No, because I didn’t know any of the things I’m now doing existed, let alone that I could be doing them.
Describe the new music video for your single
It’s about me being unable to decide whether to go to a certain celebrity party in Chelsea, NYC, imagining walking there and what it’s going to be like (people dancing awkwardly - the party never really seems to take off), and being caught in an elevator with intensely chatting socialites and celebrities who are giving me funny looks because I’m not one of them. Then it goes into a more general section about not having the motivation or cash to participate in the body perfection culture this party seems to represent (this part is not serious). In the end, I never make it there.
DOES FAME CHANGE PEOPLE?
PROBABLY!
Why should people see you perform?
I heard it’s supposed to be very “intense” and “maximum energy”.
Define the term “Munchausen” and also tell me where and when the best place to listen to Nina Hagen is.
“Munchausen” is a compulsion to show off and lie about things like celebrity affiliations and countercultural achievements, such as playing in obscure bands or catching rare/non-existent stds, and not caring if you’re getting the facts wrong. At some point it doesn’t really matter if any of it is true.
The bit about Nina Hagen is actually only partial “Munchausen” - she turned up at my house once when I lived in Camden - one of my flatmates was friends with her and had been babysitting her kid when they all lived in a squat together some years previously.
Who is the enemy?
Greed.
Neoliberalism.
What is in a name? Where does “No Bra” come from?
The name came from a cover of the now online-only “Daily Sport” softporn mag, saying “Rachel Stevens with No Bra”. [insert image?] We liked the simplicity of the name and the bad grammar - I didn’t really know about the various connotations of the term “no bra” in anglo culture at the time.
Is Page three, as a mindset, quintessentially british?
I see what you’re getting at - apparently it was only introduced in 1970 by Rupert Murdoch though who is Australian tho?
What would your uniform be for eternity?
Mini skirt, trainers, heels in bag, bomber jacket - adapted for climate change.
Does a stage occlude reality or create reality?
It creates reality.
What does Hollywood mean to you?
It’s a place in Los Angeles. It’s also a specific way of telling stories in film that is reflective of a certain 20th century American/western ideology, centred around maintaining traditional power structures, Freud-inspired psychology and binary thinking.
Where is…the original…in music
Originality starts as soon as you’re writing about what’s important to you specifically instead of copying things. Are you asking me what music nowadays is original? I feel like most music i hear is original!
In 2011, you started the weekly Gay Vinyl Club, how do your memories of that time shape up?
It was amazing because of the range of really talented DJs and performers we were lucky to have - the idea was to encourage experimentation and let everybody do what they wanted with no rules, besides it was a free party on Tuesdays, so there was no pressure..There was this really amazing energy - it felt like everyone was coming together for some kind of shared mission of sonic/cultural anarchy. Arca recently told me she thinks that Gay Vinyl “shifted the culture” via the quote “creative and emotional fusion that happened during the party”, and it’s where she learned to DJ.
The party also attracted a really mixed crowd, who were generally open to anything musically. I remember one time there were only these two kids left in the club, body-popping across the benches and floor to Coil’s “Where Are You?” for ages, then one looked up, going “i wrap my last kiss in a bandage” - what??”
How is it to work with Bruce LabRUCE?
It’s great! Bruce is a lovely, generous and hilarious person who has maintained his punk ethos to and has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies!
What better way to start the school year than with a review of a live show in Hackney Wick? Teo discusses Beatlemania and how to self-model as an indie band.
Sydney Sweeney asked Teo, What is with WPDMT's Jesus Gimmick? Teo responds:
Once upon a time, allusions to Jesus felt like the price of admission to rock. Despite a wave of late-80s avant-garde bands having put an end to such trends, by opening their album with a gospel choir, Worldpeace seem eager to revive such an outdated fad. The interest in Jesus doesn’t ring as genuine as his in Lennon. It's retro-proactive pop.
Beatlemania thrived off the currency of the young. Not so recently, hating the Beatles was fun. "I hate the Beatles" or "The Beatles are overrated" was something you said when you wanted to be different.
While he reviews WPDMT's new release, FLOWERS POWERS, Teo also discusses the evidence of a PR lead "Beatlemania" revival. WPDMT's album cover takes the original image of kids in America burning the Beatles' albums because, you guessed it, they'd said: "We're bigger than Jesus". In the centre of the flames are two effigies of Rowan and Leo. It reminds Hollywood of a satanic ritual, AKA Jennifer's body, where someone is sacrificed, and the indie band pays the ultimate price, in exchange for... WPDMTmania?
If we are talking about spam instagrams, one side of our heart is devoted to @inthebackofthetruck, the other looks to @thepsychedlicdump.
REVIEW OF FREE SHOW AT HACKNEY WICK, FRIDAY 28th of AUGUST, featuring Bassnotesonhope and J'wow.
When Worldpeace DMT announced they were doing a free show, I let myself be excitedly lured up and into yet another ex-industrial hall, alongside a queue of Londonese youth alike. So when Sydney Sweeney asked me to review the night, I was caught off guard. I had fun, and I was happy to contribute to the young and local invasion of such a gauche venue; but there’s certainly something to be said about where the show lands on Worldpeace’s cunningly marketed new-Bealtes masterplan.
As she introduced their set, Rowan Please joked about how the crowd was anomalously cool given the location of the free show. Turns out it’s easier than you’d think to pack a bunch of young people into a hot room in the pulseless heart of Hackney Wick.
Debuting their latest live formation, the duet is joined on stage by a guitarist wearing a top hat and a bassist wearing a Fortnite tee. Rayban shades: on, Leo utters the first words of the show “school is out, and I never did it like it anyway” with the sobriety of a judicial testament and continues to set out his childhood plan of proving his parents wrong by starting a band and being “the biggest in the world”- while so far being unresolved, tonight feels like he’s making a case for it. At a time when “Worldpeace DMT” starts to awkwardly make their way into industry-curated festival lineups, putting on a show in Hackney Wick feels like they’re claiming local success and enjoying a glimpse of the Beatlemania-type cultural effect that they’re so hungry for.
The quintet’s nervously jagged acoustic arrangements of “Bigger Than Jesus”, “Big Yellow Taxi” and songs from the forthcoming album “Stick around for Tea”, gently suggest that their music has just as much emotional weight without electronic sounds. Half-heartedly imitating worship, we close our eyes, lift our heads and delicately sway through the semi-biblical verses of “Jesus Jesus”; in contrast to the fuller texture on the album, the guitar romps give the song a closer affinity with The Velvet Underground's own “Jesus”.
While the crowd dissociates into chatter for some unreleased ballads, the band’s self-fulfilling prophecy feels particularly imminent during their few Beatles at Shea Stadium moments, as the crowd bursts into frenzies of bar-for-bar singalongs to “Love Yourself” and “Marina”; when Rowan sings live, her chirps and screams are slightly out of tune, and all the more spellbinding. And now, a gem for the superfans: I was stunned by the tender-hearted, alternate version of the otherwise cute-but-whacky deep-cut “Hey Marshmallow”, sealing the late-August London night with a lovely ambience of world peace.
