DAM-FUNK - SEARCHING FOR FUNK’S FUTURE
Published: Cyclic Defrost #25, Autumn 2010. 

Los Angeles’ boogie funk sovereign DãM-Funk is mining genre’s past for a way forward.

Damon Riddick doesn’t see himself as a “bridging artist”, nor a missing link between generations. His palette of vintage synths, drum machines and expanded, bass-driven, funk jams may seem of another time, but the man behind the DãM-Funk guise understands his work as anything but retrospective.

“People sometimes talk about my work as if it’s a throwback,” he offers, pausing as if for emphasis. “I like to consider it a continuation.”

Chatting from across town in his local neighbourhood of Leimert Park, bordering South Central LA, Riddick’s logic flies in the face of much of the hype and hyperbole surrounding his expansively proportioned and equally celebrated debut album, the five-LP Toeachizown – commissioned and released by Peanut Butter Wolf’s increasingly dynamic LA alt-hip hop imprint Stones Throw in late 2009.

While fans and pundits alike have hailed the record’s distinctly 80s, synth-washed sound, complex chord structures and earnest, romantic lyrical direction as a kind of celebratory reflection on early Prince or the post-disco RnB of the BB&Q Band and Change, Riddick himself – who is best known in his hometown for his weekly Funkmosphere night in Culver City – considers his output to follow a far more contemporary vein.

“My music has a certain kind of sound, sure, but it’s the extension of that sound,” he says. “What I’m trying to do is remind people that the sound never died. It just kind of went on hiatus, if you will.”

“Maybe some of the labels didn’t pay attention to it, or maybe it got hidden in G-funk or in some of the rap songs or samples or whatever, but some of us real funkstas, we’ve always been here, you know?,” he continues. “So it’s sort of my way of saying that, you know, you can listen to other stuff like techno, trance or have hip hop thrown down your throat 24 hours a day, but there’s room for other types of urban music. That’s what I’m trying to do; I’m trying to open the door again.”

If there’s one aspect that marks today’s affable encounter, it’s the seriousness with which the quietly spoken Riddick takes his music. In fact, it’s the whole reason we’re chatting on the phone. After planning to convene at Stones Throw’s offices in Echo Park, Riddick rescheduled at the last minute to afford himself a couple of extra hours in the studio. It’s barely 11am and he’s already done hard time. “I always record – I never stop,” he says proudly. “I recorded a song this morning as a matter of fact.”

Indeed, Riddick is an anomaly in an era where his choice of instrumentation and aesthetic is all too often viewed with a sardonic smirk. Spend time with Toeachizown – or his Burgundy City/Galactic Fun 12” – and you’ll find nothing in the way of irony. Often spanning six or seven minutes and littered with tumbling Oberheim DX kicks, snapping snares and Roland Juno Series synth washes (not to mention the odd lengthy keytar solo), Riddick’s deep funk excursions are no laughing matter.

“I like to make melodic, modern funk, man,” he urges. “I don’t do retro – I do modern funk. You see, modern funk never died with the people where I come from; it never stopped. We grew up on those kinds of groups making sophisticated funk. Teena Marie, you know what I’m saying? Like you could drink a glass of wine with this kind of funk, you know what I’m saying? It’s not that kind of funk that’s got that porno-style sound and wah-wah guitars. You know, James Brown, rest in peace – I always give him props – but I don’t do that kind of funk. I do that kind of melodic funk where you can still get dressed up and cruise down to the beach and chill in your ride, you know?”

“These days we have attention deficit disorder,” he continues. “Even I’ve fallen victim to these traits where, even if we haven’t had them diagnosed, the world around us passes down to us, you know, with the remote control and your computer and your iPhone. You go crazy if your computer doesn’t load up to the homepage fast enough,” he laughs.

“Everything’s just fast, fast, fast. For people coming up now, especially the kids, a two-minute track to them is pure genius. All they need is a two-minute beat and they think they’re geniuses. I like to listen to something that’s a bit longer than two minutes, you know. That’s just my taste. You don’t have to be into that, but I am man. I’m of that generation. I grew up on songs that were long, you know, listening to a lot of double albums and stuff like that.”

It’s written over all of Riddick’s methodology. “I record from beginning to end, laying each track,” he explains. “I don’t need Fruity Loops, I don’t need these computer software in a box. I do it from the gut and that’s what I’m trying to show people. You can make music like this and it can still be relevant.”

“You don’t have to call it ‘old school’. It’s not dinosaur funk,” he laughs. “It’s just real.”

Riddick’s sound – let alone his penchant for oversized shades and perfectly straightened locks – is little surprise considering his upbringing. Growing up an only child in a neighbourhood ruled by the Bloods gang in Pasadena on the fringe of Los Angeles, Riddick spent his childhood playing in school bands, staying out of trouble by noodling his afternoons away in his bedroom. His grandfather was an army bandleader and multi-instrumentalist, while his father played the saxophone and keyboard.

By the time he had reached high school in the early 80s, Prince and modern funk bands like Zapp were ruling the airwaves. Suffice to say, it was then that he acquired his first synthesiser and began overdubbing cassette tapes with his own recordings. “I grew up with the funk, man,” he says. “I’m a generation X cat, you know, so I’m not unfamiliar with days of Prince and P-Funk and Zapp and One Way and Loose Ends and those kinds of groups.”

“I was hearing Loose Ends, even groups like Change, who were just like sophisticated funkstas, you know? The chords were great and the bass lines were poppin’. A lot of people say it’s disco, but you could interview Kevin Robertson right now, from BB&Q Band, and he’ll tell you it was funk. It was just more sophisticated, man, and I couldn’t get enough of that stuff.”

“I actually heard it on the radio, you know? It’s not like I’m trying to imagine what it was like back then. I actually experienced it and it was a very different time. Things were different in music and on the street. People didn’t shoot guns half as much; they actually had a real fistfight, you know? I came up around that kind of stuff. It wasn’t about like how it is now.”

