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Nonotak

Posted on 15 de April de 2021 by nr

NR Vol. 13 Growth · Spring Summer 2021
Published · Print Unnumbered

Feature · Nonotak
Words · Jade Removille

“what drive us was the experience, the moment, to feel physically connected with a space”

NONOTAK was born from the collaboration between architect musican Takami Nakamoto and visual artist Noemi Schipfer back in late 2011. The duo embodies that merge of architecture, spatial design, music and sound. From creating dreamlike environments to performances using light and sound installations, NONOTAK present their own format of art to the world. Combining Noemi Schipfer’s experience in kinetic visual and Takami Nakamato’s approach of space and sound, the studio creates ethereal environments immersing the viewer.

NR discusses with the duo about the creative process behind some of their works, how the Covid crisis impacted the arts and music industry but how also it gave the two artists time to reflect on themselves and on the meaning of creating art and ultimately the studio’s plans for 2023.

Noemi and Takami, you both come from different creative paths, respectively illustration, visual arts, architecture and music. It is always very interesting and inspiring to see how two worlds merge. How did you meet and what inspired you to start Nonotak Studio in 2011?

Noemi Schipfer: We first met in highschool in Paris at the Japanese class ( Tak have both parents Japanese and I’m half Japanese half French so it was a way to have good marks at school. Then we lost sight for few years and we met back in Tokyo during summer holiday. Tak was studying Architecture at that time and I was already graduate from Art school. We spent time walking in Tokyo and it was really inspiring to listen to his approach on Architecture and Space.

Tak was also playing in a metal band and I had the chance to follow them on few shows to take tour footages. In the late 2011 Takami was working in an Architecture studio called Bigoni-Mortemard in Paris and they were looking for an illustrator to do a mural painting in the entrance hall of a new building in Paris. To work on this project was intense & fun and it give us the will to do more together and to create our own space. We wanted to merge our backgrounds all together : visuals, space and sound. The installations format came pretty naturally and the first idea was to develop an immaterial space were everything would be intangible and in motion.

Takami Nakamoto: As Noemi said, we have known each other for a long time and the purpose of collaborating together was mainly because we had the same vision on what format of art we wanted people to experience, and how we were going to merge our backgrounds in order to create a particular environment where light, space and sound collide all together.

ISOTOPES V2 is a light installation experience that was inspired from Fukushima’s nuclear disaster. Could you tell us more about the creative process behind creating a dematerialised space? I love the concept of making something tangible out of a feeling or something that disappeared and that no longer exists, making it almost part of something fictitious. It is also a way to sort of immortalise the individuals that had and have been affected by Fukushima and it adds a commemorative and contemplative feel to it. Is that something you consciously wanted to convey?

NS: Fukushima’s nuclear disaster is something that personally really touched me. I was in Paris at this moment but I remember I was shocked and afraid about the news. Japan is my second country, it is a place that I used to go since I’m born and I have so many memories there and part of my family. When the nuclear central exploded I thought I would never be able to go back there again so it was heart breaking. At this moment I felt really strange how one part of your life could feel like it was almost just a fiction. Everything could change or even worth, just disappear.

Time is a notion that fascinated me a lot even when I was a student in art school. Memories are a notion that is so immaterial but so strong at the same time. When we develop our first installation ISOTOPES V2 we wanted to represented this different notion of immateriality by creating a space that is constantly changing and where the audience would be able to travel through.

TN: I think this project is special to us as long as it was our first piece being exhibited in an international exhibition like the Mapping Festival in Geneva. First time we were able to share the experience of our work to unknown public and it felt like a new chapter in our career. It also made us look at our work in its actual scale, as long as we have been working on small scale models to work on the composition. This really brought another dimension to the purpose of our hard work.

LEAP V.3 at Wave Of Tomorrow Festival 2019 in Jakarta, I loved this piece which I thought was such another great work of yours in terms of translating feelings or emotions into sounds and lights. Could you tell us a bit more about this piece?

NS: The first time we developed our installation LEAP was in a festival called Electric Castle in Cluj Romania and the exhibition space was really specific and historic. It was in an old stable of a castle, so the space itself was really atypical and the celling had beautiful bricks arcade. It was important for us to keep this strong architecture so we decide to invest the ground as the canvas. We wanted to deploy the installation in the maximum surface of the space and the light to cover every corner of it. That’s how we design those custom panels where 4 indirect lights are hidden behind and pointing 4 different directions. Light is a very flexible medium that has a huge impact on it’s environment. By controlling lights it’s not only the source itself that is moving but the entire space gets affected and painted by the shadows it creates.

LEAP V3 in Jakarta is the biggest version we did of this installation. We wanted to keep the massive volume of the space and highlight the length of it with the speed of lights and sound.

TN: In fact it was important to actually stay and program the installation on site, considering this unique context in Jakarta we were immersed in. We like the fact each site specific installation is about experiencing it through the build of it, the space itself, the people who are helping us with construction with the same goal of looking at something special at the end.

Last spring you revealed a large-scale installation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, titled GIANTS. The audio visual light and sound installation was set inside the Farol Santander building which was reminiscent of Nonotak’s first commissioned project in the lobby of a public housing building in Paris. Exploration of sound and space is at the core of GIANTS. Was also being in Brazil informative as to how you wanted to conduct this piece? It feels like a lot of your pieces are connected to the spaces they inhabit and are quite site specific like LEAP V.3. The interactions from the visitors in some of your pieces such as PARALLELS with the lights and by walking through the space, adds a very important element to that connection.

NS: When we get commissioned for an art installation, the starting point that drive us is the space that will host the piece. When we got the floor-plans and pictures of Farol Santander building we were struck by the verticality of the space and the massive columns. We wanted to accentuate this characteristic by adding more columns with light. The space offer a 360° view so it was important for us to include this specific in our piece as well. The columns included lights in the 4 directions, like LEAP installation concept. This space was also really interesting because there was two floor levels. You were able to see it from the ground levels, but also from above at the second floor. The rhythm of GIANTS is really contrasted. You have the first part were the ambiance is really dreamy, light dots are floating like fireflies are dancing together and then suddenly the sound get more violent and solid lines appear and move in the entire building like an army.

TN: I think the way we named the installation also speaks by itself in a way. When we saw the spatial context of the exhibition space, we immediately thought about experimenting with verticality and create an experience where people would feel like these massive totems of lights are taking over the space like Giants. The scale of these totem gave us the possibility of affecting the space with light so much that we could both create a feeling where we felt both “compressed” by it. The fact they are deployed along the whole space made these totems feel like they were ruling it.

Your work revolves around making visible, moving objects, forms, large-scale AV installations and spatialized sound. For instance with Parallels at STRP Biennale, you have used the whole space as a canvas for light which must also be quite difficult technically. That must result in a lot of experimentations and research behind each piece. Could you both tell us a bit more about that process?

NS: At the beginning of NONOTAK we were a lot exploring light through projections and semi-transparent screens.

The semi transparent screens allow us to catch the visuals but also letting passing through the light and create duplication of the same visuals into several layers. It was our way to materialise the light at this moment. We develop few installations and a performance using this concept and explore different set up to see how we can create illusions playing with the positions of the projectors etc.

When we get commissioned for STRP Biennale, the theme of the exhibition was “Outside the screen”. We were working on the concept of the piece we wanted to present and at some point of the night we just realise why not just take literally the theme of the exhibition and get outside of our screens. That’s how we develop a concept that would materialise the light through space itself by using haze and would only have the space as a limit of the installations.

The first time we were able to experiment on this new concept was during the few days we had to set it up before the opening of the exhbition. We had preparations and expectations in our mind before coming but the first day we were there we just realise the effect wasn’t working as planned. We had to change everything, move completely the position of the projectors inside the room and start from zero all the composition of the visuals at the last minute. It learns me how important it is to be in front of the piece when you program it and how dangerous it could be to work on something by simulation when it comes to something as sensitive than light.

TN: This is actually one of these projects that really drew a line on the approach and the personal relationship we have with the work we create.

We realized that imagining projects in small scale or simulating them was helpful to visualize projects but nothing felt more real than getting to our exhibition space, spend time with our new piece and work on the composition in relation to the space. Living within the project and make it an intense experience. That’s how we like to experience our installations, and we should never forget that the reason we started all of this was because of our love for materiality in light, and we do think this can’t be replicated virtually and we treat it as a material in itself.

Your 40 minute audio visual piece SHIRO was ranked by the New York Times as one of the top 15 performances at Sónar Electronic Music Festival in Barcelona in 2017. I could not find the whole performance online but watched various extracts from it. In contrast to your other works, you both are taking part on stage so to speak in the performance. How did that feel? Would you want to do more of those kind of perforrnances in which the public get to actually see you?

You have performed this piece in different places over the years, was there any in particular that you keep a fond memory of and if so, why?

NS: When we were working on our installation we also realise it was cool to see people silhouette passing through it. The relationship with the human body scale and the installation was interesting. Tak as a musician was interested to extand his background in electronic music. That’s how in summer 2013 we worked on our first performance called LATE SPECULATION. The concept was us performing inside a translucent structure with 2 projectors and use our silhouettes as part as the visual effect. One projector was placed from the front and the other one in rear. By alternate which projector was on, we were making a visual illusion of us appearing or disappearing. SHIRO is our second performance in continuity with LATE SPECULATION.

Installations and performances are really different experiences. The first big difference is the fact that we are sharing the same moment with the audience and have a direct reaction from them. The dynamic is really different. It’s really powerful to hear the audience during the show.

TN: In addition to Noemi’s answer, I think we simply like the fact to not really limit ourselves to installation artists but also performances where music takes another dimension and also the way we directly interact with the audience and experience something in real time with them.

Stage is a special and unique place to express yourself and we enjoy switching from installation projects to live performance projects.

The 2019 pandemic in which we are still in, has obviously impacted quite harshly the arts and performances industry. The past year has definitely been difficult and for some more than others but I feel like we have all in some sort and in different capacities being able to plant the seeds for the present year. It feels as though there has been a lot of self-reflection and introspective work done at an individual level which will then enable growth, which is the theme of this issue. How do you both feel with this? How does Growth resonate with you?

NS: During 7 years we had the chance to be able to live for our art and been able to showcase it in so many extraordinary places. I would be for ever grateful for this. The rhythm of our travels, exhibitions, live shows was intense and we never really had breaks at all. When we had our first show cancelled and the first lockdown was announced I was a little bit puzzled but at the same time for the first time since years, I would have a break and time to step back about NONOTAK.

Now that it’s been a year we are in this situation and seeing how it evolves I’m more than sad and anxious about the future. With NONOTAK what drive us was the experience, the moment, to feel physically connected with a space, exchange emotions with an audience, share a stage with people. And when I see the art scene going more and more only online it deeply depress me.

TN: That “covid” crisis really affected the touring dynamic of our collaboration and it is pretty sad, but we know it is also reflecting in many other people’s lives. That crisis gave us the time to reflect on ourselves, the meaning of creating art especially in this type of context. But it also gave us the time to reflect on society and the power the government has over people’s lives and their freedom but more importantly, the way they are able to fragilise culture and normalize it out in the open.

Questioning the narrative became politically incorrect, aspiring for freedom makes you feel guilty and this is the society we allowed ourselves to live in. What kind of future does Art expression have in this “new normal” we are submitting to? I don’t really know about that. But it seems to me that being a sovereign individual is the starting point of any form of expression and we feel like we are totally losing the value of what it means to be free. It is pretty scary to me and I guess it is for many other people.

I think growth is still possible in this context. being adaptive is key to finding a path you feel comfortable with in terms of creating and growing. Since “covid” started we got ourselves in projects that required lot of learning and we at least feel like we took advantage of this a little bit. We don’t know when we would have stopped touring without any interruption if this did not happen as well.