On their inter-album mixtape, Worldpeace DMT powers through a myriad of sounds, with that alternately punning and self-reflective sensibility that made the London duet such an enticing new entity over the last year. Their growing popularity doesn’t seem to have compromised their ethos of fun, or their willingness to be a bit delirious and weird; Flowers Powers is slightly perverse, retro-proactive pop.
It doesn’t take long to hear that the band has sized up on arrangements (budget). At its exposition, the opening hymn “Jesus Jesus” finds Leo in sorrow and seeking repentance, but progresses to sound like primary-school Mass, ornamented by a choir, stabs of strings and what sounds like a tiny rainbow xylophone. The Joni Mitchell cover, “Big Yellow Taxi” picks up on this playful note; the guitar licks sound like they’re being resurrected from Rubber Soul and Rowan’s tongue-in-cheek inflexions: “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” make for the poppiest WPDMT in memory. Following “Surfin’s” capricious kazoo, the quasi-emo, dead-end crescendos uplifting GUCCISAMO’s quivering bars on "Pimp My Ride” briefly glimpse at poignancy.
The slight but generous tracklist seems pretty confused about how the band want to sound; thus making their sound pretty clear, aiming beyond definition, like every beatle phase strung into one tracklist. They’re like how John Peel described The Fall: “always different, always the same” Compared to The VU & Rowan, the somewhat slippery “laptop twee” tag suggested by friends& seems less useful for understanding this release. While a song like “Tabletop” evokes an inclination towards twee, it feels like mere coincidence that they play on this aesthetic. There’s less vocal stutters, bleeps and bloops. If anything, the clanker-cacophony on stinkers such as “Artrock” and the alternate version of “Surfin’” contributes to the canon of post-beatles satire and psychedelia rather than the legacy of hyperpop and The Pastels. It’s retro-proactive music!!
Now a sanctioned member of the band, Rowan Please’s lyrical charm and wit marks the mixtape’s catchiest and most affecting poetry. Such as on the nursery rhyme “Dinosaur Punk”, which reminds me of Television Personalities’ “I know where Syd Barrett lives”, sharing a voice that weaves pop mythology with kidlike fantasy as Rowan sweetly mutters: “Dracula lives above a record store, where they play John Peel to Dinosaurs”. And I can’t help hearing an undertone of wartime-pop underneath the glimmering texture of “When Summer Comes”, in which Rowan lulls herself, yearning for the summer to bring her baby home, who turns out to be Leo: deadpan and expressionless. Distinct from her femcel swag, Rowan’s 60s darling demeanour brings a winsome glamour to Leo’s compositional freak; the sound is an unlikely combination of the pretty and the shambolic, the quaint and the manic.
It’s difficult not to acknowledge that the word “Jesus” appears three times on the tracklist. You wonder whether WPDMT are inviting listeners to reckon with their hipster micro-aggressions- but it feels like Christ is just another character among the likes of Frankenstein, Dracula and John Lennon within the absurd pop-rock folklore of Flowers Powers. Once upon a time, feigned allusions to Jesus felt like the price of admission to rock. By opening their album with a gospel choir, WPDMT seem eager to revive such an outdated fad; but their interest in Jesus doesn’t seem as genuine as that in John Lennon.
Drawing from the same source material as the album’s cover, the innocently provocative summer-hit, “Bigger than Jesus” opens with the 1966 report of when a radio station in Texas was hit by a lightning strike after inviting kids to burn beatles records following John Lennon’s infamous claim that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus- I read this intro and the album’s cover as an instance of plain beatles-fetishism rather than a comment on music, or Jesus- before the verse slaps you with the heart-warmingly cringe, middle-school defiance of, “We don't have a single care, Don't have our seatbelts on” and the maturity of the song peaks at: “I have my own two hands until they crumble off”. The Lord is once again hailed in the acoustic, off-key and off-beat finale, in which Leo (maybe druggedly) asks for forgiveness; ‘Lonesome” feels like an apologia for the alchemical heresy of the tape, which makes you want to play the whole thing over again, and again.
Considering a recent insta story that expressed WPDMT’s intrigue in breaking into the mainstream, the dump of rosy-cheeked hooks and springy 3-chord charms on Flowers Powers feels like a warm tease and wink at the non-commercial route to world domination that the duet are plotting before Stick Around For Tea drops in October.
The Superstar is dedicated to speedrunning/recording the history of the present using the convenient placeholder of 'Gen-Z Aesthetics'. In the words of Stone, see this article, which reviews it as "A starting point for establishing a generational artistic identity".
We also wonder how it is with American Birds and plays like Truck at MOMA PS1; loosely inspired by the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hardbody (1997), if the rise of the Cultural Capital Play is the answer to mid-west YouTube documentarians (Andrew, we looking @ u).
THE LINK TO THE FIRST IN THE GEN-Z AESTHETICS RUN DOWN (FASHION EDITION): Yoona on Instagram, Mutation Fashion Realism can be found HERE.
Addressing the fried elephant in the generational room, Johanna Stone finds value in a play which discusses how they might be laughing their way into losing the right to vote. As stated in the MOMA PS1 press text for TRUCK the play intends to "evoke the malaise and melancholia of contemporary life across generations." Well, fuck institutional speak, and Stone actually tells us what it means to address that, discussing American Theater as a conservative alternative to coastal elite thespianism.
Hollywood wonders what the "London" version of American Birds would be, and concludes that, here, Gen Z is a cultural miasma that is thankfully yet to be pinned down by moving image, stage or otherwise. Except for Josiane Pozi and Solomon Garcon in Opening credits 4 sunset beach (pilot) w Josianne Pozi [sub-titles on].
American Birds, written by Lucy Park Urbano, was held at Frank News, Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES (AMERICA?)- On a sweltering Saturday in July, I leave a Millennial art world pool party featuring a pepitas kale Caesar, spiked camel milk, and about 10 mid-size dogs to drive across town to Fairfax for a distinctly Zillennial event: the closing night of Lucy Parks Urbano’s play American Birds.
The show is finishing a sold-out second run, and there’s a large puddle of people without tickets waiting at the door. I add two drunks to this waitlist blob, friends leftover from the pool party, and slip inside franknews, the independent journalism-platform-turned-new-work-incubator that took up residence in the small space between a nail salon and third-rate Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard (on the same block as Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Theatre) last year. After a whispered relay between backstage and the door, everybody gets in, save for an older-than-zillenial woman who sits on the patio of the adjoining Italian restaurant, drinking an Aperol spritz while the show goes on.
A makeshift three-quarter thrust atop the LA underground’s red carpet passes the initial Brecht-del test; the lights never dim, there was no polite darkness to rest your eyes, leaving HOLLYWOOD to size each other up from across the room.
Moby’s The Ceremony of Innocence starts to play, and a man wearing a plastic bag and neon leggings sashays around the room, making eye contact with each audience member. This is the kind of display that is nostalgic for a graduate of NYC experimental theatre school like myself, the sort of thing that screams there is no fourth wall here, and you are complicit in the capitalist machine. This got nuanced as it went on, thank God.
Lucy Parks Urbano plays an undercover detective investigating the modern American city-state, much like Aristophanes dissected Athens in his classical predecessor The Birds. Although Lucy Parks Urbano tells me she prefers the Greek tragedies to the comedies.
