re just not doing anything interesting and to me, well, I just feel sick when I see that shit. Sure, they’re taking the piss, but to me it’s still just talking shit. What they’re doing is just making fun of hip-hop. They’re not progressing the art form or doing anything new and that’s what’s really popular at the moment. It’s disgusting. Trash.

Do you think people abroad understand the real hip-hop basis what you do more so than in Australia? The hip-hop scene has never really understood you guys here.

I’ve met plenty of people who understand that we do have that sort of old school aesthetic. It’s weird, we’re sort of purist without sounding purist or something. We’re about the mentality of what hip-hop was and what I believe it still really is. But that said, in the end, we’ve sort of ended up becoming our own genre because I don’t know if anyone else is really doing what we’re doing. That might sound arrogant, but I’d really like to hear other people doing what we’re doing.

It’s weird though, I guess we just have our niche. Some people might get into Curse because of the wacky costumes and some people might get into Curse because they think the music is weird, but I’d love people to get into Curse because of our message.

Sure.

I don’t know, especially in Europe, we get massive crowds and really amazing crowd response. The people are quite mixed and into different types of music; old hip-hop heads in the their 30s to young electro kids, you know.

I was talking to Earle the other day about your connections to Bambaataa and the Bomb Squad and that first generation sensibility. That idea of hip-hop being a truly creative outlet…

Yeah, that’s right. We make it fun because we want to make it interesting, not because we want to pretend to be weird or ironic or come from a perspective where we don’t know the history, because we do. It’s just that we get misunderstood because we’re not stereotypical in our look or our clothing or whatever. I think that makes a difference to how people perceive us.

But the fans are nuts. There was a guy in Paris who jumped onstage, tried to kiss us, pulled his pants down (laughs). And you know, if we can get French men – and I don’t know why it’s just men – but French men to pull their pants down onstage and scream ‘I like your band!’ then we must be doing something good (much laughter).

So you feel that what you’re doing transcends language in that sense?

If we’re causing people to go crazy during our gigs then it must be to a certain extent. Hopefully they’re going crazy over the lyrics, but they’re probably not because they don’t understand a word we’re saying. But if we’re creating a vibe that’s unique, then that’s good.

Let’s talk about the significance of your costumes and what’s happening onstage at the moment.

Shehab is still himself. I’m currently wearing a 17th Century Maltese medieval costume, which I got made. It cost me two grand (laughs). I was online and found this Maltese costume book and found this museum piece and got it made, so that’s pretty crazy. Borce’s got his revolutionary Macedonian costume and Earle is kind of a concoction of all of the costumes he’s ever worn. Daryl’s wearing all kinds of things.

The focus is less on ethnicity in a way. I’m kind of sick of being labelled as that multicultural band. We really want to get rid of that stigma, because it’s really not about that anymore. It’s just about being people, because we don’t represent anyone but ourselves in the end. We’re our unique selves, you know? We’re not trying to be spokespeople. I mean, Borce’s being a spokesperson for his people for sure, but in general Curse is about us.

Tell me about some of the sample sources on the record.

Sure, that track ‘Draindrop’ is slowed down bagpipes and about eight or nine drones from a bunch of sound art records layered on top of each other. That tracks kind of about the end of the world and these subterranean vigilantes coming up. The end of that is a black metal sample with Borce rapping two different verses at the same time through each channel, and has a sample of this gypsy lady from this Spanish gypsy film, but just slowed right down to sound really evil.

What was that on ‘Identity’?

People thought that was a growling dog, but it was actually a Persian tribal tradition where they all get in a circle and do a kind of cipher and make this growling sort of noise to ward evil spirits away. So I used that, looped it up and then put some Swiss yodelling on top (laughs).

That song ‘00’ was all weird cartoonish sounds and musique-concrete; ‘Paradigm’ is Vietnamese electronic karaoke music and Chinese opera; ‘Media Moguls’ is like psych stuff with Japanese drone stuff on top; ‘Missionaries’ is Brazilian capoeira stuff mixed with Siberian shamans looped up, then the chorus is Thai music with medieval music; ‘Connections’ is little bits and pieces of everything; ‘Honesty in Monasteries’ is Turkish psych and Cambodian funk; ‘85 Percent’ is musique-concrete and American TV commercials from the 50s, with a bit of old school hip-hop thrown in; ‘Vanishing Point’ is concrete; ‘bH’ is concrete; ‘Aegean Ghosts’ is anything from the Mediterranean to Central Asia; ‘Colossus’ is just everything; and ‘Runaway Tears’ is just the crying after the storm.

Done.

Done.

