On the Saturday night of ATP, while watching the fantastic Bitch Magnet in the Reds venue, I noticed a small wedge-shaped area on the right of the stage that wasn’t being used for anything. I started thinking about how good it would be to be taking photographs with the camera actually on the stage as opposed to from the audience’s point of view. I made some enquiries the next morning, and again thanks to some incredibly helpful folk who work at ATP, I found myself later that day setting up the 4×5 on the stage just as The Ex were getting ready to play.

I have a dim memory of seeing The Ex in Dublin a long, long time ago but have missed them every time they have played in recent years. Their gig at ATP was a collaboration with Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria. Anyone familiar with the Ethiopiques series of albums will know what an incredibly rich musical tradition there is there, but the whole history of European musicians collaborating with African ones is not a particularly inspiring one. Why do people assume that all you have to do is take something good, mix it with something else that’s good, and you get a result that’s even better? Usually it’s worse. Usually, far worse. Why do Western musicians think you can parachute in somewhere for a week, get some “local” musicians down to the studio to “jam”, and not end up with something that’s just garbage?

The Ex however are an entirely different story. These guys have put in the work. They have got in the van, several times, and toured Ethiopia, up and down the country, wherever they can find somewhere to play. They’ve studied this stuff intensely, collaborating with Ethiopian musicians both over there and back in Europe. They are not some fly-by-night act looking to add some exoticism to their recordings, they are deeply immersed in this music, and approach it with the respect and openness that it deserves. And they have hit upon an incredibly simple but smart way of approaching a collaboration with Mekuria. They haven’t concocted some sort of hybrid music, they are not playing their music and getting him to sprinkle some Ethiopian magic on top, they just basically play Ethiopian music. They don’t change their style all that much, they are still playing as a fairly intense punk group with a load of battered old guitars, but the actual songs they are playing are Ethiopian standards with Mekuria leading on sax (at least as far as I know, I’m no expert on this).  Happily, it really, really works – and the rawness and energy of it brings it much closer to what I imagine some band playing in a nightclub in Addis Adaba in the 1970s would have actually been like, if not exactly in sound, then certainly in spirit.

The photo at the top was taken while Mekuria was doing an instrumental duet with the drummer from The Ex. That’s why the other two lads are sitting down taking a breather. The intricate pattern of light trails you can see in the picture are caused by the movements of his saxophone over the course of the exposure, which was 5 minutes and 20 seconds long. You can see the faint outline of Mekuria himself in front of the mic on the left of the picture. Overall, an incredible gig and an incredible way to experience it. Big thanks to Deborah and Stone (that’s really his name) at ATP for facilitating this. My only regret is that I was in such a rush setting up that I didn’t get to speak to any of the guys from The Ex beforehand to let them know what I was doing. They were probably wondering what the weirdo with the improbably large camera was doing beside them on the stage ….

I love Les Savy Fav and even though have played Dublin several times over the years I had never seen them before. It’s easy to get distracted by Harrington’s onstage antics and forget what a great band they are. At different points in the set he was diving into the crowd, stripping off, hanging out of the metal girder above the stage, dragging a fan up and enacting a bizarre double act that ended with both of them jumping into the audience, and all sorts of other carry-on like that. It’s definitely more entertaining than someone rooted to a microphone and staring at the ground between verses, but if it wasn’t for the fact that they have such great songs it would become annoying fairly quickly.  The late night set was even better – with costumes, balloons, and the band in full-on party mode.

By the way, I have no idea what that white spike on the lower left side of the photograph is. It could have been someone carrying a phone or some other kind of light. If you look closely you’ll also see tons of dust spots on the image. I could spend hours in Lightroom getting rid of them but what the hell, I think it kind of suits the picture. It was a messy afternoon and an even messier night. Looking forward to seeing them again some time.

I’ve seen some amazing stuff there over the years – Boredoms, Melvins (for the first time ever), Sonic Youth, The Stooges, The Dead C, Slint, Melt Banana and countless others too numerous to mention. Myself and some cronies were tempted back before Christmas by the promise of a reformed Hot Snakes and various other attractions listed here. I sent some of my work to the organisers before going and asked them if they would be amenable to me doing some of my photography at the festival. To my surprise and delight they got right back to me and said yes (I say “surprise” because I am used to some small promoters in Ireland not even replying to my emails). So, after figuring out the awkward logistics of getting a load of bulky camera equipment from Dublin to Minehead, it was all go.