Marcel is a house finch. Melinda is a nightingale who only migrates to the cities you find listed on a vintage American Apparel tote. They’re chirping it up in a tree outside the house of Boy, who’s employed as the social media marketer for an athleisure brand run by his dad.
Boy brings Girl back to his apartment. Girl asks Boy to perform an assisted suicide on her 100-year-old (old, but still poor, the play notes) photographer husband.
The dialogue is high on itself: the classic hyper-referential coked-up humour that afflicts the broader Los Angeles scene:
Aren’t you really sad though
Watching the crowd outside La Poubelle
Become increasingly normal and like employed?
But these observations are cut with a methy edge and carved into delicate lines by Lucy Parks Urbano’s steady hand--
What if
There were wars here
And no one cared
Cause we didn’t care about their wars?
The comedown rattles to an audience of Cuspies stuffed with dieting discourse. LA’s contemporary oral storytelling culture (aka the city’s many autofiction readings) rarely gets so sneakily harsh in its reflections. “I fear that one of the effects of our great city, on me, has been to care about things less, unfortunately, and that my not caring has been rewarded,” Lucy Parks Urbano diagnoses.
The birds play The States Game, naming any state or region that is not California or New York and imagining what it might be like based on a patchwork of cruel stereotypes and free associations (New England is literally/ Old America/ They’re like/ Living in brick houses/ And making quilts/ Their first alcohol/ Was whiskey at the creek/At the pond/ Oh my god yeah/ They got like raped/ On the bed of the pond). This verbal tornado fluctuates across the map, crescendoing on a debate about whether Los Angeles is America at all, and collapsing into a moment that ponders whether people from Nebraska matter, “how they are/ Just like/ Lost in a field of dust”. The conversation-game brings the birds borderline-sexual pleasure, and you feel the tension in their apathy as they giggle away the idea of possessing the right to vote.
The birds’ explicit coastal elitism tends to feel cooked after a decade of warnings about its electoral consequences. Director Dylan Frederick recently captured the inverse American viewpoint in his documentary American Theatre (2025), following a conservative theatre group that creates a musical retelling of the Salem Witch Trials in protest of leftist cancel culture. Frederick confirms the ignorance of Lucy Parks Urbano’s birds remains period-accurate: *“American Theatre takes place in Georgia, and when we show that movie on the coasts, [the audience] is encountering folks who talk and think like this for the very first time, and they’re often in complete disbelief that what they’re watching is real. So much so that many, many people believe the documentary is fiction.”
*The play’s human characters are stand-ins for stereotypical contemporary hetero relations. Girl, played by Lucy Parks Urbano, is a calcified girlboss, self-described as “a wall you can nail anything into” (Lucy Parks Urbano was inspired to write her own roles after being typecast as “a teenager or a prostitute, sometimes both at once” too often throughout her acting career) Girl mourns the decline of her historied husband, who lived through the North Korean occupation of Seoul and the persecution of his family; conversely, the Boy in the room with us feels completely spiritually castrated, a lonely virgin who experiences the Army through YouTube ads, swiping blindly through the algorithmic jungle looking for love, so desperate for any kind of intimacy that he’ll pile onto someone else’s herstory of violence.
Boy can only communicate effectively via Drake lyrics; at the height of the action, he breaks down while attempting to rap the entirety of “In My Feelings” - Melinda makes similar use of “Passionfruit” to deal with her breakup from Tyler, the Robin. This seems to hit home for the audience.
“Lucy is giving herself an opportunity at every turn to make language fail in the most interesting and funniest ways, the ways that are unsettling,” says Frederick. “You’ve got high stakes, and you’ve got people who are meeting these stakes with failing language.” Through a series of circular fumbles, Lucy Parks Urbano fertilises a Yassified Theatre of the Absurd, where language falls flat due to an excess of meaning, every phrase deep-fried with predetermined memetic significance. It’s barely an exaggeration of Zilennial-speak, and gets a lot of laughs.
A fitting genre for a generation stuck in learned helplessness. The play doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions aside from placing a sword in the hands of its protagonist, a gesture lifted from any romantasy novel.
Now for a brief cold plunge down the scenic iceberg, if you even care: American Birds has gestated amid a bubbling ecosystem of Los Angeles experimental theatre, a gap in the city’s art scene finally brought to attention by the arrival of Berlin-based artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s New Theatre Hollywood, where I saw Lucy’s surrealist 4HL doomspiral short A Business, last fall. Since its arrival, New Theatre has put up a good chunk of exciting new work that blends mediums and comments on the current- Jasmine Johnson’s immersive reality TV series The Death of a Star was a notable early example. Siena Foster Soltis has also brought new life to LA theatre with site-specific psychosexual dramas- her latest, Sugar Tub, was enjoying a simultaneous run across town, with choreography by Mamie Green. Green’s Volta Collective has been a crucial player as well, heavily incorporating text by local writers into their dance pieces.
Less visible yet no less important is the influence of playwright Agnes Borinsky, whose writing workshops have fostered neural networks in the community- I met Lucy’s former teacher and current collaborator, Kap Taylor, in Agnes’ workshop. Borinsky, herself a student of the legendary playwright Mac Wellman, established a name in the NYC downtown theatre community before relocating to the West Coast. I wasn’t surprised to find that Dylan Frederick is good friends with Agnes, and Arne Gjelten, who plays Marcel, is moving in with her next week. Gjelten was offered the role of Marcel after Lucy Parks Urbano saw him in Calla Henkel of New Theatre’s play The End is New at REDCAT, the only place in the city where the GOAT of the theatrical old-guard avant-garde, the Wooster Group, sometimes performs.
More so than its contemporaries, American Birds recalls this very important take that I recently screenshotted off Gen Z starlet Ivy Wolk’s Instagram story, calling for a Zoomer art movement based in its own iconography and history instead of upcycling the millennial, whether that be through drain, sleaze, twee, whatever...The birds’ sadistic song, the Drake crashouts, the surrealist memespeak all feel distinctly like “fetishising what we know and what we’ve seen”, which, as Ivy notes, is at least a starting point for establishing a generational artistic identity.
Underneath their glib exteriors, Lucy Parks Urbano’s characters are desperate to belong to history, to society, to family, to even just one other person, as they survey the increasingly bleak prospects of their existence. The political stakes aren’t new, but the sense of absurdity develops from an intergenerational stasis. In its final moments, the play implicates the audience using a vestige of national unity; the curtain call is choreographed to the Cha-Cha Slide, and when the song instructs, everybody claps their hands.
In rehearsal, I watch as Frederick instructs the actors to sing a line together in harmony. They attempt several times and fail, laughing through each reset. On the night I watch the performance, the singing line has been cut. Set and costume designer Eli Hauser talks to me about the lone dryer sheet on the Boy’s coffee table. “I told Dylan I wanted set pieces that were abstract and ethereal, but still based in reality and domesticity,” said Hauser. “I was like, does that make sense? And Dylan was like, not really… eventually he was like, what about a dryer sheet? And I was like, yeah.” The effort at every level to understand one another’s siloed existence is what makes the thing Gesamtkunst-werrrrrk.
