Tag: club culture

Global Groove, Local Varbs: NTS X Diesel TRACKS Hits South Ah!

This place has insane energy and a distinctively effortless cool that flows through the streets. It’s no wonder that this inexplicable local flair is increasingly resonating globally and major international brands are acknowledging the unique cool factor that defines South Africa. As more brands come knocking, it means more to us than mere recognition; it’s a nod to our unstoppable and ungovernable spirit. So it’s always a vibe when we see a suitable synergy between said big brands and the manifest movements we make on the ground.

Initially rooted in denim mastery, Diesel was established in 1978 by Renzo Rosso. It’s now known as an innovative international lifestyle company and a leader in premium fashion, but what makes it interesting to us is that it’s remained a genuine alternative to the established luxury market. Beyond apparel, Diesel produces fragrances, watches, jewellery, interior design, and real estate projects through Diesel Living. Bolstered by its parent company OTB, Diesel continues to foster creativity.

Originating in Hackney in 2011 as a DIY passion project, NTS is a global music platform and radio station that broadcasts from over fifty cities monthly with permanent studios in Los Angeles, Manchester, and Shanghai, with over 600 resident hosts, including musicians, DJs, and artists. Aiming to provide an alternative to mainstream radio, over half of the music played on NTS is unavailable on mainstream platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. With a growing global audience of 2.8 million monthly listeners, NTS continues to broadcast the best in underground music on a mass scale, free of charge and without on-air advertising.

Now the collaboration between NTS and Diesel TRACKS, which initially launched worldwide last year, has made its debut in South Africa. With a foundation in the fusion of music and nightlife, TRACKS gathers progressive musical talent from various corners of the world to champion the universal language of club culture, connection, and celebration. The focus is now on spotlighting emerging DJs who represent the distinctive local music scene and nightlife culture.

Image courtesy of Bandcamp

Scheduled to take place every last Friday of the month, starting November 3rd, 2023, this initiative will champion a diverse array of sounds, including GQOM, House, Amapiano, Techno, Club, Experimental, and drum’n’bass. The inaugural artist, Teno Afrika, aka Lutendo Raduvha, unleashed the sounds of Soweto with his musical style that skillfully blends techno and electro with deep house, infusing elements of soul and jazz to craft harmonies, percussions, and basslines—an embodiment of the DIY essence of amapiano.

Teno Afrika is rapidly rising in the realm of South Africa’s electronic music scene and has gained considerable international recognition. Growing up in the townships of Gauteng province, Teno Afrika discovered his passion for DJing and production on his father’s computer in 2007. His debut album, Amapiano Selections (2020), received acclaim for its minimal yet impactful exploration of the genre, while his second album, Where You Are (2022), features stellar collaborations with fellow artists, contributing to the genre’s evolution.

With features like this, TRACKS promises to be a sonic fusion that brings together mind-blowing musical mavericks and ignites the universal and invincible spark of club culture. Through dynamic mix series, electric live club nights, intriguing radio shows, stunning talent showcases, and generative roundtable discussions hosted by influential music professionals and collectives, who knows what kind of boundaries could be shifted and where this could take the future of nightlife? TRACKS is not just about music; it’s an invitation to dive into a world where beats and cultural connections collide in a symphony of transcendental energy.

Access the featured DJ mixes at DIESEL or NTS!

20 November 2023
Wolfgang Tillmans: Fragile – A Question to The Art of Photography and its Materiality

An activation of materiality. A display of careful calculation. Grids and lines are followed in a non-conforming rhythm. Architecture is used as a curatorial device. An installation masterpiece. A photograph as a test. A photograph as a material object. A photograph as a sculptural object. Images untouched by digital manipulation. Welcome to two decades of Wolfgang Tillmans embodied under the title Fragile. Fragility apparent in both subject and material artefact.

Patient, yet enthusiastic spectators gather to consume the address by JAG’s curator-in-chief, Khwezi Gule, at the press opening of Fragile. As Gule leaves, Tillmans begins to guide his audience, manoeuvring eager bodies through the expanse of his show. Stepping into the first space you are frozen in your tracks by one of his most well-known works, Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees (1992) – a large-scale photograph of two figures, naked torsos exposed, finding minimal cover with their vinyl jackets loosely styled on their frames. But the amazement, appreciation and emotion that his works instil are yet to be explored by us, his immediate audience.

