Mental wormholes in the night
Strange ideas give a familiar fright
Some phantom power pulling you back
And onto a completely different track
Jack Duckworth has spent years making Soft Riot records that seem to know exactly how ridiculous modern life is, then politely invite the machines responsible over for dinner. On his latest LP, Crux, out now through Possession Records and Minimalkombinat, that dinner appears to have taken a turn. Somebody has started transmitting instructions through the walls, and Duckworth is sitting there with a synthesizer trying to determine whether the voice belongs to inspiration, paranoia, technology, or some unseen bastard who has been rewriting his lines while he sleeps.
Ghostwriter sets the idea in motion with a Motorik beat, clipped electronics, and Duckworth’s sprechstimme delivered with the disciplinary authority of someone reading factory regulations during an evacuation. There is something of Nitzer Ebb and Suicide in the chant, Fad Gadget in the nervous intelligence, and Skinny Puppy in the sense that electronic equipment might eventually develop opinions about its owner. Elsewhere, the stylish severity of Japan, Bill Nelson’s eccentric futurism, Simple Minds before stadiums swallowed them, and late-period Wire all seem to inhabit the same crooked apartment building. Prince lurks somewhere downstairs, idly wondering why everybody is dressed so seriously.
The song concerns creation becoming possession. Ideas appear without explanation, strange mental tunnels open after dark, and ordinary thought gets interrupted by transmissions whose sender remains unknown. Duckworth turns writer’s intuition into supernatural interference: inspiration as somebody else grabbing the steering wheel.
His video makes that concept gloriously physical. Forget the standard musician-stares-meaningfully-at-camera routine. Duckworth does that, but becomes part of a universe of printed graphics, hand animation, projected textures, surreal juxtapositions, and visual jokes that recall Dada photomontage, Saul Bass title sequences, and the wonderfully deranged graphic vocabulary of 80s television. Everything looks cut, pasted, shoved sideways, photographed again, and allowed to misbehave.
All animations were made physically, with printed graphics manipulated by hand, while projector imagery was filmed again to produce the backgrounds and textures. Duckworth handled the graphics and editing, with assistance from Leyre Mann Vadillo. That analogue process becomes part of the argument:
“This allowed me not only to get off the computer for most of the creation of this video, but also opened up the doors really wide for collaboration with other people in a far more intuitive and inclusive way,” says Duckworth. “This allowed the usage of computer software to be basic and minimal, mainly keying out backgrounds, levels, colourising and layering of the animated footage. As I feel the world of what I recognize as an underground music scene and community keeps getting more absorbed into the world of statistics, data and marketing that is more in line with late-stage capitalism, it was important for me to focus on things in the real world like working with other people, meeting new ones, connecting with people, traveling and performing live.
The digital world today is planned, created, and orchestrated by the corporations that build it — a far cry from the more utopian possibilities the internet held when I first got acquainted with it in the 90s. The physical world, however, is something that we still don’t know the purpose of yet, despite thousands of years of humans trying to speculate why it exists. Ultimately, the digital world we’ve created can’t exist without the physical world it sits in — not the other way around.”
Watch the video for Ghostwriter below:
With Ghostwriter Jack Duckworth has made a song about invisible influence while creating its visual counterpart with scissors, paper, projectors, hands, and other people. In an era increasingly obsessed with converting creativity into metrics, his forthcoming album Crux finds Soft Riot asking a useful question: when an idea suddenly appears inside your head, who exactly handed it to you?
Listen to Ghostwriter below and order Crux here.
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