64: Cold music, no t-shirts

Welcome to Border Crossing issue #64. I hope you’re well.

I walked up the hill past the great coffee shop, headed for the only quite good coffee shop (because it has more room). It’s too cold to sit outside. But sitting outside, with his great coffee, was a big friendly looking beardo man who was reading David Graeber’s short posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, which I’m also reading. He wasn’t reading it at that moment, his copy was on the table. He was energetically explaining how great it was to a small bemused woman on the next table. They’d not arrived together. She didn’t look threatened, or even irritated, but gave off the acquiescent, glazed vibe of someone being sold something they don’t urgently need.

Then there were two moments. First an overwhelming desire to track back and join in the conversation. This Graeber essay is enriching, all about pirates who created their own communities along the coast of Madagascar — and the anarchic experiments in democracy and deceit they undertook to survive there. Secondly, a juddering of self-knowledge that this coffee shop book guy, in his keenness to share enthusiasm for his copy of the book, was doing exactly what I’m coming to realise is awful about me. So, I’m a good curator of culture for other people, yet at the same time (somehow) I can often present it in the most annoying hyperbolic way. If not kept in check, I have a focused intensity of enthusiasm that can send everything awry. What happens is, I’ll pick terrific, appropriate items from the arts or culture, that a certain friend will enjoy. Items that match this friend’s taste and perspective. I’ll do it much more effectively than most other people. But this friend (and most other people) don’t really want that kind of diagnostic curation to be imposed upon them. And in explaining, or sharing, I cross the mystical line into being a pain in the arse and — damn it — this actually ends up putting them off whatever magical thing it was I’d recommended.

Thank you, chunky bloke outside the coffee shop, for providing imagery for my crisis of curatorial diffidence.

And thank you very much for supporting this email. Welcome new subscribers, it’s lovely to have you onboard.

This issue is about contemporary music (mainly in Iceland).

my stuff

1

Border Crossing Live #1
There are about 30 tickets left for our first live gathering, which is in two weeks…
At Work In The Ruins — Dougald Hine in conversation
Tuesday 21st Feb, 7pm-9:30pm
Friends Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton
DETAILS / TICKETS

2

The first three episodes are now live of The Brighton Paradox podcast series, Richard Freeman’s beautifully written investigation into the state of our city. It’s available wherever you get your pods, and is produced by Lo Fi Arts, my little audio production business, which means I’m doing sound design and editorial work on the show. I’m very proud of it.

3

Tickets have flown over the past few days for Jim Bob’s just announced summer UK shows in Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol and Brighton. Leeds and Bristol have fewer than forty tickets left each. Brighton and Nottingham have some more — but the tour is eighty percent sold already. This will be it for UK touring in 2023, we won’t do another run this year.

4

You can still purchase my Chris T-T complete annotated lyric book Buried in the English Earth via the Border Crossing shop. I’m down to my final fifty or so copies (thank you so much if you got a copy) and I won’t be reprinting it, so once they’re gone, they’re gone.

gems

1

If you’re into left-field music and performance the mailing list newsletter of the comedian Stewart Lee is rapidly becoming an essential gig guide. I spotted three tours I’d missed. This time around, Stew also reprints Jenni Russell’s terrific reporting in The Times about a vast environmental scandal on Teeside, and he plugs a book I’d not heard of that I’ll probably love. Particularly impressive when it’s ostensibly just a promo tool for his own stand-up.

2

Dan Kois’ Slate essay on the evolution of Roald Dahl’s misogynist villain Mrs Trunchbull over the various versions of Matilda. Kois also has his debut novel out this week (or at least, this week in the USA), called Vintage Contemporaries. I haven’t read it yet but there’s every chance it’s excellent.

3

If you can access BBC Sounds, here’s Caroline Polachek’s live session on Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC 6Music show. Just wonderful. Skip to 1:26:50 for the session for fans of top drawer electro-pop with (on her new stuff) a balearic tint.

