The Twenty-One Best Albums of the Decade So Far: 2010-2014

Feeling only moderately provoked but more to the point inspired by Pitchfork’s list of the 100 best albums of the decade so far, I have compiled and extensively written out this list of my own. My list forgoes EPs, otherwise works by Blood Diamonds and Holy Other would have made the cut, Zola Jesus would have been placed higher, and Burial and FKA twigs may have been contenders – and perhaps I should have looked out for all of these a little bit, without encouraging them to take figurative dives for the metaphorical short-end money. I am also ignoring some excellent reissues and compilations: The Beach Boys’ The Smile Sessions; Robbie Basho’s Visions of the Country, one of several of his works reissued by Grass-Tops and Gnome Life; and the recently uncovered tandem of albums by the synth-pop artist known as Lewis. The list could have borne more rap and ambient electronic artists; and young and older luminaries of independent music, June Tabor, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Grouper, and St. Vincent, have marginally missed out. There is little sense and only a throwaway impulse behind the inclusion of two How To Dress Well albums, for instance, but not a third; or spurring the presence of Before Today but the absence of Mature Themes. Great albums always grow with age, which at least explains a proclivity towards the earlier years of the decade. I chose twenty-one albums because that is how my endeavour came out; and because there is something to be said for odd numbers, and for numbers which – like my own years – divide neatly by seven, an important figure for all manner of reasons.

21. Frankie Rose – Interstellar

Uniting rather than replacing the sounds of 60s surf pop and proto-punk with 80s synthesizers and new wave – like The Cure gazing skyward at night-time on the Florida Keys, or more simply Blondie turned celestial – Frankie Rose’s second solo album is a distilled triumph of pop music. The titular opening track introduces Rose as a disembodied voice on an astral plane, before a drum hits and she rebounds in the space between it and earth. This is the modus of Interstellar, bounded by glossy synths, glimmering chimes, and pulsing percussion, and rounded by Rose’s vocals, which at points coalesce with the music, and sound especially clear and open-throated on the album’s ballads. At the core of the record is the outstanding middle sequence of ‘Pair of Wings’, ‘Had We Had It’, and ‘Night Swim’.

20. Waka Flocka Flame – Flockaveli

Replete with a motif of mouthed gunshots, Waka Flocka Flame’s debut album is in the same gesture brash and grandiose. In name and conception, full of featuring artists, Flockaveli is an explicit call-back to the gangster rap of the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Yet it steps away from those forebears thanks to Lex Luger’s relentless production, which features dense and heavy-hitting drums, synthetic throbs, and flourishes of orchestral bombast; and Waka Flocka Flame’s aggressively playful vocal delivery. Buoyed by his percussive onomatopoeia, tracks thrust and double back upon themselves, winding up before unleashing with renewed intensity.

19. Zola Jesus – Conatus

Not as tightly wound as the Stridulum EP, Zola Jesus’s third full-length retains its industrial rhythms, dark synths, and Nika Roza Danilova’s voice: at once commanding and empathetic, calling out from a frozen horizon and intimately within the listener’s head, provoking a visceral response felt in the throat and the chest. Zola Jesus’s songs build and change shape. As her singing urges on and reaches a crescendo, the supporting synths may surge in accord, or they may dissipate into murky ambience; or else the music may sustain, while her words fall and inhabit the space with a hard-won hesitancy. On Conatus, Danilova’s singular voice is sometimes subsumed into layered choruses, and instants of voice bounce against and between one another. Her sound has widened, retaining its distinctiveness through more familiar song structures, as on ‘In Your Nature’; and excelling amid the dance environment of ‘Seekir’.

18. Olga Bell – Krai

Russia today – after the contested addition of Crimea and Sevastopol – is comprised of eighty-five federal subjects. Most of these subjects are oblasts, which are provinces with federally appointed governors and locally elected legislatures. Twenty-two republics are afforded more autonomy than the oblasts; five autonomous subjects see even greater autonomy granted to areas where ethnic minorities predominate; and there are also the federal cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, to which Sevastopol was added in March. ‘Krai’ is a historical designation, retained for nine of Russia’s subjects which were once considered frontier territories. Today, Russia’s nine krais function much like oblasts. The nine krais extend from Krasnodar, which looks out onto the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea; to Perm, by the Ural Mountains; Krasnoyarsk, a vast expanse in the heart of Siberia; Primorsky, which borders China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan; and to Kamchatka, which gazes towards Alaska over the Bering Sea. In short, the krais cover the extent of Russia; and capturing that scope and that diversity on a single record is a stern task, but one at which Olga Bell proves adroitly capable. Trained as a classical pianist, she scored a throng of instruments for Krai, and cello, electric guitar and bass, harp, drums and glockenspiel are prominent among those which fill up the album. Rhythms coil and undulate, or drone as the sound slips effortlessly across the nine pieces from folk to the abstractions of modern electronic music. Voices of all accents accumulate, breaking apart in the best moments as the blazing clarity of Bell’s voice comes through.

17. Majical Cloudz – Impersonator

From within a small space, Devon Welsh commands an audience. In spare songs, comprised of short loops of synthesized keys and strings – guitar, organ, and piano are prominent – Welsh pushes his voice into the gaps of the music, stretching words out and conjuring unexpected sounds and searing emotions. His voice is at once straining, and decadent in its luxurious depth. Welsh’s partner in Majical Cloudz, Matthew Otto has noted that the majority of Impersonator was recorded or processed through analogue equipment – providing the album with a warm background hum, which is allied with brief bursts of white noise which create a lively surface texture. Welsh’s lyrics are acutely personal, yet often cloaked in an elusive language which makes their sentiment feel diverse and general. Some of the album’s strongest songs, including the title piece and ‘I Do Sing For You, show him curiously exploring his craft and his identity as a writer and singer.

16. Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven

Daniel Lopatin’s Warp Records debut takes its impetus from constrained aesthetic production and the confines of modern life, and frames a view of America in wide perspective. The record’s title indicates Lopatin’s interest in Oulipo, a school of writing founded by Raymond Queneau, and whose practitioners have included Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, which seeks creativity through the imposition of constraints and adherence to identifiable patterns. One of Oulipo’s constraints, referred to as N+7, involves replacing each noun in a text with the noun seven places after it in a dictionary. Lopatin followed Oulipo’s strictures on R Plus Seven to spread disfigured vocals throughout his record. Chopped choirs chatter and chant, accompanied by synthesized brass and saxophone, new-age harmonies, and the sounds of nature, which break through and provide moments of respite. There is a sheen to these pieces which recalls something like Opiate’s Objects for an Ideal Home; but where that record is playful and often warm, R Plus Seven is more fractured. Concerned hums and throbs lie at the heart of tracks, and after the adjusted celebrations of ‘Americans’, tension increasingly builds. The word ‘wait’ is uttered on ‘Problem Areas’ – the only fully enunciated word on the record. The tension reaches a laden and hectic climax in ‘Still Life’, before ‘Chrome Country’ unburdens in a choir of children.

15. Mount Eerie – Clear Moon

‘If I look, / Or if I don’t look, / Clouds are always / Passing over’ – so sings Phil Elverum, the opening lines to ‘The Place I Live’, the third song from Clear Moon. Elverum consistently relays for us, compassionate and clear eyed, those minutiae which substantially comprise all of our lives. Clear Moon was the first of two records he released in 2012: both it and the denser, more experimental Ocean Roar focused immediately upon his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, and were recorded there in the large room of a converted church. Yet through both his lyrics and his music, the detail of his observations, the scope of his speculations and misgivings, and his tracings of the landscape come together to extend beyond the provincial and evoke that which is essentially human. On Clear Moon, accompanied by a rumbling acoustic guitar, steady percussion, and occasional backing vocals which wisp and wind, Elverum’s voice thinly sustains and encompasses.

14. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

I saw Kanye West last year at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, and his was an exceptionally conceived and fantastically rounded stage show: allowing space for elaborate costume changes and for a tirade against capitalism, slickly and energetically offering some of his biggest hits, but with an extended and improvised version of ‘Runaway’ at the culmination of the evening portraying the supremely talented and instinctively daring musician at the heart of his records. ‘Runaway’ is both the most introspective song and the star feature on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but the album is a tour de force: by the time the first piano chord on ‘Runaway’ plays, the record already seems to distend backwards, to the bluster and drama of ‘Monster’, with its featured performances by Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, and Bon Iver; to the horns and psychic gesturing of ‘All of the Lights’; and to the tribal sounds and Kanye’s snarling vocal delivery which urge on ‘Power’.

13. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today

While Before Today proved a breakthrough album for Ariel Pink, noted for its clean sound after a decade of lo-fi recordings, and for its hooks which seemed to reconfigure generations of popular music, still the album also served to crystallise some of those aspects which have remained hallmarks of his peculiar aesthetic. Ariel reworked a number of songs for the album, including the centrepieces ‘Round and Round’ and ‘Beverly Kills’. I have discussed his music before in the context of heteroglossia, particularly in relation to the successor to Before Today, 2012’s equally engaging Mature Themes – but no two songs better disclose the tension-filled multiplicity of voices of which his music is uniquely capable. Ariel Pink combines sudden shifts in pitch, rhapsodic choruses and static refrains , and lyrics which contrast openhearted honesty with vague ejaculations and disconnected quotations from old Hollywood.

12. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Chords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do

Fiona Apple’s fourth album is defined musically by her piano playing, its plush jazz sound sparsely constructed whether softly repeating or restlessly pushing forth, and by variegated percussion: along with utilising field recordings, Apple and her drummer, Charley Drayton, are listed in the album credits as playing ‘thighs’ and ‘truck stomper’. The loose and flexible patterns of the percussion and the restrained piano allow Apple’s voice to hold the centre. Her singing is fearless, rolling out into torrents of words with palpable expressive vigour – the straining movements of the muscles in her face as she sings almost show through. The Idler Wheel… also possesses some ofsharpest lyrics written, from the vertiginous psychological insight of ‘Every Single Night’, through pages of personal history, to cultural allusions both recondite and pop-cultural, as in ‘Anything We Want’, which references folded fans and fighting championships.

11. How To Dress Well – What Is This Heart?

Where How To Dress Well’s predecessor Total Loss could feel like a coming together of inspired fragments, What Is This Heart? is more cohesive, despite being the most stylistically varied and sonically diverse work of Tom Krell’s musical career. From the acoustic guitar of album opener ‘2 Years On (Shame Dream)’, the bell chimes which spartanly introduce ‘What You Wanted’, and the industrial beats of ‘Face Again’, each song seems to inhabit a discrete realm of sound and to push towards a distinct genre; further on into the album, there is the steady orchestral surge of ‘Pour Cyril’, and the smooth R&B of ‘Precious Love’. What unites all of this is Krell’s voice, which sounds more relaxed and more tender than ever while reaching lofty tonal and emotive heights. The lyrics depict entangled family history, and see Krell engage acutely – most notably on ‘Repeat Pleasure’ and ‘Words I Don’t Remember’ – with the complexities of love, through its movements of desire and surfeit, as it both compels and cloisters the individual self. The flow of his language too is richly developed, on ‘House Inside (Future is Older than the Past)’ for instance, as the syllables pile up through the first three verses before the punchingly elegant chorus.