We are doing this interview during the first few months of 2021 and the issue will be released this spring. Are there any projects you are looking forward to be taking on and that you could share with us?

NS: We are working on permanent installations that will take place in 2023. It’s a different challenge than working for events or temporary exhibitions but really exciting about the idea that the piece will last for ever.

Kevin Saunderson

Posted on 30 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · Kevin Saunderson
Words · Ellie Brown

“no matter how big we became, it was always a struggle back home”

Back in June, Kevin Saunderson of Inner City made headlines when he claimed, in an interview with Billboard, that the music industry had failed Black artists. And he’s got personal anecdotes to back that up – recalling, over the phone to NR, the time himself and fellow Detroiter, Derrick May, played a festival in Australia almost ten years ago. The pair found themselves playing a stage with around 200 capacity; the Canadian EDM producer, Deadmau5, was on the main stage, playing to an audience maybe 20, 30, 40 times the size.

It’s a story that captures dance music perfectly in a nutshell. Back in the 1980s, it was Kevin, Derrick and their high school peer, Juan Atkins, who pioneered and popularised techno in Detroit; young, Black producers making music for people like them. ‘Our crowd was 90% Black,’ Kevin explains – sure, the crowds were smaller than they are now, but that’s because EDM music exploded into a billion-dollar industry. An industry whose most well-known faces are male and white; Deadmau5, Skrillex, Diplo, David Guetta, and so on.

What’s the solution? Kevin thinks that it starts with promoters, agents and general management because, at the end of the day, ‘they’re who put music in front of you.’ There needs to be more Black management in the industry to ensure that people of colour are getting more opportunities and not being ‘taken for granted’; he sees it as a collective responsibility to bring other artists up. All that said, Kevin sees the scene as being in a good place, pandemic aside; there’s a more diverse sound coming through the next generation, much more so compared to back in the day.

Kevin was born in New York, before moving to Belleville, a suburb in Detroit, as a teenager. It was there that he met Derrick and Juan, and it was also there that, together, the three would define the sound that became Detroit techno. The 1980s provided the perfect environment for a new genre to grow; in Chicago, there was house – pioneered by the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson, and in New York, there was disco (and later, garage). Though the scene in New York pivoted around gay culture, Kevin would travel back and forth from Detroit to New York for the music, going to legendary clubs like Paradise Garage to see Larry Levan play. It was an inclusive scene in an otherwise segregated music world;

“I was always inspired to make music for everyone because I was inspired by New York where it didn’t matter who the music was for.”

When Kevin formed Inner City in 1987, he brought that inclusive nature of the disco scene to the techno sound he’d found in Detroit.

At the time, music by Black artists was regarded with hostility in America – something Kevin and Inner City found ‘no matter how big we became, it was always a struggle back home.’ It was when the band’s first hit single, Big Fun, recorded with vocalist Paris Grey, was included on British DJ, Neil Rushton’s compilation album, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit (1988) that Inner City found success. And though Inner City’s second hit single, Good Life, is now recognised as a definitive anthem of the era, Kevin notes that no amount of global success changed their prospects back home. Artists who’d found success in the UK and beyond were met with doors slammed in their face back in the States; ‘they’d hear that agents are full up, “our rosters are full.”’

It never put Kevin off. Since those early days, he’s produced under many different names, from E-dancer to KS Experience, and in 2019, he brought Inner City back from retirement with the help of his son, Dantiez, and the singer Steffanie Christi’an. Back in August, the band released their first album as a new formation (and Inner City’s first in almost 30 years). We All Move Together is a celebration of dance music, from its formation in Kevin’s early career, to the present day. After being shown a clip of the actor and DJ, Idris Elba playing Big Fun by his friend Dennis White (Inner City’s original tour manager), the idea was floated to bring him into the mix for the album. ‘When I saw that, it sparked something to contact Idris.’ The result was the album’s opening track of the same name, in which Idris provides a spoken word history of the dance music industry. The album plays like a crossover between old and new, sidestepping the otherwise white-washed EDM scene.

Working with Dantiez and Steffanie has given Kevin the chance to shape Inner City for a new audience, whilst being able to also keep its legacy going. When it comes to Steffanie’s vocals, it’s been great to create new songs that are shaped around her voice; ‘at the beginning, it was just previous stuff and that’s always difficult for anybody trying to sing someone else’s song.’ Kevin’s also open to using technology differently to the first-time round.

“Technology back then was more hands on, more hardware-based – you had to touch something. Software imitates what was done in the past, it’s recreating what I created.”

It was because of the technology that he got into producing in the first place, using sequencers like the Squarp, and drum machines like the 909, 808, 727.

Kevin ‘appreciates both ways’ now – sure you ‘had to put the work in with the old ways,’ but newer software, like Logic and Ableton are shaping the future. It’s clear that Dantiez’s influence has rubbed off on his dad; it’s something Kevin has been sure to emphasise since Inner City reformed. And it makes sense because, at the heart of his music and the philosophy that underpins it, is a desire to push forwards. It was the futuristic sound of the German band, Kraftwerk, that had a huge influence on Detroit techno. How did a band from Dusseldorf end up on the radar of a teenager living in the suburbs of Detroit? Via the radio station of the Electrifying Mojo, who had a profound effect on Kevin, Derrick and Juan.

“Kraftwerk used technology to make music and it was so future sounding”

—Kevin explains. It provided the tools to create a definitive sound of the era, one that was able to reach a global audience without interference from the music industry guard. Risen from the ashes of a city decimated by the decline of the car industry that revolutionised the twentieth century, came a genre of music that would change the world once again. And, as Kevin points out, the legacy remains; ‘Detroit is Detroit – DJ’s always want to come to Detroit to play.’

Credits

www.instagram.com/kevinsaunderson
www.kevinsaunderson.com
Words · ELLIE BROWN
Photograph · Scott Sprague
Thank you to the Prizm Network

Kaytranada

Posted on 27 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · KAYTRANADA
Words · ALEX MOHAMMADI

Pivotal points and personal breakthroughs

As the sun sets earlier and the air gets colder–as the weather folds–Louis Kevin Celestin (also known as Kaytranada) is returning to Los Angeles to pick up where he left off pre-pandemic, with a new understanding of himself. When the coronavirus broke out, he was in the midst of lining up studio sessions with artists, shooting a new series of visuals, and transitioning to a more collaborative creative process. Bubba–his sophomore album–had just been released and he had tour dates booked around the globe throughout the year. Be that as it may, he had to wrap things up and return to shelter in his Saint-Henri apartment. The pulse and tempo of his raw and distinctive take on out-and-out dance music would also have to stay confined in the custody of TikTok dancers for the time being.

2020 was meant to be everyone’s year, but our most ambitious intentions subsided to a transformative journey of trials and tribulations as things went a whole other way. Abundant introspection has brought many of us to retrace our own pasts and re-imagine our futures in tides of hope and fear. The conversation Kevin and I shared was the occasion to revisit pivotal points of his life and personal breakthroughs of the past year, as well as the impact it has had on where he stands today, in the world and within himself.

Born in Haïti and raised on the outskirts of Montréal, his notion of belonging has been in continuous motion over the years. Grappling with his perspectives on queerness lead him to find multiple groundings for his identity, as an artist and as a person. Growing into the power of only saying “yes” when he means it, of setting boundaries and maintaining them has meant asserting a much truer self. After spending the summer re-connecting in different ways–with nature, with friends, with other creatives, with himself, with film, with literature, and so on–he is back in phase with his own rhythm.

Over the years, you’ve shared with me how touring and the acclaim that has come with it has been a source of relief at times, and the cause of distress at others. How has your relationship with being on the road shifted?

In 2014, I was going on my first tour. The ‘If’ and ‘Be Your Girl’ remixes were buzzing, I had shows in Montréal getting sold out, people were showing up, it was kinda crazy, everything was growing at the same time… so my first tour in Europe was… a first tour. It wasn’t a disaster but my manager and I were learning a lot, especially my manager because I was always counting on him. I’d never been to Europe. I went to London first to just chill then we went to Italy for the first show and the hotel was in the middle of nowhere in some outskirts really far from the city and I was like “what the fuck, that’s Milan?” *laughs* […].

Touring was like an escape for me; when I went to LA for the first time, I met my label and the Soulection people, and it was like wow I’m finally there. When I’m in LA, I’m in a good space that’s nourishing to me, good vibes.. that’s what I’ll pay attention to– seeing, things I’m aware of… I used to not deal with it the right way and wouldn’t do much out there, now I’m trying to be more present mentally and trying to be less shy too, not that there’s something wrong with being shy– just not overthinking or holding myself back.

All this LA shit happened before my first European tour actually, which is crazy. I was in LA, I was finishing school, which I didn’t even finish… I got the Boiler Room LA offer, then I went to Europe that summer. I came back to Montreal and right off the plane I had to head for Murale Festival, one of the first ones. That’s when I saw that a lot of people were there just to see me, there were so many people dancing to my shit, I played some unreleased stuff that later became hits.

A true homecoming. So when did the feeling switch up?

Yeah, so when I went back on tour, my first album wasn’t out yet, I had only released 2 singles with XL– so I was on tour with no new music, which really bothered me because I was either playing other people’s music or songs from 99.9% that wasn’t even out yet, and people wouldn’t recognize [them].

I would often tell my manager ‘I can’t do this anymore’ and he would be like ‘hang on man, you can do it’, to a point where I got really sick on tour– overworked, stressed, I couldn’t eat, and thank God my brother was there because it really saved me.

“I would be trembling with shivers, I had to perform sick and go right back to bed shaking, throwing up my meds, I couldn’t eat, I had to force myself to eat soup… at the same time I was drinking a lot and I didn’t know that drinking was gonna kick my ass the way it did, like every night getting drunk, my head was hurting, it was killing me… there was so many things that I didn’t realize, I was kinda overweight too… I was not well.”

All that back to back stress accumulating into a burnout… how did you cope with that?

I stayed home for much of 2015, I had money though, which was cool, so I was really like “okay this career shit works, I’ll be back on tour later on”. It was bitter-sweet because I loved to perform but I didn’t like traveling from a city to the next, so it would’ve been a lot better if I had like 3 days off in Berlin, because I wanted to see Berlin, I wanted to see Philadelphia…

I had to take a long break, I was at home, I really wanted to move out and get my own spot– my mom couldn’t understand it– but I was like ‘I’m still sharing my room with my brother and I’m 24 years old this is ridiculous’… I hadn’t come out of the closet yet, so that was just before I put out 99.9%.

So while there was so much changing on one side of your life, it was more of the same on the other

Yeah so then I stayed home, worked on the album; I didn’t even work in the studio with anyone on that album, I mixed it by myself and then I turned it in, and the album came out in May 2016, a couple of weeks after the article where I came out.

I came out years before but I had to re-come out again– because I had told my family I was bi to be more acceptable, but

“it got to a point where I told them ‘I’m not gay anymore, I’m delivered’, forcing myself to not-be-gay and to have girlfriends, because my friends would ask me ‘so when are you gonna have a girl?’, my uncles, everybody was worried for no reason, like, mind your business.”

Did that help you understand yourself better?

I mean, there was a typical identity of being gay, so I wasn’t sure of myself because there weren’t gays like me that listen to Madlib or like Mobb Deep or Tribe Called Quest or M.O.P., raw shit like that– that’s what I listen to every day. I got my own divas that I like but it’s like Mariah Carey or Janet, she worked with J Dilla you know– because they’re hip hop.

Yeah, even Mariah singing over Shook Ones or Cam.
While a lot of people have been adapting to the concept of remote working, you’ve said you like working that way better from time right?