Tillmans invites his audience to interact with Sendeschluss/End of Broadcast by asking us to step closer to the black and white pixel image. Just close enough to prevent your face from touching the surface. And it is then revealed to the naked eye that this image is constructed of colour. This opening to the show, comprised of over 200 works spanning from 1986 – 2018, invites a word of caution from the artist, warning against first impressions, and encouraging a second look.

‘Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christopher on beach’

With work that holds an eminent position in the world of contemporary art, the artist is known for his perpetual redefining of the photographic medium as an artefact of materiality and as an image constructed by light. Led by an unquenchable curiosity, Tillmans navigates the world and reproduces that which he observes with his eye by occasionally placing a camera in front of it. His abstract works and more sculptural pieces include Paper Drop, the Lighter series (one of Tillmans’ very view series of work) and Freischwimmer / Greifbar. Through his experimental approach, Tillmans has developed the photographic medium, both the technical and aesthetic potentialities of the practice further.

Intimacy, compassion and familiarity translate in image form creating a tangible emotion. An observational modus operandi characterised by a humanist approach to the complexities of the world. Tillmans’ oeuvre comprises of his club culture photographs from the 1990s, abstract works that find their footing in extreme formal reductionism, images narrowing in on the beauty of the everyday, and depictions that display a rigorous perception containing a grounded socio-political awareness.

‘Freischwimmer / Greifbar’

In discussion with the German photographer he elaborates on his interest in objects of the everyday and the narrative of his work by explaining that for him these objects are not necessarily banal objects. His train of thought continues to the value of such objects, “I’m very aware of the values potentially attributed to the things that I photograph, but want to leave the absolute values also quite open.” Explaining this statement through various examples of images in the exhibition, he ends off with the following trajectory, “I choose not to influence. I choose things to settle. It’s the narratives that are usually non-linear objects, and people and places in the pictures and installations. The narratives and associations are definitely more driven by challenging value systems.”

Reflecting on his work, Tillmans expresses that he does not see himself as a deconstructivist but rather leans towards what he refers to as a nostalgic modernist. “My way of installation at first glance is sort of not modernist but maybe actually it is because there is a certain purity and vigor and a trust in a linear development. Not just in atomization. It looks so super multi varied but actually there are, rhythms, there are recurring themes…”.

Contrary to tradition, Tillmans does not often work within the frame of series. After the act of taking his photograph, the need to recreate a similar image is worn. “Because I like to make work that is coming from an actual engagement with a subject matter in the here and now and not just from the idea that I should make another one like this.” Tillmans here refers to a feeling of intensity – an instinct to create. Over 30 years of photographing he now has “families of pictures”.

‘Deer Hirsch’

Connecting the works on display to fragility, Tillmans explains that Fragile fulfills the purpose of working as a title and is not a defining label in itself. There are however moments of fragility captured in an expression, in an emotion felt or in the medium of photography. Then there is the fragility of appropriating the world as can be seen in the work Truth Study Centre. Attracted to the economic nature of the photographic medium, Tillmans equally enjoys the ability it has to facilitate conversations around physically concrete and sculptural issues.

Tillmans sees the art as something that allows him to speak about the physical world and simultaneously penetrate something that is more psychological. “It’s so able to record emotions and relations and it can manipulate a lot and pretend a lot but used sensitively it is an incredibly psychological medium.”

What draws one to a Wolfgang Tillmans show is more than the images displayed, in part you are pulled by his curatorial method that becomes an artwork in itself. Looking back on his journey with curation, Tillmans explains that his current mode of display was not something which he had planned to be a recurring part of his practice. He states, “I didn’t plan to come up with a way of making art that would leave ultimately only myself to install the exhibitions and it ended up this way.” It was with his first exhibition in 1993 that he first employed this method of display resulting in curators asking him to bring forth his particular grammars and syntaxes in shows. “…it really is to try to represent the way how I look at the world. Which is not just ordered in sections and it’s not all in a line. It’s allowing different attitudes.”

‘Paper Drop’

An agreement to the fragility that defines us as individuals and that influences our relations to one another is viewed as strength. Since his adolescence, Tillmans has been acutely aware of this interplay which is marked throughout the expanse of his artistic practice. Fragile has been used by Tillmans before, as an early artist name as well as the title of a music project he was involved in. Teasing out new ways of making with frailty, failure and rifts, these make reference to the imperfection of life and open up diverse perspectives on the materiality of the above.

