Strings of life.

I like the ICA. I've watched Jodorowsky films in the cinema there, picked up copies of the Wire and shamelessly skim read Bataille in the bookshop, and sank the odd Saxon lager in the bar too.

So, as a fan of the music, their Detroit:Techno City exhibition was a no brainer. It was in one of their smallest rooms and was low on artefacts yet it told a story of a music, that along with Chicago house, reverberated around the world and changed the way most of us listen.

Amongst the vinyl, photo montages, and clips of film you can feast your eyes on some of the famous Roland equipment. From bottom to top we've got the 303 (a bass synth with built in sequencer originally marketed to guitarists in need of bass accompaniment for practice sessions), the 909, and the 808 (the latter two both, essentially, drum machines - though, in many ways, so much more than that).

The story stretches across the best part of two decades. Early 70s Detroit denizens were dancing in clubs like Studio 54, The Pink Poodle, and Wash's Flamingo. Parliament/Funkadelic were on the rise and the Seventh City was, correctly, proud. The p-funk sound begat electro-funk and the electro-funk begat disco.

DJ Ken Collier started a disco club, Chessmate, where black, white, gay, and straight crowds danced to the new electronic sounds. Stacey 'Hotwaxx' Hale was another early influence. She not only DJ'ed to crowds on a night out but took it to local radio stations like WLBS, WHYT, and WJLB. Felton Howard added gospel and house to the mix. He started DJ'ing 4 nights a week - at different venues - which was a novelty at the time. Soon he was playing 12 hour sets to crowds of over 1,500 at the Climax+ club.

Dr Charles Johnson, better known as The Electrifying Mojo, had a five hour long late night radio show on WGPR. As well as p-funk he played The B-52s, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and Depeche Mode. Cliff Thomas's Buy Rite Records stocked the few techno sides so far released alongside the rap and house records.

The music itself reflected Detroit's economic decline, the city had relied far too long on one industry, automotive production, and due to an economic recession and cheaper imported cars was suffering. From the studios of Gratiol Avenue, fast becoming the hub of the scene, came an electronic music that reproduced the robotic, soulless sounds of the car factories. It somehow managed to both condemn and glorify both the industrialisation and the decline of Michigan's largest city.

Labels were formed. Among them Deep Space, KMS, Transmat, and Metroplex. Behind the founding of these labels were three legendary musicians. Juan Atkins (the originator) had released his debut album in '82. Derrick May (the innovator) was responsible for Strings of Life which first created international interest in the genre. Kevin Saunderson (the elevator) moved to Detroit from NYC, aged 9, and with Inner City became a serious transatlantic chart botherer. I can remember hearing, and enjoying, Good Life in Basingstoke back in 1988.

These three men became known as the Belleville Three. Named after the city on the south-western suburbs of Detroit where they all lived. Derrick May described their sound as 'George Clinton meeting Kraftwerk in an elevator'. It may still stand as the best description of techno yet given.

In 1988 the British ex-Northern Soul DJ and producer Neil Rushton visited Detroit and put together a compilation Techno! The New Sound of Detroit. Eddie 'Flashin' Fowlkes, Blake Baxter, and the other leading lights all featured. Juan Atkins persuaded Rushton to use the word techno in the album's title, Rushton having initially preferred The House Sound of Detroit. Atkins had been inspired by Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave which told of a dystopian vision of a post-industrial city characterised by scientific and technological reinvention. The book had come out in 1980 and featured characters named the Techno Rebels. Atkins' act Cybotron had already, back in 1983, released a track with the title Techno City. Also that year The Face ran a feature with the title Motor City Techno which helped cement the term.

As we've established techno had been brewing for a decade or more but 1988 looks very much like the year techno broke. Album releases and Face features probably weren't as important to those on the ground as that year's opening of the Music Institute. The first club in the world devoted to playing techno. Every Friday and Saturday for three years in Detroit people danced from midnight to 9am. Both alcohol and drugs were prohibited as the promoters sought to emphasise techno's positive message.

