#ellis sam

THE FUTURE LIVES HERE ______________________________________________ by GABI DAO LISTEN TO A FANTASY IN SURREY En route to the Surrey Public Library, the Sky- train’s balanced robotic voice announces, “Your next station is Surrey City Central.” An adjacent billboard gleams, “The Future Lives Here”. A Fantasy in Surrey is an aggregate of abstract electronic verses organized in six sections. Against the backdrop of architecture appropriating Frank Gehry’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, an MPC 1000 is positioned for a photo-op. Brought to the Surrey Public Library for the sake of a photo shoot, it composes the foreground of Fantasy’s album cover. Same Same’s SoundCloud features accompanying text that points to the optimism of the modernist architecture. He admits, “For a moment while in the Surrey Public Library I wasn’t afraid to make music.” The sampler is like a euphemism for a human being, a funny cyborg reposed and illuminated on the curve of the frigid utopia where Same Same might have escaped from the hubbub of the city in order to focus on his work. Each moment within “Sections 1-6” is a distinct progression without a chorus and resists conforming to the structures of a danceable beat. It’s meant to be listened to attentively—academic ambient—more like the geeky cousin of the beat driven tracks that one could shimmy to at a handful of coy spots in town. Indulgent in deep metronomic sequences, its pops and clicks skim over abrupt textures that hinge onto intermittent droid like vocals that nod to the social etiquette of the library. The tableau of a library patron clicking on a laptop in a shiny public library-cum-recording studio is a picture of post-studio practice. Work is no longer necessarily relegated to the traditional space of a studio; in this case it can be made anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection, a laptop, editing software and some headphones. The city of Surrey champions the alleviation of business centres, the dispersal of civic resources and hype. The 77,000 square foot library is designed as an extension of the home—to exist, as architect Bing Thom states, as “a community room”. Without a studio at the time, Same Same felt comfortable enough to compose Fantasy quietly on headphones in a library that he heard looked like the Guggenheim. As an independently released EP circulated on free online audio distribution platform Soundcloud, it participates in the virtual real es- tates that make it possible to host the boom of electronic music demand, production and reception. Like these distribution platforms, condos and civic community centres model a uni- form experience of space. The sonic pleasure of Fantasy, like much of the electronic music in town, requires idiosyncratic spaces that don’t fit into the agenda of city planning. These idiosyncratic spaces allow a kind of participation free from regulations that define specific types of public venues such as bars clubs. Arguably, they can establish a kind of programming that isn’t completely ruled by an equation for maximum revenue. The energy of immediacy, unhindered by regulation, elicits a freer itinerary in providing visibility for local talent within a particular aesthetic of electronic music. These covert venues become intoxicating, but consecutive late-night jives are accompanied by the fact of city by-laws and politics that give next weekend’s plans a precarious status. A public and private binary becomes exaggerated by the need to remain covert, setting a model for when and where these cultural activities can occur. Under these parameters, a tense standard is formed. What makes Fantasy so singular is that this EP/artwork circumvents and cryptically subverts the standardized spaces of cultural production and reception, both in visual art and electronic music, on the Internet and within civic reality. It offers a poetic critique of metropolitan ambition while maintaining the sincerity of its medium that quietly speaks to a modest 41 virtual followers. ______________________________________________ GABI DAO is really into sculpture and sound. She is a member of the collective practice Avenue.

I WILL NOT BE COOKING ______________________________________________ by ELLIS SAM There are the bones of an animal at the heart of this soup. I stare into a simple bowl of Tonkotsu “pork bone” ramen. The noodles bore me. The broth tastes complex but mostly sweet. A slice of pork intervenes: it is acting up, an outstanding reminder that the lake, which keeps it afloat, was once bound to it as bone. The meat provides a point of reference—something to chew on whilst pondering a poster on the restaurant’s wall illustrating how bone becomes broth over a three day process. During my meal my eyes look for more than what is in the bowl. I hope to sink my teeth into a design beyond the pleasure of taste. “Food” does not simply go into the stomach. At Index, Scott Kemp exhibited an installation composed entirely of objects that would support the theme of “fridge”. Recomposed in synthetic materials, a white door handle, translucent plastic panel that might sit atop of a vegetable crisper and white slim rod pulled from a shelf with the framework of a grill all sit comfortably amidst the tones of “gallery”. These precedents have been rewritten beyond the tactile pleasures of their design. Some of these structures seem to have sprouted legs in order to close back in on themselves, or end up flattened against a wall. It is endearing to see, in the face of utility, each object feign a new design. You could not reconstruct a fridge out of the contents in this exhibition, nor could you find a replacement for a broken fixture. The artist has playfully positioned these artificial objects in a game of camouflage by screwing them, attaching or placing them against the architecture of the gallery where at every turn they humbly blend in and also extend it. Many of the objects are repeated in both of the gallery’s rooms with slight nuances attributable to each version. It is as if each room is two family portraits where each member occupies a different spot in the photo. A theory is not needed for this familial picture nor is one required for an appliance. One does not need instructions to take action with a fridge—we fill it up. The artworks in Major Appliance are com- pletely vacant of service: their surfaces are as mute as the surface it mimics. For the most part, a dialogue with a fridge is as dynamic as its veneer. Only an actual fridge may raise cause for alarm, which is more like a soliloquy about death than a conversation. I listen for the wavering signature of its hum followed by a moment when I grip the handle to check beyond its façade and am greeted with a foul smell of food whose passing is more trau- matic then the loss of my relationship with this austere machine. Spoil can be a site to be seen, such as fermented pig bones in a bowl of ramen, but one that only becomes so with context. It is safe to say that the fridge in the art gallery has been unplugged but the ensuing task of confronting perishable goods has been usurped by objects that have barred this outcome, they represent diversions of the context that they come from. As diversions, their aesthetic leads back to the same context—one that I can see when I look over to my fridge whose door is shut, and picture the entirety of Kemp’s installation stored on one of its shelves. But unlike the food, these objects will not spoil, but are able to keep cool alongside the idea of how sweet of an object a fridge is. ______________________________________________

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