"Beneath this charged surface, writes Laura Grace Ford in her zine collection Savage Messiah, 'You can hear deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping out across the abandoned caverns, the derelict bunkers and broken terraces....' These spaces are reshaped by music, and among them you will find the tapped energy of the Victorian railway arch, of which there are many, both sides of the river."
"Acting as a brake in the ceaseless ebb and flow of commerce, the archways on these transit routes come with a readymade darkness and genuinely shadowy ambience, sending out siren calls to the experimental and the underground, and they are still - more than 150 years after their fabrication - places where interesting things happen. At Elephant & Castle station on Elephant Road, South East London, is a string of graffitied arches that are home to small businesses like TR Autos."
"'This is the third arch I've worked in, in my 20 years of night club management,' Corsica venue manager Jamie Shearer tells me. 'It feels underground, dingy, off the grid.' 'It feels like you're in a basement, even though you're not in a basement,' adds Laura Krull, who has worked at the club for four years."
London's restless surface of traffic, people and construction conceals deserted, derelict spaces with a shadowy ambience. Victorian railway arches create atmospheric, subterranean-like sites that attract experimental and underground music. The archways act as brakes on commercial flow and remain creative places more than 150 years after construction. A cluster of graffitied arches at Elephant & Castle hosts small businesses and Corsica Studios. Corsica Studios was founded by Amanda Moss and Adrian Jones and moved to these arches in 2002 after losing previous premises. The main studio contains black panelling, heavy-duty pipework, lighting rigs, a bar, a smaller dancefloor and a green room.
Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music
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