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L ast week FIFA President Gianni Infantino penned a short statement to fans urging those questioning Qatar s abysmal human rights record to focus on the football and scolding critics for handing out moral lessons to the rest of the world While few will have been shocked by this shameless attempt at evading responsibility and indeed expected no less from such a profoundly soulless organisation it is a sadly familiar line I shan t waste too many words on such eminently bad faith arguments but just for the avoidance of doubt no my opposition to Qatar s hosting of the World Cup is not based on a deep seated hatred of Arabic culture nor do I believe that the United Kingdom or any other nation for that matter has a spotless human rights record The irony is that the Qatari state which has spent approximately 220 billion preparing for the tournament has never been focused The Wynd on the football FIFA and all the oncerespected voices that the Qatari regime have purchased are willing collaborators in a monumental image laundering operation aimed at making the tiny petrostate an acceptable investment site for foreign businesses and an attractive destination for tourists all part of the country s attempts to diversify their oil based economy The refrain of keep politics out of football has not merely been applied to the snow akes who inexplicably take issue with the deaths of 6500 virtually unpaid migrant labourers however Last summer we heard it ad nauseam from various right wing voices in relation to the England team s decision to take the knee before games at the European Championships Outwith the boundaries of football conservative commentator Laura Ingraham infamously told LeBron James to shut up and dribble following the NBA star s decision to use his platform to protest Md Shaifuzzaman Ayon Qatar Airways Boeing 777 3DZ ER FIFA World Cup 2022 Livery 2021 CC Attribution ShareAlike 4 0 International Page 2 fl Opinion

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Yet this week we will mark Remembrance Sunday accompanied by a minute s silence before games and a poppy on players shirts I am not suggesting that I oppose honouring the fallen in this way but how can we argue that this is not a political act What about the widespread tributes paid by football clubs following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II This is an overtly political gesture particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland yet none of the voices who opposed taking the knee have said a word The question therefore is obvious Which politics are allowed in football and who gets to decide Allow me to present a case study Following Russia s barbaric invasion in February the world of football came together in support of the people of Ukraine Statements were issued ags were own and tributes were made Just to stress I completely support these acts of solidarity But let s compare this to May 2021 when Leicester City players Hamza Choudhary and Wesley Fofana ew a Palestinian ag following their victory in the FA Cup nal amidst a fortnight of violence that would see at least 256 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces The response within the press and on social media was markedly di erent with calls for the pair to be ned suspended or even sacked for the gesture One could point out that Palestine is not recognised as a state by the UN so action on the o cial level is diplomatically complicated but when the football world stood together following Putin s invasion I believe they did so to show support to the people of Ukraine not merely to the notion of Ukrainian sovereignty But the responses make it very clear in our media ecosystem and national consciousness ying a Ukrainian ag is admirable while displaying a Palestinian ag is deserving of censure at the very least So which politics are allowed It feels as though the answer is those that don t rock the boat Sandboxing political expression in this way may ensure that the sport remains lucrative to sponsorship but we should not be limiting the ways people can express themselves to those that will not o end the delicate sensibilities of political commentators and advertising executives So no you cannot keep politics out of football Nor should we try To this day the sport represents one of the only avenues by which fl fl fi ff fi fl fi fl Opinion fl fl fl fi ffi Page 3 ff Rory O Sullivan Average Apolitical England Fan 2022 The Wynd police brutality in 2018 It is clear therefore that protesting racial injustice is seen by many as a political act Perhaps they re right Much as we wish it were not the ght for racial equality is not nished and any discussion of altering the power structures of society is inherently political

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young people of colour from deprived backgrounds can build a fortune for themselves and their families It brings joy to young and old rich and poor uniting people across societal divisions and building solidarity between communities that would otherwise be divided The Wynd either uncomfortable or outrageous at the time While it is too early to tell whether the taking of the knee or the protests against Qatar s human rights record will have any concrete impact players should never be dissuaded from attempting to use their status to a ect change Football is at its best when it is a vehicle for genuine good From Matthias Sindelaar defying Hitler s orders to represent Germany rather than his native Austria to Socrates and C sar Luis Menotti openly challenging the military dictatorships in their homelands of Brazil and Argentina to Iranian footballer FIFA stated in 2011 that it hoped that giving international exposure to Qatar would force it to improve many of its more egregious abuses If we are to achieve this then we cannot accept vague platitudes We must hold Qatar s and FIFA s feet to the re We cannot and should not attempt to keep Saeed Piramoun celebrating a goal this week with a show of support for women protesting against the hijab football has a proud history of using its massive in uence to make a di erence This has always held true even when the protests in question were deemed politics out of football as doing so robs the sport of its ability to transcend the world of entertainment and be a genuine force for good that makes a material di erence to the lives of those across the globe fi ff fl Page 4 ff ff Opinion

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Lula Neither the First nor the Last Environmental Activism and Hope in South America By Angus Chambers Lula Neither the First nor the Last Ag ncia PT Lula durante Semin rio Estrat gias para Economia Brasileira 2017 CC Attribution 2 0 E ven if he ate kangaroo testicles became King of the Jungle and returned to the front benches a conquering hero turtle neck wearing disgraced former minister Matt Hancock wouldn t have achieved half the political comeback of Lula Former trade union leader and metalworker from a working class background Lula was president from 2003 to 2010 He left government immensely popular with an 80 approval rate In 2017 however he was tried and found guilty on charges of money laundering and corruption He spent over 18 months imprisoned before the Supreme Federal Court found his imprisonment to be unlawful and ruled his convictions be overturned Upon release in 2019 Lula relaunched his political career and this year roared back to beat Jair Bolsonaro in a nailbiting presidential election As mentioned Lula left o ce in 2010 in a unique position as a prominent politician popular From 2003 2010 he achieved great success He launched multiple e ective social programs growing the GDP and reducing in ation and debt He took 20m Brazilians out of poverty with inequality illiteracy unemployment infant mortality and labour rates all falling The minimum wage and average income increased substantially as did access to schools further education and health care all contributing to a markedly improved quality of life for Brazilian people Bolsonaro on the other hand in icted mass impoverishment environmental destruction fl ff ffi Opinion fl Page 5 The Wynd

