Snipe Likes: S O H N

London/Vienna-based producer and multi-instrumentalist S O H N releases his debut single today on the fledgling Aesop label – listen and read what we had to say about the swoon-inducing, stuttering, minimal electronica that is The Wheel, here. Snipe caught up with S O H N for a brief chat about London versus Vienna and plans for an imminent live show …

You’ve previously described your time in London, the final months at least, as quite isolating, a time of ‘dark nights’. How has moving to Vienna influenced you creatively?

Vienna is a far more relaxed city than London and the stress, anger and urgency that I feel influences London musicians certainly recedes in me once I’m in Vienna. That definitely has a knock on effect on the music – though from time to time I need that stress and urgency back, so I travel back to London and work at friends’ places on new material. Somewhere between the two cities is the ideal I think. Also the seasons in Austria are far more pronounced, summers are really hot and clear but with amazing rainstorms at night and winters are long, snowy and cold. Not London-cold … real, hardcore cold.

What’s Vienna’s electronic music scene like currently? How does it compare to London’s?

There are some great electronic artists in Vienna and I think they’re less influenced by trends there – Dorian Concept is a great example of a guy just doing something that is unquestionably ‘him’. Of course London has incredible electronic musicians and producers too, really on the cutting edge of the movement – it’s exciting for me to be experiencing both worlds.

You’re a songwriter first and foremost – how does the creative process work for you? Do you put together tracks as a producer and then try and compose melody and lyrics over the top, or do you write songs and then try and fill in the electronic gaps?

It all comes at the same time I’d say, I don’t write electronic productions without vocals but I also don’t write vocal compositions without production. My writing style is very fast and reactive and I’ll generally write and produce the main body of the track on the first day, after that I have my mixer-producer hat on and work on the finer details.

How are plans going for the S O H N live show? Can we safely assume there’ll be no go-go dancers or flame bellowing obelisks?

Ha-ha, you can safely assume that. I’ve started work on a live setup and it sounds amazing. I’m very lucky to have some good friends who are great musicians and synth-experts who I can bounce ideas off of. It looks like the live set will be playable totally without computers, which excites me massively and for me adds a different element to the way a lot of electronic music is performed nowadays. You can take it from me though, the live show will be really, really good. Even I’m excited about it.

Buy The Wheel 12” here, or digitally here.

City History: Soho's Chinatown is a product of World War Two

Chinatown Oral History Project – Part1 from Collins Tam on Vimeo.

In this video (it takes 55 seconds to get going) a Chinese man, so old he claims not to know his own age, tells the story of his life and of Soho’s Chinatown.

From it we learn that the original Chinatown was in Limehouse, clustered round the sailors working at the docks. But then the bombs of World War Two forced another displacement of Chinese Londoners, further west to Soho.

Collins Tam’s film is also good at explaining some of the outward pressures pushing people to leave China and come to the UK in the mid-20th century.

For more Chinese London stories, see our in-depth interview with photographer Mike Tsang. He explains how the children of those first immigrants deal with their complex Chinese/British heritage.

And there’s a brilliant post from 2009 here about the mistreatment which the original inhabitants of Chinatown in Limehouse received from the popular press. The Yellow Peril, and all that.

More city history:

More demonisation of immigrants, and a gun-toting chase across Edwardian Walthamstow – Filmmaker Si Mitchell brilliantly explains the Tottenham Outrage of 1909
Protected building porn – English Heritage’s round up of London’s newest listed buildings
Samuel Pepys gets a steel rod up his cock – Dr Richard Barnett’s Sick City Project for the Wellcome Trust

In-depth interview: Photographer Mike Tsang on the blessing and the curse of growing up a Chinese Londoner

Snipe: Your exhibition is about China and Britain and the people in between. People like William Wong (pictured above), who describes his mother growing up in a family of subsistence farmers in a village in Hong Kong. He now lives in Enfield and is a PC in the Met Police. That’s a staggering change to have taken place over just one generation. Do you feel that it stretches cultural identities and traditions to breaking point? How do people deal with that sort of rupture?

Mike Tsang: It’s certainly a huge change to take place over one generation, and I think that’s one of the challenges that all first-generation communities have to face – how to communicate with their children who are “in between”. Growing up I sometimes felt the difference in culture between my friends at school and that of my parents. Both of my parents had quite an impoverished upbringing as my father was from a family of 13 children and my mother from one of ten. So most arguments would come from their perspective of me taking our relative prosperity for granted, and me not understanding why I couldn’t have more personal freedom.

I don’t think it stretches identities to breaking point, but it can definitely cause tension unless you’re actively aware of it – Stephen Hoo in his interview spoke of a conscious decision he made as a teenager to find out more about both his Chinese and British sides. As I grew older, I think my parents and I have tried to understand each others’ viewpoints better which has brought us closer together.