After graduating high school, Riddick began to pick up session work with various LA studios. Celebrated producer Leon Sylvers III enlisted him to play keyboard sessions for New Jack Swing act Double Action Theatre amongst others on his Solar Records label. But it was only after being introduced to Binky Mack of gangsta rap duo AllFrumTha I that Riddick’s reputation really began to flourish, tracking sessions for countless members of the city’s burgeoning gangsta rap scene.

“I was doing a lot of session work with cats like MC-Eiht, Mack 10, Ice Cube and WC,” he recalls. “It was strictly session work, but it was good, it was a good experience. They were very business minded and I got paid and I got credited on the albums and it was nothing but professionalism.”

“What happens is that a lot of people get those cats misconstrued and think that these cats were walking idiots with guns loaded in their pockets 24 hours a day. But it’s not even like that.”

That’s not to suggest it was an environment without its challenges.

“Don’t get me wrong, of course they were still real cats and they get down in a real way, but people still handle their business and I was able to handle my business around these cats because I grew up around these kind of things.

“Game recognises game and nobody took advantage of me. Some people couldn’t hang, but you have to know how to survive in any situation, whether it be the paradise of the Swiss Alps or the jungle of South Central LA. You’ve got to learn how to adapt to either situation. It was a good experience overall, but what happened is that I just got tired of doing session work. I had my own music and I wanted to do that. So I reconvened and thankfully everything worked out the way it did.”

The DãM-Funk nom-de-plume emerged at the start of 2000s. “Everybody calls me Dam, short for Damon. They don’t use the ‘e’ because here in America, ‘Dame’ means a lady,” he laughs. “Well I’m sure everywhere ‘Dame’ means a lady. But it was just one of those things where I was kind of a funk student and a funk digger. I was already tagging my name but then I just added the ‘Funk’ because nobody was reppin’ that shit, you know. So it just clicked man – I just started hittin’ my name up like ‘DãM-Funk’ and that was that.”

It wasn’t until close to the end of the decade that Riddick’s DãM-Funk persona began to enter the wider vernacular, firstly via his Funkmosphere parties, then through a remix of Baron Zen’s cover of the Gap Band’s Burn Rubber in 2007. The mix caught the ear of Peanut Butter Wolf, who urged Riddick to contribute to Stones Throw’s BBall Zombie War compilation for gaming company 2KSports. The brilliant Burgundy City 12” surfaced to great acclaim in 2008, before Riddick set about tracking his full-length debut.

“I was just recording a lot of joints – like a lot of joints, man – and there were way more tracks than could fit on a record,” he laughs. “We just couldn’t narrow them down. That’s why we came up with – and we laughed when we did it – the whole five-album box set. A lot of people cut out songs and edit them down, but we didn’t want to do that. We kind of just wanted to do something special.”

Toeachizown is epic to say the least. Bouncing between maximal beat attacks and opaque synth atmospheres, rich, complex chord structures and impeccably smooth, syrupy bass lines, the record extends and abstracts what might otherwise be straight grooves into sprawling, intergalactic boogie-funk jams. The snaking bass lines, snapping beats and fluttering synths of tracks like ‘Brookside Park’, ‘Mirrors’ and ‘The Sky is Ours’ stretch compact breaks into transcendent instrumental drifts, where cuts like ‘Searchin’ 4 Funk’s Future’ shatter shimmering atmospheres with kinetic bass hooks and stinging high-hats. It offers the perfect foil for Riddick’s Prince-like falsetto, which he moulds into various romantic odes to his wife, music and the funk gods themselves.

“It was kind of like a puzzle you know,” he recalls. “But it just made sense, you know. Almost everything lined up the right way in terms of the music and the situation. Just in meeting Wolf and him believing in my music and just recording these songs and what they meant and the way they flowed putting together the record. I mean, anyone can put together a record, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to sound right. It’s like ‘Why’d this guy put this song after that track?’.”

“But Toeachizown is done so strategically, you know, so it’s almost like a long ride. Each track was placed purposefully. I didn’t just turn in a bunch of tracks and let people pick the sequence or whatever. I actually meticulously placed the songs where I wanted them and that’s why the five-record box set is the way it is.”

For Riddick, the key to the record is the human touch. “It feels real and that’s the way I’m trying to record,” he says. “Even if I do choose to use some of the more modern recording technologies, I’m still going to give it a human feel. So if I do get some new equipment, I’ll still approach it like a human as opposed to letting the technology dictate me.”

“I want to dictate the technology, you understand what I’m saying? That’s why that album sounds the way it does. I didn’t let the technology overtake me; I stood on top of the technology and looked at it in the face, like ‘I’m running this, you’re not going to run me’.”

But while something of a purist, it’s not to suggest the Riddick’s views on music are all puritanical. Indeed, he’s outwardly approving of a new generation of beat-makers led by the likes of Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke, whose skittering, schizophrenic song structures seem to run counter to DãM-Funk’s fluid sound.

“I respect everybody’s approach,” he offers simply. “I go back to the title of the album, you know: Toeachizown. I don’t know if that phrase is common in Australia, but the way I see it, it just means that everyone is entitled to their own way of living. So it’s like, kudos to Hudson Mohawke and kudos to these other cats. What they’re doing is really amazing to me. There’s room for everybody to do their own approach, because it would be wack if everybody was sounding alike. And trust me, there are plenty of cats sounding alike right now. I’m glad that there are a few of us out here who aren’t sounding alike. It’s a breath of fresh air, you know.”

In fact, Riddick is enthusiastic about beat-based music’s current state of play. “I think it’s pretty cool and I’m really glad that these cats are starting to experiment with different sounds urban-wise. Not just indie-rock or what have you, but some urban sounds are starting to be a lot more experimental.”