4

While I’m plugging electro-pop, I discovered Russian artist Rosemary Loves A Blackberry in achingly cool circumstances last week. Possibly I’m only plugging her to boast about it: she was performing on the floor at a party run by the post-dreifing collective (also very worth checking out, the link is to their Bandcamp) in the basement of Reykjavik record shop 12 Tónar. Perhaps fifty kids were crammed into the space, racks shoved back against the walls, an ad hoc bar upstairs. Some of Pussy Riot were there, marking the end of their (excellent) art exhibition and… actual Björk was there, yes, off duty, just hanging with the cool kids. A perfect Iceland moment.

5

Daniel Spicer interviews genre-defining minimalist composer Terry Riley for Songlines magazine.

6

Watchmeforever on Twitch TV is an infinite animated sitcom about nothing (very much in the Seinfeld vein) that is being constantly generated in real time by artificial intelligence / machine learning (mostly GPT 3). So it goes on and on. One thing that makes it compelling is Twitch’s constant stream of (actual human) viewer chat, which scrolls up the right-hand side of the platform. So the most interesting element is probably watching the interactions of humans who are watching the robot pseudo-creativity. Nice. Right now 14,000 people are watching.

potato gem

Photos from last month’s Stroud Potato Day. How nice.

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Cold music, no t-shirts

I’m back at Mykryr Musikdagar festival (Dark Music Days) in Iceland, which I first wrote about in early 2020 (here, for Louder Than War). That time I unpacked my wider experiences of Reykjavík in one of these emails (here) — that solo trip was the last thing I did before covid struck us. I’ll write more about this return visit at some point, it’s wild. For a start, it’s once again a bloody wonderful music festival, now one of my very favourites anywhere. Plus, obviously, Reykjavík is a fascinating, unique city to hang out in. The weather has been mild, though a blizzard is coming. 

This international neo-classical music scene is well niche. I mean, the world of contemporary art music composition; where experimental new scored works for orchestra and various forms of chamber ensemble rub along with glitchy home-built electronica, glacial minimalism and, occasionally, just phenomenally intense noise. Some performances I’ve seen in the past few days have been closer to witnessing a roaring hour-long stoner metal drone than anything one would associate with the phrase ‘classical music’. All fantastic of course. A lot of this music is glorious in its extremities. A heady (even when brutal) excavation of sonic joy carved out of the listener. Well, that’s what I firmly tell myself as a storied Canadian string quartet settles into one chord for an hour, with only microtonal and timbre variation. 

This area of music is one of those culturally peripheral disciplines where the artist simply must be in it for the art, or it’s not worth it. Audiences are small, costs are high, even compared to other specialist genres. The amount of labour is intimidating compared to, say, writing a pop song, or rehearsing up an indie band. I dislike it when I slip into capitalism-speak and use an acronym like ‘ROI’ but that’s what comes to mind, pondering how these composers can travel from zero to such dazzling results.  

Nobody (well, almost nobody) is building a decent sustainable career creating this music, let alone winning mainstream fame and fortune. They all need to undertake constant, loosely connected portfolio side-hustles to survive, regardless how great their talent. The folks around the world who do manage to turn this kind of artistic output into a livelihood of sorts (who weren’t already independently wealthy) are relying project-by-project on their home country’s precarious public sector support for the arts. National governments and philanthropic foundations prop up an entire intertwined global network. Or, if they’re very fortunate (and talented and hustling and flexible and networked) they just might find a place in the film and television industries, composing soundtracks. Perhaps this is the highest status side-hustle, yet it’s really not the same, with the composer’s craft placed firmly in service of someone else’s creative vision and drive — to a greater degree than composers will comfortably admit.

Even apart from finance issues, apparently the artworks, the musical compositions, that emerge from this twilight world also have a major challenge getting re-performed. You can probably imagine: orchestral repertoire is dominated by the tiniest sliver of what has been composed over the past five-hundred years or so. Often a modern composer will manage to achieve the glint of light that is a ‘premiere’ performance of their work (perhaps by the ensemble that commissioned it in the first place) only for it to never, ever get played again after that debut.

