Ice Age

In discussions/meditations on containerisation and container ships, I was surprised that this album didn't get a mention: Icebreaker International's 'Trein Maersk: A Report to the NATOarts Board of Directors'. I first picked this up in the music Oxfam in Ealing (one of the few things I miss about working there, interesting post-punk stuff cropping up a lot of the time, vinyl almost always in pristine condition)having heard nothing about it... the sleeve was so curious. It was clearly not some kind of straight sound-effects job - the image on the reverse (very much like the one at the top of this post) signalled that there was some kind of concept behind this, it was some kind of wheeze (I mean, the guy on the right looks like Sufjan Stevens or something...). The sleeve opens out to reveal the following

"On 6 January 2000 Alexander Perls and Simon Break boarded the container ship Trein Maersk at the port of Yokohoma, Japan. Their mission, as specified by the NATOarts board od directors, was to produce an audio report that would promote free international trade....

Trein Maersk... is intended not only for use by academics and policymakers, but also as a guide for artists, merchants and members of the public who wish to make connections between developments in contemporary art and international trade. Mr Break and Mr Perls hope that this document will serve as a tool to open national markets to free and unfettered global exchange."

Inside the sleeve is also a large global map showing the route taken through four major ports, plus statistics and other information on the ports and their development. Before having done a little internet research it was possible to believe that this whole story was a fabrication, a very well thought-out conceptual package, although even then by feelings about it were nicely poised: surely NATO endorsement would have to be official, they wouldn't allow this as a joke, surely? Anyway, they did undertake the journey, NATOarts is real.

The natural thing for me, and clearly for other people too, is to approach this as an act of subversion. I recently came across this interview, though, where they refute that reading:

A: And we’re not like Deep Forest, you know? It’s not like we’re attempting to… The whole point was we’re making a portrait of the world in which people from all over the world…
S: Essentially share the same culture.
A: Share the same culture, which happens to be the American-dominated one. That’s the kind of realistic portrait whereas hundreds of these World, like Douchy-Doouchy from Djibouti
S: And if you go to Djibouti…
A: They all drink Coke!
S: They drink Coke and listen to Destiny’s Child and they’re very happy. And we don’t want to say that’s good or bad but that’s the way it is. I mean we’re certainly not going to say it’s bad (like a lot of people, they say this is terrible) because that’s like saying that the people who like these things are stupid. We don’t think they are. The stance of this audio-document is very much in favour of globalisation and presenting an argument in favour. Now whether people want to see that as being in some way, you know, a stance that we’re taking, in some way ironic, is up to them; entirely irrelevant. But certainly from our point of view it’s entirely sincere. But the choice to not be trying to take cultural elements from these different places we visited was very very deliberate because we found… It’s not like we went out to tiny places in the countryside where we may have found whatever the kind of local folk-zither players were like. This was a journey around big big industrialised cities. And what we found was that what we saw in each one was mostly the same. There were variations, but they weren’t to do with local culture, they were more to do with shifts in political and economic geography rather than culture. Certainly the culture, the business culture would change from place to place but the actual artistic culture, for want of a better word, is very much now a sort of global dialogue.



Should they be taken at their word? Is this really a record promoting the benefits of global capitalism?

Perhaps better to take the quote "And we don’t want to say that’s good or bad but that’s the way it is" as the cue. It stands, it presents. But what do you make of it?

Musically, it purports to be representational - it's divided into two records, each with a side devoted to a port: so side (C), in three movements, 'describes' the leg of the journey that takes the duo to the Port of Rotterdam. Often, with its clean electronic sounds and guitar lines, its steady rhythms, this sounds like music that could work on some kind of high-class sales film or company induction video.

Peppered throughout are utterances like the following, disembodied, just capital thinking outloud:

"The good news is the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting richer too"

"Ten years ago, Ronald Regan was being toasted in Moscow"

"I believe that the genius of our system is that the founders set up checks and balances to limit our dependence on great leaders"

"Virtually every leading economic indicator is pointing in the right direction, the markets are up" (this on a song called 'The Long Boom')

Maybe the interview's part of the act, but in a way it's more interesting if they mean it. Because just by making you think about the big picture, this 'communicational sublime' as K-punk termed it in a Kraftwerk review, and which was developed here, it sets itself up to be investigated, challenged, thought through. Obviously, time and the global crash have magnified the Canute-like folly and pathos of that last quote from 'The Long Boom', but there's an undoubted Kraftwerkian melancholy about the (A)/Port of Yokohoma sequence. Then there's the exaggerated gameshow positivity of Port of Dubai, which sounds like the theme from Blockbusters.

Also as they acknowledge in the quote above, that music doesn't sound as though it necessarily needed to have been made in the part of the world it was recorded in, it isn't ethnographical. In fact, it erases ethnicity - 'local culture' just adds flavour to the business transactions, all you need to do is... break the ice?. This is relevant while the positives or otherwise of deterritorialization are being discussed.

This is the sublime of Capitalism - the lack of sense of effort, of manpower, everything glides, there's no hint of a human presence on the Maersk ship you see on the sleeve. The only struggle is to unblock the lines, maintain the flow.

"In order to continue to grow its economy, Dubai... must resist pressures to impose unnecessary regulatory burdens on corporations"

"The Port of Yokohoma... faces serious challenges in the long run. Hamstrung by restrictive Japanese labour laws, complex environmental regulation and a high federal tax burden, Yokohoma finds it often cannot compete with ports such as Manila and Taipai"

Everything must flow.

*****

Side D ends with just the sound of the sea.

"The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in following years."