Watch Both Teasers Of "MIASMA", A Live Installation By Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine @ Trauma Bar und Kino In Berlin

Drawing from Ligottian horror, MIASMA takes place in an unnamed seaside town in the artists’ home region of Northern England where a blackened volcanic hole opens below an abandoned car park. The work incorporates 3D design, neo-noir film, and the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh to unearth sensations of dread, mourning, and alienation.

MIASMA autopsies the corpse of post-industrial urbanity, carving out its wounds in unparalleled catharsis: an encounter with darkness that oscillates between the solemn and abrasive.

In Thomas Ligotti’s The Shadow at The Bottom of The World, a strange profusion surfaces and exhausts itself into the atmosphere, afflicting the air, vegetation, and people in a nearby town—ultimately turning a familiar place into an estranged version of itself. This duality becomes the subject of Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine’s (Tom Heyes) debut audio-visual installation, MIASMA.

These uncanny dispositions frequently appear throughout MIASMA, within crowds of twisted and curled faces, as characters and dancers stagger past illegible signs of defunct businesses—a gesture to Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: “You suppose that you could be in familiar territory … few landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them in any order. The point is to get lost.”

Live and recorded Butoh alchemize MIASMA’s provocations into a visceral, unnatural domain, forcing viewers to take part in the mutative rift that opens, not only across the towns, but also within the minds of its inhabitants and visitors.

Through the virtual and choreographic, MIASMA conducts its autopsy on the town’s post-industrial corpse, carving out its wounds in the act of unparalleled catharsis: an embrace and respondent transformation to darkness characterised by its balance of the intimate and abrasive.

Text by Matt Dell

MIASMA will be on view this Saturday, October 22 at 21:00 @ Trauma Bar und Kino Heidestraße 50, 10557 Berlin

Video by Hannah Rose Stewart
Graphic design by Jordi Theler
Ue5 development by Filip Setmanuk Soundtrack by Blackhaine, Croww, Rainy Miller

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Hanging Out With Bowie: Terry McGovern Remembers A Night Out With the Thin White Duke

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John Carter was a record promoter in San Francisco. I was a DJ on KSFO. I was doing something typically silly on my show. Boom-chuck-chuck. It takes two people, taking turns w/the syllables in waltz time. You say boom, I say chuck, you say chuck…and so on until someone messes up. The door to my studio opened while I was playing this nonsense game on the air with a caller. I saw John and we exchanged a smile. And then I saw who he was with. "David wants to play this game w/you." I almost fell off my chair. It was David Bowie, in town to promote his latest album. Bowie sat down and we began to play. I think he wiped me out in no time. After the show, David, John and I went to the Boarding House, the very hip venue on Bush Street. John had to take off, so I sat there for over an hour watching the show with David Bowie. It was surreal. Just two guys, taking in a show, knocking back a couple of drinks, checking out the scene. I was struck by how polite he was, warm and sincerely interested in everything going on around us. At one point, the light hit his face and, yep, there they were. That one blue eye, and one green eye. He caught me looking at him and smiled. "Odd, aren't they?" he said. We laughed. Bowie was on his way to Japan…by ship. He said he was terrified of flying, so he planned on taking a cruise ship from San Francisco to Tokyo. I remember thinking how cool that was to turn a morbid fear into a leisurely, sophisticated sea voyage. I can't recall much else. The show ended. (Sadly I have no idea who was on stage.) We said our farewells and he thanked me for playing his music on the radio. We parted. This morning, I woke up to the news that he was gone. The Thin White Duke with those extraordinary eyes. I had his company for an hour or so one night a long time ago. I'll never forget him. I'll never stop listening to him. And I'll play boom-chuck-chuck with anyone who'd like to.

Text by Terry McGovern. A San Francisco media fixture for decades, McGovern is well known on radio, TV, commercials, animation, feature films, theatre, and video games. You may remember him uttering those immortal words “These are not the droids we’re looking for” in Star Wars, A New Hope. He has also appeared in films such as American Graffiti and Mrs. Doubtfire.