presenting / stage

clippings ii [edit]

Soundhunt 26 / 11 / 23 linked to ‘Cambridge Jazz Festival’

Quartet: Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg (voice), Lawrence Casserley (signal processing instrument), Pascal Marzan (10 string microtonal guitar), and Philipp Wachsmann (violin) + trio N.O. Moore (guitar), Verity Lane (violin), and Douglas Benford (harmonium and objects).

Nathan started the evening speaking about the dangers of co-opting African-American culture in the form of jazz – offering up experimental traditions from Europe as alternative influences. There seems a general discomfort and maybe a little frustration with improvisations association with jazz. The first to play are the trio, followed by a short break then the quartet. The bands produce wonderful varieties of textures, atmospherics, and harmonics. There’s the occasional break out of eerie melody, contorted rhythms, rasping and plucking, everything is tried out – following trains of thought

Jean-Michel Van Schouwberg can be see on the ‘Berbarian Sound System’ – inspired by the crazy Italian horror films of the seventies – films like those of Lucio Fulci. His wide eyed gurning and gibbering and gobbling and clucking and… he runs through all the voices he can produce, framing them with snarls and stares. Eyes wide open, eyes barely open. It’s peculiar and brilliant. The band stir up some weird, affecting noise – flickering noises somewhat – he brings stagecraft as well as another range of textures to a remarkable sound.

It feels odd to be describing improvised music – it’s difficult to give it a form when it resists form – it’s difficult to pick out method or pinpoint results when each musician follows their own paths and goals while listening and responding to their fellows… it seems chaotic, to me it sounds chaotic, and I like it. My brain settles down with a little quietude – it’s nice. The music is alive in the moment and inspired by the moment – & there there’s almost a blank canvas and the musicians go to work on it with only skills and experience and instruments and their companions to work something out. It doesn’t lend itself easily to critique, after all to attempt something that may not achieve all you want it to is still to achieve something and each something is something, and each moment leads to something, and frankly criticising isn’t achieving much.

I’ve heard Nathan Moore play a number of times – I have recordings of him on cd (‘Chord’ is currently my favourite) – I probably favour him most in the trio due to familiarity. His range is broad. The trio find their way between the weightless and cacophony and the melodic. Fantastic set.

Notes

https://shrikerecords.bandcamp.com/album/chord

Reply from NO Moore:

“With Jazz, it is not so much frustration as caution.  Anyone can play jazz but the nature of the world is such that it is necessary, as a matter of ethics, to recognise the historical conditions under which jazz emerged into the world.  There is also the problem of what I call friendly racism, where white people over emphasise/identify with some aspect of black history.  After Black Lives Matter during the lockdown, some London musicians have emphasised the link between jazz and blackness – quite right too!  These things go in and out of fashion (I don’t mean to be dismissive in saying that), and white people have a long history of contributing to jazz; whilst its harmonic content is basically European.  But I have a lot of sympathy for those younger musicians trying to find a place for themselves in jazz.  To my ear, the South London musicians have not produced much interesting music, but that might not be the immediate point (and it is early days). There is no doubt that there are some very talented musicians amongst them.

On top of that, the whole problem – that you will be aware of – of the ‘culture industry’ as a vector for gentrification.  Every aspiring city has a jazz festival!  

The difficulty of writing about improvisation is, I think, a problem of form.  The historical tendency is to separate form out, and make that the ‘essence’ of the event or object.  In other words, the form as idea/ideal.  There is a crucial history of abstraction, but it is only a technique and not, as it is usually mistaken as being, the essence of what can be.  In improvisation, the abstract form is social: people, venue, audience, etc.  Musically, no form is applied, but emerges from the interactions between musicians and between musician and instrument.  Form and content/material collapse into each other.  Everybody spouts off Deleuze and Guattari these days, but ‘rhizome’ is the right word for what we do.  Root form, not tree form.  That said, a good way to impose form on improvisation is to record it.  I am convinced that, without recording technologies, and the ability to listen back at a distance, the type of improvisation we do would not have emerged.  We are dealing with the sound of sound.

