She Past Away @ Show Barlang

One of the points of urban subcultures is that you all look the same.  It’s like a safety net in a jungle of fashions and musical styles: if I put on my skinny jeans and band T-shirt and go to one of those things called brit parties around here, I can safely bet I’ll listen to some indie guitar music with my lager and meet fellow minded people with whom, before the beers kick in a bit too much, I can expostulate on the intricacies of which Foals album is the best after all, and why.

Every now and then, of course, you get tired of the safety net, and indulge in something that it, let’s say, on the fringes. Goth culture is probably as friendly to indie as it gets, since some of the music is shared between the crowds: case in point, dark wave, which often, if not always, sounds like the long lost child of Joy Division. It can can get a bit tiring to listen to the umpteenth singer trying (and alternatively succeeding or failing) to sound like Ian Curtis, but Saturday’s offering, She Past Away, at least sound like Ian Curtis if he were Turkish, which is intriguing, to say the least.

I have always felt sympathy for acts that get into some exotic niche that is not particularly typical for their geographical region- these days it’s of course much easier to connect globally with anything your heart desires, but, back in the days, being a die hard, say, Stone Roses fan in an Eastern European backwater, required passion, patience and dedication.

Turkey on the other hand is big and diverse enough to harbour pretty much anything, and the local culture is strong enough to leave a trace on the most alien of imports: so while the melodic backbone of She Past Away’s music is as joy division-y as it gets, and the singer’s voice strikes you as totally Ian Curtis at first hearing, it slowly dawns on you that he actually sounds much closer to a typical Turkish rock singer than to any Western counterpart. (For this you should of course have some prior knowledge of how Turkish rock sounds, but in the always useful bathroom queue I was informed by several people that he ’sounds familiar and yet a bit off’, but they can’t put their finger on the exact nature of the offness.)

Before She Past Away we were also treated to Pornography (that sounds supicious, I know)- but they’re ’merely’ the Hungarian Cure tribute band, with a lead singer who very much looks the part of Robert Smith, as he should. Tribute bands are another ’pet curiosity’ of mine, for I could never really understand the need to become completely submerged in the music of another artist, and would often think that becoming a tribute band is basically admitting the defeat of your own creative ambitions.  I can’t say to having been enamoured by this one either- the first couple of songs were quite alright, but in the longer run a sort of tetchy boredom set in,  with people chatting over their beer or going for a smoke outside.

This downtime did however allow for a closer inspection of those in attendance- they were pretty much what we would call goths alright, but in general, goths strike me as a rather diverse sub culture. They might be clad in black as a rule, but they come in all shapes and sizes, giving the impression of a community that is welcoming of anyone who might feel a bit of an outsider for any reason. As a further soothing fact, none of them felt the need to put on any ridiculously gory Halloween costumes, they kind of look the part everyday anyways.

And as a short final remark. It was of course hard to go to a concert on the 31st of October and not think of the people who had died a day before in the blaze in Bucharest’s Colectiv club. Besides the tremendous sadness of so many young lives lost, I did however also feel grateful that the club scene in Budapest is generally safe, and lessons have been learned from the West Balkan tragedy. Whenever people complain of security staff being overzealous, attendance limitations and space restrictions- just keep in mind that we need all those rules and regulations to be kept safe, and ultimately, to be kept alive.

November Splendour

So we've made it to that bit of autumn that's so ridiculously pretty you almost forget what comes next. If a month ago I was just noticing how the light shifts, now sunsets are aflame with the kind of burnt golden hues you only really get in early November. Like everything about the passing of seasons, this light is fickle too: for a long while the colours of the trees are not strong enough to compliment it, and then just as suddenly they wither away. It's a window of opportunity of a few days, provided there's sun, and then the fog settles and days gradually become dull and trees barren. Let's enjoy the late autumn splendour until it lasts.

Houses We Built

Anyone can take pictures these days, you don’t even need to subject yourself to the hassle of carrying a camera around: your phone is smarter than you and always readily available to fire away.

The problem is that, in the meantime, we have kind of forgotten how to actually look at things. And see them. Not just store them away for later, when we’re going to click through them in a frenzy, post them to God knows which social platform and occasionally bore a bunch of friends with a slightly tedious slide show of fifty shades of the Eiffel tower.( It’s actually mostly grey, yes.)

Ideally a photograph should mean a new way of seeing things, or a way to discover that which we have not seen before. Shooting old buildings in nice angles might seem like a rather shallow preoccupation of the Instagram generation- but it’s led me to become more aware of my surroundings, their history, and to ultimately form a different picture of myself.

As a child I often wondered as to which of my (then physically imagined) halves is Romanian and which is Hungarian, because, once I would discover the identity of my left side, I would know the nationality of my heart and would therefore belong somewhere.

And, quite logically, here comes architecture to save the day. The more I pointed my camera to buildings around Arad, the more they started to resemble those in Budapest, Vienna or Novi Sad.  Smaller, a bit shabbier, a tad in disrepair, but it’s all connected- there’s an area of the world where people with often similar identity dilemmas lived, worked, created, and made a history which was not always the best or the smartest, but it’s the history we share and that stares back from us from the faces of the houses we built.