Yeah I mean at the time I used to, but I don’t want to do that anymore, because I always know [how it’s gonna turn out] when I work remotely, so now I really wanna be out there and create with the artists, its more fun. And I used to get too much in my head when I would try to create with an artist and that wouldn’t come out as nice but yeah I know now I’m not gonna just work remotely, and it worked ’til covid happened– like I was ready, I put out Bubba, which was what I really sound like personally, so people reached out and those that did because of the album, it made me more confident to just do my thing, so that was working out until covid happened and I had to go back home.

It’s ironic that right as you were becoming more comfortable with that way, everything had to shift back to remote working.

Yeah, it makes me forget that I was that way, that I was ready to work with people. Some days I’m like– I’m going to LA soon, so– I forgot– I feel like I’m back to my old ways.

So let’s revisit how the year went down; how did going into lockdown unfold for you?

Okay, so– the pandemic was hard for me. I had a tour planned after putting out Bubba in December, so I was ready to go on tour for April-May-June then go to Europe after that– I had my whole year planned. I had done the Australian tour in January, which was amazing but a lot of problems came after that and everything kind of went down.

I was in LA when the pandemic happened and I was working with people, on what was perhaps going to be the second part of Bubba that I was talking about, which didn’t happen because I had to go home right after doing the Need It video, and things went downhill…

I went through a breakup in June, and that really messed my head up at a crazy level and I don’t know why, it’s funny because I didn’t need anybody but the breakup was hard to take, and day-to-day life, making beats, was harder than it used to be, I really lost myself.

I grieved for I guess 3 weeks then I got up like, you know what– I’m not gonna spend my whole summer crying and shit– so I went to my friend’s studio. Alex from BADBADNOTGOOD got a nice farm somewhere in the countryside and we took shrooms, made a lot of beats. He has a beautiful spot, a bunch of vintage synths, a nice lake in the back, all to him and his fiancé… it’s amazing, his dogs are very nice, his cat too, that’s the best shit ever for me… I regret not going earlier or more, but next year I definitely will. Even when we’re not making music, we’re just listening to records, we talk about records a lot, so he just brings out the dopest Brazilian records.. and we just sunbathe and drink wine. That’s the fucking Life, I swear.. so it was really that state of mind…

“I tried to distract myself from this breakup and I managed to have one of the best summers I’ve ever had still. Maybe less beats, but all the beats that I made were made on purpose and were dope. I found a new formula, I felt elevated.”

Your creative process?

Yeah, my approach is so different now, and I sample less too, which is crazy.. all my records are just sitting there not being sampled it’s just weird. *laughs* Now I just rather create my own samples and add drums at the end and its a completely original production. It feels great to have that.

A lot of things have been leading you back to yourself.

Yeah, sort of.. even this breakup made me want to go to therapy, so I started therapy for the first time and it really blew my mind. I didn’t know why self-love was so important– why loving myself was so important… seeing friends that remind you that you’re the shit, because I was so invested in my relationship. When I was freshly single it was like “okay I gotta find distractions I guess“; good distractions– my friends really helped me, all the people that were there for me this summer, I didn’t know I had that many true friends.

Having folks really show up for you.

Yeah, so on top of that it just feels good to have that, and realizing in the long term, “okay this is connected to what happened before: this is why I act this way, this is why I react this way to this breakup“, its all related to what I’ve been through before, and who I am today. It was really an awakening I had inside of me, being in touch with myself and now I feel good about being by myself too.

What are some self-care habits that have helped with that?

Meditating, reading at least 15 minutes a day, making beats, reaching out to people and collaborating more, going to the farm, spending time in silence.

Team

Photography KANE OCEAN
Fashion SAMUEL FOURNIER
Interview ALEX MOHAMMAD
Creative Direction NIMA HABIBZADEH and JADE REMOVILLE
Grooming CAROLE MÉTHOT
Prop Stylist ANA LONTOS
Photo Assistant SAM NOVACK
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Collard

Posted on 25 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · Josh Collard
Words · Ellie Brown

“I think it’s okay to just be easier on yourself now”

Josh Collard, the singer from South London better known by his alias, Collard, has just returned from Milan when we speak via video call. He’d been flown out to perform at the Bulgari event for MFW. It was the first time he’s been able to play live since lockdown hit, and though it may not have been the dream show – ‘I only got to do three songs, it was great but, you know, no one knew who I was really except the people that booked me.’ It was, he says, a tough crowd, but it was also likely the first time in half a year that the fashion set would have been able to see each other. He had good fun though; ‘it was just nice seeing my guitarist again as we’ve not had a reason to be face to face yet.’

Collard’s upbringing is one of the first things you’ll find when you Google his name; brought up in a strict Mormon household, too much of a troublemaker to be baptised at the age of eight (then becoming convinced he was a sinner), surrounded by music by the likes of Janis Joplin, James Brown and Prince. He joined the hip-hop collective Last Night in Paris at the age of 19, but it wasn’t really him. ‘I was doing crazy performances that I didn’t enjoy, that didn’t feel was a direct reflection of me. I felt like I was always up there emulating something else. I’m not a jump about person – there was a lot of jumping about and rapping. I’ve got asthma; I’m a two-stepper slow grinder, that’s what I do.’ And so, he left.

‘I didn’t have my own intense love creatively for a genre,’ he recalls, rather a ‘love for different genres and different music that just felt like a hobby.’ He was just recreating what was popular, musically, at the time and not really pushing the limits of his potential. That changed on a trip to LA with his producer, Zach Nahome, where he began to experiment more and veer away from the realm of hip-hop and into the territory of a more eclectic mixture of soul and smoother R’n’B. ‘It wasn’t until LA that I let the shackles go a bit.’ And 2019’s Unholy, Collard’s debut release, encapsulated his new sound perfectly. The album received rave reviews, and comparisons to a modern-day James Brown of sorts – James Brown with the addition of a feature with rapper, Kojey Radical.

When listening to Unholy, it’s possible to hear all the different elements that come together in Collard’s current sound; the influence of Motown, the references to religious themes, and the inherently twenty-first century twist. He speaks about creating something that takes from the past, with a modern outlook – something you can propel forward and make completely your own. That, Collard notes, is how music changes to reflect a new era, through exploration and design. He has a keen eye for detail, appreciating the visual side of making music as much as the sound – which is apparent in the way he enthuses about scrolling through albums on his phone, being visually stimulated by seeing the artworks, condensed and filed.

When it comes to the visuals that supplement your music, is there anything you gravitate towards?

I like uniform, order, structure. I like the kind of Wes-sy Anderson aesthetic, or Stanley Kubrick, where everything’s got a purpose; all the colours have got a purpose, it all makes sense and it’s all uniform. I liked the shoot [for NR, at Purpose: The Archives in Tottenham] because I think it worked with my creative direction; the colours were pretty uniform, the backdrop was pretty uniform, the grey, the cement, everything. It looked pretty futuristic in a way. My favourite city is Stockholm – that place feels like a glimpse into the future. I’d say that visually, that’s my thing: with my creative directors, everything is about accentuating my love for uniformity and the need for things to make sense and kind of mesh. That’s what I’m visually attracted to.

Do you apply that same logic to making music, or are they quite separate approaches?

Yeah, no – it’s not chaotic at all. It’s actually very uniform in terms of my layout. What I think about might be chaotic, or the situation might be chaotic, but I like to get it into a neat form so I can contain myself, you know? I like to start with the chorus – I always go with the chorus first – and once I’ve got the drift of what I’m really piecing together, that’s when I get into the verses. And I still love a uniformed 3:20 song. I love it you know; when it sounds like it could be at the end of a movie, or something like that, and you’ve got to fit within the constraints of that, which is beautiful. That you can fit something so wild, so personal, and you know, say the most out of this world things (which I sometimes say in my tracks), but fit it into this orderly fashion – that’s how I create for sure.

A lot of stuff has happened this year, and in light of that, it would be interesting to know if the past seven-eight months have changed how you make music and your outlook on things?

I think my outlook has changed because I realised I wanted to be more present in music. I do like uniformity; I do like creating catalogues, but I think it made me want to explore different ways of presenting myself and my music. Not so rigid, and not so time-consuming. I’m excited to do another album, but I’m also dreading it, you know? I can’t speak for other people but, for me, it’s such a – it’s a positive, but positively-draining process that I don’t know if I want to dive back into. So, having the quarantining time and then not having to release anything [at that moment], I got into a thought process where I was like, this doesn’t need to be for a catalogue, maybe it can be just a theme. Just two songs; you love it, just put it out. Every artist’s thing is that they won’t make anything as good as the last song that did well, but I think if you get caught in that loop, you really stop yourself from just putting your art out there. Not that you should be hitting it all the time with “content, content, content,” but I think it’s okay to just be easier on yourself now. I think that was a big thing for me to learn, so I think that’s my plan in future – I’m going to fall into making an album, but my releases are just going to be fluid and what feels right.

Have you been able to making anything in the past couple of months?

So, I didn’t get into the studio for a while because I work really closely with Zach and, at the time I was like, if I’m working, I’m only working with that guy because I know him and he’s a very hygienic man – you know what I’m saying. And we waited because he’s got a household and I’ve got asthma so we chilled for a while, but since we got back in, we’ve been able to actually make quite a few songs. We haven’t stopped. That’s just the way we work though; we get in, make three-four songs, you know – so we got right back up to speed at least. I’ve been working with him for a decade – nearly a decade now – so the process is always easy to get back into. I mean, it was the same as how we always work: just me and him, so with social distancing, I mean, maybe I spent a bit more time in the booth while he was in the control room, but that’s about it.

You mention being a bit more fluid when it comes to making music now, but the sounds and themes of Unholy were quite specific to that album, so are you likely to consider veering off to explore other topics or inspirations?

Yeah, I think that’s the bit I’m trying to protect right now and not force. It’s not the continuation of the sound, but the continuation of the narrative; I don’t want to force the narrative on the next album. So, it’s about figuring out what will fit for this one, what I want to talk about. I think, in terms of organisation, I don’t want to see myself swaying from a 10-track album: and the timings, I love an interlude dead in the middle. I don’t think I’ll change from that format, it’s a nice “Collard” format. But who knows? Sometimes, I’m two songs in, like with Unholy, it was after one and a half songs that I realised what it would sound like. Once I’ve found those one or two songs and the narrative for the next album, I’ll know what to do and what direction to go in. And obviously I’m not trying to make a carbon copy of Unholy, but in terms of musical components – a live sounding album will never leave me; I just love instruments too much.

So, when we eventually get back to live shows that aren’t just a one-off like Bulgari, what will you be looking forward to?

The whole band getting back together; I love my band. Signing with a major label [Virgin], I was lucky enough to get what I wanted in terms of my live set up – so I have the whole works. But, the drum solos, the guitar, hearing new music live, even just being able to rehearse and perform that. There’re talks of a show at Jazz Café next year, so I’d be super excited about being on that stage. Headlining would be amazing because that’s the first place I ever performed. I’m looking forward to that, hearing new songs and performing new songs, just even rehearsing new songs cos everyone in my band’s so good. Sometimes, I don’t even want to sing I just want to hear how it all falls together – I’m excited for it.

