ALABASTER DEPLUME

Over the past decade, musician and activist Alabaster DePlume has become central to the new London jazz scene, even if his musical only sometimes operates within the genre. Operating out of Total Refreshment Centre in Dalston, DePlume has developed his own compositional practice, working with a rotating lineup for his unrehearsed live performances. In conversation, DePlume is beguiling and earnest, and prone to redirecting questions about his work towards broader theories of life and performance. TANK spoke to DePlume about his philosophy and his upcoming performance at RALLY. Listen to his short piece “A perspective on live development” on our Soundcloud below. 

TANK Your music is made in a collective manner. What are the results of this work?
ADP The greatest things we do are invisible to us, and the worst things too. I can't know nor control the results of this work. With anything involving people, they will decide what the meaning of it is. They're going to do what they want to do and I want them to. All I can concern myself with is where I am coming from.

TANK What you're describing is an antidote to the idea of individual talent. Intention can come from the individual, but the work comes collectively. Is that correct?
ADP We're going to have a good chat that you’re going to make it into a piece of work. The more of you that we can have in this piece, the happier I will be. It’s a short fucking life and living involves suffering. When you’re driving a car, we don't look at the car, we look where we go. If you continuously look down at the car, you crash the car. What I'm really doing is not selling records, nor is it about me looking good. It’s not about me at all actually: it’s about getting out of the way of the song. The great thing wants to happen; let us allow it to happen. 

TANK Has that always been your philosophy or have you arrived at that philosophy over time?
ADP I'm arriving all the time. Every time I say “I”, I am talking about a different person, but I think it's just becoming more clear. The more I relinquish this work, the more I find what I must stand by and the more I must face myself.

TANK I'm intrigued by your use of the word work: does it feel like work to you?
ADP Mayakovsky says the art is not a mirror to reflect the world, it's a hammer with which to shape it. Work is a word I’d like to reclaim. In industrial times, “work” was all the shit things you had to do to get money. I see my works as my influence on this world, in this time that I have on it. We tend to conflate capitalism with work, like capitalism is what happens naturally, that anytime you do any kind of business, you're being a capitalist. I can do great business without being a capitalist: business can be making activity sustainable. Most capitalist policies, I would say, are bad for business.

TANK Here's another word for you: resistance. Your records and your recent trip to the West Bank reflect a kind of resistance. Resistance implies a struggle, a potentially unyielding quality, but your work is imbued with a gentler sensibility.
ADP We can tend to be brittle in our resistance. Brittle things snap. Resistance is a response to something, so do we want to find ourselves on the back foot responding? Are we talking about resistance or are we talking about defiance, or are we talking about the natural, positive future that we seek to create? Are we getting caught up in the identity of resistance? Do we want to resist or do we want to insist? There is so much to say about the defiance of this settler colonial racist European project that you mentioned. As if I did anything about it: I went on holiday. But that is doing something about it, to go on holiday. The truth is, there is something you can do. I see us walking around going, Oh, but there's nothing I can do, what a shame. What a shame it would be if the Israeli state visited the same genocide upon the Gaza, and then expanded that to Jordan, Lebanon, and the West Bank. This issue in Palestine is the same issue that we face. Other issues around the world are embodied in this moment, in the annexation and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

TANK You've spoken about the necessity for reinvention within human experience and your experience of having lived multiple lives, the silhouettes of which you have tattooed on your arm. Reinvention implies a severing of what came before, leaving something behind. Do you grieve those past selves? 
ADP I killed the people who I had been, killed them, rejected them and denied them. When somebody or something rejects you, in response, you reject yourself. I put them on a tattoo because actually, they were not so bad. We don't need to be nasty about them anymore. These are not the only selves I have been. We are always growing. Love always lasts, it's people who don't last. We don't want people to last, we want them to grow. Do I grieve? Yes, certainly, but sweetly. I lost my friend Jackie Hagen recently. Jackie was a poet, and she got a very strange illness where they had to keep amputating things. They had to chop her leg off, and while she was in the hospital she wrote a play called Some People Have Too Many Legs. She was an amazing, incredible human being. My friend told me “She came to do something and now she's done it.” It’s the same with these lives I’ve lived. I was talking about nostalgia the other day, and it's like an illness. Unless you're consciously, actively enjoying it, like, oh, how sweetly I miss that thing. 

TANK You spent time working with adults with developmental disabilities. What did that period teach you?
ADP Ten years ago when I started that job, I thought I was getting a job to make money, but that school taught me the greatest things – things that I'm using when interacting with you now. My team leader Maureen knew that I wanted to make music, that I loved performance and was quite theatrical, and that I've got a capacity for bringing people together in a group. We would organise group sessions for making music and I would work extra hard to make that happen. The situation required me: the work I was doing I had to be me to do it. 

TANK How do you relate to the idea of finality in music, if it is part of a constantly modular process?
ADP There’s that quote “a work of art is never completed, only abandoned”. We talk about spiritual music as if some music is spiritual, and some is not. I think a moment is spiritual. Every piece of music has its time in this life, on this Earth. You might be in that time and you might not. Is it good music or bad music? Well, is it good for what? Some music is perfect in some settings and some music is shit in the moment. Making a tune is like how we present ourselves to someone. When we’re insecure, we will want to present ourselves as complete. If we are more sound with ourselves, we might present ourselves as incomplete. I love making a tune with something slightly wrong with it. That’s the hook that catches you.

TANK RALLY is partnering with lots of grassroots organisations across London, South London in particular. Other than the Total Refreshment Centre, what were some grassroots community organisations or platforms that inspired you across your career?
ADP There’s a bunch of people up in Sheffield with a magazine called Now Then. Debt Records in Manchester, not exactly a record label, just a bunch of characters getting together. Louis Barabbas, who’s up in Scotland now, was running that whole thing. PIANODROME in Edinburgh. They built a geodesic dome out of upcycled pianos which you can play. Once again, we return to the word “work”. Work is our excuse to connect. When we used to do a show, like the one we did in Koko, I could work on it in a different way than anywhere else because Koko was where I was connected to the different communities and could bring them together. The task itself is nice, but it's an excuse. It's the piece of filth in the oyster that becomes the pearl.

RALLY will be hosted at Southwark Park on 24th August.