Indeed, we might just be closer to funk’s future than we realised. The man known as DãM-Funk thinks so. “Man, as these major labels break down and run for cover and don’t know what to do next, it’s opening up doors for these artists to come out of the underground and rise up and start to get their music out there and travel and share it with different people,” he urges.

“I mean, just the fact that I’ve been to Israel and some of these places man, that the funk genre can go back to these places… I mean, some of the guys I came up with, they didn’t even get to make it out of the city.”

“So it’s just a new world, man. It’s just good to be a part of it.”

Toeachizown is out through Stones Throw/Fuse

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, May 1, 2010.

WHAT Grant Nimmo: if you are a big tree, we are a small axe
WHERE Anna Pappas Gallery, 2–4 Carlton Street, Prahran, 8598 9915, annapappasgallery.com

There’s a genuine sentimentality and veneration to Grant Nimmo’s idyllic landscapes and human encounters. Though his crystalline mountainside vistas, anonymous family gatherings, fluoro smiley faces, dreadlocked hippies and seemingly indiscriminate lashings of neo-psychedelic colour adhere to tropes of the 70s postcard as much as naïve, early high school perceptions of “cool stuff”, this show transcends any snide sense of irony. Indeed, these oil-on-linen paintings both recast a particular, time-honoured, utopian aesthetic, and summon the arcane sense of wonderment it espoused. In I Think I See a Magic Door shards of black, soft pink, purple, yellow and green tile the icy blue of alpine peak, a headless female form lounging in the foreground; in I am Absolutely and Well and Truly Inside a Bucket, a “Happy Tooth” replete with dreadlocks hovers in front of a mirrored mountain scene like a stoned premonition. Elsewhere, a yellow smiley face, the yin and yang and the SMS era acronym “LOL” rise from a dark, ominously beautiful forest scene; a pro basketballer is captured mid-dunk; pallbearers carry a coffin that reads “F*** THIS”. It’s a piece of poeticism that so beautifully encapsulates Nimmo’s work. What might seem kitsch appropriation or hipster irony at a glance is in fact seems more a celebration of the opposite. These images are the celebration of an activated imagination. They are teen wonderment unlimited. They are the total awesomeness of life. Tues to Fri 10am–6pm, until May 8.

WHAT Simryn Gill: Gathering
WHERE Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, 9850 1500, heide.com.au

Running alongside a lovely collection of video works by young Melbourne artist Charlie Sofo, this expansive survey of the recent work of celebrated Malalysian-Australian artist Simryn Gill courts themes of exploration, collecting and unearthing subtle lyricism in the apparently prosaic. Following on from a major photographic exhibition at CCP last year, Gill’s Gathering brings together several different series of photographs with found and collected objects, not to mention her sublime sculptural works. Her brilliant May 2006 series is a highlight. The project saw Gill take over 800 photographs of her immediate neighbourhood using a discontinued film stock that had reached its expiry date, shooting a roll a day throughout the month. While we bare witness to Gill’s deepening sense of place and connection to her home suburb, we also behold the closing of a chapter; the final time she will use a particular material. The most striking work is 2007 sculptural work Throwback, in which Gill recreates the mechanical parts of a 1985 Tata truck (that had spent its life as a roadwork vehicle in Malaysia), using materials from the local environment such as reconstituted termite mounds, river silt, fruit skins and coconut husks to recast the original parts. It is a powerful allegory for interconnection between object, places and history. Tues to Sun 10am–5pm, until July 18.

WHAT Matthew Shannon: 17.04.10–15.05.10
WHERE Conical Inc., Level 1, 3 Rochester Street, Fitzroy, 9415 6958, conical.org.au

This new collection of aural, visual and robotic works from Melbourne artist Matthew Shannon functions in the realm of perceptive deconstruction. Spanning across all three spaces at Conical, Shannon’s series of “special effects” espouse a rethinking not only of what we see and hear, but the signifiers, rules and structures that govern our means of interpretation and perception. We learn that the droning, textural, seemingly abstract sound work Sol Lewitt at the Speed of Light, is in fact a re-processed recording of the late American artist’s 1969 paper Sentences on Conceptual Art, as sung by John Baldessari in 1972. In the video work One Side Makes You Bigger, Shannon employs pre-CGI movie special effects, injecting milk into brine via a hypodermic needle to create a simultaneously vast and microscopic explosion of what appears to be smoke clouds. Perhaps the most striking work, though, is Shannon’s Hors Champ, a robotic, 2.4 x 2.1 metre white wall that automatically moves about the space on a hidden set of wheels, the floorboards creaking spookily beneath its weight. It is both a spectacle in itself and a point of erasure. Framed as the “physical manifestation of the editing process in film production”, the work effectively decides which parts of the gallery vista we can view, which are obscured, and in what order. On the one level, it could be read as a fateful metaphor for the increasingly sophisticated schema of political, corporate spin in the media. If selectively erased, rearranged and re-edited, raw data can tell any story that is required. Wed to Sat noon–5pm, until May 15.

WHAT The Nothing
WHERE West Space, Level 1, 15–19 Anthony Street, city, 9328 8712, westspace.org.au

Excellently curated by West Space’s new program coordinator Kelly Fliedner, this succinct group show explores the gulf between human knowledge and understanding. Haughty as it sounds, The Nothing approaches its point of enquiry in a surprisingly (and quite joyfully) playful manner. Deborah Ostrow’s television installation Deviations of Nothing, Sanne Mestrom’s space-sensitive An appearance, uncertain and Lou Hubbard’s light sculpture ET are highlights. The standout, however, is Damiano Bertoli’s brilliant Continuous Moment, a montage focussing on aesthetics of empty Miami Vice suspense scenes. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until May 8. 

