Mark Leckey - ‘Exorcism of the Bridge@Eastham Rake’ (Warp)

Mark Leckey - ‘Exorcism of the Bridge@Eastham Rake’ (Warp Records) (born 1964) is a British contemporary artist, Mark Leckey’s first major video work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), was informed by the artist’s working class upbringing. Foregrounding Leckey’s use of collage, music, and film, the work featured cut-up footage of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s UK dance-music scenes. His more recent work combines ancient and digital items to examine the way objects—artistic, primitive, and quotidian—“speak” to each other. GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) features a Samsung smart refrigerator “acting” against the background of a green screen, while The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things explores the Internet of Things, the science fiction–like scenario of digitally embedded sensors that allow humans and machines to remotely interact. In 2008, Leckey won the Turner Prize for his exhibition “Industrial Lights and Image”.

Mark Leckey releases a limited 10" on Warp, exploring refracted memories and suburban mythology. The broadly musical ideas of remixing, sampling and recreating are constants the work of Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey. One of the world’s most consistently exciting and iconoclastic visual artists, UK post-punk and rave culture in particular have been the foundations for some of his most striking creations.

In his latest output ‘Exorcism of the Bridge@Eastham Rake’, Leckey returns to a motorway bridge on the M53 in Birkenhead near his childhood home to deliver a track that plunges into the suburban occult. The throaty refrain of ‘out demons, out!’ hopes to exorcise the malignant spirits, real and imagined, that seem to have come out of the woodwork of contemporary Britain. As Leckey describes it, “a kind of ritual chant made modern”. 

The track comes backed by a remix from Evian Christ, who drags it onto the dance floor of one his vaunted and chaotic Trance Parties. ‘Exorcism of the Bridge@Eastham Rake’ is available now on 10" Vinyl only, limited to 500 copies. Highly recommended!