Liam Gillick |

Liam Gillick is a New York-based artist working in a variety of forms, including installation, video and sound. As a theorist, curator and educator, as well as an artist, his broader body of work includes published essays and texts, lectures, and curatorial and collaborative projects. Gillick’s work reflects on the conditions of production in a so-called post-industrial landscape, including the aesthetics of economy, labour and social organisation. He worked on a series of concerts with New Order in 2017, resulting in the live album New Order and Liam Gillick ∑(No,12k, Lg,17Mif). He has composed the soundtracks for 15 films by fellow artist Sarah Morris. Gillick’s work has been included in numerous important exhibitions, including documenta and the Venice, Berlin and Istanbul Biennales. In 2009, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. Gillick has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London and the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin.

1. Ellen Furman – In The Sea

Artists Space in New York has an increasing program of live music. It has led me to new experiences and forced my ears open. I stood by while Ellen Fullman prepared for a performance in their Tribeca location. I did not blink as I watched her physically manipulate tonal space, moving up and down her long-string instrument, Rosin-coated fingers. This was my point of entry into this list, beginning with a human producing elevated sound via direct engagement with an apparatus.

2. Arnold Dreyblatt – Resolve

Builds you a new set of new set of structures while continually building upon a new set of structures. It is better to play the whole record on shuffle repeat than try to pick a single track. Or try different sound systems in different rooms playing out of sync with each other. The sense of constant restart and construction here resonates with my interest in production rather than consumption.

3. Tom Carter – Long Time On the Road

A lot of live performances collected together. Good for stretching time. Manipulating time. And becoming lost in nuances that can only come from breaking, elongating and repeating. In the 1980s I spent a lot of time at the Seven Dials Jazz Club in London whenever they presented the more extreme end of free music. This is not that. But the enduring appeal of a person and an instrument and some form of tonal control remains. Sometimes Carter can be found in unlikely live locations. This remains essential to the interpersonal effect of music between people mediated by an instrument. Also, a link here to a live performance in what looks like the story corner of The Wild Detectives bookshop in Dallas. Which turns out to be exactly that.

4. Tamio Shiraishi – 月 (Moon)

Finding spaces within disorder sensitively yet precisely. Tamio’s music unleashes sound shadows from more stable forms and layers them to generate surprise via difficulty. A live footage link is again added here to convey something of the way music can pierce holes in you while permitting access to fundamentally strange emotions that you didn’t know you shared with others.

5. Phill Niblock – Touch Five

Almost every selection here is a complete album. I don’t listen to single tracks very often. Phill Niblock may not require much introduction. The sonic complexity of the music is based upon an apparent simplicity that fractures and layers while turning in on itself. Endless folds evoke the philosophical baroque of the recent past. Also here is devastating footage on Roulette TV from the year 2000. Music that is distilled yearning, produced with modesty and concision.

6. Mildlife – Phase

This is on the edge of my list. I keep taking it off. Structurally one of the most orthodox in this whole playlist. The selection exists here for the way it walks close to genres, backs off, returns to face them, then unbuckles from any clear resolution. It also sounds good when experienced in an alienating environment where no one knows you. The moments of recognition here trigger my earlier attempts to block out certain stylisations. But they keep poking through regardless. Also included is a link to their concert from South Channel Island, Australia. I am wound up and unbound at the same time. Sorry. Maybe this is the music of the 21st Century. I don’t know what that would imply.

7. Wilson Tanner – 69

Good to listen to while lying face down on the floor. Also good to listen to when you have missed something, forgotten something or want to escape from something. I have to keep putting in these live links. One of the only things that YouTube is good for is absent-mindedly preserving things that should have way more than 1.4k views.

8. Al Dobson Jr – Rye Lane Volume II & III

I lived in Peckham in the 1980s. We used to try and imagine this kind of music into existence but everyone had to wait until 2014 before it began to arrive. It brings me back to a place that did not exist in my time. A projection into the gap between the recent past and the near future that pulls at my lost moments and does not attempt to be complete, total or a final word.

9. Jeremiah Cymerman – Purification/Dissolution

Suspension is a theme in this list, as is the ongoing relationship between mediated forms of production. This is just good and sincere, sitting somewhere between the constructed and the live. So here is some live and some constructed. The presence of the performer is still important in my context.

10. Chie Mukai & Che Chen – 2.23.11 (w/ Chie MUKAI 向井千恵)

Another work from more than ten years ago. A lot of kokyū here – the traditional Japanese stringed instrument. This record of a live performance requires full attention. And rewards with full concentration. Yet, unusually, it can just be listened to while doing quite complex tasks. There is something here that mines a deep human commonality in neurological processing. I don’t know what that might be.

11. Blacks’ Myths – Blacks’ Myths

Just bass and drums. There are moments here of such complete resolve and restrained power that the entire record both expands and contracts at the same time. Future past. A live video link is also included here for a sense of sensibility.

12. Hiroshi Minami/Eiko Ishibashi – Gasping_Sighing_Sobbing

Time is a big component of this list. Obviously. But I mean time as a material or as a quasi-cinematic device for adjusting consciousness of present circumstances. This record is the epitome of the ability of complex music to kill contingency and allow new ways into elusive contexts. Sudden repetitions. Caught in a loop then unblocked again.

13. Carman Moore – Soul Musings

A series of vignettes that move towards resolution or go from resolution towards a desire for something longer. Musings and meditations of a real composer. Live streaming from Artist Space is included as a bonus.

14. Leo Abrahams & Shahzad Ismaily – Visitations

I began with the guitar and still believe in its potential as an object that remains to be fully tested. This record comes close at times to what I mean by the unrealised guitar.

15. Speaker Music – Techxodus

By the time you get to the end of this album, other music will be insufficient.

16. Speaker Music – Soul-Making Theodicy

This is what your recording set-up truly desires and what it plays to itself when you are not there. DeForrest Brown Jr.’s ‘Assembling a Black Counter Culture’ brings it all back to Detroit. You should buy the book from Primary Information, or a lot of what you are listening to will make no sense at all. General and specifically.

17. Död Mark – 4Evigt

Yung Lean and Gud. The title. Sort of “forever” in Swedish. There is not much to add. The words are good. In my time only valleys and mountains. My dreams are painted with paint. Feels like I’m stuck in someone else’s dream. I am not making this up. Another track that meanders past genres with appropriate amounts of indifference.

18. Bladee – False

Accelerated photosynthesis. I believe. I used to believe. I used to feel. I believe I used to be real but know I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Thanks for this introduction, Orson. I am beyond club days but my chronic tinnitus is a permanent legacy that helps me identify with the lyrics here … ‘In the club going hard and I’m staring at the wall.’

19. Varg²™ – Hitty ft. Thaiboy Digital

Familymancore. Washing the dishes to this one. These are the comments that Thaiboy Digital provokes. Excellent. Even the word combinations of Thaiboy Digital and Hitty – among all the other words that could exist temporarily still the disturbing dislocation that can stalk anyone.

20. Central Cee – Entrapreneur

I had to have something from London here. Even though I haven’t lived there for 25 years I still get a certain frisson when I go to petrol stations at night. I love a 24 Hour Londis. From Yaris to Urus. It’s here because it sounds like London. And sometimes someone might still need that.

21. Joyul – Earwitness

I have a soft spot for music that contradicts the materialist complexity of my stated approach to structures – artistic or intellectual. That might explain the absences in my own work that are filled with the non-visual. Affective earwitnessing is the presence that I secretly secrete into the empty surroundings of everything.

Glean

21 Tracks
for the 21st Century

Liam Gillick