Rapture is two. Two years spent celebrating grassroots artistry over 45 features.

It’s got me thinking about the number two. Small and mostly unassuming, but more intriguing when you look at what it becomes as pairs and duos. So, what’s there to really say about twos?

Company, closeness, security, sentimentality. Pairs are two things made for each other, functioning at their best together. But two also creates the opportunity for contrast and conflict to creep in. For all its harmony, two invites comparison, imbalance and even the possibility that something else might be missing.

With these meditations on twos in mind, what about these twos?

One of my favourite bands is The KVB, a Berlin-based dynamic audio-visual pair making cold-wave, shoegaze beats with effortless cool. I first saw them back in 2017 in the live room that once lived above The Joker. The immense sound emanating from partners Nicholas Wood and Kat Day still lives in my memory as one of the best shows I’ve seen in Brighton: loud, experimental and totally enveloping. A duo locked in sound.

Although the gig lives on, the live space does not. It has long since disappeared, replaced by a glossy cocktail bar and private hire space. This isn’t the only grassroots bar/venue lost in the city centre, with Bleach above the Hare and Hounds across the road and Sticky Mike’s off the seafront being two more sore losses. Sadly, not all pairings last.

There are almost too many twos in art to know where to begin. But the first that spring to mind show two sides of the pair, and in doing so, become a pair of their own.

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt depicts two figures dissolving into one another, cloaked in ornamental gold, lost in a fantastical meadow of mythical harmony. The world around them falls away. They are the world.

In contrast, René Magritte’s The Lovers II shows two figures attempting the same closeness, and failing. Their faces are covered with deathly grey shrouds, their kiss denied and desire unfulfilled. The lovers are unable to truly touch or communicate. Any shred of feeling is absent.

Two kisses of two kinds. One overflows with love, the other stands stark and rigid. One dispels distance whilst the other creates it. Perhaps neither extreme is really to be aspired to. Such harmony risks diluting into excess and feigned intimacy risks becoming a permanent state.

Songs return to two time and time again, with love and with rupture. Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ captures the heartwrenching, soul-shattering longing that comes when one half of a pair disappears. Blur’s ‘Song 2’ is the opposite: a short, sharp burst of exhilaration, the “woohoo” of when pairs are working in tandem.

More recently, there’s Wolf Alice’s ‘Just Two Girls’.

Although it’s perhaps my least favourite track on The Clearing, it’s one that holds value far beyond its catchy chorus. It’s about the joy and assurance of female friendship, and reminds me how important it is for girls and women to nurture those relationships in a world that often pits us against one another - “she’s too this,” “she’s too that.”

As a young teen, I adored Wolf Alice when they arrived with their debut EP Blush, then drifted away. Looking back, I can uncomfortably recognise that internalised misogyny may have been lurking; a subconscious conditioning that encourages criticism of other girls, usually for their talents or boldness characterised as “too much.” It’s an insidious lesson absorbed early and often, shaped by the media, politics and the world around us. Thankfully, the veil lifts, and most young girls unlearn those false ideas as they grow up.

The best song on the album is ‘White Horses’. But there’s no two in that. So ‘Just Two Girls’ will do.

2 Tone built itself on contrast, used radically to bridge differences and create a new subculture that bled into pop culture.

2 Tone sounds fused Jamaican ska and reggae beats with punk and new-wave overtones, creating a sound that was celebratory and defiant. It became the soundtrack for multicultural youth to come together and express themselves through their shared style of slick suits, pork pie hats and checkerboard imagery. The stark black-and-white aesthetic of 2 Tone was a visual identity and a statement of unity across race, politics and music - the antidote to the rise of the National Front in 1970s Britain.

Two, here, becomes a refusal to be divided. Nothing says this better than that image from 2017: Saffiyah Khan calmly smiling in the face of an EDL protester, wearing a The Specials T-shirt.

Two also finds its sweet spot in food. Specifically, two doughnuts from the seafront kiosk that feels like stepping back in time, The Beach Hut Cafe. The doughnuts arrive big and hot, glistening in cinnamon sugar, almost too good to eat.

They’re best eaten whilst sat on their rickety metal bistro chairs, watching the murmurations that arrive in November and February. Hundreds of starlings folding, twisting and expanding across the sunset skyline in impossible formations. Not a two, but a huge, shifting organism made of many small birds. A pair of doughnuts in your hands, a collective overhead.

Perhaps the most interesting pair of all is monologue and dialogue. We’ve all been in conversations that lean more towards one than the other. It happens.

But writing complicates this distinction. An essay appears at first to be a monologue; a single contemplative voice attempting to convey an idea to a reader. In doing so, the solo writer must engage with an inner dialogue, questioning, refining, arguing with themselves to arrive somewhere coherent. 

The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin said that meaning emerges through dialogue, through the interaction of voices, even when only one is visible. Writing is full of invisible exchanges between ideas, drafts, the writer and the imagined reader.

Writing becomes a kind of internal duet. A monologue on the surface, a dialogue underneath, and a new dialogue once it’s read, absorbed and pondered by another.

Two years in, it feels fitting to think about twos. 

I’ve learned that the most interesting things rarely exist alone or without a collaborative spark. 

Meanings emerge in the spaces between things.

Thoughts always welcome - meg@rapturemag.com