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and vicious social conservatism on the Brazilian people He led a dreadful response to the pandemic as symbolised by his own visits to the ICU which came so regularly that I hope he had a loyalty card Deforestation of the Amazon rose by 75 33m Brazilians face acute hunger 100m Brazilians are now living in poverty and LGBTQ people and other marginalised groups have been cruelly targeted by discriminatory policy The Wynd desire for left wing policy and radical change Lula actually beat Alckmin in the 2006 Brazilian presidential election highlighting their historical political di erences His re election would have been disastrous As such Lula spearheaded a united front against him with the backing of trade unions grassroots and workers movements to self Both of these views have merits The importance of the work done by grassroots activists and left wing campaigners cannot ever be understated or undervalued Lula s rhetoric is radical and inspiring and he does commonly touch on traditional left wing and socialist talking points In his victory speech he declared that we are not interested in trade agreements condemning our country to enter the role of the seller We are going to described centrist political parties and an arguably centre right running mate They campaigned chie y on o erings of equal pay between men and women LGBTQ rights building more a ordable housing wealth taxes an increased minimum wage protection of Indigenous land and culture poverty relief programs and an end to mass deforestation in the Amazon reindustrialise and invest in the green economy On the other hand he has amalgamated an array of political actors who do not necessarily share his political ideals or those of his campaigners and may not be able to form a united front against a common enemy There have been and will continue to be compromises that those on the left both in Brazil and further a eld will not like Lula s campaign and backers represent something of a broad church As such many across the political spectrum have pointed to his victory as some vindication of their own beliefs Socialists and the far left have pointed to the work put in by trade unions and social movements as a critical factor and symbolic of Lula s personal political philosophy Others have observed that Lula s running mate Geraldo Alckmin is described by local analysts as a pro business centrist with strong links to the political and nancial establishment They claim Lula s victory Sometimes left out of this analysis though is the wider geopolitical context in South America In viewing Brazil singularly it can be reasonably argued that nothing particularly radical is being o ered just an alternative to fascism However across South America there has been a surge in the popularity of left wing ideas and politicians Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won in Mexico in 2018 and Alberto Fernandez was successful in Argentina a year later These were followed up with wins for Xiomara Castro in Honduras 2022 Gabriel Boric in represents centrist or centre left pragmatism in the face of fascism rather than a genuine Chile 2021 Pedro Castillo in Peru 2021 and a landslide win for Luis Arce in Bolivia ff ff ff fi fi fl Page 6 ff Opinion

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The Wynd UNCTAD Luis Arce addressing the Conference 2015 CC Attribution ShareAlike 2 0 2020 For me though the crowning achievement of all of these victories was that of Gustavo Petro who earlier this year became the rst left wing Colombian president ever Two fundamental questions arise from this why has South America shifted to the left and is this indicative of longer term change I believe that concerns about climate change are crucial in this movement and that these concerns will help sustain these governments or at the very least substantially shift the goalposts of what opponents will have to o er How far left these candidates really are is still up for debate and I won t evaluate each case individually However I will say that every last one of these elected o cials is at least left of centre and substantially further to the left than their opponents were Indeed Castillo Boric and Lula o ered something dramatically di erent to their competition Most of them provide an alternative to the global neoliberal economic model and seek to strengthen their countries against imperial in uences They all have looked to expand So why have we seen so many countries in South America elect leftists One possible explanation for the hard nosed pragmatists is that this current wave can be explained by standard election cycles seen worldwide Elected governments do tend to swing from one side to the other fairly regularly and South America is no exception The pink the welfare state and restrict the in uence of the private sector for example tide that saw the election of multiple leftwing leaders in the late 90s and through the Opinion fl ffi ff ff ff fi fl Page 7

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00s including Lula s rst term was followed up by a shift to the right in the 2010s Perhaps this surge in left wing popularity is just a ash in the pan Perhaps not In understanding South American politics and political trends it is crucial to recognise the continent s history and the profound environmental and social scars left by imperialism and resource extraction Large areas of South America are rich in resources and have long been a site of extraction for foreign companies Raw materials like copper gold and oil were mined or extracted and exported back to the Global North This occurred through much of the 20th century allowing these companies to gain a signi cant stronghold on the continent meaning South American economies were incredibly reliant on resource extraction and exports as a means of economic development Some point to this as a partial explanation to why the pink tide occurred and was sustained but also as its downfall due to commodity prices falling in the early 2010s This economic downturn led to backlash and public anger who mostly blamed their governments rather than the extractive industries This helps provide some context behind historical shifts from left to right but doesn t explain more recent events To my eyes it seems that newly formulated radical demands and a disassociation with the neoliberal economic model and Sustainable Development SD agenda are crucial to explaining the current popularity of leftists in South America While traditional Unsurprisingly this has caused considerable frustration among South American people who are not nearly as responsible for global warming as external industrial and imperialist forces and are far more vulnerable to its e ects too In particular foreign development projects have frequently violated Indigenous people and cultures Lithium extraction for batteries used in electric vehicles is occurring on ancestral Indigenous lands and territories in Chile and Bolivia for one appalling example There is a clear pattern of Indigenous or vulnerable local people being forced o their lands to make space for development projects to meet sustainable development goals and western targets for sustainability For Indigenous people in South America the value of the environment goes well beyond what we can extract or gain from it It is deeply important on a spiritual level and to their ways of living and knowing This has always been relevant in South American politics but has taken on a new signi cance in the context of climate change and the importance of protecting natural spaces The new glitzy sanitised unimpeachable label of sustainability does not make it any easier to fl fi ff g fi Page 8 ff fi Opinion The Wynd extraction of raw materials is less common and more regulated now the SD agenda and demand for green ener y have led to a new wave of extraction and a continuation of colonial projects Developing countries including those in South America hold most of the remaining renewable potential Thus instead of exploiting land for copper and gold we build wind farms and solar panels in the name of sustainability

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Massive protests have taken place across South America in the last few years concerning Indigenous rights and climate change which has been re ected in new policies and rhetoric by their left wing governments For example Gabriel Boric has blamed forestry companies for droughts among Indigenous Mapuche communities in Chile and vowed to restrict their activities substantially Likewise Gustavo Petro has included three Indigenous leaders in his cabinet and told COP27 that it is the hour of humanity and not the markets as the market is not the main mechanism to overcome the climate crisis He also called for increased inclusion and visibility for everyone Further in his victory speech Lula spoke of his commitment to the Indigenous peoples and declared that when an Indigenous child dies because of the greed of predators part of humanity dies with it we want environmental paci cation and we are ready to defend it from any threat This is why South America s politically leftward trajectory can be sustained The environment protection of Indigenous land and climate change are not issues that will disappear There is a real widespread ardent demand for radical action on these issues which has helped put left wing leaders into power The people of South America are standing up for themselves and the environment and ghting back against extraction and exploitation Instead of blaming their governments for a fall in commodity prices and an associated economic downturn as they did previously they are attacking those doing the extraction and destroying their lands The target of their wrath has shifted and it s hard to see what could reverse this change any time soon Nevertheless it is also vital to note the meaningful and encouraging fact that progressive movements have substantially enhanced their reputation and gained serious ground in other important political debates too Feminist movements have grown in stature and support particularly regarding abortion rights LGBTQ groups have been ghting for recognition and are making good progress with Gustavo Petro of Colombia promoting multiple LGBTQ people to government positions and advancing the rights of same sex couples These progressive movements are now better funded and better organised and will continue to spread their message across South America Ultimately though I believe the demand for radical action on climate change and the environment is central to this new surge of left wing support Perhaps we are seeing a Green Tide rather than a pink one Defeat for Lula would have meant environmental catastrophe in Brazil with deforestation in the Amazon projected to accelerate even further The ght against climate change will be the political issue of the 21st century and the people of South America know this I hope my predictions are correct and that progress made on this issue and others by fl fi fi Opinion Page 9 fi fi The Wynd stomach the continued exploitation of their land I believe this partly explains the swing to more left wing ideas as well as the concurrent rejection of the establishment particularly among Indigenous people and young people