I have a bunch of pictures from the festival that I am going to post up over the next week or so. The one above is of Battles, who curated the Saturday (Les Savy Fav did the Friday and Caribou took care of business on the Sunday). I’ve seen Battles both with and without Tyondai Braxton now and you know what? I prefer the new three-piece version. The photo was taken in the main venue at Minehead during their afternoon set. It’s an exposure of 5 minutes and 48 seconds. They were playing the song Sweetie And Shag with guest singer Kazu Makino appearing on the two screens behind them. Drummer John Stanier is still a joy to watch. It looks like that symbol is about 10 feet above his head but he really can reach that far.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of the whole event. Many of the talks were of a dense philosophical nature that really required a background in various arcane branches of theory to properly get to grips with. I was also somewhat thrown by the fact that all of the talks consisted of the presenter reading out a prepared text, with no space for dialogue with the audience. After a while though, I realised that this had more in common with a literary reading than with the sorts of conferences that I would have attended in the past, and the texts themselves were so precisely and carefully constructed that it wouldn’t have made much sense to present them as improvised summations of the key ideas contained within them.

One talk I really enjoyed was by Karin Selberg who spoke about the performance artist Franko B and the parallels that can be drawn between the kind of ritualised self-mutilation he incorporated into his work and the antics of Dead, the deceased singer of Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, who used to regularly cut himself with knives onstage. While the art gallery and the metal concert are worlds apart, in this case what’s going on is strikingly similar. Allegedly after Dead killed himself, his fellow band members made necklaces out of pieces of his skull and handed them out as gifts to various people active in the black metal scene. It’s unclear whether this is actually true or not but if it is then no doubt one will pop up on eBay eventually (that is if Charles Saatchi or someone like that doesn’t get to it first).

They had various different things projected on to the screen behind them as they played – including a chunk of John Carpenter’s Dark Star. Usually that kind of thing just turns into a white rectangle during a long exposure photograph (like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters pictures). During the shot above there were some simple hand-drawn “hangman” style stuff on the screen that didn’t change too quickly, so it came out okay.

Here’s a nice Pinback video featuring some serious Aurora Borealis action.

A quick explanation might be necessary for those not well versed in the sub-genres of metal. Black metal arose out of 1980s trash metal and combines ultra-fast, ultra-heavy, intense metal with subject matter mostly centered around anti-Christian ideology, nihilism, satanism, and general misanthropy. The term came from English band Venom’s second album (Black Metal 1982), but the whole genre really came into its own with the so-called “second wave” of black metal which arose in Norway in the 1990s, and included bands like Burzum and Mayhem. Unfortunately this scene tends to be remembered less for the music than for certain notorious incidents that occurred within it. An extremely aggressive anti-Christian stance was de rigeur and it wasn’t long before both fans and band members took to burning down churches right across Norway. This was accompanied by a violent internal feud that culminated with Varg Vikernes of Burzum being sentenced to 21 years in prison for the murder of Mayhem’s guitarist (he’s now out). The notoriety of this incident has cast a long shadow over the whole scene but it hasn’t stopped the Norwegian government from acknowledging black metal as as important part of their cultural heritage. It was recently announced that Norwegian diplomats would henceforth receive some basic schooling in the ways of black metal, so that they could effectively deal with the increasing numbers of queries they receive about their country’s most infamous musical export.

These days Black Metal is pretty big news in underground music circles in the US, with many new bands taking up the style and stretching it in new and unexpected directions. It may seem an unlikely subject for intellectual academic analysis but some of the participants themselves (particularly from the more recent wave of US bands) are not averse to such activity. For example, here’s a quote from Aaron Weaver of Wolves In The Throne Room which is taken from this interview:

I think that black metal fundamentally is an attempt to reawaken an ancient spirit. It’s an attempt to touch some sort of transcendent primal knowledge that I think human beings had access to up until 3 or 4 hundred years ago when the world changed so much with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. I think that black metal is an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a fundamental level saying that the modern world view is missing something. It’s missing acknowledgement of a spiritual reality. That estrangement from spiritual knowledge is the source of very deep sadness and alienation. I think that is fundamentally what black metal is all about

Another case in point would be Hunter Hunt-Hendrix of Brooklyn band Liturgy who went as far as to present a paper called Transcendental Black Metal at the first Black Metal Theory Symposium. This called for the acknowledgement of US Black Metal as a different entity to its European precursor, defining a distinct set of aesthetic concerns, and arguing that it is based on a positive notion of transcendence, as opposed to a negative nihilism. It would be wrong to suggest though that such discourse is not without its critics within the tight-knit BM community. A quick Google search will turn up legions of enraged fans spitting fire at these guys for what they see as pseudo-intellectual posing.

