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There’s a story tucked within the spider’s web of monotonous spoken word, ceaseless electronic loops, and immediately recognisable Whitney Houston vocals found on Richie Culver’s deeply engrossing Sunday Mix.
Dubbed ‘sleep paralysis on a one-night stand’ by its creator – the Hull-born multidisciplinary artist behind last year’s I was born by the sea LP, and its forthcoming remix accompaniment featuring Rainy Miller, Space Afrika and more – the new mix explores this precise concept in a fashion akin to the artist’s work across other projects and mediums. Where there is bleakness, there is familiarity. Where there is unease there is, well, a touch more where that came from.
“I walked in and wanted to leave instantly,” begins Culver’s tale. “There was what looked like stolen goods everywhere… Whitney Houston was playing. The CD was skipping. As soon as the door slammed shut, I knew I was trapped there…”
Photography: Brett Walker
Sunday Mix: Richie Culver
Through intense introspection and a DIY approach to sound, Richie Culver taps into the loose, potent energy of the afterparty, capturing the feeling of discovering worlds thought impossible in cigarette smoke and shitty speakers.
Richie Culver is responsible for some of the most quietly devastating music of recent years. Already infamous for his visual practice, which has been described as “squat art” (a label the artist is more than happy to stand behind), in recent years Culver has turned his attention to music. Between Post Traumatic Fantasy, an EP for Italian label SUPERPANG, A Change Of Nothing, a collaborative release with Pavel Milyakov for his own label, Participant, and his debut album, I was born by the sea, last year, Richie Culver announced himself as a musician with an unmistakable voice, shining new light on the themes of his work and in ways both excruciatingly raw and singularly evocative. While his visual works portray autobiographical vignettes of outsider observations and macabre parables scrawled and sprayed across canvas, walls and cardboard, fleeting and fraught glimpses of a difficult past captured with a crackling, transient urgency, with his music, his words are set adrift on threadbare loops worn raw and ragged, spray paint rendered as synthesis, glacial swells of ambience, industrial throbs of noise and dark insomniac drones exhaled together as thick melancholy haze. For Culver the transition from visual art to music is hardly surprising, he came up in the rave, developing his outlook on both art and life in the thick of the free party scene in and around Hull, a period so formative that the spirit has never left him. “I remember when I first got introduced to rave culture and then, shortly after, club culture, instantly deciding on the spot that I was going to dedicate my life and soul to this,” he explains. “With no tools, talent or links I rolled the dice.”
“This mix gently echos the underbelly of a desire or obsession to be part of something that doesn’t really exist,” he continues. “Maybe it was a myth? It can’t have been because I saw people succeeding, getting paid to do something they would do for free. Was that too much to ask? That was always my goal.” Moving through a choice selection of tracks from the year past, remixes, re-edits and a trove of unreleased material, Culver chases the ghosts of dance music through the atmospheres and ambiences of his formative years, like sifting for ecstasy in the cold waters of the Humber. “I remember watching Boyz N The Hood when I was around 12 or 13,” he recalls. “Laurence Fishburne’s character, Furious Styles, always stood out to me. He was my secret idol. I never mentioned it to any of my friends at the time when we would watch it on repeat. None of us had great male role models but I figured we were all thinking the same thing. This was my first glimpse of what I thought a man should be. Someone to look up to, someone to give you good advice at those critical stages of life. Someone who cares about you. Even though it was through a TV screen. He gave me hope, some kind of a blueprint to turn to when those life-changing, crossroads moments should appear later down the road.” It’s this hope that pervades much of the new material presented here, like Rainy Miller’s reverberant, avant-drill rework of ‘Daytime TV’, taken from an upcoming collection of remixes of tracks from Culver’s debut, which threads skittering hi-hats and queasy bass surges through the original’s sombre ambient cascade, or the staccato synth stabs of ‘We got to be,’ heralding distant crashes of percussion, evocative of breakbeat and hardcore, only heard from miles away in the distance.