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MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL - NEW FRONTIERS
Published: Broadsheet, April 30, 2010.

We get the low-down on the year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival from Program Director Sophie Brous and curate our own slice of the festival’s eclectic pickings. By Dan Rule.

When it comes to music or art, limitations are our tools for definition. Rules and parameters allow us to devise genre, form and medium; they give us a context by which we navigate our way through the maze of diffuse creative output and product, jazz included.

Not necessarily so, according to Sophie Brous. Indeed, for the prolific 24-year-old musician, vocalist and decidedly youthful Program Director of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, the genre jig, it seems, is up.

“A lot of what’s happening this year isn’t just about booking an act and putting them on at the Recital Centre,” she says of festival, which kicks of on Saturday and runs until May 8th.

“The overwhelming theme for curating the festival is about progress and letting the music speak for itself,” she continues. “By doing that, naturally a lot of boundaries around what people understand jazz to be or not to be get stretched and reshaped, because the music itself has actually evolved so much.”

MIJF will see established venues like the Melbourne Recital Centre, The Forum and BMW Edge play host to headline acts of the ilk of legendary US piano virtuoso Ahmad Jamal, Ethio-jazz forefather Mulatu Astatke, German fee-jazz and noise icon Peter Brötzmann and Chicago postrock groundbreakers Tortoise, but it’s the less conventional spaces and curatorial strokes that seem to characterise this year’s program.

Events like Overground will see roaming, improvised performances and first-time collaborations fill various spaces within the Melbourne Town Hall, while public art installations such as The Places In Between (featuring a specially commissioned light and sound work by pianist Chris Abrahams of Australian improv trio The Necks) will subsume various city spaces.

“Context and environment is really one of the key aspects of the festival,” says Brous. “So many events are about changing our view of what experiencing music and art is and perhaps entering people’s daily experience without them necessarily even realising it. It’s not just going to a concert hall, but experiencing music in a plethora of different venues.”

That’s not to suggest that MIJF is about to abandon its foundations. “Those major, headline concerts are at the centre of what we do and we’re incredibly proud of them,” she maintains. “For any festival, it’s really about exploring the brevity of what sits at its core.”

It’s just that Brous and her team have assumed a more active role. “We’re just producing so much this year,” she offers. “We’re working with artists, developing new projects, developing new repertoires and commissioning new works and new collaborations.”

“That’s one of the things I’m most proud of, bringing musicians together for the first time and kind of creating those new opportunities,” she continues.

“And it’s that kind of work which properly articulates just how far jazz music has come.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Hybrids and Folklore
Saturday, May 1, 12pm
NGV International, Grollo Equiset Garden
Free
Tickets: melbournejazz.com

This “psychfolkic” performance installation is set to have audiences reassessing the very fundamentals of sound and music-making itself. Featuring some of Australia and Europe’s most exploratory sonic and visual artists – psychedelic performance lunatics Hi God People, sound and expanded cinema artist Joel Stern and Dutch treated piano composer Cor Fuhler among them – the free event will recast the NGV sculpture garden as a site for weird, wonderful and outright bizarre acts of sound creation and improvisation with the natural environment

Mulatu Astatke 
Sunday, May 2, 8pm; Monday, May 3, 8pm
The Forum
$72 / $65 concession
Tickets: melbournejazz.com

One of MIJF’s headline acts, Mulatu Astatke’s reputation precedes him. Widely considered the founder of 1960s ‘Ethio-jazz’ – an amalgam of Latin jazz, soul, funk and traditional Ethiopian harmony that became a genre of its own – the 67-year-old’s influence has been felt worldwide for almost five decades. He is joined by Australian/Ethiopian ensemble The Black Jesus Experience for two very special performances.

Overground
Melbourne Town Hall
Sunday, May 2, 2pm–8pm
$30
Tickets: melbournejazz.com

Billed as a “festival within a festival”, Overground is something of a musical first for Melbourne. Over six hours this Sunday, the event will see the cream of the world’s experimental, avant-garde and improvisational community take over the Melbourne Town Hall in a wave of new music. Expect free jazz, grindcore, noise, expanded cinema, video, contemporary classical and performance installation. Featuring Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Peter Brötzmann, Han Bennink, My Disco, Mick Turner (Dirty Three), Oren Ambarchi, Marco Fusinato, Anthony Pateras, Kim Salmon, Snawklor, Pikelet, Kram, Embers Big Band and countless others.

Peter Brötzmann
Tuesday, May 4, 7:30pm
BMW Edge, Federation Square
$35 / $30 concession
Tickets: melbournejazz.com

There’s no bigger name in European free-jazz or improvisation than German saxophonist and noise-rock forefather Peter Brötzmann. Having worked alongside anyone from Don Cherry, Evan Parker and Cecil Taylor, to Derek Bailey, fellow festival guest Han Bennink and famed Korean conceptual artist Nam June Paik, the musician, composer, visual artist and graphic designer has carved an uncompromising mark as one of the most powerful saxophonists to perform or record. The fierce sonic attack of his 1968 opus Machine Gun still stands as one of the signpost moments of world jazz. He will be supported by anarchic Australian trio Pateras/Baxter/Brown and a solo set by Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase.

Theo Bleckmann: Songs for Voice, Loops and Toys
Friday, May 7, 6:30pm
The Forum Upstairs
$38 / $35 concession
Tickets: melbournejazz.com

For German born New Yorker Theo Bleckmann, music is the sum of countless parts, approaches, mediums, bits and bobs. A collagist in every sense of the term, Bleckmann’s compound of contemporary jazz, electronic and ambient music – replete with live processing and looping – is its own infectious language. This event will see both a solo performance and a one-off collaboration with a clique of contemporary jazz artists, including Australians Gian Slater and Stephen Magnusson, and New York experimental composer John Hollenbach.