The merciless transience of that notion is unsettling. Like, discovering that twenty percent of tracks on Spotify have never been played, not even once.

You can instantly play a never before heard Spotify track via Forgotify, if you fancy it. 

At least my old stuff exists and people occasionally play the songs! 

Perversely though, I’m realising on this trip, all these difficult facets of the contemporary scene are partly why I love it so much — and would like to be a part of it in some way. Even when it’s surrounded by the formality of the orchestral tradition, the ‘true’ (the least compromised, least commercialised or commodified) artistic drive swims right up close to the surface here, where it can be glimpsed by us, the audience. The weirdoes and obsessives and craftspeople giving their whole selves to a life-long apprenticeship of Universal Creative Spirit. They do it because they have to, I think more than even other niche genres.

Indeed, when I’ve hung out with trad folkies of the British Isles, however devoted to the craft, they have a far more commercially-minded attitude, regardless mostly leftie politics and an actual craft-form being equally niche; playing to a similarly specialist (and worryingly ageing) crowd. Folkies also work project-by-project, crewing many different musical boats in order to maintain that portfolio livelihood. They reach for public funding where possible. There are parallels. Yet, for example, folkies are merchandise obsessives: they know vividly that branded tote bags and mugs are as much a part of an income as albums and gig fees. Like comedians, folk players tour hard and cheap, throw themselves into the intimate. Way back in the early 1990s I remember Dave Swarbrick and Martin Carthy at Winchester’s (much-missed) Tower Arts Centre, flogging tea towels alongside the t-shirts and CDs. I swear folkies were the first live touring acts of any kind to figure out how to bring credit card readers on the road, while the punks and Americana bands and orchestras and pub theatre troupes were still firmly cash only.

Anyway, by contrast, in 2023, at this upmarket art music festival, aside from one touring group from Canada, nobody’s running any merch at all. Actually, it’s basically impossible to purchase recordings of these pieces, or work by these artists, anywhere, especially on vinyl, never mind a promotional t-shirt or something. Maybe it’s because they have such a different relationship to the originator (composer) of the material. Like how, in the folk world, the songwriter is unknown and the piece handed down and reworked over time, whereas here the composer is probably at the gig, ready to jump up for their round of applause at the end. So, like, whose face goes on the tote bag?

Or it could be the lingering association to the buttoned-up formal mainstream classical music world that makes an agile, DIY-ish commercialism distasteful to performers and organisers. Unlike every rock, folk, jazz or electronica music festival in the world that I’ve ever been to, big or small, Dark Music Days has no promo gear for itself. Maybe that’s an Iceland thing — there’s only three hundred thousand people in the country. I should ask really, it’d be interesting to know if they’re conscious of it. Arguably I should’ve asked them a bunch of things before writing this, but I only just thought of the questions.

For my upcoming author event with Dougald Hine, Dougald’s publisher has arranged for a local bookshop to sell copies at the show. I was briefly surprised at this formality of approach — in my naiveté I’d assumed Dougald would just rock up with fifty books in a suitcase. I should’ve realised this was daft, especially if he’s coming on the train, not driving. Still, he’s selling. But it does remind me of the polite formalism on display here.

It’s too much of a stretch to ponder a lack of commercial instinct as part of some noble element of the creative character that liberates ‘true’ composers — as they actually create — to dig into their core. Push capitalism aside, find your heart-spirit.

No, I can’t quite get away with that, however much I want to. 

•

get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @cjthorpetracey @thebordercrossing @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton

border crossing live

At Work In The Ruins — Dougald Hine in conversation
Tuesday 21st Feb, 7pm—9:30pm
Friends Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton
DETAILS / TICKETS

always there

All my stuff via LinkTree

Purchase Buried in the English Earth via the Border Crossing shop

My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too.

Look after yourself and your people.

All my love and all good things, as always.

Christopher
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