Down Is Updiscusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos, self-releases, and output from small or overlooked communities. Today, Jenn Pelly highlights the Majical Cloudz offshoot project Belave and a new multimedia compilation, Major Tendons.
This past weekend, I witnessed a miracle—a band with a real self-made foundation, Majical Cloudz, opening their first date on tour with pop's reigning anti-material girl, Lorde, at the 9,000-capacity Mann Center in Philadelphia. Miraculously, Majical Cloudz visibly engaged the crowd and played one of the best-sounding sets I have heard from them. The smallest venue the Montreal synth-pop/conceptual performance project will play on this tour clocks in at 5,000-capacity. This makes it as odd and entertaining a time as ever to explore one of singer-songwriter Devon Welsh's lesser-known projects, which lands far, far on the other side of the creative spectrum: Belave.
I received the peculiar Belave debut, Darlet on the Brush, in May of this year as Mediafire link, in a curious email with the subject line, "Releasing an album via .zip file". I have since learned that Belave is a continuation of the earliest incarnation of Majical Cloudz, which began as a collaboration in 2008 with Matthew E. Duffy, the playwright/poet/collage artist/occasional Grimes dancer who came up with the band name's unusual spelling. The earliest Duffy-Welsh creations were four-track noise improvisations made to perform at house shows; Welsh says the project was crucial, helping him think beyond the idea of guitar-and-voice as music. "Banging on a cooking pot with a spoon also had its own sound," he wrote in an email, "and the point of making 'music' is to organize sound in some way or another."
Darlet on the Brush picks their experimentations back up, a mix of subtle disintegration, glitching beats, and grim, grating abstractions, atop which lie the medieval-sounding poetry recitations by the project's eccentic frontman, Duffy. Welsh handles the droning instrumentals (demos began last year in Berlin, while he worked out new ideas for Majical Cloudz) with contributions by Dylan Travis and Zach Henderson. The accompanying seven-page PDF of dense poetry at times appears to be written in a foreign language, but it is not. An excerpt:
For a low-key, home-recorded affair, Darlet on the Brush is a surprisingly extreme avant-garde record. Duffy's outlandish meditations come out in hushed but visceral whispers or clenched, gutteral screams. It sounds like a Shakespearan stage actor locked inside a decrepit noise warehouse, illuminated by sunbeams through a cracked window, fighting to be heard. "Boukolikos and Faithdreams By" and "Chardnights" highlight the intensity of Duffy's theatrical spoken word, but even the wordless compositions, like the gorgeous, blistering, piano-driven closer "Cold Noire Breaths", feel emotional and narrative. Welsh hopes Belave will one day allocate resources to hire classically-trained jazz musicians to record under the direction of Duffy.
I was intrigued to find that a track from Darlet, the eerie, atmospheric "Volta Ghosts", appears on an unconventional new music/video compilation, Major Tendons. Each track on the mix, which also features Blue Hawaii, Mirage, Suicideyear, and more, is accompanied by an original video piece—not unlike Beyoncé's visual album, in miniature—and you can explore them using the pretty psychedelic interface, below, created by Molly Soda. The compilation was curated by the poet Melissa Broder in her role at the publishing platform NewHive, which "aims to disrupt culture" by offering tools to make cool, embeddable, multimedia webpages. The result is a fascinating work of internet art. I asked Broder a few questions about Major Tendons. Explore here.
Pitchfork: How did you get involved with the NewHive platform?
Melissa Broder: I was introduced to NewHive as a poet, actually, when they commissioned me to create an echapbook. I found that the form drastically influenced the content, which is typically true of poetry; but in this case, the multimedia tool kit inspired me to utilize more organic structures (8-line stanzas, handwritten). I hadn't written a poem by hand in years. NewHive is structured chaos, which really resonates with me. I love Alexandra Gorcynki's projects with us and David Marinos' long pieces, where you scroll down infinitely. We have projects with the musician EMA and the artist Jeanette Hayes running in the next week or so, which I'm excited about.
Pitchfork: What provoked the idea for Major Tendons?
MB: This project came from a desire to see how far we could push the definition of a music video. Also, the way music is distributed, which is why we sought mostly original tracks. We selected the musicians first and then paired them with artists whose aesthetics, we felt, were resonant with the musicians. And Molly Soda was a natural fit for the cover, because who wouldn't want an old school mixtape cover designed by Molly?
Pitchfork: Can you elaborate on NewHive's intention to "disrupt culture"?
MB: NewHive provides a completely blank screen and a kit of tools—for free—which were formerly limited only to web developers. You don't need to know how to code. From a spatial perspective, what's cool about newhives is that they are embeddable in other sites. They're the YouTube videos of web pages—totally transportable. So in that sense, these visual/auditory hybrics can physically disrupt and be integrated into foreign spaces.
In the case of this collection, the music and visuals were made by different artists. But a musician can create his or her own visuals (like in the case of our upcoming project with EMA, which incorporates her own text, video, music and photography). The musician can create a world that is multivalent—not just auditory—and more deeply push the culturally agreed-upon characteristics of what defines music or art. Suicideyear is debuting the title track from his forthcoming EP, Remembrance, in this collection. I'm excited, because, in addition to him being one of my favorite producers, I think it signals a new era in terms of how we distribute and first experience music.
Pitchfork: How do you see this multimedia mixtape fitting into the evolving landscape of "internet art"?
MB: You mentioned the psychedelic aspect of Major Tendons. The musicians and artists in the collection are internationally-based, but NewHive has a tendency to attract artists with a psychedelic aesthetic and we think it's because of our West Coast roots. Also, the site's blank canvas aesthetic lends itself to a visionary quality. Mirage's sound is psychedelic. Blackbird Blackbird has a hint of that otherworldliness, the dreaminess. Belave's track has a fantastical, spooky feel. The pieces that Max Capacity, Nicolas Boillot and Willa Koerner made for them reflect those elements. Stephen Michael McDowell gave Shallou's track the trippy, deep undersea world treatment. Valley Raider turned Fennec's track into a mystical cliffs Renaissance video game. And none of the artists ever saw each other's pieces!
Blue Hawaii's track also possesses a psychedelic quality, but I feel that David Marinos' long-scrolling take on this track mirrors its emotion rather than its sound. I think that good art expresses a universality of emotion, even an ineffable emotion. Maybe especially an ineffable emotion. In that sense, I think the future of internet art—and its opportunities for collaboration—are limitless. The internet at its best, to me, is "you feel that way, too?" in a mindblowing way.
Pitchfork: So, is the endless feed of the Internet mind-numbing or inspiring?
MB: I will never speak ill of the Internet and all of the joy (and dopamine) it has brought into my life. But like anything else, like life, not everything is for everybody. Somehow water finds its level. We find what we need to find when we need to find it, maybe. The Tao of Internet. It would be nice if you could click out of life like that.