A SPIRAL is a shape with no start and no end; we can choose if we go down or if we ascend. It’s the thought that generates a feeling that generates meaning over and over. The brain’s bad alchemy and nature’s good maths. A curve that travels away from a point, circling it at ever more of a distance. There is bigger beauty in the spirals we build. Spiral is obsession, the frightened mind, a journey. Pattern up and let’s ritualise what works. What airborne particles can we choose to generate?
RÉPÉTÉ-REPÉTÉ
Pumping bluetooth’d Laraaji in a red-lit housing association flat in Neukölln. I turn it down, out of equal parts respect and fear for Frau Becker, who, after all, has lived here thirty-nine years and eleven months longer than I have. I’m on the run from South London after a tuff summer of amateur soul kintsukuroi. About that. A Quora.com sage tells us, “unlike pee, your poo isn’t sterile, it’s full of bacteria, but the bacteria is mostly all your own stuff.” If love is shit and grief is love with nowhere to go, then heartbreak is straight up compulsive coprophagia. My planned-for bounce back was, understandably I feel, predicated on the rest of the world not ending too, but Okay Covid, fuck my drag. Nothing to do but eat shit in private. In the first month after my breakdown I couldn’t stand to listen to any music at all. For two months after, nothing with vocals. Couldn’t cook a meal and forgot all my internet banking information. I began to build up the tolerance for the prospect of staying alive slowly, through repetition: same food, same walk, same bpm. To start with it was just blank noise to block thoughts then I found sweetest relief in the space in tone freed from all past references, then beat beat beat forcing the tempo of ideation back down from ratchet footwork to a gentle drone. It’s been scientifically peer-reviewed that repetitive sounds induce the production of beta endorphin, adreno-corticotropic hormone, plasma norepinephrine and cortisol in the brain. I know that obnoxious baby Bryony who wrote MHV1 thirteen years ago would hit the roof if she knew I was here writing about the healing neurological powers of fucking dance music, but to her I say sorry bitch, you’re in your mid thirties now, a pandemic killed hardcore, plus you’ve got bigger things to kvetch about, like wrinkly eyelids. Just to top it off so she fully wrecks me, on the same repetitious freedom tip I also got way into chanting. Connect with kind Nichiren Buddhists in your area. One is the only real number.
I WANTED TO LAND A UFO ON TOP OF THE TRACK
If there was an awards ceremony for most legendary retailers on my street (Rye Lane SE15, birthplace of John Boyega, Giggs, and my Granddad) Pete Willis of BOOKS would be second only to the extended Khans universe of KHAN’S BARGAINS. Honourable newcomer mention to the Pinoy princesses at BOLA BOBA. While BOOKS (which is more of a tiny shack with folding tables) was shuttered during The First Lockdown, Pete created a daily digest of things he’d read, watched and listened to online, a panoply of weird archival gold, diverting me away from doom-scrolling and towards para-social wiki-to-youtube-n-back rabbit holes. Through these daily emails I learnt about the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) and watched their video essay The Last Angel of History (45mins, 1995, dir. John Akomfrah)
I’ve giddily recommended this to people as ‘an incredible doc about Afro-Futurism,’ but really that’s a miss-sell. For a start, it implies this will teach you about something that happened, when the term itself had only just entered mouths as TLAoH was being written, first used in 1994 by Mark Dery in his essay ‘Flame wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture.’ Giving a name to a current that forgoes linearity (no start and no end) the film is anything but a stable timeline. It’s travel, movement, it’s switchily serving as a planted marker in the glowing sands of another planetary surface. Atop lively interviews, BAFC’s Edward George (who wrote this) plays Data Thief. He’s our time-travelling protagonist sporting unfathomable levels of drip (at one point he’s in Ray-bans, a button-down, box fresh white-soled skate shoes and a large straw hat) bounding across diasporic landscapes. He guides us around Afro-futurism’s slippery then-now-yet-to-be future-story. Data Thief believes the line between social reality and science fiction is an illusion and he’s here to convince us the same. He triple-triangulates AF’s musical dimension to genii, genre and vehicle. Clinton’s funk spaceship the Mothership Connection, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s reggae Sky Computer and of course father Ra’s jazz Ark(estra). Despite their obvious venn diagrams of vision, he plots these out as cosmic rhizome to show this was anything but a linear influence thing (cf. Clinton’s v lol ‘I don’t know her’ Mariah moment with LSP. By way of contrast, he did once famously say of Sun Ra ‘That boy’s out to lunch - same place I eat.’ ) pivoting instead to an extended intertexty riff on the music tastes and motivations of actual Black astronauts. Octavia Butler and Uhura from Star Trek are the only women heard from, but we could imagine Data Thief making a non-linear time jump update to visit Moor Mother, Rasheedah Phillips, Missy Elliott, Lizzie Borden or Ngozi Onwurah. Beloved Sam ‘Chip’ Delaney pops up to talk about Speccy-fic and I couldn’t help thinking about his joyous use of Twitter these days as a stubborn corollary to his thoughts on the possibilities of the internet a mere twenty-five years before.
