Cluster Fits @ The Foundry

By Londonist Last edited 180 months ago
Cluster Fits @ The Foundry

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The Foundry, it's the sort of pub you either love or loathe. It looks like an art student's squat, with dolls hanging by their necks from the ceiling, and anarchist posters on the walls. If you aren't afraid to drink outside the sterile environs of the chain pub, and have open enough ears to brave their sometimes aggressively eclectic music policy, then visit it.

Anyhoo, The Foundry has always had an interesting art policy, being in Shoreditch, you know. Its only proviso is that the work must not be funded by The Arts Council. This leads to the art of their walls being unfettered by such bourgeois conceits as genre, medium, and sadly sometimes quality.

We recently visited to behold a 'sketch jam' by Cluster Fits (almost getting sidetracked by the packed free poetry night in the basement, but that's The Foundry for you). This is an ever evolving, mutating mural on one of the walls. It's a bit like the development of a wall of graffiti shown at high speed. The drawing style? Comic book graphic art. With hoodies in gas masks, army snipers, ladybirds, and even one of the Furry Freak Brothers in a spacesuit. While this may seem like the sort of thing you'd expect to see if you put some artistically talented stoners in a white walled room, with marker pens, it fits the Foundry well, and they have an anti-preciousness sadly lacking from a lot of art.

If you head down tonight, you'll get to hear them doing a sort-of-electronic-space-jazz-improvisation-music performance with clarinet. This will be broadcast on the 'if Radio 3 did pirate radio' excellence of Resonance FM.

Cluster Fits at The Foundry, 84-86 Great Eastern Street, until 29 March.

By Oliver Gili

Last Updated 27 March 2009