Brain Damage

It is fortunate that the French duet Brain Damage’s record Spoken Dub Manifesto, released on Jarring Effects last year, has the additional title Vol. 1. For it is a presage of a continuation. Brain Damage, formed in 1999 by two members of the dub collective Bangarang from St Etienne, invited a troop of guest artists for their third record, but the ideas and possibilities grew quickly, and a limit of eleven participants had to be set.

The basis of the record is spoken word, or more precisely dub poetry, a Jamaican form of performance poetry from the 70s. The eleven artists were presented with the duet’s musical drafts, then each selected one and entered the studio. In the resulting album these different tracks have been integrated into one another. It is a record of paradoxes, at the same time airy and massive, electronic and acoustic, where post-dadaists, pirateologists and poets meet in an unholy alliance.

In its swift and swirly movements it resembles a musical dervish dance, where the spread arms are soundtracks whose one hand is turned toward itself while the other one is outstretched towards the world. But instead of, as in the case of the dervish, evoking a feeling of the mind leaving the body, it is a dance that intensifies the body’s presence in the poetical and political room. The duet has provided the artists with a spacious dance floor, and become themselves visible in their collectivist choreography. The records creation is already a story with innumerable anecdotes. After more than 250 concerts in France and abroad Brain Damage is now coming to Gothenburg to let them be duplicated at the Clandestino Festival.

Athena Farrokhzad