At the end of this film, the theorist Kodwo Eshun labels the music producer as a type of cyborg: decks as extension of body. Then he says ‘a cyborg to where?’ I have thought a lot about ’borgs in my time, but the cyborg as directional, a conduit, struck me so much I had to stop the video to play it back. (Eshun incidentally has written about punk, too, read his book on Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion before you buy the new Bootboyz shirt.) Visually, TLAoH is exactly as luscious and prescient as nearly every nostalgia vox-pop doc dirge you’ve sat through on punk is wearisome and bland. There are too many incredible moments packed in to mention, but perhaps the funniest is the image of Mad Mike Banks (of Underground Resistance) tiny in the top-left background of techno OG Juan Atkins’ talking head shot. MMB is referred to throughout in third person while he watches on, staring intently at the camera through a balaclava hole, moving like a dubbed IRA guy on 90s’ Trouble’s era BBC (“Are you saying the British government dubbed the voice of Gerry Adams because it’s too sexy?” per Derry Girls) He’s radiating so much defiant power it passes through the eye of the self-serious needle to become irresistibly camp. Like their later films, TLAoH’s register summons both theoretical depth and mad connective whimsy without need for the heavy-handed stretched out ‘gotcha’ of music docs you see today that have, at most, what, one idea?
DJ Spooky helps us understand techno as the first post-industrial music, booming in the shadow of Detroit’s husked out Ford motors plant. Motorik. Kano recently started a YouTube series where he interviews people who grew up in his East London borough of Newham, from fellow Grime originators Footsie, Ghetts and D Double E, to Idris Elba, who had stints doing nights at Dagenham, London’s own Ford plant, where many of the English side of my family also worked in the 70s and 80s. It limps on today, the only model still produced is that boy-racer standard which in turn once ferried so many gurning rave-herberts out across the motorway to hear the sounds coming out from a few boroughs over: the Ford Fiesta. While the majority of voices here are African-American, Goldie reps this British angle incisively (it’s fun to see him prior to the slightly gurned-out pop-adjacent joker image he’d be landed with by the ’00s) elevating hardcore breaks for its unalloyed aggression and immediacy: the sound is created there and then, amplified then eaten up through dance. Infinite Babylon mash loop. I wonder what my uncles and aunties liked to listen to as they drove to their shifts at Dagenham. Probably not breakbeat. The M25 as a turntable: the future as a locked groove.
WHO ARE YOU?
I used to believe that in a reality bent on atomising us by rewarding only self-regard and learned helplessness, making transformative shit happen was the only way to feel good and useful to the world. I went on and on about how we should all become sharp instruments of service to help avoid this fetishisation of the interior. I stand by this mostly, but the problem is, when you value yourself primarily for the stuff you do, not the you you are, you will come to predominantly orbit others who see you this same way. Then, when you have to, choose to, or are made to stop doing all that, the risk is your people actually won’t know who you are beyond what you’re for, without that stuff. If you’ve set up your engine this way and you’re a punk, you’re likely in crisis right now because this pandemic pause has forced you to assess yourself without any that. By the same token, if you’re in engaged in any type of political work, this moment has probably only upped your tendency to measure your worth through the prism of what you can offer. All I’m saying is this: we neglect our interiors at our peril. Where we are headed you will need those load bearing walls and a sturdy selfhood that remains intact beyond all projection. Meet you inside.
Part II ~ Soon