It may sometimes be useful to borrow someone else’s name, especially when the name is already famous (Hype Williams directed videos for the who’s who of the rap-pop world from Nicki Minaj to Kanye West to Coldplay and tons of others), but so what? What is the purpose?
Oh, I am really on the wrong track if I am looking for meaning and purpose with these two. I didn’t know anything about Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt (which may be or may not be their real names) the mysterious English duo behind Hype Williams, but the more I read about them, the more I realize they are stunt specialists. According to the Guardian, they have claimed to have released music by putting USB sticks in apples and selling them in Brixton market, to have been caught robbing raccoons from taxidermists and to have joined the Nation of Islam?
Some of it may be true, I guess most of it is crap, a little bit like their set at the Echoplex on Tuesday night. I am not sure to remember anything from the music, which seemed to be a bizarre (the world is weak) collage of loops of movie dialogues (something that had to do with ‘the white man’) lo-fi electronics, what it seems to be slow synth stuffed with new-age-y moments, improvised, out-of-the-blue, free-jazz parts (at least it sounded that way) of drunken and dissonant sax and drumming, but as I said I can’t remember much as these two female bodybuilders, straight from muscle beach Venice, California, were slowing stretching their semi-nude muscular bodies in front of us during the whole set,… was it because one of the tracks of their album is entitled, ‘Venice Dreamway’?
The very short performance happened in a close-to-darkness hazy ambiance, with flashing white and yellow lights and fog residue from the previous set. During the whole time, it was simply weird and like nothing I had seen before, which can be a plus, except it was going nowhere, it was turning in apocalyptic circles around these two beautiful bodies, and all this seemed meaningless.
But Blunt declared in an interview:
‘People wonder why nothing is interesting, it's because they try to get a fucking answer to it, to everything. There are things you can't articulate. There's that 'thing' in the world – music has it, every kind of art has it. And people talking about it can destroy it.’
‘You live, and what you live comes out in what you do. I'm not smart enough to have a philosophy. Everything means something to me in that moment, beyond that I don't care or know. Nothing means anything any more, so people should stop trying to make sense of things.’
I agree, I should totally shut up, there is no answer, no meaning and there is no point to explain what they are doing!
Their new record, ‘Black is Beautiful’ with big white letters saying EBONY on the cover (confusing again), was released on April 17 via Hyperdub.