Snipe: You also spoke to Don Mei (pictured below), who remembers as a child in bed late at night hearing his father downstairs desperately practising his English – striving to integrate himself to his new home. Immigrating to the UK at that time was a great struggle as well great opportunity. Is that experience, that struggle, something that the first or second generation of British Chinese can relate to?

Mike Tsang: I think all can relate to that struggle, but it’s important to remember that the Chinese diaspora is varied and so experiences will be too. For example my parents learnt English at school in Mauritius before it was independent from British rule, so acclimatisation in terms of learning the language was easier for them. Emotionally though, I think the struggle is more universal. My father remembers crying when he left home when he was 20yrs old to go to the UK – he knew he wouldn’t see his family for a long time after that as there wasn’t the kind of affordable air travel that exists now. He didn’t return for over ten years, so he must have felt quite isolated for some time starting out in the UK.

Snipe: China is a country that a lot of Westerners don’t really know what to do with – it’s a place that seems very big but also very far away. Can you talk about how you think China is perceived here and how the lives and experiences of your subjects feed in to that.

Mike Tsang: A tricky question! I think the popular stereotypes about the Chinese are well-known – we all practise kung fu, eat with chopsticks and perform Chinese opera. We might even have a relative here illegally selling DVDs! In all seriousness though, I think China is still very much seen as the exotic ‘Other’ for a lot of British people. Some interview subjects said they feel less accepted as a ‘British’ person than say, a person of Black or Indian origin. I hope that this exhibition can share the stories of these British Chinese and people reading about this project can learn more about their rich heritage and see how that is part of Britain today.

Snipe: How specific is the story of Chinese immigration? Can we compare these stories to West Indian immigrants from the same period, to Eastern European immigrants today? Do you think there’s a universal narrative of immigration?

Mike Tsang: I definitely feel like there are themes in this project which are similar to other migrant communities. I grew up in Harrow in Greater London, which has one of the highest population of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan origin in the UK. Many of my friends’ families had emigrated from there. We felt a common bond from the experience of being the children of parents who had moved here, and even now we’re all very close. I would love to do a follow-up project with a different group of peoples and see how true that idea is!

Snipe: Your subjects are of two cultures, or more than two in some cases. Yet at the same time, they have had to confront the idea that they are neither “properly Chinese” nor “properly British.” Several of them say that their inability to speak Chinese made it hard for them to feel fully Chinese, while the fact that they were not white made it hard to feel fully British. Are these attitudes changing? Has the richness of their heritage ultimately been a blessing, a curse, or something else?

Mike Tsang: From my own childhood I thought it was a curse whilst growing up but now I see it as a blessing. As a child I wanted to fit in but physically I looked different. I think with maturity, and living in a international city, you start to appreciate the advantages of being able to relate to more than one culture. The positive responses we’ve had to the project from people outside of the British Chinese sphere illustrates that: people are fascinated with the richness of the subjects’ heritage as they make for great stories.

_{Artist Zoe Chan, whose grandfather worked in China as a carrier of precious metals}

Snipe: Finally, you’re a photographer and your exhibition includes photography. But there’s also oral history, archive imagery, a website with audio recordings…does this sort of holistic, multi-media approach suggests ways that photographers and artists might present their work in the future? Is the time passing when you could tell these sort of stories with photography alone?

Mike Tsang: There will always be a place for great photography but I think with the saturation of digital imagery that the public are exposed to, it is much more difficult to catch someone’s attention with just one image. The ‘holistic’ approach to this project comes from wanting to make the subject interesting and accessible to people. I’ve seen a lot of great heritage projects that have very valuable content but through a lack of visuals, audio etc do not reach out to people, which is a shame. It also stems from my own interest – I like stories first and foremost, and I think you can get a much more immersive experience if you can read and hear the people as well as see them in photographs. As a photographer, I hope to do more work like this in the future, at the intersection of arts and heritage.

See other in-depth London interviews:

Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting on their Olympic pedalo film Swandown
Kate Flowers of CoOperaCo on her mutualised operatic finishing school
Stratford filmmaker Winstan Whitter on what got lost in the gentrification of Dalston

"What's the point of Boris?" asks Iain Duncan Smith

Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith has launched a bitter attack on Boris Johnson after he approved the redevolpment of Walthamstow Dog track.

Chingford MP Duncan Smith said that he was “absolutely furious” about Boris’s decision and said that his constituents were now asking “what’s the point of Boris?”

Two years ago Boris publicly joined Duncan Smith and local Labour MP Stella Creasy in their campaign to save the stadium.

However yesterday he reneged on his support saying that the redevelopment plans would be a “major boost for Walthamstow.”

Duncan Smith said that Johnson had failed to show leadership. He told BBC London radio:

“I’ve been secretary of state for a while. You take tough decisions. Sometimes when your officials tell you that this might happen, you say ‘Lots of things might happen but I tell you what will happen. I’m going to overrule this or make a decision here. And that’s what it takes to be in charge and to be leader.”