The mix is littered with crossroads moments like these, an unexpected burst aquatic surf guitar warble, courtesy of Pavel Milyakov, signalling an onslaught of new sound, the unreleased ‘Scream if you don’t exist’ unravelling in hiccuping piano licks and pitch-shifted exhortations, an unhinged mantra spiralling off into the void. The deadpan delivery of ‘Afterparty stranger,’ a stark spoken word piece, splits the mix in two, finding Culver viscerally inhabiting the creeping paranoia and low self-esteem of an addled memory, his worst impulses echoed back at him, his desperation relived with unflinching clarity. In the mix’s most poignant moments, Culver pulls focus from his own voice to the voices of others, wrenching open the ribcage of his own experience to make space for a new polyphony. ‘Oh my god they’re gone’ sets bright, looping chimes against an etherised monologue from Culver’s wife, who draws from her experiences working as a death doula to work through the transcience of life and the permanence of grief. As the mix draws to a close, Culver exits the stage to let a text-to-speech tool play him out, as though breathing artificial life into words too painful to be spoken, too painful, even, to be scrawled. What we’re left with is a retrospective of sorts, both of Culver’s recent releases, instant cult classics, inscribed messily in the canon of outsider music and experimental electronics, but also of the full circle that brings Culver back, through art, to music. Through intense introspection and a DIY approach to sound, the artist is able to reproduce the loose, potent energy of the afterparty, capturing the feeling of discovering worlds thought impossible in cigarette smoke and shitty speakers. “At age 15 I left school early as I got a good job offer on a caravan site,” Culver concludes. “At age 17 I left that job and decided to dedicate my life to rave in whatever way the genre would accept me. A decision I made on my own. I never did find a place in any kind of genre.”
You can find Richie Culver on Instagram and on Bandcamp.
Tracklist:
‘Dream about yourself’ (Re-Edit)
‘Daytime TV’ (Rainy Miller Remix)
‘We got to be’
‘Gateway drug’
‘It’s hard to get to know you’
Pavel Milyakov & Richie Culver – ‘Track 2’
‘Scream if you don’t exist’
‘Afterparty stranger’
‘Create a lifestyle around your problems’
‘Clenched jaw’
‘Underground flower’ (Rainy Miller Re-Edit)
‘Oh my god they’re gone’
‘A victim of my own thoughts’ (Nuno Loureiro Re-Edit)
Blackhaine & Richie Culver – ‘I’m not gonna cum’
Richie Culver contemplates god and Elvis in Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems
Filmmaker and Participant Records co-founder William Markarian-Martin captures iconoclast, outsider artist Richie Culver in his mother’s house near Hull, revisiting the home town he spent his entire young adult life trying to escape.
The resonant barrage of concrète clatter and MRI machine churn of ‘Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems’ swells at the beating heart of I Was Born By The Sea, the devastating debut album from iconoclast, outsider artist Richie Culver. Unfurling as relentless friction, a Sisyphean surge and retreat that evokes trying and failing, again and again, to break out of an itching cycle of frustration, the track’s DIY sonics sandpaper a malleable surface upon which Culver inscribes his observations from the fringes that take on cavernous emotional potency with each repetition of his dissociated delivery. Here, the artist looks back at the “hardest working man in the job centre,” this “habitual bastard,” the “most underrated person in your family,” pinned under the crushing weight of his home town, obsessing over the need to escape while battling the apparent absurdity of such ambition: “you and god on a rollercoaster.” For the accompanying visual Culver, alongside close collaborator and Participant Records co-founder William Markarian-Martin, fittingly makes a return to his mother’s house in Withernsea, the titular seaside town of his birth. “The video was shot in my Mothers home near Hull. Where I was brought up also,” explains Culver. “You can hear the Sea from inside the house in Winter. Sometimes you can’t walk on the promenade because it’s so wet & wild.” Captured with an unflinching and poignant fusion of grey nostalgia and tender catharsis, Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems evokes a past battered by the rain, shaken by personal struggle and ransacked by Tory austerity. Footage of foam-flecked waves crashing across sodden concrete is obscured by the phrase “picture yourself succeeding,” as cold rain smudges a blurry lens.
Supplementing the track’s original bleak seaside poetry with additional writing, Culver and Markarian-Martin’s video reimagines the composition as a surreal broadcast from the Withernsea tourist board, inciting viewers to “think a positive thought to drown out a negative thought,” to “minimise obstacles,” while the fraying crunch of the broadcast’s grim soundtrack evokes the kind of limbo it feels impossible to imagine ending. Shifting focus in a hallucinatory sequence of dusty bottles of cologne, grey skies and various items of Elvis Presley memorabilia, the broadcast messages abruptly turn to faith, as though picking up evangelical radio signals or plundered from local church billboards. “If god be for us, who can be against us?” we are asked, before an unconvinced assertion: “I can do all things through christ which strengthen me.” This soggy invocation to faith transubstantiates the images of Elvis presented to us into escapist iconography, the fading remnants of the ‘Fantasy Island’ of Culver’s turbulent past, monolithic and technicolour, yet dull with salt and petrol fumes. “My Mother is obsessed with Elvis. Always has been,” explains Culver. “My stepdad was a singer in the local pubs. We always used to sing Roger Whittaker – ‘The Last Farewell’. That’s what I am singing in the video. I never really learned the words properly. Nothing like staring down the barrel of the North Sea on a wet & wild Tuesday evening in January.” All of this before pitching in to the spoken word of the track proper, a doom-laden introductory exclamation singularly evocative of an unmistakeable anxious stasis: “Woke up. In the morning. Pray for me. Don’t trust Elvis. Bad vibes. I wish I could sing. I listen to grime.”
