Art Metropole

#11089

Gay Goth Scene

Artist

The Hidden Cameras

Price

$8.00

Date

2013

Publisher

Evil Evil

Format

Audio

Size

18.5 × 18.5 × 0.2 cm

Genre

Vinyl

Description

Within Joel Gibb’s every move lies the steadfast elegance of a conductor. Fervently-tempered, yet exquisite like a floral bouquet on a Victorian chest. Somewhere between Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, sumptuous, unbridled.

Since 2001, the Canadian has played with his band The Hidden Cameras. In the churches of Toronto he staged the most legendary nights of the city. Male gogo dancers offered a performative space for overturning normative categories, questioning religion, and celebrating sexuality. Gibb shaped Toronto’s music scene at a time when it was practically nonexistent. He was the first Canadian artist to sign with Rough Trade. In the meantime, Joel Gibb lives in Berlin and has found his place, as songwriter and as artist. On “AGE”, he is no longer concerned with who he is, but rather, with how he came to be.

Joel Gibb works like a graphic artist. He engineers meticulous sound-sculptures and collages whose exactitude stays concealed at first behind an aesthetic of extremely harmonious, yet also dreary, pop music.

“Gay Goth Scene”, for example, was originally intended as a joke, as an ironic finger exercise. Now, it sounds sacred like a requiem for forbidden love. The song is already more than ten years old. Gibb wrote it while still living at his mother’s. In Toronto, he even organized Gay Goth Scene shows with friends. Once again, beneath layers of violins and Gibb’s dark baritone, one finds a meta-level that hints toward his childhood. Mary Margaret O’Hara’s voice is also to be heard on the track. The same Mary Margaret O’Hara who can be heard in Morrissey’s “November Spawned a Monster”.

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