TITLE: BLACKHAINE EXPORT
DATE: 18-11-24
TIME: 15:01
AUTHOR: FIN COUSINS
3D VISUALS: FIORELLA DE CARO
DESIGNER: YUSUF S. BOZKURT
IMAGE COUNT: 9
TAGS: X
I WASTELAND
Our first encounter with Tom Heyes, the artist also known as Blackhaine, was in the foyer of London’s Southbank Centre. It posed a contradiction: his first performance in reference to his upcoming project, God’s Country, in a room named after Queen Elizabeth II. The space was stark and sanitised, with geometric skylights and béton brut surfaces. Austere, but oddly ornate. An aesthetic undercut by Heyes’ performance, which opened with footage from his visual art piece Statistic. It depicts a system ridden with decades of dereliction, violence and erasure. His silhouette watches over the night sky from a window. Police drag a writhing body into a van. Luminescent neon uniforms cast dread over dark streets. The anxiety is palpable, you can almost smell it. A potent scent, caught in the nostrils. Red flares hang in the air, swirl into smog. Two cars circle each other, filling a Tesco car park with tyre smoke.
A monologue from Alan Clarke’s 1983 film Made in Britain is threaded through strings. It decries an education and justice system built to decay.
“You’re on the bandwagon, boy. And you won’t get off… round and round you go”.
As the speech unfolds, frequent collaborator Bruxism flails against a concrete pillar on screen. When Heyes appears, he also disappears, folding himself over barricades, curling into foetal position. He strikes his temple with a microphone, his body pulled from all sides: the force of the crowd, his own involuntary movements. It’s a tensile performance of Clarke’s torsional “round and round”. In the sterile foyer, this subversive corporeality seems to whisper phantoms. The country haunts him, and he haunts it back. A movement made by Britain.
II BANDAGED
“My heart and my thoughts are in this country. All the time”.Tom Heyes has become an inimitable multi-hyphenate. A taxonomy-defying choreographer, dancer, artist and musician, kept on speed dial by industry giants and tapped by art institutions across the globe. But he’s clear to state that the increased attention away from Manchester and Preston, his hometown, has not been at the cost of his love for the scene that nurtured his emergence. He’s still flanked by Space Afrika, Rainy Miller, Croww, Iceboy Violet and others, a group that has been bestowed with the daunting responsibility of pushing the cultural climate of the North-West past the Madchester scene that has droned monotonously in the backdrop for decades. “This city used to mean something”, Heyes says. “It’s not as if I’m trying to bring back the glory days, but I’m sick of people talking about fucking Oasis”. While he’s sure not to draw comparisons, the upcoming project title perhaps signifies an acceptance of this responsibility.
‘God’s country’ is a phrase many British people have a conflicted relationship with. It stems from regional pride, but also has spiritual roots, connected to divine providence, describing a blessed land. “It revisits the moors”, he explains. “It’s existential, it always has been. When I was first thinking about it, it was a metaphor for desperation”. As pre-packaging, it appears to be a politically overt title from an artist who tends to let visceral performance art to do the talking, “God’s country is inverted now. I say it out of spite. There are riots on the streets, there’s all these people dying. Poverty is the worst it’s been in 40 fucking years”.
From the ashes, he creates an acute contradiction: the charged phrase paints a picture of a person clinging to something abstract and immaterial, something that was never truly there—a contrast to the concrete, bodily material his practice often grapples with.
In Heyes’ oeuvre, geography is not an abstraction; it’s physicality. It exists inside the body, often, it is the body. Coordinates, grids and digital locales morph into a limblike topography, where arterial roads can be traced as veins and railways are aortas carrying blood, yearning to remain alive. “Cracked glass on the tray, palms bleeding on the train, Salford city getting maimed”, he spits on the cerebral, murmuring ‘Hotel’ from 2021, his voice splintering with digitised stutters. He emits a deflating whistle after the first iteration of this line, like a slow release of air from the body. The punctured wound of a city doubled over, convulsing, becoming limp. Much of his erratic production choices feel like this: scarred, knitted up and bandaged. His voice nestles in the rubble, the remains falling apart in his hands.