Tortoise
Friday, May 7, 8:30pm
The Forum
$68 / $63 concession
Tickets: melbournejazz.com

Before the inception of the somewhat haughty musical tag ‘postrock’, there was Tortoise. In a career that has spanned almost two decades, the Chicago quintet have built an interface between innumerable styles and inflections and garnered a host of imitators. Emphasising rhythm, texture and groove ahead of full-formed melody, their sound has touched on anything from jazz, minimalist electronica and Krautrock, to hip-hop, techno, ambience and rock. Long after ‘postrock’ was dismissed, Tortoise are still forging forward. Supported by the Brain Chase/Seth Misterka Duo.

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GONJASUFI - ‘A SUFI AND A KILLER’
Published: The Big Issue #353, April/May 2010. 

A Sufi and a Killer
Gonjasufi
****1/2

A Sufi and a Killer, the solo debut from enigmatic, hair-heavy Las Vegas voice-smith Sumach Ecks (aka Gonjasufi), is a record lost in time and space.

Across a maze of no less than 19 whoozy, dust-crackled sketches – courtesy of LA producers The Gaslamp Killer, Mainframe and Flying Lotus – the amorphous vocalist visits strains of grit-scarred blues, darkened psych-rock and sub-bass hip hop, alongside flourishes of Mediterranean folk, understated, atmospheric funk and various analogue ephemera. It’s a trip.

Cuts like the shuddering, floor-shaking frequencies of ‘Ancestors’ and the narcotic psych groove of ‘Duet’ trawl menacing depths; the angelic, pastoral folk melodies of tracks like ‘Sheep’ and ‘Klowds’ offer glimmering respite. But there are countless highlights. The raw, skeletal rhythm and blues of ‘Aging’ has Gonjasufi sounding like a time-warped Howlin’ Wolf.

Though diverse, A Sufi and a Killer is anything but disjointed. Gaslamp, Fly Lo and Mainframe’s cuts share an unlikely resonance, while Gonjasufi’s slurred, whispered, growled parlance reverberates with an odd charisma – equal part ferocity and vulnerability. Put simply, it’s unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.

Unhinged from any sure era or footing, A Sufi and a Killer is defined the vision and experience of an engrossing and very much singular character.

Dan Rule

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, April 24, 2010.

WHAT John Young: Safety Zone
WHERE Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 6131, annaschwartzgallery.com

This poignant new collection of paintings, chalk drawings and reproduced photographs by Hong Kong-born Australian artist John Young inhabits a space suspended between personal ode, poetic allegory and straight, historical record. Drawing on interviews, photographs and historical evidence surrounding the Japanese invasion of the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1937 – in which more than 250,000 citizens were killed – Young draws attention of to a group of 21 foreigners, led by German businessman John Rabe and American missionary Minnie Vautrin, who established a ‘safety zone’ to protect upward of half a million Chinese from their invaders. The results are intermittently sublime, affecting and almost brutally shocking. The work is split into three distinct zones within the gallery space. Three large-scale mixed-media paintings occupy the left wall, depicting soft spring blossoms against a backdrop of blown-up photographs taken at the Nanjing market in the months before the invasion. The vistas are idyllic. The archival photographic element creates a sense of distance ­– a kind of historical reverie – before the beautifully rendered blossoms seduce us into the scene and the moment, drawing us close enough to touch. It makes the turmoil images on opposite wall – a panelled installation of chalk drawings, observations and statistics, horrific archival photographs and messages Vautrin and Rabe – all the more heart wrenching. A pair of oil-on-linen paintings of crippled trees bookend the gallery and effectively act as transition point between the two chapters of the Nanjing narrative. Their stripped, butchered trunks and branches evoke the beauty of what once was the reality of Nanjing’s hostile, irrevocable recasting. Tues to Fri noon–6pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until May 22.

WHAT Deidre But-Husaim: Swan Hunters
WHERE Helen Gory Galerie, 25 St Edmonds Road, Prahran, 9525 2808, helengory.com

Deidre But-Husaim’s soft-lens, photo-realist oils capture the precocious perfection of youth. But there’s a complication to the large-scale, head-and-shoulder portraits of young, beauteous male and female models that comprise Swan Hunters. Indeed, But-Husaim augments her youthful beauties with baroque facial tattoos – flourishing arrangements apparently inspired by a recent trip to St Petersburg. It could be read in a couple of ways. By merging historical decoration with the flawlessness of youth, these paintings seem to celebrate such beauty as art itself. On the other hand, there seems to be a suggestion of generational, cultural fissure to these works. But-Husaim’s blithe young models have allowed themselves to be irreversibly scarred by the hand of another. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until May 8.

WHAT Izabela Pluta: Sailing for the Abyss
WHERE Nellie Castan Gallery, Level 1, 12 River Street, South Yarra, 9804 7366, nelliecastangallery.com

Polish-Australian artist Izabela Pluta’s photographic works summon a kind of nowhere place, a point of intermittence between solid, defined locales. Running alongside Prudence Flint’s wonderful paintings at Nellie Castan, Pluta’s new show Sailing for the Abyss features a series of arcane landscapes, interrupted street scenes, screen-printed postcards and an oddly metrical video work. The outcome, it seems, is a rumination on flux. In the large-scale photographic series, landscapes lead only to an unremitting distance, while building facades and streetscapes are muted by timber and black plastic. The video, meanwhile, depicts water rising and falling in Parisian canal lock; a passage for boats to travel between canals of varying levels. In the show’s accompanying essay, Dr Ashley Whamond suggests that Pluta’s work explores a kind of permanent marginality of the contemporary migrant experience. It’s a notion that echoes throughout these works. Pluta intimates a seduction and longing for a destination and grounding that is just out of reach. Tues to Sat noon–5pm, until May 8.

