#10 (29.11.25)
jungles, gardens, the coast
SEE
And yet it still moves, by Noémie Goudal.
Edel Assanti, London W1, until Dec 12
Edel Assanti hosted the latest launch of Draught magazine — or half-launch; its numbering system is intricate — with readings, iced beers, &c. Rachel Allen’s new poems, in the form of riddles, were funny; so was Jen Calleja’s deadpan diary of working with Michelle Steinbeck in Rome. The gallery was dazzlingly white, & though I tend to find that respectful, even kind, to artworks, here it seemed overblown; then I thought that, deliberately or not, it gave Noémie Goudal’s clever, illusionistic images something to offset. They’re like windows onto prehistoric worlds: “deep time”, her subject, has so many colours suspended in simultaneity. I liked them.
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LISTEN
Tranquilizer, by Oneohtrix Point Never.
Ridge Valley
‘Measuring Ruins’, from Daniel Lopatin’s excellent new album, could be the aural counterpart to Goudal’s work. Or: it reminded me of two scenes set in an oxygen garden, one beatific & one sinister, from Danny Boyle’s masterpiece Sunshine (2007). And: of video-game soundtracks, which have to surround, or underpin, a particular kind of artistic experience, more second-person than first-. A funny thing about Lopatin’s music is that you can’t stop imagining events to which it might be set, as if you were its co-creator; this is the opposite of most contemporary music, which knows the story it wants to tell.
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READ
Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood.
Viking
Benjamin Wood’s books — this novel is his fifth — tend to look sympathetically at frustrated youth. Here, in a north-western English coastal town during the early 1960s, we follow Thomas Flett, a 20-year-old whose body has already been smashed by his work as a shanker: one who scours the beach for shrimp at low tide. A man visits from Hollywood, maybe too good to be true; there’s a local girl, & ditto. The best part of Wood’s writing is how he describes interiors: the warmth of a dry kitchen versus the squalling rain outside. The elements rescue Seascraper from gentleness, & give it a keener edge.