moominland chronicles zehn SOPHIE the plastic fantastic
For those who do not know any of the below names here’s a few albums that’ll help:
Eartheater - Irisiri
https://alexdrewchin.bandcamp.com/album/irisiri
Lucrecia Dalt - Anticlines
https://lucreciadalt.bandcamp.com/album/anticlines
SOPHIE - Oil of every pearls un-insides
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8h4HnWyys
Shygirl - Cruel Practice
https://shygirl93.bandcamp.com/album/cruel-practice
I’m about 100 blinks from sleep but ideas are fermenting inside me so it’s time to write them down.
Another week has passed into the cabinet of spent time and as I lie here with my laptop, my plush pig and my jar of rosehip tea i turn over the experiences I've encountered. Strange lonely people with bedrooms dedicated to their cats, vast wood furnished homes that hark back to my childhood memories of perceived americana, candlelight and spells backlit by eartheaters transcendent irisisi.
And a lot, a lot a lot, of music, in sweaty dimly lit basements, in peeling rooms of creative enquiry, in packaged venues patrolled by security teams that outweigh the audience. This is where i pause, this was last night and it softly horrified me.
I go alone, nearly always, I am now part of a predominantly male group of people that are not searching out company when they enter a music venue, but instead some clue, some key, something to unlock an idea or an emotion or a technical curiosity about the artist they are seeing. I want to translate what I imbibe on my headphones into a shared space and let the creator of that sonic piece transport me to their world, the stage design and lighting is ulterior though not unconnected to the individual or band of people on stage. But what comes out of the speakers, the waves that glide invisibly into the room, how they move me, they are the treasure I embark on my quests to find.
So yesterday night was Friday night, the queue to Berghain was probably 2 or 3 hours long at its zenith, gorgeously bespoke a lined hipsters were waiting in droves patiently outside griessmuehle and the more discerning tourists stood swaying in line at Tresor: what I’m saying is there were a lot of people queuing and a lot of people dancing.
But as I ended off my night, at 3am, a conservative time here to go home, I left a nearly empty room.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a Crack open air event at Else, there I felt a great sense of togetherness and celebration amongst the crowd, thoroughly enjoying an Olaf Drejer DJ set and being tickled by Omar Souleyman and his legion of wonderful fans. So when Crack announced a night they were putting together at Festaal I bought a ticket promptly spurred on by the line up including SOPHIE and Shygirl.
SOPHIE in particular caught my eye as I have been listening to her newest LP ‘Oil of every pearls un-insides’ quite regularly, at first finding it grotesque and frustrating but then reforming my opinion during a clean in my favourite household, which affords me the opportunity to plug my phone into very capable speakers and let the music I usually just pour directly into myself churn around me and become diffused by the various objects in the room.
It is a curious thing, ‘Oil of every pearls un-insides’ it is roundly drawn out of the western/ global, zeitgeist, but, naively, I haven’t much looked in to how it was made, or why, just listened, with surprise and wonder at how it chops so quickly from sugary pop to mean fabricated pulses and heavy distortion. I had an inkling of SOPHIE, a vision of her as a songstress, a performer, so I was looking forward to seeing a solo female producer meld her vocals into a live electronic set, and her hair is like mine, which is a shallow reason to be attracted to something but made me feel a sense of sisterhood with her.
Queues, queues, queues, it’s the mainstay of Berlin nightlife, I have never queued as much as I have done here, I’m not sure if I’m just seeking the queues out now and they were always there in London, or if there are more queues here, but now I always expect one when I go to a night in a larger venue. So I left my sister witches house at 23.15h in a bit of a panic as the facebook event said get there early as entry was not guaranteed, there has been so much hype, publicity, surrounding SOPHIE that I felt like I might not get in at all, as I waited for a the S41 at Ostkreuz I speculated on a near future of me panting up to find that capacity was filled and then standing there, smoking a cigarette and waiting for an uber to sweep me back to my little yellow house. This was all carried through when I got to Arena and, like one of the drowsy late summer wasps that feature here at this time of year, confusedly bumped up and down the street cursing googlemaps until I found correct passage and rocketed through Kreuzberg (haven’t got that A-Z yet, it’s a process unlinking your i-phone, though I got to curious fox and today I’m using a bound thesaurus rather than an impermanent one).
There was a queue, but it was minor, I listened to the tired sounding fashionistas behind me surmise that this was a marketing trick of the promoters and exhibit surprise at there being any kind of queue at all before showing my qr code, getting stamped and being ushered on to have my bag generally ignored by the second of a three tier security system at the entrance. It was ugly, I realised this on my way there when I checked my ticket and thought properly for the first time about what I was going to and connected the dots of it being linked to a fashion fair run by Zalando in the neighbouring warehouse Arena. The crowd I was expecting were there, taking selfies at a small planted wedge of wall and lighting meant to recreate entrances to large public events, where celebrities duly stand and pout before press cameras. 80% of the audience were in crisp high street threads that looked newly bought, emblazoned with branding and preserved whites on their footware, not much a line black, it was a little London in fact, you couldn’t even smoke inside.
