VATICAN SHADOW + MARIA CHAVEZ
Arnolfini, Bristol | September 6th
About 50 seconds into Maria Chavez’s set she pulls a shard of vinyl from her lap, nonchalantly lifting it toward her head. Darkness envelops all but the Peruvian-born, Brooklyn-based sound artist who is performing, and for many introducing, experimental turntablism to the Arnolfini crowd who sit patiently on the floor, soaking up a palpable stillness.
The evening’s first release of noise shoots symmetrically like liquid nitrogen through your ears to a mid point in your brain where it sits, resonates, cutting through the silence with sharp and driving bursts of drone. We close our eyes. There’s something endlessly satisfying about filling your face to capacity with sound.
Poised with intent, Chavez delicately taps the moving table, before placing the vinyl-shard over the first record already in play. “Sound [interference] … like a xylophone” announces a male vocal, intermitted with noise. More of these jagged servings of vinyl materialise erratically from Chavez’s bag and they are snapped, torn and fastidiously dropped atop the turntable and its increasingly heavy load. At one point, trying with might to snap a particular piece, and failing, she tentatively balances the half-snapped tool on its side, and blows toward the needle. The needle springs and bounces, jumps off this sonic jigsaw sabotage one by one, evolving the pattern of grating distortion that brings with it a new layer of sound, unveiled from beneath. She has a soft voice, so she should use the microphone, she tells us. She’s going to play this one, but it won’t sound anything like the original. This record has battle scars. It’s fitting, for within this show precision is seemingly eschewed, and what’s vital in creating her sound is imperfection.
As instinctively your senses grapple for safety in repetition, eagerly seizing hold, it’s all too quickly stripped away. This idea paves the way for tonight’s noise-art agenda; electronic music through the prism of performance art; anarchic systems to channel a chaotic world. Enter Dominick Fernow aka Vatican Shadow, whose implicit forays into the political personify his work, each one inextricable to the other with tracks like Saddam Statue Conspiracy, Cairo Is A Haunted City and releases Washington Buries Al Qaeda Leader At Sea – Deck 1, 2 and 3. Striding into view to stand behind an impenetrable rusty chest, he delves inside it. Industrial swirls of drone engulf the room as the screen shows endless reams of psalms and newspaper clippings of religious intent; ‘God’s Representative On Earth’. Slowly, this is layered with news coverage of last decade’s ‘war on terror’, interwoven with faces you could be sure were mongers, criminals or victims of war. ‘Snipers As A Breed Tend To Be Superstitious’. George Bush’s face appears, inducing swathes of noise that lick vehement and crushing electro waves. It grabs you at the throat, fills your windpipe. ‘Military violence is waged in shadows’. No one is dancing; most are writhing with emotion. Tearing away at societal battle scars, Fernow himself is seething, frantic, throwing back his daunting frame in frenzy. He flounces stage left, stage right and into the crowd, hair flailing, jeering us.
Before we closed our eyes, and now we can’t shut them. There is no comfort to be found here. At points we feel like crying. It’s manic, maddened, and we become totally consumed by its objective to overwhelm. Conclusively, Fernow returns to the stage, hostile, to slam shut the chest. Taunting with aural aggression and triumphalist abasement, Vatican Shadow’s manifesto trembles the ceremonial dance of the ordinary, through the ritual march of the obscene.
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residentadvisor.net/dj/vaticanshadow
Words: Anna Tehabsim
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