Maxwell Sterling

‘Staying Present’: an AQNB x Video in Common screening rundown

26 October 2016

What happens to the present when we’re stuck in the future? AQNB editor Jean Kay, and Video in Common (ViC) presented the ‘Staying Present’ screening, reading and discussion at Berlin’s Vierte Welt, as part of the Creamcake-organised 3hd Festival, on Wednesday October 12.

In referring to the title of this year’s festival topic ‘There is nothing left but the future?’ AQNB x ViC focussed on the question mark, interrogating what is actually meant by ‘the future’ and whether the past has a role in determining it. The programme presented artists, musicians and ideas drawing on convention and tradition to comment on the contemporary condition by integrating old aesthetics, formats, media, practices and logics into producing new work.

‘Act I, Scene II’ of Jaakko Pallasvuo‘s The Hunchback of South Bermondsey sound piece — originally produced for quarterly podcast Status Effect — opened the event with a glimpse into a near neofeudal future. Armed with an “iPod Shuffle, your Master’s degree, the keys to your apartment”, a character called Lancelot navigated a play and a scene full of “wizadry, alchemy, allurement, sorcery”, while London-based producer Klein talked about the influence of Gospel music and the internet on her visceral vocal ambient project in an AQNB x ViC editorial video production.

 

Meanwhile, Gary Fembot and Easter combined and conflated contemporary issues and ideas with traditionally transgressive queer-punk aesthetics and outdated filming techniques in excerpts of their respective ‘Scream of the Mandrake’ and Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me videos. Maxwell Sterling laid fielded footage of Los Angeles’ surreal landscapes over his ‘Hollywood Medieval’ music production, while Institute for New Feeling looked into the oracle of the online in a custom massage chair and screen experience in ‘seek: a self-fulfilling prophesy’. Finally, writer, artist and witch Martha Windahl of MW Tarotscopes drew up an astrological chart prediction and joined the Berlin event from her base in Los Angeles to predict the future of Europe, live and via Skype.

‘Staying Present’ follows a series of previous events organised by AQNB and video production partner ViC in Berlin, London, and Los Angeles –all key cultural centres in the collaboration’s network. Titled ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’, ‘At the Backend’ and ‘Accessing Economies: Engagement & Withdrawal’ together these programmes interrogated the systems and infrastructures embedded in networked communication, and how this affects distribution, flows of information and power, as well as language, community-building, identity formation and assimilation.

Below is the full programme of video, audio and stills of the works presented in their running order:

Jaakko Pallasvuo: The Hunchback of South Bermondsey, ‘Act I, Scene II’ (2015) [27:17 min]

Helsinki-based artist Jaakko Pallasvuo explores a dystopic future with a view of the contemporary, as well as the past, in a co-production with Roy Boswell. The sound piece, drawing from three years of three different eras — 2555AD, 1677 AD, and 2015 AD — presents a narrated play that mixes and confuses historical signifiers, only to draw parallels between systems of power and hierarchy across ages.

Klein: ‘Key Changes’ (2016) [6:54 min]

London-based producer and performer Klein talks about her influences spanning the breadth of the internet, from Kim Burrell to Pavarotti, and how it feels to be a self-taught musician and artist being embraced by the greater “electronic realm”. Klein released her first EP Lagata on September 1, where she produces a unique blend of athletic vocal exercises that clash and combine with noisy ambience.

Gary Fembot: ‘Scream of the Mandrake’ (2015) [16:00 min]

San Francisco-based musician, director and zine-maker Gary ‘Fembot’ Gregerson bids farewell to the old days of his Bay Area city’s liberal activism and queer counter-culture, now overrun by Silicon Valley tech employees and bourgeois boutique lifestyles. Using blanched Super 8mm film, Sta-Prest and Puce Moment band member Fembot draws on a specific aesthetic tradition of San Francisco’s radical punk past, while revealing the hollow corporate sprawl left at its disemboweled core.

Easter: Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me, Episode 4, ‘The Age of Corn’ (2015) [17:06 min]

Berlin-based art and music duo Stine Omar and Max Boss of Easter present what their press release, written by Vika Kirchenbauer, calls a “soap opera in the guise of an essay film”. The four-episode series produced between 2014 and 2015 stages a world described as being in “absence of present”, one where multiple pasts emerge through the subconscious and internal worlds of its characters. Filmed with a camcorder and narrated by queer icon Vaginal DavisSadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me contrasts high quality sound with the low resolution video material to construct its own “ambiguous future”.   

