Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Bootlicker
You have to admire not just the ambition, but the vision of Auckland underground band Grecco Romank: their new album of edgy techno-rock Arts Colony is just one aspect of the culture they are trying to expand, explore and critique.
They put it this way: “We're trying to tap into this vein of slop-culture that's being created in the world, that we're inundated with on social media.
“And there's this sense of frustration, the enshitification of everything.”
The result of this is not just the new album – which follows two previous albums and a remix collection – but a hefty 325 page book of art, photographs, essays and creative writing, also titled Arts Colony.
“We asked the book's collaborators to respond to that feeling. We're just trying to not take the attention away from the fact we live in a fucking techno-feudal hellhole. And a colonial hellhole at that.”
Now, you may not necessarily agree with that premise but the book and album pack quite a punch, and of course they relate to each other: contributors to the book include Andrew McLeod, Sam Te Kani, Princess Chelsea, Ron Gallipoli, Natasha Munro, Chris Cudby, Lance Strickland, James Milne, Antonie Tonnon and many others.
So it is a music/art project curated by Grecco Romank's Damian Golfinopoulo (a filmmaker), Billie Fee (a classically trained singer) and drummer Mikey Sperring (Drab Doo Riffs, Bib Kids).
The industrial strength album pulls together punishing or claustrophobic techno, dyspeptic speak-sung lyrics (2Hot2Hunt, “a feverish exploration of digital-age anxiety”), social comment (Gold Card, “who am I what am I where am I who am I”) and samples of voices, conversations, phone messages and such: like the hesitant voice saying “also if you also want confidential services (pause) . . . um . . . we can . . .”
There's a lineage of such sound collages in local music from Auckland's Big Sideways, Braille artists out of Wellington, Blam Blam Blam's Respect, Greg Malcolm's Trust This Face and What is Keith? albums in the Nineties and others who bridge the divide between music, random or related samples, social comment or humour.
The book – published by Grecco Romank's own Piss Baby Global Alliance – opens with a mesmerisingly random collection of found photos of diverse people from what seems like an early 1970s Christian youth group (the hair! the dresses!! the moustaches!!!) through kids in costume at what is probably a primary school production, Korean visitors to the no man's land at the divide, business people, soldiers and wedding guests, a large group at a restaurant table in the 1960s and . . .
Just people of their period, all now long gone but frozen in the lens. It's a human and interesting way of engaging the reader (because we've all been there at some time, and we project context and meaning) before the real meat of an interview with the band (“I regret our stupid name every fucking day”), collage and images related to 2Hot2Hunt, social comment and essays (The Creation of the Art of Destruction by musician/writer Hannah Harte), photos, poetry and more, all tied to or loosely linked to the album.
Some of this amusingly surreal and pretentious, as with the heavily redacted essay Limb From Limb: The Argentine Ant Vs the Post Capitalist Super Colony by band member Sperring.
At other times – Back to the Pen about prison and the accompanying Onegin text in the book by Lee Grey – it is disturbing and moving.
Any way you cut it, Arts Colony is quite a project: the album is a real step up from their previous Wet Exit.
Human Bin
Fee really unleashes her range over the beats and disruptive techno; the book keeps you guessing, turning the pages and sometimes stopping you in your tracks.
You can't ask for much more from music and art when they collide in this enshitifaction world.
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You can hear and buy the album at bandcamp here
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