Albert Ayler used to speak of his music as being concerned with shapes and geometric sounds.  I like this – a spatialisation of sound, away from the temporal unfolding of music.”

[…..]

‘City of the Living Dead’ is a horrible, grizzly exploitation flick designed only to titillate and appal. Lucio Fulci creates a serious sense of impending doom. The peculiar dubbing, low production costs and creaky acting do not impede the creeping dread – maybe they add to the sense of watching something very wrong. The action is delivered with handfulls (& mouthfulls) of maggots, worms, compost, and butchers offal – flesh comes apart like wet clay tearing open – and the soundtrack plods along to the events with intense synths and slow beats. There are two other Fulci’s films – ‘Zombi 2’ and ‘The Beyond’ – where he ah achieves this level of horror – in my opinion (I like my horror to have a fantastic element – I don’t get on with giallos). Probably the most potent attempts at existential horror in horror films. Gruelling & fascinating. I like that they’re cheap and not Hollywood – I sort of like that they will try anything to achieve their goal.

Ah – I mentioned I visited the Michael Werner gallery to see the Don Van Vliet exhibition. It was quite good – cool stylising. Nice townhouse.

Big weekend.

clippings i

It’s been a a good weekend – despite some small after effects of Covid (I can’t stop yawning) – I went into London for a wander around the UAL at St. Martins and the exhibition of Don Van Vliet in Mayfair Michael Werner gallery, watched ‘City of Living Dead’, visited Elspeth Owen’s studio in Grantchester, and attended the last Soundhunt of the year – so experimental music, crazy exploitation horror film, painting in the swishest of settings, plus ceramics and paintings in the most beautiful studio in Cambridge.

Elspeth has ah had her studio since 1978 (if my memory is accurate), an old cricket pavilion moved away from its cricket pitch to its current situ in a small copse of trees on the edge of the meadows. There’s a nice a pub across the road. The studio’s wooden and filled with dust and cobwebs and Elspeth’s art and detritus – everything from a mummified rat to newspaper clippings to dried fruit to tools and books. Pots are distributed amongst tea lights in patchy dark wood, white painted planks mixed with treated hard wood, reclaimed from flooring or parts of the original structure. The first group of pots are laid out on dried quinces on a bedding of grit. Elspeth’s pots are pinch pots, shapes are rounded – not pristine – not glazed but fired with pigments and materials giving uneven textures and concentrations of colour. Unless she pushes the pieces into a smooth almost porcelain effect. A couple could be small Korean moon jars. Interpolated among the flickering candle light objects of rusting metals, dried flora and fauna, and blackened furniture the pots stand out. The forms Elspeth moulds could be organic – to me it seems as though – she fabricates shapes and textures imitating the formations of growth and decay in objects which will not grow or rot. The plastic qualities maybe the mimicking of natural formations in uh nature… Li in Chinese aesthetics – but still the materials are manipulated to emphasise the power of their composition. This is only one element to Elspeth’s work. She creates rituals – often based around cycles of the moon – walking rituals and feminist happenings. Pots have been given away, ritually smashed, and pots carted across London in a wheelbarrow. The ‘goodbye to menstruation’ pot – humour comes into play with carefully delineated cycles – a big part of the rituals. Uh there’s more – plenty more – some of it here: http://imaginedcorners.net/home.html and the studio draws out the best in the pots she shows there – giving context and atmosphere that helps them shine or glower.

