The view from the screen: The Orchestra (For Now) and a dystopian London gig
On a windy, particularly chilly April day in London, art-rock seven-piece The Orchestra (For Now) were pulling off the impossible: a secret show somewhere near Shoreditch, promised to be streamed straight to their Instagram live.
Though the mysterious affair sold out quickly, I managed to bag a ticket and tapped into the strangest gig experience I’ve ever had, watching the show unfold through an iPhone recording cast onto a screen for half of the fans in attendance.
Was this a live experience (a live Live experience, a live squared experience?), or was this just another way of hegemony of digital culture to sink its teeth into the impressionable masses?
For over three decades, Rooz Studios has provided a dilapidated foundational ground for emerging indie artists such as The Libertines, Babyshambles, and King Krule to thrash at their instruments, and buy a glass of wine for £9 (or a box of cigarettes for £13).
It would become the virginial site upon which Black Country, New Road adjacents The Orchestra (For Now), would try out the material for their yet-to-be-announced new album, following a blindingly impressive EP Plan 76, for the first time. Here’s what went wrong.
“The idea here is…”
Despite buying my ticket and heeding their somewhat overly anxious Instagram explanations that the “pretty cramped” space might need the crowd to be more “helpful” than usual, with the pseudo-threatening admonishment that they “just want everyone to be OK”, I faced a different problem upon entering the gig: I simply couldn’t see.
I’m familiar with this issue: As a small woman, I’m used to craning my neck over the beanie-wearing, six-foot-something silhouettes before me to still land upon a single sliver of face to get me visually through a show. However, this was something different. There was a wall separating the band and me. Instead, I was forced to watch the entire affair through the screen recording of the camera app on a mounted TV screen; the phone was on the other side, facing the band and capturing a POV for their Instagram followers.
“The idea here is we are playing new songs,” vocalist Joe Scarisbrick began from behind the wall, and the dozens of fans who could see, or at least feel the experience of seeing, cooed along. Scarisbrick, almost corporate-like with his shirt collars propped up over his pullover, continued, “I don’t really talk normally,” he admitted, “but we actually really don’t know [the new songs] very well, and this is the first time we’ve ever played them. And it’s a small room, and you’re all very intimidating.”
The “idea” might’ve been charming, but if the songs were to be heard above all, why bother with the recording? To content farm, as bands trying to make it on the oversaturated indie market will be all too familiar with. Also, I suppose, to provide a solution to the poor sightlines.
However, the focus on a content-driven lens as a way into their maximalist sound felt emetically dystopian. And, as the bassist leaned languidly against the back wall and the vocalist hid away behind his jumper, the insistence on the framing of the digital spectacle, despite there being no real need to see, felt like a clear indication that our online world is fast taking over our empirical world for no clear reason except the triumph of the tech bros who mine human life for profit.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that I’d moved through the city and paid my hard-earned money to be confronted with a screen recording of a set I wouldn’t even watch on my phone for free. I was there to feel the experience of the new songs settling on my skin. Watching through a screen, but hearing through my ears, had an unsettling, discombobulating, mind-body dualist feeling to the affair, which felt symptomatic of the industry which favours digital entrapment over creative, inventive art. I was on the outside, like a powerless God, forced into helplessness.
The unparalleled value of community
Perhaps it’s the old soul within me that’s never understood the charm of an Instagram Live; the awkwardness of the immediate, spontaneous content, the fact that the person you are watching knows that you’re engaging in a sardonic pixellated power-play. It has a room-of-mirrors feel to it that all leads back to the same dungeon-baring exit. But right here was a gig primed for the Instagram live generation.
This is by no means an issue to be aimed at the group; rather, I thought it was an honourable effort from the keen Birmingham musicians, forging a community with an air of fabled mysticism currently lacking from our over-sharing, content-driven society of the spectacle.
True enough, on their own rudimentary, but respectable, website, the band has their own community forum where they post updates and ask for live photos in a thread that mostly consists of WhatsApp numbers for drug dealers in Qatar (I don’t know, either). It’s heartening to see.
The fact that we’d gathered in a poky studio for this display of wobbly sonic experiments wasn’t the problem; the problem was the dichotomy between experiencing culture and consuming media, forced to intermingle due to the curious demands of the evening. Often, music dispels dystopia by looking it in the eye; in this instance, the act of looking was the dystopia, alive and breathing on a street corner in London.
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