OPORTO, STREETLEVEL & BELOW
Oporto, Portugal is a beautiful weathered city. Between fantastic meals that shake your taste buds awake people exist solely on cigarettes and espresso. Gentle melancholy scents the air, not just there but everywhere Iīve been in Portugal, and like my friend Max said, you can spot a Spaniard a hundred yards away because they are talking so much louder than the Portuguese.
Many of the housesīfacades have lovely pastel tiles, and a handful of the walls hold pissed-off graffiti and stencils, written in playful pun-ridden Portuguese with the occasional forray into direct, angry English. Below is a dope iconographic blend--Bush, Hussein, the social elegance of a business suit turning into bombs & flags. Patriotism. Persecution. A cycle of propaganda. Things that make nations.
(What will happen when the budget airlines slam into Portugal? This new colonial outpouring is odd indeed: driving into Budapest a huge sign announces "Tesco [UK supermarket chain] welcomes you to Hungary!" Easyjet arrives, then Wizzair (the London-based, Central- and Eastern European-branded equivalent) and simultaneously, a flourishing of British stag parties in Budapest, steaming Britons stumbling around, asking for the whores... It happens like that in Barcelona too: Sleazyjet economy-- cheaper foreign city sidestreets as the marketplace; women, usually African or Eastern European, as the goods. Plane home on monday, English spoken all the while.)
Back to Porto-- going underground, which is where Ove-Naxx & I performed. Ove---a polite maniac noisician from Japan who maintains enough rhythmic base in his music so you can A. dance along and B. feel the full impact of his violence against structural normality---went buckwild, rocking a Saddam Hussein mask thrashing about in the transfixed audience. At some point he sliced open his thumb, deep cut, on broken glass. Ove kept raging, pounding out riotously fun architectural beat-splinters on his MPC2000 sampler--spilling blood everywhere in the process: on gear, floor, clothes, other people. He didnīt stop early, despite heavy bleeding.
People often joke about "crazy
Japanese" or slap totalizing labels on "extreme music from
Japan", but the fact is, the experimental / noise / punk freakout
scenes
in Japan possess a downright impressive sense of historical context.
Nuances of style hold enormous importance. Punk Japanese
experimentalism isnīt conceptual
in the WIRE-approved, Alvin Lucier type way, but kids really care about
the ideas, attitudes,
and situations that go into a particular work or performance--the
concept, or
story, behind any given piece is something you need to get as well as
its
actual sound.
At least I think thatīs whatīs going on. Sometimes in Japan itīs hard to tell.