Elspeth had opened her studio and brought in a number of artists – including poets. I am only going to pick out one: Mark Van Heygen a painter with greatly reduced eyesight. Mark works mostly in oil paints. Building up thick layers of scraped impasto paint. There are subjects embedded – usually centrally – often worked in, worked over and worked back in again. Repetitive actions used to search for – here I am speculating – a balance of surface tensions with a series of shapes constructed from broad brush strokes. Often the ‘image’ collapses into chaos – becoming illegible. The over all effect – unless colour upsets the balance, colour that he cannot always see – is oddly serene, offers a quietude but created by forces built up across the canvas, dense paint – scratched and piled on with trowels and brushes and palette knives mixed in with layers of glazes. As Marks eyesight has faded he’s expanded the tools he uses; preferring to se his fingers and a motley array of builders equipment. Very physical paintings – sometimes big enough to cover a wall – plus smaller pieces often more like relief objects on reclaimed bits of boards and second hand canvases. There is a very clear method to his painting – conjuring repeated motifs from memory – and working the materials with every method available to develop the surface tensions, most often whites and off whites with a preference for kings blue, but also acidic yellows and a pink / lilac, and occasionally black. The colours sometimes overpower all other aspects to the detriment of the piece – this I put down to his struggles seeing the colour. Memory and repetition seem to be key for the subject. Resolution takes time and work – and still is never comfortably realised – he could just keep on, and on. The image – just like memory – is never distinct and often completely obscured or stylised beyond recognition; but each motif has importance in his own lexicon.

Seeing Mark in Elspeth’s pavilion was something of a treat. The two complement each other. Lots of shifting between the intense and the diffuse.

Notes

I’m splitting this post up, writing about experimental music is proving rather difficult, or at least dodging the rather crass usual manner in which people write about experimental music is proving rather difficult.

And this post was turning into a monster post.

26/11/23 soundhunt

Dissent

Excerpts from ‘Witness Against the Beast’ by E. P. Thompson:

[pg108 line29] “[The danger is that we should confuse the reputability of beliefs, and the reputability of those who professed them, with depth or shallowness.] I have already suggested, in discussing justification by faith, that the antinomian position was consciously antihegemonic. That is, if we accept the view that in most societies we can observe an intellectual as well as institutional hegemony, or dominant discourse, which imposes a structure of ideas and beliefs – deep assumptions as to social proprieties and power, a general ‘common sense’ as to what is possible and what is not, a limited horizon of moral norms and practical probabilities beyond which all must be blasphemous, seditious, insane or apocalyptic fantasy – a structure which serves to consolidate the extent social order, enforce its priorities, and which is itself enforced by rewards and penalties, by notions of ‘reputability’, and (in Blake’s time) by liberal patronage or by its absence – if we accept this large mouthful, then we can see that these antinomian sects were hegemony’s eighteenth-century opposition. More than this, antinomianism’s intellectual doctrines (the suspicion of ‘reason’, justification by faith, hostility to the moral law) constituted in quietist periods a defence against the reigning hegemony, in more active periods a resource for an active critique no just of policies or personalities but of deep assumptions of the social order.”

“And we can take this argument a little further. For what the antinomian or Muggletonian declaimed against as ‘reason’ we might today prefer to define as ‘ideology’, or as the compulsive constraints of the ruling ‘discourse’. Antinomianism doctrine was expressive of a profound distrust of the ‘reasons’ of the genteel and comfortable, and of ecclesiastical and academic knowledges not so much because the produced false knowledges but because they offered specious apologetics (‘serpent reasonings’) for a rotten social order based, in the last resort on violence and material self-interest. In short, the antinomian stance was not against knowledge but against the ideological assumptions which pretended to be knowledge and the ideological contamination of the rest.” [pg109 line25]

[…]

[pg110 line13] “And to this we must add a further cultural or intellectual definition of ‘class’. Everything in the age of ‘reason’ and ‘elegance’ served to emphasise the sharp distinctions between a polite and a demotic culture. Dress, style, gesture, proprieties of speech, grammar and even punctuation were resonant with the signs of class, the polite culture was an elaborated code of social inclusion and exclusion. Classical learning and an accomplishment in the law stood like difficult gates-of-entry into this culture: the grammarians must show his expertise in derivations and constructions, the politician a familiarity with the models of Rome, the poet and artist a fluency in classical mythology. These accomplishments both legitimated and masked the actualities of brute property and power, interest , and patronage. A grammatical or mythological solecism marked an intruder down as an outsider.”