If you haven't already got with our flipping program, there is a 16 year-old spectre haunting the most tasteful musical events in London and abroad- it's Nico.
He took a trip to Paris to review an Atomiser show (oui!) but its our reporter's hilarious review of the mire of FakeMink that really set hearts alight across the globe.
The courtyard below the Marble Arch fountains has been fenced off since the year I was born, so it’s a nice alignment of the stars that Hollywood Superstar suggested I report on its Westminster council-approved return into the civic for one afternoon. London is still waking up as the orderly queue of longhairs in band tees descends into the disused exit to the train station; a stage has been set up in the centre of the pit, but everyone stops in front of it despite the staff’s innocuous requests to fill the whole space.
Two metres away from me, Lolina rises onto the stage wearing sunglasses, a thrashed leather jacket, zebra-print trousers and white air forces; it looks like she put on whatever she found littered around Marble Arch. Her mega hit single Gg (remixed by New York) starts playing and she’s already asking cold and daring questions on the concrete dancefloor. She’s expressionless while delivering the hook, “Who’d you throw under the bus? Who might you run over?” Her set is amorphous, covering a range of UK Bass sounds (also briefly recalling Chicago’s footwork) tainted with her trademark Londonese Hypnagogia that is as nauseating as it is ecstatic. If not a smoke filled basement, this dingy pit feels like her home ground.
YHWH Nailgun fist bump each other as they take their positions, only to dillydally with leads and microphones for five minutes. A screeching feedback needs fixing and the singer is teasing us with adlibs. The frontman begins to twitch and wave his mic around like a wand, casting the band to run through their fresh 11-minute album Magazine.
I’m immediately flinching at the drums which are appreciably louder than on the mix of the album. The pitched down rototoms give the drumming a primal feel (he’s also not wearing shoes) that reminds me of binging videos of early Death Grips shows- I saw at least two drumsticks snap throughout the set. The vocalist is certainly matching this ferocity, manically quaking with every unintelligible croon and roar.
It would be nice to see the other two members resemble the outrage of their instruments a bit more; the guitar and synth parts are indistinguishable, combining to resemble sharp sirens and hums of machinery, also merging with the industrial sounds of central London. In The Art of Noises, futurist Russolo hypothesised the modern ear would come to crave the sounds of the metropolis in music; indeed, the quieter moments in which this fusion is apparent feel surreal!!
I think these four New Yorkers should be an urgent reminder, for some of today’s rock bands, that you can still make compelling music when guided by pure intention rather than image (not naming names.)
Fifteen minutes is not yet sufficient to appease an audience and so the band play some old songs, setting off a mosh that carries a few crowd-surfers. The most eager call for an encore I’ve ever heard ignites the one-minute throwback of Hawk Violence which ends at five on the dot, precisely as promised by NTS.
A free show is an irresistible way to lure Londoners back into the exponentially unapproachable circus that is the city’s centre.
Nico, our teenage MUSIC reporter, ventures across to Paris... to attend an Atomiser gig! Many such cases.
You know what they say: you can take the boy out of London but you can't make him listen to shit music!!!
We're trying to expand our music coverage and he appeared like a guardian angel referencing Branzi's writing and talking about hurdy gurdy's and shit. He's writing part diary and part research- we couldn't have asked for a better music nerd if we tried.
Go off nico!!!!
HE NOTES: "Valentin Clastrier does not play. He is the best."
Before we met nico online these were our notes on music:
So far on my 3 day vagabondage of Paris, I have reunited with old friends and cousins that have accompanied me on wanders around the lovely and bait spots of the city’s centre; but on this rainy Sunday, I embark on a solitary expedition to the musical underworld of the city - which on this occasion, assembles in a garden.
It’s 4 when I arrive (ticket unchecked) and B2E are playing with an ipad for their soundcheck.
It feels like I’m intruding on a family function as the early-comers politely and quietly lounge in the veranda outside the main hall. This is a foreign, initially awkward dynamic to a London night-concertgoer like myself, that I will soon reconsider to be a charm to Atomiser’s afternoon.
Considering Italian designer Branzi’s writing on “Contemporary Music and Space”, Le Sample can be seen as an example of musical territory rather than specialized space; an ex-industrial ground, claimed and repurposed by artists, that is void of acoustic function and impositions- granting musicians and curators like Atomiser the artistic freedom today’s music needs.
A Chinese-whisper goes round warning the music will begin shortly and so we enter the main room where B2E stand on a carpet, ready to perform. You can tell the back2egg shell is just starting to crack as their presence gradually shifts from shy to sly. Persevering through a streak of technical difficulties, the band perform cloud-rock ballads over chops of speech and field-recordings that seem to marry the loud rainfall, acting as a convenient low end. Boy-girl two pieces are the most beloved acts right now and B2E is a cool French variant.
Around 6, Daisy Ray opens her set by larping as a bee; does some impressive looping; raps over her guitar (used as percussion) and then camouflages back into the crowd. Occasionally silly, sometimes very fun - as outsider music tends to be- the performance felt warm and clearly stated the unrestrained nature of the afternoon.
The flux of tension, comic relief and awe makes the sequence of acts into a circus. Atomiser’s project to conceive seemingly implausible conglomerates of artists is the reason I always feel an urge to buy a ticket - it has atmosphere, regardless of the execution.
Interrupting Lucia Kagramanyan’s clubby remixes of Armenian music, we applaud as Valentin Clastrier climbs onto a stool and - with chivalric prowess - arms himself with his ridiculous weapon of choice: an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy. The French luminary used to kick it with the likes of Jacques Brel as a guitarist in the 60’s, before getting bored and deciding to become one of “the great masters of the hurdy gurdy”: title of his 1987 album.
Within the first minute of music, it sounds like a whole orchestra is evoked by the single instrument. Using his right hand to generate either a ceaseless groove or drone, his virtuosic melodies played by the left, blaze through, achieving that real Dionysian effect. Valentin’s resurrection of a medieval folk instrument with his own electronic amendments is magical to witness live, as the success of a life long mission.
I am sitting on the Eurostar back to London as I finish writing this souvenir for my trip. Somewhere along the English channel I ask myself: What has the weekend taught me?
I note:
It’s nice that venues like Le Sample are still kicking (bittersweet as it is being forced to close)
Valentin Clastrier does not play. He is the best.
Blog
/ 18 May 2026 / By: Hollywood Superstar Review
Taix rhymes with Sex and that's what LA was gathered to Eulogise. Or rather, confess. Hollywood appears to have been copying our Superstar bit: there is anonymous writing celebrities everywhere. Jack Skelley edited the iconic Barney: A Modern Stoneage Magazine in the near '80s, whilst writing The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (semiotexte, 2023), an editor favourite. Skelley writes an absurd sexual scene report in a style we thank him for: Miley Cyrus is back on shrooms.
As below events occur, empires careen thru history’s stoopidest war.
