On the 16th of June, late on a Friday afternoon, central Dunedin was cordoned off and clos
This has been a
big story internationally, covered in the NME and Spin as well as NZ
media, but almost none of the reportage seems to have any awareness of
L$D Fundraiser or the nature of his work. There's been a lot of
assumptions made, some of them ridiculous, some of them just lazy or
wrong-headed.
For those of you, especially in other cities, not
aware of his work as a musician and multimedia artist, I wanted to post a
good example - shot by me at the Atonal Eclipse of the Charts festival
at None Gallery in 2012 - and talk a little bit about how I see it, and
about some of the misconceptions I've seen and heard about his work, and
what happened.
The artist known as L$D Fundraiser is one of
Dunedin's more coherent, sustained and prolific artists. He's had a
developing international audience as a noise musician/sound artist, and
an underacknowledged local role as Dunedin's sharpest and most critical
street artist. However like other experimental Dunedin artists, this is
largely through word of mouth. There is very little overground coverage
of Dunedin's underground communities even in Dunedin, let alone in the
rest of the country. One exception was the local critical culture
magazine Point, which was produced for a couple of years but barely seen
out side of Dunedin and Christchurch (and which I contributed to,
including writing about L$D Fundraiser). The arts and culture
institutions of the city are very limited in funds, scope and local
knowledge, so both the scenes L$D Fundraiser operates within and the
media that seeks to formalise, acknowledge and discuss it are by
necessity non-institutional, artist-run, often short term frameworks
that also largely operate outside of the limited funding systems
available as well.
As a musician, L$D Fundraiser utilises an
extensive array of largely pre-digital sound tools, both designed and
accidental, to create bleakly beautiful, heavy - and heavily sustained -
sculptural, repetitive/nearly repetitive compositions. He's always
somewhere in relation to some element of the history of music, not
noise, usually something buried away in some corner of psych music of
the last 40 plus years. He looks like he comes from Cleveland in 1974 -
having just got kicked out of Rocket from the Tombs maybe - but
assembles his compositions in ways that best reflect a very specific set
of parallel paths that remind me most of very early industrial culture,
just after punk, filtered through both cultural and technical paths
assembled from the detritus of a small town at the end of the world. It
may be poetically appropriate to consider this as music two doors down
from the city's dump, but it's also very nearly concretely true. And
much of both the equipment and material of L$D Fundraiser's work has
always drawn from the things we discard as a city.
As sound and
as music, it's an often buried, introverted sound. The three adjectives I
would use to describe the sound of L$D Fundraiser - and I think the
music shifts between different clusterings of these three elements
through almost all of the work I know - are oppressive, depressive and
ecstatic.
L$D Fundraiser's parallel career as an street artist
based in the immediate local environment has a startlingly coherent and
really useful relationship to the music. Simply put, it provides the
context for the sources of the oppressive and depressive elements of the
sound. Through a series of primarily collage poster works equally
influenced by surrealism, 19th century political satire, situationism
and underground rock n' roll, and an increasingly fearless approach to
placement, these are smart, angry, trenchant, often hilarious
commentaries on life under late capitalism. In a town whose council
makes the claim to be a centre for street art, L$D Fundraiser is by far
the most prolific, rigorous and critical local artist currently
operating - and as such is generally completely ignored as a street or a
visual artist on any official level, more regarded as a jokester than
anything else.
The visual works are immediately distinctive both
technically and tonally. Oversaturated, rephotographed, deliberately
low resolution colour prints, collaged and cut-up, with typewriter
addition, by turns snarky and deliberately obscure, constantly mimicking
and inverting the language of contemporary political and commercial
discourse. Anyone walking the streets of Dunedin should have come across
the work of L$D Fundraiser before, perhaps sniggered at it or puzzled
over it, maybe wondered what it was doing there, or what it was trying
to sell. But L$D Fundraiser isn't really trying to sell you anything.
Indeed what he's been arrested for wasn't so much a promotional stunt as
a genuine attempt to find a new way to distribute the music to someone
other than the same old folks who've been listening for years. Over the
last few weeks, about 10 copies of StreetNOISE have been pasted up on
walls known as band postering areas around inner city Dunedin, and most
of those tapes have been picked up without the police needing to be
called. The release of the StreetNOISE album (not a demo tape, as the
Otago Daily Times had it, but perhaps they don't realise that tapes are a
valid and appropriate release medium now) was really not a publicity
stunt for an album release but rather the actual album release itself as
a giveaway.
It's pretty interesting to see how many people have
jumped to attribute selfish motives to the release of StreetNOISE, but
for an extreme artist who's been self-releasing music for around a
decade, wide, viral publicity isn't necessarily of that much interest.
