Soundtrack or Treat: A Halloween Mixtape

I used to regularly bother bars and parties playing willfully quirky selections of other peoples records mixed badly, something that ceased to be a unique selling point somewhere around the late nineties. I don't do this very often any more, except on the occasional aurally-masochistic request.

As a result, I have started making mixtapes again. This, along with my recent return to comics and loud and lousy bedroom guitar, is entirely symptomatic of my recent college-era geek regression. I plan to blog about the latter soon, but I haven't had much time to write recently. Instead, in celebration of the Halloween season, please accept the following mash up of horror soundtracks and other spooky seasonal treats, featuring guest appearances from John Carpenter, Burt Bacharach, Biz Markie and the long awaited meeting of Goblin with the Goblin King! 

Soundtrack or Treat! : Mat's Halloween Mixtape (Download on Soundcloud) 

Look away now to avoid the oncoming horrors of... 

1. “Cropsy…” (The Burning)
2. Saving the Day – Alessi (Ghostbusters)
3. “The dead are coming back to life…” (Night of the Living Dead)
4. The Gonk – Herbert Chappell (Dawn of the Dead)
5. Haunted House – DJ Yoda feat. Biz Markie
6. Suspiria – Goblin (Suspiria)
7. The Blob – The Five Blobs (The Blob)
8. “I knew this boy..” (Halloween)
9. The Beyond – Fabio Frizzi (The Beyond)
10. Putting out the fire – David Bowie (Cat People)
11. Halloween theme – John Carpenter (Halloween)
12. He’s Back (Man behind the Mask) – Alice Cooper (Friday the 13th Pt VI)
13. Silver Shamrock – John Carpenter (Halloween III: Season of the Witch)

I'll be back soon, but in the meantime please visit my friends at the really good Garageland Magazine arts and culture blog where I've just guest posted on Bergman's Seventh Seal.

Happy Hallowe'en!

A Brief History of Rhyme: The Place of Space in Popular Music

"I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher . . . we might get a much better idea of what we saw." - Michael Collins, Astronaut, Apollo 11  

From our earliest beginnings, Space has been a constant and incalculable influence on the development of humankind. Its vast unreachable beauty has seduced philosophers and theologians to establish the fundamental belief systems of our world. The challenge of cosmic unknowability has inspired scientists to achieve technological developments of great audacity and hubris. It has also had big impact on popular music of the last fifty years.

The original Satellite of Love:
The Tornados Telstar (1962)

The birth of rock and roll coincided with our first faltering steps into Space and so it is little surprise that the airwaves of the late fifties were cluttered with cosmic boogie. The post-war baby boomers of the fifties embraced the modern and looked to the future, keen to hip-shake away the austerity of the past. In 1957, as Sputnik became the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the airwaves below were cluttered with such songs as Skip Stanley’s Satellite Baby, Jackie Lowell’s Rocket Trip or Sonny Sheather’s Orbit With Me. One of the biggest hits of this era was Telstar by The Tornados, an instrumental that reached the US Number One spot in 1962 and was rather unromantically named after one of the first communication satellites.   

Space travel represented an aspiration for a better world and the Space Race imagery of this new technology would come to define a generation. Between 1961 - when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin undertook the first human spaceflight – and 1969 - when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon - Space exploration would remain a pop music preoccupation. However, for the hippy generation unlike the unreconstructed rock and rollers before them, it was no longer the technology of the establishment that seduced them.  

We can see this conceptual shift in the cheery country rock of The Byrd’s Mr Spaceman (1966).  Here, frontman Roger McGuinn asks not that humankind reaches out to conquer Space, but instead begs that some alien being comes to invite us to the stars and release us from the boredom of our little world. Presumably, McGuinn immediately regretted this plea to “take them away” as his band members would thereafter be abducted by west coast supergroups on a frustratingly regular basis.  

It’s no coincidence that a cosmic theme would dominate an era of astral projection and chemical experimentation. For a youth who longed to be free from the ridged conventions of oppressive conservative society, Space was the ultimate trip, man. It was a place to find freedom and transcendence.  

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon (1973):
the soundtrack to countless teenage
stoner daydreams.

The Grateful Dead’s epic Dark Star (1968) was literally a psychedelic space capsule designed to carry the listeners out to the farthest reaches of cosmic consciousness, without the necessity of multimillion dollar technology, whilst Deep Purple took us on an altogether more raucous and booze fuelled musical tour of the solar system in Space Trucking (1971). Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive (1966) - complete with a musical nod to the Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme – would be a practice launch for their later progressive rock journey to The Dark Side of The Moon (1973).

