New York’s Museum Of Modern Art has a funkier outpost in Queens, its Long Island City PS1 complex boasting an established tradition of summer all-dayers, in the shape of its weekly Warm Up parties. During the colder months, a geodesic dome is constructed in the courtyard, and some less hedonistic agendas are explored.
The Allgold art collective is dedicated to multiple disciplines, and is now resident in PS1’s Print Shop. Their latest Sunday Sessions presentation was titled Underground: an Indefinite Community?, exploring alternative elements of film and storytelling, but mostly concentrating on wayward electronic music.
The centrepiece of the afternoon was an appearance by members of Underground Resistance, the pioneering Detroit techno collective founded by Jeff Mills and Mad Mike Banks in the late 1980s. DJ Nomadico opened up with a set that cavorted from funk though Afrobeat into electro-pop, eventually stretching into a stripped, bleeping techno-skip, bruising with insistent stutters and crunchy crash-beats. The scattered floor cushions were pushed aside, and the audience was urged to dance even though this was a relaxed afternoon, not exactly flooded with booze or loaded with momentum. Even so, the encouragement worked, and a good percentage of people took to their feet. Nomadico fared quite well, given his standing start.
Then, oddly, the mood was dialled down, as a documentary filled in the background to UR and chairs were set out for a panel discussion with Banks, Nomadico and Cornelius Harris, manager of the UR record label. The audience sat back down on the cushions, and everything quietened down for some in-depth analysis.
It soon became apparent that Mad Mike Banks is an exceptionally charismatic and profound speaker, possessing an authoritative aura as well as a debunking sense of humour, garnished with a savagely scalpelling critical facility. The UR crew want their music to spread organically, in a viral fashion, transmitting techno in the blood. There’s talk of engineering the sound of a rumour into a record, and Banks likens his sought-after sound as being equivalent to the fear of stepping on a landmine. He speaks of developing protective clothing to withstand the pressure of chokeholds, but then muses that such advanced garment-technology would immediately be made illegal.
Banks considers the mostly instrumental nature of techno as a way of side-stepping censorship. He says Detroit is way ahead, having heralded the failure of capitalism. He deliberately derails the expected responses to certain situations, squirting bitterly humorous asides, but also revealing some astute observations on an expansively imaginative front.
He wonders how effective street demonstrations can be if they only give the authorities an excuse to clamp down further, suggesting that a longer-reaching perspective for the future should be encouraged. Banks is obsessed with the concept of techno as a music for the future, and aghast that it’s not been used much in science fiction movies, for instance. His earthy motor mechanic nature informed grand concepts of societal advancement, in one of the most individualist and thought-provoking panel discussions witnessed in a long while.