Team

Photography DAVID REISS
Fashion SAM CARDER
Interview ELLIE BROWN
Creative Direction NIMA HABIBZADEH and JADE REMOVILLE
Grooming EMILY PORTER
Set LUCY WHEELER
Photo Assistant TAYO NELSON Fashion Assistant Harley O’Connor
Discover more of Collards music on Apple Music
Listen to Collard’s curated playlist for NR

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Goldlink

Posted on 23 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · Goldlink
Words · Lindsey Okubo

“It’s just that algorithm of life, greatness takes time”

Nostalgia knocks on D’Anthony Carlos’ front door with branlike knuckles. Memories materialize into wispy shapes and heavy eyelids flutter conjuring the fading, fluorescent pink lights reminiscent of discos past. Blink twice and the heavy strobes from sold-out shows and basement parties alike flash as he drifts in and out of jet-lag induced sleep still hours before dawn. The DMV (meaning places accessible in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia by the metro) native is better known as the Grammy-nominated rapper, Goldlink. He’s home for a few days between touring with Tyler, The Creator on his US Igor tour and gearing up for his personal biggest tour to date of the European continent to promote the release of his newest album Diaspora, and he’s trying to recalibrate. Having become a household name in the hip hop industry having birthed sans uterus a genre of his own called “future bounce,” Goldlink splices thumping house, eyes-wide-open club and silky R&B, to create an auditory landscape solid enough for his hometown to call a foundation. An identity turned dance floor.

When Goldlink’s home, he doesn’t leave the house. Success becomes clear when he returns to standing in front of his bathroom mirror, where his reflection remembers and exhales on its own. If the shower’s running the steam gathers to spell out retribution. He’s come to understand the rest of the world by first understanding his city and considers comparison to be a fruitfully empathetic lens. The DMV’s rich culture is steeped in its “Chocolate City” roots, wrought by fables of the American Dream, gentrification and dancing feet that echo the drum snare. He strives to preserve the city’s original vibrance by coloring sound with feeling and you can bet that it evinces in shades of brown. Having grown up as a product of divorced parents in the District’s darkest years as the grim reaper plucked lives with outstretched hands and eyes closed, Goldlink turned to music as his forever sensei. Through it he’s been able to find the answers to the lingering questions of ‘why me?’ as his path is hand laced with perseverance. This unwavering dedication to his community has in turn grown to understanding that sometimes to love home, means having to leave it. Growth is not only an open wingspan, it is the flight itself, a reinvention without reincarnation.

Whether it’s from reading previous interviews or dissecting the verbal homages that live between the bars of your lyrics, it’s no surprise that home and the DMV, not only mean a lot to you but it’s a defining factor of your identity.

Home for me is the space that you’re most comfortable being in. A place that you can reset yourself you know. That’s really it, I’ve been a lot of places that feel like home but there’s no place like home really.

When you’re kind of talking about resetting yourself I think it’s this idea of like holding up the mirror per se. I don’t know if it’s this way for you, but for me and being from Hawaii, it’s going to my grandma’s house or something like that. What does resetting yourself look like?

Yeah it’s chopping it up with the homies, seeing my son, seeing my family, resetting in that. It is the mirror aspect you were talking about and being able to look at and see yourself clearly in that mirror. It also allows you to see all the things that you’ve been able to accomplish while you were away and it’s the perfect time to do that.

Right and I feel like it’s also this level of honesty that you’re forced to face and it causes you to question what your personal definitions of fulfillment and success are. For you, you’re an artist, a musician and pioneer per se but you’re also a father, a son, a friend. Have your definitions of success and fulfillment changed at all?

It hasn’t changed much. It’s changed a few times throughout the course of my career but it’s kind of stayed the same recently. I think it’s as simple as focusing on something, accomplishing that task and that’s generally what succeeding means to me. Success can be anything really, it doesn’t have a linear definition as in like, oh this is what it is. I feel like I’ve just set certain goals for myself, accomplished them and then reset new goals and then I try to accomplish those things next.

Right and it exists in tandem with a level of perseverance. In regards to your music you’re always striving to have people understand how you grew up, your home, things like that but where does this need to be understood come from?

Being understood is a basic human need because it’s what we need to be supported. I also know that there’s a balance to it. People won’t understand everything, let alone understand it right away so I never really look for the acceptance of understanding immediately depending on what it is that I want to do. When I released Diaspora, I understood that it would come with delayed gratification. I ask myself if what I’m doing serves a purpose immediately and then if it will continue to serve that purpose in time.

What do you what do you mean by delayed gratification?

I am much a delayed gratification person because I understand where music is going, I understand the trajectory of things and I make it a point to do a lot of research to remain ahead of my time. Sometimes you need to be ahead of your time to serve a purpose in the landscape of today. We need those unsung heroes and I try to be that as much as I can.

And with Diaspora too I feel like you know obviously At What Cost from 2017 was so much about home, life in the DMV, creating that sound and then with Diaspora it seemed like you were extending outwards. Was it more so about just taking the next step in your career?

Yeah, it felt like the next step. It was like I tried to find myself locally and then was able to travel internationally to understand myself and my home even better.

Yeah there’s something to be said about leaving home and what it does to your own understanding of yourself.

I mean I still haven’t left but I’m okay with leaving because you have to grow as a person. I don’t feel like people should stay somewhere if they feel like they can grow somewhere else but you just stay where you’re needed. I’m never going to leave home entirely and I’m not confined to the definition of what leaving is, there’s multiple definitions of what leaving can mean. If you really love your home, you have to leave it to make it better. If I left and go around the world and compare my home to things that are happening in other cultures to understand and get a better read of why my home works the way it does. You know in order for you to change something entirely, you have to understand it from an external point of view.

Right. What does growth mean to you and is it always synonymous with change?

Yes. Like in order for me to grow I have to change so I think change and growth are like the same thing, not always but they should be.

How are they different?

Growth and change? Well, in order to grow you have to change. In order to change, it doesn’t mean you have to grow. It’s not like backwards compatibility, it’s not like it works only one way.

Yeah but it’s interesting in conjunction thinking about this idea in tandem with the concept of diaspora and the array of experiences that both differ from and are similar to our own. What does diaspora mean to you?

To me now, it really just means that everybody and every community is experiencing the same social economic problems and are dealing with it in the same way but they’re just different things. That’s really what diaspora means and we’re very much connected. You might do a Harlem Shake but in Hawaii you call it something completely different thing and in DC, we’ve got our own version too but we can understand each other and empathize through our own lenses.

You’ve mentioned having to deal with survivor’s guilt and the inherent inequalities of the American Dream and now that you’re in the spotlight it must feel like it’s been magnified. I think it doesn’t really necessarily go away, maybe it changes but I think it sticks with you.

Yeah it just kind of changes. Instead of being weird about it and feeling guilty, that guilt grew into me doing something about it, whatever that may be. It’s asking yourself, “that’s how you feel, now what do you want to do about it?” My answer was that, I’m going out and trying to make it fair for kids like me to be able to find a place to make it feel like they’re a part of something.

“I want to create the necessary stepping stones to making sure that that guilt continues to transform into something positive really.”

This issue is obviously called the reinvention issue and I think it’s interesting to think about reinvention in relation to sacrifice.

Ultimately it just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish in everything because everything is some sort of sacrifice and we all make sacrifices. I sacrifice my time, often my social life, to make sure that I accomplish my goals. I don’t feel any guilt anymore, I felt it at the time, just because I felt like “Why me?” I found all the answers to those questions. So it’s like I don’t feel that anymore and it doesn’t make sense to feel that way anymore actually. If you want to succeed, you decide to make the necessary sacrifices to get to that goal and you keep working through that goal indefinitely, and when you succeed where is the guilt? What is the guilt?

Right but it’s also perhaps also having to feel guilty for your success sometimes right?

Right, it’s just knowing that I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do to succeed. I knew what I wanted. I went to go get it by any means necessary and I worked really hard. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink, I’m not fucking, I’m just working and trying to be great. But what happens? You succeed at writing poems.

I felt guilty because it was so surreal, I’m going back to the community, writing the song, but why me? Why me? I have to tell myself it’s because you fucking tried and you cared. You did everything right. So you just succeeded.

Yeah. And I know you also talked about this whole idea of taking the slow road versus the fast road.

“Reinvention takes time but in a world of instant gratification we don’t give ourselves the time to process things.”

A lot of great people take the slow road. It’s just that algorithm of life, greatness takes time. Nothing and I mean nothing in the world comes fast and works forever. I don’t care what, who, and how you are, it’s never going to work. Things need to balance and things need a base. When you go too fast, you’ll miss it all. You’ll miss the hard part of things. You’ll miss the important thing that create sustainability. That’s why you can’t just be the greatest pianist overnight. You don’t know what it feels like to not be great. You don’t know what it feels like to lose. You don’t know what it feels like. Or, Steve Jobs is a perfect example of that, people like Jay-Z and Kanye West are good examples of people who take their time, every time they did something it felt like it was the first time but then when you look up it’s been 20, 30, 40 years, they take their time to learn something new. To continue to grow is a hard thing to do. There are certain things you can’t cheat, the universe you can’t cheat. If you think of anything that’s worked immediately, it never works forever, ever. It’s like a rule of thumb. I just always make sure that I’ll take the right road.

I think the misconception about me is that I could have blown up a really long time ago but I didn’t because that’s not what I wanted to do. It’s not that I can’t get on a track with Beyonce — granted that’s a hard thing to do. But it’s just like how am I going to enjoy being on Beyonce’s song if I’m one or two tapes in? That’s not smart. Beyonce has been making it for 25 years and that’s because she’s doing something right consistently and it still feels like she hasn’t dropped the biggest album of her career because she continues to grow, it’s amazing to see. It only feels like she can only get better. So that’s why a lot of the greatest people told me to take your time, so I take my time.

Yeah. And I’m wondering do we go through multiple reinventions or just one turn of the tide?

You go through multiple reinventions throughout your career, you can reinvent yourself as many times you want as long as you decide to grow. You’re not going to be the same person as you were when you’re 20, you’re going to be different when you’re 25, 32, you should decide when to be different, to reinvent. It’s nothing changing. It’s just adapting.

Team

Photography · BRENT CHUA
Creative Direction · NIMA HABIBZADEH and JADE REMOVILLE
Fashion · LUCAS CROWLEY
Grooming · MARCO CASTRO
Interview · LINDSEY OKUBO

Designers

GoldLink wears custom pieces made for his current tour through- out.
Full Look ANN DEMEULEMEESTER

6lack

Posted on 23 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · 6lack
Words · Lindsey Okubo

“I’ve made some of my best music and had some of my best moments from being resilient, pushing through, getting through the struggle”

Speaking with a cadence that lends itself to the kind of familiarity one feels at the turn of a season, Ricardo Valdez Valentine, better known as 6LACK, holds no reservations when it comes to speaking about change. As it moves him, with the wind when the feeling is right, he finds himself peering over his shoulder. Flitting between Los Angeles and Atlanta, 6LACK has become a resident of the in-between, a finely cast shadow that dances upon reflection itself. As presence and absence oscillate, a sense of introspection grows and calls forth the demons from 6LACK’s own mind so that one day he may address them as angels. Would you recognize insecurity if it told you its name was now faith? Having released his latest EP 6pc Hot in June of this year, the recording artist and recipient of 3 Grammy nominations who has collaborated with heavyweights like Future, Young Thug, Offset, Sir Elton John via The Gorillaz and Selena Gomez to name a few, has begun to adopt a different approach to his career and life itself. Utilizing his emotional candidacy and the art of conversation, 6LACK ruminates on his own transgressions, projections and desires in the pursuit of total clarity. He wears no halo but the latter has given him wings.

6LACK has always made music with the intention of resonance but instead of weaponizing his own vulnerability and using resilience to romanticize strife, we see him walk away from these sad boy fantasies laced with martyrdom and move towards a crossroads in which utopia begins to look like the life he already has. The foundations of this new outlook have been cemented by his role as a father and committed partner, bolstering his identity with a sense of purpose and directionality There now exists a healthy dynamism to his person and artistry as he continues to untether himself from the experiences and sounds that once defined him. Having gone on to create initiatives like 6lackbox, a platform that provides an array of tangible and affective resources for his community, 6LACK is letting go but remains held. All roads lead home.

