Photo: Underworld’s Karl Hyde (left), Rick Smith, Beautiful Burnout (not the song or exhibit)
The pioneering electronic music trio Underworld have just begun a multi-media exhibition on view at New York’s Jacobson Howard Gallery through August 15.
During the exhibit, Underworld will play the three-day All Points West festival in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park. They go on just before Radiohead on Friday at 6:30 p.m. Regular single-day tickets are sold out but carpool packages, VIP-ticket packages, and three-day tickets are still available here.
Open to the public, Beautiful Burnout gets its name from a great track from Underworld’s 2007 album Oblivion with Bells. It is also the name of the art piece at the top right, which is on sale at the gallery. It’s a handmade silkscreen on rag paper, 37 x 29 inches, and a limited edition run of 100.
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Underworld - Born Slippy [MP3] - Buy Underworld music at Insound
In a release, this exhibit — one of many “Art Jams” run primarily by the Tomato group, of which Karl is a member) — is said to produce “an intoxicating confluence of graceful macro-photography, compelling videos and film, lush and mesmerizing sound, layered collages of street snapshots and a poetic diary of painting, images and text.” You can keep tabs on the exhibition at www.underworldlive.com/artjam.
New York electronic-music blogger Showtrotta, a friend of TheMusic.FM, had a nice chat with Underworld’s Karl Hyde to discuss these exciting projects and more.
You guys have been touring for quite a bit over the past year. How’s that been going and have there been any particularly memorable shows lately?
Ah, wow. Yeah we just played in Hyde Park in London – the crowd was too big for the space that we were playing in. The same happened in Belgium. We’re playing to bigger and bigger crowds now – the kind of notoriety of the band as a live band has taken on a new momentum.
The All Points West Festival that’s coming up in August has quite a number of artists on the bill, is there anyone in particular you are looking forward to playing with or seeing?
Yes — MGMT.
The multimedia exhibit Beautiful Burnout is happening in New York around the same time as the festival. From my understanding the installation is going to be continually modified for the 2 weeks that it’s going on. Do you think that playing at the All Points West Festival in the middle of it is going to influence your and Rick’s contributions to the installation?
In as much as we won’t be there for a couple of days. Yes in a sense as well in that we’ll go to the gallery, start to make work, go away and will have had fresh experiences that then we’ll go back and bring them to it. But we’ve been art jamming now for many years and we have an online art studio that we jam in with our friend John Warwicker who we’ve been in with for 27 years. He does all the art work. We also publish a monthly online book called the book of jam which is some of our jams from that month. Improvising and jamming is a kind of natural thing to us.
Do you have any idea in mind for what you want to with the installation?
Oh yeah. There will be some things that we’ve already created. We make large scale, small scale drawings. We do lots of photography. I use very lo-fi, half frame cameras. Rick uses very hi-fi, digital cameras. We’re going to be doing a wall where we’re jamming on top of each other’s work, making marks, painting, text.
So it’s definitely a long term, ongoing thing.
Yeah. There will be video and there will be sound installation as well. When we were in Japan last year we had a big art jam there which was a wall 7 meters high by 50 meters long. There was a whole group of us there of artists and a team of helpers helping us work on it. It’s a fantastic way of making art.
The name of this installation is Beautiful Burnout which is a track off of Oblivion With Bells. What made you choose that specific track for the title of the installation?
It was the gallery, the Jacobsen Howard Gallery. When they offered us the space for two weeks which was in itself an extraordinary offer because they are an important gallery in New York, they said we would like to suggest calling it this because they had come to see us play in Central Park in New York, loved what they heard and saw, because they also saw what we have on stage – sculptures of light and the video art that we take around the world with us and they connected the two things up and wanted to make a very clear connection between our music and our art. It came as their suggestion.
When Underworld was in its early years did you or Rick think you’d be making music and still touring 20 years later?
No. It’s funny, we say that almost every week. We kind of go, who would’ve thought that when we met 27 years ago we’d still be not only touring together but actually happier now than when we started. It’s extraordinary what we’re doing – I don’t mean this as a boast or anything. I’m as amazed as anyone else. What we’re doing – if you would’ve asked us as kids what our absolute ideal dream to do in the future would be it would be this. It would be to make the music we want to make, to be touring it around the world, to be able to support our families by doing it, to make art when we wanted to, web radio shows, to work with people we wanted to work with, to work in and out of all sorts of disparate medium and in different styles this would be it. We get bored very easily as you can imagine, so we end up making lots of things. But, no - we’re very surprised.
I’m sure it’s very fulfilling for you guys.
Yeah and very tiring.
Over that time and more recently, what are some of the more significant changes you’ve been noticing in the music industry, for better or for worse?
The one that we really welcomed was the huge changes that are going on in the industry which are I guess, force lots of people to take a more independent approach, a more outsider approach and take responsibility for the publication for their art. The industry as it was had some major drawbacks in it. One of them was that it kind of - it made less of what everybody did because it forced so much of it into preformed boxes and pigeonholes. More people are having to think outside of the box and that’s a great thing.
What about changes in technology, how has that changed how you operate both in the studio and live?
It means now that we can carry a really high end recording studio in a laptop and work in our hotel rooms or on airplanes as well as back home in our main studio. That’s fantastic because at one time that kind of technology wasn’t affordable and the nearest you could get was going to a regular recording studio and spending a few weeks there at best and then it wasn’t something you could do continuously everyday, whereas now we can record wherever we are in the world. So that’s been a big step forward. I remember we supported the Eurythmics on their farewell tour in the States and Dave Stewart had this mobile studio and it was enormous. It took up about six flight cases and now you can do the same thing with a laptop.
What do you think about a lot of the emerging artists in electronic music today like Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, and a lot of the more developing bands?
Well Simian Mobile Disco we took to Japan with us last year because we like their music so much and we just did two shows with Justice. We really like what the younger artists are doing a lot. Reinvention is an important part of music and when I see artists like that I think it’s still alive and it’s got a real future.
Is there anyone, other than those two, new and young making electronic music that you are particularly excited about or think is very good?
Oh gosh, you know I’m terrible at remembering names. We’ve got a book of names for when people ask me these questions. We sort of, you know, we don’t focus on any one style of music. We really like disparate styles of music so everything from the Delta Blues and the Desert Blues of Tinariwen through to Late of the Pier and MGMT through Simian and electronic artists in the middle. People at the Cocoon label are doing great things that inspire us for a long time. You’ve got fantasic things coming out of Germany. You’ve also got bands that are doing more fusioney things like Efterklang that are taking electronics and subverting traditional instruments by using electronics.
Do you and Underworld have any collaborations planned either art or music-related coming up?
Yeah we’re working with Nina Nastasia. I don’t know if you know Nina’s work. She’s based in New York. She did my favorite album of many years called On Leaving. She’s somebody that we’ve currently got a collaboration going with at the moment. Constantly talking to people and people that inspire us, people like Efterklang or Melt Banana in Japan and you just know that somewhere up the road your paths are going to cross again and you’re going to be able to do something. Right now apart from Nina, Rick and myself and John Warwicker have got so much work on just jamming between ourselves but the door stays open and that’s the lovely thing about what we’re doing. The door remains open. One big one that we want to do is work with Gabriel Yared again who we worked with on the Breaking and Entering film score and get together with him and a full orchestra and do an orchestral piece.
