Richie Culver – Alive in the living room – ع​ل​ى ق​ي​د ا​ل​ح​ي​ا​ة في غ​ر​ف​ة ا​ل​ق​ع​د​ة [Drowned By Locals]

Richie Culver first realised he understood art at an afterparty. Growing up by the North Sea, on the outskirts of Hull, the artist spent his formative years reckoning with the gravitational pull of his hometown, wracked with anxiety, aimlessness and low self-esteem. After leaving school to work in a caravan factory to facilitate a growing rave habit, Culver started to pull focus on himself in the abandoned warehouses and knackered bedsits of Hull’s party scene. It was on staggering to one of many post-rave afters that he was exposed to a book of Nan Goldin’s photographs. Through dense skunk smoke, over the chaos magic incantations of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge emanating from punctured speakers, Culver recognised something in the world viewed through Goldin’s lens. “I would look at the pages and understand these images,” says Culver. “This was where I was from. I realised that people were capturing this for a living.” It wasn’t long after this that he would learn that Throbbing Gristle had formed in the same city he had always felt so trapped by, an epiphany that would spell a sea change for the artist at his most embryonic.

In both his visual practice and his DIY approach to music the afterparty is conceived as a paranoid site of production, not only as the stage upon which the artist began to learn the addled language and pitch-black humour that drives his work to this day, but as an internal space for reflection, a place in which to slip into an evocative mode of disinhibited honesty. Years spent hanging around Hull institution The Lamp, inspired by the presence of local legends Fila Brazillia, Baby Mammoth, Bullitnuts and other eccentrics orbiting around cult electronic label Pork Recordings, led to a short-lived period spent DJing in the early ‘90s and a fraught relocation to Berlin, where the artist proceeded to haunt Berghain every single Sunday. Unfortunately the constricting pressures of self-hatred, the ever-present ebb and flow of hometown existentialism and consistent struggles with substance abuse proved too destructive for his musical ambitions, with Culver retreating further and further into addiction. “Underground is too glamorous a label,” he asserts, “it was a hermit lifestyle.”

Flash forward to the present, through sobriety, family life and therapy, and the voice that Culver has forged out of an unflinching commitment to inscribing his outsider observations has returned, full circle, to music. Describing the spoken word that has long been a part of his practice as “like my paintings speaking,” Culver conceives of sound in similar terms, his emotionally charged machine music unfurling as a sonic extension of his text-based paintings. Yet the loose experimental spirit of the afterparty persists. Culver’s bleak seaside poetry is amplified by threadbare loops worn raw and ragged, spray paint rendered as synthesis, as glacial swells of ambience, industrial throbs of noise and dark insomniac drones are exhaled together as thick melancholy haze. Above this drifts the faded pulse of the dance music the artist grew up on, the refracted sounds of the night before filtering deliriously into the morning after. Invoking the spirits of iconoclasts past like Miles Davies, Charlie Parker and esoteric oddities The Vampires Of Dartmoore while positioning his perspective in resonance with contemporary grime and drill narratives, though, as the artist notes, “from the customer’s perspective,” Richie Culver broadcasts live and direct from the fringes, drawing from a deep well of pain without romanticising the process, communicating rawness without wrath, struggle without shame.

A 27-min sound mass on CD and handwritten hymnbook by Richie Culver. The sonic landscape delves into the artist’s personal experiences with sleep paralysis, a condition he has lived with throughout his adult life. The improvised sound piece sets a “Bleak terrain of dead dreams,”—vocals intentionally omitted to echo Culver’s speechlessness during paralysis. The poem, which would have been spoken word, is instead meant to be read by the reader/listener themselves, and describes his subconscious experiences evoking discomfort and vulnerability. The book features the original handwritten poem by Richie Culver, presented in both English and Arabic.

Release date: September 22th, 2023.