It's debatable how well that worked but the music, as we all know, spread further and further. The second wave redefined the boundaries of Detroit techno. Whilst still relatively unknown in the USA the music's tendrils had truly wrapped themselves around the dance music scenes of the UK, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. Often appealing to those previously uninterested in electronic or black music.

Berlin, then as post-industrial as Detroit itself, particularly embraced the new sounds. Tresor invited DJs from Detroit to play in their club:an underground vault of an abandoned department store. In the UK Neil Rushton put out a follow up. Techno 2:The Next Generation which, as its title suggest, placed focus on the second wave of Detroit artists.

Richie Hawtin had been born in Banbury, Oxfordshire but grown up in a part of Canada that was within commuting distance of Detroit. His hard edged tunes like Plastikman pushed the music into more aggressive directions. Stacey Pullen, Claude Young, Kenny Larkin (who'd been serving in the US Air Force during the Belleville Three's ascent), Anthony 'Shake' Shakir, and Carl Craig also featured in the second wave if not, necssarily, on Rushton's album.

Craig was behind the label Planet E which along with Hardwax and Plus 8 were either modifying or streamlining the sound. Kelli Hand started to use the alias K-Hand to challenge gender stereotypes. In a scene that was highly indebted to the black and gay experience it's good to know that women, too, were welcomed. Eventually.

The apparent lack of superstar egos aided and abetted this. If you were dancing to this music you were as much of a star as those playing/making it. At least in the early days. That all changed as we know too well.

Aims noble enough for sure but Underground Resistance went further. Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, and 'Mad' Mike Banks (who'd played with Parliament in the past and, by some accounts, actually was borderline crazy) wanted change by sonic revolution. They felt mediocre audio and visual programming was stagnating the minds of Earth's inhabitants, building walls between people (what sort of nutter would propose such a thing?), and preventing world peace. They felt music and dance were the keys to the universe and called on brothers and sisters to create and transmit tones that would knock down these walls and wreak havoc on the programmers.

Counterintuitively they also sought to redress the global influence on techno and reinstate Detroit's primacy. Of course none of this worked but I admire much in their idealistic methodology and, if nothing else, they pumped out some serious bangers to illustrate their point.

Drexciya are fascinating. Where rock artists may contrive back stories to sell records or pump up their own image Drexciya wove a complex fiction that sought only to highlight historical transgressions and horrors. The Drexciyans were said to be a race of underwater dwellers that descended from pregnant slaves thrown overboard ships on transatlantic crossings.

It's a magical realist premise worthy of the very greatest historical fiction. Yet the story of techno itself is worthy of the very greatest historical fact. The ICA's may be a small show but it's one that shines a light, a strobe I like to think, on to an important musical, American, black, gay, and eventually global phenomenon. Clearly the best way to experience it is to listen to the music but it's worth an hour of your time, surely, to hear the story of those who made it and why they did.

Fleapit revisited:Problemski Hotel.

My friend Paola had two tickets to attend the Raindance opening gala at the Vue in Leicester Square. I'm both grateful and thankful she invited me along.

Woefully underdressed I wormed my way through London's glittering West End (as Titbits would've had it in 1975), took my complementary flute of warm fizz, and had a look at what was in my goodie bag. Popcorn, an almond bar, flavoured water (mint & cucumber), 'smellies', a Little Barrie CD, and a DVD of the film Honeymoon. Quite a haul.

Raindance began in the early nineties and is now a well respected festival of film. Enough so that they'd hired out Cafe de Paris for the post-film soiree. The festival gave UK debuts to Pulp Fiction and Memento and also provided What's Eating Gilbert Grape with its world premiere. Tough acts to follow, perhaps?

Definitely. But, like a rock band following up a hit album with an intimate personal piece, the organisers opted to open the festival with Manu Riche's ensemble piece about a Brussels immigration centre Problemski Hotel.

As topical as you could wish for but unlikely to interest the multiplex crowd. Which is a pity because it's great. There's a dark comedic vein that runs through the film, abated when absolutely necessary, yet a warmth too. Humanity you'd call it.