But even if the tie-dyed daydreams of the hippies and rockers were the privileged affectations of a predominantly white middle class, the promise of freedom delivered from beyond the stars still proved a universal and multicultural attraction.

In the Beyonder cycle, prototype hip hop collective The Last Poets embraced the ‘otherness’ of African American culture by reflecting on a fictional history of a black diaspora literally descended from an powerful alien race. Perhaps this was the only way to explain the terrible inequalities and indignities of segregation and - in this narrative - there was also the promise of cosmic emancipation at some point in the near future.

Jazz bandleader Sun Ra and funk icon George Clinton both took this concept of 'Afrofuturism' even further.

Sun Ra claimed that he was of the "Angel Race" and was not from Earth, but Saturn. He developed a complex persona using cosmic philosophies and lyrical poetry, leading his "Arkestra" on a free jazz journey that pioneered the electronica and the space rock genres.

Pass the peace: 
George Clinton arrives on the Mothership.

George Clinton also adopted an outrageous extra-terrestrial persona, who arrived on Earth and onstage in The P Funk Mothership, accompanied by his agents of Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication. An integral part of the P Funk mythology, the Mothership existed both conceptually as a fictional vehicle of funk deliverance and as a physical prop central to P Funk concerts. Powered by unknown means, presumably The Funk and simple stagecraft, the Mothership appeared over the Planet Earth many times during the second half of the Twentieth century and was even seen to physically land at a number of live music venues in the United States during the 1970s in order to disgorge its Funk to the people.

Perhaps The Arkestra and the P Funk Mothership weren’t exactly what easy listening and uneasy siblings The Carpenters yearned for in their rather odd cover of Klaatuu's Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (1977), but at least they too tried to reach out to the zeitgeist.

During the 1970’s, the counterculture and the Space industry both faced a dramatic comedown. Each had searched furiously for something greater beyond the confines of our little world and had discovered little more than a vast, empty nothingness. Encapsulating this mood, jazz poet Gil Scott Heron was more concerned with down to earth matters and saw the Space Race as an unnecessary technological distraction in times of great social and racial inequality. After all, how relevant was the arrival of Whitey on the Moon (1971) when “the man just upped your rent again”, “the price of food is going up” and you “can’t pay no doctor bill”. Here, Heron angrily vocalised the ambivalence of deprived, impoverished and segregated communities still here on earth to the fabulously expensive and ultimately futile endeavours of the entitled establishment. Even Elton John’s hit single Rocket Man (1971) reflected the bittersweet notion of astronauts no longer being perceived as heroes, but in fact as an "everyday occupation". 

Loving the Alien:
David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Nevertheless, whilst increasing scepticism that our utopian future might be written in the stars dampened enthusiasm for the psychedelic excesses of the cosmic, Space still proved a compelling canvas upon which to project the rhythmic, melodic poetry of our teenage symphonies to lust and longing. Proof that more alienating times only serve to increase the allure of the alien can be found in the career of David Bowie. Bowie practically pioneered the persona of the pop star as alienated alien - quite literally in his eponymous role as The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). Bowie’s Space is a surreal and strange place of dreams and malleable meanings. Space Oddity (1969) may reflect either the plight of the Apollo 8 astronauts or simply Bowies own drug use and desire to let go of the world. Life on Mars (1971) is like a love song as painted by Salvador Dalí. The infinite possibilities of Space offered a context for Bowies abstract cut-up lyrics and invested them with an anthemic believability that would have been quite impossible if tethered to the gravity of our everyday lives on Planet Earth.

At it’s heart, pop music promises escapism and the greatest escape of all will always be into the stars – whether literally or figuratively. Sci-fi Hi-Fi is the embodiment of aspiration, whether lofty or - in the case of Mötley Crüe's longing for a "lady with a body from outer space" or Ash's whimsical Girl from Mars (1995) - lustful. It’s no surprise that during the Acid House explosion of the late 1980s Space again became a preoccupation of the ravers of the self-styled Second Summer of Love. In terms of intergalactic obsessions there were many parallels with the First. Psychedelic electronica outfit The Orb made many ambient musical journeys into Space, most notably on U.F.Orb (1992), a concept album of bizarre soundscapes documenting the bands fascination with alien life. One of the defining anthems of this period would be The Prodigy’s Out of Space (1992), which samples from the Max Romeo’s classic reggae track, I Chase the Devil (1976). Romeo's lyrical cry - “I’m gone send into Outer Space, to find another race” - was originally a call to reject the Devil and banish him to a distant galaxy, but in the hands of Ecstasy kids it became the chant of another jilted generation once again reclaiming their birthright to escape to the stars. 

