WIRE – Mix: Sunik Kim auf den Spuren von Henry Cow

The New York noise musician and film maker shares a new mix, inspired by the English rock group Henry Cow…Verlasst Euch nicht auf den eher harmlosen Anfang. Das kommt dann alles zusammen in den Mixer und dann gehts zur Sache 😉

“This mix is almost entirely a product of my really sitting down and listening to Henry Cow,” says musician and writer Sunik Kim, “most notably In Praise Of Learning, Western Culture and Unrest. And hearing, in their passionate, rigorous overflow of notes and ideas, a way out of a creative dead end.”

Kim often treats mixes as “densely layered ‘pieces’ in their own right” and an extension of noise music and experimental film making practice. “Before this much-needed eureka moment”, they say, “I was increasingly attempting to capture an extreme musical intensity in a rather direct, largely effective, but ultimately literal and limited way, through sheer, unrelenting density of sound itself, extreme volume, digital clipping, and hyper-speed tempos. Henry Cow’s approach completely reoriented my thinking on musical intensity: rather than establishing a visceral, near-psychedelic sculptural intensity (like I had been trying to do), their intensity explodes calmly, horizontally – every musical gesture has a certain almost slapstick flatness, but those gestures are layered, sequenced, and aggregated with such dexterity that the visceral intensity is there, just achieved through entirely different means.
“From this starting point, in making this mix I mapped out a constellation of artists that achieve a similar effect via similar means: an absolute dryness and flatness of sound spun into dazzling percussive webs. In this process, I found that humour – which I truly believe is present in my recent work, against appearances – was the other thread tying everything together, manifested most directly in vocalising that wavers between a deadly serious operatic approach and an almost cartoonish improvised one. This combination of technical rigor, playfulness, and militant political intensity – as exemplified by Henry Cow, but also many other artists here – is music to me… at least for now…”