This is an uncovering of erasure, a violence silently exercised against a place and its people. It’s an evaporating, ghostly violence; iterative and endless. The kind of violence that drove Andreas Malm to argue that violence against property is legitimate, a way of biting back. But within the inversion of God’s Country, “there’s still hope”, Heyes reflects, “it’s not a 2D sketch”. Perhaps these lacerations are more like dehiscence—a partial healing or total separation of a wound’s edges. Improperly healed, but capable of healing. “I am trying to find hope. A lot of the music I’ve recorded from the God’s Country sessions is, to me, with hope for a better England”.
III IMMERSANTS
At Berlin Atonal 2023, Heyes took to the stage of Kraftwerk, a former power station, to unload a performance sequence titled ‘Paith’. A hooded figure circled him, wrestling with the garment, contorting it into an object half-worn. The figure acted as his misshapen shadow, a flawed contour, but another double appeared on screen above the stage: footage of Heyes circling the inside of a shipping container, ricocheting off the walls and curling back against them, as though his stomach had been slashed. The three images—Heyes, shadow, and digital double—begged questions of exportation: of art inside packaging, how form is constrictive, and how it must be challenged.
Wrestling with constraint has always been a focus for Heyes and his collaborators. His work with Preston-born producer and vocalist Rainy Miller, encompassing the Armour duology and And Salford Falls Apart, were early signs of his desire to create a new avant-garde for the North-West. In TWIST 003, when we spoke to Miller, he appeared an artist obsessed with curation and art direction as methods of subverting genre and packaging, a way of ripping into new horizons. “He’d seen me do my thing”, Heyes recounts, on the subject of their co-creation. “We were talking about our direction. I had the ideas of where I wanted to go, I had the lyrics. It was only after the first two shows I did that I thought, I want my thing to be more of a feeling”. Their synergy makes sense: Miller’s sharp production and ability to skew projects into the left field works synergistically with Heyes’ focus on ‘feeling’, an affective practice which builds and expands ideas of what choreography is capable of—a blunted physicality that rises to the surface of muddied ambient synth layers and experimental drill. Together, they create an obliteration of any preconceived vessels. The shipping container is the enemy.
Heyes’ musicality is designed to impose this restructuring. It reaches for fluidity and blurriness, regardless of vehicle. “Taking the medium out, a lot of it is formless. When I first started, I didn’t like rapping on beats per se. It just became about going, if it’s a 32 bar, I’ll try eight flows or change the rhyme scheme, so it’s still formless”. This defiance of structure creates a primordial site of becoming. A vacancy that, as a listener or viewer becomes immersed, promises new structures to emerge: a network where any element can latch to any other.
Beyond coherent structure and adherence to bar formats, Heyes’ vocals lean into the anatomical: guttural screams and expulsions that drive beyond the paraverbal, into the ingrown somatics of trauma, the kind of pain Elaine Scarry described as ‘language destroying’, pre-linguistic and inexpressible. The orality unearthed evades interpretation; the snarls are as important as the words—a series of nonlinear reactions that piece a flurry of images into an assemblage. A veiled panorama of frayed objects, feathered susurrations, and apparitions of blood, razors, hotel rooms, enclosed spaces. Powdered substances strewn across tables, bleak allusions to the North and to cold, dark streets. They mingle together into an elusive substance, a swirl of noir aesthetics and affects.