 

Pop star astronauts from likely the most intolerable Space mission in NASA's history:
(Clockwise from top left) Lil' Wayne, Moby, Lily Allen and Christina Aguilera.

There is still no shortage of galactic longing. Since Bowies defining first appearance it has become a regular occurring trope for the distinctively unusual, idiosyncratic or just plain kooky pop performer to present themselves as something quite alien. Kate Bush, Tricky, Bjork and Lady Gaga have all flirted with this at some point in their careers. It was even recently reported that Beyonce and Jay-Z were in talks with commercial spaceflight provider Virgin Galactic to shoot the first music video in Space.

As Oscar Wilde observed, whilst we are all in the gutter, some of us will always be looking at the stars. In fact, in more austere times, those who look to the stars appear even more glorious and alien.

What the music of these eras share is optimism, sometimes for what we have achieved up to now and sometimes for what we could achieve in the future. On reflection, Space seems most often associated with hope and, in these challenging and distinctly down-to-earth times, perhaps we could all do with a little more cosmic in our boogie and sputnik in our bowl.

Möbius Stripped Bare: Some Thoughts on Loops and Repetition

Cecilia Bonilla’s video art installation In An Instant All Will Vanish is a looped film of a gymnast preparing to deliver her floor routine. The seamlessly replayed clip denies us the resolution of her actual performance, stretching a brief moment of anticipation into an eternity and inviting us into the private inner world of the lone athlete.

In An Instant All Will Vanish

2011, single chanel DVD, continuous loop, soundtrack
(Cecilia Bonilla with Matt Lewis, commissioned by Haringey Arts Council)

Exhibited as part of Fabricate, Inter Alia's current exhibition at The Parlour Gallery, this installation is intriguingly curated into the otherwise static company of photography and printed works. As an experiential piece, it is quite compelling and left me reflecting on the psychology of loops and repeated patterns. 

Upon viewing a moving image, our first instinct is to interpret narrative and continuity. In Bonilla’s piece, we feel the sense of rising tension as we wait for something to happen, but it never does. The moving image implies a passage of time and so a carefully looped video can almost create an alternate timeline for the viewer, alternately extracting and abstracting meaning like a repeated word word word word word word word word word word word word. 

Scooby and Shaggy run out of the

"repeat pan" and into the fire!

Yet despite the infinite promise of the endlessly recycled vignette, this hypnotic effect is temporary. As we begin to notice and preempt the repeated shrugs and small movements of Banilla’s subject, the spell is broken. We interpret the illusory passage of time only until the brain has enough information to recognise the loop as ultimately inanimate as a still image. Like the "repeat pan" trick of an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, once we've seen a terrified Scooby and Shaggy fleeing past the same background door, window and potted plant for the fifth time, we realise they aren't actually going anywhere at all.  

Into the uncanny valley of the dolls with
the Nedo Repliee Q2 robot hostess

Once we recognise an image as constant and unchanging, we immediately lose the temporal dimension. It was common practice in cheaply produced television shows of the 60’s and 70’s to use still images in place of filmed action – often in cutaway scenes to establish location or draw attention to an object or plot macguffin. Even though these are typically scenes that would demonstrate no activity even if captured on film - such as a close of up an impending murder weapon for a Columbo antagonist or the gates of the Southfork ranch in Dallas – the use of such still images seems extremely jarring. The perfectly frozen nature of the still seems unnatural, wrong or somewhat unreal.  

Perhaps there is parallel to this effect of disengagement in the “uncanny valley” - a hypothesis in the field of robotics that suggests when human replicas look and act very close to, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. Our brain seems hardwired to reject the unnatural symmetry and predictability of the manufactured facsimile and the illusion of life is lost. 

Never a dull moment 
with veteran superstar 
turntablist Grandmaster Flash

The repetitive beats of dance music are especially reliant on maintaining this organic - or analog - connection with the listener as long as possible. Some of the very first popular music to feature mostly loops and samples, such as that produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra or even the wildstyle turntablism of Grandmaster Flash, was carefully structured to feature steadily layered textures of looped sounds and a progression of rhythms that are never allowed to become predictable. 

