Sat in a Turkish café on a junction in Dalston, a couple of hundred yards from the warren of streets he has lived variously amongst for his whole life, Roy Nnawuchi is discussing the ‘foil-people’ that have featured over the past year in short films he’s made for art shows. “When you mold foil over someone’s face it gives an exaggerated version of it, like a caricature”, he explains, “I basically always look like a gorilla”. His latest short film idea, called Money, involves a parade of people wearing these foil-masks through Hackney and Clapton, culminating in a real basketball game on a street court. “It’s got to make you feel for a minute like you’re not where you think you are. It’s clearly an art performance but I want it to be a proper match that people just stumble in on”, he says. “So that you feel like you’ve been brainwashed to live in this alternative universe for a short period of time”. It’s a statement that resonates across everything that follows.
We’re talking about the foil-people because performances of Roy’s musical project Hype Williams often start with him in a foil-mask. It’s a crossover that, if not merely symptomatic, is endemic. “For me the music is a continuation of the same thing”, he explains, “I’m really into approaching every medium the same”. Comprised of Roy and Aliina Astrova, a curator who runs the transient project space/gallery Ceylan Projects, Hype don’t really have songs, involve a revolving cast of collaborators and typically play in art galleries or house shows.
With a torrent of tracks, mix-tapes, split-releases and videos emerging from the messily irreverent group over the past year – under at least three distinct monikers, or amalgamations of such, indicating distinct groups of collaborators involved on any given track – it’s hard to draw a line between Hype, Paradise Sisters or the Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band, each bearing the mercurial fingerprints of Roy and Aliina. As Roy stresses, perhaps rather paradoxically, Hype isn’t a band and its members aren’t musicians.
Their performances, such as those in the basement of Seventeen Gallery or at Ceylan’s Magic and Happiness exhibition where the group played in separate rooms from the audience, suggest something above the typical fare going on. At Seventeen Gallery, for example, the audience were confronted with total darkness whilst Roy squatted in one corner with torchlight illuminating his apish tinfoil-caricatured face. After disappearing through a curtain, Hype started playing in an antechamber. Removed from the performance, hearing music and watching a video-feed piped from the other room, and isolated from each other by the pitch-blackness, the audience were left to question what they were consuming, what was on offer. A performance that denied its audience the intimacy, the authenticity even, of performance itself? Perhaps but for the percussive reverberations, dulled by the curtains separating rooms, one could think that Hype weren’t even playing at all, that instead one was watching and hearing a recording. At the least this suggests a group not content with merely using performance as a medium of expression but one actively engaged in questioning the nature of the medium itself.
Whilst varying sonically between reverb-drenched psychedelic hip-hop rehashes and improvised jam sessions, Hype’s music is saturated with a hip-gnosis inducing lo-fi primitivism – like a tweaked-out epiphany attained through tuning in to the hum of a refrigerator at dawn as the sun breaks in through the window to stream across your face. Live Roy presides like a hipster-shaman beating out the percussive core of the ritualized drone to follow; looping chants, groans and yelps accelerate the ever-rising intensity into a resonating ball of feedback and alliterating fuzz; everything reaching towards saturation, to white noise, and breaking waves of nigh-religious luminosity. It gives their music an epic, timeless expanse; evoking images of barbarians thumping out rhythms on the gates of some ancient civilization as flames scorch the skies and leave the earth an ashen silhouette. Both in terms of practice and sound, it’s a transplanted echo of Gang Gang Dance’s early noise-improvs.
More recently, at least in terms of live performance, Hype has almost ceased to exist as its own entity, instead being consumed into the wider improvisational collective of the Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band. “It’s loads of people. Us, Hounds of Hate and a bunch of other delinquents which turn up every Wednesday and practice for five or six house, record that, chuck out all the off-cuts that are really bad and put it out as a release”, explains Roy. “Bo-cat is not a good word where I’m from”, he continues. “It’s a guy that likes to go down on a girl, which basically in Hackney is an insult. We had a few people addicted to Khat in the band, so it just ended up being like, ‘Yo, Bo-Khat!’ That’s how it came together. Khat’s actually a big part of what’s been going on recently. A lot of chewing.” Roy’s since cut down on his own consumption of the African bushweed narcotic after a picture of him looking like a saucer-eyed tumbleweed farmer with Khat in his hand invading a party of innocent youths surfaced; “it’s actuall the cover of the De Stijl 7””, he adds.
What marks both Hype and Bo Khat apart is their focus upon free improvisation, upon the singular events or pure moments of a musical conversation. Without songs, set patterns or directions to abide by each session can be anything, go anywhere, depending on the contributions of those that happen to be there are participating. “The best bit about playing music”, exclaims Roy, “is when you surprise yourself, flick an accidental switch and go, ‘What was that!’ If you have a point you’ve expected to get to and then you get there, are you really happy?” he muses. “Being surprised, for me, is the best state. I don’t believe in things having to be discussed or there having to be a point”. “To me this is the point”, agrees Aliina, “creating conditions in which you can be surprised by things”. Discussing Ceylan’s week-long Carnival residency, which turned Chapter One gallery into an open project space and culminated in a video of the work produced being screened alongside a Bo Khat session, in terms equally applicable to the Family Band, Aliina says, “with so many people and ideas together you have no idea what is actually going to happen”.