Thompson writes about William Blake, ‘Witness Against the Beast’ is a dive into the sources of Blakes thinking and philosophy. Thompson was privy to the discovery of the Muggletonian archives – a sect with roots in the mid 1600s – a sect which followed the antinomian traditions (which rejected laws, priests and church in favour of personal divinity….) it is related to some of the sects present for the English revolution – the Ranters, the Moravians, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Quakers. The Muggletonians refused to evangelise hence their eventual disappearance, and while some of their beliefs are a bit daft their founding principles are rather compelling. Thompson puts Blake in these traditions.

Blake has been placed on a number of pedestals – usually revolving around his genius and his madness – Blake as a sort of holy fool – an isolated voice in turbulent times. Giving him a tradition and a social context changes the narrative – just as Erdman (Blake: Prophet Against Empire by David V. Erdman) describes a London filled with pro-active political dissidents, so this gives a sense of communities of dissenters (of working people) with views very like those of William Blake and perhaps places him as their greatest voice. Though I doubt he’d be appreciated as such – arguing over details seems to be an important aspect of spiritual life for dissenters. It also shows that there were substantial philosophies in resistance to the governing bodies of the time – republican voices, anti-capitalist voices, anti-evangelical, and anti-colonial. It gives further depth to Blake as a founding thinker capable offering philosophies countering contemporary hegemony – empire and slavery and climate disasters are unavoidable processes in progress / history….. there have always been opposing belief systems. Declaring that Blake was (is?) sane – could be a revolutionary act.

Notes

Andy Wilson – much Blake https://travellerintheevening.substack.com/?fbclid=IwAR1W7PM4Z39cyrkMWVAJ9YsRqb7pOJ8ZCENETwLbQMQ5HpeCxSJxXVFATXQ

fossil

Mixed media on rag paper, 190 x 280 mm.

from a drawing at the Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences, original:

a5 sketchbook, pencil.

I lost track of the original drawing so the painting went it’s own way for a while…. The Sedgewick is my favourite museum – it looks old fashioned – it has big piles of fossils, & draws & draws of them, plus a skeleton of a hippo that lived in Cambridge some time before the university turned up.

Last soundhunt of the year

For its regular monthly Sunday afternoon slot (which takes place on the last Sunday of every month), Soundhunt presents an exceptional international quartet of world-renowned improvisers. Belgian vocalist Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg (who film fans may remember from Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio) has been described by All About Jazz as employing “a vast vocabulary of sounds”. Lawrence Casserley is a pioneer of electronic sound processing, while classically-trained French microtonal acoustic guitarist Pascal Marzan has forged his own language on the instrument. Completing the quartet is violinist Philipp Wachsmann, quite simply one of the world’s most imaginative and experienced improvisers.

PLUS the trio of N.O. Moore (guitar), Verity Lane (violin), and Douglas Benford.

ta – ta – ta – ta – ta – tav – ta – ta – ta

pencil on paper, sketchbook – a5?

On the brink of Covid, not knowing I was on the brink of Covid a week or so ago, I went out to Kings Chapel for the remembrance of John Tavener (part of Cambridge Music festival). Under the beautifully sculpted ceilings the music was gorgeous – a phenom. I know little about it – & Tavener is new to me – this intense sacred music takes me somewhere I uh won’t attempt to describe. From the notes handed out Tavener offered an observation on his methods – he was attempting to create an Ikon, a painting in the Byzantine tradition – not out of wood out of sound.

I love Russian and Greek Ikons, I have some excellent reproductions in books. Their colour, and their perspective, and the stylisation gives me a sense in someway comparable to the sacred music. A physical response.