The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, famously once said, “the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” You had mentioned previously that it was easier for you to communicate via music than in real life. Taking that into account and coupling it with quarantine and the collective growth that occurred through time for introspection, voluntary or not, what kinds of conversations were you having with yourself and what are you telling yourself as you emerge?

I think that in the beginning of quarantine, I was going through something similar to what everybody else was going through where we started off relatively strong and as time dragged on, we got a little bit dry. I reached a point where I was trying to figure out what I needed to do for myself before I even began to make music, just to be able to express myself, communicate, grow, learn, I felt super stagnant for a second. I realized I had to get back to myself, get back to being curious, get back into reading, get back into doing other things that sparked my creativity because I didn’t realize that I had stopped. I had put everything into music for so long and the setting and meeting of every goal only had me looking at the next one. It became a matter of okay, what do I do now? What do I do now? This way of operating ended up becoming a block of other parts of my life and that was one thing that I identified and began to do something about. I recently started therapy too, so that’s been cool to talk to an outside person who can give me advice or tell me what I’m thinking is cool, or not cool, or is me, or not me. So therapy, self-reflection and creating new routines has helped me to feel a lot better now versus how I felt at the beginning of quarantine.

Totally and with therapy in general, there’s a lot of trust involved. Do and would you say that you’re someone who trusts people easily or are you known to put your walls up?

I’m not too bad on trust, I give people a lot of chances and benefit of the doubt so I’ve never really struggled with that part of it. I guess really it’s more so just trusting myself in a lot of different situations.

Right and in terms of trusting yourself, how much of that is synonymous with being honest? There are ugly truths inherently wrapped up in self-reflection and we often don’t want to see ourselves as we are.

Yeah I think it’s a tough thing, I feel like most people will kind of look at that and think it’s automatic, or an easy, or natural type of thing but I’ve learned over the last few years that honesty, even with myself, is embarrassing. Sometimes it feels shameful, sometimes it’s humiliating, it’s not always my favorite stuff to talk about but being able to resolve situations that have transpired from those things has been one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do in my life. And it’s not because I don’t like to be honest or anything like that but when you go through a lot of things that aren’t necessarily favorable, why would you want to shout that out? Why would you want to tell somebody? Why would you want to trust somebody else with that information? So I’ve learned to speak on it more and every time I do a new album or get into a cycle of making music, I have to stop, I have to reevaluate everything, I have to see how I feel about where I am and where I want to be. I have to get to a point of being honest with myself before I start writing because otherwise, I would just be writing from the viewpoint of the last album.

Right exactly, there’s a certain voluntary vulnerability that is hard to give access to even with yourself, it becomes a question of how do you get there? We all arrive “there” differently, can you give us more of a window into your thought process? Put us in the room with you as you’re starting to write and come upon a closed door per se.

Definitely, recently this year I spent a lot of time in a studio just sitting there. I wasn’t being hard on myself but I didn’t want to walk if I was going to walk the same way I walked last year. I would go there thinking I was going to work, I’d fire up a beat or flip through like 20 beats and eight hours would go by, ten hours would go by and then it’d be time to go. I’d be sitting there the entire time because I was sorting through my thoughts, trying to figure out what specifically is going on and what I needed to get myself going. I really just needed to be brave enough to sit down and have all the conversations that I needed to have with the people in my life because naturally, when you hear things that you don’t like especially pertaining to your person, you want to deny or fight or reply in a way that isn’t always reflective of who you truly are. I had to remember that those feelings aren’t natural and it’s more so about getting it out there and allowing other people to make the decision of what to do for themselves, giving them a choice versus choosing for them.

I can imagine you being in the studio, sitting there and feeling maybe a bit unfulfilled and obviously there’s this idea of success and respective markers of it like putting out a new album, garnering press, outside validation etc. But I’m wondering for you, as someone who is more so an artist than an entrepreneur or performer, how do you differentiate between fulfillment and success?

I’m honestly just trying to keep a gauge on just how grateful I am. This year, I had to check myself and look at what I was doing and realize if you want to feel fulfilled, if you want to feel clear, if you want to feel creative, if you want to feel all the things that you want to feel, you have to remember to do things in your everyday routine that echo and practice that. Otherwise you’re going to find yourself in a daze or at a point where you’re not in the driver’s seat, miles from where you want to be. I had to get back into practicing, whether it was waking up and eating something right for myself, writing something down in a journal, reading something out of a book, or watching a documentary, I had to refocus myself to get back to that. I got so far away from those things because mentally, with music and my career, it’ll engulf you. It’ll make you feel like this is all you have and those thoughts start to take up space in your mind alongside your personal life and in order to stay clear and fulfilled, I had to remember to be super thankful. Gratefulness created balance for me. No matter what your intent is, every single day, you keep running into problems because you are explaining your intention instead of making them clear through action.

Preach, good intentions are too often used as the scapegoat for shortcomings! What are those things that you want to be more intentional with?

Primarily the relationship that I’m in and making sure that I’m giving the equal amount, if not more than, what someone is giving me especially if they’re a source of positive reinforcement in my life and are there to teach me things where I need to learn. I was in a space where I’ve always been the mentor to everyone else, so transitioning to have somebody else to do that for me was out of the ordinary and a bit difficult. It’s hard to let go of the reins because I was just so used to doing things by myself, sorting through my thoughts by myself, dealing with my emotions by myself — so when somebody else is there and they’re like, “you don’t have to pull the weight by yourself,” you just have to be willing to let go.

Wow yes, and so often we think that love never asks us to change who we are but why can’t change be synonymous with adaptation for the better? Why does sacrifice have to hold a negative connotation? Love is a difficult thing, it forces you to face things about yourself that you might not necessarily want to see or be willing to see. To what capacity has she held up the mirror per se and made you see?

I would say that the biggest thing is letting go of that feeling that I had to do so much on my own. You kind of go through life in the neighborhood, in the classroom, and studio, all these different rooms that I’ve been able to live in, change and adapt to and teach people and when I got to a point where I met someone who could teach me instead, I had to be able to stop myself. I had to think about what I’m saying or not saying, what I need to listen to, what I can actually learn from the situation versus continuously trying to be on this mission to teach everybody else.

Yeah and if you’ve always been in this position as the teacher of sorts, to what extent is it kind of like being a martyr? How comfortable do you allow yourself to get with excess weight on your shoulders? You’ve said you’re someone who trusts people easily but I feel like, if you’ve been carrying that torch around for people, you’re not really letting people in or exist in your life in the ways that they might want to.

That’s another thing that was pointed out in therapy too, these effects might not show up in the form of you breaking down or crying but all those things stick with you. As time goes on, the requests, the demands, the advice that you give, flows out of you and you keep moving and more things stick on you but you keep moving and eventually, you get to a point where you’re like, I’m tired and I don’t know why. It’s because you either haven’t mourned, you haven’t let it go, you haven’t actually solved it, you haven’t given yourself a minute to just focus on you because you’re carrying a torch or pulling the weight of doing the work for so many other people.

And I think in doing so, you don’t really open yourself up to being vulnerable. We want our men, our partners, to be strong but half the time they don’t even commit time to addressing the ongoing internal battles within themselves, let alone even recognizing that they exist. Your platform 6lackbox is a resource for so many people and I don’t know if this is something you’ve envisioned but I can also see it existing as a space to normalize mental health issues?

Yes, it’s definitely something that we’ve been trying to put more energy and planning into. However we can get more people involved so that it becomes a community thing and not just a me-to-them situation because I have created different communities with my fans and developed a lot of long-term relationships with them. It’s always been cool to figure out a way to let them know that beyond the music that y’all aren’t in this shit by yourself. If you got shit that you need to figure out, or if you have something that you’re going through, that’s what the music was made for, that’s literally what we’re here for. One day we’ll figure out how to specify that and nail down an actual plan.

There’s been so much talk around this whole idea of community recently and for you, what does that really look like? Is it a utopia of sorts?

I think it’s just a collective group of people who have a purpose towards something specific. A lot has been going on, in the country, in the world in general and I don’t think that the primary way that we fix that is by focusing on like the higher ups, or what’s going on on TV all the time. I think we really need to narrow it down and get back to home, our neighbors and the people around us and remember that if we create a stronger community and a stronger bond with each other than everything else will be in a better position to find resolution. This past election is a good example of people coming together because they felt something and wanted to do something about it as a whole. However, we can continue to do things like that on a smaller scale, everything on a larger scale will start to iron itself out.

Speaking of small scale, home is also something that maybe you’ve been thinking about recently? It’s such a subjective word, you find home in people, you find home in your music and we’ve all been inside, in our homes, in our own head spaces. Is home a place or is it a feeling?

Home is definitely a feeling right now. Physically, I live between LA and Atlanta and I have really great reasons to be in both. When I go to Atlanta and I get to be with my kid, I feel like I’m at home, no matter who’s around, or what I’m doing. When I’m out in LA and I get to spend time with the person I love, I feel like I’m at home. That’s the best version of home that I could ever really ask for in just having something to look forward to, having something to have fun with, having something to learn from.

You mentioned fatherhood briefly and I grew up with a single dad too. He’s my rock and not always the most vocal person but he recently told me that he thinks we’re pretty similar which was shocking and endearing for me to hear. What have been some of the unexpected lessons of fatherhood?

It’s taught me a lot of clarity, not even to compare it to music but everything that I did album wise before that point was a lot of I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m trying to figure it out. Since then, I’m closer to figuring it out because somebody’s watching me. Other than that, it’s been a really good opportunity to express myself fully, to be a kid again, to be an adult, be every single thing that I am because you get to practice it with somebody who doesn’t know anything bad about you necessarily, who doesn’t judge or have any predetermined thoughts about you. They just are happy to see you and want to be fulfilled in some other way. My thing with her is just making sure I give her the stuff that I didn’t have, which was constant reassurance. I want her to know that she can be herself, she can express herself. I was talking about that the other day in therapy, how at some point in my life that reassurance disappeared and I didn’t realize it until I was able to say it out loud. When that disappeared, my life started to shift a little bit, I started doing different things, my grades started to shift, my personality started to change, my insecurities started to form and these were all things that were a result of my relationship with my parents changing.

Right and thinking about the word reassurance, I think especially in relationships, whether that’s with another person or with yourself, it is sometimes something that we seek for the wrong reasons, out of insecurity and that’s a hard thing to admit. .

It’s definitely a hard thing to gauge. I think knowing the specific kind of reassurance that was missing for me, I know that it’s not doing too much to just let your kids know that hey, you look like me and those are good features, or you remind me of so and so and that’s a great thing, or that they’re doing good. It’s about spending time with them and being the type of energy and person who they’ll want to have a conversation with. I think that reassurance can be a tricky slope. I also just learned about myself that I move, act and think in a way where I know that the people around me know who I am but that is not to say that I can go without making the effort to clarify something for them. I am aware that this is something that I can work on for myself and the people in my life. It’s something that I want to make sure Syx doesn’t have to think too much about you know, it’ll be just enough.

Right and thinking about what’s enough, that word itself can be such a trigger for so many people. We’ve all had to recontextualize our own definitions of what’s enough, especially, when we’re not doing all these external facing things anymore as of late.

I think that has been an interesting thing to figure out too because something can definitely be enough to you and not be enough to somebody else. That’s the fun part and not so fun part to figure out that subjective definition in all of your relationships. The easiest and the best way to do it is by being able to sit down and have conversations where you detach your personal needs or ideas of who you want somebody to be and adopt an open standpoint.

