Filmmaker and Participant Records co-founder William Markarian-Martin catches critic, outsider artist Richie Culver in his mom’s home near Hull, reviewing the house town he invested his whole young adult life attempting to escape.
The resonant barrage of concrète clatter and MRI maker churn of ‘Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems’ swells at the pounding heart of I Was Born By The Sea, the ravaging launching album from critic, outsider artist Richie Culver. Unfurling as unrelenting friction, a Sisyphean rise and retreat that stimulates attempting and stoppingworking, onceagain and onceagain, to break out of an itching cycle of aggravation, the track’s DIY sonics sandpaper a flexible surfacearea upon which Culver engraves his observations from the fringes that take on spacious psychological strength with each repeating of his dissociated shipment. Here, the artist looks back at the “hardest working guy in the task centre,” this “habitual bastard,” the “most underrated individual in your household,” pinned under the squashing weight of his house town, consuming over the requirement to escape while fighting the evident absurdity of such aspiration: “you and god on a rollercoaster.” For the accompanying visual Culver, togetherwith close partner and Participant Records co-founder William Markarian-Martin, fittingly makes a return to his mom’s home in Withernsea, the titular seaside town of his birth. “The video was shot in my Mothers house near Hull. Where I was brought up likewise,” describes Culver. “You can hear the Sea from inside the home in Winter. Sometimes you can’t walk on the boardwalk duetothefactthat it’s so damp & wild.” Captured with an unflinching and poignant combination of grey fondmemories and tender catharsis, Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems stimulates a previous battered by the rain, shaken by individual battle and rummaged by Tory austerity. Footage of foam-flecked waves crashing throughout sodden concrete is obscured by the expression “picture yourself prospering,” as cold rain spots a blurred lens.
Supplementing the track’s initial bleak seaside poetry with extra composing, Culver and Markarian-Martin’s video reimagines the structure as a surreal broadcast from the Withernsea traveler board, prompting audiences to “think a favorable idea to drown out a unfavorable believed,” to “minimise barriers,” while the tearing crunch of the transmitted’s grim soundtrack stimulates the kind of limbo it feels difficult to thinkof ending. Shifting focus in a imaginary series of dirty bottles of perfume, grey skies and different products of Elvis Presley souvenirs, the broadcast messages suddenly turn to faith, as though choosing up evangelical radio signals or ransacked from regional church signboards. “If god be for us, who can be versus us?” we are asked, priorto an doubtful assertion: “I can do all things through christ which reinforce me.” This soaked invocation to faith transubstantiates the images of Elvis provided to us into escapist iconography, the fading residues of the ‘Fantasy Island’ of Culver’s rough previous, monolithic and technicolour, yet dull with salt and fuel fumes. “My Mother is consumed with Elvis. Always hasactually been,” discusses Culver. “My stepdad was a vocalist in the regional clubs. We constantly utilized to sing Roger Whittaker – ‘The Last Farewell’. That’s what I am singing in the video. I neverever actually discovered the words appropriately. Nothing like gazing down the barrel of the North Sea on a damp & wild Tuesday night in January.” All of this priorto pitching in to the spoken word of the track correct, a doom-laden initial exclamation singularly expressive of an unmistakeable distressed stasis: “Woke up. In the earlymorning. Pray for me. Don’t trust Elvis. Bad vibes. I dream I might sing. I listen to gunk.”
The work vibrates with a stress inbetween uncomfortable recollection and positive forward momentum, something that characterises the psychological texture of I Was Born By The Sea. Culver’s cold narrative matches the temperaturelevel of Markarian-Martin’s beach videofootage, yet at the exactsame time points to the position he now discovers himself in, prepared and able to appearance back without blinking, a procedure that has continually offered the engine for his continuous journey as an artist and artist. “Hometowns are odd things,” he states. “Nothing can hold you back like a hometown. Imagine if your hometown was New York . I marvel if New Yorkers understand about the North Sea in January. My eldest child was initially in the video. But my partner stated we must modify him out cos the video was a bit too morbid.” It’s this lively irreverence around extremely real strife that drives Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems, around which the commercial scrape and hum of the track turns, burrowing towards some deeply buried sensation, penetrating at the saturated roots of the artist’s present clearness. Even the track’s title, which at once to points to Culver’s past hasahardtime with compound abuse, stimulated in the sporadic fear of his tv fixed soundscapes, likewise appears to refer to the uncompromisingly autobiographical nature of his visual and noise art, which takeson with piercing economy his trajectory from self-described shut-in, wrecked with low self-confidence, to a vita