Painting is a useful means to decipher this process. It’s a medium Heyes continually references when picking apart his practice. Of all his projects, Armour 2 is the most intelligible, its narrative built around a car crash, but he’s leaning further away from this early arrangement. “After Armour 2, I was like, fuck, man, I want to be able to make people in pain. I was mostly getting booked for art venues at the time. They do not want to hear ‘Stained Materials’. I was looking at Francis Bacon paintings and thinking, I want to make that”. Unpeeling his output, Heyes’ performances and vocals can be read as ekphrasis—a writing device that describes a scene or artwork, creating an encounter between visual and verbal representation; an impressionistic piecing together of motifs that reflect on how a painting acts, to expand and amplify the original image. He sets them in motion, creating an ever-expanding series of responses, revelling in painful slippages between source and subject.
Nowhere is this idiosyncratic practice more evident than in the ventures into noise. Heyes’ live shows often throw off beat structures and song transitions in favour of a dissociative noise music with its roots in Throbbing Gristle, Coil and Merzbow. Early works like the cyclonic And Salford Falls Apart and blistering diptych Did U Cum Yet / I’m Not Gunna Cum, a collaboration with Richie Culver, were initial stirrings for his more recent work. The short film and self-produced soundtrack And Now I stand on a Hill, released in 2024, signals an intensifying pursuit of noise, with amorphous synths and chords that relocate and punctuate passages read by an automated voice. It’s a move built from memory: “I was listening to a lot of Bill Dixon and going back to the music I first felt emotion for. I used to live next to Sub Dub in Leeds, which had that ‘70s dub sound. It’s still the most transformative experience of my life, the weight of it. I could feel the bass hitting me in my chest”.
Heyes has referenced Joseph Nechvatal’s 2011 text Immersion into Noise as an inspiration, a work that describes noise music as “art noise”, capable of strengthening our imagination, undercutting market dynamics and dismantling formal structures of creation. The immersant is both connected and disconnected; locked in a noise environment, they enter a trance state experienced as a form of dissolving. For both Nechvatal and Heyes, this space is latent with potential. “It’s deeper than rap”, he says. “It was feeling the weight of it, taking inspiration from dub sounds and mixing it with Artuad’s Theatre of Cruelty, to get people to break past the initial pain or disgust and get to a point where they hear the melodies inside the walls of the sound. Or they start to become numb and see past the anger”.
This is performance as transportation—a mobilisation that reaches for what Steve Goodman once described as the “not yet heard”. A resuscitative state where the many walls, rooms and enclosures no longer matter.
V THROUGH SHADOW
To be visible is to be controlled in the eye of another. It is, as Michel Foucault put it, “a trap”. Visibility often lends itself to categorising and stultifying. For an artist, perception and control of visibility are near impossible in an age where art evaporates from their hands, is wrenched away, scraped by the dark forests of the internet.
Heyes’ practice is partially defined by a desire to subvert and undercut visuality and presence. He frequently leans into the undiscovered and difficult to trace. His presence in Playboi Carti’s Opium label is elusive; a spectral battle cry across social media feeds that announced Carti’s 2024 singles, or a howling figure heralding live shows, his identity a site of intrigue for attendees. His large-scale choreography is similarly illusory, his body only just possible to glimpse among seething throngs of dancers’ bodies, mediated by the deluge of collective movement. At times, he’s a shadow of another artist, a mirror image of their movement, a companion, or an antonymic opposite.
This movement as collective form often displays strength in numbers, submerged beneath surveillance and pushing up against increasing demands for an artist’s visibility. Fans may have seen the Blackhaine alias mentioned in cross-Atlantic cosigns; they may have actively engaged with Heyes’ image strewn across digital media, in reputable culture magazines and platforms that whirr away in the background. But his focus on the communal over the singular pushes his practice away from being a focal point, and towards acting as physical scaffolding: a structure that creates locales of influence and resistance. It resembles what Michel de Certeau called tactics—ways of subverting the violence of the everyday, garnering small victories and moments of freedom.
