Category: Uncategorised

Below I have attached one of the songs from my performance in Oslo.

https://emmanuelsblog.myblog.arts.ac.uk/

I had the opportunity to perform Baile Noise at a club in Oslo. I jumped at the chance and got booked to play. It was in a small underground outside space in the centre of the city, the room became packed with noise heads and club heads a like. I was using a CDJ Nexus 2000, paired with my laptop and noise equipment. I began to perform, the performance opened with twisted and warped versions of Daddy Yankee and MC Bin Laden acapellas – I was fond of creating Deja entudu. It was incredibly loud, the sub was shaking my clothes. People started dancing and shouting, the incredibly loud and distorted cumbia beats and synths were blaring.

The experience was amazing, I think the crowd were incredibly receptive and excited to hear this. I would count the performance as a success.

Recently, I’ve become deeply invested in the world of Baile Funk. To me it is a party sound like no other, with a blasting DIY production, amped and clipped to compensate for poorly and barely functioning sound systems. It’s a genre from necessity, gritty, loud and totally sincere. Baile funk refers to the parties in which funk carioca is played. These parties shaped the Brazilian party and funk scene. Baile funk is minimal, loud, and distorted.

I wanted to experiment with elements of this party scene and turn them even more extreme. I wanted to experiment with making noise music more danceable and work within the environment of baile funks necessity. This is how Baile noise was formed.

Responding to the work of Bataille, Nick Land’s The Thirst For Annihilation was the first English language attempt to respond to the philosopher.  Perhaps, this is already a fool’s errand, something which Land himself points out, though Bataille’s concerns lie amongst the religious, the erotic and myth. Land seeks to use Bataille’s philosophy in order to examine what he refers to as our, humanities, ‘thirst for annihilation’, That is to say, the accelerationist urge to push forward to self destruction so that the world can start over, so that capitalism is forced to reset.

Later in life, Land has unfortunately become a right-wing reactionary, however The Thirst For Annihilation is more nuanced. The philosophy is undoubtedly edgy, and Land’s stance is extreme. There is a danger of sliding into ecofascism, and thus there is much to be critiqued about Land’s philosophy. However, in positioning The Thirst For Annihilation is the abstract I am able to consider the implications of a technological capitalism, and how we can consider alternative versions of a future outside of capitalism.

The silence throughout Breaking The Waves is palpable. Lars Von Trier’s English language debut follows Bess, a woman who lives in an isolated religious community in Scotland. She meets an oil rig worker, Jan. The two fall in love, get married and consummate the marriage. However, when a tragic accident befalls Jan and leaves him paralysed, he requests that Bess take on other lovers and discuss her sex life with them to him. Bess is distraught, as she attempts to grapple with her faith and her desire for her husband. Though Breaking The Waves is filled with conversation, the non-diegetic music only occurs in between scenes.

As with much of Von Trier’s oeuvre, Breaking The Waves is split into chapters and each chapter is denoted by a title card. Ironically, the music used in contemporary pop music which would not be listened to inside of Bess’s isolated community. David Bowie, Elton John, Mott the Hoople and Bob Dylan occupy the airwaves of the spaces in between, the places where Bess in neither arriving nor going, where time is moving but not quite.

Only at the end of the film is any other sound heard. In an early scene, Jan remarks that there are no bells in the church which occupies the centre of community life. At the films end, Jan is back working on the oil rig and he hears the ringing of two huge bells, almost as an act of God, from above him. The bells, and the music, is calling him home.

I am ten years old. I am looking inside of my computer screen, browsing my favourite creepypasta forum. As always, I return to my favourite story . One is an image of a dog with human teeth. Usually, I would read through the tale too afraid to look at the picture at the end of the article. The ‘Smile Dog’ was, after all, fabled to cause a lifetime of nightmares and seizures for the viewer, lest they pass the image onto someone else. Today is different, though. Today I scroll down, today I choose to be greeted with the dog with the human teeth. It looks at me through the screen and I look back at it. The story told me that, now, it would jump from behind the screen and into my dreams. That the flat image

That night I do not sleep. I look at my curtain pole, eyes wide with terror, a body unsure of what my dreams will now contain.

I am twenty three years old. I am attending a screening of We’re All Going To The World’s Fair at BFI Southbank. There are five other people there, all older and all expecting a horror film. One of them leaves. Casey, the film’s protagonist, enters into an ARG style game: The World’s Fair challenge. She expresses that she often feels isolated, that she does not feel that she can relate to other people. Inside of the computer, she attempts to find community through horror, she attempts to mend her isolation with performance. She emeshes herself into the computer, the line between her body’s end and the screens beginning blurred.

