a voice, uncanny instrument

Posted on November 7, 2015 by

Bosch copyThe Quiet Coach on a train is often a site of tension. So when three male off-shore workers, all of them drunk as wasps drowning in a whiskey vat, decided to occupy a table just by the sign that said QUIET COACH, the word trouble might as well have been added to the buffet menu. Their fun lasted from Edinburgh to Darlington, at which point the youngest, most voluble of the three was neatly extricated from the train by transport police, presumably fated to find his way to Leeds by many buses, all of the loudly advertised plans for himself and his girlfriend gleefully trashed by Mr Alcohol. This left the other two in whispered conference. What could possibly have caused this catastrophe? After all, the lad had done no harm. Finally their puzzlement was solved by the woman who stood up to inform them: “You are in the quiet coach.”

This scenario exposes the ethical conflicts that typically erupt from antagonisms of acoustic and social space. What also comes through is the stark power of the voice to disrupt and dismay. Softly unassuming in repose, voices can mutate into weapons with an inexhaustible supply of ammunition, the harm of their most serious wounds lingering over a lifetime.

IMG_0004 Voice is an uncanny instrument. Up it rises out of the body like fire and smoke, but from where: the lungs, the chest, the stomach, the larynx, the mouth, the mind? In close proximity you can feel its sound entering the ears yet also sense the air of it, even the temperature and smell. Voices heard together in anger or laughter are like weather systems in collision, swirling together through echoing space they are loath to share.

Profound thoughts, banalities, vulgarities and obscenities, confessional whispers, harrowing screams and enticing murmurs: these are all voice. Every voice functions within a relatively narrow spectrum yet each is distinct, identifiable, unique. Masked emotion is betrayed by the voice, each shred of pride or vulnerability, anguish or joy. Voices match each other in intricate improvised counterpoint, flow in affinity or rancour; sympathy soothes grief, calm may neutralise rage yet neither can erase the raw texture of the voice they seek to subdue.

IMG_0891Voices in extremis are fearsome. Listen to singers who have technique and courage to explore the far limits. Possessing the same basic instrument, most of us know that comparable extremes are buried deep inside us, unresistingly unlocked by emotional or physical pain, ecstasy, alarm and fear. So there is a fear of self-knowledge in hearing this alien voice, secretly carried within.

Bell conversation_0001Improvising singers work with differing levels of analytical consciousness. These may range from obliviousness to hyper-awareness, yet all these levels are distinct from the analytical consciousness of speaking about singing. Can the voice talk about itself, in flux between that part of the brain that engages in analytical discourse and the body giving full flight to sung voice? Can it move fluidly between all of its properties: its silent, secret self; its instrumental self, separated from communicative imperatives of language; its need to project ideas, sounds, stories and questions out into the air, often using technologies that launch the voice into spaces far beyond its own body?

Since 2000 I have been based at London College of Communication, occasionally wondering what the word ‘communication’ means in the digitised, globalised twenty-first century. A voice is a thing of strange noises, fluctuating pitches and terrible silences. It must fight through tangled thickets of class, race, gender, sexuality, ideology – what Mladen Dolar in his book, A Voice and Nothing More, called “the political dimension of the voice” – for recognition, clarity, even just audibility within an ecology of communicative signs.

Polke copyIn the past I interviewed many remarkable singers – Kate Bush, Björk, Luther Vandross, Robert Wyatt, Scott Walker, Abbey Lincoln, Bobby Womack, Diamanda Galas, Youssou N’Dour. As if the nature of the voice is an unspeakable mystery, none of them had much to say about the voice as instrument, only its context and effect. In 1989, for example, Kate Bush told me about her visit to Bulgaria, to collaborate with The Trio Bulgarka for her album, The Sensual World: “The girls were asked to perform by a friend, so the oldest lady, Eva, picked up the telephone and listened to the dialling tone, went ‘Mmmmm,’ and they all tuned up to the note and burst into song. Within five minutes I was just crying. We’re not used to that intensity, really.”

These are the reasons why I have brought together three remarkable improvising singers – Shelley Hirsch, Sofia Jernberg and Elaine Mitchener – for an event: The Ecology of the Voice. Our purpose is to explore these possibilities (with the audience), moving as freely as possible between vocal modes and registers. Will it work? Only those within hearing distance of the voice will know.

Ecology of Voice 2015

The Ecology Of the Voice

David Toop with Shelley Hirsch, Sofia Jernberg and Elaine Mitchener

Platform Studio Theatre, Central Saint Martins, Handyside Street, London, N1C 4AA.

November 12th, 18.30.

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stick, spit, reed and tubing

Posted on August 17, 2015 by

 

bullroarer

“Or maybe the music we are hearing tells us about the unconscious, coming from some place of archetypes or from the trauma of unspeakable secrets.”