“Not the CNN/TikTok wars; nor the 2004 Simulacra Wars of Ikea pressboard
rationales, such as WMDs; nor the counterfeit meme wars of 2024 – ‘they’re
eating the cats and dogs.’ Today’s war churns hydra pedogarchy’s smashing
and eating of babies and placentas for Peter EpThiel’s Mars colony. After this –
ha! – abandon hope, all ye of democracy fig-leafs. For now, the striptease of
market cabals gives hard-ons to patriarch missiles. But check it out: Their own AI
foresees the collapse of ugly naked body empires. So Antifa Luke Skywalker
tangles his tow-cables around the ankles of those big, armored snow walkers,
and – boom! – the fuckers fuck themselves. See what I mean?”
This is Miley Cyrus whispering into my ear with her licking and flicking tongue.
We are standing on Sunset Boulevard outside of Taix (pron. “TEX,” rhymes with “sex”)
restaurant, soon to be demolished. I adore Miley more than ever since she’s back on
shrooms. We’re all out here in a sidewalk wake staged by Sammy Loren in eulogy to
Taix, the romantic hang and receptacle of confessions from the naughty ids of Los
Angeles.
Lily Lady is here too. Lily leads the crowd in a cheer: a chance Sunset sidewalk
chanson of:
One by one, the artists and writers recount memories of blowjobs and choke-sex in the
Taix restrooms. Oh, wait. that wasn’t Taix. That was El Prado, down the street. Or was it
Footsies in Highland Park?
It’s funny because, the following week, I run into Miley Cyrus again at the St Patrick’s
Day House Party: This is the lit-reading I throw with Lily Lady at Lily’s vacant Gothy
avocado courtyard apartment in lower Los Feliz. It is there I remember that Lily Lady
and Miley Cyrus both performed in Alejandro Jodorowski’s film Blood Brother, in which
Miley plays Lily. (Blood Brother has since evolved to become Lily’s new book of poems,
launching April 30 at Poetic Research Bureau, where I will QA Lily and get to the bottom
of all this!)
Before our guests arrive, Lily points out the MAKEOUT ROOM. It’s the bedroom, but
instead of a bed, the floor is filled with plushies pillowed 3-feet thick. Mostly white-and-
red Snoopies and Hello Kitties. Also cerulean Blue Smurfs peppered with paisley Labubus.
“If people get horny, they can do it in here!” beams Lily.
The reader/performers include Clarke E Andros, Ryan Lynch, Molly Larkey, Jo
Stone, Danielle Altman and Diva Corp. Andros’ love sonnets are tight and tender. Diva
Corp manifests as a video of artist Petra Cortright enacting Diva Corp’s poem “Gun” in
fiery arcs and blurs.
Altman reads “Striptease,” a sexy confessional, including:
I try to gather the pieces of myself together
But he pulls me back on the sheets
Reassembles me roughly
Strokes me past language
One can’t help imagining the “I” of the poem as one of Danielle’s Instafit teddy selfies.
After the reading, I find Miley. She’s holding a paper cup of Jameson Irish Whiskey.
“Are you drinking Jameson in honor of Fredric Jameson, the Marxist theorist and
Octopus of Totality?” I ask. “I just wrote a one-act about an encounter between you
and Fredric Jameson. You know: When you were tripping in the Bonaventure Hotel?”
Miley’s response – and it’s a St. Paddy’s miracle! – is to press her tongue again into
my ear! “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Into the plushy MAKEOUT ROOM we leap. Haloed by Hello Kitty cherubs, Miley is
erotodelic goddess. Miley is a radical of insurgent licking, scooping and choking.
Roughly dis- and re-assembling her, I nuzzle Snoopy into Miley’s heart-shaped treasure
wet with warmth. Preverbal and compressed, Miley is small, vowel-shaped, fiercely
obedient. Then, side-by-side, soothed in DDLG growls and whispers, she tongue-fucks
secret grammar. She strokes me past language. Miley shines. Miley murmurs...
“Now, together, we see thru the lizard-brain default mode the System forces upon
lab-grown psyches and bodies toward endless abuse, wars and genocide. The
System being – let’s fucking face it – capitalism and its hydra proxies of morality,
politics, culture and The Kardashians. But, ah, a sexy Sacred Heart alchemies
base Matter into a Flaming Lips dawn. Together, we bestow unity of
consciousness – thru flesh – to our sum inter-experience, including precious
love, and triple star-loads of soulpocalyptic orgasm ripples. Can I get an Amen?”
Introducing Hollywood Superstar's 16 year old rock reporter, Nico. Cameron Crowe fuck off.
We asked him: What you want to write about?
He said: Mitsubishi Suicide and Samba Jean Baptiste.
The editors said: Ok, Go, Nico, Go!
The editors say to you: Keep the Semi-Secular Faith; out in the lonely nights of London.
Atomiser Presents: The London Bulgarian Choir and Mitsubishi Suicide at The Crypt. 13/03/2026.
I embrace a strong sense of faith as I descend, into the crypt below St Martin-in-the-Fields, appeasing my scepticism on the discordance of tonight’s forthcoming performances. Being in the underground hall that is sprawling but airless, makes me notice that the venue’s secularity is suitably emulated by the musicians: Mitsubishi Suicide’s reformulation of the screamo, post-rock, American tradition and the choir’s iterations of folk chants.
Having claimed a spot next to the stage, I feel fooled as a voice announces the choir will begin performing on the other end of the crypt. Tales of esoteric courtship rituals, forbidden love and such -a song was about trapping a wife in the foundations of a house- are enchantingly sung, converting the initially teasing and subtly condescending crowd to hushed meditation. Still, a few heads twitch at the familiarity of a cadence resembling Crystal Castles’ ‘untrust us’.
The polyphony-induced daze I dwindle in and out of is briefly broken by the sweet and sometimes boisterous song introductions courtesy of Dessisalva Stefanova. She is the true star of the night despite her awareness of the anticipation for their successors; she expresses this in introducing a belting chant, “I know you are all here for screamo so now we will screaamm… you can stay here we love you.” By the end of the performance this love is evidently reciprocated as the final applause lasts accordingly.
We turn back to the stage and the band (with two new faces) are testing pedals and tuning without seeming to notice the crowd. They are arranged in a diamond shape, facing each other. A cool jitteriness is emitted by the quartet and audience as we hold our breath, awaiting the terribly impending music. Unannounced, the rapture commences.
The opening songs seem to be a summation of Mitsubishi Suicide’s history, realized through extended epics that morph crawling, sustained phrases into theatrical moments of emo-violence - inspiring half-hearted moshing that is quickly impeded by the immense pillars that (somewhat sardonically) are the foundations of a church.
Older songs like Ilex court are delivered lovingly, with the new guitarist adding tasteful ornamentations. The music’s effect on the crowd is hard to generalise, due to the liminality of the band and its fans between conventional rocking out and something more like wistful reverie.
Perhaps in virtue of the archaic undertone set by the choir, I reflect on the affinities of Mitsubishi’s allure and that of This Heat, a London band which was similarly cherished for its deviance from the sounds the underground of its time (76-82) was promoting. A band that embodied the claustrophobia and murk of London while also evoking the alien and tribal, an effect Mitsubishi echo through their distinct reformulation of midwestern sounds. The quartet’s heady bass tones and capricious arrangements sound sublime in this crypt and I imagine so would This Heat’s- but I don’t know if Thatcher would’ve let that slide.
