Exhibition - Mark Leckey: 3 Songs from the Liver

Three songs, not from the heart, as I don’t wish to be too sentimental. Nor from the intellect, I don’t want to be too discursive. No, these three songs - and by songs I mean they are short and musical - originate in the liver. The liver was once thought to be a kind of screen for mental images, like a mirror or a pool.

For the past eight years I’ve had a regular slot on the London radio station, NTS and this show has come about through that involvement in music.

To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) The bus stop smash was posted on uk-bants and I wanted this squalid little act, ****** in its resolution, to become immense. Exulted, meaning to ‘leap up’ or ‘leap out’: So, for me he exults through the bus stop.

Carry Me into The Wilderness came about at the end of lockdown when I went for a walk in my local park at Alexandra Palace. I was pushing the pram and listening to music and when the sun came out I was overcome with a kind of tremendous muchness, an excess of everything that was almost unbearable, though tolerable enough that I managed to record this experience on my phone.

At that time I was fixated on Byzantine icons and very taken with the notion that they are not an image, or a picture, but a window through which we can mediate between material reality and disembodied realms, and between distant persons and ourselves.

Mercy I Cry City is a city that existed before the invention of single point perspective and will be built after that perspective has exhausted itself.

I don’t actually know where this city is. It could be underwater or in outer space, it could be from within or without and it could be a city whose population has transcended all current human concerns.

All three songs are about the point of dissolution. The meaning of Ecstasy is to be displaced, literally to be removed from out of the place you stand. Intense emotions, that make you unstable, untethered, that remove from your normal place of function and towards something groundless, without horizon or a z-axis.

—Mark Leckey