urner Prize-winning artist, Mark Leckey (Birkenhead. 1964) presents the soundtrack to his new, autobiographical film installation, Dream English Kid 1964 - 1999AD on The Death of Rave - arriving nearly four years since he inaugurated the label with a vinyl edition of the Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) OST, which has since been extensively sampled by a range of contemporary musicians (See Jamie XX for one).Presented in its entirety, but cleft to fit two sides of wax, the OST draws from a ubiquitous archive to form a personalised mixtape of memories which speak to Leckey’s formative experience in the 35 years prior to becoming a mainstream-recognised artist. As he explains:
“Dream English Kid began when I found on YouTube an audio recording of Joy Division playing at a small club in Liverpool. A gig I’d been present at but could barely remember. As I listened I wondered if, through enhancing the audio, I could actually find my fifteen-year-old self in the recording. That led me to think would it be possible; at this point, with so much imagery available in the digital archives, to reconstruct my memoirs through all the DVD re-releases, eBay ephemera, YouTube uploads and above all the resource of the internet itself; the way it can actualize half-forgotten memories and produce a niche for seemingly every remembrance.”Leckey uses the filters of now-contemporary culture - the internet and editing software - to parse his life into seven distinct chapters “those memories that have most intensely lingered or festered over time”: chronologically segueing from his birth during the the epoch of the moon landings and The Beatles; the awakening of a libido; the experience of witnessing Joy Division as a teenager in Liverpool; touching on the dread/ecstasy/surreality of ‘ardcore rave with warped samples of Bay B Kane’s Hello Darkness and an MC chatting license plate numbers; right up to the pre-millenial, pre-digital tension of ’99 signified in new reports and a lick from Azzido Da Bass’s Dooms Night; before it all comes flooding back in reverse before the dead wax.
“Dream English Kid began when I found on YouTube an audio recording of Joy Division playing at a small club in Liverpool. A gig I’d been present at but could barely remember. As I listened I wondered if, through enhancing the audio, I could actually find my fifteen-year-old self in the recording. That led me to think would it be possible; at this point, with so much imagery available in the digital archives, to reconstruct my memoirs through all the DVD re-releases, eBay ephemera, YouTube uploads and above all the resource of the internet itself; the way it can actualize half-forgotten memories and produce a niche for seemingly every remembrance.”Leckey uses the filters of now-contemporary culture - the internet and editing software - to parse his life into seven distinct chapters “those memories that have most intensely lingered or festered over time”: chronologically segueing from his birth during the the epoch of the moon landings and The Beatles; the awakening of a libido; the experience of witnessing Joy Division as a teenager in Liverpool; touching on the dread/ecstasy/surreality of ‘ardcore rave with warped samples of Bay B Kane’s Hello Darkness and an MC chatting license plate numbers; right up to the pre-millenial, pre-digital tension of ’99 signified in new reports and a lick from Azzido Da Bass’s Dooms Night; before it all comes flooding back in reverse before the dead wax.
When separated from the visual content and considered in its own right, the soundtrack takes on an oneiric and deep topographical quality of its own, highlighting the psychedelic, sensual and hauntological in/ tangibility of memory through an evocative web of plasmic references whose detachment and quicksilver nature seem ever more relevant to modernity’s sense of flattened time and up-cycled culture.
