Perlin Noise #1: WE and The Rebel
Thu 20 Nov 2014, 7–10pm
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Announcing WE and The Rebel, the first in the Perlin Noise series at The White Building.
More an experiment into the limits of pop than a band, WE are four bodies barely obscured by identical black boxes, a broken man machine of shrill synth grooves, bizarre guitar melodies, cartoon drumrolls and sax for special occasions. Borrowing strategies from the likes of the Residents, Devo and Laibach, WE replace the individual ‘I’ with the collective ‘WE’, transforming tender love songs into threatening revenge messages and military march tunes: “WE Want to Hold Your Hand”, “WE Will Always Love You” and “WE Will Be Your Father Figure”.
WE translate the monstrous, violent, and traumatic, revolutionary process of the abolition of identity into pluralized pop. Songs about ‘me’ and ‘you’ become songs about ‘us’, intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique universal. WE present field recordings from the disaster zone of the culture industry. Fragments of 1980s club classics are sieved through the colander of 1970s power pop and pasted together into sticky B-movie surf tunes, not sold as chic upcycled classics but left to rot like a pile of discounted CDs in an abandoned Tesco.
Formed in 2010, WE released their debut 10” in 2011 and a cassette in 2014. They continue unabated.
WE are also on Soundcloud and Facebook.
The Rebel’s Ben Wallers started in the mid-1990s as the singer, guitarist and main songwriter of the legendary Scottish band County Teasers. Although The Teasers continued to release albums regularly until 2008, Wallers also started working under many different monikers including The Devil and The Male Nurse. As The Rebel, Wallers mixes garage punk, lo-fi country and eclectic sounds and his songs deal with social taboos and the political malaises of liberal democracy.
SPACE’s new sound art programme, Perlin Noise* challenges assumptions of what contemporary music and sound art are through a range of interventions – including live events, collaborative learning, artist development, and digital platforms. By tracking and reflecting the complexity of the permeable boundaries between sound art, experimental music and networked performance, we invite the audience to listen and experience in new and expanded ways.
This rolling programme invites us to explore a series of sonic interventions, soundscapes and audio prototypes, challenging the idea of what makes up our auricular environment.
* Invented by Ken Perlin in the 1980s, the Perlin Noise algorithm is a procedural texture primitive, a type of gradient noise used by visual effects artists to increase the appearance of realism in computer graphics. The function has a pseudo-random appearance, yet all of its visual details are the same size.
