Grain: Clarinets, Colours, Anti-Brainrot

I loved diving into this long read from Stephanie Krzywonos about the history of colours. In it she unravels some of the fascinating and often really unsettling DNA of specific pigments, many of which have strange and violent origins and are almost always linked to to class, colonialism, and ecology. The way we culturally view and deploy certain colours changes over time, but also the methods we use to create them. via Emergence

I’ve found watching long-form filmmaking a really good way to calm my brain recently and Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, by documentary maker Wang Bing, is one of my recent favourites. Clocking in at about 9 hours(!), the pretty astonishing 2002 film documents in brutal detail the decline of industry and state-run factories in Shenyang. The early 00s handheld digital video look makes it feel even more intimate and visceral. via Youtube

The artist Anish Kapoor’s latest collaboration with Greenpeace is a good, simple idea executed well: a huge canvas hung guerrilla-style from a North Sea gas rig, sprayed with non-toxic beetroot ‘paint’ in a deep blood red with a high-pressure hose. Done in one of this summer’s many heatwaves, it aimed to pull focus back to companies like Shell whose business practices are intrinsically linked to these new extreme global weather events. via The Guardian

This article in Frieze considers how performance art (or more broadly just forcing ourselves to have IRL experiences where you are required to be present and active in some form) might be able to undo some of the attention span brain-rotting effects of our endless social media streams, where images and feelings are forgotten almost as soon as they’ve been seen. via Frieze

I’m so happy about the return of Tortoise, a band who sit somewhere between post-rock and jazz and weird art rock. Their new album Touch is out this autumn, the first single is great, and it’s also a good time to revisit their past catalogue which has influenced basically every instrumental band that came afterwards even if they’re aware of it or not. via Youtube

Lake Heritage by clarinetist Zachary Good has accompanied me on long walks this past week. Weaving drones, trills and stacatto layers of four soprano clarinets, it somehow feels both challenging and meditative, and playfully messes around with the frequencies and parameters of what that particular wind instrument can do. via Bandcamp

Another clarinet record I’ve been enjoying is Conversation No. 1/Collecting Rocks from the Places We've Been, via NYC jazz label Relative Pitch, by artist Katie Porter. It’s a little more aggressive and amorphous than Lake Heritage above, using bass clarinet to explore rumbling lower end and swelling sonic phrases that sometimes sound like great guitar feedback. via Bandcamp

For any of you with Spotify I try and keep my studio playlist updated with bits I’m listening to.