A friend who produces breakbeat music once explained how he even incorporates mistakes and almost imperceptible changes of timing into his looped drumbeats. The effect is subliminal, but serves to make identical loops feel less mechanical and more organic to the listener. Compare this artful construction of sound with a late 80’s Mark Summer B-side and notice how quickly the listener disengages from the predictable.

Thus, in order to maintain audience connection as long as possible, the use of looped material needs to be so subtle as to avoid immediate and obvious recognition of repetition, yet still establish enough delicate variation in texture to sustain the illusion of the passing time. Yet, whilst the use of loops in music and narrative moving image is designed to be as invisible as possible, for artists the creative potential of the looped image is often exploited deliberately and directly.  

Rodney Graham's Vexation Island is a 9-minute film that presents an unconscious eighteenth century shipwrecked man with a wound on his head. The man wakes, rises, notices a coconut in a nearby palm tree and shakes it to get it down. The coconut falls out of the tree and hits him on the head where his wound already was. He is promptly knocked unconscious and falls down in the same place from which he had started. The film then seamlessly starts all over again, raising questions whether or not the short film has a beginning or an end.

Similarly, although less specifically concerned with temporality, Cecilia Bonilla’s video art installation In An Instant All Will Vanish is a looped film of a gymnast preparing to deliver her floor routine. The seamlessly replayed clip denies us the resolution of her actual performance, stretching a brief moment of anticipation into an eternity and inviting us into the private inner world of the lone athlete.

In An Instant All Will Vanish

2011, single chanel DVD, continuous loop, soundtrack
(Cecilia Bonilla with Matt Lewis, commissioned by Haringey Arts Council)

Exhibited as part of Fabricate, Inter Alia's current exhibition at The Parlour Gallery, this installation is intriguingly curated into the otherwise static company of photography and printed works. As an experiential piece, it is quite compelling and left me reflecting on the psychology of loops and repeated patterns. 

Upon viewing a moving image, our first instinct is to interpret narrative and continuity. In Bonilla’s piece, we feel the sense of rising tension as we wait for something to happen, but it never does. The moving image implies a passage of time and so a carefully looped video can almost create an alternate timeline for the viewer, alternately extracting and abstracting meaning like a repeated word word word word word word word word word word word word. 

Scooby and Shaggy run out of the

"repeat pan" and into the fire!

Yet despite the infinite promise of the endlessly recycled vignette, this hypnotic effect is temporary. As we begin to notice and preempt the repeated shrugs and small movements of Banilla’s subject, the spell is broken. We interpret the illusory passage of time only until the brain has enough information to recognise the loop as ultimately inanimate as a still image. Like the "repeat pan" trick of an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, once we've seen a terrified Scooby and Shaggy fleeing past the same background door, window and potted plant for the fifth time, we realise they aren't actually going anywhere at all.  

Into the uncanny valley of the dolls with
the Nedo Repliee Q2 robot hostess

Once we recognise an image as constant and unchanging, we immediately lose the temporal dimension. It was common practice in cheaply produced television shows of the 60’s and 70’s to use still images in place of filmed action – often in cutaway scenes to establish location or draw attention to an object or plot macguffin. Even though these are typically scenes that would demonstrate no activity even if captured on film - such as a close of up an impending murder weapon for a Columbo antagonist or the gates of the Southfork ranch in Dallas – the use of such still images seems extremely jarring. The perfectly frozen nature of the still seems unnatural, wrong or somewhat unreal.  

Perhaps there is parallel to this effect of disengagement in the “uncanny valley” - a hypothesis in the field of robotics that suggests when human replicas look and act very close to, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. Our brain seems hardwired to reject the unnatural symmetry and predictability of the manufactured facsimile and the illusion of life is lost. 

 Never a dull moment 
with veteran superstar 
turntablist Grandmaster Flash

The repetitive beats of dance music are especially reliant on maintaining this organic - or analog - connection with the listener as long as possible. Some of the very first popular music to feature mostly loops and samples, such as that produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra or even the wildstyle turntablism of Grandmaster Flash, was carefully structured to feature steadily layered textures of looped sounds and a progression of rhythms that are never allowed to become predictable. 

