Vit S at the New Gallery.

Yesterday was interesting. I took two friends, Lin and Doug, to a Vit S concert at this little bar thats part of the New Gallery complex in town. I wanted to introduce the music I’m into to Lin, Doug has already had the Vit S intro, because it was important to me that she experienced what drives me these days.

Me and Lin have this weird relationship, well it’s not weird for us, but outside it may be construed as such, because we were close as soon as we met and the closeness was surprising and a little scary because it all came straight out of the blue. There were also some wierd connections to her life that I came to represent and finally we approached a clairvoyant and got the inside track as to what we were and are to each other. Suffice to say we’re close and it was important to me that she get an impression of the gang I hang with these days.

So we all had different cars, we’re humans of the first world afterall, and parking was a little difficult but they arrived before me and were outside when I got there. They didn’t want to go back in but I led them in, the concert was underway, but after a while they decided to leave and I stayed. I wondered if I should go chase them and find out why they didn’t like it but I did like it so I stayed. Thats kinda why I like the Vitamin S thing. Questions are raised about likes and dislikes as well as the “scene” having no other contemporary mode of behaviour, it’s always kinda floating, so behaviours are simply what goes down and again more questions are raised. I have gotten to know myself and my relationship to society alot better in the brief, almost a year now, that I’ve centred myself around its peculiarities.

So the concert finishes and I meet them outside and their reasons for disliking the atmosphere are thrown at me. I’m not beautific so I throw back why I like the place and argue the reasons for what they percieve one way I understand another.

Boring, pretentsious, lacking in dynamics, melody and a beat. Oh no, here we go. We go to dinner and the argument continues. I try to just let them convince me of the validity of their arguments, and they are valid, but I can’t help myself. I argue for the thing that holds alot of weight these days for me and while this ensues I realise the details of why I like this music and how it’s taken time to embrace. It’s alike most aquired tastes that seem completely yucky at first but we instincively know theres something worth getting used to and when we finally do we see the subtleties and know our challenge to ourselves has been worth the effort.

I though, am brazen in my argumentativeness. Why do you think this music is pretenscious? Why do you need rhythm and melody. At some level isn’t all sound and noise music? This makes them more entrencehed and I am left feeling a little bereft. I think they might be right but then I remeber my first ever dose of Vitamin S, I’d forgotten about this, which was a few years ago when they were still at the Odeon. I’d thought exactly the same thing and walked out thinking “what a pretentsious bunch of wankers, can’t they think of something more interesting to do than all that noise? Wheres the melody and the beat that would make it more accessible?”

And then I realise that I also thought exactly the same thing about some of the dance being done by Val and her modern dance friends at the time when I was actually ready to embrace the way of the Vitamin called S. She kinda encouraged me to go to the Vit and with her there I found the time to accept it. It was also at a time where I was interested in branching out as I’d gotten back into electronics and instrument making and Vitamin S just opened up before me as an enviroment made for me to jump into.

So with this argument yesterday alot of stuff I hadn’t even thought of was brought to the fore as I struggled to understand why friends alike in so many other ways found this particular arena of my life a complete waste of time and energy.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. From this isn’t it reasonable to assume that for some ears what is construed as noise for some may be heard as music to others? It seems obvious when it’s written down then why is it so hard to lift oneself above ones preconceptions of where boundaries lie and open those to new ideas. Maybe it’s because the idea of music is one of beats and melodies… patterns. The idea of being able to percieve patterns within sound that are harmonious with our notions of emotional response. If those patterns become obscure and obtuse, not recognisable or able to be repeated, does that stop them from being patternable. Does it stop, or do we stop, an ability to give ourselves to complexities that may reveal depths to our characters that we don’t want to or aren’t ready to acknowledge. All these questions were raised for me last night as I realised that my friends were seeing and hearing something they weren’t ready to accept and what was apparent to me was the ease with which they gave reasons for that. I realised I had aquired a taste for something that others could not and did not find appealing. I don’t blame them for that for I was in exactly the same position myself years ago.

At the same time I am left wondering about other aquired tastes and the phenomena behind them that it’s not so much what we do, be it cover ourselves in tattoo’s or have multiple piercings, or decide to ride skateboards or go surfing etc but that in choosing a particular thing, on one hand because we identify with it in some un-acknowledged and un-understood ways, but also in that acquiescence we decide to follow a fate that allows us to find out more about ourselves and our relationship to others. The more obscure the choice is the more we seem to distance ourselves from others but at the same time see the underlying similarities in all our actions. Our gang may be obscure and have few members but it’s still a gang and isn’t it possible that it’s only reason for being is to learn the value of kinship. The stuff itself, being truck enthusiasts or crochet circles, is mere detritus, interesting detritus I’m sure in all the vagaries of this coming together but underneath I think it’s all about testing ourselves and accepting others and being able to let others be who they are while we become who we are.

This then raises again the question of the actions undertaken within the group. I find that within Vitamin S I have to suspend judgement almost all the time. I can’t define that something is good or bad because then I have to question myself why I decide that it’s good or bad. What is it about a certain grouping of sounds that raises fear in me or makes me feel uncomfortable and again, or almost reciprocally, because I am dividing it into the one that is me, what is it about other groupings of sound that feel good and allow me drift off into worlds where all possible things seem open to me.

This gang is, for me, not one where I can drop into an easy un-questioned version of myself, I feel that in this gang I can question the role of myself and try out new clothes. But not only that. I have to question why I find myself even in those particular clothes. It’s a new gang. It’s like the trial period before a gang realises it has a patch to emblazon upon it’s backs and write the charter of definition. It cannot be categorised at conch records unless it’s under weird shit that hasn’t decided what category it’s in yet… which may actually become the new category… now that’s a good name for a band that added beat and melody to this noise stuff and made pop songs for mass consumption…”The New Category”

I just went to the Vitamin S website to grab a picture to finish this off and picked this one straight off the front page and now I’ve read through the above and corrected mistakes I looked at the picture and realised one of my old paintings is in the background. It’s from years and years ago, the photo and the painting, and, Gosh and Good Golly, I just love serendipidty. Would hev been back in about ’94 when I had an exhibition at the Odeon and didn’t even know Vitamin S existed.