Clown Cubicle: Born Weekend and Friends

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 her 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 she’s produced, stuff she’s sampled, scraps of speech, glitches ripped from obscure videos — then a guitar loop, or a piano, orchestral and dramatic.

She sings live, mic in hand, then slots 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.

She’s in performance mode. There’s a manic twinkle in her eyes. Her voice 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 she pukes green slime down the front of her dress.

At another, she accidentally plays a well-known song from her 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.

Cupcake… Earthquake….
Empire state… Exaggerate…
Barely there… jump scare…
Like, share, comment, yeah….

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.