Yeah and thinking about ideals and needs, resilience has also been a word that we’ve seen pop up again and again but to what extent is it sometimes overrated? To what extent are we expecting people to “bounce back” when certain services should be civic priorities instead of difficult circumstances? Why are we coloring struggle with promise?

I think it’s like a 50-50 type of word in feelings, situations and energy. I’ve made some of my best music and had some of my best moments from being resilient, pushing through, getting through the struggle, fighting through this, crying through that. It definitely creates a pressure makes diamonds type of moment where you’ll definitely get something out of it but it is most definitely also overrated because you don’t want to be working from that space, you don’t want to be doing more than what you necessarily have to do. You don’t want to become infatuated, obsessed or interested in that process to make it feel like it’s the only place that you can work from because I definitely have fallen into spots, consciously and subconsciously, where your back’s against the wall and you feed off of that.

Right and being an artist or someone who writes in general, it’s often easier to write when you’re sad and that can be a bit toxic.

Absolutely. I had to check myself and just make sure that I was not holding on to that because that’ll always be there. If I ever need it, it’s something I know how to do but there’s no reason why I should be putting that first or to be writing songs with that in mind when that’s not where I am or where I want to be.

How do you write about things that are happy then? It sounds kind of like a dumb question but I feel like it’s hard to transition to even create from a different mental place?

That was a conversation we had in the studio and Childish Major helped me put the initial words to it. In order to be able to write about the happy stuff, the good stuff, I had to sit down and practice the shit that made me feel good. Since then, the music has grown into me talking about my growth. I still have the ability to be able to tap into the other side, the sad side, or the side that people recognize or remember but it gives me the range to be able to say more, do more, express more and help people get through more. I don’t want to just be a pacifier for somebody when they’re going through some tough shit. I also want to share in a moment where they can celebrate, have fun or feel good.

It’s allowing yourself to be a dynamic artist because when people begin to create and become known for something, they begin to become defined by that and it becomes hard for them to reclaim agency from the external validation. They compartmentalize who they are from the work they create.

It’s definitely challenging. That was one of the first reasons why I cut my hair immediately because people off the bat were like, oh, he’s this, he’s that and I was like let me just reset because I felt myself becoming like a figurehead of whatever that was on the first album cover. As soon as I cut my hair, my life started to change. I started to make more eye contact, I looked up and moved on stage. I just had to realize what was going on but I didn’t realize what was going on because I was just too busy living it.

Team

Photography · RICKY ALVAREZ FASHION SHAOJUN CHEN
Interview · LINDSEY OKUBO
Creative Direction · NIMA HABIBZADEH and JADE REMOVILLE
Grooming · DARONN CARR

Designers

Shirt and Trousers NANUSHKA Boots GUCCI
Hat SONG FOR THE MUTE Top ACNE STUDIOS Jewellery Talent’s Own
Hat SONG FOR THE MUTE Top and Trousers ACNE STUDIOS
Hat BENNY ANDALLO
Hat BENNY ANDALLO Trousers TELFAR
Hat BENNY ANDALLO
Shirt and Trousers NANUSHKA
Vest and Jumpsuit BORAMY VIGUIER Boots SACAI
Vest and Jumpsuit BORAMY VIGUIER Boots SACAI
Vest and Jumpsuit BORAMY VIGUIER
Turtle Neck HELMUT LANG Trousers MAISON KITSUNE
Turtle Neck HELMUT LANG Trousers MAISON KITSUNE
Shirt EDWARD CUMING
Shirt EDWARD CUMING

Squidsoup

Posted on 3 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · Squidsoup
Words · Ellie Brown

“We want people to suspend disbelief, to go with it and experience the work”

If you saw, or heard about, Four Tet’s string of dates at London’s Alexandra Palace last year, you’ll be familiar with the light installation that immersed the crowd for the duration of each show. The group behind this feat is Squidsoup, whose work for Burning Man in 2018 and again in 2019, you will likely have seen, like those Four Tet performances, via social media – if not in real life. Characteristic of Squidsoup’s work are visually and sensorially-arresting experiences, where light and digital art responds to physical space and the people who populate it. Yet, behind and beyond the ethereal qualities of Squidsoup’s work lies the technological and logistical realities that makes an installation of over 40,000 individual lights amongst a crowd of 10,000 people (as was the case for Four Tet’s Alexandra Palace shows) possible. Formed in 1997 by the artist and designer, Anthony Rowe, Squidsoup defines itself as an ‘open group of collaborators’ working across (digital) art, design, technology and research. Alongside Anthony and the group’s six core members, there is a team of full-time and part-time staff, freelancers, as well as a warehouse, workshop, studio space, and fabrication facilities. With Squidsoup’s trajectory corresponding more-or-less alongside the major digital advancements of the past 20 years, the group has been continually successful in bringing technological innovations into the realm of art, performance and the material world.

As Anthony explains to NR over email, without the level of digital connectivity we experience today (such as 5G, the Internet of Things and “ever smaller processor sizes”), much of Squidsoup’s work would not be possible. Being able to adapt and change alongside the progression of technology and the digital realm is only one part of Squidsoup’s story, however. As Anthony notes, “interesting ideas are normally [those] pushing the boundaries of what is reasonably possible – either in terms of materials, software, engineering or logistics. Originality and novelty are highly-prized attributes in this kind of work; to achieve that, you need to be pushing the boundaries.” Now, as Covid-19 alters the ways in which we experience and use digital and physical space – perhaps, in some ways, irreversibly – Squidsoup are learning to adapt again. In response to the pandemic, the group have unveiled Songs of Collective Isolation, a piece which reconceptualises the larger, immersive installations that Squidsoup are known for on a more intimate, or individual, scale. “This is not a piece for massive social interaction,” Anthony outlines – rather, it’s a “contrast, a parallel track to our larger public artworks.” And as much as it is evidence of Squidsoup’s ability to respond and react to the world that their work is shaped by, it’s not the end of those bigger works: “Perhaps it is also in part a memento to those larger projects, and a sign of hope that those days will soon return.”

How did the idea for Songs of Collective Isolation come to fruition, and how will this piece work in real-life settings?

Songs for Collective Isolation emerged from a series of explorations, looking at the possibilities of minimal, slow-paced sound- and light-scapes, free from the need to think about practicalities such as people flow, visitor experience and dwell time. We wanted to create a piece that would slowly draw you in, using natural and unadorned sounds, and exploring the effects of layering multiple iterations of the same sound, each from its own speaker suspended in space. The result is a raw set of sampled sounds (a violin recorded very close up, played by Giles Francis) that gains depth and breadth when played independently through multiple speakers – it fills out; becoming an orchestra, rich and deep, from such simple beginnings. We also saw a parallel with the current global situation – social distancing, lockdowns and so on. The potential of what we can achieve together, and the fragility of isolation that we were suddenly confronted with, seem to resonate within the piece. The piece starts with a solo note that, only after quite a while, begins to build in strength and variety.

The work uses a hardware and software system we have been developing in-house for the past few years, that we call ‘AudioWave’. It is the same system that was used at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona to create a piece called Murmuration (2019-20) that comprised over 700 individual speakers and orbs of light, suggesting the movement of light and energy around the outside of that building. It builds on earlier iterations such as Wave at Salisbury Cathedral, Desert Wave at Burning Man and Canal Convergence, and Bloom, first commissioned for Royal Botanical Gardens Kew. This piece is much smaller, more intimate, with just 18 light/speaker orbs. It is designed to be seen in quiet, private or controlled spaces – again resonating with the current situation.

The footage of Where There is Light is poignant to watch; How was the work, with light responding to the stories of refugees and asylum seekers, developed?

From the outset our goal was to create an abstract space in which people could listen to some real stories from real people; refugees within their midst in Gloucester. It was also important, I think, that this was done in a positive way, as part of a non-lecturing experience. And finally, we wanted to bring attention to the amazing work of GARAS (Gloucester Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers). An opportunity arose to show the work in Gloucester Cathedral, and we worked with Everyman Theatre and Music Works, two local organisations, to put the piece together.

Visually, we wanted each of the four testimonies to have a different feel, a different visual reference. And finally, there is a musical crescendo where we took the opportunity to let rip with the lights a little! The project was a collaboration with a refugee organisation local to the studio in Gloucestershire UK called GARAS. We all hear stories of refugees, but the enormity of their ordeals is so outside of our experience, that attempts to represent their lives becomes mired in the discussion of guilt, responsibility, economics and race.

How did Squidsoup’s work with Four Tet come about?

Having created indoor and outdoor versions of a project called Submergence and shown it numerous times in various types of spaces and events, we felt that the approach of the work, using a walkthrough 3D array of points of light (controlled in real time) to create the impression of movement and presence in a shared physical space, could be adapted for use elsewhere, in particular in live stage performance. In 2015, Kieran Hebden of Four Tet was finishing the album Morning/Evening, that was, for him, something of a stylistic departure consisting of two long, meandering, Indian-inflected tracks, and was wondering about a live set. A mutual friend connected us.

“The plan from the start was to search out serendipities; happy coincidences where two working processes coincide, creating – hopefully – more than the sum of their parts.”

The first shows (Manchester International Festival, Sydney Opera House, Roundhouse) had a conventional stage layout, with our volume of lights behind Kieran on stage. For a gig at the ICA in London in 2016, Kieran suggested placing himself in the centre of the room, on a low riser, in the middle of the lights. The audience, also within the installation, surrounded him, effectively breaking down the wall between audience and performer – placing them in the same space and creating a different kind of audience experience. A hybrid of performance and installation; a blurring of boundaries between stage and audience space; plus, of course, the mixing of physical and digital inherent to the original idea of the work. The ICA had an audience of 300, as did National Sawdust and Hollywood Forever, US, which we then expanded to some 6-to-700 at the Village Underground (Shoreditch, London, 2018), and eventually the 9,000 plus at Alexandra Palace. Upcoming events in Berlin and the USA are currently on hold due to the COVID situation.

Has the collaboration with Four Tet changed the possibilities of experiencing live music?

New possibilities for experiencing live music are emerging in many ways, as technology improves and becomes more available. None of what we do would be possible without a myriad of technical innovations. We have been pushing the relationship between performer and audience, performance and immersive installation experience as described above, aiming to deliver new types of experience. But we are not alone in doing this. The collaboration with Four Tet is an example of a creative partnership looking for new ways to engage audiences and expand performance – to create novel kinds of experiences. In one key sense, this has been a rare opportunity. The relationship Four Tet has with his audience is unique: they are cerebral, with high expectations, but they do seem up for new things. Not every audience can be trusted to treat the work with the physical respect it needs: the LED strands dangle in among the audience – a different audience could easily pull and break them.

What informs the ways that Squidsoup responds to different environments?

Most of our larger commissions are awarded, so we respond creatively to a specific space or cultural brief, and we also use these commission as an opportunity to advance our own agendas and work. In effect, this means that we use the space, location, community/audience, and any brief we are presented with as a canvas, and the systems and technical approaches we have developed are the paint (or medium) to create a new piece. Enlightenment, a project we installed in the North Porch of Salisbury Cathedral, was informed and inspired by the symbolic importance of the cathedral, its history and presence, and was also a response to the nature of the space. At a practical level, we needed to take into account people flow into the building, and to consider how the light and sound bounced off walls, and so on; the affordances of the location. The Polaris work at Burning Man was almost the opposite in terms of approach and experience. The first time we did it, we had no idea what we were getting into; we just liked the idea of an LED cube driving around the desert. We were invited out by Cyberia, one of the camps at Burning Man, to give it a go using an ex-army truck. What could possibly go wrong?

“It was a baptism by fire, and the answer is pretty much everything went wrong (generators failing, dust getting literally everywhere), but we learnt what needed to be done for kit to survive out there.”