The internet was haunted again, through the cinema screen I could feel that same fear I had as a child.

What does it mean for an image to be haunted? If ghosts have unfinished business in the world, how does this transfer to the internet, into a screen? A screen is a thin piece of glass, separating a physical world from an online one, a space which is just as much of a space as one with tangible moving parts. If the images inside of a screen are not seen as tactile, then how can a haunting occur? Ghosts, those caught between realms of living and dead, cannot exist unless they have space to occupy, unless they have somewhere to grab a hold of. If an image can be haunted, does this not also suggest that we can conceptualise the internet as space? That we can see these areas which exist only due to codes and digits as real places which we must conceptualise in order to actualise the hauntings depicted within them. If we begin to understand ‘the internet’ not in abstract notions, but in terms of tactility, fluidity, in terms of all the same conditions one would apply to material space, then we can begin to understand the digital spaces which we al occupy.

The inconsequential background noises, honking cars, people shouting the telephone and couples arguing, make up the tapestry of the Safdie Brothers Uncut Gems. This, combined with the Oneohtrix Point Never score, allows New York Cities diamond district to feel both enormous and claustrophobic. Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler, is a greedy, uncompromising jewelry seller and high rolling gambling addict. Throughout the film, we witness the highs and lows of his extreme lifestyle. 

Uncut Gems seeks to demonstrate how the greed that capitalism fosters creates an environment where no amount of excess will ever be enough. The excess is felt most prominently in both the fast paced editing and the intensity of the sounds of New York. 

Stomach Cam is a YouTube channel where one anonymous user puts an endoscopic camera inside of themselves and silently captures video footage of their food digesting. The intimate images are, ironically, somewhat reminiscent of those captured in Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a 2022 film which focused on mapping the inside of the human body. However, Stomach Cam is different.

Stomach Cam is a fetish channel.

The strange, but overall innocuous, videos are offset by strange, grisly, descriptions of what is being digested. They invite the viewer to take a trip inside the human body and be digested too, and the comments section is filled with commenters excited to imagine themselves in the position of the food. In one video a banana is digested, in another Haribo sweets are swallowed whole. A video focused around an empty stomach is billed more as a tour, a place which could become someone’s future home, than as a place where the body could melt away. It is very disturbing, I could barely make it through a video initially, but I found a strange interest in observing how fans of Stomach Cam conceptualise their own, and others, bodies in relation to one another.

The imagery within videos found on the Stomach Cam YouTube channel allows me to think about abstract ways that people find intimacy and sexuality, which I can then incorporate into my artistic practice.

 Shozin Fukui’s film, 964 Pinocchio, forges the tale of Pinocchio: a sex slave who, when unable to maintain an erection, is discarded by his owners and left to wander the street. It becomes clear that his memory has been wiped and, after he is discovered by the homeless Himiko, he starts trying to relearn how to speak. As usual with this flavour of Japanese Cyberpunk, there is a bodily transformation. When Pinocchio begins to become self aware, his body is unable to take its newfound consciousness and it begins to transform in unprecedented, unpredictable ways. Fukui presents a creature who struggles with finding ways to navigate and communicate with a world which produced him for one purpose, and one purpose only, to be used for his body by those around him. Fukui’s other works, such as Caterpillar (1988) and Gerorisuto (1986), also feature characters wandering the streets of Tokyo, disillusioned at the city’s blinking, grey, lights which can all but blink at them as they stare back. I enjoy Fukui’s work especially because there is a melancholy underlying his dystopia, one which I see reflected back to me. The way these human-like figures wander the streets, being forced to transform from their own disillusion towards the world, echoes myself, my friends and the disillusion that many feel towards modernity.

Upon first glance, Hermann Nitsch’s 1962 Blood Painting is almost reminiscent of the works of Mark Rothko. The colours and shapes conjure images of Rothko’s famous Four Seasons images. However, the title of the image is literal. Nitsch painted it with red and black paint, as well as samples of his own blood. Nitsch was part of the short-lived Viennese Actionism movement, and created transgressive artworks that incorporated his own and other’s body parts.

Nitsch believed that artwork should disgust the audience, and in order to achieve this he often incorporated animal carcasses alongside religious imagery, as well as more real blood. His work incorporated ritual in order to celebrate the human body and Nitsch’s own personal philosophies.

The most popular of Nitsch’s works is The Orgies Mysteries Theatre. This was a six day long performance in which Nitsch attempted to reach the heights of excess, a celebration of the human body and a glorification of hedonism in the vein of much of his life’s work. The tactile, multi-disciplinary, work featured blood, food, nudity and dead animals. Nitsch also partook in the practice of action painting, one of which is described in the opening paragraph.