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Following politics can often be frustrating bleak and anxiety inducing It is vital to celebrate decisive victories and let progress inspire us Lula s victory reminds us that change is within our grasp and that we can brighten the future Brave people like him and his supporters are ghting for this and they are winning We owe it to them and others who have prevailed to show our resilience rise above hatred and move forward Before his unlawful imprisonment Lula told supporters There is no use trying to stop my ideas They re already in the air and you can t The powerful can kill one two or 100 roses but they ll never stop the arrival of spring Good riddance Mr Bolsonaro The people have spoken the roses have bloomed and spring has arrived May you and your vile fascist cowardly ideolo y rot on the scrap heap of political history A great day for democracy A great day for the Brazilian people and their environment A great day for anti fascists the world over Rory O Sullivan Lula s Rose 2022 fi g Page 10 Opinion these current governments will be continued into the future The Wynd imprison them There s no point in trying to stop my dreams because when I stop dreaming I ll be dreaming through your minds There s no point in thinking everything s going to stop the day Lula has a heart attack that s nonsense My heart will be beating through yours and there are millions of hearts

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The Wynd Language Games Why Suella Braverman Doesn t Like the Word Terrorism By Rory O Sullivan O n Sunday October 30th Britain witnessed an appalling act of extremist terrorism an attacker launched several home constructed petrol bombs at an immigration centre in Dover before taking his life shortly after Nevertheless the immediate government response to the incident appeared alarmingly reserved The day after the attack home secretary Suella Braverman addressed the House of Commons insisting that the incident was not being treated as an act of terrorism from High Wycombe named Andrew Leak had tweeted your children will feel the pain we will obliterate them Muslim children are now our target Before that Leak had been an avid consumer of far right media online According to the charity Hope Not Hate he had interacted with one far right account over 73 times Many news outlets did not consider the story front page material either The natural question that arises from these responses is thus a rather simple one why Ba ingly it then took police six full days to accept the political ideological motivation qualifying it as such despite its apparent Before going any further it is worth acknowledging that precisely what constitutes terrorism is anything but clearcut its exact de nition is a heavily obviousness Indeed just one hour before the incident the 66 year old perpetrator a man controversial matter and I don t wish to neglect that fact What is worth exploring Opinion fi ffl Page 11

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then is the various ways in which the term is used and with what consistency If there is anything I have learned from my IR lectures on counter terrorism to call something terrorism is necessarily an act of political power Critical terrorism scholar Philip Herbst notes that Carrying enormous emotional freight terrorism is often used to de ne reality in order to place one s own group on a high moral plane condemn the enemy rally members around a cause silence or shape policy debate and achieve a wide variety of agendas This is true not just of what we do call terrorism but also of what we don t call terrorism Omission can be just as powerful as inclusion It is therefore pertinent to ask what the wide variety of agendas are being upheld in Braverman s initial delay in calling the attack what it is Her own and her party s of course Braverman s delay in applying the word terrorism is merely the latest development in an increasingly hostile rhetoric surrounding the issue of immigration being pedalled by the Conservative party spearheaded by the home secretary herself as a way of tapping into portions of the electorate s latent nationalistic tendencies In previous dog whistles Braverman has characterised the current status of immigration as an invasion as well as certain migrants as Albanian criminals a statement which the Albanian Prime Minister rightly denounced as purely xenophobic It is important to remember though that this is not just a matter of trivial political posturing In an article published in issue one Worst of all anonymous reports suggest the home secretary was warned of these impacts by senior government lawyers yet persisted with her in ammatory tone regardless In so doing she made yet another powerful contribution to the ongoing normalisation of far right anti immigration sentiment It is this last o wider point that is the most important to re ect on the current dialogue surrounding issues of migration in the UK is to put it mildly rather shocking Naturally though it is not just high pro le politicians that are stoking the re social media and print news outlets are also spaces where such narratives are increasingly being proliferated Despite this the reviewer of the government s Prevent counter terrorism strate y William Shawcross has been trying to downplay the risk of extreme right terrorism Muslim Council public a airs representative Miqdaad Versi notes In reality the opposite is true and the fact that the government is slower to condemn incidences of this kind of terrorism as terrorism than it is to propagate the very language that underpins them is cause for serious concern ff fi fi Page 12 fl fl g fi Opinion The Wynd of The Wynd Samuel Sandor explored Trump s use of rhetoric during the pandemic to denigrate migrants and ethnic minorities within America It s hard not to see similarities here Such uses of language have alarmingly tangible impacts on public perceptions towards marginalised peoples perceptions which always have the potential to inspire acts of violence akin to those seen at Dover

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troubles and bitter qualms The Wynd Italy before meeting his tragic end of suicide The presentation of these parallel lives develops a sense of duality within the sequence akin to the coexistence of both beauty and decay throughout the lm The exploration of these themes sheds light on the transient nature of such things as beauty and the earthly realm thereby enhancing the sense of bitterness and longing that characterises the lm s tone The dialectic between eeting temporality and transcendent eternity is echoed in a scene which depicts the people of a small spa town bathing in a lake Though immersed in the dreamlike Do you know why they re in the water I n Nostalghia 1983 Tarkovsky crafts an atmosphere of dejection and disillusionment softened somewhat by the bleakly poetic setting of central Italy The lm follows Andrei Gorchakov as he travels across Italy with his guide and translator Eugenia researching the Russian serf composer Pavel Sosnovsky who had committed suicide years before We follow these two as they pursue the trail of this long deceased composer rarely speaking to one another but remaining instead submerged within their own thoughts surroundings of Italy there appears to be something desolate something dismal about the place and there is an underlying ripple of decay which runs beneath everything in sight This perpetual sense of damp decay mirrors the internal brooding of Andrei re ecting his melancholia and bitter nostalgia for his Russian homeland This wistful nostalgia characteristic of Andrei persists throughout the entirety of the sequence mirroring Tarkovsky s own sense of rupture in grappling with the idea of leaving the USSR This longing for the past is intensi ed through transitions between the present the lm s setting of Italy and the past Andrei s rainsoaked dacha in Russia where his wife and son await his return Andrei views his stay in Italy as sort of exile enduring his time there bitterly whilst constantly dreaming of his homeland There is a certain irony in his research of Sosnovsky the dead composer who had been exiled to The re ection of internal brooding within the external landscape o ers an illustration of Tarkovsky s ideas of beauty melancholia and of course nostalgia The subtlety of colours and textures within the lm reveals a deeper more profound depiction of aesthetics and beauty than traditionally portrayed I am tired of seeing these sickeningly beautiful sights Andrei laments I want nothing more for myself That s enough It seems that neither the beauty and rugged simplicity of the Italian landscape nor the striking features of Eugenia are enough to subdue his attachment to the past Instead he remains estrangement intent on evading the present Themes of an existential nature are pervasive throughout the lm Matters of reality and illusion as well as of identity and perception are touched upon through the subdued atmospheric vision that Tarkovsky cultivates fi fi fl fi fi fi ff fi Page 14 fi fl Culture fi because they want to live forever alone haunted by his feelings of As the lm unfolds it becomes apparent that fl Eugenia asks observing these people It s