Dan Rule

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Crisis Tales is out through Mistletone/Inertia

•

OSLO’S ANGST
Published: Broadsheet, November 16, 2009.

The debut exhibition from cult Melbourne cartoonist and illustrator Oslo Davis inhabits a space where the absurd, the mundane and the irritating coalesce, with hilarious results. By Dan Rule.

Oslo Davis doesn’t strike you as a particularly flappable character. He isn’t one for dour self-analysis or philosophising. On his computer screen is a drawing of a jolly-looking elf. The caption reads “Where I get my jokes: ‘Gary’”.

Hanging out in the kitchen of his humble Footscray weatherboard – where he lives with wife Mika and their daughters, 4-year-old Minami and 14-month Yuna – Davis is all about toothy grins and giggles. He swaps jokes with Mika; he flips through old sketchbooks, cracking up at random; he dotes over Yuna, who, it seems, has developed a near-obsessive penchant for pushing the buttons on the stereo.

“A joke could come at anytime,” he says, pausing, smiling. “My job is about being aware of that and being ready for it.

“You could be lying in bed, or on your bike, or in a meeting, but it’s then that you might see that funny shirt or something.”

It’s a quality that’s written all over the 37-year-old cartoonist and illustrator’s work, which has seen him illustrate for publications ranging from The Age, New York Times and Business Week, to Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, Sleepers Almanac and Is Not Magazine, and will feature in his debut solo exhibition This Annoying Life (opening at Lamington Drive at 6pm this Thursday). No matter the absurdity of the ink and watercolour scenes he creates, they are still, almost by prerequisite, anchored in the machinations of the everyday.

“I think the joke has to start in the basis of reality and then it just has to take a step past that,” says Davis, a member of Melbourne illustration clique The Jacky Winter Group. “Having a husband and wife in an argument, where the end result isn’t something bad,” he giggles, “to me is really funny, because we can all relate to it and it’s just so real.

“So it has to start with something that we can all connect to and then just take a step further into the unknown; and hopefully it’s funny.”

Flicking through Davis’s work, you’ll find his ‘Pretty Tough Going’ Guide to Summer Reading, including such uplifting titles as 18th Century English Winters, The German Tax System, Lonely Planet: Colac and ABC’s Landline: The Complete Transcripts. Elsewhere, there’s the IKEA Marriage Breakercatalogue, replete with a compact storage unit dubbed The Minor Squabble, a chest of drawers called The Ensuing Vicious Legal Battleand the piece de résistance, The Criminal Intent.

There’s also his collection of Harry Potters in the Works, which feature an increasingly despondent boy-wizard in titles such as Harry Potter and the Target Voucher (“This place is SHIT!” he growls to himself), Harry Potter and the Lee Kernaghan DVD, Harry Potter Still on Dial-Up and the classic-in-the-making, Harry Potter in the Car while Dad gets some Two-Stroke for the Mower.

“Looking at the work and all the Overheard pieces I’ve done for The Age and all the jokes and cartoons, everything sort of has this line of angst running through it,” offers Davis. “And I love that. I don’t want my work to be really, painfully dark. I think jokes like that are too easy to do and, quite often, not all that funny.

“I kind of like that idea of Curb Your Enthusiasm, you know, like those notions of ‘get over it’ or ‘calm down’ or ‘get off my back’ or those sorts of feelings,” he laughs. “That’s where the idea of This Annoying Life kind of comes from.”

Interestingly, Davis didn’t come to drawing until his early 20s. Having grown up on the northwest coast of Tasmania, he studied and worked as a high school English teacher before the urge to draw took hold. “I actually had a really good mate who taught himself to draw and I found that inspiring,” he recounts. “I was really impressed by Leunig and Spooner in The Age and my friend said ‘Just do it!’ and I haven’t stopped.”

Drawing even brought romance: “When Mika and I met, we would sit in cafes and make each other laugh by drawing the people around us.”

But while Davis is finally entering the gallery, he doesn’t see his practice in terms of art. “I’m not so into being an artist or ‘art for art’s sake’ kind of person,” he admits.

“I want to help people appreciate what cartoons and drawings can do, because I think in Australia we don’t really have exposure to the versatility of the cartoon.”

For him, it’s all about the joke. “I almost want people to think of it as not as a cartoon, but just a way of communicating a gag,” he offers. “It’s almost as if the cartoon itself or the drawing itself doesn’t need to be there; it’s just a vehicle.

“I just love it when an editor is like ‘We need a joke!’ and you’ve got an hour in a hot room to make it happen.”

Oslo Davis’s This Annoying Life runs opens 6pm-9pm this Thursday November 19 at Lamington Drive and runs until December 23.

www.oslodavis.com

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