Technology and technique in modern society: from the mechanical hammer to the most advanced computers operated by futuristic software, from the noise of the engine and the presses to the silence of hard disks and memory cards. This entire journey, actually enclosed in a minimal portion of time if compared to the general evolution of human technology, Peter Christopherson seems to have crossed and investigated in all its vastness, and his meeting with Ivan Pavlov, exponent of a visceral electronics and little inclined to compromises - coincidentally merged with the moniker COH in the Austrian label MEGO, a breeding ground for artists such as Fennesz, Hecker, Merzbow and Radian -, to give life to the SoiSong project, has nothing casual but is the linear continuation of a journey that began in the mid-seventies in England. Christopherson was among the founders of some of the seminal bands of the English and world cultural and musical underground from Throbbing Gristle to Psychic TV and Coil. In an effervescent London, in fact, it was Throbbing Gristle, composed of Genesis P-Orridge (Neil Megson), Christine Carol Newby, Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson who started, right around the mid-seventies, the new genre of “industrial” music. Their relationship with technology was not simply instrumental, a mere opportunity to manipulate and create, but it was an investigation and denunciation of the dehumanization in industrial civilization. At the base of this group of intellectuals there were certainly the influences of a great literary and cultural tradition that harked back to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley. From the ashes of the English band, strongly focused on avant-garde electronic experiments and multimedia shows, Psychic TV was born in 1982, “a video art and music project” that crossed the territories of psychedelia, punk and experimental electronics, but above all gathered around itself important collaborators from Soft Cell to Derek Jarman and many others. The relationship with Derek Jarman returns in the most current phase of Christopherson's artistic career, the one in duo with Pavlov, with a tribute to the English director and it is once again a work that leaves nothing to compromise, a sound testimony of an artist always ready to get back into the game.
Homage to Derek Jarman
A visionary filmmaker and radical experimenter, Derek Jarman was first and foremost an extraordinary poet of images. Eccentric, refined and melancholic. Linked at the same time to Shakespeare and punk, to pictorial research and gardening, he gave life to some of the most intense films of British cinema of the Seventies and Eighties. His formal research, condensed in masterpieces such as Caravaggio, Edward II, Wittgenstein, The Last of England, went as far as the brilliant Blue, a painful farewell to life and a shared reflection on the disease in which the blue screen (an Ives Klein blue, a friend of the director), is framed only by words that tell the universe in which an AIDS patient slips.