Maxwell Sterling: ‘Hollywood Medieval’ (2016) [7:32 min]

LA-based, Manchester-born musician and producer Maxwell Sterling takes his classical training in double-bass and experience in scoring film to produce live renditions of cult-producer James Ferraro‘s ‘Burning Prius’, as well as releasing his own music in recent album Hollywood Medieval on Los Angeles Memory No. 36 Recordings on August 6. Through cut-up and collaged images, and layered and augmented synthesiser samples and recordings, Sterling develops an audio-visual experience at the point where nature and the city collide.

Institute for New Feeling: ‘seek: a self-fulfilling prophesy’ (2016) [3:48 min]

Pittsburgh- and LA-based art collective Institute for New Feeling echo humanity’s age-old obsession with future-telling via the dystopian narrative of modern clairvoyance and its corporate co-option. A live personal session in a massage chair VR that uses personal internet search histories and online surveillance to produce a future reading, ‘seek: a self-fulfilling prophesy’ presents an oracle that offers a false sense of calm in the face of uncertainty.

Martha Windahl: Live Skype psychic Reading

LA-based artist, writer and witch Martha Windahl uses alternative logics and practices to make sense of a universe in chaos. Her ongoing performance and clairvoyant work emerged in the grip of the 2008 Global Economic Crisis, not only as a practical solution to fiscal insecurity but also in response to a growing demand for a new source of reason in an increasingly complex world.**

Martha Windahl, 'Staying Present chart, Oct 12, 2016, 6:00PM CEDT'. Courtesy the artist.
Martha Windahl, ‘Staying Present chart, Oct 12, 2016, 6:00PM CEDT’. Courtesy the artist.

aqnb x Video in Common’s screening ‘Staying Present’ was on at Berlin’s Vierte Welt as part of 3hd Festival, October 12, 2016.

Header image: Maxwell Sterling, ‘Hollywood Medieval’ (2016). Video still. Courtesy the artist.

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An interview with Maxwell Sterling

18 August 2016

The original artwork accompanying Maxwell Sterling’s ‘Hollywood Medieval’ featured the British-born Los Angeles-based producer taking a selfie in the reflection of a window looking into the garish interior of a Psychic Store on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a picture that captures the sense of a space that the Manchester-born, Leeds-educated musician and composer does with sound. His first album, also called Hollywood Medieval and released on LA label Memory No. 36 Recordings, features seven songs inspired by and made up of layers —layers of iPhone recordings and analogue synthesisers, layers of simulated string sections and choral patches; car horns, bird song, traffic, an uncanny voice describing the theology of a New Age religion. Together they’re moulded into urgent and odd movements with titles like ‘Synthetic Beach’, ‘Funeral For A Building’ and ‘$50 Curse Removal’; songs for the Californian city made up of cascading melodies and vocal samples reminiscent of the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never or James Ferraro. In fact, after a stint as nanny to some children of the rich on Mulholland Drive and studying film scoring at UCLA extension, Sterling put his classical training in double-bass and composition to good use with cult-producer Ferraro’s ‘Burning Prius’ to a cello ensemble, first performed at LA’s Château Shatto.

“When you know all the sites so well, and you’re aware of all this culture, I think you just have this pull”, says Sterling, over tea with milk at London’s Wellcome Collection about the reasons he found himself ‘visa-hopping’ in the home of fame and fortune for the last four years. He began his career in music production with the “old-fashioned notation on manuscript paper” of his early music education in Northern England’s Leeds, then nannied, then studied some more, then worked writing scores for moving image —here, a collaborative soundtrack for a video work by artist Sam Kenswil, there, a small-budget feature starring thirty-something child Disney star Raven-Symoné.

Even as we speak about the differences between native ‘Angelenos’ and cultural tourists like himself, as well as his very Baudrillardian approach to music production, Sterling is between rehearsals for the first of two projects he’s been doing with his mum, post-punk artist and musician Linder Sterling, commissioned by lofty cultural institutions ICA and Southbank Centre. Sterling Elder is perhaps as well known for her work and association with bands like The Buzzcocks and The Smiths as her claim to being the first to wear a meat dress, well before Lady Gaga, which is perhaps an appropriate access point for the kind of space that Sterling Younger himself occupies as an artist. It’s one that’s suspended between any conventional notion of old and the new, high and low, specialised and amateur, together crystallised in Hollywood Medieval‘s soundscape for a place that can’t be described.

