While fans and critics obsess over a batch of new British upstarts, the eccentric Charlie Osborne is quietly sculpting her own universe out of music, film, installations, and theater.
When I first saw Charlie Osborne, she was at C3, an underground Milanese venue co-run by a couple of people formerly involved in the huge, legendary Macao squat. She performed inside a courtyard in front of a mural of a grinning face by local artist Pietro Agostoni. Everything began quite rigid and quiet, but soon the dramaturgy ramped up. At one point she screamed into the mic while standing totally still, then played a mechanical, 808-driven track, chanting in whispers. Suddenly, she pulled out a latex mask and held it up, away from herself, toward the half-circle crowd forming around her. She didn’t interact with the mask, which looked like an old man with empty black eye sockets, but let him observe the crowd as they stared back transfixed.
The crowd was torn between awe and suspicion, not really sure what was happening but still intrigued, bobbing their heads to the sounds. Even though this show was one of her simplest, it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. When I saw her again in Basel, she was already doing something completely different.
While London’s underground is absolutely thriving right now, some fans and critics are missing the genius burbling beneath the surface. Next to near-mainstream rappers like fakemink and Esdeekid, or the attention-grabbing duos NEW YORK and Rat Section, there’s a smaller scene that Charlie is part of. This includes artists like the rave duo Bassvictim, harmonica-playing sound collagist Worldpeace DMT, sample-based screamo artist 300skullsandcounting, underground-one-hit-wonder The Femcels, scary-looking weirdo-indiesleazer Oatmilkandcodeine, and drumset-juggler Ship Sket.
“Most gallery shows that are legit seem so boring to me because I’m just like, fuck,” Charlie Osborne tells me. “I just listened to my friend’s track last night and it’s got way more about it than this whole solo show!”
What separates Charlie Osborne is her narrative ecosystem. At only 25, she’s built a multiverse out of video, performance, poetry, installations—a magic cauldron spewing everywhere. She only started making music three years ago, having mostly focused on film while studying at Central Saint Martins school and Camberwell in London. Her videos took up simple motifs from local legends, internet culture, and night-bus poetry, distorting them into absurdist narratives that hint at characters, emotions, and stories. One of those is Old Town, a film that featured in an exhibition curated by Mark Leckey, where a Smurf couple argues and hugs; some characters do the Polish polonaise in a sea of foam in front of a stage that looks like it belongs in a school theater.
She’s also worked on installations, like a chair whose wood-metal base is pierced by arrows, which she did for a show at the Piccalilli Gallery in London. The sculpture made me think of Anna Uddenberg’s Continental Breakfast, which looks like a carseat for babies and is mostly presented with female performers that lay in it in an uncomfortably voyeuristic way. Osborne’s work feels like it has much more subjectivity. It seems like a deconstructed version of a spatial narrative, like a memory that is only partly available, that abstracts and mutates itself in a dreamy surreal way.
With music, she expands into poetic lyrics sung, murmured, or howled; lively electronics with a variety of genre references: metal vocals, bedroomy textures, grimy grunge riffs. “Sync-Up,” the first track of her EP Finding Melody Pt. 2, throws unmastered vocals over well-mixed distorted guitars. There’s a daunting theatrical aspect to the music that forms through energetic build-ups, like in “stuck in a rut,” which starts with guitar chords before slowly adding more elements, eventually spiraling into an emotional firework of confusion and anxiety. The compositional cherry on top is a harmonica that fidgets alongside Charlie’s screams.
Earlier this month, I hopped on FaceTime to unpack the ever-evolving logical chaos of her artistic practice. She was in the kitchen of a friend’s place, a white room with a beautiful window in the back, where she was working on her next video project. Once in a while, she sips from a cup. When I ask a question, her eyes flash and her head quickly goes off, then the thoughts and images bubble out of her.
Elia Brülhart: How are you experiencing the current musical underground in London right now?
Charlie Osborne: Lots of amazing stuff is getting made here. It took a while for me to find where that sits within where I live. But all of a sudden, it was just happening. And I think we are all working really hard, and people are accessing it, which is really cool. The work is just so multifaceted. It’s mishmashing so many genres and modes of thinking. That’s why most gallery shows that are legit seem so boring to me because I’m just like, fuck, I just listened to my friend’s track last night and it’s got way more about it than this whole solo show!