WHAT Territorial Pissings
WHERE Utopian Slumps, 33 Guildford Lane, city, 0403 009 291, utopianslumps.com

Toby Pola’s laminated balsa wood works are a highlight of Territorial Pissings, the sprawling group show to relaunch Utopian Slumps in its new Guildford Lane location. His figurine-sized sculptures of various maimed, injured and freakish people – let alone his wonderful Cigarettes and Undies (no need to explain) – are like a little shop of horrors. There are a couple standouts. Nathan Gray’s lurid paint and pencil-on-ply works continue his fascinating exploration of process and abstraction, while Jake Walker’s video and oil paint work draws various connections between the virtual and tactile. That said, much of the work feels a little unfocussed here and for the most part, connections the show’s proposed objectives of addressing “ironic incarnations of ownership and assertions of ‘property’ in contemporary art” seem pretty tenuous. That said, there’s still plenty to like about this show. Indeed, Territorial Pissings makes for a gritty, fun and happily flawed way to ring in Utopian Slumps’ return to the fold. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until May 8.

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MATTHEW HERBERT - ‘ONE ONE’
Published: The Age, A2, 48 Hours, April 24, 2010. 

Matthew Herbert
One One
(Accidental/Inertia)

Matthew Herbert has explored a swathe of unlikely musical terrains in his prolific 15-year career. Working in various guises – including his role as the leader of the incredible Matthew Herbert Big Band – the classically trained UK composer and avant-gardist has fashioned some of contemporary electronic, swing and classical music’s most unusual, subversive and downright beautiful moments. Rarely, if ever, though has Herbert crafted a work so intensely intimate and engaging as new oeuvre One One. A solo record in the keenest sense of the term, the album sees Herbert play every instrument and track every sound across its 46 minutes, even recording his own hushed singing voice for the first time. The results – which tell the tale of a single day in the life of one man – are stunning to say the least, with Herbert condensing ornate, full-bodied arrangements into a series of crystallised, shuffling pieces of pop. In a personally detached, time-poor era, Herbert has created a work that defines itself via proximity and connection.

DAN RULE

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BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #75, April 2010.

Autechre
Oversteps
****1/2

If there’s a quality that resonates throughout Oversteps – the opaque, warren-like 10th record from sonic futurists Rob Brown and Sean Booth, aka Autechre – it is its deft quiet. While perhaps as compositionally intricate and complex as their work ever has been, this extraordinary collection submerges itself in the duo’s most ambient terrains since 1997 classic Amber. It’s a fascinating shift in palette. Buried shards of synth and echoes of bell-like melodic gestures puncture dense textures and counteract stuttering, asymmetrical rhythmic fragments. It’s engrossing. Following the static abrasions of recent efforts, Oversteps mines the future via a completely new set of tools.

Warp/Inertia

Bonobo
Blacksands
****1/2

The melding of live instrumentation and arrangements into electronic beat structures is a true art form. While the ‘folktronica’ tag of the early 2000s revealed the countless electronic producers willing to try their hand, it also revealed just how difficult it was to get it right. On third album, Blacksands, Simon Green (aka Bonobo) shows us just how it’s done. A record of sweet, sultry atmosphere, Blacksands feeds peeling guitars, strings and woodwinds into crisp, downbeat percussive loops and warm, soulful bass inflections, referencing soul, crystalline jazz, breaks and all between. Indeed, this isn’t a mere collage of converse modes, but a seamless, joyous amalgamation.

Ninja Tune/Inertia

Mantra
Power of the Spoken
****

Local hip hop’s guest-verse go-to-guy, Illzilla frontman Mantra is regarded as the most skilled young MCs around. Suffice to say, the anticipation for the debut solo record has been palpable. Power of the Spoken more than repays the faith. From the brain-bending syntax of its title-track opener, Mantra weaves trademark rapid-fire verbiage over a array of musical moods and styles (courtesy of Mr Savona, M-Phazes, Count Bounce and others). That said, he’s still at his most dynamic when detonating over rugged boom-bap and a little more wouldn’t go astray here. Regardless, the prodigious young MC has delivered a debut of rare light and shade.

Obese

Ben Swire
Frome Here to There
****

From Here to There is a charming statement from San Francisco artist/musician/composer Ben Swire. Fusing understated electronics with tapestries of field recordings, double bass texture and melody, his open sketches evoke rather than invoke, hint rather then tell, create space rather than build structure. It’s a fascinating dance. Over eight unhurried vignettes, Swire gradually reals you in – the pulse of oceanic filed recordings underlaying the burbling instrumentation and percussion – until you’re hooked. It’s a record that resonates with the echo of place and the spaciousness and atmosphere of travel; a record that proves slowly and gently intoxicating.

Preservation/Inertia

Madlib
Medicine Show No.2: Flight to Brazil
***1/2

Though Madlib’s production genius and ear for an exotic hook is unquestioned, it’s hard not to occasionally question his focus. Indeed, LA’s Beat Konducta is prolific in the extreme, churning out more beats, records and mixtape explorations into rare global sounds than anyone else behind a sampler. This edition of Madlib’s Medicine Show is the second of a whopping 12 Madlib longplayers to be released on a monthly basis throughout 2010. As a loose mixtape, it’s an intriguing journey into Brazilian musicality, sifting though funk, psych, tropicalia, free jazz and various obscura. Those wanting to hear an album of Madlib’s deft hooks and wonky, weed-induced treatments, however, will have to wait.

Stones Throw/Fuse 

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THE ICON - HENRY ROLLINS
Published: Music Australia Guide #75, April 2010.

In The Icon we profile those who change music. This month, Dan Rule delves into archives of hardcore punk iconoclast, spoken word artist, poet, actor and activist Henry Rollins.

Before the TV talk shows, the radio slots, the books and the famously self-deprecating spoken word performances, Henry Rollins was one of the most uncompromising figures of North American hardcore punk.