Image courtesy Maxwell Sterling.
Image courtesy Maxwell Sterling.

It’s funny that when you speak of the “dark underbelly of LA” you’re talking about well-to-do suburban families.

Maxwell Sterling: Yeah, well I guess whenever you’re dealing with those sorts of people, if you’re working for them… I was just living in their home, it was great. But mostly they’re really keen on taking the kids to these kinds of schools in far, far out Pasadena or Downtown, so I think through that you see some really interesting sights and it really highlights the massive gap between wealth and poverty. I think it’s only really in LA where you see such a radical change.

Do you think that’s where that sense of dread comes from, because that wealth disparity is really visible?

MS: That is a good point, yeah. But I think a lot of Angelenos are pretty unaware of it. I think, perhaps with my experience of being a foreigner, or being even a tourist at some points, you’re really aware of it.

Someone might not be aware of it but they’re drinking Kombucha every day…

MS: [laughs] It’s true, it’s true. I think that’s a real desperation, that I think you’re more aware of as an outsider, or as somebody who is not an Angeleno. I was always terrified, I had this stupid fear at the back of my head: ‘what happens if I run out of money’. That line between comfortable and uncomfortable, it’s very thin and I was always slightly fearful of that but I do think that’s something you’re more aware of as somebody who’s an outsider there.

LA is a really weird community where there are Angelenos that live there but there’s also sense, like in London, of just all these people that are checking through, or checking in, or checking out. It’s just quite a transitory place, really. It feels like there are roots there but also people often go there to figure out their own shit, and you’re never unaware of that. Or at least that’s how I felt when I was there, that there is that sense of desperation and a lot of the people I was around seemed very lost too. For me actually coming back to the UK for a while has been a very refreshing period of time, moving back from that overbearing desperation that you feel sometimes…

Maxwell Sterling + Nora Berman. Courtesy the artists..
Maxwell Sterling + Nora Berman. Courtesy the artists.

I’m going to go through your album song titles, I have a screenshot… ‘Hollywood Medieval’, ‘Feeling Without Meaning’, ‘Your Last Cadenza’, ‘$50 Curse Removal’… what does that last one mean? Is that referring to the Psychic stores?

MS: Yeah, pretty much. For me it was kind of poking fun at that New Age-y or psychic love affair…

Alongside capitalism.

MS: Exactly, which is why so many young Californians are so, they might have their own private jet but they still want to make sure that they’re karmic-ally not in too much debt. So, to me, I was always fascinated by Koreatown and Los Feliz, where all these weird psychic stores were basically in people’s homes. That was part of it but it’s more of a humorous thing for me. I’m not an atheist myself, I’m actually quite interested in lots of different forms of spirituality but I was just really aware, in my time in LA, of just how gross it is. How people try to offset their way of living with some vague notion of spirituality to make sure they’re going to be okay.

Is there much of a concept underpinning ‘Hollywood Medieval’?

MS: I wanted to tell a very small story. There wasn’t a specific kind of character or anything but there was this very, with the whole album it deals with the artificial sounds and synthetic sounds of instruments and how far you can push those until they become neither the original, nor synthetic. It’s this weird uncomfortable hybrid, taking these found sounds, then cutting them up into very small pieces, then looping them, then building up on that until a point where you reach a certain level of tension that just releases.

This idea of hybrid music, Tim Hecker talks about it a little bit with his latest album  [Love Streams] as well. He also lives in LA as an expat.

MS: Yeah, yeah I know [laughs]. I’m a big fan of his work definitely… For me, I made a really conscious decision with this album to only use sampled instruments and two synths, this Roland Juno and a Yamaha DX7, two synths that are very rooted in a kind of ‘1983’ sound and these samples that I find incredibly sterile, very saccharine. I really wanted a very specific sound palette. I wanted to convey certain emotions and ideas that typically would be easier to do with live instruments but I just really wanted the challenge of making something that kind of has a sense of struggle.

This idea of the feedback loop between live and synthesised sounds reminds me of this Baudrillardian notion of simulacra, of a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction; the way an image decays. LA as a space is very much like that, where there is no such thing as an ‘original’ or a ‘real’ space in the city.

MS: That’s very true. I think music that I’m really interested in is getting that sense of decay but also that augmentation; what happens, what is added within that dialogue, as well as what’s lost. For me, I’ll always be more comfortable with acoustic instruments, so it’s just really being quiet limited with the sound. When you’re working on a feature film there’s a sense that you have to get as real as possible, a bit like PhotoShop retouching visually. There’s this idea of ‘what is real’ or ‘what sounds real?’ And often it’s something that’s actually completely hyped and extended. I just got kind of bored of that. So, for me with this album, it’s almost like trying to push it and make it a quite vulgar usage of the sounds.

