“In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle” finds Mark Leckey stitching together a fantasy travelogue made up of found sounds, spoken word and dismantled tunes like some hallucinogenic mixtape; part audio diary, part YouTube session taking in fairytale folk musics, iMessage notifications and gothic horror...
“In the Age before These Times I'd been reading lots of folklore about Fairies, and Changelings and the like. At the same time I'd watch all these shows with my young daughter which revolved around magic and myth: enchanted realms, unicorns, mermaids, trolls etc. That I could instantaneously conjure up these shows on various devices made them appear even more magical. In my head these two worlds began to converge; the contemporary magic of consumerism, embodied within a rainbow unicorn, and an older mindset that could transact between the mundane and the supernatural. When the lockdown began this sense of the modern and medieval co-existing grew and grew, along with the belief that all the streaming services served as a protective magic from the encroaching dark age.
Come the pestilence I had the kids, online magic and a hard drive full of stuff I'd collected for O Magic Power of Bleakness, things that I wanted to emulate, that sonically suggested the sensations I was looking for, sounds and music that evoked Childhood and Consumerism, Fairies and Trauma, Hauntings and Concrete. More than these concepts though what I really I wanted was it to sound like someone totally lost and confused with the ongoing mystification of reality. An actuality where a Great Worm could reasonably appear on my news feed app as the Moon turns to Iron.
We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe there are no monsters. KARL MARX.”
Born in 1964, Mark Leckey lives and works in London. His best-known video, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), is a 15-minute journey into urban British youth culture from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. Leckey's presentation of twenty years of dance hall material does not, however, result in a documentary work: the video is rather a visual essay with hedonistic promises of club culture, the birth of funky chic, and the cultural shift of the rise of Acid House. Active in music production through donAtella, a glam-trash duo formed by the artist and Ed Liq, Leckey also makes live performances, CDs, and sound installations. Plunged into the lowbrow of culture, Leckey is one of the most perceptive cultural readers of Western societies.