10. Jolie Holland – Pint of Blood

Jolie Holland’s songs have always had the quality of sounding, upon first listen, like nuanced and well-sung reworkings of American standards. Welcoming rather than requesting your time, as the songs open up over repeated hearings, their subtle gradations come into focus along with the poetry of her voice and her lyrics. Holland’s voice has become more ornate as her career has progressed, and this has sometimes seemed to alienate fans and serve as a barrier to her music, disguising her careful choice of words. Yet her voice has a majestic tone, and utilised in this way turns her pieces into encompassing soundscapes, amplifying rather than detracting from the underlying emotion. On Pint of Blood, tight song structures and amplified guitar and piano accompany her vocal reverberations: through the sneering ‘All Those Girls’; the moving ‘Tender Mirror’ and ‘Gold and Yellow’; coming to a close with Holland’s interpretation of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Rex’s Blues’, as she elongates the lines and embellishes the song’s steadfast fatalism.

9. Sean McCann – Music for Private Ensemble

Beginning his career with a series of experimental noise pieces released via cassette, on Music for Private Ensemble Sean McCann moved decisively towards modern classical composition. Playing an array of strings, keys, woodwinds, and percussion instruments himself, and sampling others, McCann’s four arrangements – with distinct parts – feature over a hundred layers of conscientiously edited instrumentation. The pieces fluctuate abruptly between different sounds and moods, with finely shaped tumult and orchestral swells giving way to spacious interludes.  They are characterised by McCann’s violin, fluttering and billowing glockenspiel, dimly lighted French horn, reiterating cello, and a gentle choral conclusion – in ‘Arden’, the third section of the album’s final piece – built up by McCann from the vocals of Kayla Cohen.

8. Julia Holter – Ekstasis

Julia Holter has cited illuminated manuscripts as an influence on her music, while Ekstasis was inspired particularly by the Alain Resnais/Alain Robbe-Grillet film Last Year in Marienbad. These sources show through in Ekstasis, in its rich colours and bold contours, and in the impression it creates of cyclical navigation between long corridors and rooms which, though their features change markedly, remain inexpressibly the same. Though the sound is lighter and the compositions more complex, there is an austerity to Ekstasis which is reminiscent of Nico. Fragments of words emerge to be sung – as in ‘Goddess Eyes II’ and ‘Goddess Eyes I’, variations from the original on Tragedy, where the lyrics come from Euripides Hippolytus – and whirring pop structures advance from multilayered and jagged ambience. The album that results is densely musical, meticulously constructed, and yet in its fluid patternations and vocal flourishes instantly memorable.

7. The-Dream – Terius Nash: 1977

After three acclaimed albums established The-Dream as the grandest album-focused R&B artist since Prince, but failed to result in glorious commercial success, in late August 2011, The-Dream released for free this work under his birth name, and with his birth year as the title. Seen as a stop-gap while work on what would become IV Play progressed, the record went unheralded, even after Def Jam released it commercially at the end of 2012. But despite The-Dream sounding sombre as he dwells on failed love, Terius Nash: 1977 is a roundly accomplished work. The first five songs are especially strong, from the irony and wordplay of ‘Wake Me When It’s Over’ to the free-form crooning at the end ‘Ghetto’. And amid bright synths as he defiantly elaborates his feelings upon the wedding of a former lover, ‘Wedding Crasher’ stands – next to ‘Yamaha’ and ‘Cry’ – as one of The-Dream’s defining moments of the 2010s.

6. A$AP Rocky – Live.Love.A$AP

Critics digress, finding difficulties with A$AP Rocky’s commercialism – which seems to a suggest a culture which only embraces the rampant materialism of the mainstream and economically upper-class – and with the subject matter of his lyrics. All this can be laid aside, for Live.Love.A$AP is a perfect harmony of sound. Combining the influence of Southern hip-hop with the emergence of cloud rap, Rocky’s voice lingers and lulls effortlessly over loops and beats provided by producers including Clams Casino, A$AP Ty Beats, and Beautiful Lou. Any hack can write socially conscious lyrics, but few possess Rocky’s ear for cadence, his rapping languid yet emboldened and packed with internal rhymes. ‘Bass’ is especially remarkable, defined by Clams’ low-frequency looped sample which has an impalpable, gaseous quality. Live.Love.A$AP is enhanced too by entertaining cameos from SpaceGhostPurrp and A$AP Ferg. This is the best rap album released so far this decade.

5. Robyn – Body Talk

Body Talk – a compilation of three mini-albums bearing the same name released throughout 2010  – is an album of singles which speak across and echo within one another. Its numerous highlights – among them ‘Dancing on My Own’, ‘Hang with Me, and ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ – portray not the full bloom of love, but relationships which are tentative or disintegrating. Robyn’s romantic hold is therefore never firm; but her voice is both plaintive and commanding, as she endures tribulation and heartbreak without ever doubting or denying her sense of self. The depth of her voice is allied to crisp but continually surprising electronic music, to produce a potently moving, eminently dancable masterpiece of pop.

4. How To Dress Well – Love Remains

Love Remains was love on first listen. How To Dress Well’s debut album smothers softly a beautiful falsetto voice and R&B melodies underneath layers of thick reverb and unsettling percussion. Opening with ‘You Hold the Water’ – introduced by a line from Julianne Moore, from the Todd Haynes film Safe, with this borrowing from film a consistent facet of How To Dress Well albums  – the first five songs sound like keening turned towards popular music. Tom Krell laments in turn strained relationships, a body and mind broken down, and the irrevocable past. ‘Suicide Dream 2’, the longest track on the album and one of its standouts, is equally stately and anguished, emerging steadily and dissolving in profound pain.

In the middle section of the album, the tempo picks up and the songs become more dance-oriented, but the album is unified by a resolute aesthetic, by the production and Krell’s voice. The atmosphere and the conceptualisation of the music call to mind projects like William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks; the rhythms have seen How To Dress Well placed at the forefront of a posited movement which has been alternately dubbed PBR&B, alternative R&B, or bedroom R&B. Yet four years after its release, Love Remains still sounds like nothing else, and could equally have been produced in an empty church: it is an intensely personal and deeply spiritual record, which dwells close to the ground and still ascends as crooked smoke.

After the exuberant breaking clear of ‘Decisions’, ‘Suicide Dream 1’ provides a coda to the album. Krell’s continual refinements of these compositions – on the orchestral Just Once EP and for live performance – have shown the strength of the structures which underlay the sound of Love Remains. His two subsequent albums – Total Loss as well as What Is This Heart? – have proved equally affecting, maintaining something of the same pace and depth of feeling, while significantly broadening his sound palette and bringing his voice to the fore.

3. Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me

Released in 2004, The Milk-Eyed Mender was a breathtaking debut album, which drew from the modes of folktale and the methods of modernist literature as much as from the sound palette of folk music; showcasing across concise, compact songs Joanna Newsom’s agile harp playing and her exceptional voice, at once delicate and twisting and flowing forth with words. Ys, which appeared two years later, featured ornate orchestral arrangements, with movements which seemed to capture mythologies in the act of their initial telling.

In touring for Ys, Newsom began working as part of a five-piece band, and together she and band-member Ryan Francesconi rearranged the album’s songs for live performance. These processes palpably influenced Have One on Me. Combining apparent performative ease with prolonged length and elaborate ornamentation, the album sprawls over two hours and three discs. For the first time, Newsom accompanies herself on piano as well as harp. Songs including the title piece and ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ stretch out, and drive and build to a climax; and they sit happily next to shorter pieces like ’81’ and ‘On a Good Day’, which play as redolent parables.

Indeed, the album’s musical openness extends to its lyrics, which offer American histories and biographies and accounts of the road along with some of the most personal evocations on record. Prominent among these are ‘In California’, and ‘Does Not Suffice’, which closes Have One on Me and reprises the progression from the earlier song, as Newsom recounts in close material detail the strained ending of a relationship. ‘Baby Birch’ is especially devastating, culminating in violent discord as Newsom subjugates the realm of nursery rhyme and allows herself to sound sinister, as she suggestively depicts life’s losses and closed doors.

2. Björk – Biophilia

Conceived as a project as much as an album, the music of Biophilia was intended first to dwell within the rooms of a house-museum in Iceland, then to lead a 3D film which Björk hoped would be directed by her frequent collaborator Michel Gondry. When Biophilia eventually came to fruition, it was as a multimedia endeavour: comprising an album, accompanied by a complex of apps for the iPad and iPhone – replete with games, musical scores, and short essays – and a series of residencies at which the music was to be performed.

Björk’s first Biophilia performances took place in Manchester across June and July 2011, as part of that year’s Manchester International Festival. I attended one of these performances and – aside from the pleasure at seeing Bjork in such an intimate venue, joined by the excellent Graduale Nobili choir, and with the bespoke instruments crafted for the event, including a pendulum harp, MIDI-controlled organ, gameleste, and singing Tesla coil – was enraptured for the first time with ‘Moon’ and ‘Thunderbolt’, and invigorated by ‘Crystalline’, a piece of electronic dance music which draws from drum and bass and had just been released as the album’s first single.

At the same time, the concert closed with ‘Declare Independence’, a song from Björk’s previous album Volta. An exceptional work, with ‘The Dull Flame of Desire’ – based on a translation of Fyodor Tyutchev, and featuring Antony Hegarty – a highlight, Volta always felt to me more like Björk’s earlier albums: a strong collection of disparate songs rather than a closely integrated world, such as those evinced by Homogenic, Vespertine, and Medúlla. The performance of ‘Declare Independence’ in Manchester provoked a fuller conception of Volta. It was a rare and uniquely powerful instance of the communal potential of music. Still, Biophila marked for Björk a move again towards sparser electronics, alongside crunchy beats, unusual time signatures, and lyrical contemplation, with songs which entwine the private with the physiological, and all manner of natural and celestial phenomena. Björk’s voice freely traces the outlines of the music, and – as on Medúlla – she sounds close to the listener. The album stands with the best of her works, which together comprise one of the greatest catalogues in popular art.

1. Grimes – Visions

Grimes is often discussed within the framework of the postinternet – a product of the internet’s profusion of materials, its endless repetition and recontextualisation of images, its viral videos, its fractured texts and snatches of songs – and one of the characteristics of the internet’s materiality is that it speeds up time. With so much to view and to download, and popular content shared with millions and then shared again across a multitude of social networks, trends rise and fall with rapidity and what once gains favour quickly grows old. Yet despite the the wide acclaim and the wide appeal Grimes and her album have won since its release at the beginning of 2012, from the opening shuffle of ‘Infinite ♡ Without Fulfillment’, Visions still sounds like the shock of the new.

Age cannot wither, nor custom stale its infinite variety; and Grimes too makes hungry where she most satisfies: but it is not only the rhythmically propulsive loops and the exquisitely layered vocals, or the diverse influences which range from experimental noise music to K-pop, which make Visions a great album. Nor can it be reduced solely to an inherently modern or feminist manifesto – it took time for people to fully grasp the lyrics to ‘Oblivion’, for instance, while other songs offer profound enjoyment though their lyrical content remains undisclosed, abounding in utterance and expression while eschewing determinative statement. Equally important is the album’s structure and consistent sense of space.

It moves coherently from the opening’s multiple voices into the soaring synths and vocals of ‘Genesis’, while ‘Oblivion’ begins a movement into industrial sounds, squelching percussion, and dance. ‘Vowels = Space and Time’ explicitly gestures towards the inexplicability of language. ‘Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)’ is monastic, and develops musically and lyrically the sense of waiting which is sustained throughout as one of the album’s predominant themes. Indeed, for an album with so many musical ideas and which abounds and rebounds with so much energy and replenished confidence, Visions feels markedly tranquil. An album which merges the generous impulse of a song like ‘Be a Body (侘寂)’ with the tender intimacy of ‘Skin’, Visions is the record of a person quietly embracing life at the same time as she boldly impels it onward.

