Brighton
18 October 2018
After Iglooghost’s live show I was sat up in bed, unable to sleep, furiously making notes and trying to find out exactly why I found this show so brilliant, significant and ground breaking. I still haven’t got to the bottom of it, and I have a strong suspicion if the artist himself read this review he would conclude that I had totally overthought the whole thing, but nevertheless I will share my ideas as best as I can.
Iglooghost — essentially — makes electronic music, manic, Technicolor music which reflects a hypersonic world of dreamlike overstimulation. To accompany this music, Iglooghost has created a world we are brought into through every aspect of the show. The most remarkable thing to me was the interdimensionality of it; the desktop interface projected as live visuals is twisted to be curiously Iglooghostly… we are led to believe the interface is being used to create the music in real time. I assume it’s just artwork and not a functioning interface, although part of me wouldn’t be surprised if he had created that too, being responsible for all the music and visuals.
The aesthetic of Iglooghost is as unsettling as it is innocent; concepts of the biological and the spectral digital world are combined, digital eggs are accidentally downloaded and “birthed”, certain windows on the screen create noises through random bubbling, fruits are electrocuted and used to power tamagotchis… The idea that excited me most (causing me to try to get notes down in my phone whilst negotiating a surprise circle pit) is that Iglooghost’s live show manages to create its own reality whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the artifice of our own. Its made-up languages and symbols echo our own layer upon layer of symbolism, far removed from the physical items they once referred to.Iglooghost’s “grid” reflects the endless digital interfaces we can seemingly swim through to eternity in computer games and artificial living spaces. The world draws from reference points accumulated online in hyperspeed, every second of our information intake these days is nuanced with branding, every pixel in the colour palette imbued with meaning. The way we communicate with each other and hope to understand ourselves in digital hybrid reality… it’s a complicated thing. Iglooghost is one of the only projects which is coming close to comment on the complexities and confusion in experiencing and understanding current “reality”.
Peak Iglooghost reminds me of how white light is made of all colours at once, the intensity and mania of it levels out into a single pure thing, the simplicity of his fairytale world simultaneously incorporating such vast concepts as the call to the void and the veil of reality, calling to universal primal emotions which are shared by all humans at some stage.Iglooghost fans are fully invested in this world, possibly relating to the Technicolor flickering on-and-off apathy/terror of the chronically overstimulated. Or I don’t know, they just really like it. Cheering at some characters, actively scared of others, singing along to every word in the made-up language of a made-up world. The world which is being communicated seems to resonate with the rapidly transforming human experience. At twenty-one Seamus Mallagh, has a stunning mind, he has created a stunning world, and I can’t wait to see what he does with it from here.
-Megan Clifton-