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The Wynd Andrei Tarkovsky Nostalghia 1983 Where am I when I m not in reality or in my competition and materialism He then imagination Through such questions proceeds to immolate himself in a shocking Tarkovsky introduces anew the theme of sequence which is made all the more duality while also drawing attention to the appalling by the apparent indi erence of the very limitations that duality poses bystanders as he writhes among the ames Humankind it would appear cannot be divided in two It is simply not enough to separate reality from imagination the conscious from the unconscious beauty from decay This concept of the multiplicity of the self is interrogated further in the words of Domenico an eccentric old man who Andrei comes to befriend I can t live simultaneously in my head and in my body He says That s bound by the promise made to Domenico to ful l this task He staggers continually from one end to the other intent on ensuring that the candle remains lit in a mesmerising shot lasting just over nine minutes This boldly elongated sequence is characteristic of Tarkovsky s works and only intensi es the Both Andrei and Domenico share a feeling of pained frustration that mars the face of alienation from their surroundings a longing Andrei On completing this task and ful lling for the past Towards the end of the lm his promise he collapses Such is the Domenico delivers a speech in the city staggering disillusionment Tarkovsky proclaiming the need to revert to a simpler conveys stringing together a bleakly poetic state cherishing love amongst brothers and sequence of nostalgia and the psychological weariness of a man in exile sense of patient concentration as well as fi fi fl fi ff Culture Page 15 fi through a mineral pool carrying a lit candle why I can t be just one person sisters and rejecting modern ideals of fi The nal scene follows Andrei as he wades

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By Finn Fallow eld Art The Blue Moon Review D avid Bomberg born in 1890 was one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century he nonetheless continues to be overlooked Despite achieving greater recognition since his death in 1957 after limited commercial success within his lifetime his vision s unparalleled clarity and pioneering nature remain unappreciated Through his radical teachings Bomberg inspired a generation of contemporary artists including most notably Frank Auerbach and Leon Kosso while his unique approach to painting and drawing bridged the gap between Post Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism His method can be succinctly characterised as an attempt to capture the spirit in the mass a desire to render a personal subjective and cross sensory response to a particular subject thereby capturing its essence rather than simply representing its immediate physical form It is an ideolo y inherited from the legacy of Cezanne who wrote Painting from nature is not copying the object it is realising one s sensations Bomberg had a rich artistic education being taught by some of the most prominent British artists of the time He studied under Walter fi Page 16 ff Culture g Capturing the Capturing the Spirit in the Mass Spirit in the Mass Art The Blue Moon Review David Bomberg Sunset the Bay North Devon 1946 The Wynd

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David Bomberg The Mud Bath 1914 The Wynd Sickert at the Westminster School of Art and subsequently Henry Tonks at The Slade in 1911 the foremost art school of the day having been helped attain a place there by John Singer Sargent There he was one of the most precocious and avant garde of a generation described by Tonks as the second crisis of brilliance which included Stanley Spencer Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson among others A natural draughtsman Bomberg initially suited the traditional technical teaching method there though in time he began to develop a more forwardthinking approach Many of his other early in uences came from two legendary exhibitions organised by Roger Fry a pre eminent art critic of the time and one of the strongest proponents of Post It was however this Vorticist style of work that earned Bomberg initial critical and commercial acclaim perhaps the most he d ever receive in his career He exhibited with Sickert s Camden Town Group in 1913 and was part of the rst London Group exhibition a kind of rebellious maverick alternative to the stagnant Royal Academy fl fi ffi Culture fi Page 17 Impressionism a movement he named There Bomberg was rst exposed to Cezanne Gauguin Van Gogh and Matisse Inspired also by Fauvism and Futurism his style moved in a direction that began to test his teachers with work that featured complex networks of abstract geometric shapes This di culty culminated in Bomberg being thrown out of the Slade in the summer of 1913

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David Bomberg Sappers at Work Canadian Tunnelling Company R14 St Eloi 1919 fused the organic with the arti cial In 1914 he was given a solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery Chelsea which was praised by both Roger Fry and T E Hulme and resulted with help from Augustus John in the purchase of two of his paintings by major American collector John Quinn This early success was brought to an abrupt end in 1915 when Bomberg enlisted in the Royal Engineers His experience of war and the consequent death of his close friend and fellow artist Isaac Rosenberg as well as of his brother challenged his prior embrace of mechanisation and the harsh angular inorganic aesthetic of Vorticism His commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund Sappers at Work depicting the rst Canadian Tunnelling Company constitutes a more haunting and critical execution of Vorticism s primary motifs It was subsequently rejected as a Futurist abortion forcing Bomberg to create something more The bridge at Ronda best captures this aesthetic and was the inspiration for some of Bomberg s most accomplished work There are perhaps the same robust and structural forms underpinning these paintings as in his fi fi Page 18 Culture fi By the end of the 1920s Bomberg had evolved an expressionistic style of painting from his pared back depictions of sprawling arid Palestinian townscapes His brush became more loaded his palette much wider and he produced a long series of heavilywrought landscapes featuring Toledo Ronda Cyprus and Cornwall Much of this work David Bomberg The Gorge Ronda Spain 1935 The Wynd representational in order to secure the commission This period would prove to be a turning point that would inspire several years of far more traditional cubist landscape painting across Palestine and later a nal pivot back towards something more radical

