Next Friday we will celebrating the life and work of Mark Fisher with Simon Reynolds giving the third annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture.
As announced last week, we will also be throwing our third annual for k-punk party and today we’re really excited to let everyone know who will be joining us on the night.
For more information and to RSVP, go to the Facebook event page or find us on Resident Advisor.
MARK LECKEY
Mark Leckey’s video work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is arguably the first hauntological artefact for the 21st century, produced in 1999 just as the death rattle of rave was becoming audible beyond its own community. However, less a work of pure nostalgia, it has remained within the popular consciousness as a hallucination of a past moment that might one day return.
Leckey has continued to adeptly explore this tension between hallucination and memory over the past two decades — with Simon Reynolds himself writing a number of texts responding to his work in various exhibition catalogues — and his recent exhibition at Tate Britain, O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, has demonstrated the continuing resonance of this power beautifully.
He also has a killer NTS show and so we’re really excited to have him come down and play some tunes for us.
TETINE
Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Tetine are Bruno Verner and Eliete Mejorado. Renowned for their explosive performances, they bulldoze their way across genres, bringing a hard baile funk edge to their post-punk sonic excursions.
Following the duo’s amazing b2b DJ set at our for k-punk fundraiser at the end of last year, we have invited them back to show us the other side of what they do.
They will also already be familiar faces to many around New Cross, with Bruno currently co-teaching Mark’s former “Popular Modernism” module on the BA Fine Art and History of Art course at Goldsmiths. We couldn’t think of any other duo better to help us think Mark’s work as a dancefloor this year.
CHOOC LY
Chooc Ly Tan is an artist, DJ and lecturer who recently launched the club night Décalé at DIY Space for London in the summer of 2019.
“Décalé” means “being displaced in space and time” and this is a vibe that epitomises life in this strange city more now than ever before, as a space where temporalities and spaces jostle for position.
“When dusk arises, agitated spirits awake…”, she writes, describing the night as a platform where “nocturnal creatures, loud existential insurgents, and disobedient children” can “encounter experimental, collapsing and flawless sounds/visuals — a night for collective experience” where together “we will re-write reality for an alternate tomorrow.”
Echoing the sentiment at the heart of for k-punk over the last few years, she is evidently a fellow traveller of the highest order and we can’t wait to hear what she brings to the occasion.
RKSS
rkss’ 2018 album DJ Tools, released on UIQ, has spent a long time in my head. I wrote about it on the blog not long after its release and what was said there remains reason enough for why I’m excited for her set on Friday.
Following on from Reynolds’ 90s essays on the hardcore continuum — “No narrative, no destination: Ardkore is an intransitive acceleration, an intensity without object.” — rkss reveals rave’s new form in the 21st century to be laid out across a plane of consistency where underground and pop culture, snd and Ultrabeat, become an altogether new blob — and it still slaps.
This isn’t meant to be a surprise, however. This is not a crass postmodernism for avant-pop. You will find no trace of Evian Christ’s thousand layers of irony or Lorenzo Senni’s avant-garde rehabilitations here. This is popular modernism as Mark always hoped to see it.
JENNIFER WALTON
I first met Jennifer Walton at the launch of Most Dismal Swamp in Dalston last year. Connecting through mutual friends, Jen was evidently a fellow traveller from the first time I saw her perform. Since then, she has toured extensively with Kero Kero Bonito and recently released White Nurse on Mutualism.
An EP openly inspired by the Xenofeminist Manifesto, White Nurse is a work of power electronics that eschews the genre’s previous predilection for fascist imagery, transforming its wider aesthetic into a necessarily and properly prosthetic mode — a 21st century slab of throbbing bass gristle that escapes essentialisation and ask how both the politics of music and our bodies can continue to make themselves new.
Fittingly, you never know what to expect from a Walton set, other than a visceral collective and embodied joy. Don’t miss it.
2 Comments