Relentless

Artist Brian Dettner's take on a medium that to many begins to feel obsolete.

We recently had a look at a postmodern adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic Regency romance Pride and Prejudice, which brings to mind another closely related, and similarly bizarre personage - Brian Dettner.


Artist Brian Dettner’s medium of choice is once again literary, but his approach and reinterpretations take a different form. He intervenes in a rather more physical way, and the result is fittingly striking.

High wire maestro Eskil Ronningsbakken steps into some shoes left by an extraordinary man.

Eskil Ronningsbakken, a 29 year-old Norwegian, is like a 49 year-old Frenchman. The latter, Philippe Petit, tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers in 1974; the other, Ronningsbakken, recently biked upside down 1000ft above the Norwegian Fjords in harsh winds. Both are Artists.

As Petit wound down a career in soul-stirring performances, he left a hole. There was no natural successor, no one to grip us like Petit had, no one to hold humanity in his thrall. But now we have Ronningsbakke and his arsenal of extraordinary feats:

"What I do is draw a picture with vulnerable human beings and their bodies in the surroundings of mother earth. That's the balance between life and death, and that is where life is."

Such a poetic approach aligns him far more closely with the school of Petit than it does with less considered stunts underwritten by the safety harnesses we, the public, can’t see. In 2007 Ronningsbakken balanced on a single ice cube 65cm by 35cm in size suspended on two ropes 1000ft over Dovrefjell National Park, in Norway. He also balanced on a trapeze upside down beneath a hot air balloon.

Jane Austen's Regency romance is getting the gore treatment.

Jane Austen's legendary Pride and Prejudice gets quite spectacularly resuscitated by the Los Angeles-based film and television writer Seth Grahame-Smith in what he proclaims would become the advent of 'murder-lit.'
 

Claiming the mash-up nature of pop music as inspiration, the author suggested that the novel was already an easy target. The 1813 classic is conveniently out of copyright, and if you look at it with the critical eye of a film connoisseur you begin to see all the buiding blocks of classic horror bonanza - a country estate, heroines in distress and the misleadingly idyllic landscapes of Longbourn and Meryton, with a gaping lack of gore.



Going into more detail will probably not be doing any justice to this suspenseful stylistic marriage. At the moment, however, it is subject to a ferocious Hollywood bid, in which we are sure it will make a killing.

Pun absolutely intended.

The book is currently out in the United States, with a UK edition in the works.

Christian Fennesz's nautical music soundscapes.

With spring ripe in the northern hemisphere, time comes to align our music library to something more representative of the impending long days.

Austrian ambient artist Fennesz is quite possibly the most fittingly appropriate example of spring music. And even though his work ticks all the right boxes for a pop musician, its delivery does not fit many popular music conventions.

Fennesz's music is minimal, but the result is quite the opposite. He amplifies the minutae of feedback and seemingly arbitrary noise occurrences into a loud, organic aesthetic. 

His legendary 2001 album Endless Summer is one of few examples, where the work's title has a direct relationship with its content. It is an album that is a veritable modern classic - an enduring example of an artist picking up vernacular sounds and converting them into something that is as far away from the ordinary as it gets. A masterful ebb and flow of textures, incrementally layered patterns that supercede some of the most colossal rock riffs ever written.



Fennesz’s nautical aesthetic is further accentuated in his most recent outing - Black Sea which it is out now on Touch, and is equally remarkable. You can also catch Fennesz at the Southbank Centre’s Ether Talk on April 20, or live the following day.