• Infinitesimal Hinge: Tender With Malcontent

    June 8, 2020 - By 

    In the latest installment of his column, Infinitesimal Hinge, Belfast musician, producer and writer Jamie Thompson aka James Joys reflects on the political and economic realities underlying the momentous times we find ourselves in. Perhaps the salient characteristic of our neoliberal capitalist moment is that the people who benefit most from the orthodoxy of centuries of structurally reproduced inequalities are the ones who present themselves as the only pragmatic, electable solutions to the eruptions of discontent these inequalities spur. That our system – a festering seam of collaborators – of the expensively schooled, of finance lads, of property developers, landlords,…

  • Infinitesimal Hinge: As The Grossness of Spring Lolls Its Head Against The Window

    March 30, 2020 - By 

    “This is how you disappear”, Scott Walker sings at the start of ‘Rawhide’, the first track from 1984’s Climate Of Hunter. The persistent high pedal of clustered strings that seems to hold everything in suspension – his voice, the secondary voice of the fretless bass – taut like a puppeteer’s strings, we now unmistakably recognise as characteristic of his arrangements. We can trace this dissonant resonance back to tracks ‘Such A Small Love’ from Scott through ‘Plastic Palace People’ from Scott 2 to Scott 3’s ‘It’s Raining Today’ – all his own compositions – and specifically to the talents of…

  • Infinitesimal Hinge: In The Fold

    February 17, 2020 - By 

    In a 2016 interview the composer and saxophonist Matana Roberts asks, “Where is the new language for how we talk about difference?” Sceptical about current protest movements’ uncritical resurrections of previous vocabularies of struggle – which, in their reliance upon dualisms of black and white, us and them, reinforce the structural underpinnings of three decades of culture warring that led, quite logically, to brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, and other demagogues around the world whose only overtures are ones of blame and resentment – Roberts’ suggestion is that only replicating older articulations of opposition dulls our ability to construct a language fit…