London music
fromPitchfork
1 week agoPoison Ruin: Hymns From the Hills
Poison Ruïn blends medieval themes with modern punk to critique societal issues and express solidarity with marginalized communities.
We're standing in the Fleet Street offices of MayDay Rooms founded over a decade ago as "an archive, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories". Its holdings form a vast paper topography of refusal over 100,000 flyers, bulletins, pamphlets and minutes tracing the history of the anti-authoritarian left. Much of the material is British but threaded with transnational currents: together they form a living diagram of insubordination as it travelled the world.
Recorded at one blistering London live show in April 2024, Libertine collaborated with Chilean guitarist Eva Leblanc, reimagining tracks from Libertine's back catalogue including ones from her time singing with 1970s anarcho-punk pioneers Crass. Produced by Crass founder Penny Rimbaud, it treads a path between performance art, experimental music and earth ritual; with her strident operatic tones, Libertine sounds like a soothsayer foretelling an apocalypse.
Perhaps Tiff Bakker was misled by the title of Sally Wainwright's BBC series Riot Women (There is a fascinating TV series to be made about a menopausal rock band Riot Women isn't it, 22 October). Ms Bakker reaches back into the 20th century to make her point, and says that lesbians have always been invisible to society. Lesbians were visible and audible in 1970s feminism.