We were lucky to be invited to return the following year, where we both re-ran the Polaris project and were also commissioned to create a new work for Burning Man 2019: Desert Wave.

It’s fascinating to see Squidsoup’s progression from the early works to some of the large-scale bespoke commissions. Is there a direct connection between these earlier pieces with the present day?

Definitely. Our work has always been about immersion – working to create beguiling trance-like experiences and making the tech an invisible enabler, rather than a prominent component. Visually, our works have moved away from using screens, as the screen is a boundary; a barrier between the viewer and what they are looking at. We wanted to break down that barrier, either by placing the viewer inside the content, as with VR, or by letting the media spread into our shared, physical world. For us, VR felt too lonely an experience, where you leave this world behind, so we looked for more hybrid approaches, eventually landing on the various approaches using arrays of lights (and sound) in physical, walkthrough, shared spaces.

As our work has developed, it has become more abstract. This is partly due to the nature of the media we now use, but it also feels right for us, as it allows for quite a primal, visceral form of engagement. It also allows each person experiencing the work to decide what it means for them. That, in itself, is an interactive and creative process. What is consistent throughout our work is a will to remove the technology from one’s conscious experience. We’re not pretending it’s not there (our work is quite technologically ambitious), but we don’t want people feeling that they are engaging directly with ‘computers’. This is partly because they are a means to an end, not a focus in themselves in our work, but we have noticed that people change their approach when confronted with digital/binary decisions. They start to think about how it all works, which is absolutely not what we are looking for.

“We want people to suspend disbelief, to go with it and experience the work with all their senses, rather than their intellect.”

What can people learn from Squidsoup’s interdisciplinary approach to combining technology and research with music and art?

Interdisciplinarity is increasingly necessary in our work, but I’m not sure that we actually see it that way. We see it more as collaboration between people with different skills, as we need a range of skills and expertise in order to make real our artistic visions. Learning advanced computer, materials, robotics, music, design and architectural skills, and so on, takes time and, if you’re not working with a trained professional, there will be a lot of learning by trial and error. Even when you are using a trained professional, we often end up asking them to do things that are out of their comfort zone anyway – so trial and error, and iteration, are the order of the day. Connected with this is communication. We often work remotely, even more so these days, by necessity due to current movement and social distancing restrictions, so getting an idea across clearly but accurately is vital when working with people from various disciplines. Although our projects generally start with a fairly clear concept and idea, there needs to be a degree of pragmatism involved during the development phase. Some aspects of an idea may be impossible, or better approaches may be uncovered along the way. Being able to see these and work around or with them when they arise, is crucial – and also down to communication. The flip side to that is that it can also be tempting to dilute an idea for the sake of practical expediency. Any changes of direction are carefully thought through to ensure that the core concept is not compromised.

Squidsoup is described as something that can ‘be experienced online […] and in shared spaces’; how do you anticipate the different ways in which participants might engage with the work, either in real life or via online footage?

In mid-2020, the variety of ways that people can engage with our work are significantly compromised by social distancing, travel restrictions and other knock-ons from the current pandemic. Our best-known works are experiential physical spaces, in galleries or outdoors at festivals and other events. But we do also create permanent exhibitions, and smaller artworks that straddle the area between installation and art object. Currently this is a main focus; to make smaller works that can be experienced in private and smaller, more controlled, public spaces. Although our works have been shown many times, the world is a large place and the most effective way to speak to global audiences is through the web and social media. We have not made a web-based artwork for many years, but we try to document our work in an honest and truthful way, so that people who can’t actually make it to an installation can still get some understanding of what the works entail. However, most of the online content associated with our work is generated by visitors. Social media users have been kind – many of our projects are very selfie-friendly. There is a definite irony there, as one of our stated aims (as mentioned above) was to move away from screen-based experiences to physical ones. And yet here we are, with many more people knowing our work from digital content than from encounters with the physical work.

Credits

Find out more about GARAS at www.garas.org.uk

www.squisoup.org

Designers

Submergence, 2019, Canary Wharf image by Rikard Österlund
Four Tet, 2019, Alexandra Palace image by Rikard Österlund
Four Tet, 2019, Alexandra Palace image by Rikard Österlund
Four Tet, 2019, Alexandra Palace image by Rikard Österlund
Desert Wave, 2019, Burning Man image by Travis Cossel / Black Label Films

Lolo Y Sosaku

Posted on 2 de September de 2020 by nr

NR Vol. 12 Change · Autumn Winter 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · Lolo Y Sosaku
Words · Lucrecia Landin

“alienated while completely connected at the same time”

Their work move between different languages such as sculpture, installation, kinetic art and painting. The modus operandi: to constitute itself as a subject, and from its mechanic materiality, to point to transcendence, to mysticism and to the unknown. Encompassing installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, sound and video, Lolo & Sosaku’s wide-ranging practice explores the capacity of creating new meanings through the association of the objects, the surroundings and the spectator. Taking inspirations from ancient Greek sculptures, from Dada and Bauhaus School to Jean Tinguely, Alexander Calder and Jean Dubuffet, Lolo & Sosaku soon altered the traditional artistic practice concentrating on the possibilities inherent in the materials they used often metal, wood, glass, incorporating music and sound. Electronic music is certainly the highlight of their inspiration as a complex language translated into sound installations and sculpture compositions. Shapes, lines, materials and sounds are assembled together into motion sculptures that perform taking their own voice in an unpredictable continuous transformation Exploring many artistic horizons and redefining boundaries, their interest is the energy and the hidden forces that guide life in our technological age.

Lolo, Sosaku! You guys. Truly beautiful to meet you last week. So, lots of things were said and I thought of some recap key ideas that stayed floating around. I would start with SONAR, in which you just performed a few days ago.

Given the present pandemic context, you have just been part of the (first ever) virtual edition of SONAR, where you live streamed from your studio in L’Hospitalet.

How did this situation feel? How did you conceive producing this piece to fit an iPhone screen? (Modern times…)

Lolo: We felt in a way alienated while completely connected at the same time. Is the digital streaming behind this or is it a more global thing related to the current situation? Maybe both, yet we are anxious to be back to physical exhibition dynamics.

Sosaku: Visualizing our work through phone screens was conceived as an amplified version of our usual visualization mediums or supports, always having in mind that the spectator completes the artwork, even from the other side of the screen.

L: Our piece Concert for four pianos is an audio piece interpreted by non thinking machines installed in four pianos, they are sound sculptures that generate different textures and audible rithms. With this sounds we composed a sound piece with Sergio Caballero and thats the piece we presented in Sonar, putting up three shows for a reduced audience from our studio and a concert that was showcased for the whole world from Sonar’s live plataform, it was a great experience.

We understand our artwork as something that happens between a gap in what we conceive as the “present”, where concepts of space and time are no longer a unified continuum and act as separated entities.

S: We feel comfortable working in this temporal space.

L: With the years, we have created our own reality, as Arca coined it the last time he was in the studio. “A world within a world”.

Do you have hopes that our future may shift back into a less technological reality, in a sort of resistance act, or do you encourage the exploration of technology in this sense?

L: We are living in really particular times, exposed to constant sudden changes, in an accelerated way. The Anthropocene, the current geological time according to Paul Crutzen, is characterized by the visible and signicative influence of human behaviour in the planet… for some theorics it goes back to the industrial revolution… inexorably this age would evolve into the Post- Anthropocene, which, in conversations with Maike Moncayo, we differ in how it will take place, given that for her it will be the communion of human-machine-nature, forging a new ecosystem of renewable energies and a way back to the natural equilibrium of the holocene. Our vision is a bit darker given that we believe that we will evolve to a kind of machine – human symbiotic being, to survive climatic changes and death, where nature will be in a second plane or extinguish, given that it wont be necessary.

When we met, we talked about your artwork’s translation from the physical, tangible world into the two dimensional language of video or photography.

You mentioned a particular experience with Disco, where the audience thought you were presenting a 3D render, when actually there was an actual disc and a whole physical effort behind it.

Did this experience transform how you conceive future artworks?

S: To forge Disco, a huge human physical effort was necessary. Lots of months of hard work interpolated with unplanned difficulties. It was a great adventure, and I was working sick for the whole of the production.

L: Disco is a site specific project that works in dialogue with MentalStones, a permanent installation by Tito Diaz, which is situated in an olive field in the Delta del Ebro area, far away from civilisation. To our surprise, when we published the first images of the project, we received several reactions which interpreted that the artwork was a 3D render. We had put so much into it that the final piece looked artificial, like a render…

Even though Disco exists in the intersection between sculpture, land art and video art, we had never imagined that the audience would interpret it as a digital artwork.

S: We think imagination is sometimes digital.

L: It is a constant transformation… the digital looks for the organic, the real mutates into a digital language. We are exposed and immersed in a constant digitalization of everything, I wonder if Disc would have actually been a digital render, would it be real?

As sensible subjects, what interests would you say you pursue or dig on through your practice?

L: We see autonomous intentions in the behaviour of some of the machines we create, which escapes any logic understanding, as if they acquired a soul-condition, or something like it.

S: When we did the theater piece we had various press conferences… conventionally, actors also assist to this conferences so we took with us Tipo P, one of our sculptures, which was the protagonist of our piece. I was with him for many days, travelling by metro and taxi to different places, and a really close nexus evolved.

L: Tipo P did really bad in the first interviews.. as if he were nervous. He changed attitude once he was in front of cameras… thank god he did really good in the actual performances.

S: Yes, he’s a really good actor.

Being that you come from so far apart (literally, Japan-Argentina) the fact that you have found each other and created this artistic communion, to say, feels like a magical encounter, your artwork, this synergic creative act, like an alchemic process. Do you believe in chance?

Have you ever thought about how your paths could have shifted if you had not ran into each other?

S: We’re really close friends and we sort of like the same stuff.

L: The first time we met (early 2004) we could barely communicate because we practically didn’t speak english… and naturally we started creating stuff and working together… we developed our own language and work methodology which imprints itself in all of our work.

S: Now we work in the same ways as in the begining, but in bigger projects.

Lolo: Nowadays when I think of that first encounter, in like how this unexpected chain of events brought us together, I feel very grateful.

S: Yes, if I think about that I feel as if an exterior force had joined us in some way.

L: Maybe that is chance, two independent processes that converge… Lucrecia, you were asking if we believed in chance, we do believe and we implement it in lots of our artworks, maybe the most evident one would be Panting Machines.

S: We build machines that have as an objective to paint or draw, and though we are very present during the process, they paint what they autonomously desire to paint, and when there are more than one of them, lots of times they collide, change paths and generate new lines and shapes, mixing their traces.

L: There’s a whole narrative revealed in chance.

This issue of NR has the concept of Change as its main trigger. It is obviously a word that resounds in all of us given the pandemic context, in any of its multiple consequences. If you would be able to propose, within a utopian scenario, activities or rules for a different society… what would you suggest, if anything? All valid. And… calling on utopia, would you recommend any readings, movies, or tracks that have triggered your imagination, your conception of life or reality?

S: Create a new civilization, without violence, where everyone has access to everything.

L: In the conversation we had before this interview, we really liked something you asked regarding the spaces we use to install our artworks, which are generally abandoned spaces or spaces in which our artworks establish dialogue or modify them, you were asking if we had thought of building an entirely new space that would not only host our pieces but be an intentional enviroment for them. We could do the excercise of replying to this question with the creation of a utopic social space, a place where there are no physical limits, where anything you can imagine is possible.

I’d recommend the amazing documentary “L ́homme a mangé la terre”, by Jean- Robert Viallet

S: Yes, I’d say also the last book by Yuichi Yokoyama “New engineering”.