Humanity, in my eyes, doesn't simply consist of looking after your own, those that look like you, or those you deem worthy of support. It extends to caring about those you may strongly disagree with and trying to find common ground, or at least some kind of acceptance, with them. Riche, and his team, seem to come from the same place.

The people who make up this drama find themselves in Belgium for a number of reasons. Escaping danger, economic, a combination of both, or, in some cases, unclear. Moral judgements are put aside and the story left to tell itself. All the various strands are refracted through the character of Bipul (a tour de force from Tarek Hallaby), a man who can't, or chooses not to, remember where he's from originally but uses his multilingual skills, and obvious education, to assist the others in their often fraught dealings with Belgian authority.

Initially a distant figure Bipul enters into a relationship, of sorts, with the gamine Kazakh Lidia (Evegenia Brendes) whose urchin charm and utter, stop at nothing, determination make uneasy bedfellows. She dreams of a life in Chipping Sodbury but has no idea where it actually is.

Her friend Martina (Lydia Indjova) has fled a vicious gang in Omsk and Lidia's idea for them to sneak in to the UK in a shipping container during the Xmas break when all the guards are on holiday is fatally flawed. It's a sign of the desperation that underpins these lives. Mostly it hangs in the background. A grey crowd always ready to break open and rain piss down on a dream.

Nigerian Olugbenga (Gorges Ocloo) and gym fanatic Igor (gangly, taciturn Zlatan Ibrahimovic lookalike Kamil Alisultanov) demonstrate this the clearest. Olugbenga joyously cycles the city as Igor pumps iron and learns French in anticipation of joining the Foreign Legion. Both their fates are dependent on the contents of a small envelope delivered with faceless bureaucracy. Bipul, of course, is there to translate.

Even with a romance of sorts burgeoning Bipul remains mostly dispassionate. Give or take some frankly rotten poetry (one of the film's few misfires). His friend Mahsun (Gokhan Girginol) does the emotion - and the comedy. Mahsun is desperate for a Belgian wife but has nothing but enthusiasm and his friendly nature going for him. A night in a dreadful looking cocktail bar ends, predictably, disastrously.

Back in the immigration centre Shaukat (Ilyas Mettioui) cheats at chess, keeps his wife Hafeeza (Rema Jabr) in servitude and, it is strongly suggested, knocks her about a bit too. The film hints at a gradual reconciling of conflicting beliefs, understandably embraced by Hafeeza more urgently than Shaukat, and I think it's a brave piece of film making not to shy away from this aspect of some Islamic cultures.

In fact it's a brave film throughout. It's refreshing to see the immigrants in the foreground while the staff play supplementary roles. Equally admirably those same staff are not portrayed as monsters or jobsworths but well intentioned, hard working people struggling to find a balance between their ideals and their lived reality.

Balance between hope and hopelessness could be said to be the underlying theme of this film. There are some horrifically bleak scenarios, mostly played out behind doors thankfully closed to us, but there are also scenes that are testament to the sheer power of human resilience.

Problemski Hotel may not be a masterpiece, and it's unlikely to show up at your local Odeon, but it's an important and sensitive look at a subject that is, tragically, as topical today as it's ever been. It's a bloody good film too. If I was left with just one message it'd be that those of us who've never known such times should be very, very careful to pass judgement on those who have.

There is a light that never goes out.

The invention of photography in 1839 contributed to a period of change for visual art in Britain. New technologies and innovations led to a 'conversation' between photographers and painters which shaped the work of both during the Victorian and Edwardian ages.

Tate Britain's Painting With Light exhibition begins in Edinburgh in the 1840s. Auld Reekie was home to a community of scientists, writers, and artists. In 1843 Robert Adamson established one of the first photographic studios. Together with the painter David Octavius Hill they took more than two thousand photos over a four year period. That's even more than I take on my phone most weeks.

