@a.v.dummy

The Eiffel Tower stands over a sleepless Las Vegas. Ten minutes away, at the Luxor Hotel and Casino, the Sphinx and a Black Pyramid cast a shadow on the strips risk-drunken populace. In 1904, Vegas was an empty valley. Now it holds two of the world's biggest landmarks. It doesn't matter what it means – It doesn't matter what it says. In a world of endless excess, meaning has no actual value. Information is just white noise, a constant frequency, buzzing away in your ear: Excess, excess, excess, excess… Asher Gamedze's album, 'Dialectic Soul', had just been released. Upon listening to it, I immediately reached out, and to my surprise, he responded. I felt a strong sense of admiration for him because, to put it simply – His music made me feel smart. There was an academic edge to 'Dialectic Soul'. It felt like history unravelling, a tapestry tracing the roots of universal black music. With an admittedly limited knowledge of jazz full stop outside of the generally agreed-upon classics and having never even heard any South African jazz, it felt like I'd stumbled onto an unseen gem. And I had. Asher makes God's music. Christy and I wanted to do something similar but completely different. We wanted everything all at once, an ungodly fusion of this, that and this. The song was initially written over drum samples from both Ginger Baker and Tony Allen – An encounter between Europe and Africa heard on the 'Live!' record by the Africa '70. Having Asher on board completed the 'Postmodern Exorcism' puzzle, giving the senseless chaos of the words and sounds a direction. The result is the message – There's too much everything, and none of it makes sense. ~BUCHANAN

Cancelled. The virtual foot in the virtual mouth, followed by the virtual outrage of the virtual masses. It seems to pander to say that ‘Man Burns Self’ is actually about so-called ‘cancel culture’ – It’s not. It’s about the idea of the public persona in the age of instant gratification. A lot of imagery was taken from Tibetan monks setting themselves alight in the name of a cause – Here, the cause is merely to be acknowledged. There is undeniably a herd mentality online that can manifest in wildly unpredictable ways. Entire cultural-political movements that fundamentally make no sense, like several alt-right groups, form on the sheer basis of provoking other people. There’s a severe lack of questioning, and beyond that, even an active refusal to engage in rational trains of thought just for the sake of being contrarian. Scarier still is the way major corporations go out of their way to endorse genuine social justice movements as a simple PR strategy – A Nike sponsored protest raises serious questions about the authenticity of the protest. All of this, to me, felt like a very new form of authoritarianism– Twitter, with its 140-character cap to further limit the likelihood of intelligent debate, had somehow become the format of choice for changing the world. Much like in ‘1984’, it felt like we had begun to adopt Newspeak, except a more daunting thought was that we did so voluntarily and without the domineering of Big Brother. ~BUCHANAN

I was high watching a burning building. When we were told Grenfell tower was on fire, we naively imagined a small dumpster fire on the rooftop – Entertainment value, short work to put out, and likely a prank. We first walked to the bathroom window to get a clearer view. Then we walked to the building itself. No one spoke as the sirens of fire trucks drowned the atmosphere. The large crowd of local onlookers simply gasped and turned away as people fell. How could such violent disregard for human life occur in one of the most financially well-off boroughs in the country? And why did we feel so numb in the face of it? When I wrote ‘The City’, I wanted to approach impending doom. The globalised world was caving in and eating itself, and we were all gonna be the first to go. The poor in this city eat cheap, fast food and inhale the car fumes, waiting for the River Thames to swallow them up. No matter what happens, the governments seem ineffectually uninterested in doing anything. The hope of any resolution shrinks daily. More than anything, ‘The City’ grudgingly accepts fate. Violence, fear and immorality are inevitable features of life, and in the increasingly apocalyptic landscape of a climate crisis, nuclear threats and authoritarian regimes, it’s sometimes easier to surrender. ~BUCHANAN

some things about the album online, courtesy of @waxmusicuk , @soundofviolencethemedia , @rimasebatidas + @district.magazine we’ve just been happy to have it out there after so long

recents

Traces of ‘In Colour’ had been floating around in Christy and I’s chats for years. I first heard the central riff in 2016, and as Christy gradually developed the song over time, I struggled to come up with something that felt right. I knew what I wanted to do – I wanted to somehow characterise collective identity and its fear of the unknown. But I just couldn’t get the words right. Then came the global pandemic. Everything that had happened in the past few years suddenly felt explainable. The tribalism: The refugee crisis, Brexit, the storming of the Capitol building, the murder of George Floyd. There was a feeling of fear across all demographics and sides of the political spectrum. In an age of interconnectivity the world had never seen before, there was a feeling of complete isolation. No one understood anyone. And everyone was out to get you. I took bits and pieces from everywhere – Police planting piles of bricks at protests in the hopes of allowing them the opportunity to violently escalate. Contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. Delusional right-wing conspiracies suggesting the government were filling drinking water with mind-altering substances. 5G towers set ablaze in glorious displays of technological regression. The world was fucking insane, and the idiots universally were grouping together. Identity politics and culture wars followed the same line of Us and Them. The individual was dead. ~BUCHANAN

It was around 2018, and the pills weren’t working. I’d spent the past years as tired, bitter, and irritable as ever, except with the added state assistance of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, which I was also coming of age to be dropped from. Nothing was great. My primary source of productivity was an idea for a concept album called PORNOVIOLENCE, a title based on a Tom Wolfe essay I’d randomly discovered through Wikipedia. Yet, this connection was aloof – I vastly liked the title for shock value. So instead, I initially wanted to tell a story- A sort of album format of Orwell’s ‘1984’, using the character of Winston Smith in the world of Donald Trump. ‘Brave New World’ is actually named after THE other major dystopic novel of the 20th century, by Aldous Huxley – Soma, the cure-all drug that numbs the population of the World State, is distributed freely to make the people feel good. When antidepressants like fluoxetine and sertraline are prescribed by GPs on an unquestioning whim, whilst real support is brushed off as too time-consuming, part of myself believed that these medications weren’t intended to make anyone better. At best, they were placebo and, at worst, a tool to instil docility. In a time of alternative fact, alternative right, and alternative left, it appeared the world had discovered a new religion: Apathy. ~BUCHANAN

PORNOVIOLENCE. An album by AV Dummy. Out at midnight.

‘postmodern exorcism’ featuring @one.stab out midnight

.

some vids from shows we did over the last few months we want to extend a massive thank you to @earthcruises , @ntint23 and @thestephenevens for putting us on we also want to show big love for all the people who played with us @thepsychoticmonks , @gordianstimm , @bweavermusic and @cowboyyband 🖤 most of all we want to thank everyone who came to see us, without u it would have been pretty fucking boring. love u all we’ll be back, so see u soon x

thank you to @thelineofbestfit for the lovely pub chat we had lots to say about everything from social media to kanye west also maybe some news about the album