Pulling up Clean Since 1995: Thomas Lobban's I Pull Up Clean for no Reason, Reviewed
The ambient droner infusing vacuous landscapes with experimental hip-hop, setting us before a plasma-lit stage with no star.
The music video to Lobban’s opening track quotes Levinas on nothingness: “It is like a destiny of the void, like a murmur of silence. There is nothing, but there is being, like a field of forces. Darkness is the very play of existence which would play itself out even if there were nothing. It is to express just this paradoxical existence that we have introduced the term ‘there is’.”
Lobban’s music videos are interesting starting points to understanding his work, given his interest in Kirostami’s Five and The Making of Five, the former being a selection of five long shots, four of which use a stationary camera, depicting the “500 metres of beach in front of (Kirostami’s) house”. Dedicated to Yasujirō Ozu, both auteurs use a largely stationary camera: no panning, no movement, just people moving in and out, the scene flipping and re-arranging itself before us. Lobban’s videos are entirely handheld, sometimes stumbling and zooming, but things seem to be passing him by: the wind that moves an incandescent palm tree under a streetlamp, the last few people who stumble around Cabot Circus before closing. In a place where security guards linger to enforce the illegality of recording the place with anything more than a phone camera, you must wonder what the presence of such a vacuous place, unchanging and hostile to human impression, is doing here, sitting as an accompaniment to Lobban’s music. As Ozu and Kirostami, Lobban is being passed by, the camera is a window fixed in the wall. His yearnful cellos amidst a washing of the tide set us up for his premise: that there is something to be seen in the vacuous. Existence plays itself out even when there is nothing of note to see, only the rotating onslaught of streetlamp flares that you pass by on the motorway like the relapses of a coil.
For a largely ambient album, I Pull up Clean for no Reason is surprisingly eclectic: ‘Chiya Knows When’ features Babyxsosa, whether through natural collaboration or cameo. Babyxsosa formally introduces the track: “Thomas Lobban, pulling up clean since 1995”. Babyxsosa is no stranger to an element of sound collage, and her more avant-garde and experimental tracks (‘Bye Bye’ and ‘New Rent’ feature harsh noise, clanging, wordless vocalising). Here, though, she is the sound-byte that opens and closes the piece, which, like the titular ‘I pull up clean for no reason (with Loor war’n Trevena)’ has an imax intensity - the kind you’d imagine would accompany the bright light at the end of the tunnel framed through cgi golden gates, glimmering with an slightly sickly opacity a real camera could not find. There’s also the extensive use of autotune in ‘Bikey Madness (w/ DanPino)’, rolling on the heels of explicit and emotionally immediate uses of autotune in the likes of Caroline in Caroline 2 - Klein, and in particular Hype Williams for the application of tone-skipping, xylophone autotune to careening vocals in tracks like ‘The Whole Lay’.
Where Lobban dips his toes into sparse areas of experimental hip-hop and electronic pop, such elements are inflexions on a larger ambient sound that, across the album as a whole, verges into post-rock. ‘The Tuesday Weld (w/ Lily Frances)’ is one such track that builds and builds and meanders and builds much like the more instrumental and cinematic elements of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Silver Mt Zion. A single, clear, wobbling violin careens singularly amongst a massive warm ambient string hum, otherwise giant and indistinct as a fog. My favourite moments from the work are those that border on the bones of a rock song: ‘Cummy Norman (w/ Eloise Lobban)’ featuring a near-classical piano arrangement that climaxes then gives way to a guitar solo. These select moments, where frets are carefully plucked in an obscurely reverbed room give rise to the moments of most secrecy and intimacy in the album. There’s a feeling that had such songs been less meandering they could’ve been a Gallo track from Recordings of Music for Film, or the backing to a Charlie Megira song minus the sunglassed-superhero-pop-rock-star, the stems without the lead. They are the intimacy and delicate-fiddling of the former without a coinflip charismatic/narcissistic silhouette gesticulating at the helm in sunglasses and heeled boots. Lobban’s camera-gaze stays situated and anonymous, there are no stars here.
Again, ‘The Tuesday Weld pt.2 (w/ glider)’ features a tinkering riff, where reversed guitar harmonises with Lobban’s largely string-focused arsenal of noise, creating a technically interesting yet fairly simple and slow piece, paced-down, hazed-out, yet driven and sure of itself in its sturdy repetitious rock riff. There is a resonance with the feel of a Roy Montgomery track that had its riffs pulled apart and broken down into a more languid and down-tempo selection of notes. We’re building at a walking pace. Whilst the imax blaring of humm and strings seem sometimes monotone in their invocation of an angelic white light, Gilder bandmate Louie Newlands’ guitar gives you something to follow.
The use of sound-bytes and the chopping and sampling of vocals make frequent appearances in Lobban’s tracks, particularly ‘Lorcan’s Wake (feat. Lorcan)’ and ‘The Tuesday Weld’ which create the presence of an inhuman thing vocalising into the sound. With little actual harsh noise, often a circuit hack for a feeling of intensity, Lobban creates a climactic falling apart more inventively: by chopping and warbling a female voice that speaks in unintelligible English. Lobban ties us back to Levinas: that though there’s nothing to be understood in these voices, their lack of substance still has a force, as the cluttered motorways and the floors of Cabot Circus exist vacuously but are still bathed in light, tenebroso. We listen but we do not understand, it’s all chatter & collateral, things are happening before us and they sit within a frame, they ask for our attention, but they don’t ask to be known.
Lobban’s album launch gig taking place on Sunday 22nd of March.