More explicit and direct influences can be heard in the 4-piece’s music which ended the show with a cataclysmic piece, reprising a riff from “biblical-violence” by (Zach Hill’s) Hella; the bassist tells me he loves that I loved it before I emerge out the crypt.
Outside the church, screamo diplomat Random Guy bestows on me a few words of wisdom; testifying the show was the perfect reunion for the band he’s followed since its beginnings and illustrates the exclusive novelty of attending a screamo show in London. He has faith in the scene, populated by bands such as Scadenza which I would consider paying attention to if you like the sound of screaming.
My pulse is altered as I walk through Trafalgar square, and I conclude that the lineup: which initially seemed a reach, or maybe a stroke of luck turned out to be pretty miraculous.
Private life & AM Radio present Samba Jean Baptiste +3 Album Listening Party. Thursday, February 19th 2026
Me and my friend burst when we read the undisclosable address of Samba Jean-Baptiste’s listening party; we had often yearned for our experience in this venue which hosted a “quiet show” by Harto Falión and some of his boys (including Cajm) in July- a wonderful anomaly within the evenings of my GCSE summer. The trackside auditorium evokes a funny purgatory vibe, with paw shaped windows from which you can spy on dads liming home and yg’s doing loons in London fields’ February twilight. You can tell the crowd are initially disoriented by the nowhereness of the space as they roam wondering where to sit and conclude to stand.
I am happy to be back; images of Harto rapping on a sofa with his feet up, veiled in a scarf that brushes his microphone are rekindled. Another reconception of music experience will be induced on my revisit.
Theodora's 10-minute, oceanic keyboard piece inaugurates the evening- this is also my introduction to her work. Amidst the pianist’s sustained arpeggiations, which cause metal pipes to rattle, I grasp onto a key theme that will be true across the 3 acts of the night: they all nicely comply to Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music, music that allows for drifting attention, and “accommodates many levels of listening without enforcing one in particular”. There's an entrancing quality shared by the three musicians, characterised by repetition, birthing an underlying progression that is not blatant as it is purgative.
Smokers return and so the room is chilly when Cajm’s set commences, going mostly unnoticed by the condensing crowd: greatly populated by capes and cloaks. I don’t know whether to expect a mix featuring some of his production for the likes of Jawinino or John Glacier, something more industrial-inclined or anything else- his YouTube features derivations of church-organ music. His set is an idiosyncratic, electronic prelude to the album, humbling the many that thought they could nod their heads to his perpetually mutating beats while also talking over most of the music- which he mixes on his knees.
Samba rises from the audience which has decided to wait on the floor- shuffling pedantically, you can tell the males are perplexed as to whether they are looking suave or infantile. He makes an endearing speech, confessing his shyness about publicly sharing his music that he is used to approaching privately- he is awkwardly content to be ‘braving the cold together’. The opening track is beautiful, and all of a sudden I feel the urge to apologise to my dad that I'm not with him on his birthday. The coolness of the crowd shatters.
The artificial-whispers that remind us we’re listening to ‘+3’ in most songs, and his recurring use of floaty autotune makes it feel like I’m listening to a zany strain of a trap mixtape.
Samba has nothing to do with the nostalgia-baiters and Dean Blunt impersonators that a soundcloud mix may foolishly associate him with- he’s one fine songwriter. The emerging and vanishing synths over his cloudless guitar distinguish this album from his past work; the fuller compositions seem in a fleeting exchange with his balmy contralto, summoned in such a way that wouldn’t wake up his roommate. Portrayals of life's physical traces and ashes throughout the ‘mixtape’, evoke anagogical interpretations of the ordinary. Everything he utters turns vital.
In paralleling this listening party with Nettspend’s (in which he bleh’s out as many sounds as he would at a concert) that has flooded my fyp, I affirm the significance of tonight’s experience. Samba is definitely not performing and maybe not even exhibiting his work, but it’s nice to think he is an equal subject to it as me. It seems that he wrote these songs to materialize moments of his being- while they are certainly vivid glimpses for me, I’d expect they are much more so for him.
+3 was precious. I can sense its fables will act as a sweet remedy for 2026’s cruel twists of fate.
A note on solidarity—as I write this, the US-Israeli killing machine continues to annihilate. My heart is with Iran. May Western imperialism collapse and the entire empire fall… No amount of art discourse comes above this.
Manic! That’s how I was feeling. I didn’t go to any of the actual fairs (cuz honestly you don’t need to), but I went to about 10ish fair adjacent happenings in LA and experienced shock… delight… confusion… everything in between…
I started my art week rendezvous Monday night at untitled (halo)’s performance of Ryan Trecartin’s BUCKLE YUP: CUE SHOES at the Kiko Kostadinov store on Western. It took me 40 minutes to find parking and I had 3 cups of complimentary white wine. Trecartin was not present (as far as I know—I had grandly misassumed that there would be some showing of Trecartin’s video work that I was dying to see), but it’s okay cuz untitled (halo) was great. I had the most fun when I was getting my third cup of wine and impulsively asked the Kiko Kostadinov bartender if he was single and he said no but that I was “really pretty” and he was “flattered” and we laughed about it and wished each other well and it was honestly a beautiful, vulnerable moment…
Fast forward to Friday, my day began at 99CENT—a show by Barry McGee and his “100 closest friends” in partnership with galleries Jeffrey Deitch and The Hole. When you first walk inside that pink 99 cent store on Wilshire, you’re hit with a distinct smell that’s a mix between the stale scent you’d expect from a defunct 99¢ store and the light b.o. radiating off the mass of bodies in there with you (doesn’t help that the weather has been in the high 80s—in fahrenheit, clarifying for all my readers in better parts of the world where celsius actually means something other than an energy drink). But what you experience in the nose is quickly eclipsed by what you’re intaking through the eyes. You’re visually bombarded by just a million artworks sprawled across the floor, the walls, atop the cash register (even video works playing from the cash register screen), the ceiling, and inside the freezer sections, patiently situated amidst the many people (somewhat slack-jawed) weaving between it all inside this grungy retail space built to sell cheap mass-produced goods.
Now to quote my Create Mode post that inspired this piece,
“I witnessed the "skaters" people [by “people” I mean DIVA CORP who had posted about the skaters on their IG story] were talking about — every time they did a trick there would be an awkward pause and then a small woot and some light clapping. The reaction was so unsure and the moment was almost underwhelming but also endearing because it was awkward and honestly you literally can’t help but have fun because the inside of the store is just Pure Spectacle and the sheer mass of art and objects to see in there meets the viewing-pace of a public whose majority would identify as having fried dopamine receptors like the experience of consuming the art in there requires my eyes to glaze over slightly the way they do when I’m watching Reels and like I really can’t hate that because it satiates every need to see More More More New New New…”
The overwhelming “chaos” of sorts is certainly an entertaining, sensorial experience the way the zoo or even Disneyland is. With the skaters, graffiti, floor-to-ceiling cardboard structures, and grime all in that one abandoned store (“abandoned” being disputable here because allegedly it was previously occupied by mutual aid groups), there’s definitely this street aesthetic and post-apocalyptic vibe happening. I befriended one of Barry McGee’s “100 closest friends” in the aisle he was working out of. Through him, I learned that the show actually came to be kinda randomly and is very much tied to the graffiti scene. It’s funny because Barry comes up on Google as an “American artist” but this show was less about him and his artist friends than it was about him and his graffiti friends. The show supposedly started as this casual invite from Barry to just throw some stuff up in this empty store with these graffiti guys but because the store was too big, they got like galleries, brands, and other people on board—it’s all a fuzzy, haphazard web of both loose and tight connections but I think that’s the appeal. Also don’t quote me on this because this is secondhand information.