The World Cup in Wider Culture

While on the field, the 2014 World Cup saw the rise of new superstars, the decline of footballing philosophies, the interplay between varying formations, and appeared to demonstrate the narrowing of traditional power gaps in the international game – in the knockout stages, from the round of sixteen through to the final, only three of fifteen matches were won by a margin greater than one goal – this piece extends beyond the confines of the pitch and beyond the immediacies of the sport. It looks at the wider cultural aspects which informed or which emerged from the World Cup.

In turn, it considers how Brazilian society functioned towards and about the tournament, and the ways in which the mass media depicted Brazilians; views the psychology and sociology of individualism as it is increasingly made manifest throughout the game; analyses the rise and spurt of soccer in the United States, and Twitter’s role in soccer’s recent prominence; plays upon the nature and extension of World Cup chants; and contemplates the innovative and encompassing uses of technology which influenced and drew upon the month-long affair.

Brazilians: Competent Organisers, Not So Crazy About Football

The buildup to the 2014 World Cup was dominated in the Anglophone media by apprehension over Brazil’s capability to host the event. The issue at the forefront of the story was the building of Brazil’s World Cup stadiums. Countless articles suggested that stadiums would not be finished in time for the beginning of the World Cup. Posited problems covered everything from incomplete roofing, exposed wiring and concrete, loose scaffolding, and unstable staircases, to blocked exits, no internet, and insufficient catering and transportation. As NBC put it, ‘Brazil will welcome the players and fans to unfinished airports, drive them past uncompleted transport systems, through streets that have been clogged with rioters protesting the cost of the tournament and into stadiums that have cost lives to build and haven’t all been finished.’

Even FIFA delegates described the preparations as ‘hell’ and the ‘worst ever’ – allegations which have already been made regarding Rio’s progress towards the Summer Olympics in 2016. Across the couple of weeks immediately preceding the start of the World Cup, it was repeatedly asserted that Brazil was not yet ready to hold the tournament, with particular worry over the stadiums in Sao Paulo and Manaus. Manaus was the target of additional mockery when, just days before the venue was to host its opening match between England and Italy, it was claimed that ground staff had been painting the pitch green to hide the fact that it was dry and underfed.

There remain vital concerns over the extent of Brazil’s expenditure on World Cup stadiums – which is thought to have totalled $3.6 billion – and over the simultaneous lack of work completed on local infrastructure projects. Despite spending over €11 billion on infrastructure, half of the projects intended for completion back in 2007, when Brazil was awarded the World Cup, were subsequently scrapped. These included the proposed high-speed rail line between Rio and Sao Paulo; although a small number of projects did find happy conclusions, with a line of the Salvador Metro in Bahia finished just prior to the onset of competition after fourteen years under construction, and taking spectators to the Arena Fonte Nova. More, some of the stadiums are without top-level clubs and will struggle to be utilised beyond the World Cup, bringing into question the long-term legacy of the tournament.

At the same time, the World Cup itself appeared to suffer little from any architectural or infrastructural issues. The stadiums were ultimately all completed in time; few problems were reported with travel between airports or to and from stadiums; and even the pitch in Manaus held up for its four group games. Preparations for major sporting events tend to prove problematic. It must be remembered that the City of Manchester Stadium, built with two temporary stands for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, was still undergoing work in the days before the event’s opening ceremony, and a metro link between the stadium and the city went incomplete. The Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 saw soaring costs and a race to be ready amid numerous delays to construction. While the Olympic venues were completed well within schedule for Beijing 2008, the Games brought considerable controversy over forced relocations: which affected somewhere between the Chinese government’s suggested 6,000 families, and the 1.5 million residents predicted by human rights groups.

In fact, many quarters have acclaimed the organisational achievement on display in Brazil. A survey of foreign journalists suggests an overwhelmingly positive response to the travel provision, airport service, and level of personal security afforded during the World Cup, as well as towards Brazilian culture and nightlife. David Ranc of the Football Research in an Enlarged Europe project has argued that the World Cup in Brazil was better organised than the 2012 London Olympics, citing routinely full stadiums and relatively conservative large-scale security measures. The counter argument has also been made that – despite problems with the provision and construction of stadia and the continuing inequality which is characteristic of Brazilian society – Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup ought to be seen as a testament to the country’s growth, and to the significant improvements made in health and education over the last decade.

Beyond the headlines regarding unfinished or unfurnished stadiums, fears were expressed in bursts that the World Cup would be beset by riots. A wave of protests took place across Brazilian cities in June 2013, with the impetus being fare increases to public transportation, but feeling soon extending to encompass anger over other social issues, over perceived governmental corruption, and at the excessive police response to the protests, which included the use of rubber bullets. The protests became known inside Brazil as the ‘V for Vinegar Movement’, after groups of protesters were allegedly arrested for carrying vinegar, intended as a remedy against the police’s use of tear gas and pepper spray. The height of these protests intertwined with Brazil’s hosting of the 2013 Confederations Cup. With the protest movement and football linked, growing upset over the cost of the World Cup, and a sense of complicity between the Brazilian government and FIFA, belief built that the tournament was liable to see trouble on the streets and around the stadiums.

While there were clashes in Brazil’s major cities as the World Cup got underway – which saw the police again use tear gas on those demonstrating – these soon subsided. With little to report, conjecture arose that an early exit for Brazil would prove the catalyst for violent manifestations of unrest. Given the context, these fears were understandable, and aired by committed and talented journalists, including the BBC’s Tim Vickery. However, vague and concerned premonitions became, in the tabloid presses, scaremongering invoking the potential for widespread rioting and dirty bombs.

So as Brazil’s drubbing at the hands of Germany in the semi-finals was still being digested, speculation proliferated online and across social media as to whether it would provoke the Brazilian people into rioting. By late evening, sensationalised reports of rioting, flag-burning, and mass theft were being published. Such accounts were soon being tempered, however, with the Brazilian police suggesting that some disturbance on Copacabana beach had amounted to little more than fighting between opposing groups of supporters, and reports of theft and gunfire remaining unconfirmed. A number of photos eagerly circulated as evidence of renewed rioting turned out to be deceptive, with the images actually drawn from the Confederations Cup protests a year ago.

The argument persists that the response of the Brazilian police has been marked by aggression, and that their heavy-handed approach limited the capacity of demonstrators during the World Cup. Still, there appears a discrepancy between the notion of Brazilians set upon trouble – and distraught to the point of violence or insensibility upon the loss of a football match – and what actually occurred after their side’s capitulation. Instead of attacking or mourning, Brazilian supporters seemed models of magnanimity following the game against Germany, recognising the flaws of the Brazilian team, and praising the abilities of their competitors. Appreciative of good football rather than narrowly and viciously partisan, the positive atmosphere in Brazil around the game and around the teams of the World Cup remained for the duration of the competition.

A Surfeit of Individualism

Though individuals have found themselves the centres of attention at many previous World Cups – Diego Maradona in Mexico in 1986, for instance, and again for less savoury reasons eight years later at USA 94; while Ronaldo came to dominate the world’s focus in the buildup to the final of France 98, as he suffered a convulsive fit just hours before kickoff  – never before has a tournament been built so thoroughly upon individual players. Many of the top teams seemed structured round one player, whether by design or by necessity.

Brazil and Argentina, the two favourites going into the tournament, were – despite a divergence in experience and subtly differing gameplans – from the start orchestrated around their outstanding attacking players, Neymar and Lionel Messi. Though both players had strong tournaments, finishing with four goals apiece, Brazil floundered dramatically after Neymar suffered an injury in their quarter-final game against Colombia, while – despite leading Argentina to the final with an array of crucial goals and assists – the unduly critical perception shared by many was that Messi had failed to excel. After a lackadaisical close to the season with Barcelona, it was thought that he could go on to consolidate on the international stage his reputation as one of the world’s greatest ever players. He was awarded the Golden Ball, and so officially declared the tournament’s best player; but this decision was broadly derided, by figures including FIFA President Sepp Blatter and by Maradona, who triumphed with Argentina back in 86.

Elsewhere, with their striker Radamel Falcao out of action owing to a knee injury, and despite impressive performances by Cuadrado and their defensive players, James Rodriguez became the figurehead for Colombia and – though Monaco spent €45 million on him a season ago – the breakout star of the World Cup. Alexis Sanchez occupied a similar position for Chile, and was the standout from their side especially as Arturo Vidal struggled for fitness. Arjen Robben was clearly the Netherlands’ exceptional player, the impetus to their attack as Robin van Persie stuttered and Wesley Sneijder indicated a career on a steep decline. Uruguay were capable and committed with Luis Suarez on the pitch, but abject without him. Clint Dempsey for the USA and Tim Cahill for Australia – attacking midfielders or second-strikers for much of their careers – were tasked with leading the line and focusing their sides. And likewise Nigeria and South Korea were largely reliant on their wide attackers, Ahmed Musa and Son Heung-Min respectively.

While the focus on individual players was variously tactical it was also philosophical, and extended beyond the immediate contexts of the sport to reflect a wider sociological impulse. Even where facts on the pitch seemed to refute the reliance upon star men, still nations clung to individuals. Wayne Rooney continued, in the lead up to the tournament, to be regarded England’s best hope for success, and he continues to be considered the squad’s only world class player, quite ignoring a litany of mediocre performances at major tournaments and the emergence of youngsters who would seem to challenge his place in the team. Didier Drogba was restored to the Ivory Coast eleven for their decisive group encounter against Greece, despite looking his age and in spite of Wilfried Bony’s two goals in the two previous matches.

Most egregious, however, was the decision to interrupt the World Cup final itself with an individual awards ceremony for FIFA’s chosen players. Thus – before Germany were able to lift the World Cup – Manuel Neuer and a defeated and deflated Lionel Messi ascended to receive their awards for Golden Glove, as the tournament’s best goalkeeper, and Golden Ball. James Rodriguez, the winner of the Golden Boot with six goals, and Paul Pogba, decreed in association with Hyundai the tournament’s best young player, were not dragged out for the occasion; but postponing the celebrations of the victorious team in order to regale and reify the individual contribution seemed an error indicative beyond football, and especially absurd given that one of the awarded individuals had just lost arguably the most important game of his career.

Twitter and the Rise of Soccer in the United States

The World Cup final between Germany and Argentina was the most-watched football game in the history of American television. 26.5 million viewers tuned in overall to watch the match live on television, with 17.3 million following in English via ABC, while 9.2 million watched in Spanish over on Univision. The figure of 26.5 million compares with the 24.7 million who watched as Spain beat the Netherlands four years ago in 2010; with the 14.5 million who watched the final of the World Cup held in the USA in 1994; and with the average audiences of 15 million obtained by both this year’s NBA Finals and last year’s baseball World Series.

A further 1.8 million people viewed Germany vs. Argentina online using WatchESPN. Adding those online viewers via ABC and Univision, the total number of people on all devices watching the game live came to just over 29 million. And these figures remain restricted to those who watched within the confines of their own homes: the figures do not account for the people who packed America’s bars to watch, or attended viewing parties hosted in clubs, parks and cinemas, and in their potential thousands at local stadiums.