The scene in the North-West carved out by Heyes and his peers has become a site for this performance tactic. Each artist has their own distinct qualities, but consciously or subconsciously, perhaps borne from a shared environment, they share a connective tissue: a world-building that unravels when traced. Heyes’ frequent citations of Theatre of Cruelty display the importance of physical performance spaces in this process. It’s ‘scene’ as scenography, a collective style that prioritises spectacles of hopelessness, torn images and the body in pain.
A study of this scene, published in DIY Alternative Cultures Journal by Steven Taylor in 2023, noted that Heyes and Rainy Miller often discuss their formative venues, The White Hotel and Soup Kitchen, or the small studio in which they recorded through lockdown, as infrastructure. As Taylor states, this creates a departure from views of what infrastructure constitutes in music circles: traditionally meaning access to expensive technical equipment, such as monitors, microphones, and synthesisers. In a time where artists can do so much with so little, the pair and their peers turned their focus to space. “We are all very informed by space in terms of practice. I don’t think I’d be here saying what I’m saying, making what I’m making, had I not been in that little box room, or on the balconies. I always want to be near balconies”.
Heyes’ artistry has gathered momentum and attention, but he still desires this state of compression. “In stadiums, I couldn’t give a fuck. There’s not the same heat from the body. It’s about familiarity, the smaller the spaces, the easier it is to confront what you’re trying to drag out of yourself. I can connect with people, I can look them in the eye, I can push them. That’s when this really feels like a thing”. This spatial practice creates an intimate quality in performance and inadvertently cultivates the images that define the movement, nurtured by old industrial sites, where the harshness of steel and exposed concrete creates an affective churn charged with cadence. But it’s also a movement that wants to constrain itself, to dwell in constriction.
This world-building, and the performances and flow of image-making that stem from it, is developing a house style. Increasingly, other distinctive performers appear to be responding to these images and experiences, creating a rhizome: a nonlinear network of refracted feedback. Taylor described witnessing Youth, a Manchester-based experimental outfit at Café Oto in London, where a performer, Yūgen Disciple, lurked in shadows behind an Apple MacBook, cloaked in a dark hoodie, scarf pulled over the lower half of his face. The scene isn’t just developing sonic references; it’s creating a visual archive of a performance style and tactics, of dark garments, murky presence, and hooded silhouettes.
The transgressive performance style Heyes has created uncloaks the inner workings of discipline. It creates new codes for performance—a subversion of uniform, a force that traditionally absorbs identity. In uniform, humans disappear, they become a reflection of a value system, a disposal body to be controlled, its demand of authority a never-ending site of contestation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his collaborations with Bruxism, which render both artists simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. Their clothing is dark and form-fitting, their heads shaved. They create a mirror image of each other, a tactic that pushes uniform to its limit. At Southbank, the pair’s physical similarities made the introduction to the performance, for any unfamiliar viewer, opaque.
“It’s 100% a uniform thing”, Heyes says. “But it’s also to create the idea of an any man. The lads I’ve come up with are all from my area. So, it’s to make us indistinguishable, even though we always will be, but I want it to be about the idea that this could be any guy”. This masculine sameness is strained and painful. It creates tight entanglements. Their bodies interlock in a despairing fight with no bell to sound a beginning, just a throbbing bodily uproar. There is never a winner. In Be Right Now / We Walk Away, the pair flank each other in a disused office complex, dim lights illuminating the space. Heyes incantates, his eyes closed, holding his arm as if wounded. The camera cuts and the two switch places: Bruxism squats, shields his forehead, before moving, his arms thrashing as if carried by strings.
It’s a wretched image.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be a bad man and all that. Now, suddenly, I’m considered an artist.But I’m more obsessed with the pathetic nature of it. Where I grew up, it was all big guys from Manchester, Liverpool, Ireland. We thought we were big guys, but we’re not”. Trespassing geographical boundaries, Heyes creates a vulnerable casket into which any man could step. But he also empties the fragile category of an ‘artist’, a label that is slippery and intangible—a status attached as quickly as it is seized and prised away.