My new friend (who I’ll call “G”) is also a graffiti writer and he said that’s how he got to know Barry since Barry is one of those legends in the scene I guess (Barry’s tag is “Twist”). G had to teach me all this new vocab… No we don’t call ourselves “graffiti artists”... We just say “graffiti writers” like “yo what do you write?” and then you’ll say “I write _____” and the blank is your tag name—the name that you graffiti. G was running the aisle that had art and clothes made by himself, his friends, works from John Doe gallery, and merch from NYC-based brand Homerun. I ended up going back to the show again on Sunday when the Anti-Fascist Zine Fair was happening so that I could gather this intel. G introduced me to the guy who runs Homerun (who is also a writer but I can’t remember his tag) that’s like this buff, charismatic guy with nice teeth who supposedly had G and some other dudes doing pushups in the aisle the day before (similar to the skaters it’s like spontaneous performance art but not really). That was the day they had already done the “5k Run Against Fascism” from the Nike-funded Homerun x John Doe Gallery popup on West Adams all the way back to 99CENT on Wilshire. It all contributes to the What Is Even Happening feeling of it all.
G and I debated about the show calling itself anti-fascist (with many artworks shitting on Trump, ICE, etc. too), clashing with things like the Nike collaboration, displacement of the mutual aid groups there, and many of the galleries in or promoting the show still being these larger white cube galleries whose clients are probably in the Epstein files. While my personal opinion is that there’s definitely a reduction of anti-fascism to an aesthetic or spectacle experience happening (Walter Benjamin tap in), I was comforted by the conversations I had with the folks running zine booths there who are actually engaged in mutual aid groups and a Real Praxis. I guess it should still stand to mean something that an event calling itself anti-fascist drew such a large crowd that there was a line to get in that Sunday. Glass half full… Glass half empty… You choose… At the end of the day, what I’m satisfied with is this feeling that I’ve cracked open some kind of secret, guarded underbelly of LA—the graffiti scene—and its ties to the greater art world here.
If I wasn’t already over my word limit, I’d really get into the other great shows I saw but here’s my blurb of honorable mentions:
Sayre Gomez at David Kordansky (Precious Moments). As a city, we will never tire of art with a keenly LA Aesthetic, and frankly neither will I. I’ve always believed in divine coincidences but when I just so happened to see the real Play Pen building after seeing Gomez’s Playpen (2025) painting earlier that day, it felt like a kiss from the universe. Truly.
Ryan Trecartin’s visiting artist lecture at the UCLA grad studios in Culver City. This time I got to see Trecartin in the flesh. He screened a new video piece (funded by Fondazione Prada I think) that featured the uncanny post-millennial personalities of his late-2000s-era work but this time their faces and movements were being morphed and mutated by AI. Love his vibe. Not sure how I feel about the AI direction. Don’t even want to talk about how nice the studio space was compared to mine that’s on main campus. I have no space for envy in my heart.
{optional image tbh}
The Worst Rave In The World at And/Or Gallery presented with Dem Passwords. And/Or is one of the most special places in the world for browser-based artists like me or really anyone who has ever cracked open a book about Net Art. Legends like Olia Lialina, JODI, Cory Arcangel, and Petra Cortright have been inside those Pasadena walls. The Worst Rave In The World was an installation of animatronics and multi-channel videos by Matt Barton and Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman). From the show notes: “The show plunders from the failures and noise of contemporary culture, which, when recombined, is no longer bad or good…” It’s truly the worst rave in the world, but also possibly the best rave in the world? The figures dance in this clunky, jerky way that is so pathetic yet endearing that you feel for them as if they were human. By the end of art week, I felt like the slumped figure in the back gallery—there’s a realism to this “rave” because yeah exactly there’s always going to be someone k-holing in a dark corner.
Maya Man’s performance lecture StarQuest. This isn’t the exact wording, but I was most struck by the line, “It isn’t about Images and the Real. It’s about Images and Power, and who gets to win…” There were references to the reality TV show Dance Moms, Addison Rae, Charli D’Amelio, the renegade, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and the world of competitive dance that is all too familiar to me too. I have a picture of me doing #TiltTuesday around somewhere. Of all the artists working with AI, Maya is the only one I can really get behind. [There’s more I want to say so I shall save it for a future review perhaps!!!]
Sizzler as part of Wilshire Online (on the same block as 99CENT) curated by Grant Edward Tyler. Inside of that dim forest green interior of an old Sizzler restaurant, there are works adorning the booths, the walls, and a particularly eye-catching light installation inside what used to be the salad bar. 99CENT had a more energetic bustle that kept you constantly moving in the space, while Sizzler was more still and conducive for a hang-out vibe. People were perched in the booths and against the walls chatting, having a smoke or a beer outside… Fab.
Wondering what the landlord for these vacant retail buildings on that particular strip of Wilshire thinks about the art world and this compulsion to show artwork in these defunct spaces… What you feel inside these spaces is kinda what you feel when you’re on Main Street inside Disneyland. Non-places that are imbued in a mysticism yet haunted by the Real—the ghosts of the actual Sizzler restaurant, 99¢ store, the Colorado and Missouri towns that Main Street is based on… These shows felt like temporary shelters for art (and the people who want to see it) that have their appeal in the post-apocalyptic, grungy aesthetic of it all that exists as the “cool” “edgy” alternative to the clean, glossy fairs across the city. You’re reminded of the dystopian state of the world we live in, but it’s really only kept at bay at the back of your mind, until the art week frenzy and haze lifts and you realize it’s time to get back to Real Life. Art can only do so much before Reality sinks in.
Clowns in a Cubicle: Cat Valentine’s Notes from Inside Ormside Projects
29 January: Performances by Bornweekend, Gabrielle Levie and Charlie Osborne
Pepe at the door gives me the iconic Ormside stamp. I’m sure someone, somewhere in South-East London, must have it tattooed.
I walk up the stairs. I smell the incense they always burn there.
“I haven’t been here in a while,” I think to myself. “And I’m glad to be back.”
Ormside is where I did my first line of K. Ormside is where I first learned a little bit about who and what is happening in London. A couple of years ago, Ormside introduced me to a certain type of millennial — the ones making deconstructed club music, putting on riverside raves, orbiting Dean Blunt. Music sounded experimental in a literal way, not in a genre way. People’s vibes were austere and spiritual - A kind of woke militancy. Lara Croft dressing mixed with keffiyehs. Clunky military shoes slowly giving way for streamlined activewear trainers. People walking around in those five-toe Vibrams, or the weirdest, froggiest Y2K Diesels you’ve ever seen.