Although toying with near-clichéd ideas of 60s experimentalism and happenings, the Family Band’s improvisations avoid feeling hackneyed through the vitality that emerges from a group forging new avenues for dialogue and collectivity between themselves. “When it comes to improv we prefer to do it in a bigger group of people”, explains Roy. So is Bo Khat about adding more and more people to the musical conversation, without having any preconditions or set playing field and just letting it generate itself from there? “Yeah, exactly”, agrees Roy. “And it just gets better and better. It’s beyond music. They just want to get involved in the conversation and say something. It’s really fun. Which is why Bo Khat is really exciting, because anything can happen. It can be anything at all. No matter what it’s like I’ll be happy, because how could a conversation go wrong? The only way it goes wrong is if people stop talking.”
Underlying everything Roy and Hype are doing, mind, is a distinctly absurdist humour. “Just imagine fish spilling out of a room”, he explains of littering the threshold of the room Hype played in at the Magic and Happiness opening with fresh kippers. “Hearing all these shitty sounds and it looking like fish are literally pouring out of it, like the room is full of fish.” It’s a funny idea but it pales when compared to Hype Williams’ supposed origins, which, at once preposterous and compelling, hearken back to Roy’s comments on creating alternative universes.
According to their bio, Hype were formed in 2005 by a husband and wife team of motivational speakers, Father Ronnie Krayola and Denna Frances Glass, as an 18-year relay project handed on to somebody new every three years. Think of that old-school drawing game Exquisite Corpse and you’ve got the idea. The recordings from Ronnie and Denna’s stint have been stuffed into a piñata, hidden away until the end of the project. “I think it’s just tapes of them talking”, claims Roy, “these secrets that they’re sure are going to change everyone’s lives. But not for another 14 or 15 years.” Asking around the close-knit scene of artists and musicians Hype run with meets with mixed responses of incredulity and blind faith. Whilst, for example, Hounds of Hate’s Stan Iordinov claims he’s actually seen the piñata, a nagging suspicion remains that it’s tagging along to keep a fantastical concoction going.
“They’re obviously not very normal people”, Roy offers in explanation of the project’s progenitors. Apparently managing Hype and only available for interview via email, Denna seemingly verifies this in claiming the pair now sell methadrone and bootleg pulp fiction. “It’s totally true!” chimes in Aliina, “I didn’t realize that people find it so hard to believe. To us it’s all pretty normal. Roy probably makes it seem more extraordinary by his evasiveness. I think he’s just being protective over his kid.” Admitting how it could seem like one big art project he’s orchestrated, Roy protests that, “I really don’t understand what’s going on. It sounds like a pile of shit, but… sadly most of it’s true.” One wonders whether Ronnie and Denna are real people, or if he just made them up? “So do I,” counters Roy, “But that is what Hype Williams is”.
Whatever Hype is one way to get a better idea of what’s going on in the wondrous looking glass worlds abounding around the group is to consider a gold plate almost ever-present at their gigs and in the videos Roy makes. He compares it to when you’re a kid, “you find something like a stone that you make into this thing of great importance and hold it up everywhere you are like Simba on the mountain”. If only through its very presence at every show the gold plate becomes that. For Roy people do this all time, with other people too and its what most relationships are based on. “Now that it has this really big importance, it has to have its presence”, he says. “But, as is anything, it wasn’t anything. It could have meaning, but really it’s just a gold plate.”
“This is pretty ludicrous what’s going on. It’s not serious”, concedes Roy, “This is not someone taking their life very seriously right now”. Adding that if he thought about the future he’d probably stop what’s he’s doing. “But that’s what art is, you immerse yourself in it, you either do it or you don’t”, he continues, “Art is meant to evoke something – even if it’s disgust. I really hate indifference.”
In contrast, Roy brings up Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s disappearance at sea during his art performance In Search of the Miraculous, “Strive for the extraordinary in search of the miraculous. He went in search of the miraculous, went out in a boat and went missing. I guess he’s dead, but… maybe that’s what he was looking for? Maybe he found it? We can all assume he died, but maybe he found the miraculous.”
At once the instantiation of absolute meaning and inherently, absurdly, superfluously meaningless, the gold plate could perhaps be seen as a cipher for the miraculous ‘eternal troof’ sought by the group’s improvised musical conversations – the point of not having a point – and the Hype project itself. In a sense, it all comes down to a choice between just blandly accepting life or wanting it to really affect you strongly – that if Bas Jan Ader did die, he found the miraculous? “Exactly”, confirms Roy, “Something happened. Something occurred.”
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