Subjectivity with the potential to transform. Providing an extensive overview of his complex work this exhibition is a showcase of the various shapes of artistic expression of Wolfgang Tillmans. The show includes photography from large scale installations taking up an entire room, to small post card images and even smaller polaroids of 90’s party culture, publications, sculptural objects, video content and the installation practice particular to the artist. Activating discourse, an exchange of reaction takes place when presented with new scenarios. Space is given for mystery, deep emotion and speculation.

A sculptural practice wrapped around economy. An absolute awareness of the materiality of, not only his medium, but life itself. The deeply psychological nature of his portraits ingrained. To see as never seen before. Attending this show is a perception warp itself and a realization of fragility, a realization of your own inevitable fallibility and life span. If you enjoy walking out of your comfort it is definitely where you should be.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Fragile will run to the 30 September 2018 at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. I promise there is no regretting it.

‘Headlight (f)’

‘Anders pulling splinter from his foot’

‘astro crusto’

19 July 2018
Ikonika’s Dancefloor Disruption

“I always had headphones on and I always knew I wanted to make music”, Ikonika told me. I sat down with the London-based electronic musician, producer, and DJ last week at KCB Braamfontein, where she and the Pussy Party posse were embarking on a nation-wide dancefloor revolution: a series of femme insurgencies to shake up club culture, forge new sound, and nurture emerging talent. With Ikonika as guest mentor, Pussy Party is launching a series of DJ and production workshops for femme-identifying artists in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.

Alongside the workshop series, Ikonika will be pouring her bass-heavy, off-kilter rhythms and oozing synths over our urban dancefloors. In the process, she will be engendering a sonic dialogue between two parallel generations — across continents — each seeking to make a life radically different from that of their parents. Each born of collisions between multiple times and places.

As a kid growing up in London, Ikonika listened eclectically: metal and punk, alongside RnB and grime. “All the different tribes, I was hanging out with all of them”. Like many producers before her, Ikonika (Sara Chen) crafted her early sound from late nights and Fruity Loops. She remembers starting out as a DJ: a dingy Sunday night residency with an audience of five. Today, Ikonika has given us more than a decade of genre-bending, progressive electronic music. She has released two albums with Hyperdub Records (Contact, Love, Want, Have 2010; Aerotropolis 2013) and produced four EP’s (Edits 2010; I Make Lists 2012; Beach Mode 2013; and Position 2014). She has toured widely in Europe, Asia, Australia, as well as North and South America — all the while shifting between her roles as DJ/Producer.

“When I DJ, it’s about making people move and feel something, but when I produce my music, that’s really personal to me. That’s my own little world I wanna create. And if I can play those tunes and people feel them too, that’s really special to me. To be able to share my music, and music I’m feeling, my friend’s music”.

Dub-step holds special place in Ikonika’s origin story as a DJ/producer. “The sound systems were incredible. Mad Jamaican sound systems in places like Kitcheners. I’d never felt music like that physically.” In small basement clubs like Plastic People and parties thrown by DMZ, Ikonika was taken by the new dub sound. “The music would just shudder in your chest and you couldn’t swallow anything apart from bass.” Those were the days when Ikonika learnt the importance of sound systems and started infusing more base into her music.

Since these early days, Ikonika’s sound has broadened, spanning grime, RnB, dancehall, footwork, house and techno: spinning soundscapes at the underground’s most progressive cusp. Her sound is a testament to her love of nightclubs, to the dialogue between DJ and dancer, and to music itself. When I asked Ikonika about the supposed ‘death’ of London’s club scene, she said:

“We still keep it underground and we still find basements. Chuck sound systems down there. Could be a fire hazard, I don’t know. We always find a way to have our music because music means so much to us, and clubbing means so much to us. Dark room and a sound system is all you need right?”

In the club, Ikonika’s focus is on the dancer/DJ dialogue. I asked about the extent of improvisation in her sets:

“I used to plan a lot and that never worked out. You just don’t feel the room as much. If you’re just sticking to a set, it becomes very cold. You’re not watching people. For me it’s about interaction. It’s a team effort between me and the dancers. I’ll try not to plan too much. Maybe I’ll decide on the bpm range and take it from there”.

