UUUSE is a new label for contemporary music. Our debut release remembers a double bill performance night at Perdu in Amsterdam where Ivan Cheng and Steven Warwick each presented a new work. This split EP arrives on the anniversary of the night. Yet, the two tracks exist in an ambiguous limbo. Are they live recordings from Perdu? Faithful renditions? Or entirely new compositions?
Riffing off the fictional town of Stars Hollow from the popular early 2000s television series Gilmore Girls, for 'Suns Hollow' Ivan Cheng was joined on stage by artist Magdalena Mitterhofer. For his contribution to the EP, the performance in-ear track of a duologue between the characters Rory Gilmore (Mitterhofer) and Lane Kim (Cheng) is placed over his feedback cover of The La's 1990 hit 'There She Goes'; the first song heard in the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls. With a text heavy with cultural references, he goes further into the aspirations and dynamics of the two ‘best friends’ from different backgrounds.
Steven Warwick, also known under the moniker Heatsick, completes the record with ’There Will Be’. Combining a syncopated hi-hat with heavily distorted vocals, he delivers an Americana cowboy dance medley – a meandering, surreal snippet that ends with a triumphant blast of cinematic noise. During the performance, Warwick appeared onstage as various personas, changing costumes and characters to narrate an epic poem depicting the nightmare of representation, speech acts, drag, neoliteral, bureaucratic interventions into rising societal and global threats
Muddying dominant narratives, from the frameworks of crisis and control to aspirational fandom, to the purity of the original, uncontaminated art form, UUU01 tells a blurry story. It occupies the space between the real and the re-membered, offering a distorted documentation of Cheng’s and Warwick’s performances. Commissioned as part of the series ‘Speaker, Broker, Stringer’, both performances responded to an invitation to play with the notion of Werktreue, fidelity to an original text.
About the Artists
Steven Warwick is a British artist, musician and writer residing in Berlin. His practice includes durational performance installations, plays and films using the construction of situations and language. He also makes music under his own name, and previously as Heatsick – his previous record, titled “MOI”, is out on PAN. He has performed music at Berghain, Issue Project Room, Trouw Amsterdam, Unsound Krakow, London Contemporary Music Festival, Mutek Mexico, Novas Frequencias Brazil, Warwick has exhibited work at Schinkel Pavilion, ICA London, SMK Copenhagen, the Modern Institute Glasgow, Cleopatras NYC, Balice Hertling NYC, Kinderhook; Caracas, and was artist in residence at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles 2015. His writing has appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Urbanomic, Art Forum and Electronic Beats and has co-authored a book released on Primary Information.
stevenwarwick.info
Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces video, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for using performance as a critical medium. His work has recently been presented at gta exhibitions (Zurich), CNAC Magasin (Grenoble), Maxxi (Rome), Édouard Montassut (Paris). Confidences/Majority, the latest in a series of vampire books, was published by After 8 Books in 2022. He has initiated the project space
bologna.cc in Amsterdam since 2017.
ivancheng.com