These works were symbolic of the relationship between photography and painting/drawing. Compare JMW Turner's Edinburgh from Caulton Hill (below, top) with Hill and Adamson's far less idyllic photo of the same place for example. 

Hill's 1846 oil painting fuses both the idealistic and the realist approach to satisfying effect.

Photographs at the time, despite often being resolutely bleak, were being compared to the works of masters like Titian and Rembrandt. Hill and Adamson aimed to capture the cosmopolitanism of Scottish society, schisms in the church, and different styles of Highland dress.

Intense debates about the truthfulness of art became part of the ongoing debate. Inspired by artist and critic John Ruskin an approach of 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing' took hold in which both painters and photographers left the warmth of the studio to explore light and atmospheric effects.

The effects were varied. Ruskin's Courtyard of a Late Gothic Wooden House, Abbeville and John Everett Millais's almost chocolate box Woodman's Daughter seem to have nothing in common but both sprang from this line of questioning and thought.

More impressive were those artists who grappled with the concept of awe. John Brett's 1856 Glacier at Rosenlaui was based on a Coventry Patmore poem and William Dyce made Pegwell Bay look somehow otherworldly and not at all near Ramsgate. Atkinson Grimshaw's Bowder Stone, Borrowdale almost looks like a photograph. Even to our modern eyes.

Once they'd got outside there was no stopping them. In Italy John Brett painted Florence from Bellosguardo. Thomas Seddon and William Holman Hunt travelled even farther afield. To Israel where Seddon made Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel (catchy name) and Holman Hunt got to grips with Nazareth. Bold colours and sun dappled affects dominate these canvasses.

There was, of course, more than a little exoticism at play here. Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said, was ramped up even further with Frederick Goodall's Song of the Nubian Slave in 1863. Frank Dillon's fetishisation of Mamluk architecture in A Room in the House of Sheikh Al-Sadat at Wafa'Iya, Cairo could easily be accused of the same. Yet they're both elegant and tender works that can only be admired whatever our reservations.

The use of tableaux was also popular at this time. Shakespeare was ripe for interpretation but it appears that Tennyson, more than anyone else, was the go to guy. He was a direct inspiration for Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, and Millais.

Julia Margaret Cameron drew from Arthurian legend and Henry Wallis painted, in 1856, the suicide of the 18th century poet Thomas Chatterton. It's a real event but one imagines Wallis allowed himself as much artistic license as Chatterton did arsenic.

Of local interest to me was Edwin Landseer (most famous for the lion sculptures at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square) and his painting The Plundering of Basing House. Cromwell's troops are seen sacking, and disrespecting, the Charles I loyalist stronghold that still stands on the edge of Basingstoke.

With Tennyson still chief inspiration Julia Margaret Cameron took the photo of his Elaine mourning Lancelot in the 1870s. It shares compositional similarities with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix from a decade earlier. Rossetti was emboldened by Baudelaire's suggestion that art made from memory could be more powerful than art made from life. At the bottom of these three works you can see his Mariana from 1870 and draw your own conclusions. Personally I have problems with the pre-Raphaelites and their wilful obsession with a past that never was. I reckon they'd vote Brexit.

The landscape painting of the time could go either way. Taking cues from French impressionism and realism but transporting the action, if it could be called that, to Norfolk paid dividends artistically for Thomas Frederick Goodall. 1883's Rockland Broad and Bow Net from three years later hardly appear to be from the brush of the same artist but both convey an ache for capturing life as it was at the time.

They're good but they suffer by sharing a room with works that to my mind are amongst the greatest ever produced by any artist in any era. Whistler's Nocturnes are utterly joyous to me. Yearning, wistful, longing. I almost feel as happy looking at them as I do when walking along a river or a beach on a cool summer's evening.

As if in reaction to the clarity of photography artists, and none more so than Whistler, were taking a more expressive approach. Beneath the two Whistlers you can see Alvin Langdon Coburn's Regent's Canal from 1904. Almost ironically Coburn sought to create photography as hazy and ambiguous as a Whistler nocturne. He also underlines Whistler's debt to Hokusai and the Japanese tradition of wood carving. I can't emphasise enough how much I adore these paintings. Click on them and make them large!