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The Wynd early futurist inspired abstract pieces with layers of broad angular brushstrokes used to describe the shapes of the rocks and lead us upward to the bridge and the city above in harmony with the valley below The breadth and depth of colour and Bomberg s application of paint unite to create a hugely evocative and dramatic overall portrayal One can t avoid the feeling that Bomberg has immersed himself in the scene that he paints that he is re ecting and realizing his response the contours of his sensations carved out on canvas This combination of structural rigidity and expressive even romantic abstraction epitomises the meaning of capture the spirit in the mass the central tenet which sets Bomberg s philosophy apart Importantly Bomberg cultivated his doctrine through teaching rst at the Bartlett School of Architecture then most signi cantly at Borough Polytechnic in Southwark now London South Bank University At this point any recognition had long since dried up and he entered the profession out of necessity rather than from any genuine desire Having applied to over 300 roles between 1939 and 1944 before being given either of these two positions his attempts to join a more prestigious institution were fruitless Bomberg nonetheless attracted an eclectic but dedicated and energetic group of students who were drawn to him by his unconventional methods He exploited the disorganised nature of the Borough to evade any prescribed curriculum and instead focused on teaching each student on a oneto one basis instilling in them a rigorous learning through doing approach Almost a Despite the mysterious and highly personalised nature of his teaching Bomberg was constant in his core instruction that students should search for the spirit in the mass A straightforward explanation of the phrase has always proved elusive due to Bomberg s consistent refusal to elaborate on it so the testimony of his students and some deduction must be relied upon instead Undeniably the ambiguous nature of the doctrine is by design as part of its purpose is to encourage an individual internal commitment to each composition and the practice of painting as a whole Some have referred to it as more of an attitude a sort of personal artistic integrity but there does seem to be a more speci c technical explanation Implied is the goal of achieving a coherence between rstly composition the importance of a linear structural foundation second observation recording the most essential fundamental elements of the scene those that give it life and nally expressiveness ensuring that a personal emotive a ecting account of the scene is produced In 1946 Bomberg formed the Borough Group with his most dedicated students exhibiting alongside them seven times before disbanding in 1951 The group was derided at ff fi fi fi fi Culture fi fl fi Page 19 kind of spiritual authority Bomberg would often give feedback in an enigmatic quasipoetic manner once assessing a gure drawing by sketching two dome shapes and proclaiming that the dome of St Paul s is like this and not like this

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David Bomberg Evening in the City of London 1944 the time for being a cult of thick paint and the students were called little Bombergs or Bombergians It wasn t until after Bomberg s death in 1957 and really until a Tate retrospective in 1988 that Bomberg received some true recognition Even so Bomberg and the Borough Group s subtle but sophisticated doctrine was and still is widely misunderstood The fact that the most successful of his students were the least ideologically loyal in Frank Auerbach and Leon Kosso both of whom would certainly also t the reductive thick paint mantra hasn t helped Bomberg s legacy is a complicated one His career appeared to exist in three distinct sections early irtations with Vorticism a period of seemingly conventional landscape painting and nally his expressionist and teaching years It has proved di cult to reconcile the three Each of these periods built on each other however and there is a discernible underlying trajectory It is an incredible show of strength and conviction that Bomberg remained steadfast in his vision through the many obstacles rejections and humiliations he faced His students may deserve some credit for helping maintain his determination though it is true ffi Page 20 fl fi ff Culture fi The Wynd

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The Wynd that he produced much of his most daring work in short and productive breaks from his teaching on trips to Cornwall and Cyprus for example Nevertheless it is rather tting that Bomberg who died in poverty spent some of his last months on a nal trip to Ronda the stimulus for so many of his masterpieces One of Bomberg s major achievements was in pre empting the American Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s and 60s particularly the subset of painters still concerned with portraying a particular response to a particular person or landscape Joan Mitchell is perhaps the best example of this with her beautiful evocative monumental nature paintings which can be viewed as a chaotic maximisation of Monet s late water lily paintings Unlike Jackson Pollock though Mitchell s work is still grounded in a scene responsive rather than entirely spontaneous and process oriented Bomberg may not have directly inspired any of the artists of this movement but he certainly made the same innovations and often with greater coherence Joan Mitchell La Grande Vall e 1983 fi Culture fi Page 21

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The Wynd Film The Long Read They Contain Multitudes or the New Cinema of Complex Identity By Samuel Sandor Samuel Sandor Multiple Hamlets 2022 Literature W knew who a character was you could in fact be fairly sure what they may be within the bounds of standardised plot structures Ten years before Hamlet if you upon the stage of the Globe Theatre were not just a reaction to aesthetic trends of the time e know what we are said Ophelia but know not what we may be Some time between 1599 and 1601 these lines were spoken Their meaning was clear to anyone who d been haunting the London theatres for long enough to know how plays usually went Until around 1590 most English theatre revolved around stock characters who behaved in predictable ways Shakespeare s work as well as that of his strongest contemporaries whether it be Kyd or Webster would reject the staid simplicity of the types of characters you could describe in a word and whose very fates you d already heard in the prologue to the performance The complex personas strutting their hours Page 22 Culture

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The Wynd though Late sixteenth century England was in the grips of an identity crisis It had split from Catholicism just over half a century earlier returned to Catholicism for a brief span of ve years and was now protestant again with Catholics having to practice in secret at risk of hefty nes or sometimes execution What exactly are you was an inescapable question in Elizabeth England and the answer invariably had to be black or white Nuance was not permissible in matters of identity Hamlet Romeo and Juliet The Spanish Tragedy and many more of the strongest pieces of art from this period thus rejected both the aesthetic and political strictures of identity endemic to the time This article will seek to demonstrate how a similar reaction has been occurring in cinema over the past two or three years First however I will brie y capture two more salient moments in the history of identity in art 1855 saw the publication of Whitman s radical poem Song of Myself where he memorably declared that I am large I contain multitudes perhaps the most recognisable statement on multifarious identity ever written With the Civil War on the horizon North South tensions in the US meant picking a side and while not all made the right choice the very requirement to de ne oneself in such a way constitutes a denial of humanity that although necessary is tragic in its reduction of people to the beliefs they hold When divisions quake the fault lines of nations it is up to artists to provide nuance and humanity to shed light on how complicated people are Though they may Skipping forward a century or so to the 1960s and early 70s there is once more a noticeable uptick in lms interested in identity and its multifarious faces Taxi Driver 1976 for instance showed audiences how a war veteran who means well could become a nonsensical mixed up monster In Scorsese s words for the lmmakers of this period cinema was about characters the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves Earlier The Graduate 1967 had portrayed a young man struggling to be all the things that he was supposed to be who then decided to become precisely what he ought not to be Dog Day Afternoon 1975 on the other hand sought to demonstrate a truth that should not have needed to be demonstrated that a movie could have a gay protagonist and more importantly that this could be done without the whole lm being about how they were gay Such characteristics as sexuality and one s obedience to the law as de nitive assessments of who someone is are eyed up with suspicion by Lumet s lm Andrew Sarris reviewing the movie for Village Voice wrote that while in the 40s or 50s the story would have been told in such a way as to make the audience root for the bank manager his employees the police Lumet portrays the two criminal protagonists fi fi ff fi ff fi fi Culture fi fi fi fl Page 23 not erase or ignore the di erences between people this would be a di erent breed of falsity they emphasise multiplicity

