Welcome to Four Things #38.
Hope you’re doing as well as you can, today I’m keeping my intro paragraph short and sweet and leave my usual rant for the First Thing. (You will see what I mean)
A quick shout to a few people whose work continuously inspires me and motivates me to realize my own ideas: Jeroen Erosie (in concrete), Duval Timothy (new album!), Raji Rags, Amelia Ideh, Charlie Dark, Waajeed & UMA, Colombian Drone Maffia (album), Chris Richards who I don’t envy for having to write In Memoriams for Sly Stone AND Brian Wilson in a single week, and photographer Josh Sisk who documented Baltimore’s Turnstile under the K Bridge. (also watch this incredible video of that concert, I timestamped it)
Let’s get to the Things! Welcome to my new readers, hope you enjoy the ride. If you are into the Four Things vibe then please subscribe, pass the link on to your friends, and use it as your own conversation starter if you will. Feedback, topics or collaborative ideas are very much welcome, hit me up by email or in a DM on IG ! Wishing you love and health..
Martyn
June 17th, 2025
FIRST THING: FIELD MANEUVERS & THE POLITICS OF SCALE
The other week I was approached by someone wanting to ‘hop on a call’ and discuss ‘growing my Patreon’. No doubt their intentions were genuine, but it made me think of the concept of scale and growth. In every aspect of our lives we are reminded of the ‘growth mindset’, everything needs to continuously scale up in order to make more profit. More sales, more followers, more views, etc. In the arts, whether you make music, DJ, run a club night or (in my case) a mentoring program, there will be a point in time where popularity transcends the initial scope of the project. In other words, if you don’t continually question not just what you’re offering but also at what scale, you risk crossing a threshold of growth where your ‘product’ will become less and less valuable to your intended audience.
This came up in the excellent interview with the founders of the independent festival Field Maneuvers on the most recent No Tags podcast. They argued that expanding their festival beyond its current scale would detract from its original vision of ‘just a dirty rave in a field’. The other problem with scale is that at some point you will have to partner up with actors who are not interested in what you are trying to do necessarily, but purely in growing it. This is the conundrum the Sonars, Boiler Rooms and Field Days of this world find themselves in. At one point or another they opted for ‘growth for growth’s sake’, crossed an invisible threshold and aligned themselves with companies like Superstruct who now have a stranglehold on the major festival circuit. Shawn Reynaldo’s newsletters of late about Superstruct and its connections to private equity firm KKR dive deeper into this subject matter, but at the root of it is the addiction to continuous growth regardless of how much it dilutes the experience and underlying ethos of music and art.
Back to the Field Maneuvers interview though - Does a festival always need to scale up in order to survive? The goal of an independent festival, label, artist, mentor etc. is to provide something meaningful and substantial and do it for as many people as possible without compromising the quality of the work, ie. to not scheme people out of money for as little effort as possible. If scaling means you lose quality it defeats the purpose of doing it, there’s really no point in doing it at all.
Maybe there is an IFS, an ‘Ideal Festival Size’, where the event offers a great experience and simultaneously remains sustainable in order to keep going year after year without further concessions. There may be an ideal amount of fans buying an artist’s music, or an ideal amount of punters attending a club night. But sustainability of small independents is only achievable with actual punter money. While boycotting the cheap thrills of a Superstruct mega event feels good (and looks good), the real resistance happens when we actively support counter culture initiatives.
SECOND THING: ANDREW HILL RETROSPECTIVE
My show The Darkest Light on NTS has apparently been going for over 9 (!) I had no idea it had been going for so long, but I’m having more fun with the concept than ever. Besides my usual stream-of-consciousness shows, filled with music I’m inspired by and/or records I picked up on my travels and tours, I love putting together retrospective shows on my favorite musicians. I’ve done them for people like Junie Morrison and Mal Waldron, and recently I made a two-part show on the music of avant-garde pianist Andrew Hill. Find part 1 here and part 2 here.
THIRD THING: MARCO BRAMBILLA
The first time I came across the Italian-born Canadian video artist Marco Brambilla’s work was at The Standard Hotel in NYC’s Meat Packing District. It was a small but beautiful 3D video installation located inside the elevator called “Civilization”, a continuous loop made of hundreds of sampled images from movies and TV. Not long after that he made the video for Kanye West’s ‘Power’, which catapulted his name into the mainstream consciousness. Since then he has worked with U2 and Maison Margiela, made large installations for the Sphere in Las Vegas and on Times Square. (Also, cool trivia: in a former life Brambilla worked in Hollywood as a director, debuting with the sci-fi movie Demolition Man featuring Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock and Wesley Snipes)
I think most great artists condense large all-encompassing themes into artworks of a more moderate size, but what I really like about Marco Brambilla’s work is that he uses the grandiosity and sometimes shock value of today’s media diet for his equally grand messaging. “I use spectacle to comment on spectacle” he said before he unveiled a massive project on Times Square in 2024. Last week I came across this great interview with him for 032c magazine, where he comments on image saturation in social media, and the role of the artist in an age of spectacle.
FOURTH THING: PANTA REI, THE FILM
It’s been such a joy working with Ehua on her conceptual multimedia project 'Panta Rei' for our label 3024, and after the vinyl and booklet release last month, she is now presenting a short film of the same title, screened exclusively at The Bath House in London.
'Panta Rei' was shot in Hackney by video artists Nikola Lorenzin and Niccolò Natali (of the Italian director’s collective Santabelva) and explores the theme of transformation through experiential conditioning of the body and the self. The film is divided into four chapters and it delves into aspects of Ehua's artistic identity, investigating the ideas of endurance, resilience, acceptance and how they alter one's consciousness and lived experience.
This one-time screening will be accompanied by live readings from the Panta Rei booklet written by Ehua, a Q&A with the artist and music inspired by the Panta Rei sonic world.
The Bath House, 80 Eastway London E9 5JH, more info and RSVP here:
Great read as always. Thinking a lot about questions of growth and scale recently – especially limits to growith and scale, whether natural or deliberately set ones.
Also love to see/hear Andrew Hill here; such an underrated artist and composer. It's notable that Alfred Lion mentioned him as one of the three musicians he heard in his life that made him stop and record everything they did (the other two being Monk and Herbie Nichols).