deathship

'' '' [sic] Goldie - Mark Wastell - Eddie Prévost - Mattin

Thanks to Dennis, Anthony, Alexandra, Nick and the people at Titanic

Between the long stagnant and vital (full of forms of life) trough of commercial road, the self-mythologising skyline of the money mill beyond Aldgate, the Titanic, Totenschiff, death ship: a container ship of spent labour power looms out, for this night welcoming an evening of para-musical hiatus.

The would-be Wire journalist making notes in the corner pondering the possibility to make a review – report that spoke only of the audiences’ performance?

An audience-performer talking erratically in a variety of foreign tongues on a mobile telephone.

One week after the E.S.F. – graspings at organization, fumblings in the semiotic darkness and dead ends of a “the war on terror”. This neat skipping between poles of sound meshwork and unravellings came on more vital. Players with enough distance between to safely mock their opponents, few enough furnishings to require total attention to their task and an orientation that turned the performance outside in : the audience in the limelight, the ‘performers’ relegated to the corners of vast space. In this theatre of discomfort – edginess, in many ways the ‘audience’ didn’t rise to the occasion…

Even the polite head nods and exchange of smoking materials felt edgy in this space and under this performance-rule this non-theatrical theatre of contingency. Performance marked out in amongst palpable traces of the violence of this space – violence of the relations that produced it – under which it yielded - tempered with the uneasy violence and restraint in the sound making gestures offered back.

Left as alienated as before – communing without community, and without, for once, the pretense of this, its pressure. This one, this space this night, escaped heritage : this one space heritage’s (peepers) scan over incredulous at finding find activity energy squandered filling an empty space otherwise ripe for his regular harvest of stasis - normative value. Value restored through restoration of a norm that will never exist until the contingency that always banished it is dead to the last shred. Unable to intercede he (ritage) retreats recovering his footsteps, better gaze on the Lutheran Church, better scorn the developers billboard and walk away. Out of the orbit of culture’s terror. Re-used mis-used spent and soon to be afloat again on the float of fictional capital. The charge of disinterested moneymen a short term stay for tooled up music makers with the time to waste.

Abandon ship we melted away eased and loosed as without coordinates as we had arrived.