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Martin Scorsese Taxi Driver 1976 as wounded creatures capable of an extraordinary emotional audacity Once again these cultural critiques can be mapped onto the political and social tensions of the time Juliet Hess argues that growing out of some of the major political movements in the second half of the 20th century identity politics was a mode of organizing around shared identities as sites of oppression citing such examples as the Civil Rights Movement second wave feminism and the LGBTQ liberation movement As Hess points out though these types of comingtogethers based on shared oppressions and political goals created and continue to create uneasy collectives shared strategic identities that often masked underlying complexities In other words while organising by race ff ff ff fi gender or sexuality was a necessary means of mustering the collective strength to e ect Culture fi The Wynd change it had the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of emphasising and foregrounding the very di erences between them and their oppressors which they were ghting to disassemble Indeed the term identity politics would be coined in the 70s Many of the most challenging and important lms of this era thus went against the idea of core identity seeking to complicate and counterbalance the one dimensional views on identity which abounded at the time Films like Taxi Driver also engaged with the Vietnam War another phenomenon which deeply embedded itself in the American consciousness driving profound fault lines between vastly di erent views on war between generations Much the same as in the previous eras mentioned one had to either be for or against and while there were those that were wrong and those that Page 24

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were right one s stance on the war became another sticking point in the way of a full and colourful perspective on identity It is with this history in mind that my interest has been piqued by many of the last few years most recent lms There is an incipient but already prevalent shift in the way identity is being committed to lm The focus this time is as always similar but di erent to eras past Filmmakers are once again attempting to stress the complicated and multiplicitous nature of identity More speci cally characters have been increasingly depicted as enigmatic incomprehensible and paradoxical Pablo Larra n s mercurial and beautifully crafted Spencer 2021 is one such lm Indeed Larra n himself claims that after making the movie I can tell you that I don t really know very well who she was And that is interesting And weird at the same time I think that s because of Diana s enormous amount of mystery Spencer takes a public gure with virtually mythic status and returns her almost to the level of the quotidian portraying her fears struggles and idiosyncrasies The Worst Person in the World 2021 is a rather di erent lm but it has a similarly cloudy treatment of identity emphasising the potential of people to metamorphose completely What Joachim Trier does so well is re ect this in the form of the lm something Spencer and indeed several of the other works of art mentioned in this article do not attempt to do in such radical ways Take for instance Trier s decision to split the lm into twelve chapters to accommodate for and highlight Julie s the protagonist s many changes or perhaps the magical realist elements used to reinforce the mysterious and unstable nature of the self Indeed even the stunningly brilliant soundtrack provides fi ff fi fi fi fi fi Culture ff Page 25 fl fi Joachim Trier The Worst Person in the World 2021 fi The Wynd

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The serene yet surprisingly brief opening shot featuring Ahmad Jamal s I Love Music is one e ective use of this technique wherein the unexpected exploratory musical meanderings of Jamal s piano speak eloquently to the unpredictability and inde nability of Julie The ending of the lm is equally well soundtracked however with Art Garfunkel s cover of Waters of March wherein the lyrics speak of variety and vibrancy A stick a stone it s the end of the road It s the rest of a stump it s a little alone It s a sliver of glass it is life it s the sun It is night it is death it s a trap it s a gun Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022 picks up thematically where Worst Person left o taking the idea of human potential and inde nability to its logical and often entertainingly illogical conclusion In the Daniels lm unfortunately produced by Marvel s Russo brothers a rather literal but consequently very compelling and lucid demonstration of the many things even the most downtrodden or ordinary person could be if only in another world It is a picture patently concerned with the multitudes we contain within us framed uniquely by the lm in terms of the multitudes of us that the universe contains Like Worst Person EEAAO mirrors subject matter in form though the Daniels are not so subtle about it either a strength or a weakness depending on your stomach for absurdity and excess Regardless it s an unreservedly successful lm in examining the In the end we are asked to remember both how di cult it is to really understand people even our partners and children and to be kind The second half of this answer as spoken by Waymond may be a trite one through certain lenses Still it s hard to refuse its unashamed optimism even if it fails to do justice to the relative complexity of the rest of the lm But I ve been avoiding the hard question why now What about the last few years has given rise to this renaissance of xed identitycritical cinema The simple aesthetic based answer is that it is likely a reaction to the oversimpli ed characters of major blockbuster lm franchises As Scorsese and so many others have noted Marvel and indeed to a lesser extent DC Star Wars and other cinema screen imperialists have slowly but surely been monopolising the medium of lm For much of the low rent hollow excruciatingly pro establishment entertainment put out by these franchises ff fi fi fi fi fi fi ff ff fi Page 26 fi fi fi fi ff ffi fi fi Culture fi fi subtly but powerfully to the themes of the picture The Wynd powerful and yet easily overlooked un xity of identity EEAAO is impressively bold however for extending its analysis far beyond the descriptive to the normative seeking to nd an answer to the question of what we ought to do with the knowledge of in nite possibility and ine ability At rst both hope and nihilism are o ered the former embodied by Eveyln s wide eyed wonder at what could have been and still could be the latter in Joy s Jobu s apathetic traversing of the universe in order to put everything on a bagel

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The Wynd the characters are conveniently simple and neatly crafted Every character has their audience tested quirk their trademarked sense of humour and a personality designed by plucking a pinch of adjectives from a primary school dictionary Many of the lms mentioned in this article aim to serve as antidotes to this simplicity Larra n for instance explained that he doesn t believe you can actually capture someone in a lm But ultimately Diana was someone that was very human and that is where we wanted to connect with The spanner in the works here if you inaccurate the true and the untrue The lm triumphs in this goal and the damning contrast to Marvel is made all the sharper by the similarities that can be drawn between the franchise and the Daniels picture Daniel Kwan one half of the directorial team put it this way in an interview with Steve Weintraub for Collider it s kind of like an Impossible Burger you know it tastes like a superhero movie and it feels like a blockbuster but at its core it s an indie movie it s actually a really beautiful personal drama Aesthetically this is the Such oversimpli cations of identity are far more caustic when applied to politics however as they often are Twitter discourse has seen opposing sides of the political spectrum stray further and further from each other each side becoming less and less willing to compromise or engage in meaningful discussion Once again this is not a sin I count myself out of and I don t think it s hypocritical to say this while simultaneously standing by the fact that I think my beliefs are mostly the right ones message of EEAAO lms need not sacri ce complexity of identity in their characters to although then again who doesn t Being a TikTok user I am well aware that the algorithm has me down to a tee it gives me exactly what I want it to give me and frequently nds content I didn t even know I wanted TikTok s image of who I am is on the whole fairly close to the truth But to say this is the whole picture would be a huge misstep and it s a misstep that is di cult to avoid fi fi fi fi fi ffi fl fi fi fi Culture fi fi fi Nevertheless there are de nite political and social motivations behind this recent trend too The polarisation and fragmentation which has occurred across social media sites due to algorithmic pigeon holing and extremifying has been incredibly damaging to stable notions of identity When who does the TikTok algorithm think you are becomes a socially comprehensible means of understanding yourself an identity crisis is surely at hand What is so dangerous about this is that it blurs the accurate and the haven t yet spotted it is that Marvel heavyweights the Russo Brothers produced EEAAO This isn t the problem it seems like it is at rst blush though Indeed it merely throws into relief the more speci c project of the lm to achieve a similar level of excitement as Marvel lms that lavish overstimulating fast paced fervour while not populating it with at characters awkward cliches and tired plot structures Page 27 fi achieve the blockbuster aesthetic Marvel thus has no excuse for its dull simplicity