Everyone who plays there seems to want more fog, more strobe, more layers of haze to hide behind. The room immediately evokes nostalgia and occasion, like you’re early to something that doesn’t know what it is yet. It’s the opposite of Cafe Oto, which could book similar acts but feels institutional — ICA-ish — somewhere you go to see something that’s already been decided is worth paying attention to.
I was a bit drunk and ketamined and remember almost sending [redacted] a sad text along the lines off:
“i canr believe ur not here.. youre missing the WHOLE THING.. Dont u care anymore?!!”
<\3
Let’s talk about what that WHOLE THING was.
I arrived into a cabaret performance by a life-sized nutcracker doll: Gabrielle Levie. Her movements were perfect, somewhere in between a music-hall ventriloquist act and an Oskar Schlemmer figure — those Bauhaus dancers dressed in geometric costumes, bodies turned into moving objects — half human, half prop. Gabrielle’s costume is self made.
She was lip-synching to old French cabaret music. It almost sounded like the voice she was channeling came from her, but not quite, which I like. If lip-synching is too good it stops being good — it feels like trickery, like someone hiding the seams. The good ipsyncher channels the voice in an idiosyncratic way.
Gabrielle ended her set by walking into the crowd, throwing little dice around. The room felt hazy and carnivalesque, like a travelling show back room only meant to exist for one night.
When it’s in between sets, Ormside visitors disperse over three main areas:
Outside smoking.
Buying a Vodka-Mate
Standing in line eagerly awaiting a bathroom cubicle door to open. When a door opens, often not one, not two, not three, not four, but five, six, sometimes seven people spill out of one tiny cubicle. Like clowns in a car.
Whispers start going ’round the three main areas that the next set is about to be on. Everyone reassembles in the main room, except for the poser losers who stay back doing drugs and taking pictures in the cushiony, loungey sofa area in the back. It feels vaguely clandestine back there. Like a soft-furnished VIP section no one officially declared VIP. I imagine this is where scene overlords whisper co-signs into the ear of the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes I am one of the poser losers, but not tonight, because next up it’s… Charlie Osborne.
Charlie is wearing a red-and-white maiden gingham dress with their logo screen-printed onto it. It looks strangely pristine, like it’s been through a cartoon laundromat — flat, glowing, unreal. Which is funny, because Dylan McDonnell told me he worried it would smell off the million cigarettes he smoked while sewing it together on the floor of his tiny room.
Charlie’s set-up is a table with a MacBook and something that looks like a keyboard but is actually a synth. Beside it: a mic stand. Beside that: a drummer. I think his name is Pike.
Charlie keeps moving between the stage and the audience, circling back to the table, blending sounds — stuff thats self-produced, stuff they've sampled, scraps of speech, glitches ripped from obscure videos — then a guitar loop, or a piano, orchestral and dramatic.
They sing live, mic in hand, then slot it back into the stand and starts clicking again, doing laptop wizardry on what I imagine is a completely overcrowded desktop: a hundred tiny files, half-finished exports, things called FINAL_FINAL2.
Charlie is in performance mode. There’s a manic twinkle in their eyes. This isn’t the soft-spoken Charlie voice I’m familiar with — it feels possessed. Sometimes a digital witch, sometimes a distant child.
At one point, they pukes green slime down the front of their dress.
At another, they accidentally plays a well-known song from the laptop — breaks character for a second, like “sorry hahahah” — then keeps going.
I love the drums. They have that Midwest-emo, sample-pack crispness — thrilliamangels-type drums — except live, so there’s heat and air around them, perfectly locked into whatever chaos Charlie’s building.
Let’s call this chaos a digital orchestra.
Thrilliamangels makes digital orchestra too — stitching together loops, vocals, scraps from all over the internet. They sound like songs, not mixes, but you can hear the seams, hear the collage. When he plays live he doesn’t try to hide the digital collageness. He doesn’t perform it either. He presses play on the CDJs and does a weird, funny dance. I like his irreverentness to IRL-ness, he lets the bedroom sample construction speak for itself.
Charlie makes it come to live.
The drummer makes it live. Her running back and forth to that crowded laptop makes it live. Pressing the wrong thing makes it live. I feel the labour.
After Charlie’s set I need a break. I go for a cig. I run into my friend Gulliver.
“I saw you in the audience headbanging, you looked cool,” he says in a sardonic Gulliver manner.
The Ormside whispers make their rounds to me: Bornweekend is on.
I amplify the whisper:
“BORNWEEKEND IS ON.”
As I watch Bornweekend’s set I become a sexy emotional robot-bug.
Bornweekend is wearing a grey oversized suit. He confidently speaks poetry into a microphone stand. He is not hiding behind fog or strobes, he is right in front of me, in yellowish light. He moves mechanically, like a tin me. He asserts himself physically - shoulders squared, planted stance - but his eyes reveal a slight bashfulness.
The lyrics feel intimate and emotional, but filtered through something non-human. Not quite “his” feelings. More like feelings processed by a small metal creature inside him trying to understand the world.
Hopes, dreams, little fantasies — textured with biology and debris and artificial sweetness and stickiness.
Rhymes like:
Little purple dinosaur, always leaves you wanting more. Engine running in my chest. Can’t you see I tried my best. Cracked skull full of smudge. Trying not to hold a grudge.
It’s not really diary-writing. It’s more like: the world through the eyes of an emotional robot-bug, maybe a bug with some Laurie Anderson DNA running through it. Everything disasters, love, the internet, random objects nicely flattened into the same deadpan tone.
He speaks his lyrics over a backing track he produced himself. Bassheavy and quite minimal, there’s room to hear the sounds he uses as individual textures. They sound squishy, slippery, wet, bubbly, squeaky, clicky, carbonated, plasticky in a bit of an oldschool way. They also sound fun and satisfying and like I want to dance with my hands in my hair, sexy on da dancefloor.
I look around the room and see people like me dancing with their hands in their hair, I see my editor bobbling around with a smile on her face, then I see her making out with a guy.
When Bornweekend plays his last song the audience cheers and claps and demands another song.
“I don’t have another song hahahh” Archie AKA Bornweekend replies. I think he played the entirety of his Photo Album.
He looks happy, he looks a bit overwhelmed. He slips off the stage, people pop up from everywhere congratulating him. I ask him how he feels… how that was… He replies something along the lines of:
“I’m glad it’s over hahahah.”
I personally wasn’t glad it was over but I was excited for what would come next…
…the afters…
Writing this I had to google “what is a keyboard thing that isn’t keyboard called?” Also: this wasn’t the whole night. I only caught three acts. Later, when I was asking my friend Rosie what she thought the angle for this article could be, she showed me one of the tiny dice Gabrielle had thrown into the crowd — she’d kept it in her pocket like a little souvenir — and told me there’d been a wedding band on earlier. Apparently it had a spooky, retro, kitsch-from-the-past energy. I think she was referring to the Faux Fibbers.
I missed them.
You never actually see the whole thing. You just catch your corner of it. Or read about someone else’s.
