Last year, The Quietus went along to Selfridges in London for a weekend of fearsomely loud music of the far leftfield in a special venue set up in the basement – Ramleh, KK Null, Keiji Haino and JK Flesh AKA Justin Broadrick played the series of gigs for Samizdat, a project by fashion designer Yang Li. We’ve now got a video of Broadrick’s performance of Jesu’s track ‘Christmas’ at Li’s runway show for his autumn winter 2018 collection. Says Li, "Justin’s work, especially as Godflesh, JK Flesh and Jesu has been a soundtrack to my creative universe for a while – such a rare example of an artist whose output spans so many genres. We created a new version of the ‘Christmas’, which became the sound track to my autumn winter 2018 runway show in Paris – a creative dialogue considering the new context and format of a Jesu performance – Justin’s performance was full of courage and creativity even down to the way the speaker and amps where set up." The music will be receive a limited edition release on Hospital Productions later this year. We also asked Justin Broadrick about the collaboration.
Justin Broadrick: Yang contacted me expressing interest, I then looked into his work and found it inspiring and interesting; I must add that I’m not that educated in the field of fashion! We firstly worked together on JK Flesh and Ramleh at Selfridges on Oxford Street.
Can you tell us about how the process of putting the night together?Â
JB: Yang requested an solo performance of Jesu, specifically something that fit the theme of the show, ‘Christmas’ by Jesu felt most appropriate, but we changed the title to ‘Life Mass’
and I reduced the song to just guitar, voice and guitar loops.
I saw pictures of the space/church and wished to do something symmetrical with both my positioning as solo performer and the amp/speaker set up, this concept worked collectively in theory and we were all happy once it was put into practice. It was so successful that we are now looking at a release of the piece in December through Hospital Productions.
Stay tuned for that, and watch the performance above. The film was made by Jamie Reid and Eddie Whelan