A friend who produces breakbeat music once explained how he even incorporates mistakes and almost imperceptible changes of timing into his looped drumbeats. The effect is subliminal, but serves to make identical loops feel less mechanical and more organic to the listener. Compare this artful construction of sound with a late 80’s Mark Summer B-side and notice how quickly the listener disengages from the predictable.

Thus, in order to maintain audience connection as long as possible, the use of looped material needs to be so subtle as to avoid immediate and obvious recognition of repetition, yet still establish enough delicate variation in texture to sustain the illusion of the passing time. Yet, whilst the use of loops in music and narrative moving image is designed to be as invisible as possible, for artists the creative potential of the looped image is often exploited deliberately and directly.  

Rodney Graham's Vexation Island is a 9-minute film that presents an unconscious eighteenth century shipwrecked man with a wound on his head. The man wakes, rises, notices a coconut in a nearby palm tree and shakes it to get it down. The coconut falls out of the tree and hits him on the head where his wound already was. He is promptly knocked unconscious and falls down in the same place from which he had started. The film then seamlessly starts all over again, raising questions whether or not the short film has a beginning or an end.

Happy New Year: My Obligatory List of the Pick of the Stuff of the Year, 2011

Insert Generic New Year Screengrab here

As the critically ailing ship of 2011 slowly sinks beneath the waves, it’s time to burn the deckchairs head for the lifeboats. 

It’s time for my usual New Years Eve ritual of affecting cool and detached party ambivalence until the last possible moment. However, at the last minute, my resolve to stay home will collapse with a barrage of last minute texts as I try to in vain to search for that mythical perfect wild and decadent party. 

You know the one - that soon-to-be historic event that everyone you know must have been invited, except for you?

Predictably, I’ll find myself yet again pleasantly drunk and toasted on a couch somewhere with a small gathering of friends, thinking proudly to myself that this was the best plan all along and wondering why I even bothered to entertain the idea of the overpriced punishment of clubs or re-enacting Braveheart in the desperate crush of Trafalgar Square.

Until next year, at least.

Either way, we want to be close to our loved ones during the Midwinter holidays and the celebration of the passing of the old year is something hardwired into us regardless of culture. Inevitably, that celebration turns to reflection on the year passed and the year ahead. It’s a curious time, when nostalgia is at it’s most myopic as we squint to make sense as to whether we’ve made sense of the last 12 months.

A family down the road are originally from Brazil and are planning to celebrate New Year with the ‘Quema del Año Viejo’ – literally the Burning of the Old Year. They have been building Papier-mâché effigies of bad things that have happened in the departing year to be burned on News Years Eve night. If you had a recent car accident, for instance, you may choose to make an effigy of the offending vehicle to purge that memory. The youngest son of this particular family has been building a dinosaur, which makes me think my own problems must have been pretty modest in comparison.

In a way, a broader manifestation of our desire to congregate and burn away of the Old Year is in the annual lists, reviews and ‘Best of’ commentaries that dominate the digital, print and whatever other airwaves there are left. In this reflective spirit I thought I would share my own ‘List of Stuff of the Year, 2011’. I don’t consider myself to be a particular expert in any specific branch of ‘stuff’, so instead I’ll cover all the traditional bases of music and movies and hide my limited view under the pretence of a ‘pick of the year’.

2011 has been a year of unrest and austerity, defined by a mood of impending great changes and uncertainty. At times like this the comforts of nostalgia are even more compelling. Whether it’s coincidence – or clunky editorial convenience – almost all of my scattered highlights of the last year reflect this.

Refn's Drive, Blizten Trapper's American
Goldwing and Amanda Fucking Palmer all
delivered style and substance in 2011

My two favourite movies of the year - in my limited opinion the best of the year by some distance - were Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Both look back reassuringly to a different cinematic age, yet are also fresh and wholly contemporary.

Drive channels the same bleak 80’s neon dreams that I’m sure still trouble Michael Mann on a regular basis. Ryan Gosling’s Driver-with-no-name is an everyman nephew of Clint Eastwood and Travis Bickle. A vision of icy retro cool, punctuated with blasts of intense and brutal violence, Refn delivers pure cinema and a timely reminder of the importance to show and not tell.

Black Swan, conversely, reanimates the 70’s Giallo with a wild melodrama just barely contained by beautiful psychedelic visuals. Amidst the mayhem, Natalie Portman takes the role seriously enough to keep the viewer emotionally engaged and the climax packs a harder punch than any ballet-based drama has a right to.

