NOVEMBER 2022: DEAR LAURA, …
It was so good to see you the other week. I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversations, both in person and in the folded up corners of this flyer.
I watched a documentary about heavy metal, and it made me think about your column on transcendentalism. Someone in the video spoke about the catharsis of hearing metal live, while a birds-eye view of a concert showed a section of the crowd running anticlockwise in tight formation, forming a circle pit. From that perspective it looked like some ritualistic entity; a communal whirling dervish, or a human murmuration. It’s clearer than ever to me now that there’s a need for some divinity in all of our tiny worlds.
You highlighted a great point in that piece, about Black Futurism and its capacity through artists like Sun-Ra and Drexciya to conceive of other timelines and lifetimes. There’s a great quote by the artist Arthur Jafa: “Black people figured out how to make culture in free-fall”. I feel like there’s a link to be made between this and the spirituality that sits at the root of our scene: when your existence on earth contains no semblance of a safe harbour, looking towards the outer reaches of possibility becomes both a balm and a survival strategy. I don’t care about techno dinosaurs perched on mountains - launch me into deep space with X-102’s Discovers The Rings Of Saturn as my only accompaniment :) I learned today that with that record Mike Banks, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood invented the vinyl locked groove. Imagine desiring to transform the listening experience so markedly and conceptually that you can look directly at the familiar technology in front of you, and see the possibility of something new!
On a related note, your column about Patrick Cowley made me consider just how many crucial intersections there are between technology, musical innovation, sensuality and marginality. Like, what if there were no brothels in New Orleans’ Storyville? Would jazz even exist? Likewise, if not for the heady spectacle of sex and athleticism in southern strip clubs in the US, trap would not be recognisable. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be as club culture without the closed, secure, discrete spaces used as dark rooms and bathhouses. I like to imagine the energetic feedback loop between these audiences and the nimble hands and risk-taking of Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy on a reel-to-reel. Of that era, I’m always drawn to the work of Walter Gibbons. I think of him as that time’s Little Richard--wild and unbridled, wielding his razor blade edits, weirding everything up with Lee Perry style flourishes, before he turned his back on disco and gayness to devote himself to God. He was already in isolation by the time he remixed Strafe’s “Set It Off”. I hope he could still feel the electrifying impact of that edit in those critical, life-saving spaces, even as he quietly waged his own private battle with AIDS.
One question that becomes ever more urgent to me is how to properly archive all of these truths and traumas and radical catharses? How can we tenderly carry them close to our chest, but leave ourselves enough space to be expansive and generative? I have no answers, but I do have a track to help mull the question: “V” by Nkisi contains multitudes; it reaches across and behind time.
It’s a small piece of divinity that helps me float away from this sometimes hellish earth.
I’d love to know what's keeping you grounded, or aloft, or perhaps both at the same time.
With love,
Christine
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