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The Wynd Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022 This is dangerous though it s essential to recognise that The rage and confusion you feel swell within you at the sheer hatefulness of that or the utter ignorance of this or the blind delusion of the other this has the potential to be dangerous It is valid to disagree with opinions we read and often to feel passionate about this but it is unnatural the level of distaste we have all been made to feel for each other for those who vote a di erent way The fact that a person holds this or that opinion can never tell you everything you need to know about them and the idea that it can held subconsciously by so many of us leads to a precarious state of a airs Such thinking has stimulated a widespread demand for concise selfidenti cation everybody must be something The reaction from many now being Strangely enough although such simplistic views on identity are observable at every interval across the political spectrum they derive from the conservative mode of thinking which has always been an ideolo y of boxes and enclosing things within them Everything must conform to strict preordained categories and moving between them us perceived as transgressive to the most extreme degree translated to celluloid is refusal be a feminist and still enjoy being mouthfucked Polarising discourse forces to the g fi Page 28 fi fi ff ff Culture This is why these lms are so important In this ongoing culture war the with us or against us credo seems to be the name of the game Nuance is a fallen soldier to the strictures of the boxes constructed by each side of the debate Worst Person interrogates this particular issue best as seen in the chapter of the lm where Julie asks can you

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The Wynd foreground features of identity which really ought not to occupy a central position so that seemingly silly questions like this become deadly serious and deadly serious questions are often left unresolved Trier shows that no label is su cient to encompass all the unfathomable multitudes that urry forth from a person when you take even the vaguest of glances at them These cinematic explorations of the intricacies of identity will continue until they have made a su cient impact on the world and culture inevitably moves on but for the time being I m all for it I ll take an utterly incomprehensible main character over any brand of neatly sketched easily digestible one adjective protagonist Excitingly we may soon be seeing the next instantiation of this trend with T r 2022 Unfortunately due to lopsided release dates on each side of the Atlantic UK viewers have not yet been able to see the lm but based on Adrian Horton s enlightening review for The Guardian Todd Field s latest directorial e ort appears to put pressure on identity in Many of the lms of the last two or three years are knocking on the same door It s an opening which artists have exploited for centuries but it has become particularly relevant right now just as it did in the 60s and 70s the 1850s and even the 1590s and 1600s Such complex treatments of identity somewhat tragically have never been common and there s a reason for that Art is reactive and thus period speci c it requires a force to push against Hamlet could not have been what it was without a preceding era of thoroughly boring stock characters and on a lower level neither could Everything Everywhere All at Once have existed without Marvel Fortunately it seems we have reason to be thankful we are most likely entering into a prosperous era for lm where characters are varied rich and thoroughly mysterious fl fi fi fi ffi fi Culture ffi fi ff Page 29 particularly germane fashion In Horton s words Lydia T r the protagonist is portrayed as in nitely complex and opaque and unlike the ideologies that can infect or transform or characterize us is not wholly dismissible

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Food Of Mate and Traditions By Armando Gaxiola Edgar Claros Franetovic Yerba mate 2005 F recently I was more interested in asking how she attempted to take Argentina with her She pointed at a bookshelf in her o ce stocked full with dusty editions of the poetry and prose of Jorge Luis Borges raised the mate she had been drinking before I arrived and smirked ive weeks after moving from Buenos Aires to Mexico City Mar a Endrizzi felt for the rst time away from home She had planned to avoid homesickness by taking Argentina with her and succeeded in keeping her attention elsewhere until an October night in 1966 After a discussion on the Spanish poet G ngora with her doctoral supervisor she headed towards her at when she became overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of the con guration of the night sky Mar a told me this anecdote fty two years later as a prelude to lending me her Mate is a ca einated infusion typical to the Latin Americans from the Southern Cone The leaves of an Ilex paraguariensis plant are dried and chopped roughly to become yerba They are used to ll two thirds of a small gourd also called mate typically covered in leather and ornamented with silver The receptacle is tilted to make a hole for a silver copy of Aratus Phenomena a book I never returned and only got around to reading fl fi ffi fi Page 30 fi fi ff Culture The Wynd

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The Wynd Richard Nixon Library Richard Nixon drinks yerba mate 1958 Public Domain straw with a sieve on one end Water barely below the boiling point is added and voil Despite its simplicity mate is a crucial part of South American identity it is a tradition passed down and maintained through community ritual I met Mar a in 2018 the last year she taught Now a pocket sized eminence with a voice ruined by age tobacco and years of talking in public the students who really cared would sit in the front and lean over to hear her better She had very few traces of her Argentinian accent and used Mexicanisms here and there When the lecture was over she answered questions and asked whoever was left in the small classroom if they wanted to continue the conversation in her o ce There any topic however tangential to the module was allowed While some people I was mainly there to talk about Siglo de Oro Spanish Golden Age literature she had generously transmitted her love for the Hispanic Renaissance to me and we discussed it for hours However the dominoes of tangents led to me telling Endrizzi that I was interested in drinking mate I had just started university and felt like I could use the ca eine I wanted to stop consuming tea and co ee with origins so culturally distant from us and get into a Latin American tradition something with roots I could share She told me to buy a mate gourd and a straw and bring them to her She directed me to an ffi ff ff Culture Page 31 sought her out for relationship advice others asked for book recommendations

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Argentinian restaurant in San ngel that doubled as a deli It was owned by a family that had ed the Argentinian dictatorship of Ongan a and they sold everything from dulce de leche and wine to all the mate paraphernalia necessary as well as many di erent brands of yerba From its beginnings it had always employed migr s running away from authoritarianism rst Argentinians then Uruguayans and Chileans At the time it was sta ed almost exclusively by Venezuelans eeing from their moment of national heartbreak The gourd is porous and must be seasoned This is done by letting it rest over three or four nights each time with the alreadysteeped yerba of that day s mate Consequently if you want to participate in the tradition properly you need someone already in it to hand it down to you Outside of the Southern Cone this is usually followed by a list of places you can buy the yerba and a recommendation on the brands Once someone has inducted you into the tradition the gourd is seasoned and you have yerba and a straw you re ready To brew mate you put warm but not boiling water in a thermos sit in a circle with the people you care about prepare the mate and let everyone pass it around and take sips This is how the Guaran people did it before they were conquered I gave the gourd and straw to Mar a and she told me to come back the following week She The traditional form of mate now requires leather and the straw is made from silver or nickel The Americas didn t have cows until the Spanish introduced them in service of their colonial ambitions and the Guaran es didn t know how to extract or work metals The gourd and straw I have in my desk have brass Guaran motifs Mate can stand for mestizaje the forced mixture of cultures imposed by Spanish Colonialism from the 16th Century and used to justify Latin American Nationalism since the late 18th It is the kind of appropriated object that sets us apart from the Spanish without acknowledging that some of the more privileged Latinos such as Endrizzi and I have more in common with each other than with the indigenous peoples whose customs artefacts and culture we have stolen fi ff fi Page 32 fl fi fl ff Culture The Wynd passed away during the weekend After her homage her daughter approached me and told me she wanted to give me my gourd and straw but couldn t nd them She told me she didn t care for mate so I could have her mother s instead It is not what Endrizzi intended but it moved me to tears When I moved away from Mexico amidst increasing political tension I took her mate with me When I drink it I remember her and feel part of the broader Latin American tradition embodied in my little gourd and the infused leaves that ll it I do not feel so far away from home