That magic that happens, when all of us collide in a dark room, with bass flowing down our throats needs to include women: especially behind the decks.

That has been the fuel for facilitating femme-focused DJ’ing and production workshops. “I would want women to feel a bit more comfortable in this industry”, Ikonika says. I’d never felt real sexism till I started in music. I’ve had a lot of guys come up to the mixer, and I’ll have like two faders up in the mix. They don’t believe that I’m mixing so they’ll come up to the mix and pull the fader down. Or like on a day I’m playing vinyl, they’ll put their hand on the vinyl to make sure it’s actually coming out of the vinyl.”

Alongside fellow artists E.M.M.A, Dexplicit and P Jam, Ikonika has co-facilitated a series of workshops in London, titled Production Girls. “We teach production at a beginner level. People are scared to try the software. They can’t navigate around it. We show them how to make drums, how to mix down, how to use the synths and that kind of stuff”. It’s no wonder then that Pussy Party, which provides ongoing mentorship for Johannesburg’s femme DJs, would partner with Ikonika on a femme-oriented club-culture intervention.

“Women as tastemakers is the best thing you could ever have. Cos if the girls aren’t dancing on the dancefloor, what’s the point?”

‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

6 March 2017
DJ Capital (Siyabonga Sibeko) and the Dancefloor Dialectic

DJ’s write our nocturnal soundtracks. Spinning the energy in the room, they ease their audience in; build them up; hold them in suspense. They have us clawing for the next big drop, then reeling from the release. This week, I met with Siyabonga Sibeko (DJ Capital) to talk about the art of the DJ. In the nightclub, there is a dialectic: audience and DJ in communion and conversation. The DJ attunes themselves to the energy of the audience, reading their desire or distaste through their bodily responses, their calls, the extent of draw to the dancefloor. “You can’t really plan a set because you never know what kind of crowd you’re gonna get”, Capital says. “You’ll have 5 big songs that you will play. But for everything else, it’s a ‘feeling’ thing. When I play a song you haven’t heard before, you are going to stand and look at me. You have to find a way to ease them into it”. The task of reading the crowd demands high-level intuition and improvisation. “If the time now is 1.27am”, Capital says, “[Often], I don’t know what I’m playing at 1.30am”. And the audience, too, has ways of asking, thanking, sharing and validating their DJ.

For Capital, music festivals are the epitome of the DJ experience. “You’re this one human being, controlling five to ten thousand people. They’re all looking at you. It’s a crazy feeling.” The tacit conversation between DJ and audience harkens back to an ancient ‘call and response’ tradition: a leader calls out, signaling the song to be sung, and the crowd echoes their response. A DJ spins a track and watches the reverberations through the crows. As with our ancestral forebears, Capital describes this sonic communication as eliciting a type of trans, an out-of-body experience, in which he is as intoxicated by the audience as they are by him. Recalling a recent festival in which he threw his chain into the crowd, Capital says, “Afterwards, I remember asking out loud: ‘what did I just do?’”

Some clubs, Capital says, have lost this energy. “Parties in the North are not really about fun anymore. It’s about how can I stunt on you – more bottles, more ‘chicks’. People get so caught up in that competition that they forget we actually out here to have fun.” Capital prefers the small towns: the audiences who come with the sole purpose of hearing the music, entangling themselves in musical ties with the DJ and others on the dancefloor.

The dialectic between DJ and crowd has been the driving force of Capital’s art. He first tried his hand at DJ’ing — not in a basement studio, or on a friend’s PC, or in his bedroom — but in the club. As a student at Wits, Capital began throwing parties at what was then Keys club: already an architect of ‘the good night out’. One night, when a headline DJ failed to pitch, Capital found himself behind the booth. “I literally ran to my car, where I always had the latest music. Got all my CDs and I just started playing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just putting a CD in and pressing play. No sense of mixing whatsoever. It was terrible. But luckily I was playing all the right songs. After that I was like, ‘Yo I can actually do this if I actually learn what I’m meant to do’”. From there, Capital was self-taught and dedicated, dropping out of his final year at Wits. “I was so scared to tell my parents I actually wrote them a letter”.

