Turner Prize 2016, The Tate – Helen Marten

Here, have another slice of fresh Doomsday Student. Like we said only yesterday, Doomsday Student are Eric Paul, Stephen Mattos, Craig Kureck, and Paul Vieira, people from previously vital to your lives bands such as Arab on Radar, The Chinese Stars, Athletic Automaton, and Chrome Jackson, “one should not be particularly surprised by the level of dissonance, mania, and peculiarity thoughtfully melded into every layer of the music, from unsettling lyrics to hysteric guitars and irregular rhythms. Obnoxious to those who seek the obvious but beloved by many others”.

“Doomsday Student’s third album, A Self-Help Tragedy, unwraps like an exorcism, and hits like a nervous breakdown – full of anxiety-inducing guitar wails, curiously plucked patterns, raucous rhythms, and lyrics that read as personal anecdotes and confessions. Listening to tracks such as Fight and Flight is like being let in on vague, dirty secrets, decidedly taciturn even in their blunt forthrightness” so shout the press release, we could sit down and review it ourselves, the record not the press release that is – reviewing press releases would be fun, we don’t half get some right old horsepoopery dropping in to the in-box from bands and their appointed spokespeople – we could sit down and review the new Doomsday record but hey, who needs reviews? Here’s a second taste, go explore, the video there should make it obvious to all that this band are as vital to your well-being as any of their previous bands were    .

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The Doomsday track there is off Doomsday Student’s newest LP, A Self-Help Tragedy, an album released by Three One G Records on vinyl/digitally and through Skin Graft Records in CD format back on December 2nd.

Where were we? Doomsday? Well out of it now, no hanging around fume-filled car parks congratulating ourselves, that was so last year, or was it the year before that? It kind of looked positive for a moment back there, like there might be a building energy, like it might be the seeds of something worth investing something in, worth investing some commitment in, some much needed unity and some coming together to reach beyond the small insular little art pool. Alas no, it fell apart in a crash of ego and white powder, that and a gang of selfie-taking artists content to just show their art to each other and not take it any further, happy to keep it all insular and inward looking while they celebrate themselves and fail to connect to anything like the real world that’s out there beyond the safety net of those art schools they miss so much now that system has spewed them out and left them to fend for themselves. You want it all but you can’t have it, no big what? Faith no more? Don’t forget to hit the ‘like’ button now, the bloke took another photo of himself, better ‘like’ it straightaway.  Apparently “the Polish cold winter has created a new beast. The name of this beast is UR and its primal sounds have been put together under the moniker of Hail Death. The debut EP, Hail Death, will be released via Arachnophobia Records on the 15th December 2016″.

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Well the initial complaint on these fractured pages that the Turner Prize had gone rather under the radar this year is now a little redundant, this post Brexit post Trump atmosphere of let’s bash anything and everything while we have them on the run is starting to get a little sickening now.  “the Turner Prize has always been something of public punchbag for disgruntlement over the supposed excesses and pretensions of contemporary art. But this year rightwing commentators lost no time in heaping scorn on the prize as symbol of everything that was wrong with contemporary culture” said  J.J. Charlesworth pondering the rightwing backlash against this year’s Turner Prize and the contemporary artworld, the piece can be read in full over on the Art Review pages

Turner Prize 2016, The Tate – Helen Marten

“The rightwing of politics has never much liked contemporary art. Contemporary art is always, in the minds of right-thinking types, liberal, leftish, elitist, obscure and airy-fairy. Such complaints have been thrown at artists for decades, but the best part of the 90s and 00s, they receded into the background, as mainstream culture found its current enthusiasm for art, and as politicians, financiers and developers all got behind what growing popular appeal of contemporary art.

But in a post-Trump, post-Brexit atmosphere, the cultural mood is showing signs of change, and the contempt for contemporary art is reappearing, dressed up in populist rhetoric. Helen Marten, who this week was awarded the UK’s Turner Prize, had some inkling of this in her acceptance speech, when she talked of a swing against an open, “pluralist and liberal outlook”, mentioning the rise of “alt-right groups gaining a very visible and frightening political platform for a xenophobic, homophobic and racist outlook on the world’…. read on here

It isn’t just the Turner Prize though, the Turner has always been a punchbag for almost everyone, that’s surely part of what it is all about? my problem with this year’s Turner Prize was that it was so underwhelming (and I’m still pretty sure that train is a piss take).  it is easy to poke at the Prize, but this year it feels different, it feels more like an attack on cultue on art, one music on everything, it really does feel like there’s a storm coming and at times like this we need to be pulling together and pooling our strengths.  The attacks on the Turner Prize and culture as a whole, the post Ghost Ship attacks on anything deemed alternative.  For most of us this year has been about survival, about fighting for our spaces and places  The battle for Hackney Wick, the smugness of property developers and venue destroyers, those who see it all as being about me me me and the survival of the fittest and sod art sod community. Several times in the last few weeks I’ve heard or read arguments about art being an elitist thing, that 99% of people just don’t get it and are excluding from it, what rubbish, give people more credit than that, when galleries doors are open and people made to feel welcome, they more than get it, to say they don’t in insulting. Enough of all that, here, have this, something new from all boy/all girl, the intention today was just to post you a couple of slice of music today. I do find the need to defend  Helen Marten now, to celebrate her, isn’t the Turner Prize brilliant, love it!

Development by all boy/all girl. Taken from their new LP “Slagroom”, available now on Grind Select.

And here, have this as well, New York City outfit American Anymen have announced a new release with Lise, a Parisian singer and pianist. The ‘OUI EP’ is the second collaborative release for American Anymen and LISE. In 2014, they released a demo called the ‘+EP’.  In the two years that have since passed, they have jointly played shows in NYC and Paris.

the fight for our culture is on….

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of course none of this means anything when you listen to the news of the people in Allepo…

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