How did you start including music in your work?
Charlie Osborne: Every art project I’ve presented and given in an exhibition has come with music. There’s the process of soundtracking your objects, your writing or your performance. It feels incomplete to me if I don’t have music involved.
Before I started producing, I was never musically trained and totally at a stage of being unaware that you could basically just make music from your laptop. I asked my boyfriend at the time what route I should take to successfully process my ideas into music, and he recommended GarageBand. I still make my demos on it, and I finish them with Logic or something like that, either on my own or with the support of other producers like Ship Sket and WorldPeaceDMT.
How do you feel about genres?
Charlie Osborne: I’m not caring for genre as a label for my work. But I’m interested in genres being drivers for my sense of materiality. Sometimes I’m able to bring genre into the art before the music’s even made because I’m using genre before academia or art movement reference points. I’m asking myself questions like: What does it look like if I want to make a bunch of objects that maybe come from, like, heavy metal?
So, you use them as referential elements to build your sound?
Charlie Osborne: Exactly. I’m interested in them as a construction tool. It starts in formation, implementation of mood and feeling, followed by constructing and directing them. I’m always conducting something with other people and their collaborations with me, or with this one idea that I continuously develop and stretch. Maybe a film project comes at the end of it or a set of performances.
So, it’s important that your practice keeps evolving and adapting?
Charlie Osborne: Yes, I mean, I sometimes admire, as well as feel confused by certain artists who are making music and performances following certain formulas and then presenting this formula. And if you saw them in another space, maybe half a year later, it’s still quite similar. And I feel like my stuff’s way more reactive. So if I’ve ingested a certain piece of text or movie I’ve seen or a conversation with my collaborators… within a few days of workshopping and studio time, the formula and the construction has again totally shapeshifted.
How do your different practices co-exist?
Charlie Osborne: Once when I arrived at a space, I heard a friend say, ‘Charlie will be over there, doing her clown show,’ but in reference to like oh, yeah. I’ll be over there, embarrassing myself.
Because that’s quite literally what I will be doing, when I get on stage sometimes. And I think this position as a clown really has become quite strong in the work and it is a mask that fits. There are some alter egos being defined over the years depending on what project or what side of the practice I’m working on.
How important are personal themes in your work?
Charlie Osborne: It’s always from a personal place. A key central character appearing in my work, who comes in different shapeshifting forms, will forever be my dad. I find it near impossible to not pull from somewhere personal. I also think if a work lacks this, it’s the removal of spirit, and that’s again the removal of humanism.
For me, the world is split between being extremely dangerous and scary to being extremely beautiful. I kind of toy with this darkness that appears in the streaks of the work, not because we need more of that in this world, but because that’s how I’m feeling, and I hope that by the time it gets regurgitated into a medium of music or film, it’s touching people.
You’ve talked about this world you’re building and referred to yourself or your dad as characters in it. How does this world work?
Charlie Osborne: I guess it works within a kind of law of logical chaos. There’s always reasons and justifications why that specific person is there, but there’s fact and fiction wrestling with each other. Generally, I think it’s just lots of writing development. Something like the dad as a character was a little bit hidden at first and now it’s kind of being celebrated that he’s in there. And so, characters come in different forms of hierarchy in a way.
For example, we’ve got the sub scene of the disenfranchised grunge emo kids being always there somehow. And then there’s also, the crush or the partner or the love that that can be split into, like, two people that’s maybe not even about me and that person.
And how do you create those characters?
Charlie Osborne: I find them mostly through people I know and on YouTube, and then they go fictional. For this part I work mostly lyrical, but for example, there’s this one image that became so stamped as the start of “Finding Melody,” these kids in a car park that I found a video of on YouTube. And I don’t even think they’re a couple in the video. They are just hugging one another, and I just was playing with washing it out to the point where it’s really blurred as two people, a guy with very long black hair, hugging a girl with a side fringe and an Alice band.
Are you working on any new projects?
Charlie Osborne: Yes, a series of new video works, one of which I’ll be working on in another meeting immediately after this, plus a performance.
“For me, the world is split between being extremely dangerous and scary to being extremely beautiful. I kind of toy with this darkness that appears in the streaks of the work, not because we need more of that in this world, but because that’s how I’m feeling, and I hope that by the time it gets regurgitated into a medium of music or film, it’s touching people.”