An honourable mention should also go to Duncan Jones' Source Code, which was a fresh, economical and exciting spin on some classic pulp science fiction. I also enjoyed Jason Eisener’s wild exploitation movie Hobo With a Shotgun. Although an entirely more sleazy feature – and therefore heaps more fun – it manages a similar trick to those above. It is a grindhouse tribute, borne from a fake trailer for Tarantino & Rodriguez’s Grindhouse movie, but never descends into self-conscious parody or pastiche. Instead, it feels like the real deal, which is because it actually is. Even the Raccoons cartoon end theme blasted over the credits feels like it was always destined to close a splatter movie about a vengeful vagrant. It’s bloody, antisocial, subversive and – most bizarrely of all – occasionally quite charming.

Similarly, I’ve found myself travelling back to more comfortable and secure times through most of the year in music. I’ve been rediscovering and reloving the rare groove, funk and daisy age hip hop I grew up with and making virtual mixtapes from the whimsical folk rock of Fairport Convention and CSN&Y that soundtracked a time when I actually believed anything was possible.

This is why it’s fitting that my favourite long player release of 2011 was probably Blitzen Trapper’s American Goldwing. It’s a healthy slice of retro country rock on first listen that reveals many sublime pleasures on subsequent play. It also has some a couple of economical guitar solos and a heap of catchy singalong choruses, two endangered musical species that I’d never realised how much I’d missed. It is perhaps Blitzen Trapper’s least schizophrenic recording and sounds simultaneously new and fresh yet, at the same time, like an old friend who had always occupied that space somewhere between the Eagles and Joe Walsh on my record shelf.

Speaking of old friends, the last year also brought Bad As Me, a new release from Tom Waits. This is always a cause for celebration and it’s always a comfort to know that no matter how things may change over the years, ol’ Tom is still out there howling at the moon for all of us.

Aside from those two albums, I haven’t heard many new releases that have excited me. It’s a contrast to the rich pickings of the year before that brought us fresh sounds from The Dirty Projectors and The Animal Collective, amongst others.

Maybe all this nostalgia isn’t just a case of me starting old and jaded. Maybe there’s a wider sense of looking for escapism, or perhaps inspiration for where we can go from here.

In fact, amidst the chaos of the financial crash and a glimpse of the beginning of the collapse of complacent ideologies we’ve carried for so long that we almost seem to have forgotten they are ideologies in the first place, there are some positive signs. Foremost is in the power of collectivity, from the Arab Spring to the hopeful audacity of the Occupy movement.  

In 2011, I discovered that Twitter might actually be a force for good and have some positive practical social effect – although our current Government appear to think quite the opposite and seem rather scared of any unsanctioned collectivity.  It was sad footnote that we lost Apple idealist Steve Jobs in October, as perhaps as much as anyone, his legacy was to bring the world just a little closer together.  Bill Gates, please note: the fact that Microsoft spellcheck doesn't even seem to recognise the word 'collectivity' just made me a little more suspicious of you.

It might be crass to suggest that this enduring spirit of collectivity was reflected in an unexpectedly strong year for live music, but the carnivalesque is an important factor in community empowerment. Any positive or peaceful thing that brings people together at a time when society seems to be fracturing has to be celebrated.

The Low Anthem delivered exquisite low anthems at The Green Man festival, Amanda Palmer began with heartbreaking keys and ended with a rocking punch into the air at Heaven in September whilst the legendary Roy Harper's 70th birthday concert at The Royal Festival Hall was intense, cathartic and transcendent. Those fearless feral freaks, The Artful Badgers, also proved there was clubland life beyond Dubstep – although I sometimes wear a tail and carry their boxes, so should maybe declare an interest.

In the arts there have been a few standouts too. The Fine Arts, at their best, should reflect our wider situation and it’s very clear that there have are big changes on the cultural horizon.  For me, it was actually a retrospective of work from the last 40 years or so, the Susan Hiller exhibition at Tate Britain, that most captured the spirit of the times with its demonstration that interesting and challenging ideas could be engaging and entertaining without resorting to excessive showy glamour. 

