Subsistence plays ATOPOS 7 (2023/09/06)
To Subsistence’s pleasant surprise, we were chauffeured to our first live show of our Meanjin tour in a Mercedes-Benz. Isadora Chadeaux sped us to Fortitude Valley with the sunroof retracted, chatting with Grotto who was riding shotgun, while I took in the unfamiliar, parallaxing geometry of Meanjin and watched as the wind tugged Grotto’s long brown hair out through the roof of the sedan. Office buildings and apartment complexes passed in and out of the sunroof’s frame, glittering in the dark. Lit in cobalt blue, the lurid underside of a bridge shone reflected in the river Maiwar, passing far to my right. Another bridge over the water, we would later learn, was under construction for the sole purpose of connecting the CBD to the work-in-progress Star Casino. This bridge was all cluttered masts and cables and garish green lights, like some theme-park ghost ship. An abstract DJ set by one of Isadora’s favourites crackled and boomed through the stereo. Whisked from the freeway into the busy streets of the Valley, Maps told us we were near; Grotto and I hopped out of the Merc, lugging gear, while Isadora drove on in search of parking.
The gig was the seventh instalment of ATOPOS, Yvette Ofa Agapow’s DIY public sound program and soon-to-be-label. The place, we discovered, was the pedestrian underpass beneath Story Street Bridge. We approached through a small park and found a crowd of thirty or more onlookers clustered around the mouth of the underpass - impressive numbers for a DIY show organised at short notice! We peered into the concrete tunnel. Extending in the shape of a rounded square, its walls were adorned with a hideous public mural commission, illuminated in sporadic pulses by lights set in the ceiling. The lights faded on and off in response to motion below, which lent the first performance a ghostly feeling. The tunnel was empty of onlookers; within, we saw two performers, a photographer and his dog.
One figure concealed within a white, tattered shawl tumbled towards and away from another, cross-legged against a wall and shrouded in black. This was the performing duo moshi moshi. Sounds emanated from the figure in black, from instruments hidden behind the veil. A reedy sound - perhaps that of a concertina - reminded me of the shō, a Japanese reed instrument used in gagaku music. A striker emerged from the dark cloth and sounded a drum, over which fabric flattened into a circle. The whims of the lights’ motion sensors sometimes enveloped the performers in cold fluorescence, sometimes dropped them into shadow. I felt I was watching two spirits encounter one another in the night, able to communicate only through halting dances and short, sharp bursts of sound. I have never seen a performance that felt quite as otherworldly as moshi moshi’s. The instant I looked into the tunnel and saw their work, I knew we’d made the right choice in flying up. Then, looking around at the audience, which immediately struck me as attentive, excited and sincere, I also thought to myself: ‘I don’t want to go home!’
Cock Safari carried an assortment of tape machines into the tunnel after the first performers had finished, along with a tall can of Asahi. He wore a blue flannel shirt and dark glasses. He set his machines down on the floor, cracked the can and gestured for us all to come closer. On the floor next to the wall, a small white light shone from an unidentifiable source near a partially disassembled cassette recorder. Further into the centre of the tunnel floor sat four colourful objects: what looked like two kids’ cassette recorders patched into each other, a silver walkman and a tiny windup teddy-bear that lay motionless, toppled onto his lilac plastic face. Sounds began to emerge again, rising up through hushed conversations. Warped, heatstricken horns, looping over and over. Listening closely I eventually caught a dirge melody, a drunken waltz tripping and tumbling over itself. An egg timer’s bell sounded in the underpass. The horns faded out and a stuttering, fragmented loop faded in that recalled a photocopier, or maybe a laser cutter. Cock Safari made sardonic acknowledgement of passing Valley punters who stepped gingerly over his machines as and weaved through the tunnel crowd. The revv and crackle of a passing motorbike echoed through the tunnel, and from beneath these echoes emerged the haunted horns again, sounding now like a backmasked message might reveal itself if playback were reversed. The final loop felt as if it was being drawn, ectoplasm-like, from the mouth of a medium.
Kim Day was next, playing as Lesbian Merzbow. We would later see Kim and Yvette perform as Gorgina Cunt. I had recognised Kim in the crowd, clutching a laptop and some gaudy circuit-bent toys, dressed for the office in a skirt and blouse. Now she was kneeling on the tunnel floor, hunched over her laptop with a pink plastic microphone pressed to her lips, laughing, shrieking. Through a small but surprisingly loud Panasonic desktop speaker came the pulse of a gabber bassdrum, gradually overtaken by metallic noise like coins in a clothesdryer, abstracting and abstracting until a shrill, pachinko-like melody pierced the tunnel air. The melody, ever heightening in pitch and intensity, could well have encoded some kind of addictive slot-machine game directly into my frontal lobe. Kim fell to her side, went foetal and screamed into her toy mic with all the air in her lungs. One leg extended out into the middle of the tunnel, over which stepped a mystified passerby before continuing out through the underpass.
Marek Rygielski, the photographer with dog in tow (Kahlo, who rather than find the noise disturbing was often put to sleep by it), has for years done the public service of recording and photographing almost every musical performance in Meanjin. His video archive is accessible here and his playlist documenting ATOPOS 7 is accessible here. I’m much more interested in writing about our Meanjin friends’ performances for the gig than about our own, so if you want to get a sense of what Liam and I played you’d best consult Marek’s playlist.
Thank you for reading, many more missives to come!
Subsistence Office Playlist 4th September (2023/09/05)
- Accelrator - Royal Trux
- Thank You - Royal Trux
- In A Silent Way - Miles Davis
- Live Evil - Miles Davis
- From Here We Go Sublime - The Field
- Amibent Pop 2002 - Kompakt
- Captagon - Rod Modell
Grottos' 'Somewhere On A Friday Mixtape' Aug 4th (2023/08/05)
Grotto presents a new edition of his 'somewhere on a friday' mixtape series, avaible till the following friday - dl it here