The work vibrates with a tension between painful recollection and optimistic forward momentum, something that characterises the emotional texture of I Was Born By The Sea. Culver’s cold narration matches the temperature of Markarian-Martin’s seaside footage, yet at the same time alludes to the position he now finds himself in, ready and able to look back without blinking, a process that has continuously provided the engine for his ongoing journey as an artist and musician. “Hometowns are odd things,” he says. “Nothing can hold you back like a hometown. Imagine if your hometown was New York though. I wonder if New Yorkers know about the North Sea in January. My eldest son was originally in the video. But my partner said we should edit him out cos the video was a bit too morbid.” It’s this playful irreverence around very real strife that drives Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems, around which the industrial scrape and hum of the track turns, burrowing towards some deeply buried feeling, probing at the waterlogged roots of the artist’s present clarity. Even the track’s title, which at once to alludes to Culver’s past struggles with substance abuse, evoked in the sparse paranoia of his television static soundscapes, also seems to refer to the uncompromisingly autobiographical nature of his visual and sound art, which tackles with piercing economy his trajectory from self-described shut-in, wracked with low self-esteem, to a vital voice of the resolutely fucked, contemporary condition of the United Kingdom, echoing from the outside in. Like finding god in an Elvis mug, or translating the North sea into both blistering noise and heart-breaking song on I Was Born By The Sea, Culver finds wild beauty in places that once looked desperate.
‘Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems’ is taken from I Was Born By The Sea, which arrives via REIF on November 11.
For more information about Richie Culver and his work you can follow him on Instagram. You can also find William Markarian-Martin on Instagram.
Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems Credits:
Director – William Markarian-Martin
Additional Camera – Takeru Brady
Music – Richie Culver
Boomkat Product Review
Outstanding, darkly poetic collab from conceptual artist Richie Culver & electronic shapeshifter Pavel Milyakov (Buttechno) - a bloodletting for the times RIYL Blackhaine, Teresa Winter, TG
Landing in the slipstream of Culver’s surprise ace for Superpang, ‘A Change of Nothing’ presents the Hull-based multi-hyphenate meeting an ideally cranky foil in amorphous artist Pavel Milyakov, who relocated from Moscow to Europe with his Ukrainian wife earlier this year for obvious reasons.
Both artists bring their respective realities to the fore in utterly compelling style on ‘A Change Of Nothing’, meshing Culver’s spoken word observations and Max/MSP patches to Milyakov’s ravishing guitar and synth textures in visceral forms that speak vividly to their shared backgrounds in the brutalism of Hull and the former Soviet capital. It’s not a union that we might have readily predicted, but it proves a vital meeting of minds and energies, underlined by a soberly mature emotive intelligence and ability to divine beauty from harshness, or, at the least, a certain artistic truth.
As with Culver’s preceding Blackhaine collab ‘DID U COME YET / I’M NOT GONNA CUM’ and solo debut for Superpang, his lyrics are wryly realist, autobiographical observations on life in Hull, from the perspective of someone who grew up there, but found themselves rotting away, and moved cities to pursue his art, before moving back as a different person, sans addictions. Pavel’s perspective is similar but different, having grown up in Russia during the challenges of the ‘90s, then witnessing an autocratic ruler execute imperialist ambitions, effectively pushing him to abandon his home.
Where that combination of experiences could precipitate sentimentality, the pair hold a to a fine line between catharsis and disciplined restraint in five starkly evocative, open-ended works, with Culver’s unapologetically DOA Humberside vowels uttering junkie proverbs and punchily plaintive observations to Milyakov’s freeform textures. At times resembling the emotive orchestrations of Fennesz, at others like Kevin Drumm’s skull-scrape ambient tones, or with the bite and roil of Shapednoise; it’s a real deal expression of contemporary dread that’s going straight in our special folder of North Sea doom music.
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