The 2014 World Cup averaged 4.557 million viewers in the US, in contrast to the 3.273 million who watched each match on average in 2010, the 2.321 million from 2006, and the 2.801 million who watched back in 1994. Such numbers do not guarantee that the game’s appeal will continue to grow, or that it will flourish inside America. Viewing figures this time round have been aided by the proximity of US time zones with those in Brazil; while for 2018, ESPN – who have led soccer coverage in the US and dedicated considerable television time to analysing the latest tournament – have lost the World Cup rights to Fox.

Domestically, the average attendance figure for the 2014 season of Major League Soccer so far has been 18,704: a slight increase on the previous season’s average, but still marginally down on the number from 2012, and leaving many stadiums well short of capacity. In fact, despite rising from a low of 13,756 in 2000, since the first season of Major League Soccer in 1996, match-day attendances have hardly boomed: then, a novelty and just two years after the 1994 World Cup, 17,406 people on average attended Major League Soccer games. If the trend is for more and more people in the United States to watch football on television, this does not appear to be translating into behinds upon stadium seats. Perhaps this will change in 2015, on the back of a World Cup which has been so popular – and which has been widely discussed as a turning point for the game in the US – and with new players, including Kaka, David Villa, and Frank Lampard, set to bolster the domestic league. Meanwhile NBC continues to invest time and effort in the English Premier League, having spent £250 million for the rights from 2012; and Fox have acquired the rights to the Bundesliga for five seasons starting next year. Major international football will return to the US in 2016, when it will host the Copa America Centenario: a special edition of the Copa America to celebrate its centenary, which will feature the ten South American teams plus the United States, Mexico, and four others from CONCACAF still to be determined.

The popularity of this summer’s World Cup in the US owes significantly to the rise of Twitter. In 2006, Twitter was just starting out, first being launched publicly that July. By the second quarter of 2010, it had grown to boast 40 million monthly active users. Yet four years on, that number has risen to 255 million. Over 62% of these active Twitter users live in the United States. And throughout the World Cup, Twitter was a prominent force for the spread of US soccer fervour. During the United States’ three group matches, over 15 million tweets were sent relating to the team’s progress. During the round of sixteen game against Belgium, Twitter recorded more than 9 million tweets sent. Major American companies took to Twitter to post images of themselves laying aside work to watch the games. Sites like Mashable came replete with postings which simply highlighted Twitter responses to the US team’s highs and lows.

Rihanna – who has the eighth most-followed Twitter account, with over 36.5 million followers – emerged as an ardent fan of the sport throughout the World Cup’s proceedings, tweeting photographs of herself at the final at the Maracana in Rio, and then with the German players as they celebrated their victory on into the night. Overall, Twitter reported that 672 million tweets were sent pertaining to the World Cup across its one-month duration. 35.6 million tweets were recorded as Germany beat Brazil 7-1; and a record 618,725 tweets were sent per minute as Mario Gotze scored Germany’s decisive, cup-winning goal against Argentina.

The Sacred and the Profane: The Extension of World Cup Chants

The 2014 World Cup saw innovations in the realm of football chants, as they became increasingly elaborate, frequently political, and transcended the sport to become part of the summer’s pop-culture. Spain’s early exit from the tournament – aside from damaging the prospects of national retailers grown accustomed to the team’s success – meant that short shrift was given to ‘Yo soy Español, Español, Español’, the chant which characterised Spain’s triumph in South Africa four years ago. England persisted at moments during their brief stay with the jocularly antagonistic ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’, sung to the tune of the minstrel song ‘Camptown Races’; and Germany introduced a contemporary political perspective to proceedings when, in their match against the United States, their fans responded to shouts of ‘USA! USA!’ with ‘NSA! NSA!’. Algeria progressed to the round of sixteen with their famous chant ‘One, two, three – viva l’Algiré!’ – recited in English, and an emblem of the Algerian revolution against French rule. Hosts Brazil stuck with ‘Eu sou Brasileiro, com muito orgulho, com muito amor’ – ‘I am Brazilian, with a lot of pride, and a lot of love’.

Brazil were involved in one of the minor controversies of the tournament when their game against Mexico highlighted the Mexican supporters’ use of a contentious chant during opposition goal-kicks. In recent years, Mexicans have taken to shouting ‘puto’ just as an opposition goalkeeper makes contact with the ball. The endeavour to perturb an opposition goalkeeper is not unique, and similar goading occurs throughout football. Yet it has been strongly argued that ‘puto’ is a homophobic insult, more than simply an allegation of cowardice or an indistinct profanity. After Brazil faced Mexico, and at the instigation of the anti-discrimination group Fare, FIFA opened an investigation into both nations, who they ultimately cleared from any wrongdoing. Brazil had apparently retorted in kind to Mexico’s chants. For their part, Mexican supporters responded to this perceived mendacious and unnecessary meddling by subsequently changing the chant from ‘puto’ to ‘Pepsi’ – the leading competitor to Coca-Cola, who were one of the tournament’s main sponsors.

The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ can already claim a rich history upon football’s seating areas and terraces. The basic melody of the song – thought to be derived from Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony – was first appropriated back in 2003 by Club Brugge of Belgium, before being co-opted by AS Roma when they met Brugge in the 2005-06 UEFA Cup. By the summer of 2006 – and still known phonetically among Italian players and supporters as ‘Po-po-po’ – it had become the unofficial theme for the Azzurri, as Italy won the 2006 World Cup. The melody was a prominent facet of the celebrations, led by Francesco Totti, as the Italian squad arrived, triumphant, back in Rome.

Still sung for and most closely associated with the Italian national team, the melody has since extended throughout the world of sport. It was ubiquitous during the 2008 European Championships in Austria and Switzerland; and featured again four years later in Poland and Ukraine. In the United States, ‘Seven Nation Army’ has become a staple of college football and college basketball games, and has been utilised through the NBA and in the NFL, where it is especially favoured by the Baltimore Ravens. Emerging amidst the 2006 World Cup which was hosted in Germany, greeting the goalscorers of the 2013 Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, and becoming – in remixed form – an anthem of the Bayern side, ‘Seven Nation Army’ is also entwined with German football, and sometimes sung by Germany’s supporters – so that it remained present in Brazil even beyond Italy’s early elimination.

Germany’s World Cup final opponents Argentina are known for a vocal support and an ability to produce an array of innovative chants – which sometimes descend towards the bawdy. ‘Vamos, vamos, Argentina’ encodes a reference to a brothel; and at a previous World Cup Argentinians sang in memory of their Brazilian counterparts, ‘They’re all black, they’re all sexual deviants, everybody knows Brazil is in mourning’. For the occasion of a World Cup in the home of their fiercest rivals, Argentina’s supporters devised a brand new song, to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’. Entitled ‘Brasil, decime qué se siente’, when translated into English, ‘Brazil, tell me how it feels’ reads:

Brazil, tell me how it feels

To have your Dad in your house,

I swear that even as years pass

We will never forget

That Diego tricked you

That Cani scored against you

You’ve been crying ever since Italy

You’re going to see Messi

The cup will be brought to us

Maradona is greater than Pele

The chant became so popular that it spread beyond the supporters to the centre of the Argentinian squad. Argentina’s players were videoed singing ‘Brasil, decime qué se siente’ in their changing room as they progressed towards their semi-final against the Netherlands.

The culturally outstanding chant of the tournament belonged to the Americans. With its beginnings over a decade ago in the United States Naval Academy – and in Navy football, American style – ‘I believe that we will win’ ascended rapidly throughout the World Cup, usurping the traditional three-syllable utterance ‘USA!’, to become one of the hallmarks not only of the US team but of the entire competition. Impelled by ESPN, who used it for its World Cup commercial, the chant soon grew to dominate in the bars of America and at public screenings. On the page, ‘I believe that we can win’ initially appears debased, a reduction of the football chant to absurdity: its words offering only the slightest of sentiments, a simple belief that the essence of sport – a physical competition in which the winner is uncertain – remains its essence. Yet when performed, the chant is both powerful and memorable, drawing from gospel music in its call-and-response and simple rhythms, which drive towards a crescendo.

Technical Innovations and The Time of the Game

Technological innovation – not usually one of association football’s bedfellows – abounded on the pitch for this World Cup. Goal-line technology was implemented for the first time, courtesy of the German company GoalControl – who beat off the challenge of rivals including Hawk-Eye, before their technology was implemented in competition at last year’s Confederations Cup. GoalControl’s setup involves fourteen cameras, each capable of taking five-hundred photographs per second. It thereby determines in real-time whether the ball has crossed the goal-line, and whether a goal should be awarded or play allowed to continue. Its decision incontrovertible, a message is passed wirelessly to a watch worn about the referee’s wrist. Despite working perfectly, the system caused hilarity when an irate BBC commentator Jonathan Pearce misunderstood its functioning and railed against being so deceived.

The other bold innovation of the World Cup has in fact already been a feature of Brazilian domestic football for eight years. This was the ‘vanishing spray’, a white foam which referees may use in an attempt to ensure that defenders remain the requisite ten yards from the ball upon attacking free-kicks. So during the tournament referees sprayed a white mark by the site of the stationary ball, then a horizontal line by the feet of defenders – meant to keep them at bay, and disappearing after a minute or so on the playing surface. Hitherto used in the domestic leagues of Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, there is no conclusive evidence that the spray contributes to more goals scored from free-kicks. Still an eminently sensible if only partial solution to a real problem, the spray has been ratified for the forthcoming seasons in Italy, Spain, and France, and will feature in the UEFA Champions League. While the English Premier League first proposed compiling a series of reports on the issue, and allowing the spray from 2015 at the earliest, it has ceded ground and will now introduce it too in 2014-15. The Germans are still contemplating whether to use it for the coming season.

Away from the pitch, The Time of the Game drew upon a variety of interconnected technologies – televisions, and the other screens through which we watch; cameras, which as facets of mobile phones and tablet computers have become extensions of ourselves, and allow us to share images seamlessly; and online social networks – to provide an interactive history of how the world saw the World Cup final. A collaborative project devised by the writer Teju Cole, and achieved alongside software artist Jer Thorp, and artist and developer Mario Klingemann, The Time of the Game describes itself as ‘a synchronized global view of the World Cup final’. Before Germany and Argentina kicked off, Cole asked his 160,000 Twitter followers to post photographs of their screens as they watched the game, noting the minute of action and their own location, and using the hashtag #thetimeofthegame.

Collecting all the submissions which used the hashtag – and those too which used the tag #timeofthegame – resulted in a body of over 2,000 images. The Time of the Game collates these images and shows them chronologically. Fixed and centred upon the viewing screen – most often a television, but also frequently a laptop or tablet – the photographs flash consecutively across the 120 minutes of football played. So The Time of the Game offers a unique perspective, a fractured collage of the World Cup final, and it can be viewed with an eye for the football on display: showing players’ expressions, decisive moments, even differences in coverage between broadcasters from different nations. But more than this, it provides the specifics of how people watched the World Cup – the devices which they used, their surroundings, the materiality of their lives – and a broader sense of a communal experience shared equally among people between different time zones, parts of different cultures, and living with differing circumstances.

As Cole wrote when introducing the project, ‘We live in different time zones, out of sync but aware of each other. Then the game begins and we enter the same time: the time of the game.’ While the images are ‘formally satisfying’ because the focus on the screen affords a ‘frame within a frame’, in an interview with The Atlantic Cole conceptualises the cumulative result as an investigation of ”public time’ […] which is the chronological equivalent of ‘public space’.’ Indeed, The Time of the Game plays thoroughly with the concepts of public and private. It seems to publicise the private space as much as it makes the public space intimate; and contrasts the public sphere of football – which moves beyond the playing of the game, and beyond its broadcasters and analysts, to the discussions we share about football with others – with the individual act of sitting, often alone, and staring and viewing. In addition to the full thread of pictures, it is possible to select via the site a range of images based on time or location: selecting all photographs taken, for instance, in Brooklyn, or in the 45th minute, or for the thirty-minute duration of extra time.

