You're always at the wrong party..

We've created a terrible confusion here. A huge, snorting hulk of a double negative. I'm finding it difficult to write objectively about this when we're writhing in the belly of the authentibeast, but nevertheless I should fill you all in on what we've learnt so far..


Week 1

Sans William, was mostly spent either in the New York Public Library (Oliver <3 Free Internet Access 4eva), or blindly trying to charm people with clumsy Englishness and talk about ABBA. It seems to work. People want to play music with us. Then I play a complicated, underwritten song at the antifolk cathedral, Sidewalk, and about five people join me on stage to reproduce the sound of impotent agony. People are notably less enthusiastic. I tell people that the project is about failing and produce fliers with 'ABBA' in huge letters at the top. I expect people to get the joke.

Week 2

William joins but is mostly away on other duties. I miss Sidewalk this week in favour of performing a guest spot as part of Will's gig at a Brooklyn house party. This is much more succesful in terms of 'musical' 'quality', but a majority of the attendees have already heard about us and are not interested. Already we have the feeling that a scene which is based around irony was perhaps not the best place to present a conceptual project that is essentially a huge, ironic joke. Still, we press on.

Week 3

The dark comedy is turning into thick, oily sewage. We play at Sidewalk, both as The Abba Confusion and Faceometer. Will is unsatisfied with his performance and The Abba Confusion seem to be being viewed as something of a recurring curiosity that, rather than be integrated into the scene, is viewed from afar with big glasses. Cue a massive wordcry on video (see this post). The same thing happens as last time, people get on stage with us and play. This time it's less painful to listen to.


We have to start looking at this in a different way from now on. Correct me if I've got the wrong end of the antifolk pole, but we're now looking at the context of failure in a scene where success seems to be viewed with suspicion, within a country where success is the national lifeblood. It's a complicated situation, but it's made even more complicated by our refusal to define boundaries or definitions. What exactly did we want to achieve from this? We seem to achieve our three basic aims every time we play at Sidewalk, that is playing a gig, forming a band and making a recording. And if authenticity comes from spontanaiety and spectacle, then we certainly achieve that. There's so many different genres of music at Sidewalk, so many different kinds of people, and they get on fine just using it as a place to present what they love doing to their friends and a wider audience. Maybe by playing music that I don't usually make, being more emotionally honest than I usually am, by playing music in a scene that I don't usually engage with, by framing it in this artistic ho-hum, maybe that shows through in the music we make. Or maybe it's seen as essentially disrespecting the inherent authenticity of the people who are doing it for the love of creating. Maybe, against all my beliefs and prejudices, pop music and artistic thinking are just not made to mix. Like oil and an A-bomb. I've certainly had a better response from artists and comedians and writers and generally people who work outside of the field of making music for the joy of making music. The thing that I love about the Beach Boys, and ABBA for that matter, is that they make it seem absolutely throwaway and effortless, but there seems to be something of the divine in them, which only shows its beauty within that context. It's beautiful because it's so disposable. But then there's music like Steely Dan, XTC, Scritti Politti, The Waitresses, which I love because it's using the pure form and playing with it, adding dissonance or wit or coke and hookers. If we were trying to do something like that, and I'm not sure if we were, it's hard to tell if we just chose the wrong place to do it, or there just wasn't enough of the concept in the product. It might be a bit of both. Or we might just be crap. Or have no sense of humour. Nevertheless, we need to get the songs out there. That's the point. It goes on.

Will told me about a lecture that was given by his tutor at Oxford, in which he says something along the lines of.. Picasso is essentially different to cubism at large because you can tell that he's a trained painter, and a student of art history. My natural reaction to this was to take the punk angle and spit in Will's face. How dare anyone say that art is inherently better if one has knowledge or 'better' technique! It presupposes a couple of things - firstly that if the end result of an untrained artist's work is essentially, to most people, indistinguishable from the work of a trained artist, then the trained artist's is better because of the process. And I'm naturally suspicious of either mystification or demystification of the process, my usual thought is that process shouldn't matter in the first place. Secondly, it presupposes that without the training, the unschooled artist is less aware of what he's doing when he creates. And that just made me cry bullshit. Until Will pointed out that his lecturer wasn't making any kind of value judgement. I have confused views about art, ABBA is just the beginning, and it's difficult to think objectively about this, which is all I really want to do, when I'm so full of contradictions. I hate the idea of somebody having to put something of 'themselves' in art, some emotional value, which is sometimes given as an indicator of authenticity. I hate the idea of art having to mean anything authentic. But, to bring it back to the only art form I really understand, I am also naturally averse to anybody singing in an overly affected voice, shouting out 'weird' and theatrical. But Rock and Roll is built upon theatricality and the abnormal. And more importantly, if I'm so averse to the idea of an intangible 'authenticity', then why the fuck do I care about it so much? Why does anyone care? To the aim of establishing a more objective angle, we're interviewing people. Really cool people. Watch this space.

Oliver