Credits

www.vimeo.com/loloandsosaku
www.instagram.com/loloysosaku
www.loloysosaku.com

Lolo and Sosaku’s work has been exhibited and performed, amongst others, at
Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), PSA Museum Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China), MIS Museu da Imagem e do Som (São Paulo, Brasil), Fundation Gaspar (Barcelona, Spain), Fundação Casa França Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil), Sónar (Barcelona, Spain), Matadero (Madrid, Spain), Palace of Culture (Iasi, Romania), MAVA Museo de Arte en Vidrio de Alcorcón (Alcorcón, Spain), O Art Center (Shanghai, China), Luis Adelantado Gallery (Valencia, Spain) and Instituto Cervantes (Milan, Italy).

Designers

Lolo & Sosaku by Cecilia Díaz Betz
Stellar, 2017
Studio view, 2020
Untitled, side A Painting Machine 68cm x 56cm x 10cm x 8cm
Piano I image by Silvia Poch – Lolo and Sosaku (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977 and Tokyo, Japan, 1976 ) investigate the possibilities of sculpture as an expanded field. The nexus that unites his works is the search for an object in contact with his surroundings and with the spectator. An object that seeks friction and tension.

Hania Rani

Posted on 1 de June de 2020 by nr

NR · World
Published · Online

Feature · Hania Rani
Words · Ellie Brown

“Creating makes you free wherever you are stuck”

When pianist and composer Hania Rani’s sophomore album came out in May and in the middle of a global pandemic, its title, Home, likely took on greater significance than when it was conceptualised. The album has been described as a ‘metaphorical journey’ through notions of the home; about places that ‘become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice.’ The ambiguity that comes with calling a place ‘home’ is something that Hania surely knows well, dividing her time between Warsaw, ‘home’ home, where she studied classical piano at the prestigious Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, and Berlin, where she now works. As a result of the pandemic, she explains, this is the first time since she was at school that she has stayed in the same place for a long period of time. Hania has been at her parents’ house in Gdánsk, where she grew up, and where she first took piano lessons. The return to her childhood home, during which Home was released has led Hania to re-evaluate the album; ‘I guess we have all changed a bit.’

Back in late March, shortly after lockdown in the United Kingdom had been announced, the presenter Mark Coles profiled Hania for BBC Radio 4. ‘In difficult, troubled times I usually turn to music,’ he notes, ‘each night this week, at the end of the day in lockdown here at home, I’ve sat in the dark after everyone’s gone to bed, […] I’ve poured myself a drink and reached for [Hania’s first solo album, Esja], and lost myself in its simple, minimalist beauty.’ The gentle sounds of Hania’s music certainly provide a soothing experience at a time of upheaval and uncertainty, but also buried in both Esja and Home is a sentiment that allows you to be transported elsewhere. Esja, notably, is named after a mountain near Reykjavik, where Hania travelled in 2017 to record what would become this first album. The process of creating music, Hania explains, can ‘bring you to places that you could never buy a ticket to,’ no more so than when travel is largely not an option right now. ‘Creating makes you free wherever you are stuck at [that] moment,’ she adds, but it’s ‘not enough’ to use music purely as an escape.

Hania came to prominence when Esja was released last April through Gondwana Records. Esja was not just a classical record – not even, strictly speaking, a classical record. A keen interest in the way the piano functions, as a mechanical object, and an appreciation for other genres, like jazz and electronica, gives Esja an ever so slight rawness. This surfaces in moments of sustained reverb, or in instances when the piano can be heard creaking beneath Hania’s craft. These subtle elements mark a deliberate distinction between Hania’s musical training and her role now; ‘As a classical pianist, I was just a performer. As a ‘neo-classical’ [pianist], I am a composer who also performs her own music.’ She likes the lack of limits imposed on neo-classical compositions, as it’s ‘[closer] to the values that I believe in.’ Those values, which begin to appear on Esja, take the forefront on Home. Hania has described her latest release as being the second part of a book, where Esja was the ‘musical prelude to a real plot.’

The transition from Esja to Home is immediately apparent on the album’s opening track, ‘Leaving’, where the piano makes space for Hania’s vocals. The addition of vocals and other elements that appear on the second album, including drums, guitar and synthesisers, confirms Hania’s transition away from classical music proper. It’s a shift that has been on the horizon for a while, too: ‘I have been experimenting with new things for years, but when I signed to Gondwana Records, we all decided to release a solo piano album first.’ The process of creating Esja afforded Hania the opportunity to try things out in the meantime, tracking her progress and maturing her style. Home is, therefore, a record that has been a long time in the coming. Hania describes the process of making Home as involving layers. For the opening song, ‘Leaving’, which was composed in 2018, she consolidated the piano composition and vocals into stems, ‘[editing] each layer a lot [until] I was happy with the result.’ This has become a familiar technique for Hania because of the endless possibilities it affords. Outside of this production process, the layering approach proved helpful in working out the sounds on the album more generally. ‘Each of the new elements came to me naturally,’ and each element was tried, recorded, and evaluated – from the double bass and the drums, to the string quintet that appears on ‘Tennen’ towards the album’s end.

Credits

Photography MARTA KACPRZAK
www.haniarani.com www.music.apple.com/gb/artist/hania-rani

Primavera Sound Festival Barcelona 2022

Posted on 31 de May de 2020 by nr

NR · World
Words · Ellie Brown

After a two-year hiatus, Primavera Sound returns to the Parc del Fòrum in Barcelona this weekend. That, in itself, is a reason to celebrate. For sure, the very idea of a live festival is music to the ears of many after the coronavirus pandemic saw the cancellation of summer events in two consecutive years. Last year would also have marked the twentieth anniversary since Primavera Sound launched back in 2001. In its first edition, the festival was a much smaller ordeal and took place at Barcelona’s Poble Espanyol. But the likes of Sonic Youth, The Kills and The White Stripes all performed there – setting the precedent for the festival’s line up each year, as music icons and legends from around the world return descend upon Primavera’s stages each summer. Of course, the festival has grown considerably in size, popularity and reputation since then, whilst managing to retain something of a “local” festival feeling. But perhaps there’s no greater testament to Primavera’s global influence within the music world than the fact this year’s iteration has been promoted to a two-weekend line up. Whilst Massive Attack, Tame Impala, The Strokes, Gorillaz and Tyler, The Creator (to name just a few) are set to headline this weekend’s events, the likes of Dua Lipa, Lorde and Megan Thee Stallion will also perform next weekend.

The addition of this second line up to Primavera’s programming is part of the festival team’s response to the pandemic. As Marta Olivares, Primavera’s affable Head of Communications, tells NR over Zoom, COVID was a moment for pause and reflection – especially as, she says, it was a time when the “whole ecosystem proved to be so fragile.” For Primavera co-founder, Pablo Soler, this couldn’t have been more apparent; the pandemic didn’t just reaffirm the importance of live music, he says, “it has revealed it;”

“Without festivals, we realised that we were missing a part of our lives that was the collective experience.”

The communal aspect of a festival goes without saying – it’s about the excitement and the emotions that are experienced with other people that, Pablo says, is crucial for creating a state of happiness. The idea that the festival is nothing if not for the people is crystal clear, as Marta explains that having this year’s events spread out over the course of two weekends (with a week of indoor performances in Barcelona in between, no less) was made possible by the fact that last year’s ticketholders “overwhelmingly” decided to keep their tickets. As a result, Primavera 2022 is an amalgamation of three years’ worth of acts in some ways; Beck and Pavement, scheduled to headline in 2020 will, for example, make a much-awaited appearance in Barcelona this weekend. But over the course of the pandemic, Marta says, we’ve witnessed;

“so many artists creating amazing stuff, working so hard and releasing incredible records.”

In that sense then, Primavera 2022 is an ode to music in the lead up to, and over the course of, the pandemic – especially when popular acts from today might have flown under the radar back in 2020.

Given that the festival will be a de-facto twentieth birthday celebration, this weekend’s events will be both a moment to look back on Primavera’s journey so far, whilst also looking towards the future. In fact, part of the festival’s events will take place at Poble Espanyol – something that Pablo thinks the team can be justifiably sentimental about. “Over the years, we have played concerts at this venue outside of the festival,” he notes, “but going back there with Primavera Sound is even more emotional.” It will be, Marta says, a kind of homage to that tiny festival that was first unveiled. But as much as Poble Espanyol is part of Primavera’s legacy, the festival team’s outlook is to keep moving forward. In fact, in the midst of the pandemic when the Primavera team were figuring out their bid for survival, the answer was, perhaps surprisingly, to grow bigger still – though “sustainably” as Marta puts it. “It felt weird to stay put,” she recalls adding that there was a need to pivot somehow. As in previous years, the festival will head to Porto for the weekend (which will occur at the same time as the Barcelona edition’s second weekend). But satellite festivals will also take place in Los Angeles, Santiago, Buenos Aires and São Paulo later on in the year. “It was [a case of] go home or go big,” Marta notes of the decision to grow the festival in this way. “Definitely we’re going big.” For Pablo, the new locations explain the festival’s future-facing outlook in themselves: “we are a festival that any country would want to have.” And with an insatiable international appetite for Primavera as it’s staged in Barcelona, it perhaps makes sense to take the music to the people. So how does the essence of Primavera translate to these new locations? Marta notes that the festival’s Barcelona location is part of its draw – close to the city, near the sea, and with a lot of cultural pull as well as music. “That’s something we want to be careful with,” she says of the other locations – noting, for example, Porto’s luscious green backdrop near the coast at the festival’s site in the Parque da Cidade. But as Primavera looks outwards and globally, it’s also turning back inwards, too. Earlier this year, Primavera Sound Madrid 2023 was announced – a way for the festival to continue its newly-established tradition of two back-to-back weekend events in Spain. There is, it seems, an exciting path ahead for Primavera over the coming years, but first: this weekend.

“We are always the first festival of the season,” Marta explains, adding that this particular edition means that the weekend will be something of a test run for the string of European festivals that follow on.

“I want people to come to Barcelona and celebrate life, to express themselves and to feel safe and alive again”

Marta says. Pablo concurs; “seriously speaking, we have learned that we have to live in the moment – seize the day – because we are all more vulnerable than we thought. If we should take this twentieth anniversary party as the party of our lives, then so be it.” But what should Primavera punters expect when they’re there? For Marta, it’s the unexpected – recalling Arcade Fire’s impromptu performance on a boxing ring-esque stage at the 2017 festival. This is, of course, not an indication or confirmation that such an event might occur this year, but possibilities and chance encounters are certainly part of the Primavera fabric. To that end, Marta describes the ideal standard that the Primavera team strives for: “at the perfect Primavera;”

“you would be able to enjoy a show from your favourite band; you would go to something that challenges you; you would see someone you don’t yet know will be your next favourite act; and the fourth would be something you really had fun at.”

And with a line up as glittering as Primavera’s is this year, it’s almost guaranteed to be perfect.

Credits

More info · Primavera Sound Festival Barcelona
Special thanks to Chris Cuff and Henry Turner (Good Machine PR)

Category: Music

Nonotak

“what drive us was the experience, the moment, to feel physically connected with a space”

Kevin Saunderson

“no matter how big we became, it was always a struggle back home”

Kaytranada

Pivotal points and personal breakthroughs

Collard

“I think it’s okay to just be easier on yourself now”

Goldlink

“It’s just that algorithm of life, greatness takes time”

6lack

“I’ve made some of my best music and had some of my best moments from being resilient, pushing through, getting through the struggle”

Squidsoup

“We want people to suspend disbelief, to go with it and experience the work”

Lolo Y Sosaku

“alienated while completely connected at the same time”

Hania Rani

“Creating makes you free wherever you are stuck”

Primavera Sound Festival Barcelona 2022

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