Today, Capital is a three time SA Hip Hop Award nominee and has opened for major international acts: Usher, Wiz Khalifa, Lil John, DJ Drama, Deadmau5 and more. In July 2015, he embarked on a European tour, headlining shows in London and Moscow. He is host of the Capital Rap Up on Touch Central, and presenter of ETV’s Club 808. It’s part of his acknowledgement that a DJ is not simply a music vessel, but a personality, such that music somehow tastes different depending on who’s delivering it. Capital has produced several tracks with some of the country’s best Hip-Hop acts, including Hell of a Life (ft. Reason and AB Crazy), What You Like (ft. Kwesta x Kyle Deutsch) and All to You (ft. Dreamteam). “Hip hop has influenced so much of my life – the way people talk, the way people dress, even hip-hop sports like basketball”, he says.

Few people know just how much DJs, and club culture, have had to do not only with the success of South African Hip Hop, but also its sound. “About 5 years ago, all the [Hip-Hop] DJs and all the artists met at the Radisson in Sandton. We were literally having this huge argument. Rappers were like, ‘Why don’t you DJ’s play our stuff?’ And we were like, ‘Why don’t you give us stuff we can play at the clubs?’ Back and forth, DJ’s and artists. At the end of the night we were like, ‘There’s obviously a problem here. Let’s work together. And that’s when DJs started putting out songs with artists. And that’s literally how South African Hip Hop changed”. It’s not simply that many clubs now sound like hip-hop, hip-hop has increasingly been made to sound like the club.

Despite his own production success, it’s the energy of a live audience that is still primary for Capital. He tells me he once done six gigs in a single night, starting in the late afternoon. “In December, I did three provinces in one day”. There’s a reason Capital defies time and space to play for a crowd.

As author Bill Brewster said, it’s “because DJ’ing is not about choosing a few tunes. It’s about generating shared moods; it’s about understanding the feelings of a group of people and directing them to a better place. In the hands of a master, records create rituals of spiritual communion that can be the most powerful events in people’s lives”.

2 February 2017
Just for the Drama: A Trip through the Nu-Flex Party Archive 2006–2008

We’ve become expert archivists of our lives after dark. At nightclub entrances and dotted across our dancfloors are clusters of partygoers huddling to snap that essential Selfie. A big night out is an exercise in self-curation — the clothes, the music, the crew, the venue – each serving as raw materials in our imagining of the space and our place in it. The imagery is then methodically logged on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat: a clublife catalogue, a recreation record.

Recently I was offered a rare glimpse into a party archive, recorded and documented before the social media take-off, before our night lives were exploded into a kaleidescope of online albums. The catalogue belonged to fashion designer and DJ, David West, who in the years 2006— 2008 facilitated a series of Cape Town-based parties called Nu-Flex.

Nu-Flex emerged in conversation with Nu-Rave: a wistful wave of post-punk and acid house, which hit the UK/European club scene in the mid-2000s, draped in UV glitter, glow-sticks and neon skinny jeans. Nu-Rave sought to re-interpret and revitalise 90s Rave Culture: ‘The likes of BoomBox and other club nights in London, where dressing up was a thing’, David explains. BoomBox offered a spectacular collision of fashion and music — novel for its time. Partygoers revelled in the shambolic dress-up, mingling with many of London’s fashion heavyweights. Relatively short-lived, Nu-Rave served as a passing moment of ephemeral euphoria. It came and left, leaving in its wake a dazzling debris of bold prints and lime-stained nostalgia. The novelty had a life-span, David said. ‘It’s better to burn bright than burn out’.

Back in the mid 2000s, Nu-Flex partygoers would amass on a more-or-less bi-monthly basis at Disko-K in Cape Town’s CBD. Today, Loop Street is a popular night-time destination. But at the time, this was ‘a part of town that nobody ever went to. Sailors came in for drinks while docked in the nearby harbour’. Disko K, which no longer exists, ‘had the most ridiculous sound and light set-up and it had kareoke.’

The Nu-Flex crowd included droves of students, interspersed with an older group who had lived through rave’s first wave. ‘We did also have lots of visitors from Johannesburg and yes – some kids used to travel in from Wellington and Worcester to be there’.

Nu-Flex was draped in audacious colour. But David concedes that the scene was predominantly white. Not much has changed about Cape Town since, he added. Contributing to the narrow demographic were the limitations of David’s own audience. The Nu-Flex crowd, he explained, was often an off-shoot of Evol, an edgy divebar, which David also ran and describes as having been ‘very white’. In a time before social media, news of Nu-Flex travelled by word-of-mouth. This gave it an ‘underground cool’, but also entrenched forms of exclusion. Perhaps there’s something to be said about the relationship between rapid-fire-tweets and the democratisation of dancefloors.