In a joint statement Duncan Smith and Stella Creasy accused Boris of misleading voters about his support for the scheme:

“We are deeply disappointed in the Mayor of London as we understood him to be in support of the dog track and our constituents voted for him partly on this basis. This isn’t over yet – we are taking the matter to Eric Pickles now.”

A recent freedom of information request by campaigners revealed that developers are set to make a £14.5 million loss on the scheme.

The viability report also threw doubts on the developer’s promise to contribute £3.8 million to local sports and education facilities.

Campaigners against the redevelopment of Walthamstow dog track today vowed to continue their fight against the proposals.

Behind local anger over the Walthamstow dog track demolition, some deep and difficult questions remain

Rick Holloway, of Save Our Stow, spoke to BBC London after Boris Johnson approved a plan to build houses on Walthamstow dog track.

The Mayor was rubber stamping the decision take by Waltham Forest Council at a contentious meeting back in May.

Mayor Johnson’s approval of that decision will disappoint campaingers given his previous statements. In a letter sent to Mr Holloway in April 2012, the Mayor said he was

“…becoming more and more concerned about this planning proposal as more information comes to light…I understand local residents’ concerns and their desire to see dog racing on this site, and I would welcome a user who was able to facilitate this.”

In November 2010, Mayor Johnson said

“London has a rich tradition of dog racing and it is lamentable that some of its iconic stadia have suffered decline and closure in recent years. I urge Londoners to support this increasingly endangered pursuit and the owners of the remaining stadiums to preserve these in active use or dog racing for the benefit of Londoners. I urge the owners of Walthamstow Stadium to take full consideration of the needs and wishes of local people with regard to the future of this sporting venue.”

These words will please students of political phraseology. While they sound supportive of the campaign to save the track, any firm commitment to help is elusive. So it has proved.

But there are much bigger stories unfolding here too.

First, those dogs. The dog track closed in 2008 for a reason – it was no longer making enough money.

Nationally, dog racing attendances fell 19% between 2004 and 2008. This decline self-perpetuated: smaller crowds led to closed stadia which led to still smaller crowds. Would a restored Walthamstow dog track be able to buck that long term trend? It looks like we’ll never know.

Secondly, housing. That London has a problem with the economics of housing its inhabitants has been well documented. The new plan will build 294 homes, not a negligible addition to the housing stock. According to L&Q Housing Trust, which owns the site, 20% of these homes will be “affordable for local people.” But none will be social housing.

The architects plans for the devlopement (their latest statement is here) are suitably wholesome.

Again, opponents protest. The bulk of these properties will not be bought, and possibly not lived in, by people from the area. They wonder if these plans are really for them. Whatever the dog track was, it was undeniably Walthamstow.

There are also questions about whether L&Q can meet its commitments and still make a profit. Since it receives public money, it would be something of a scandal if it could not. L&Q says it will make a profit. The Standard covers that dispute here.

So where are we?

We’re without a dog track. But we’ve been there since 2008. More importantly, we’re in a planning system which makes scant allowance for how people feel about the places where they live. There’s a dilemma here which resists glib solutions: how to empower individuals without letting NIMBYism kill improvements which could benefit the city as a whole.

This isn’t easy. More houses might well have to built if London is to accomodate its people. The question is, do they have to be built like this?

See also:

Campaign website – Save Our Stow
Architects Conran’s statement – Mayor Gives Conrad’s Walthamstow Homes Plan the Green Light
Walthastow MP Stella Creasy Call on Pickles to Call In Stow Stow Decision Over Value for Money
Evenign Standard – Walthamstow stadium project ‘will lose £14m’
Snipe – The Council Vote to Approve the Plan in May

Will the Silvertown Tunnel ever be built?

Lots of press this week for Boris Johnson’s umpteemph announcement that there will be a new road tunnel under the Thames at Silvertown.

But will there really? Despite telling us last year that the government have backed the tunnel, TfL now admit that there is no funding whatsoever in place.

And today Boris came out against the only alternative source of funding TfL have so far proposed:

He told LBC that:

“I certainly won’t be putting in a toll in my Mayoral career… my Mayoral lifetime…”

Which is one promise he can’t fail to keep.

TfL admit that the earliest the tunnel can be built is 2021. That’s at least five years after Boris plans to leave City Hall.

If Boris really wanted to build a new road crossing east of Tower Bridge then he would have started four years ago.

Instead he cancelled the only plan in place for a new crossing, and has spent the remaining time messing around with cable cars instead.

If Silvertown Tunnel ever does get built, then it won’t be by Boris.

Interestingly, while Ken Livingstone opposed the crossing Labour’s London Assembly leader and chairman of the London Labour Party Len Duvall told me earlier this year that he backs both the tunnel and the proposed tolls to pay for it.

Could it be the next Labour Mayor of London who actually decides whether this goes ahead?