Body/Head at Café Oto, 22/02/12
Text by Dean Mayo Davies.
Kim Gordon is beating her guitar with a percussion mallet, softly as a vintage red Mercedes-Benz ominously moves closer, in slow motion, on screen. She’s singing ‘la jeune fille’ into the microphone. This is the low-key UK debut of Body/Head, Gordon’s project with noise aristocracy Bill Nace in Dalston’s Café Oto. All washed out fragments of songs, broken shards and the threat of menace. Nace is wearing a black t-shirt and Gordon a black bra with white shirt over the top – the video projected over them so that Gordon literally becomes a living canvas, a multi-layered metaphor of expression beyond Body/Head’s atonal glacier sections and whispering caress.
She sits on an amp and moves through the audience exploring the space. Whilst the clip plays for the entire 40 minute performance. From 70’s movie The Driver, a getaway car laps a car park and gradually becomes more destroyed, bodywork dented and broken up. By the end, we’ve been on a real journey, captive as every passenger in that auto.
Gordon was interviewed in the current issue of Clash Magazine, read an excerpt from the piece HERE.
Photos by Helen F. Kennedy