Have you heard of Los Angeles Plays Itself? It’s basically a history of LA as seen through its own cinema. It’s like a fictional documentary of its own fiction in a sense and it’s a real head fuck, in terms of how Los Angeles is its imagined self.

MS: Yeah, for me it’s such a fascinating thing, you know. Also, over my time there —I have moved maybe three or four times —and you really get a sense of, as vast a city as it is, you’re always aware of these micro-almost-villages, so to speak. You’re really aware of those different cultures and different communities and I think it’s a kind of paradoxical thing where it’s one of the busiest, densely populated cities but you can feel so lonely there too. I really wanted to explore that in my work as well. But there is no true, authentic experience, I guess, wherever you are.

It’s like it’s own filter bubble or something. The first time I was there as an adult I hated it. I didn’t understand why anyone would like it but that’s because I was hanging out with people from the film industry, then I saw a side of it that I like.

MS: Yeah, for me, it’s hard to really get a sense of it or understand it. Well, I’ll never really understand it fully but it’s taken me at least four years to even get an idea of how to relax into it because I think you can’t really ever escape the pace of LA too. To me it felt like you’re treading water, everything felt like such an effort to do there. Part of that is just to do with the geography of the city and just getting around but you’re also aware that everything just happens at half-speed, which, the more you relax into it, it becomes easier to deal with. It’s a fascinating place and I’m sure when I go back there I will get to revisit it and it will be a new place again.**

LA-based producer Maxwell Sterling’s Hollywood Medieval was released via Memory No. 36 Recordings on August 8, 2016. 

Header image: Courtesy Maxwell Sterling.

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Sam Kenswil, Dikes and Sills, Chlorophyll (2015) documentation

27 April 2016

Dikes and Sills, Chlorophyll, a solo exhibition at Paris’ Room E-10 27 apartment art space by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Kenswil ran from October 23 to 31, 2015. An immersive environment of sound, video, image and sculpture reflects a relationship with the Southern Californian landscape; an alliance described in the press release as “parasitic” and stemming from “a reading of the late-carbon liberal.” The show is placed in the context of Kenswil’s ongoing interest in queerness and the varying degrees of death; a recurrent theme linking catastrophe post-HIV with looming environmental disaster.

Using geological vocabulary, the title references three different types of natural processes that occur within the environment: a ‘dike’ being a slope of a rock face that regulates the flow of water, a ‘sill’ is the word for an intrusion between older layers of rock and ‘chlorophyll’ is a bio-molecule responsible for the green pigment in plants and algae. The works hover above the backdrop of these natural phenomena, and the attempted conversation feels unstable and fragmentary.

Mimicking the shape of organic formations, three corresponding pieces are placed around the floor. Handmade, the ceramic and sand sculptures look limp and floral. Beside is a triangular shape made from blue-green algae with resin and a zipper. Above, a mixture of resin, soil, acrylic paint and algae is made into a horizontal arrangement. A handful of sand is held onto the wall by a gel, its flatness humorously playing with the two photos stuck to nearby windows using cling. One zooms in to the artists’ smiling face, the other captures him from behind with sand on the elbow cuff. The third digital print is placed on wooden panelling, a man holds a rock tenderly in his hands and the colour of his suit matches the beige palette of the landscape.

Laying horizontally on the ground, a monitor plays an 8”55′ HD video of a rock formation shot with a slight handheld shake in Joshua Tree National Park. A soundtrack composed with Maxwell Sterling plays over top, the movements and sound are slightly out of sync with one another. In a 2015 interview about the work, Kenswil details his interest in living soil crusts or “desert glue”, stating that they are “dominated by cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae [that] keeps everything in place in the face of desert winds.” The exhibition is rooted in tender and fragile attempts to dissolve what feels permanent. Meditating on instability, the suited artist traverses a landscape searching for movement and flexibility within what feels calcified and unchanged due to a sublime amount of time.**

Exhibition photos, top right.

Sam Kenswil’s Dikes and Sills, Chlorophyll was on at Paris’ Room E-10 27, running October 23 to 31, 2015.

Header image: Sam Kenswil, Dikes and Sills, Chlorophyll (2015). Install view. Courtesy the artist + ROOM E-10 27, Paris.

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