The Scythians and The Rite of Spring: Stravinsky and Roerich et al.

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (in French, Le Sacre du printemps) – the third ballet which Stravinsky composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, after The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) – was written for the 1913 Paris season, and premiered just over a hundred years ago, on 29 May, in the newly-opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The centenary of this most notorious premiere is the occasion for numerous celebrations: new performances, revivals, and festivals which will extend across the next year. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is hosting a range of balletic and orchestral performances, in a programme led by Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet. In Moscow, four choreographies of the work have been shown by the Bolshoi Ballet over the last two months; with their performance of Pina Bausch’s interpretation set to travel worldwide. The Barbican and the Southbank Centre in London will feature orchestral performances of Stravinsky’s music. Carolina Performing Arts at Chapel Hill have devoted the next year to various showings of the work.

In Amsterdam, as part of the Holland Festival, the Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei has produced a new version for Het Nationale Ballet. The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel – which houses the Stravinsky archive – and Boosey & Hawkes are publishing a three-volume centenary edition comprising essays and an annotated facsimile of the score. In Zurich, David Zinman – who studied under and served as assistant to Pierre Monteux, the conductor of The Rite of Spring premiere – will investigate the musical and literary facets of the Rite with the Tonhalle Orchestra on 8 and 9 June. It is something of this endeavour which this piece will also attempt: an exploration of the cultural currents in Russia, centring on conceptions of the East, which led to the development of The Rite of Spring.

The influence of Asiatic art on Russian art, and in the realm of music in particular, was especially evident from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Mikhail Glinka, the father of Russian classical music, drew extensively in his compositions from Russian folk music, which he had heard growing up as a child near Smolensk, and which was being annotated and collected from the last decade of the 1700s. Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), an opera in five acts based on Pushkin’s poem, is considered an example of orientalism in music owing to its use of dissonance, chromaticism, and folk melodies. Following Glinka’s lead, Mily Balakirev began combining folk patterns with the received body of European classical music.

Balakirev utilised syncopated rhythms, while Orlando Figes – in Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia – argues that his key innovation was the introduction into Russian music of the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale has five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven and which characterised much of the European music of the common practice era between 1600 and 1900. While the pentatonic scale has been diversely used, it is a prominent aspect of South-East Asian music, and is a facet of many Chinese and Vietnamese folk songs. Figes asserts that Balakirev derived his use of the pentatonic scale from his transcriptions of Caucasian folk songs; and writes that this innovation gave ‘Russian music its ‘Eastern feel’ so distinct from the music of the West. The pentatonic scale would be used in striking fashion by every Russian composer who followed…from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky’.

Balakirev was the senior member of the group of composers also comprising Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui – known variously as The Five, The Mighty Handful, and the kuchkists (‘handful’ in Russian being ‘kuchka’, (кучка)). Balakirev’s compositional manner aside, the central philosophical force upon this group was Vladimir Stasov, who as a critic relentlessly forwarded a national school in the Russian arts. Balakirev’s King Lear (1861), Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (the name for a tone poem of 1867, and for the opera of 1896) and Scheherazade (1888) were all dedicated to Stasov.

From the early 1860s, Stasov researched and wrote a series of analyses demonstrating the influence of the East ‘manifest in all the fields of Russian culture: in language, clothing, customs, buildings, furniture and items of daily use, in ornaments, in melodies and harmonies, and in all our fairy tales’. His extensive study of the byliny, traditional Russian epic narrative poems, led him to conclude ‘these tales are not set in the Russian land at all but in some hot climate of Asia or the East…There is nothing to suggest the Russian way of life – and what we see instead is the arid Asian steppe’.

While positing the influence of the East was one thing, stating that these traditional Russian songs were in fact not Russian, but had originated entirely elsewhere, drew for Stasov considerable criticism. Any picture of the relationship between Russian and Asiatic art is complex: the developing understanding of this relationship in Russia throughout the 1800s is entwined with so many political and artistic movements and events: the emergence of orientalism after Russia’s annexing of the Crimea in 1783, and while they fought the Caucasian War between 1817 and 1864, which gave Russians a new awareness of and access to the south, and which impelled Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time; the persisting influence of Western Europe, encouraged in literature by the critic Vissarion Belinsky; and the Slavophilism which opposed the predominance of the West, seeking instead the emergence of a truly distinct Russia rooted in its own past. This Slavophilism gained momentum after the Crimean War from 1853-1856, which saw the British and French empires join the Ottomans against Russia. It was inextricably linked with the Orthodox religion; bore the related pochvennichestvo ‘native soil’ movement; and implicated in different ways Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Such complexities are encapsulated in a piece Dostoevsky wrote for his A Writer’s Dairy – a periodical he wrote and edited, containing polemical essays and occasional short fiction – in 1881. Dostoevsky, an ardent Slavophile for much of the second-half of his life, advocates for the progress of Russia through an engagement with Asia which will, at the same time, renew Russia’s relationship with Europe:

‘It is hard for us to turn away from our window on Europe; but it is a matter of our destiny…When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her, something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when America was discovered. With our push towards Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength…In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we can be Europeans.’

All this is the long background to The Rite of Spring. The Symbolists who would achieve a Silver Age of Russian Literature were influenced by a combination of orientalism, folk tales, European literature, their Russian forebears, and some of those philosophers and mystics who were a product of the heightened religious thinking that was so much a part of Slavophilism. The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev – a close friend of Dostoevsky – has been characterised by D. S. Mirsky as ‘the first Russian thinker to divorce mystical and Orthodox Christianity from the doctrines of Slavophilism’, thereby establishing a metaphysics apart from nationalist sentiment. Mirsky depicts Soloviev as leaning towards Rome in matters of theology, and as a Westernising liberal politically. Yet he too was fascinated with the East. An important figure for Andrei Bely – whom Mirsky places alongside Gogol and Soloviev as the three ‘most complex and disconcerting figures in Russian literature’ – and for Alexander Blok, Blok’s The Scythians takes for its epigraph two lines from Soloviev’s 1894 poem ‘Pan-Mongolism’: ‘Pan-Mongolism! What a savage name!/Yet it is music to my ears’.

The Scythians was Blok’s last major poem, completed in 1918, just after The Twelve. Mirsky calls it an eloquent piece of writing, but ‘on an entirely inferior level’ as compared with ‘musical genius’ of The Twelve. Its title references the group of poets of the same name: an offshoot of Russian Symbolism in so far as it consisted of its two leading figures, Bely and Blok, plus the writer Ruzumnik Ivanov-Razumnik.

The Scythians as an ethnographic group were nomadic Iranian-speaking tribes, who inhabited the Eurasian steppes around the Black and Caspian seas from about the eighth century b.c.. Herodotus believed that, after warring with the Massagetae, they left Asia and entered the Crimean Peninsula. In literature, ‘Scythian’ increasingly became a derogatory term to describe savage and uncivilised people. Shakespeare refers to ‘The barbarous Scythian’ in King Lear; while Edmund Spenser sought to declaim the Irish by positing that they and the Scythians shared a common descent.

Alexander Pushkin used the term more warmly in his poetry, writing ‘Now temperance is not appropriate/I want to drink like a savage Scythian’; and in the Russia of the late nineteenth century, it came to be used to infer those qualities of the Russian people which marked them apart from Western Europeans. Abetted by archaeological excavations of Scythian kurgans (burial mounds) on Russian soil, a shared heritage with the Scythians was hypothesised as ‘Scythian’ became a byword for Russia’s historical past, Russian character, Russian otherness, and thereby also for Russia’s future.

Emphasising the conflux of Eastern influences in The Rite of Spring, Orlando Figes argues that Stravinsky’s ballet ought to be viewed particularly as a manifestation of this interest in all things Scythian. The painter Nicholas Roerich had initially trained as an archaeologist. He had worked with the archaeologist and orientalist Nikolay Veselovsky in excavating the Maikop kurgan in Maikop, Southern Russia, in 1897. The Maikop kurgan was dated as far back as the third millenium b.c., and revealed two burials, containing rich artifacts including a bull figurine made of gold. Roerich was an adherent of Stasov, and when he began work on a series of paintings depicting the early Slavs, he sought Stasov’s advice regarding ethnographic details. Stasov advised him that wherever there was a lack of local evidence, it was appropriate to use artistic and cultural details from the East since ‘the ancient East means ancient Russia: the two are indivisible’.

Though the specifics of his background and his orientalism were not entirely fluent with the group’s more worldly outlook, Roerich became an entrenched figure in Diaghilev’s World of Art movement. After designing the sets for The Polovtsian Dances – a ballet excerpted from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, which featured during the Ballets Russes first season in 1909 – Roerich went on to work with Stravinsky on the concept, setting and costumes for The Rite of Spring.

The idea for The Rite of Spring had emerged by 1910; Petrushka, which premiered a year later, two years before The Rite of Spring‘s own premiere, was the product of a very different core of people. While Diaghilev quickly became the prominent figure in the movement – owing to his bold entrepreneurial personality; his appetite for and ability to synthesise knowledge; and driving the publication of the magazine of the same name from 1899 – the World of Art (‘Mir iskusstva’ (Мир иску́сств)) originally comprised a group of Petersburg students around Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst. Mirsky describes Benois as ‘the greatest European of modern Russia, the best expression of the Western and Latin spirit. He was also the principal influence in reviving the cult of the northern metropolis and in rediscovering its architectural beauty, so long concealed by generations of artistic barbarity…But he was never blind to Russian art, and in his work…Westernism and Slavophilism were more than ever the two heads of a single-hearted Janus’.

The World of Art embodied these two poles, and was part of the energetic and diverse avant-garde in Russia in the first decade of the 1900s. This avant-garde also included the Symbolists in literature, and Alexander Scriabin in music – an influential composer who experimented with forms of atonal music, and who was much loved by Stravinsky. After Diaghilev’s successes staging Russian opera and music in Paris towards the end of the decade, the Ballets Russes was formed. Bakst produced scenery for the company’s adaptation of Scheherazade in 1910; while Benois designed the sets for many of its earliest productions. He worked especially on Petrushka. Mirsky suggests that not only the set design but the very idea of the ballet ‘belongs to Benois, and once more he revealed in it his great love for his native town of Petersburg in all its aspects, classical and popular’. Both Scheherazade and Petrushka were choreographed by the established dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine.

When it comes to locating the genesis of The Rite of Spring, Lawrence Morton has asserted the probable influence on Stravinsky of Sergey Gorodetsky’s mythological poetry collection Yar. Stravinsky set two of Yar‘s poems to music between 1907 and 1908. He claimed that the idea for the ballet came to him as a vision, of a ‘solemn pagan rite’ in which a girl danced herself to death for the god of spring. Yet Roerich had written in 1909 an essay, entitled ‘Joy in Art’, which depicted ancient Slav spring rituals of human sacrifice. Figes argues the concept for the ballet was originally Roerich’s, and that ‘Stravinsky, who was quite notorious for such distortions, later claimed it as his own’; Thomas F. Kelly, in writing a history of the ballet’s premiere, has argued much the same thing.