Anyway, a bunch of small serendipitous events have had me thinking about Black Metal recently and hence getting really interested in going to this thing that is happening next weekend. The first was when a lady called Amelia Ishmael left a comment on a blog last week (hi Amelia!). I found out that she was an academic from Chicago with a specialism in Black Metal Theory, and after exchanging some messages with her, she alerted me to the symposium in Dublin. The second was a photo on Facebook of a friend of mine, Kris (hi Kris!), proudly standing outside the Helvete record shop in Oslo (original home of BM), clutching a bunch of vinyl under his arm. The third one was going to see, and photograph, the aforementioned Wolves In The Throne Room in Whelans. WITTR would be a prime exponent of the progressive end of Black Metal and as such incorporate all sorts of influences like drone, folk and ambient music into their sound. It was an unbelievably great gig – loud, intense, thrilling music that made almost everything else I have been to see in the last while seem puny and insignificant by comparison.

The photo above is an exposure of 14 minutes at f16. The venue was way, way darker than it would normally be, and so I opened up the aperture much more than I usually would do. Most of the light was coming from the lamps shining upwards towards the backdrops, and the band insisted on no flash photography during the gig, which was alright by me. About the only other sources were small lights attached to the guitars. This is why you can’t see the guitarists at all in the picture, you can just see the trails left behind by the lights. They have entirely disappeared into the darkness which, I imagine, is exactly how they would like it.

But an immobile canvas could suggest a change of place, just as a shooting star’s track on my retina suggests a transition, a motion not contained in it. The painting itself would then offer to my eyes almost the same thing offered them by real movements: a series of appropriately mixed, instantaneous glimpses along with, if a living thing is involved, attitudes unstably suspended between a before and an after – in short, the externals of a change of place which the spectator would read from the imprint it leaves

What Merleau-Ponty is saying is that we live in a world of movement and a painter can express this on a canvas by painting traces, glimpses, trails of the moving thing. He contrasts this with photographs, which are restricted to capturing “instantaneous glimpses” of movement and by doing so “petrify” it. He talks about photographs of running horses, frozen in unnatural positions, failing to convey the motion of the horse in the way that a master painter can. His view is echoed by Rodin’s famous remark: “It is the artist who is truthful, while the photograph lies; for, in reality, time never stops”.

The section on photography is quite short and it’s not really a central part of the essay (his main concern is with the nature of our perception of the world and how art can describe this in a way that science cannot) but nevertheless I found myself thinking about it and wondering if Merleau-Ponty (and Rodin) were taking a limited view of what photography can be. In particular this picture sprang to mind.

This photograph is from 1949 and is by Andreas Feininger. A print of it was recently on display at IMMA, as part of the excellent Out Of The Darkroom exhibition. It was made by setting the camera on a tripod and making a long exposure as the helicopter took off. Obviously there is a light on one (or both) ends of the blade and so the spiraling pattern is drawn in the air. Does this picture do what Merleau-Ponty claims photography cannot do? We could argue that, in this case, it does. The spectator can surely read the movement from the imprint the blade leaves. Or is this even more unnatural, even further from our embodied perception of things? Here is another photograph that is relevant here though.

This is by Petah Coyne – she has a whole series of these, and one of them was on display at that same IMMA exhibition. The reproduction on the web really doesn’t do this photograph justice. There is something about the surface of the actual print that suggests movement over and beyond what is suggested to us by the blurred figures that are represented in it. I found myself staring at it from a distance (it’s quite big), moving around and looking at it from different angles, and finding there is something almost like an optical illusion going on in the way that the monks seem to be scurrying about.

So, whatever about the helicopter shot, Petah Coyne’s photographs would surely have given Merleau-Ponty some pause for thought.  The curious thing is though, that while Merleau-Ponty was writing in an era when the instantaneous snapshot was the dominant vernacular of photography, Rodin’s experience of photography would have been its early beginnings, when long exposures and blurred movements were the norm rather than the exception. It is somewhat surprising therefore that he would not have seen the potential of photographs to represent stretches of time as well as frozen moments.

