Music plays a pivotal role in many people’s lives as part of everyday popular culture because it is so unmediated. At times as a real world, at others as a reflecting surface for one’s own and others’ projections, music provides scope for manifold liberating, activist or subversive strategies at a far remove from consumption or glamour.

Just Play – Music as Social Praxis discusses music as an open system, as a field for potential connections and dissociations, feedbacks and appropriations; as myth and the possibility of freedom and scope, of authenticity and commitment, of enthusiasm and alternative action. The works shown are about a social praxis that raises issues relevant to society as a whole rather than merely exposing the usual market mechanisms or deconstructing symbols and signs. Music becomes the vehicle for constructing identity and différance, orientation and dislocation, collectivity and individuality.

So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached from belief.