Whatever, by May 1910 Stravinsky and Roerich were discussing together their ideas for the ballet. A provisional title, ‘The Great Sacrifice’, was quickly decided upon. Stravinsky spent much of the next year working on Petrushka. Then in July 1911, he visited Roerich at Talishkino, an artist’s colony presided over by the patron Princess Maria Tenisheva, where the scenario for the Rite – ‘a succession of ritual acts’ – was fully plotted out.

Figes considers that the ritual which the ballet explicitly evokes may have been based on Roerich’s archaeological research, during which he had found some evidence of midsummer human sacrifice among the Scythians. The switch from summer to spring was motivated partly by an attempt to link the rite to traditional Slavic gods; and ‘was also based on the findings of folklorists such as Alexander Afanasiev, who had linked these venal cults with sacrificial rituals involving maiden girls’. While Stravinsky composed the ballet, Roerich worked on the sets and costumes, which were rich in ethnographic details: drawing from his archaeological studies, from medieval Russian ornament, and from collections of traditional peasant dress.

The controversy of the ballet’s premiere in Paris is often conceived as Stravinsky’s. He wrote in his autobiography of the mockery of some members of the audience upon hearing the opening bars of his score, which built upon Lithuanian folk songs; and the orchestra were littered with projectiles as they performed. Other critics, however, have forwarded Roerich’s costumes as the ballet’s most shocking aspect. Others still, including the composer Alfredo Casella, felt that it was Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography which most drew the audience’s ire. Figes writes:

‘the music was barely heard at all in the commotion…Nijinsky had choreographed movements which were ugly and angular. Everything about the dancers’ movements emphasised their weight instead of their lightness, as demanded by the principles of classical ballet. Rejecting all the basic positions, the ritual dancers had their feet turned inwards, elbows clutched to the sides of their body and their palms held flat, like the wooden idols that were so prominent in Roerich’s mythic paintings of Scythian Russia.’

Nijinsky had been a leading dancer for the Ballets Russes since 1909. His first choreographic enterprise came with L’après-midi d’un faune, based on music by Debussy, which premiered in 1912. This debut choreography proved controversial: among mixed responses to the ballet’s premiere, Le Figaro‘s Gaston Calmette wrote, in a dismissive front-page review, ‘We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent’. Nijinsky’s second choreographic work, again after Debussy, was Jeux, which premiered just a couple of weeks before The Rite of Spring.

Nijinsky and Diaghilev had become lovers after first meeting in 1908. In the aftermath of Nijinsky marrying Romola de Pulszky in September 1913, while the Ballets Russes – without Diaghilev – toured South America, Diaghilev fired Nijinsky from his company. He reappointed Michel Fokine as his lead choreographer, despite feeling that Fokine had lost his originality. Fokine refused to perform any of Nijinsky’s choreography. A despairing Stravinsky wrote to Benois, ‘The possibility has gone for some time of seeing anything valuable in the field of dance and, still more important, of again seeing this offspring of mine’.

When Fokine returned to Russia upon the onset of World War I, Diaghilev began to negotiate for Nijinsky to return to the Ballets Russes. However, Nijinsky was in Vienna, an enemy Russian citizen under house arrest, and his release was not secured until 1916. In that year, Nijinsky choreographed a new ballet, Till Eulenspiegel, and his dancing was acclaimed; but he was showing increasing signs of the schizophrenia that would rule the rest of his life, and he retired to Switzerland with his wife in 1917. Without Nijinsky to offer guidance, the Ballets Russes were incapable of reviving his choreography for The Rite of Spring. His choreography was considered lost until 1987, when the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles performed a reconstruction based on years of painstaking research. Meanwhile, after the 1913 premiere, Stravinsky would continue to revise his score over the next thirty years.

Nicholas Roerich is perhaps best known today for his own paintings, for his spirituality, and for his cultural activism. His interest in Eastern religion and in the Bhagavad Gita flourished through the 1910s, inspired in part by his reading of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Emigrating to London in 1919, then to the United States in 1920, in 1925 Roerich and his family embarked on a five-year expedition across Manchuria and Tibet. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times; while the Roerich Pact – an inter-American treaty signed in Washington in 1935 – established legally the precedence of cultural heritage over military defence. His art and his life is celebrated by the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which holds more than 200 of his paintings, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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Figes, O. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London; Penguin, 2003)

Gibian, G. (ed.) The Portable Nineteenth Century Russian Reader (Penguin, 1993)

Mirsky, D. S. A History of Russian Literature (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Laurel Halo: Behind the Green Door, and the Conflicts of Live Performance

Laurel Halo is seeking to make the live performance of music and the music recording process connect. After a string of EPs which initially saw her categorised as part of a lo-fi synth movement, released first over the internet, then via Hippos in Tanks – an L.A. based record label which has worked with artists including Gatekeeper, Nguzunguzu, and d’Eon (who released the split-EP Darkbloom with Grimes in 2011) – then via Hyperdub; several under her King Felix alias, which has served for her more dance-oriented productions; Halo released her debut full-length, Quarantine, via Hyperdub last year.

Quarantine was one of the year’s most engaging and acclaimed releases. For the first time, it saw Halo’s voice at the forefront of her music; coming through amidst a dense soundscape drawing from musique concrète, industrial music, dance, pop, and world music, utilising white noise and assorted samples, drum loops, and synths which both play on the surface of compositions and drone in their background. Halo’s voice, often unprocessed, emerges both readily and abrasively in these songs: she has said she wanted her vocals to sound ‘ugly and crisp’.

This juxtaposition of her voice with her music has seen the album often posited as an exploration of debates concerning technology vs. humanity; or characterised as a sort of musical science-fiction, viewing a dystopian or post-utopian future. Over the repeated listens which the record demands, the juxtaposition comes to feel less of a statement, more of a synthesis: a provocative yet convincing, living combination of the digital and material and psychological facets which comprise our world today.

In Quarantine‘s opening song, ‘Airsick’, Halo sings ‘In the instant you know the feeling of time passing/The line continues to take itself and draw’, and repeats ‘Travelling heart don’t go away’. In its closer, ‘Light + Space’, she sings ‘Words are just words/Word are just words/That you soon forget/Machine stays/Machine stays an empty silhouette’. The former lines indicate something of the nature of Halo’s music: constantly travelling, ceaselessly experimental, she has previously suggested ‘I’m pretty sure that my music will remain in flux’. The latter lyrics – in exposing the insufficiency of words – may be taken to imply the course which Halo has taken since Quarantine was released just over a year ago.

Even when touring in the immediate aftermath of that album, and despite the protestations of promoters, Halo typically only sang a couple of Quarantine‘s songs live. In several interviews – notably with The Quietus last October, during a European tour; and with Spin in April – she has expressed her unease at live singing. This extends beyond a simple discomfit over holding a microphone. In the Quietus piece, she portrays her live performances as fundamentally rhythmic and improvisational, in contrast to the meticulous recording process which resulted in Quarantine. More, stating that the lyrics from Quarantine ‘came from a hard place’, Halo depicts the process of singing as one that involves immersion in old feelings, reinforcing emotions and thought patterns rather than cleansing them.

It is rare to witness an artist using their own voice for the sake of discord, challenging the audience rather than providing a point of connection with them; and it is interesting to hear an artist describe the process of singing as jarring and restricting rather than cathartic. The broader sense Halo gives of the discrepancy between live performance and recording is one echoed by other artists. Grimes, for instance, has depicted  last year’s Visions as a cathartic record to make, allowing her to work through aspects of her past. Yet – after recording it in an intense and intensive three-week period in August 2011, then delaying its release upon signing with 4AD – she has also expressed ambivalence at having to perform live a work that feels so much part of a previous moment.

Animal Collective have frequently subverted this routine process of creating an album, then touring on the back of it. They have often used live performances for working out new material, rather than for recapitulating old. This has been partly a necessity borne of the member’s other commitments and their living apart: the precious time spent together touring has been taken and used productively towards new works. It also reflects the experimental nature of the group. Having worked in this way for a few records, for last year’s Centipede Hz, the four members of the group returned to their hometown of Baltimore for three months, coming together in the studio each day to diligently create their album.

Laurel Halo supported Animal Collective for a few dates in Europe last week; Halo prefacing the collaboration by expressing on Twitter that ‘Sung Tongs shattered my 2004 brain’. The pairing performed at the Melkweg in Amsterdam last Monday. Halo has a strong and distinctive interest in visuals: Quarantine featured a work by Japanese artist Makoto Aida as its cover; and her European tour last autumn saw her playing with visuals by the musician, graphical artist and animator Tom Scholefield (who goes by the alias Konx-Om-Pax). At the Melkweg, under jagged, changing lights, Halo performed an exciting set demonstrative of the developing harmony between her live outlook and her recording practices.

Over the past year, Halo has stopped singing live entirely. She has also foregone her laptop, and instead of programming music to be performed on stage she improvises using only hardware: an MPC, Machinedrum, a synthesizer, and effects pedals. This process and this sound has resulted in a new EP, Behind the Green Door, released a couple of weeks ago: an instrumental record which harks back to 2011’s Hour Logic EP, and which retains Quarantine‘s thick percussion and oppressive and disorientating atmosphere, but on which the prevailing darkness has lifted somewhat; the record is more drivingly rhythmic, with Halo herself emphasising its ‘sexual energy’.

‘Throw’, the EP’s opener, utilises an out-of-tune piano, which Halo played and recorded in London and looped for the track. ‘Throw’ appeared during and was one of the standouts of Halo’s absorbing, cohesive Melkweg performance. On ‘UHFFO’ electronic frequencies, dial tones and industrial sounds move between a recurring, propelling jungle beat. ‘NOYFB’ features bursts of white noise over a stuttering bass rhythm. The steady beat with which ‘Sex Mission’ begins opens into an overlapping, breathy but constrained sample, emerging synths, and clattering percussion; the beat resumes, and chemical sounds squelch back and forth, swooping off in a movement before the track fades out.

________

Behind the Green Door is out now, released 21 May via Hyperdub; while a new Animal Collective EP, Monkey Been to Burntown – a companion to Centipede Hz; featuring reworkings by Teengirl Fantasy and Shabazz Palaces among others – is released this week.

A$AP Rocky: Cloud Rap and Live at the Melkweg

A$AP Rocky is sometimes considered as one of the most prominent of a group of young artists whose sound has come to be identified as ‘Cloud Rap’. The term – which originated around 2011, associated with Main Attrakionz and Lil B, and is still in the process of emerging – is a useful one, for it suggests the way in which such artists produce and promote their songs, and the atmosphere their songs evoke.

‘Cloud Rap’ artists typically draw creatively from the diversity of influences and the easy accessibility which are characteristics of cloud computing. The interplay between different genres and styles of music, owing to the internet, is now a central facet of so much of what is being made: indeed, it is an ineluctable quality of the music of those who have grown up on the net, making use of file-sharing to listen to an unprecedented range of sources. So Cloud Rap pulls from a diversity of rap sounds and locales – from the East and West Coasts, the Dirty South, and other assorted artists who emerged from Atlanta; from genres closely related to and deriving from hip hop, including drum and bass, grime, and trip hop; and from R&B, dance, indie, rock, and pop music.

Related terms have been coined and have sought to define adjacent and overlapping movements. ‘Swag Rap’ is a label that appears to explicitly refer to A$AP Rocky, and suggests a focus on ostentatious presentation, on fashion, and on lyrics that celebrate material wealth. There are of course many precedents for such an outlook, for instance in some of the most enjoyable works of the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z ; but that the term would seem to limit our conception of the artists it refers to only serves to show its insufficiency. It either dismisses or ignores the musical processes and the musical complexities of these rappers.

