from friday 18 to wednesday 23 september – 7 pm > 11 pm
LOCALEDUE
YEAH YOU (GB)
K(h)ar-t- from Khot to Krutch to Vhod. I’m not, I’m knot
video installation
K(h)ar-t- from Khot to Krutch to Vhod. I’m not, I’m knot is a video documenting the entire journey by car from Utrecht to Amsterdam by YEAH YOU, on tour at the Sonic Acts Festival. Blunted beats, rudimentary synth contortions, and haphazard vocals as relentless and unpredictable, recorded on the dark night city-scape. The recording, made with a camera placed on the dashboard, of the cockpit scene with the two performers improvising in one of their typical car sound sessions, ends up in black, when it falls on the floor, giving us a few minutes of shadows and reflections, while the audio continues undaunted. We are left alone, in the dark, to decipher the puns of an instant life philosophy.
YEAH YOU is Gustav Thomas and Elvin Brandhi, father/daughter from Wales but citizens of the world, with ever-changing logistic between Vienna, Kampala, Berlin, Cairo, Newcastle. Improvised musical and geographical excursions are the base of their Kh-art’ Car-art. The project has an innate portability. It grew from a desire to make something during every spare moment, using compact recording gear to turn the usual banal everyday family drives to into spontaneous recording sessions in the car. Indeed, warped into identity politics, this could be an anti-formulaic deconstruction of the nuclear family and of psychic uniform, which normative roles serve to sustain. In itself is just an improv life stream. Diving in with an admittedly involuntary entropic approach, YEAH YOU provide something to enjoy/not enjoy, where the content shifts depending on how many supermarket discounts they found. “It’s really about having developed an approach to performance which eradicates its framing as ‘separate’ from what people think of as daily life”. Living under the suspicion that routine suffocates, the pair satisfy the impulse to create indiscriminately and on the go by carrying around a pocketful of miniature speakers, dictaphones, samplers, plus camera or mic – in all, more than enough to suffice. What indeed could be more late modern in music than the nomad musician travelling without any instrument at all – besides something to capture it all on? Thomas’s distorted, alluringly jarred synthesisation acts as a jagged platform for Brandhi to writhe improvised stream of consciousness lyrical trips: a lo-fi noise or a dismantled freestyle. They have recently performed at Borealis, Counterflows, Supernormal festivals. After their first improptu songs, they released two LPS, Id Vendor and KRUTCH, on UK/Berlin imprint Slip and the cassette Vhod on Alter/Opal Tapes.
in-car-video (2017), pulled from the artists’ archive of hundreds
electronics and voices Elvin Brandhi & Gustav Thomas
recorded in a black Renault Clio
co-production Xing/Live Arts Week