Grain: Invisible Hands, False Seasons, Industrial Art

I finally caught up with Maintenance Artist, the documentary about Mierle Laderman Ukeles that premiered last summer. Ukeles has been the artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department, unpaid, since 1977 (a position she essentially invented) making work about labour, care, and the invisible systems that keep cities alive. There’s a famous piece where she spent nearly a year shaking hands with every sanitation worker in the city, individually, one at a time, thanking each of them. There’s screenings across this summer in various EU/US cities. via maintenanceartist.com

The Wire have published a really great conversation between art historian Nicolas Ballet and Cabaret Voltaire's Stephen Mallinder, recorded at the ICA to mark the launch of Ballet's book Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music. The book’s an excavation of the visual and aesthetic dimension of industrial culture, looking at how Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and their peers built a visual language out of post-industrial decay, Burroughs cut-ups, medical imagery, and found footage. via The Wire

There’s a piece I keep coming back to from journalist Zoë Schlanger, writing about plant phenology and molecular memory. Specifically the way a plant’s DNA holds the accumulated weight of every winter it has ever lived through, using that knowledge to decide when it’s safe to bloom again. Climate disruption is throwing those ancient bio clocks into chaos, triggering ‘false springs’ and mistimings. Schlanger frames it partly as a personal essay, thinking about what it means to bring life into a world where seasons are being overwritten. via Emergence

I’ve been enjoying Foundry by Yu Su which is a beautiful departure from the pulse of her earlier records, sounding like a really great disintegration of '00s minimal techno and IDM, blurred edges and dubby movements. via Bandcamp

Guts by Matt Christensen features solo electric guitar, wind, and water and is gentle and minimal but completely unrestrained - the closest reference point might be Neil Young’s iconic Dead Man score. via Bandcamp

Thresholds by Andrew James Anderson has been in heavy rotation here this past week or so. It’s dense, heavy-atmospheric stuff that sounds like part ambient exploration and part cut-up collage. via Bandcamp

The spring archive sale continues for the next couple of weeks on my webstore with some limited warehouse finds and tour leftovers. Vinyl/CD/tees from £10.