‘Lo-fi Rap’ says something more about the sound of those artists who would be subsumed under its heading: positing a new group of rappers who record experimentally, frequently using readily-available digital audio workstations, without studios and the backing of major labels, it suggests the influence of indie music in a lineage from Pavement to Beck to The Microphones, and recent lo-fi developments in forms of R&B by The Weeknd and How To Dress Well. More popularly, the specific influence of Kanye West and some of his working methods – especially his manipulation of the Roland TR-808 drum machine – is made clear in Main Attrakionz titling their two 2011 mixtapes 808s and Dark Grapes and 808s and Dark Grapes II.

In particular, Cloud Rap often utilises looped samples from female singers, and often from those whose voices have an ethereal quality. Imogen Heap has been sampled on numerous occasions by Lil B and by Main Attrakionz; she also features on A$AP Rocky’s Live.Love.A$AP (on the track ‘Demons’), which includes other samples from Karl Jenkins’ new age project Adiemus (‘Palace’), the S.O.S. Band (‘Peso’), and British new wave outfit Kissing the Pink (‘Kissin’ Pink’).

Over such sample loops, the flow of Cloud Rappers is relaxed and rhythmic, allowing plenty of space in which to breathe. Atmospherically, and frequently lyrically, the songs depict the smoking of weed, and the hazy cloud which ensues tangibly and physiologically. Moreover, Cloud Rappers often begin circulating their work via the internet, releasing songs and mixtapes via blogs, SoundCloud, and temporary hosting sites. The very concept of a mixtape seems to have taken new form through and is emblematic of Cloud Rap: releasing a collection of songs as a mixtape suggests a certain fluidity, a lack of the finality and discreteness that is associated with albums.

Clams Casino is one Cloud Rap’s preeminent producers, and his production did much to define Live.Love.A$AP, the mixtape from 2011 which established A$AP Rocky and saw him earn a major deal with RCA. Clams appears again on Rocky’s debut studio album, Long.Live.A$AP, released in January of this year – but his sound is less predominant on this heavier album, which features a medley of producers including Hit-Boy, Danger Mouse, and Skrillex.

Where there has been criticism of A$AP Rocky, it has often centred on his reliance on production and the supposed limitations of his lyrics. This seems to ignore the nature of music as a cohesive whole, a collection of parts, which is never defined solely by those words which can be meaningfully written or typed on a page. The sonic harmony which Rocky achieves – combining production techniques with a supple, languid yet characterful rapping style, and lyrics which express through sound and rolling, repeating rhythm – is a mark of good art. Live.Love.A$AP has become one of my favourite rap albums, one of the most distinctive in its chilled-out feel, and one of the albums I’ve listened to most over the last couple of years; while Long.Live.A$AP counts as one of my favourite records of the year so far.

A$AP Rocky brings the same sustained energy, engaging personality, and cadenced sound to his live performances. His show at the Melkweg last night was boldly confident and encompassing in its generosity. Scheduled several months ago, Rocky was to play a single show in Amsterdam, supported by A$AP Ferg: when the concert quickly sold out, another date was added, and Ferg – who has been busy recently releasing his ‘Work’ remix, accompanied by a music video; and featuring on YG’s new song, ‘Click Clack’ – was replaced as the support act by Joey Fatts and Aston Matthews. Fatts and Matthews gave a brief but lively and suitably crowd-warming opening set.

Rocky – wearing a green flannel shirt which he later removed for the white t-shirt underneath; white Pyrex shorts; football socks; and white trainers – played a balance of songs from across his two albums; some of his earlier works, notably ‘Peso’ and ‘Purple Swag’, perhaps still most familiar and winning particularly strong responses. The audience’s already boisterous enthusiasm was spurred as Rocky repeatedly called for mosh pits, sing-alongs, and the revelation of female breasts; he slapped hands with people in the front row, and threw out bottles of water so that those endlessly bouncing up and down wouldn’t dehydrate. When other members of the A$AP crew (the acronym originates in a Harlem collective of artists, and stands for Always Strive And Prosper), took to the stage, they and Rocky prowled in diagonals reminiscent of The Clash.

While the show possesses nothing in the way of set design, effective lighting – blacks and whites and purples – and Rocky’s lithe and powerful, enthusiastically open, playfully charismatic stage presence make for a hugely entertaining and involving live experience. Towards the close of the show, Rocky took around twenty audience members onto the stage, to jump and dance during the final few songs. Eventually eschewing any rapping, he dove into and wandered amongst the crowd, allowing the party he had avowedly sought and orchestrated to come to the fore, and to persist on after his departure.

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A Redesign of My Various Tumblr Pages

Towards the end of last week, I revamped those various tumblr. pages which relate to this site. The ‘tumblr’ link in the menu at the top of the site serves as a gateway to these; and they are all linked at the very bottom of the site, in the section suitably headed ‘My Other Sites’.

culturedarm serves to summarise and link to the pieces published here; it contains shorter and slightly looser posts on topics from music to comedy to architecture; audio and video files; and occasional photographs. visualarm provides a sort of visual compendium of what is posted here, at culturedarm, and less frequently amsterdamarm: it allows me to expand visually on whatever I’ve posted elsewhere. audioarm and poetryarm are collections of poetry and music.

My revamp essentially saw me replace the four distinct themes which characterised each of the four pages in turn – and which were drawn and edited from various sources – with a single theme, consistent throughout with minor visual differences. I owe to ‘blink and it’s over’ from http://themecloud.co/ for the new theme. I felt like a change, I appreciate the consistency, and I really like the theme’s layout: I think it is lively and engaging yet still structured and clear, and it supports all manner of posts and insertions faultlessly.

culturedarm:

visualarm:

audioarm:

poetryarm:

The appearance of amsterdamarm remains the same:

Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known as a poet. Born in Calcutta – then part of the Bengal Presidency, and the capital city of British India – Rabindranath was the youngest child of Debendranath Tagore, the first leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement prominent in the development of the Bengal Renaissance.

The Brahmo Samaj was a coming together of the Brahmo Sabha, founded in 1828 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy; and Debendranath’s Tattwabodhini Sabha, a related movement which he founded in 1839. Both Ram Mohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore sought to reform Hindu religion, culture and society along humanist lines, based upon a clear conception of the Upanishads, the philosophical texts which comprise the closing texts of the Vedas. When Ram Mohan Roy died in 1833, the Brahmo Sabha declined as a force; and the movement merged with the Tattwabodhini Sabha to become the Brahmo Samaj, under Debendranath, in 1843.

The Bengal Renaissance which Ram Mohan Roy fathered, and to which Debendranath and the Brahmo Samaj were central, essentially entwined the teachings of the Upanishads with the political and cultural influences of the European West. In this it served to shape modern Indian society. Rabindranath – himself often considered a later character of the Bengal Renaissance – was brought up in the conflux of these religious and secular, these spiritual, philosophical, cultural and political rivers.

Many of his seven brothers and four sisters became notable figures in the arts and sciences. Rabindranath eschewed formal schooling in his youth, preferring to learn and to discover in his own way, from the expanse of resources located at the family’s Jorasanko mansion. At sixteen, he published his first collection of poetry under the pseudonym Bhanusimha (‘Sun Lion’). It was well received –  taken as a lost seventeenth century classic – and he would continue to write poetry throughout his life; completed eighty-four short stories, four novellas and eight novels; several pieces for the theatre; over two-thousand musical compositions, many drawing their lyrics from his literary works; and took up painting later on in life, at the age of sixty.

Rabindranath’s artistic reputation across the Indian subcontinent is unsurpassed. Two of his compositions, Jana Gana Mana and Amar Shonar Bangla, serve as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh respectively. In the West, he is best known for his Gitanjali (‘Song Offerings’). This collection of 157 poems was originally published in Bengali on 14 August, 1910. Over the following two years, Rabindranath set about translating fifty of these poems, plus other pieces, into English, into free verse. Travelling to England in the summer of 1912, and staying with the artist William Rothenstein, Rabindranath’s translations were passed about literary circles and led to the publication of the Gitanjali in English in November of the same year. The English Gitanjali were readily and widely acclaimed.

They came accompanied by an introduction by W. B. Yeats. Yeats compares Tagore to St. Francis and William Blake; and writes that the poems ‘have stirred my blood as nothing has for years’, and that,

‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’

Yeats met Rabindranath for the first time on 27 June, 1912; the two remained friends until Yeats’ death in 1939. Their friendship has been described as an important influence on both: ‘To Yeats, Tagore represented the wisdom and dignity of the East, and justified the faith that he had placed in the strength and vitality of Asian philosophy. For Tagore, Yeats was a vibrant symbol of the creative energy of the West’.

Owing much to the reception of the English Gitanjali, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 – becoming the first non-European to receive the award. He was knighted by George V in 1915, but repudiated the honour after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Rabindranath’s poetry would go on to be translated across Europe, notably by André Gide into French (Gide and Tagore met in Paris in 1921, and shared correspondence in 1930), and by Anna Akhmatova into Russian.

A number of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems as translated in the Gitanjali share similarities with some of the works of E. E. Cummings: both poets made use of free verse forms, a gently rhythmic syntax, and formal and archaic phrases and pronouns. A point of comparison and an additional point of connection may be found through the music of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (the pseudonym of Will Oldham) and Björk.

In 2000, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy collaborated on an EP with Marquis de Tren – a name used by the Australian musician and artist Mick Turner. The EP, Get on Jolly, includes a song entitled ‘2/15’, whose lyrics are drawn from the second and fifteenth songs of Tagore’s translated Gitanjali. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy performed ‘2/15’ live during a 2003 performance in Coney Island (as part of a festival at which Björk also appeared); the performance segued into ‘New Partner’ from Viva Last Blues, and was captured on video by the filmmaker Lance Bangs.

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Gitanjali 2

———

When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony – and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.

I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.

I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.

———

Gitanjali 15

———

I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.

In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.

When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.

———

Bonnie Prince Billy – ‘2/15’ / ‘New Partner’

———

———

Björk has adapted three poems by E. E. Cummings to music. Questioned by Interview Magazine in 2004, at the time of Medúlla, Björk considered her relationship with Cummings, whose poetry she first became familiar with five years previously. She recalls immediately wanting to sing his words; evokes his poetry as ‘euphoric, but humble at the same time’; and notes that ‘It goes so well in the mouth!’.

Björk’s first adaptation of Cummings came in 2001, on Vespertine. The album includes the song ‘Sun in My Mouth’, with lyrics from Cummings’ 1923 poem, ‘I Will Wade Out’. ‘Hidden Place’ was Vespertine‘s first single; ‘Mother Heroic’, featuring an excerpt from Cummings’ ‘Belgium’, appeared on the second of the singles’ two discs. Then on Medúlla, her subsequent solo album, released in 2004, the tenth song, ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’, is an adaptation of Cummings’ poem of the same name.

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‘I Will Wade Out’ (1923)

———

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body

Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery

with chasteness of sea-girls

Will i complete the mystery

of my flesh

I will rise

After a thousand years

lipping

flowers

And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

———

‘Belgium’ (1916)

———

Oh thou that liftest up thy hands in prayer,

Robed in the sudden ruin of glad homes,

And trampled fields which from green dreaming woke

To bring forth ruin and fruit of death,

Thou pitiful, we turn our hearts to thee.

–

Oh thou that mournest thy heroic dead

Fallen in youth and promise gloriously,

In the deep meadows of their motherland

Turning the silver blossoms into gold,

The valor of thy children comfort thee.