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Music The Year of the Lizard Wizard Ticking clocks fteen minute epics and more genres than you thought existed why this might be King Gizzard s best year yet By Rory O Sullivan Paul Hudson King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard 2016 The Year of the Lizard Wizard B they seemed to have pulled o the miraculous but is it just all quantity no quality Let s set the controls for the heart of the Gizzverse and nd out A lot has changed since then though with the departure of one of their two drummers Eric Moore and the global pandemic posing what ought to have been insurmountable obstacles to the band s relentless recording The rst of their 2022 output Made in Timeland is perhaps the most bizarre Originally released as a limited run vinylonly collectors oddity the album consists of two fteen minute long tracks that make up either side of the record The run times aren t even the wackiest thing about it though as will become clear the band are no stranger to lengthy improv jam style tracks that verge into minutes in the double gures Instead what marks Timeland out is its musical style elieve it or not 2022 isn t the rst time Aussie psych rockers King Gizzard The Lizard Wizard have assembled and released ve full studio albums in one calendar year Back in 2017 they put together their rst quintuple header for fans to feast on with the likes of Polygondwanaland and Flying Microtonal Banana garnering acclaim for their progressive weirdness touring cycle By emerging on the other side of all this disruption with ve LPs in hand quite unlike the fuzzed out rock the band made their name with in the early 10s it s fi ff fi fi fi Culture fi fi fi fi Page 33 fi The Wynd

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The Wynd closer to a progressive form of acid techno Furthermore the music is set against the constant sound of a clock ticking in the background hence the album title making for some interesting overlaps between drum patterns While at rst glance the tracks might seem so long and clock tickingly repetitive that they must be boring this is not the case In truth they re chopped up into lots of conjoined and more digestible mini sections keeping the ear hooked with every transition This combination of Australia avoured psychedelia and minimalist dance music ends up sounding something approximate to Aphex Twin DJing in a deleted rave scene from The Big Lez Show 2012 2019 I for one am glad such a combination exists even if it is probably the most inaccessible of the 2022 crop Omnium Gatherum their second release and perhaps their biggest project of the year is my personal favourite Indeed it s big in every way possible not least as a moment in the band s career constituting the twentieth LP in their hyper proli c output To celebrate this milestone the band recorded songs during lockdown in almost every musical genre they ve tried their hand at playing assembling a literal omnium gatherum of diverse styles and in uences It s therefore also big both in ambition and scope as well as physical length this thing is a hefty 1hr 20mins long The rst twenty minutes of that time is nearly all taken up by the behemoth of an opener that is The Dripping Tap making it their biggest single Sorry I ll stop now Frankly it sets the tone perfectly The subsequent singles Magenta Mountain and Kepler 22b tone things down a little o ering up psychedelic pop that takes cues from jazz funk and soul cues which are more explicitly explored on later cuts like Ambergris and Presumptuous Heavy metal also makes its glorious return from 2019 s Infest the Rats Nest on Gaia and Predator X whilst hip hop makes its debut on the likes of Sadie Sorceress and The Grim Reaper At rst you might not know whether to laugh at or love the overwhelming mishmash on display here but thanks to the band s knack for album craft it all works in its own way it s a self hosted festival of all things Gizzard so relax and be thankful for the free ticket Releases 3 5 can be comfortably grouped together into their own bracket all were put out in October now known a ectionately by fans as Gizztober and all stick more wholly to the prog rock jam band theme hinted at in their earlier work The rst of these Ice Death Planets Lungs Mushrooms and Lava is perhaps the most distilled statement of the formula Recorded over just one week lead vocalist Stu Mackenzie describes its creation process as follows All we went in with was a tempo a key signature and a title There was nothing else no ri s no melodies nothing like that We just went in there and picked up instruments and said Let s go The result is something that sounds beautifully organic and it s potentially the strongest of the trio ff fl fi fi ff fl fi ff Page 34 fi fi ff Culture with the garage rock ri age and environmentally charged lyrics providing the impulse to dance and mosh in equal measure

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Gizztober release 2 Laminated Denim picks up where March s Made in Timeland left o they re even anagrams of each other providing another clock ticking brace of fteen minute tracks This time though they return from far away space age dance oors to krautrock ish terra rma Thankfully it s no less trippy for it with the hazy ri s unfurling intriguingly across the song structures The nal release of the October three Changes is perhaps the most carefully crafted Among the works released since 2017 the record has been such a long lasting labour of love that Mackenzie actually denies it has a jam band avour at all although I d argue the jam DNA still clearly shines through I mean come on Stu the opening track is thirteen minutes long year for King Gizzard The Lizard Wizard Down one bandmate and knocked o course by covid question marks surrounded the band its direction and indeed its survival Nevertheless we can safely say they ve blown these doubts out of the water in the most spectacular fashion possible with ve albums that prove once again that they ve got the bite to match their bark More importantly these albums have succeeded in drawing out and solidifying the band s musical identity more than ever before They re a group that will dare to experiment beyond their comfort zone balance the socially conscious with the plain ridiculous and still manage to interweave all of this in coherent interconnecting threads The resulting latticework is far from the collection of odds and ends it might rst appear to be Instead it s a cohesive whole that can be really satisfyingly bought into if you re willing to dedicate the requisite patience and time to it I have and this is your invitation to do so too The focus poured into this record is apparent hit shu e play God forbid and you can be safe in the knowledge you re going to encounter a very chilled out but upbeat vibe Were you to do the same with Omnium Gatherum you d run the risk of being pelted by thrashy ri s or a brace of choppy rap bars and whilst as a result I don t think it can ever reach that album s highs Changes rounds o the year nicely as a statement of maturity and a promising hint of what s to come Overall then 2022 can be chalked up as a resoundingly productive and accomplished ff fl ff fi ff fi ff ff fi ffl Culture Page 35 fi fl fi The Wynd for it The lengthy almost live sounding jazzfusion grooves give the impression that if it were released in the 40s it might have been named something like An Evening with King Gizzard

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