Nu-Flex parties were heavily themed, encouraging partygoers to be daring in their outfits. Drugged-up Spring themes included: Tropi-core, Optikamax, Antihistaflex. Add to the mix the metallic Hyper Go-Go and the garbage-glam-themed Gutta-Flex. The time of Indie boys dressed in black-and-white, eyes cloaked in mascara, had peaked, giving way to an exuberant and colour-crazed fashion revival. All across town, partygoers would gather for the ‘Pre-Flex’, revelling in the act of ‘getting ready’.

Rather than the mucho masculinity commonly associated with nightclub bouncers, Nu-Flex had a ‘Door Queen’, with drag being an essential component of the party aesthetic. ‘I hired a make-up artist to style my friend Andrew (who had done loads of drag in the past)’. The Door Queen screened partygoers’ attire as they entered, commenting on their lack of effort or offering compliments to those who had come out in style. ‘The gay scene had already become very bland and hetero-normative, so I was hell bent on encouraging the queerness of the party’. For David, Nu-Flex would have been incomplete without a Drag Queen on the decks, so he made it a point to learn drag himself.

‘I was a club kid. I was schooled in aesthetics in the 90’s at Rave and House clubs’. Both as a fashion designer and party planner, David’s muse was club culture. ‘It’s been a huge part of my life and allowed me to contribute to the city culturally over time’.

Reflecting on Nu-Flex, he said: ‘I was desperate for something bright, fabulous, happy and over the top. I remember one night, I had a net full of silver-foil balloons released from the balcony at the peak of my DJ set. Just for the drama’. This was a celebration of excess: reflected in eccentric décor and dress, in being encompassed by a 303 synthesiser, in losing oneself in Nitris Oxide or psychadelics, and finally leaving the club in a 4am haze. ‘You danced so hard, it was more like a flex’. Alongside David himself, DJs included Pierre Estienne, Dario Leite (the Midnight Men), Gazelle and Bradley Abraham. Spoek Matambo and Marcus Wormstorm would perform as Sweat X. ‘Most were old enough to have had experienced the early 90s to some degree’.

Nineties nostalgia continues to hold weight among South African millenials, with much of our aesthetics harking back to the technicolour of a post-94 transition. It’s evident when we drop a TKZee lyric , or rock a Spice Girl choker, or revel in Brenda Fassie bubblegum.

‘I think many of the kids today appreciate the cheese factor of the nineties sound’, David says, ‘like Venga Boys or Crystal Waters. But they can’t handle actual rave and acid house. There seems to be a need to be able to attach irony to something for it to be enjoyable today. Do I sound old? I guess I’m waiting for something to emerge that sounds as new as House/Rave/Techno did in the 90s. And then of course, when a scene emerges around that, I think that will be thrilling’.

David yearns for the club cultures of old:

‘Nightclubs should be places of self expression and freedom, a fantasy world even. I am saddened by the clubs (or lack of them) today. Where’s the pizzazz? Where has the spirit of rebellion and non-conformity gone? Why is it all about mainstream pop music today? What happened to the underground or alternative?’

There’s no definitive answer. But if I were to go in search of one, I would ask the gqom artists playing new mixtapes out their car boots in Durban. Or the crew gathered in a courtyard to hear the latest electronica from a friend’s home studio. Or the audiences that galvanise sonically and politically around FAKA and Angel Ho. When it comes to contemporary cultural production in South Africa, I am full of that old-school, pink-glazed, neon-clad idealism, with which David would be very familiar. I see young people delight in the experimental, perhaps with less of an inclination to pursue escapist bliss. Stylistically, politically and musically, we are increasingly inclined to disrupt. But we also see the importance of giving disruption mass appeal and mobilizing for inclusivity. Like David, I believe the emerging scene will be thrilling — pumped with a powerful mix of critical nostalgia and uncompromising futurism, an unhinged blend of radio-hit consumability and radical resistance.

The Nu-Flex catalogue teaches us to pay attention to our party archives: as testaments to a generation imagining, wrestling, searching…

The Posters

The Decor

The Door Queen

The Kids

17 May 2016