–

Oh thou that bowest thy ecstatic face,

Thy perfect sorrows are the world’s to keep!

Wherefore unto thy knees come we with prayer,

Mother heroic, mother glorious,

Beholding in thy eyes immortal tears.

———

‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’ (1917)

———

It may not always be so; and I say

That if your lips, which I have loved, should touch

Another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch

His heart, as mine in time not far away;

If on another’s face your sweet hair lay

In such a silence as I know, or such

Great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,

Stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

–

If this should be, I say if this should be —

You of my heart, send me a little word;

That I may go to him, and take his hands,

Saying, Accept all happiness from me.

Then I shall turn my face, and hear one bird

Sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

———

Björk – ‘Sun in My Mouth’

———

———

Björk – ‘Mother Heroic’

———

———

Björk – ‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’

———

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Björk and Oldham have worked together on several occasions and are linked in a number of ways. Valgeir Sigurðsson, who produced both Vespertine and Medúlla, also produced Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s 2006 album, The Letting Go. A year later, Oldham covered ‘I’ve Seen It All’ – from the soundtrack to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark – on Ask Forgiveness, an EP comprising a collection of covers. More closely, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy toured with Björk in 2003. With Björk working around the same period on the soundtrack to her partner Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, Oldham sang on the first track, ‘Gratitude’: a setting to music of a letter from a Japanese fisherman to American General Douglas MacArthur.

———

‘Gratitude’, from Drawing Restraint 9

———

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Björk’s interview with Interview Magazine, 2004: http://www.bjork.fr/Interview-Magazine-2004

Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (Liveright, 1994)

Hurwitz, H. M. ‘Yeats and Tagore’ Comparative Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter (1964) pp. 55-64

Tagore, R. Gitanjali (1912) (A full flash version of which may be accessed here)

Tagore, R. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore eds. Dutta, K. & Robinson, A. (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Pierrot Through the Arts: Deburau, Laforgue, Schoenberg and On

Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.

The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.

In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.

Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

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Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis

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Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com

——–

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

Est égale à deux droits.”

–
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”

– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:

– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”

Moi: “Tout est relatif.”

–

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:

“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”

–

– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!

Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:

– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”

– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”

–

Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,

J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

C’était donc sérieux?”

——–

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!

We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air

“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes

exactly two right angles, dear.”

–

And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,

‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick: 

“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”, 

then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’

–

Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace 

“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?” 

And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness, 

‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’

–

“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play

(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these: 

“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…” 

‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’

–

Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’, 

soft … with fake disbelief in my closet 

I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –

it was serious then, was it?’

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Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat

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Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne

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Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso

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Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

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David Bowie as Pierrot

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Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)

Kanye West Live at the HMH, Amsterdam

One of the facets of Kanye West which most defines him as an artist and drives his popularity is his readiness to accept and juxtapose apparently dichotomous emotions and contradictory points of view. We expect and allow different things from different groups of people. Where a philosopher may endeavour to systematise his thoughts into a single comprehensive and coherent body of thought, against which all deviations, transgressions or disavowals must be logically explained, popular musicians are perhaps singularly suited to investigate the inconsistencies in the logics and patterns by which we lead our lives: afforded the space for both personal and philosophical expression within an art form that is still ultimately respected as an art, or as at least possessing the potential for art; whilst at the same time being entangled within marketing and consumerism, and attempting to reach a mass rather than a purely individual consciousness.

So Kanye West can arrange a series of ‘surprise’ concerts in Europe, performances in London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam announced at short notice and apparently planned to coincide with London Fashion Week (which took place from 15-19 February) and Paris Fashion Week (whose ready-to-wear version is currently in progress, running from 26 February until 6 March), the coincidence emphasised by Kanye’s appearance at Anthony Vaccarello’s show on Paris’ opening day; and a few days later, this same man – who has himself showed his own fashion line over the previous two years – can perform his music live and conclude a song with a lengthy incantation on how we shouldn’t be in thrall to labels, because they and the advertising of them are damaging and wrong not only in their practical manifestations, but in their very concepts, and therefore we ought to shun them for something ‘fresher’ which can only be found through confidence in ourselves.

It is the same sort of thought encapsulated in the opening line of ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’, when Kanye sings, ‘I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven / When I woke, I spent that on a necklace’.

Kanye West was performing last night in Amsterdam, at the Heineken Music Hall, an arena with a capacity of 5,500 that nevertheless feels quite intimate. He announced the performance only one week ago; and perhaps owing to this, and to the relative cost of tickets, the arena was not quite full, but maybe eighty-to-eighty-five percent so. His extended rumination on brands, labels, freshness and personal creativity came at the end of his song ‘Good Life’. If the concert itself was not enough, Kanye revealed at this point and began his monologue with another surprise: he had covered up the Heineken boards at the sides of the concert hall because he didn’t want any advertising, but especially not the advertising of alcohol, during his show. A chain of websites, following and taking from one another, have already characterised Kanye’s monologue as a ‘rant’. Perhaps in isolation it may be viewed as such, but it should really be read in the context of his overriding personality; and what is more, in Amsterdam it was one part, one piece, of a show that felt lively, accomplished, and generous.

Kanye opened the show with ‘Cold’, the second single from last year’s GOOD music compilation album, Cruel Summer. The big screen behind the stage displayed polar ice mountains gradually drifting apart; the stage itself, a rectangle made white and slanting down towards the audience, suggested a block of floating ice; and Kanye appeared, stranded and energetic, wearing an all-white costume, with belts and low crotch, something resembling a straitjacket. There followed strong renditions of ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’, ‘Power’, and then a sequence beginning with ‘Jesus Walks’ and concluding with ‘Homecoming’, Kanye’s ode to Chicago. The setting, those looped videos on the screen, moved through these songs from the north and south poles to the forests and the clouds. Kanye briefly disappeared behind his block of ice, and as a simulated snow fell upon those at the front of the audience, he reemerged as the abominable snowman, with a furry white mask covering his face.

Singing through the mask before removing it, Kanye progressed to ‘Good Life’, ‘Stronger’, and a powerful performance of ‘All of the Lights’. Birds flocked across the screen and across Kanye’s white suit, moving in a reddening sky; ‘All of the Light’s was replete with jumping neon beams; and during the song he required the audience to respond twice, the second time more loudly, in the shocked and upset realisation which follows the line ‘M.J.’s gone’. When he came to perform a version of the ‘Diamonds’ remix in which he features with Rihanna, Kanye again departed and reappeared, this time adorned by an entirely topical diamond-encrusted face covering.

The snow mask and the diamond mask were first unveiled at a show in Atlantic City in late December. They too suggest the sort of dichotomies Kanye freely and facilely embodies. Is Kanye an abominable snowman outside the strictures of society, a sort of beast of nature simultaneously intriguing and concerning the civilised; or do the mask, the straitjacket and the expanse of nature showing behind indicate a human impotence, and incapacity to commune with the natural world? Do the diamonds stretched across his face contort and confine, or do they grace him, symbols of flair and success?

Alongside these aspects of Kanye West’s character, he is fundamentally a talented musician – one adept and capable at directing his music from the stage and getting it profoundly right. At points during the show, Kanye would ask the three musicians accompanying him (positioned to the side of the stage, wearing similar though less elaborate white-suits and masks) to repeat sections of music, or for the volume of a certain instrument to be raised. The highlight of the evening was with ‘Runaway’, which served as the climax before the closing song. Repeating sections of the verses, with his Akai MPC at the front of the stage, Kanye embarked upon an extended improvisation utilising the song’s predominant cacophonous sample, with the piano filling in then gradually emerging and becoming prominent to conclude the piece.

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A series of eight pictures from the concert can be viewed on the front page of http://amsterdamarm.tumblr.com/, or here and here.

Doldrums – Lesser Evil, and Live at De Nieuwe Anita, Amsterdam

Subbacultcha! is, in its own words, an ‘independent, multidisciplinary cultural platform’ based in Amsterdam. It produces an extensive monthly magazine focusing on experimental and emerging independent musical artists; and arranges a diverse and regular programme of music concerts, film showings and art exhibitions throughout the Netherlands and Belgium. Hosting concerts in a variety of venues across Amsterdam, including Trouw, OT301, and Sugar Factory, De Nieuwe Anita – a small venue to the west of the centre beyond the Jordaan, along the Frederik Hendrikstraat, with a bar out front and a dance floor with a balcony – remains Subbacultcha!’s home in the city.

Doldrums – an electronic dance musician originally from Toronto, now based in Montreal; whose debut album, Lesser Evil, came out in Europe and the US earlier this week, and has begun obtaining highly positive reviews (falling, alas, but a handful of decimal points from securing a ‘Best New Music’ tag at Pitchfork today) – performed at De Nieuwe Anita under the auspices of Subbacultcha! last Saturday.

The evening’s support act was Cosmo V, apparently the name of a sole woman, whose latest EP and official debut, No Name Street, is scheduled for release in the next month. Live, Cosmo V took the form of a five-piece band, with the female singer accompanied by a drummer, a couple of guitarists, one of whom occasionally played sustaining synth sounds via a MicroKorg, and a final individual on synthesiser and digital percussion. The band were suitably energetic given the performance that was to come, playing a heavy art-rock with charismatic vocals, particularly effective when accompanied by droning synths in the earlier songs of the set.

Doldrums, the name taken by the twenty-three year old Airick Woodhead, plays a boisterous dance music with layered and distorted samples, rich bass and a varied, shifting percussion. Often conceived as part of a Montreal scene, including his friends and the fellow artists Grimes, Blood Diamonds and Purity Ring (the latter two who have, incidentally, played at De Nieuwe Anita and Trouw respectively in the last several months), Doldrums’ music is similarly experimental but denser and more earthy, and seems to draw from a different palette of sounds.

I’ve listed to Lesser Evil on record a few times since the concert, and it is already a really engaging and enjoyable album, which seems likely to unfold upon further hearings. The percussion sometimes features bold or strident hip-hop influenced drum breaks, at other times oriental bells and chimes, and there are also glitches which combine with melodies on the closing songs to produce a music which feels quite plaintive, whilst at the same time retaining the warmth and the optimism which surges throughout the album. In fact, Lesser Evil flows between movements, the first closing with the song ‘Sunrise’; followed by a strong and worldly middle sequence, beginning with the single ‘Egypt’ and progressing to the title song; and concluding with three final songs of a piece in their darker and calmer tones. A suggestive summation would be that the sound here is something akin to a particularly heavy conflux of Animal Collective and Múm. Woodhead’s voice is often pitched very high, and breaks through with a lot of spirit and clarity above or carrying through the thick rhythms of the music.

On Saturday, Doldrums was accompanied by a fellow musician who provided vocal accompaniment and a visceral yet steady and consistent percussive flair. Maracas were tossed upon the ground. A man at the forefront of the audience, who I presume knew the musicians and was a deliberate part of the proceedings, wearing a sort of waistcoat and shirt, engaged in a range of instigatory dances, most frequently returning to a form of the Running Man. The show was fresh and full of energy without being frantic. In this live setting, the vocals sounded deeper, and amidst a whirl of genres – from techno to hip-hop to psychedelia to folk – there seemed the distinct presence of jungle in the pieces performed from Lesser Evil. The final few songs were from Doldrums’ earlier work, the closer the buoyant electro-pop of ‘Jump Up’.

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Doldrums has uploaded Lesser Evil in full over on his SoundCloud page, at: https://soundcloud.com/doldrumss/sets/lesser-evil