She weaves stories using pseudo-scientific discourse, recording the sublime, the strange, the arcane and the damned. Her canon is almost not art at all, but a sketchbook, patchwork museum of neglected ideas and stories. I could have spent hours alone in the single room that comprised Witness, a dark space dominated by a forest of disembowelled audio speakers trailing from bare wires from the ceiling. Each speaker broadcasts a eyewitness interview of an experience with an Unidentified Flying Object. You can concentrate on one speaker and enjoy a moment of full confessional or sit back and lose yourself in the murmured communion of the whole.

The effects of austerity on the arts is something that has shaken the commercial spectacle of the art world and seems on the brink of liberating the artist from the restrictions of economy and marketing. It’s no coincidence we’ve seen a rising profile from ‘Street Artists’ and it’s natural that this DIY ethic is now reaching to embrace the wider conceptual and formal arts. I don’t envisage too many million dollar crystal skulls over the next decade.

Across town in “London’s fashionable” Fitzrovia is Diemar/Noble Photography.  Whilst I again have to declare an interest, as it’s a space I’m peripherally involved with, it has consistently exhibited a programme of challenging new photography alongside the provenance of classic and vintage shows.

Photography is finally being accepted, somewhat grudgingly, into the fine art club of this country and it’s about time. The immediacy of the medium has always troubled our arts establishment, despite our history as pioneers. With recent changes in technology, photography is now probably the most accessible of media to practitioners, collectors and enthusiasts. It is at the root of our new media and it’s universality and versatility ensure it’s relevance in the digital age. Most importantly, it allows diverse voices a platform and the entire contemporary programme at Diemar/Noble has surprised, entertained and proven to me unequivocally that there is some incredible talent in this city that has been criminally underrepresented. Emily Allchurch’s elegant photographic reimaginings of Hiroshiga's Tokyo – which gained an unexpected resonance as it was opened during the Japan earthquake – and Not The Chelsea Flower Show, a group and ‘alternative flower show’, remain my standout exhibitions of the year. 

Finally, there wasn’t a lot of new writing that nudged my interest in 2010, although that was likely more related the fact it was a busy year and haven’t had the concentration. As a result, I made a reacquaintance with a small pile of short story anthologies. This inevitably led me back to the science fiction I read hungrily through college – hungrily not only because it was a genre I’ve always loved as a guilty pleasure but also as I didn’t eat very much at college.

The Parallel worlds of DC Comic's Batwoman
 and Murakami's IQ84 provided escapism 
as London burned.

It’s interesting how appropriate Science Fiction feels right now. Some of the best Science Fiction works have come from the most challenging times, notably the apocalyptic mood of the 1950’s Cold War. Maybe it comes from the need to play out the best and worst possible scenarios, the utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. I guess I’ve been looking backward to looking forward, or something.

In a similar escapist and somewhat nostalgic vein, DC Comics decided to jump ahead of everyone else and choose this year to relaunch their entire universe in August. After picking up a few issues of the New 52, primarily out of curiosity, I have since found myself buying monthly issues for the first time since I was 15. Action Comics and Batwoman, in particular, have done much to sate at least part of my appetite for bite sized words and if you have any patchy history of interest in comics or costumed heroics, I’d recommend revisiting some of these titles – at least before before the next reboot.  In a year when the altogether more banal real world villainy of crooked politicians, predatory bankers and octogenarian Antipodean media moguls have once again managed to slip from the clutches of appropriate justice, it's satisfying to visit a world where some form of fitting reparation is  assured.

The only new release of an actual novel that I managed to snare was IQ84, the new epic tome by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. I suppose this story of a woman who realises she has accidentally travelled into an alternate reality actually isn’t a taxi ride that far away from Science Fiction either, albeit filtered through the sublime and slightly magic-surrealist lens of Murakami world.

So, those were some recommendations plucked from my whirlwind 2011. With just a handful of gigs, movies and albums, alongside one book and a clutch of comics, it’s hardly exhaustive in terms of cultural commentary, or even particularly informative for that matter. Ultimately, it says more about my personal year than an authoritative judgement of the movies or books or whatnot of the year - just like every ‘Best of’ list or Review, really.

All of which, brings me back to the New Years Eve. 

I guess if there’s been any kind of theme to the last year it’s been one of change. Change can be frightening if you resist it and fear it, but once you realise it’s a constant, it’s important to embrace it and take responsibility for making sure it’s leading somewhere positive and good. And so, while you’re all burning away the last year, be sure and take some time to pick through the ashes to gather up some of the best things from 2010 to bring with you into 2012.

By the way, if any of you are having any wild, badass parties tonight, let me know…okay?