He may be better known today as a charismatic media personality, but his impact as the frontman of California’s most celebrated and notorious hardcore group Black Flag – and later, fronting Rollins Band – can’t be underestimated. His brooding, visceral, animalistic intensity changed rock performance forever; his impressive articulation and willingness to engage broadcast hardcore’s niche politics to a much wider world. 

Born Henry Lawrence Garfield in 1961, Rollins early years in Washington DC fit the archetype of the punk misfit. Raised by a single mother, he could read and write before he had even entered the school system, but despite his active mind, he struggled with authority and curriculum. By the time he reached college the punk scene was calling. After releasing one EP with State of Alert in 1980 – and gaining a reputation for getting into fights during gigs – he was recruited by his favourite band, Los Angeles’ Black Flag, after he jumped onstage and grabbed the mic during one of their shows in New York.

As Black Flag’s frontman, Rollins reinvented the idea of onstage aggression. Muscular, tattooed and dressed only in his now famed black shorts, Rollins was a portrait of barely caged intensity, as frightening as he was thrilling. His words a poetic torrent of rage, disenfranchisement and hardcore activism, his first record with Black Flag – 1981’s Damaged – is still considered early hardcore’s defining opus; a guttural howl that ripped holes through music’s status quo.

But there was more to Rollins than rage. Amid his intense persona was an eye for word and an ear for more expansive musical territory. While later Black Flag records like In My Head (1985) and early Rollins Band albums such as Do It (1988) and brilliant The End of Silence (1992) fused elements of jazz, experimental music and metal into the punk format, his spoken word performances and published poetry revealed a man with an a keen eye for socio-political and personal observation, not to mention an insatiable sense of humour.  

While recent years have seen Rollins play out a variety of charismatic public roles – from a radio DJ and television presenter to a leftist political agitator and human and gay rights activist – he remain one of the few punk figureheads to retain the reverence and respect of their original fan base whilst expanding their practice and profile into much wider circles. Rollins maybe something of a modern-day renaissance man, but he will forever be hardcore.

Visit: henryrollins.com 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, April 17, 2010. 

WHAT Matt Hinkley
WHERE Neon Parc, Level 1, 53 Bourke Street, city, 9663 0911, neonparc.com.au

One can’t help but wonder just how often people overlook Matt Hinkley’s incredibly subtle, painstakingly rendered objects and artworks, such is their diminutive scale and minuteness of detail. The works that comprise the Melbourne-based artist’s latest show at Neon Parc are so minuscule – their individual details even more so – they’re easy to miss on first pass. With time though (and perhaps a good pair of spectacles) his modified found objects, tiny polymer clay castings and etched technological artefacts espouse a beautiful, almost poetic cadence. The close inspection of an aged, yellowed computer keyboard, a first-generation wireless phone and a tiny aluminium rod reveal casings and surfaces covered by the most scrupulous of patterns and pinprick etchings; what appear tiny clay abstractions divulge miniature castings. A common motif is the keyboard and number pad – the interface of first generation digital tools such as calculators, remote controls and early PCs – yet Hinkley’s delicately hand-rendered amendments feel almost reminiscent of folk art. It’s this odd collision that makes his work so seductive. While so much art of its ilk feels snottily ironic and contemptuous of its audience, Hinkley’s fragments and techno-relics are quietly engaging and thoroughly realised. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until May 8.

WHAT Heather Betts: Joy and Disturbance
WHERE Lindberg Galleries, Level 2, 289 Flinders Lane, city, 0403 066 775, lindbergcontemporary.com.au

Joy and Disturbance is a fitting title for Heather Betts’ latest body of work. These striking, expressionistic oil and charcoal works evoke a divine beauty and an almost guttural din, a swooning lyricism and an abject violence. There’s a resonance of German Expressionism, a flare and curve and movement that echoes Whiteley. Perhaps most remarkable is Betts’ inclination for volume and texture. Laden with oils – rich, bloody reds, flashes of yellow and ominous black – and scarred with charcoal markings, her paintings splay powerfully between forms and dimensions. Protagonists writhe in what could be pleasure or pain, ghosted by repetitious outlines and shadows. Figures emerge from the clamour of colour and line, their presence either an omen from above or below. Betts’ world is one where the conscious and the unconscious – the body and spirit – forever haunt each other. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until May 5.

WHAT Contemporary Australian Drawings 1
WHERE RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston Street, city, 9925 1717, rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

This survey exhibition of Australian drawing transcends graphite, charcoal and ink. Framing notions of drawing as “an integral aspect to the artist’s thinking”, curator Dr. Irene Barberis casts a net far and wide for this show, compiling work that fulfils various roles – whether developmental, realised or otherwise – within artists’ process. It’s perhaps some of more experimental works that are the most intriguing. Sarah Tomasetti’s textural fresco and graphite on muslin works are fascinating in their composition and attention to surface, as are Wilma Tabacco’s stunning gold leaf works and Hilary Mais’ 1973 linear gouache and graphite drawings. The series of works that prove the most engaging, however, is the exhibition’s most economical. Noel McKenna’s quartet of childlike ink-on-paper drawings – illustratively titled Rear of Horse, Greyhound, Horse Lying Down and Dog Beside Stool – are charming in their simplicity and seem to perfectly condense the beauty and complexity of the hand drawn. Quite simply, they say so much via so little. Mon to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon-5pm, until June 26.

WHAT Pippa Sanderson and Kirsty Lillico: Surface
WHERE Blindside, Level 7, Room 14, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, city, 9650 0093, blindside.org.au

In another fascinating exploration of the conventions of contemporary drawing practice, Pippa Sanderson and Kirsty Lillico skirt the perimeters between art making and performance in Surface. The outcome of three performances last week – in which the two artists, adorned in protective white suits, used cup-like “blowing devices” to create vivid orbs of dripping blue and orange paint on one of the gallery walls – the work effectively deconstructs and illustrates parallels between the activities of drawing and performance. With Sanderson and Lillico’s once-white suits hanging as pigment-splattered evidence beside the paint-covered wall, we are reminded of the linkages and physical, gestural process of cause and effect between artist and artwork. Thurs to Sat noon–6pm, until April 24.