L$D Fundraiser has been postering lively, sometimes even disagreeable
content onto the walls of Dunedin for years now. It's often been angry,
scabrous political rhetoric that's just sat there - or been
unceremoniously pulled down - and this is the first time he's been
approached by the police.
I don't have much to say about the
role of the police here, and the protocols they have in place to deal
with bombs or threats, except to say that it shouldn't have been to hard
for them to identify the StreetNOISE tape as being by this guy L$D
Fundraiser. I know I wasn't the only one who looked at the photo and
recognised it, and this is a really distinctive visual style that's been
literally around for many years now. Actually what the photo that's
been circulated doesn't show you is not only that the album's supposedly
threatening cover poem is in fact signed by L$D Fundraiser - a Google
term which brings enough hits to work out its a musical project, to say
the least – but the poem was actually hand typed onto sheets pulled out
from the artist's expired passport, which traditionally has the number
stamped on every page. I'm certainly very sympathetic to the person who
discovered it and felt motivated to call the police - it may well have
been very upsetting. However I'm not sure the idea of charging L$D
Fundraiser with threatening to damage property is reasonable, given that
it was the police who made the decision to close down the city and blow
up a cassette tape, made by an artist they should have pretty readily
identified. I mean I think we all quite often go to a gig or a gallery
and see something we don't really understand, but most of us don't have
the power to send the artist to jail for it.
Maybe it should have had
that label, Warning Contains Explicit Content, as was imposed upon hip
hop and metal musicians in the 1980s by the fragile middle classes of
America.
Within the arts communities I live in, there's been a
really diverse response. The most common responses are a mixture of
laughter and extreme bemusement. From two or three scenes across came
mockery of edginess and pretentiousness - which is not exactly
unreasonable, to be fair - laced with anger. A noted one-time noise
musician now located overseas waded in to describe L$D Fundraiser as,
"What a F**khead," for what he understood as a, "repulsive, conceptually
lame, insensitive and juvenile prank." People who know L$D Fundraiser
and appreciate the work have been much more supportive, and there's been
offers to organise benefit gigs here and overseas, and concern about
whether the artist is adequately legally represented - which he is. One
local artist noted, "Love thy... L$D Fundraiser and shame on the lego
police for fear mongering a community by lack of knowledge for how to
recognize a piece of art. This misunderstanding of counter culture art
and underground music which has thrived in Dunedin for decades so
stupendously framed as a threat."
The artist who operates as L$D Fundraiser is in court later this week. He was not approached for comment.
L$D Fundraiser live at None Gallery from
Campbell Walker on
Vimeo.
Wednesday, 21 June 2017
The suspicious package which sparked the closure of much of
Dunedin's CBD on Friday due to bomb fears was a demo tape from a Dunedin
noise band.
Police are providing few details on the package and accompanying note
which were found stuck to a former strip club in Moray Pl about 12.40pm
on Friday.
However, detectives yesterday confirmed the man spoken to in relation
to the incident ''claimed'' to be from a band and the item was related
to the musical endeavour.
It is understood the band was underground Dunedin noise band LSD Fundraiser.
On the band's Bandcamp page the release of a demo tape - dubbed ''Streetnoise'' - was announced on June 1.
An image of the demo tape shows it was wrapped and had a note taped to it which reads:
''When there's nothing left to lose.
''i will firebomb your car.
''i will hack into your computer.
''i will leak trade & state
''SECRETS.
''i will hammer holes in your office windows.
''i will raise [sic] your buildings to
''the ground.
''i will bring you down.''
The announcement, and a post on social media, said the limited run of tapes would be coming to ''a wall near you''.
When asked about the note, police would not be drawn on its contents, instead issuing a statement.
''Police can confirm that the person spoken to over the weekend
claimed they were a member of a Dunedin band and the item left behind
related to that band,'' Detective Senior Sergeant Rob Hanna said.
''A search warrant was executed on Friday evening at an address in Dunedin but the AOS were not involved.
''As the matter is still an active investigation the police won't be
commenting on the content of the note attached to the item at this
stage.''
Much of the central city had been evacuated and cordoned off for hours on Friday as police assessed the threat.
The New Zealand Defence Force's explosive ordnance disposal squad was
flown by helicopter to the city and destroyed the package in a
controlled explosion carried out by a remote-controlled robot shortly
after 5pm.
Police confirmed earlier this week they were assessing the criminal liability of the man involved.
When pressed for further details yesterday, police said they would
not be commenting further until the investigation was complete.
Attempts to contact the Dunedin man behind the band were unsuccessful yesterday.