The photograph at the top of this post is of And So I Watch You From Afar, playing in Whelans on the 26th of September at the Alliance fundraiser gig for East Africa. It is an exposure of 6 minutes and 30 seconds. I took it from the side balcony instead of the usual front-on shot.I was a worthwhile experiment but I don’t think it really works. Back to the centre for me then ….

You have to look closely at the one above to see it (clicking on the image will give you a larger version). Right in the centre, up near the front of the audience, there are two people standing there who are rendered quite sharply within the image. There is a blur of bodies all around them but you can see them clearly, grinning away, while they take a photograph of themselves, probably on a mobile phone. What’s obviously happened here is that the flash from their photo has caught them and frozen them onto my film.

I love this. We’ve all seen this scene a million times over but usually it’s a case of “here we are, standing on the Halfpenny bridge” or “here we are, at Jimmy’s birthday bash”. In this case it’s “here we are, at a deafening punk rock gig, just seconds before Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys crowd-surfed over our heads”. Dublin’s a small place so more than likely someone reading this will recognize who they are.  If so, please let them know, or put me in contact with them, as I’d like to them to see this. It would also be really interesting to see the picture that they took.

This picture is a 10 minute exposure taken at a show called Globe in the Liberty Hall Theatre a few weeks ago. I had never been there before although many people had told me about it, and I had always been curious about the place. It turns out that it’s a superb 400-seater theatre housed in a building just adjacent to Liberty Hall itself. Liberty Hall is of course the home of Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU, and the theatre itself is owned and ran by SIPTU also.

It’s recently become fashionable in this country to bash trade unions. When the former government frantically cast around looking for scapegoats to distract attention from their disastrous mismanagement of the economy, the trade union movement must have seemed like an easy target, especially as there was a newspaper group, owned by a mega-rich businessman, eager and willing to jump on board and put the boot into the unions and those they represent. While certainly the management of the larger trade unions have to take some blame for the coziness of their relationship with the higher echelons of power, people tend to forget that the union movement as a whole was one of the few prominent public voices that was openly critical of government policy during the boom years. What people also seem to forget is that the statutory rights they enjoy as employees (whether unionised or not, public sector or private sector) are there because the union movement fought for them, long and hard, over a long period of years. The fact that our current difficulties are being used as an excuse to gradually erode and diminish these rights is no cause for celebration.

I was reminding of all this when chatting with the friendly and entertaining production manager at the theatre. I asked him why I don’t hear about that many things going on there and he responded wryly that they have lots of things going on but that they don’t tend to get much coverage in what he referred to as the “right-wing press”. Given that the theatre is subsidised by SIPTU funding they have the luxury of being somewhat selective about what sorts of events and productions they book in, and they tend to favour and support initiatives that chime with the basic principles of the union movement. He told me that over the last year or so they have had both Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson speaking there (the Michael Moore event was scheduled to take place in the Royal College Of Surgeons but Liberty Hall had to quickly step into the breach when the management of the college cancelled at short notice after finding out who Michael Moore actually was). As well as commercial productions, they also have a regular stream of events run by community groups and grass-roots political organisations, who would otherwise not have access to the sorts of professional facilities that Liberty Hall can offer.

Liberty Hall itself is a remarkable building, not just because of its status as the fulcrum of the labor movement in Ireland, but also as a prime example of Irish modernist architecture.  It’s not a building which is generally admired by most Dubliners, but this is a little unfair as its look has changed significantly over the course of its lifetime. Originally the outside shell was entirely made of transparent glass. It was completely see-through, with the inner workings revealed to the outside, and this gave it a delicate and fine structure. In 1972, a UVF car bomb blew out much of the original glass and it was all replaced by the silver reflective coating that we see today, giving it a much more boxy and unattractive appearance.  The interior of Liberty Hall is also quite striking and my photographer friend, Artur Sikora, who is also an architect, has some wonderful photographs of it, one of which is below.

Photograph by Artur Sikora

Artur has recently started a new project involving interior photography of modernist architecture in Ireland. I would encourage you to head over to his blog and take a look at it. I am also indebted to Artur for alerting me to the following documentary about Liberty Hall that was made a few years ago by Paddy Cahill. It goes into great detail about the history of the building and it’s well worth a look.

I do also have some things to say about the Globe show itself that I photographed in Liberty Hall Theatre but let’s leave that until another time.