WE, Ravioli Me Away and Gelbart : Post-Consumer Plastic People
At the meeting point between contemporary art and popular music, Post Consumer Plastic P
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. 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, WEreplace 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.
Ravioli Me Away’s all-girl jazzy, post- pop-punk, hip-funk outfit uses costumes, props and videos to enhance their Slits inspired bass lines, Casio pop and cool Mo Tucker drumming. Stylistically schizophrenic, the band shoplifts freely from the rich history of subcultures, meshing everything together into a malfunctioning new wave calypso club hits and injecting their feminist pop with dadaesque mayhem.
Gelbart’s love of analogue sounds and cheap technology has helped him develop a considerable practice that asks questions about the relationship between humans, objects and technological environments. Working in film and writing as well as music, his records are the soundtrack to a world populated by weird creatures, murderous vegetables and “WW1 hamsters”.
WE: http://www.kollectiv.co.
Ravioli Me Away: http://raviolimeaway.co.
Gelbart: http://www.
The performance is organized by Are.
