Call it anti-clout: A conversation with Itchy Fingers Resident Nadia Marcus

Ultimately, I’d say they are all constituent parts of a single practice or articulation, but each discipline has its own set of demands. For instance, DJing and publishing are both modes of facilitating, mediating and circulating others’ work – tracks and texts – but DJing is also very much a type of performance. One could say publishing is as well, but the show is less embodied and immediate.

The common thread is likely an obsession with mark-making and impression. I’m drawn to vinyl records, etching plates, calligraphy brushes and dancefloors because they’re all tools or sites of inscription: the grooves cut into a dubplate contain information to be bumped out of speakers and meet a mass of bodies, physically bracing them with sculpted air pressure one hears as music. All the music I’ve danced to and played has undoubtedly impressed itself upon my sense of embodiment, rhythm, melody and tension, all of which of course feeds back into writing and performing poetry. Conversely, learning to attend to proportions of blank space on a print or graphic has changed the way I think about utilising silence in a DJ set.

It certainly does, maybe less in the actual content of my own creative practice, and more so in how I relate to it. I find it really vital to be able to act as a steward, facilitator and organiser for others’ work. In today’s cultural markets, there is such an intense pressure to build oneself up as a distinct brand, and to be able to flip the social and cultural capital of that brand to advance a career (which in many ways has become indistinguishable from “a practice”). It’s humbling and grounding to operate on the infrastructural side of things – publishing and organising – because this kind of labor is collective and often communal. At the same time, it’s made me appreciate the risk it takes to believe in the value of my own practice. I have sometimes felt that I hide behind the role of curator and organiser, stifling the urgency of creating and so cutting off some kind of mental and spiritual respiration. And this, of course, leads nowhere.

I’d say I love a book, a body, a record and all these countless implements I move through the world with because they bear the traces of that very transit. Working with Zack Darsee as co-director of TABLOID Press reflects that attachment to the physicality of media – we savor the sensuality of an object and all the choices that go into making it, from paper weight and texture to print method. And we have always loved the idea of books being ground into the texture of everyday life, relating to them not as precious relics but rather as things to be used, handled, stained with coffee or notes in the margins or whatever bodily fluids float your boat. In this sense, they are very much corporeal, and it’s very agreeable to then start regarding the body as a book.

TABLOID began as a reactive practice: Zack and I had both studied poetry at the same college, and we were disillusioned with the idea that contemporary lyric existed largely in an institutional discourse and the MFA pipeline. We’ve been able to pay our rents because of working with institutions over the last decades; we’ve also both earned additional degrees. But there is still a kind of rebel fire that we tend to at the hearth of TABLOID; it keeps us warm and I think others find it inviting too. So many friends and members of our community, whether they are artists or DJs or performers, have had to take brand sponsorships and act as advertisements to make money. Independent publishing is so thankless as a business model, it moves at such a slow pace and produces media that doesn’t easily translate to circulation on a phone screen or carousel of images – in this sense we’ve been spared from that kind of corporate tokensation of creative workers. So, over time, we’ve been able to build a kind of spiritual and communal currency. Call it anti-clout.

I’m deeply curious to explore the Kielland Center’s collection of books linked to sound and music – not just in a book’s content but in the form itself – because they are often felt as such divergent types of media. I loved learning about the Plommehagepartitur project from Elida Linge and Mari Kvien Brunvoll, for instance. This experimental “book” makes use of wood from Linge’s plum trees as packaging for a cassette, which in turn contains original compositions by Brunvoll based on drawings and impressions of the orchard. I knew of Brunvoll because of the absolutely iconic “Celestial Voices Remix” Ricardo Villalobos did of her song “Everywhere You Go” – this 28-minute slab of skittering vocal samples and vast, aching soul – so I was thrilled see her work in the Kielland Center’s collection. In Plommehagepartitur, graphic, sonic and textual material all feel bound in a fluent, daring but also quite sensible way. This is a difficult maneuver to pull off, I find. More generally, I’m also just thrilled to be around salt water. I grew up on the east and west coasts of the USA, and have lived in a landlocked city for the last decade. I miss that air.

I am playing a set in the autumn at subglow, the party series thrown by CCL at which I’m a resident. This function is always a bit of a family affair – it’s for the dolls, the T-boys, the synth nerds, it’s heavy on the low-end musically but also I’ve played a lot of deep house, or Ethiopian pop, or Summer Walker… And early next year will see the release of an album that I have worked on with the Vancouver-born, Malta-based producer and DJ thurlow joyce. Cole and I have labored over this collection of tracks and spoken word pieces for a few years, and it all started with me hearing him play a sample of the late, great American poet Fanny Howe at an event I booked him for. Big shoutout to Richard Akingbehin of Kynant Records for putting out the record, and making the dub techno landscape just a little bit more transexual.