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LECKEY 001LP
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2019 repress; originally released in 2012. The video installation Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) is one of the best-known and -loved works by Turner Prize-winning, London-based artist and Northern English emigre Mark Leckey. It's a hugely influential piece, and the soundtrack itself has been sampled endlessly, most notably by Jamie xx on "All Under One Roof Raving" (2014). A phantasmic and transcendent collage of meticulously sourced and rearranged footage and sound samples spanning three decades of British subculture -- from Northern Soul thru '80s casuals and rave -- it may be considered an uncanny premonition of the hauntological zeitgeist that has manifested itself in virulent sections of UK electronic dance and pop culture since the early '00s. This record severs the sonic aspect from the moving image, offering a new perspective upon what rave culture maven and esteemed author Simon Reynolds calls "a remarkable piece of sound art in its own right." Divorced from its visual indicators, Leckey's amorphous, acephalic cues are reframed as an ethereal, Burroughsian mesh of VHS idents, terrace chants, fragmented field recordings, and atrophied samples cut with his own half-heard mumbles. At once recalling and predating the eldritch esthetics of Burial, The Caretaker, or the Mordant Music clique, it's an elegiac lament for an almost forgotten spirit and an abstracted obituary to the rituals, passions, and utopian ideals of pre-internet, working-class nightlife fantasias. It's backed with another soundtrack to a Mark Leckey video installation, GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010). In stark contrast, the original video features a black Samsung Bottom Freezer Refrigerator stood in front of a green screen infinity cyc, recounting its contents, thoughts, and actions as narrated by the artist in a radically transformed cadence. Meditating on cybernetics and the ambient ecology of household appliances that permeate our lives, it's an unsettling yet compelling piece of sound design with subtly affective dynamics that reflect the underlying dystopic rhetoric with visceral and evocative precision. The piece was later used in a collaboration with Florian Hecker for the Push And Pull exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2011 (the soundtrack of which was released by PAN in 2015 as Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera (PAN 047LP)).
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LP
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RAVE 016LP
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Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey (b. 1964 in Birkenhead, England) presents the soundtrack to his 2015 autobiographical film installation Dream English Kid 1964-1999AD on The Death of Rave, the label he inaugurated in 2012 with the first vinyl edition of the soundtrack to his 1999 video installation Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (which has since been extensively sampled by a range of contemporary musicians including Jamie xx). Presented in its entirety but cleft to fit two sides of wax, the 30-minute soundtrack draws from an extensive archive to form a personalized mixtape of memories that speak to Leckey's formative experiences in his 35 years before becoming a mainstream-recognized artist. As he explains, "Dream English Kid began when I found on YouTube an audio recording of Joy Division playing at a small club in Liverpool. A gig I'd been present at but could barely remember. As I listened I wondered if, through enhancing the audio, I could actually find my fifteen-year-old self in the recording. That led me to think would it be possible; at this point, with so much imagery available in the digital archives, to reconstruct my memoirs through all the DVD re-releases, eBay ephemera, YouTube uploads and above all the resource of the internet itself; the way it can actualize half-forgotten memories and produce a niche for seemingly every remembrance." The work segues chronologically from Leckey's birth during the epoch of the moon landings and The Beatles through the awakening of a libido, the experience of witnessing Joy Division as a teenager in Liverpool, the dread/ecstasy/surreality of 'ardcore rave with warped samples of Bay B Kane's "Hello Darkness" and an MC chatting license plate numbers, and the pre-millenial, pre-digital tension of '99 with news stories and a lick from Azzido Da Bass's "Dooms Night" -- before it all comes flooding back in reverse before the dead wax. When separated from the visual content and considered in its own right, the soundtrack takes on an oneiric and deeply topographical quality of its own, highlighting the psychedelic, sensual, and hauntological in/tangibility of memory through an evocative web of plasmic references with a mercurial detachment that seems ever more relevant to modernity's sense of flattened time and up-cycled culture. Artwork designed by Mark Leckey from film stills. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Vinyl-only edition of 500.
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