Wedding Ritual #22: NO1 of Vukovar

NO1 of Vukovar

Vukovar are a UK music collective with an emphasis on 'collective'. I always make a point of telling groups that Wedding Ritual is all about putting the focus on an individual artist; that band members can conduct Rituals, but they're representing themselves and not the band. But this was clearly futile with Vukovar - they are to large degree anonymous and have even said in interview, "The Self & The Individual have no significance; there is no cult of personality."

So, we've arrived at a compromise which involves nobody compromising. An individual member of Vukovar shares a profile of their work below, but they will not be identified and will be referred to (where necessary) as 'NO1'. 

Vukovar have released 9 albums whilst building a cult following since their inception in "a crumbling placefiller" of a town (their words) in 2014. They tell me they were "always dying, and reorganized after ceas[ing] to exist in 2019" - as "effete artists pretending to be northern hardcases pretending to be uniform fetishists in iconoclast drag". Or are they? For they also say, "do not trust us; we are fragile stars." 

NO1 has also worked in other media in this time, otherwise unmentioned here.

Without further ado, here is NO1 [of Vukovar]'s Wedding Ritual, in their own words, incorporating their own redactions...

Something Old

"As part of Vukovar and really ingrained into the way they/we work, I am led and lead to not look back and instead always look forward. I must always be moving forward. This is more in terms of the approach and of ideas; once you have finished something you must move on and no longer meddle. You were completely happy with it at that time, so it is a construct of that particular moment. People never finish things because they are too scared to let go. Instead of looking back and thinking what can be changed, what can be better, I have to make something new and use those new ideas. As an artist you should move onto something new or you go stale. This can applied to most aspects of life. 

"However, I can separate myself from the role of subjective creator and role of objective listener. Vukovar albums are amongst my favourite when I am a totally disconnected witness. The music is some of the best I've ever heard and can listen to it a lot. If that wasn't the case, what would be the point in making it? 

"For 'Something Old' then, I am going to pick the 4th Vukovar album 'Puritan'. It was the first time I/we got to work with Andrzej Klimowski, the greatest living visual artist. He is a great man, a very generous man, and his artwork and visions match perfectly with ours. It was only a small release and hopefully one day it will be reissued: Other Voices Records actually approached us to do this before we chose to do a new album instead. We toured with [REDACTED] as part of the group to push it and it was an intense time. I admire hardships and tension and you must never be comfortable in life because you need to be driven. But this was counterproductive and lots of lessons were learned."

Something New

"The Great Immurement is the second album in our 'Eternity Ends Here' triptych, an obsessive memorial device to Simon Morris. Simon was our close friend and Anti-Father, part of Vukovar for a little while and the ringleader of his own legendary group Ceramic Hobs for decades. He was also an author and I could spend the rest of the time talking about his great and twisted semi-autobiographical confessionals here but will urge anyone reading to seek them out for themselves instead. 2 of our number wrote a bizarre piece for Dennis Cooper's blog late last year which will be extended into a book and can be found here."

Something Borrowed

"The first thing we need to do, in order to understand anything, is to stop thinking of time as linear. Everything is happening here and now, and then, and is yet to happen. Time will kill us.

"The first time I heard Those First Impressions by The Associates was a child on a scratchy VHS tape of songs my dad had loved he'd taped off the TV. It was a regular occurrence in my house that when my parents were going to have a drink on a Saturday evening they'd put one of the tapes of music videos from the past on. To this day there are many songs I heard on it that don't sound right unless warped by damp VHS and with all the low end missing. The beginning of the song was missing and the caption showing it so when I stumbled upon a 7 inch copy of Those First Impressions and picked it up because it was by the Associates, I felt a sense of triumph.

"Fast forward and glitch VHS-like to a prior incarnation of Vukovar sat around a table in the blazing hot sun at Transformer. We've been talking to a stand-offish young guy from somewhere South who looks uncannily like Billy Mackenzie. At this point the conversation turns into a discussion of the Associates. Simon starts singing Those First Impressions and I join in, one of the many moments of Vukovar bursting into song unexpectedly that will one day lead to a Artaud-ian musical about us being staged. Less West End, more Dead End.

"Then we're recording the Debasement Tapes and getting ready for the Theatre-Of-Cruelty and Simon is coaxing us through a version of Those First Impressions. Then he goes, and the song will appear on one of those nights where we channel the voices of the dead we have loved. The air will be electric blue and Gea, the nurse from the Chapel Of Ash, will be singing "When you fire me I'll want for nothing in this world" through the winds. It will hum in the wires and her voice is electricity. The temptation remains to meet death on the water and get my friends back. But it's just my first impression."

Something Blue

"Fornication, being composed as it is of a set of covers/readymades could easily have gone under Something Borrowed*. However, on Fornication we didn't borrow the songs so much as fuck these consenting but confused entities into completely new shapes (see our version of Forbidden Colours, sang as if by Yukio's severed head). Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll: rock'n'roll is dead and drugs are boring (or conversations about them) but sex is endlessly fascinating. The point of creation and for many a point of destruction. It's not for nothing that the album is packaged in a cover of lurid porn as art. The album itself is a piece of pornography.

"Pornography:- the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.

 

"Parts of it also soundtracked some "porn" as (unprovable & unofficially) distributed by The Brutalist House, the PissLoopTapes. In this footage, a man and woman, both nude apart from balaclavas are pissing into each other's mouths locked in a circle figure 8. This second is looped for 133 minutes or 8000 seconds & was intended as part of a series. You don't need a lead up for porn. What the Brutalist House did here was an extension of Vukovar's music: we cut away everything extraneous and leave Need."

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Vukovar's The Great Immurement is out now on Bandcamp. You can get regular updates on Facebook and Twitter.

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Wedding Ritual is an ongoing series of artist profiles curated and edited by Wes Viola.

For updates, follow WR on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. I am looking for a new solution to email subscriptions since Feedburner has recently disabled that option. 

The blog is open to submissions from visual artists, sculptors, musicians, writers, dancers, sculptors, filmmakers and all kinds of creative practitioner. For more details of what's going on here, and especially if you'd like to feature yourself, check the always-popular 'what on earth is going on here?' page. For links to the Wedding Rituals performed by every artist featured to date, see Every Ritual.

*curator's pedantic note: it couldn't quite - 'Borrowed' in these climes has to be someone else's work entirely. But that's by the by.