This container resembles the modern idea of the ‘user’, an intense, floating depersonalisation of the digital age, one that turns us uniformly into products instead of people. Against the contradicting strategies of the world today, where atrocities are ever-more brutal, but simultaneously, increasingly virtual, abstracted and disavowed, Heyes creates a tactic of empowerment that displays the body, or the user, in a state of use. Or, even more violently, a pathetic state of being used.
V CASTAWAY
Water is often a symbol of the unconscious. We’re born into it; we live as it. It’s ours and the world’s. It fills us and knows our secrets. Water is a mass charged with emotion; it takes forms we call bodies—creeks, springs, streams, confluences. Heyes’ MIASMA and And Now I Stand On A Hill are visual and sonic works that centre water as bodily return. A synovial fluid, or an ouroboros, consuming us as we consume it.
In And Now I Stand On A Hill, his body is rendered formless by the sea, flowing among the froth and glitter of waves breaking. “It’s more psychedelic”, he notes. “What you see are refractions, ideas of isolation flashing through my head as I suffocate”. Isolation is also achieved in narrative structure: the piece is completely unanchored. There is no indication of how his body arrived at this place, nor is there a definitive end point. The only referents are the abandoned shorefront and the body, emerging from the ocean or submerged beneath it. Noise engulfs the middle section, and an automated voice yearns for water:
“My eyes only wander to the wall, about which I wish would burst with water. Thick water, made of feeling, dead water.” If this narrative centres the ocean as a suffocating mass into which the body, willingly or unwillingly, must return, MIASMA is its digital duplicate. A 3D render of Heyes’ body, designed by visual artist Hannah Rose Stewart, falls through a murky simulacrum of the ocean and is washed up on the shore—a desolate landscape with a decrepit pier, a symbol of abandoned architecture or, as Stewart put, a post-industrial urban corpse.
MIASMA was born from Heyes and Stewart’s fascination with egregores: a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals—here, a mediation of the Northern working class, Japanese dance theatre, and the simulated skeletal carcass of urbanisation. For Heyes, these elements capture a dissociative state, interrogating a worsening lack of control. “I was interested in creating something soulless. I wanted it to be soulless and lost.
It’s the same reason I put reverb on my voice sometimes, so it gets washed away”. Pulled together as a diptych, these two works don’t just display the convergence of land and sea; they enmesh the viscerally physical with the all-too-visceral digital. While sea levels rise and the world faces the threat of succumbing to water, the digital laps away at the mirror’s edge of reality in a simultaneous, ever-expanding submergence. Heyes’ suffocation continues on land, suggesting that perhaps there is no return. Perhaps we have gone too far. Perhaps we have already arrived.
The ocean has always been both hauntingly familiar and dauntingly unknown. Today, it is an ever-closer, but ever-more abstracted precipice. What was once JMW Turner’s turbulent watercolour is now the viral North Sea song. The ocean renders us passive onlookers, a state comparable to how we look upon the internet. A tide of violent information washes over us on the feed. Atrocities unfold numbly in front of our eyes, yet there’s a fascination to it. A kind of digital rubbernecking: the exponential worsening of traffic caused by drivers fixated on the rubble, each trying to catch a glimpse of the singed remains.
In a world plagued by abstracted proximity to atrocities, what does it mean to perform them? It’s a subversion comparable to God’s Country. In hydro-theology, we find in water everything we could ever want, traditionally God, but now expandable to nationhood, digital capitalism, the internet. An all-knowing ideology, something inside us all, there even when, and perhaps especially when, it seems absent.
In Heyes’ practice, this immersion is decoded: the body is torn apart, just as it tears itself apart. He reveals the inner workings of the struggle for an alternative—from confronting crowds to beating the inside of a shipping container or drowning in the ruins of a virtual world. It’s a praxis for how the body acts and is acted upon. How the audience watches, and what they yearn for when they leave.