At the end of June, I had the unsettling pleasure of wandering through a blue fringed curtain and into the backroom-disco of Rowland Hill’s miniaturised Eurodance clubnight. Presented at Post-Paradise in Birmingham, Interesting Times was a foreboding inoculation of nineties ‘lyrical optimism [in] an emotively charged minor key’. La Cream, Alice Deejay, Phutura, Aqua Ninja: their tracks have, as Hill writes in the programme notes, ‘melodies reminiscent of breaking news sound effects and beats that suggest states of both euphoria and emergency’ – this is music that brings an ‘unsettling blend of doubt and hopefulness’. Sash!’s ‘Mysterious Times’ opens with samples of thunder, later including the line ‘We’re counting the hours and days to the end of all time’.
Are there many other regular concert series where one might have encountered an informal installation piece conceived as a 20-minute club- night – especially after seeing two other previous sets by composer-performers, each with their own setup? Rowland Hill’s installation is in some ways a perfect example of what Post-Paradise is about: simultaneously carefully curated and loose, sort-of ironic and sort-of not, exploring composition-adjacent practice from the point of view of composition. And with a thoroughly unsettling atmosphere. As a concert series, Post-Paradise is unusual in having a certain tone or ‘outlook’ – a continuing eschatological mood is never far away. Concerts in the series exude a vibrant sense of dread – something like Minima Moralia meets CSI: Miami.
For each event in the Post-Paradise series, the curators bring together a group of composer-performers. (The curators, Maya Verlaak, Zach Dawson and Richard Stenton, are composer- performers also.) The composer-performer is of course a familiar enough phenomenon, but there is a particular quality this form of practice exudes within the wider contexts of contemporary music. It can be a little tricky to pin down, but it does differ from the more usual lyric indie singer-songwriter or folksinger. The composer’s approach to their own material is typically more corrugated, closer to assemblage: the piece being exhibited as an example of a space the performer has come to live in. ‘This is the house’ – or shack, or den – ‘I have built for myself’. The composer-performer is also better at exuding a sense of powerlessness – something that, traditionally, composers were not in the habit of foregrounding. Given the eschatological mood of these concerts, powerlessness, even if powerlessness-while-wearing-a-smile, is at the forefront.
At the Centrala space, at the back of Birmingham industrial estate, multiple different rooms are available, allowing for performance and installation and much else in between. Alongside artists associated with UK experimentalism, the series has a notably strong connection with The Hague. As well as Verlaak, musicians working or studying at the Conservatorium featured in series have included David Pocknee, Leo Svirsky, Andy Ingamells, Robert Blatt and Lucie Vitkova. The curation of Post-Paradise since 2016 forms, at least for myself, a fascinating glimpse into parallels and linkages in artistic practice between scenes which can sometimes feel distant, with Dutch arts often sinking under the radar outside of the Netherlands. The series has featured more established artists within UK experimentalism – Howard Skempton, Matthew Shlomowitz, Michael Wolters and Andrew Hamilton have all performed solo sets. The effect of focus on performance by the artists themselves is one poised between looseness, vulnerability, self-sufficiency, asociability and flexibility.