It was also a prison, I associate Festaal with their generous decked garden area and outside bar, but that was inaccessible, instead it was one large room, bar on the left, red booth seating on the right and then floorspace front of stage, occasionally interrupted by rectangular plinthes columns and hugged at the back by the audio technicians booth. Around the upper part of the room stretched out a mezzanine area, which was the backstage space I quickly found out when looking for the toilet, a hi rise for the elite to watch undisturbed by the plebs, I’m writing this with jealousy though, don’t misread that. And the decor was empty scrawled white graffiti words around an angular stage, it was theatrical in its vapidness and a very far cry from everything I’ve been to in the last few weeks, including the open air at Else, due probably in large part to it being connected to the Zalando shopping event. But still, SOPHIE, I was excited.
Skip through Octavian and the energised grime audience that I’ve missed since getting to Berlin, skip through the 5euro non alcoholic beer in a plastic cup, skip through being very angry with my expensive eco deodorant for being totally useless and resolving to not dance with my arms up any more that night. Slowly cruise past observing a back stager and his hangers on to my left, hanging on to whatever made him so attractive with all their might, entertaining and calculating him, all appeasement, hot booty and expensive suits. She takes a while to appear, there’s a shifting in the crowd, all the happy clappy grime lovers replaced by very young faux trendy people, and me apparently, oh and the fancy people from upstairs.
She appears dazedly, blinking out at the audience as if she doesn’t know where she is, as if someone has pushed her on stage, there’s a microphone which is promising: though worlds apart, I imagine she will probably manage herself amongst the synthesisers and performance, as Lucrecia Dalt did stunningly at Atonal. How wrong I am though. She looks like shes been cut out of a magazine, jutting cheekbones and an almost fleshless chest, in a pale pale teal co-ord and a perfected calmer, shorter version of my red tinged curls. She starts, its not live, it’s all pre-recorded, I’m not even sure if she’s actually mixing it or acting, I liked these songs when they didn’t have context but standing here watching her thoughtlessly put headphones on, pout, casually prod the knobs and levers before her, I find them frustrating, false, grotesque again. Its an hour long, not once does she even touch the microphone, I flick between being convinced she is so adept at mixing that it looks as if she is barely doing anything to being annoyed that I have paid 15euro to watch someone conduct a masquerade to an audience of tweens.
It’s all artiface and roving strobes and dull dull people taking photos on their smartphones, it’s all so hollow, a surface timbre pushing it above the water, a kind of ringing crunching synthetic spectacle that dips into moments of brilliance but deported with laissez faire indifference. 20 Minutes before she is supposed to finish she strolls off stage with a simple wave to the crowd, but you see in her eyes that she knows she’s coming back, its part of the pantomime, a palatable reenactment of a real performance, no mess, no spillage, no mistakes.
I stand beestung for a minute or two after she exits, hanging next to my fancy neighbours and then buy a cola and have a smoke outside, where I have gleaned I can actually smoke.
I’m alone smoking, not trying to make friends, so I read, I read about SOPHIE because I realise that I know absolutely nothing about her, I’ve never read an article or a review or anything and now I know my perception of what she is is totally incorrect I wonder what she deems herself to be. I find this wonderful and detailed feature about her in Crack:
https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/sophie-earthly-pleasures/
She’s very smart, clearly, and industrious, prolific, I should imagine very knowledgeable on programming music, I doubt she refers to her tutorial e-book on ableton 3 or 4 times a week to further her understanding of the software. I think I understand what she is doing, but I question now if I like it or not, if it sits right in me, there is certainly space in this world for the plastic arts, but its product is so unsatisfying, it’s a big mac. I am so driven by this desire to distill and catalogue truth in my work, its drawn from a genuine need to communicate with others what I cannot say in words, I can hear it in many of the artists I like, it might not be personal truth: it might be big idea’s they are pondering, it might be ideals they are encapsulating, it is always something full bodied woven in the frequencies they create.
SOPHIE is my i-phone, she’s what I’m striving against, she’s a sleek inorganic version of me, I am very happy I saw her and came into contact with something that challenged me rather than something I knew I would adore. We learn through being challenged and having our convictions brought into question.
And I still got to watch Shygirl, who was sheer lacey feminine beauty, who hooked me and pulled me down into a subterranean world of meshing drawls and bassy unkempt eruptions. That set was made for red lights, it was music brought back from a brothel in the underworld and though I relished the empty dance floor for giving me space to strut my stuff, it was a shame she wasn’t playing to the crowd she deserved, I guess the zalando crowd want plastic, not black velvet.
This music thing is quite the adventure, I never went to 4 exhibitions in one week, that would of been exhausting. Berlin is an oyster, but the pearl is real, not synthetic and though the shell is only just opening I’m starting to get a glimpse of the endowment nestled in the pink curves of its heart.