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BECI ORPIN - COMPOUND INTERESTS
Published: Broadsheet, April 16, 2010. 

The new exhibition from Melbourne designer and illustrator Beci Orpin is a window into a world of multifarious creative endeavours. By Dan Rule.

Beci Orpin’s home studio is abuzz with quietly industrious activity. Her assistant Leah works busily at her computer; a second helper, Sarah, sits cross-legged on the floor, immersed in a sea of colourful paper shapes and collage scraps. Desks overflow with piles of notebooks, half-finished ideas, watercolours and precarious jumbles of materials. Miso, the cat, makes the occasional blithe entrance, sniffs at a teacup, inspects proceedings.

It’s a week out from the opening of The Infinite Shape of Rainbows, Orpin’s new show at Lamington Drive, and Melbourne’s favourite creative multitasker is hectic, even by her own mildly chaotic standards.

“I’m someone who has a lot of ideas,” she offers, smiles, pauses for a moment, launches back in. “I get bored easily, you know? The more things I do, the better my work is and the more ideas I have.”

A phone rings, there’s a quick conversation, a confirmation of this, that or the other. The phone is put back on the hook. Orpin swings around, smiles again, apologises. “If I’m not busy I get depressed and I don’t work very well,” she continues. “But this?” she sighs, shakes her head. “This is just a bit too busy!”

It’s little wonder. Orpin’s creative pursuits have never been so proliferous. The front room of her home – a former milk bar in Brunswick West, where she lives with her husband and business partner Raph Rashid and their young sons Tyke and Ari – is the epicentre for a graphic design and illustration business, the Beci Orpin accessories and homewares imprint, the Tiny Mammoth kids clothing label, and the office for she and Rashid’s latest endeavour, Beatbox Kitchen, a hip-hop-influenced, gourmet mobile diner.

“I’ve always just liked to work in different mediums,” she says. “Three dimensions kind of really baffle me and I like setting myself those challenges.”

“In many ways it’s all quite selfish,” she continues, promptly spinning around to shoo Miso away from fragile, half-complete paper collage. “It’s really just about me doing the work and getting enjoyment out of doing all these different things instead of worrying about the outcome so much. That’s really how good work happens.”

In a career that has stretched a decade and a half, Orpin hasn’t only exhibited her playful, eclectic artworks objects and dolls internationally (in Japan, Toronto, Barcelona and New York) – not to mention stocking her now retired fashion line Princess Tina in countless Australian and US boutiques and securing design and illustration commissions from a host of high profile international clients – but built a name for herself as something of a self-made, micro-entrepreneur.

Though she chuckles at the suggestion, it definitely carries a resonance in relation to her practice. “Looking at my dad’s family, they’re all self-employed – five out of six siblings – I’ve always kind of been the same,” she says. “I literally got my first freelance job the day of my graduate show, so it was just like ‘Oh, I’ll give this a go’ and I literally just fell into it.”

“I would never consider myself an artist in the purest sense of the word,” she continues. “I’m a designer who has exhibitions.”

“I think that because everything I do is still based around design, it’s not cerebral enough for me to consider it art, but it still has a freeness so that it still has that sense of something else. There’s a French term, ‘graphiste’, which means ‘graphic artist’ and I wish there was a genre like that.”

Orpin always felt a strong connection to the visual. As a child growing up in an inner-city commune in Kew East, she remembers drawing as an instinct rather than a choice. “It’s all I would ever do,” she smiles. “I never felt that question of ‘What am I going to do?’. Drawing was what I was going to do.”

In high school, she briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an architect (until the realities of Year 11 maths and physics kicked in), eventually enrolling in textile design at RMIT in the mid 90s. That said, she still understands her childhood experience as a particularly formative one.

“The children’s books that my parents gave me were amazing,” she urges. “They really thought hard about the books they gave me and I think that really effected me and the way I still draw today. Childhood is just amazing like that. Like, the way that my kids interpret things and analyse dreams is really interesting and really surprising.

“Tyke is actually the one who came up with the name Tiny Mammoth for the label. He was like ‘I had this dream and I could walk through walls and I could breathe under water and I had this tiny pet mammoth’,” she laughs. “It was just perfect and really kind of amazing.”

It’s a sensibility that clearly informs The Infinite Shape of Rainbows, which comprises several limited prints, stunning one-off collages and impossibly adorable hand-painted mushroom dolls. Based on the theme of opposites, the show sees vivid colour pieces offset more stark monochromatic works.

“There’re matching prints, where one is life and the other is death, and one is war and the other peace, one’s imagined and the other is real, one’s good luck and the other’s bad luck,” she smiles.

It’s evocative to say the least, with tiny details and minutiae giving the works a loose, a narrative quality. “One thing that I do think about is the potential for a story,” she muses, “and that someone could make up their own story within the work. I really love that idea, that someone might conjure a completely different set of stories from my work than I do.”

That’s not to say that The Infinite Shape of Rainbows was part of some grand conceptual plan. Orpin is a little busy for such an indulgence.

“I usually only come up with the title and theme for a show when it’s got to such a late stage that the gallery is harassing me, saying ‘We really need to print the flyers for the show! We need a title!’” she laughs.

“In a way that gives me a brief and a set of parameters and that’s what I need. Otherwise it’s endless and I’d just keeping going forever.”

Beci Orpin’s The Infinite Shape of Rainbows runs at Lamington Drive until May 8.

Website: beciorpin.com

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