Karborn
Twenty-three-year old Karborn is an anomaly on the London streets, an urban dreamer with feet riding the bassline and head in the clouds. The son of Ultravoxx frontman John Foxx (with whom he often collaborates on audio and visuals), Karborn’s work marries the organic to the technical, creating post-post-modern computer-meets-paper-meets-sound collages that are hard to decipher. Are they dystopian or utopian?
In January, Karborn (born John Leigh) completed a show, Time & Face with Cathedral Oceans, at Grok on Carnaby Street. To coincide with his latest art project, Platonic – a series of art-meets-bass 7” dubplates – he’s launched a monthly (every last Thursday at 1001 bar on Brick Lane), featuring live sets, fresh tunes, and art from himself alongside some of dubstep’s most experimental.
Karborn sent us this treatise on a London life:
“Sticky trainers on dirty pavements. The horizontal light makes gold trees with concrete boxes left and right and centre. Blue and cold and fresh. There were adventures to be had in a city like this, both new and old. The desire to be independent and to be the trees, not stuck in stone like concrete.
Pockets full of gold leaf but usually no gold to spend. Imagination made most of it, when you’re poor you knew it was because you had got a bit comfortable or had not been quick enough. It still happened often, though. The girl in the window winks. She is pretty an all. Ain’t so bad then.
The road gets layered and clever as you walk and move and glow. Changing groups and individuals enter into the manifestations. Some keep you sane and evolve ideas, some work with you, the best kind are very different… An element you miss in yourself, and they miss in you. Those relationships go deeper than a moment’s need, and seemed to be honest.
Stepping out of the arch-shaped hole in the brickwork and into a garden which was imperfect and beautiful and never to be finished. Learning answers to the unasked questions on the way, when the deepest desires lay unknown, was a pinching irony of life. Each step becomes more assured, and finding his legs as an adult was all in the mind. It perhaps was not what something physically was. It was what that thing represented to others around him. The power of the environment, its mind, just there. Deep in those shining, glowing flowers of the living world he looked to for a language of beauty and of example.
The mind can make imaginations. It can manifest. Midnight in London, the only time you can feel the solitude is in quiet streets and along the canals. An old receipt drops from your pocket as you pull out a lighter.
‘What always makes you feel alone? Do you want to be alone?’ said the night.
‘Do you want to be a monk, suffering? Sacrifice your life for this then, to it, be it, or it will offer you nothing,’ said the wind.
‘Do you want to feel the world? Feel deeply and colorfully? Then do not be lazy,’ said the earth.
There is no face. Sharp alien features dock grass eyes and sunshine freckles. The fox sits and watches from a wall. Step in the circles, watch the rhythm for the beat, and move in and out of time together. Where was I trying to go? Paint hits my shoes, my eyes are bleeding. Beautiful white cloth frames and billows across her elegant face. Long slender limbs hold my hands, pull me up. Touch, a scent like honey and hops and warm skin and grass. Clouds move by her hair and stories of unity and the infinite fall as each lock drops. “Stand and face towards the water, I want to take a photograph.” You whisper as the subject of your life is under your eye once more, and you create again.
Dark blue jeans. The oversized hood. The rucksack. Walking along pavements with a mind in hand. Trying for what he might, to build, to make projects. Not just to exist, but to meet all desires.”
