Doors: 9PM / Show: 10PM / 21+
If all the world is a stage, then our performance is a lonely one. Reflected not through eyes but through screens ad infinitum, our audience – real or imagined – is no longer a burden but a need. Attention, recognition, validation: we trade our interior worlds for the thrill of public display. In a hyper-individual world, Ulrika Spacek’s fourth album EXPO offers an antidote.
Even as its five members have been pulled by tides of their own, Ulrika Spacek has always been a symbol of collective art. Despite a range of day jobs (experimental physicists, graphic designers, music producers) the collective pursuit is there in the shared dream logic of the music: the off-kilter melodies, jagged guitars and cirrus cloud atmospherics. It’s there, in all the things that are said and unsaid between them; there in the writing, producing and mixing processes they share in. And even as each of their parts moves toward a unified vision, it’s never more keenly felt than in the bigger picture to which Ulrika Spacek belong.
Whether it is Oysterland, the self-curated night the band began to platform artists of other disciplines in live music spaces; Total Refreshment Centre, the East London studio acclaimed producer [caroline, Thurston Moore, Spiritualized] / bassist Syd Kemp runs which connects the dots between the jazz scene and like-minded experimental artists; or their creative bleed as musicians and producers with Crack Cloud and caroline, the band’s existence is inseparable from its community. And though singer/multi-instrumentalist Rhys Edwards now lives in Stockholm, it only underlines the band’s absolute togetherness when they create with one another - they go all-in, even at personal expense, for the sake of the whole. On the melodic, cold-sweat fever of “Picto”, states EXPO’s manifesto: “It’s back to strength in numbers, count in fives.”
“Just as hyper-individualism makes the world a lonely place, making art by yourself is also a lonely place,” the band share. “When you work alone, you’re confronted by your weaknesses and your limitations - whereas when you’re in a group you play to the strengths of everyone. There’s something very comforting about taking creative risks when you work as a unit.” In an age of algorithmic predictability, EXPO embodies the thrill of the unknown and the particular human magic that comes with the pursuit of it.
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