The space – Kings Chapel – was a lovely space for it. The ceiling conveys a sense of weightlessness. The mind wanders but not far; as the music works on the body – as if defining the centre of gravity. For me it is the melancholy that has weight, and it’s beauty gives us meaning

Notes

I wouldn’t have gone to the Tavener concert if it hadn’t been for Elspeth – Elspeth Owen at http://imaginedcorners.net/home.html – who had a spare ticket, & knew how good it was….

of Nature

DE SADE: Every death even the cruellest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature
Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts

Peter Weis: ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade‘ (shortened: ‘Marat / Sade’).

It’s Autumn – I love Autumn – the first chill winds are usually blessed relief from the Summer. The colours and the smells are intense and enervating. This has been a strange year. Such a wet Summer proper followed by this ‘Indian Summer’. The Cam took on a faintly nauseating burnt smell and my room filled with beautiful moths and malicious looking insects I can’t identify. Autumn has arrived and the Cam has lost that smell, it’s only spiders that are clinging to my walls and windows.

Mixed media on rag paper, 190 x 280 mm. Partly a recreation of a drawing from nature – given presentation by (stage) curtains, faintly influenced by graves out in the fens, partly influenced by David Lynch.

I found myself speculating on the future. My thinking being led hither n thiver by the peculiarity of the seasons. My immediate fear is the brain melting heat but I have another thought that gives me quite a different fear. Britain has been a nation that has quietly and efficiently cut its’ peoples from the land… whether it be enforced industrial labour or the enclosure acts or the ideologies of class structures – the hegemonic structures have insisted that the land is owned by the people who have gauged its’ price, and that nature is something ‘other’; something to be used. Rituals and stories lose some of their profundity, we no longer experience them as a part of ourselves – culture is something that passes time – nature is either tamed or wild

My head went to a place of idle futurism – imagining a generation to whom seasons are totally unknown and incomprehensible – so seasons are a bizarre myth or a loss they cannot really grieve for because they cannot imagine it. Britain has successfully reduced the importance of seasonal festivals in favour of commercial holidays and despite various attempts to bring them back, despite the influx of cultures that held onto their own seasonal festivities; holidays have been dominated by sales and a driving need to get out the country; burning vast amounts of noxious petrol to force huge metal wagons — uh up, and away.

And we are – I’m not being a pedant – from nature, an aspect of nature, and we become manure. It is possible to speak as though we aren’t, it is possible to think as though we aren’t but it is not possible to act without.

It’s been a common trope to associate working people and people colonised as ‘closer to nature’ or ‘a part’ of nature whereas the civilised classes are above it all.

The quote is not a statement I would make myself – but I like it – it expresses the fractious disorientation of alienation in the face of… that which holds no identifiable value system…. nature is the scenery for atrocities. Weiss writes at the end of the second world war as a Jew and a German.

Notes

Lectures in the UAL have ben available to us online, we join using Zoom. A recent lecture had the artist Pat Naldi travelling to the Antarctic ostensibly to create art that draws attention to the rapid effects of our climate crisis on glaciers. I noticed her tendency to speak of ‘nature’ as something other…. it may have just been a mannerism adopted as a ‘way of speaking’ but it stuck out to me – I think it is often done – nature is a thing in & of itself, something to be studied or praised or spoken down to…..

This is something worth watching as a back up to this post: https://youtu.be/k6V2SIPL59A?si=Mwt1tvmaQnX2UnIL

W. G. Sebald’s ‘On the Natural History of Destruction’ is an influence on this post – I suppose especially the last chapter: ‘The Remorse of the Heart: On Misery and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss’. Sebald applies sharp surgical implements to German literature in the wake of the war and the holocaust.

I’m in bed with Covid – this has took a lot longer to write than it should and Autumn is nearly done (probably I’ll still come back with changes). In these crazy times it’s hard to imagine what winter will be.

mess iii

mixed media on rag paper, 190 x 280 mm

I think I will stop there.

My hunting through the back catalogue and subject matter is nearly at an end – I’m afraid I have been quite sloppy in my documentation at times – I suppose it is because I am eager to get it done & then get on with the painting. It isn’t a good trade though, I would like to engage with people and this is a way to do that – I like to see it recontextualised – and this can be a way to do that….