Other artists found other ways to depict the city at night and to approach the relatively new phenomenon of street lighting. Arthur Hacker's Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus from the 1910s conveys London as a blur of nocturnal action. It's the logical next step from Atkinson Grimshaw's slightly more sober, though no less groundbreaking, Pall Mall from three decades before.

Japanese culture was very much the thing in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century and although it was viewed through a highly romantic prism it contributed to advances in our artistic language. Flattened planes, new colour palettes, and cropped formats all became part of the vocabulary. Theodore Roussell's Reading Girl (1886) and John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885) being prime examples.

Yet the lure of mythology and the epic didn't entirely loosen its grip. George Frederic Watts's Orpheus and Eurydice from 1869 and Rossetti's Proserpine, painted five years later, both continued to look for different routes forward, backwards, and sideways. In the end it was the likes of Whistler and Grimshaw that pointed the way towards modern art. Photography had played a pivotal part in the advances they made and shaped the way art is viewed today.

If you think the camera never lies you need to sit down and have a good long chat with one some day very soon.

David Hockney's diary.

It says a lot about how revered, loved even, David Hockney is that he can get away with charging £11 for what are, essentially, some quickly knocked out sketches of his mates. Thankfully my friend Kathy is a Royal Academy member and she got me into his 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life for free. In return I bought her a suspiciously-not-very-black black coffee in Waterstones afterwards.

The premise of the exhibition is that each sitter sat on the same chair in the same room over a period of two to three days while Hockney painted them. This took place from July 2013 through to March this year. Most of the sitters are not exactly household names. There's gallery owners, art dealers, models, jazz musicians, and family members. Possibly the two most well known are John Baldessari, the American conceptual artist (he's the guy with the white beard), and Barry Humphries, famous for playing Dame Edna Everage and Australian cultural attache Sir Les Patterson. You will know him by his kipper tie (that almost IS a kipper) and his pink slacks.

There's enough pink, mustard, and otherwise ill advised coloured trousers here to make you think you're either in a Buckinghamshire golf club or a West London pub. Kathy pointed out the rather unfortunate trouser bulges that a pair of chinos can give a man when he sits down. She also raised issue with what she saw as Hockney's inability to paint feet. True enough many of his sitters have been made to look, literally, like they have two left ones.

Poor old Jacob Rothschild looks like he's been deflated and regular sitter Bing McGilvray looks like he's had the air pumped into him. Part of the pleasure of this exhibition is being rude about people safe in the knowledge they're, on the most part, thousands of miles away and, also, that they're considerably richer than you'll ever be.

With wealth there often comes an idiosyncratic fashion sense. Perhaps having nobody to answer to you slowly drift into wearing whatever the fuck you like. Maybe being the richest and most powerful person in the room means your friends won't tell you when you look silly.

I'm being harsh as there are some snappy dressers amongst Hockney's sitters and, anyway, we're supposed to be here to look at the paintings. The paintings are good. Well, they're okay. But there's really very little to say about them after a while.

There's a still life plonked amongst the eighty-two portraits. I wasn't sure why but it seems one sitter didn't show up and, like Roy Hattersley being replaced by a tub of lard on Have I Got News For You, Hockney decided to paint some fruit instead.

 

The model Oona Zlamany, below, was one of the portraits that particularly caught our attention. A quick Google image search revealed the real Oona to be very young looking indeed. Hockney, though keeping her fresh of face, has added a few years on and given he some seriously wonky eyes. It's not a criticism of his work but simply an observation that what he's trying to do is eke out some aspect of the sitter's character.

More often than not he manages to do this. They're interesting paintings but in the grand scheme of things it seems unlikely they'll be viewed as anything other than a side dish to the feast that is Hockney's other work. Because of that the RA could probably have knocked a few quid off the price but as the place was rammed they clearly know what they're doing.

I'm ready for my close up now, Mr.Hockney.