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton.

 

There are many ways to think about a musical instrument. A compellingly bizarre essay published in 1976 by Alan Dundes – A Psychoanalytic Study of the Bullroarer – is perhaps the most extreme example of this. Through the convolutions of his argument, Dundes persuades the reader to consider the bullroarer through a miscellany of interpretations and theories: a phallus, a phallus inverted to become a womb or substitute womb, the fecundating agency of wind, fertilising breath, thunderous farts of the gods, an excremental device of shadows and secrecy, the voice of deceased ancestral spirits, an excreta hawk, shit eater, masturbation symbol and flatulent phallus.

Perhaps this is a lot of weight for a slender strip of wood to bear, but once implausibility and risibility are set to one side, then a different kind of thinking about objects of this kind opens up, not just in relation to the instrumentality-of-the-instrument but as a loose, vast ‘mesh’ (to borrow Timothy Morton’s term) of properties, actions, conditions and futures (what I have called elsewhere ‘bodies without organology’, which is to say an object whose extent lies far outside the constraining discourse of musicology, encompassing the deepest reaches of its composition). If what is just a simple strip of wood attached to string can inflate itself to the cosmic dimensions of flatulent gods then its supposed evolutionary position somewhere to the furthest far west of the piano becomes reversible, the piano a regression or retreat back into the cave of resonances, too timid to venture into a vibrating, respirational and unsystematic open air populated by shit eaters, excreta hawks and farting gods.

Once this was a subject of prolific anthropological debate, this complicated relationship between the playing of a bullroarer and its sounding, in which the instrument became spirit voice or mask, a collusion maintaining the structure of a society, the way in which women, men, children, non-human entities and barely imaginable beings negotiated each other’s space. The object or sculpture of the playing – to whirl a strip of wood in circles – was the small spark that lit the raging fire.

I am not listening to Seymour Wright’s Seymour Writes Back (alto saxophone solos 2008-2014), partly because I have done so and will do so again, but partly because to attend to the spark at this given moment of thinking through ideas is a distraction from the raging fire. It may be that he has some sympathy with this idea of bodies without organology. The physical form of the release is a folded sheet of texts and photographs on which are mounted four audio CDs, further enfolded in a wrapper reproducing a 1920s design by calligrapher Margaret Calkin James, an artist whose posters for the London transport system were both as celebrated yet as anonymizing as Phylliss Pearsall’s design for the London A-Z street atlas; within this he quotes Peter Brook on King Lear: to paraphrase, the play (a usefully versatile word in this context) is an object, a cluster of relationships, complexes and meanings rather than a linear narrative.

If you like, it’s a mythology of the saxophone, a universe inhabited by the gliding tremor of Johnny Hodges (true ancestor to Albert Ayler), Sonny Rollins mowing his lawn, the reaction of the crowd to those famous 27 choruses played by Paul Gonsalves that set alight “Diminuendo and Crescendo In Blue” at Newport, 1956, Richard Wilson’s Watertable (whereby London’s agitated water table could be seen and heard through a 28-inch diameter concrete pipe sunk 4 metres into the clay beneath Matt’s Gallery), the unfolding of London’s spaces and places over centuries, the blurred still image of a blurred video of Willis Gator Tail Jackson screaming through a tenor saxophone without restraint on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1955. These and others.

He quotes Clarice Lispector, from Água Viva and Hour of the Star – “What am I doing writing to you? Trying to photograph perfume?” and “as for the future” – both quotes as enmeshed with spectacularly vast sets of ideas as the bullroarer; in doing so pulling aside the screen (as Daniela Cascella does also in her F.M.R.L.) that was obscuring for us the prophetic relevance of Lispector’s writing to our present day endeavours in the making of an un-music, by which I mean a working in sound/not-sound that attempts to reclaim an intensity of time, feeling and objects from the emptied out rites of bourgeois music.

ClariceLispector            And if I listen I hear the vibration and resonance of a pipe burrowed through London clay into its watery substratum, a new way of listening as predicted by Clarice Lispector in Água Viva (1973): “I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music – I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.”

And if I listen I hear the respiratory, the gustatory, the intestinal (not unlike the bullroarer whose sacredness can never be disconnected (no getting away . . .) from sex, food, shit and death. And if I listen I hear the disappearance of the saxophone, lost in the woods or eaten up by circular inhalation and the voracious nature of space and its bodies. And if I listen I hear the future of a tradition. There is Evan Parker, seated at the table and photographed by Roberto Masotti for his book, You turned the tables on me, and there in this title and preceding titles – Seymour Writes Back, Reed ‘n’ Wright, and so on – a jazz tradition of creaking puns on names exemplified by another alto saxophone player, Lee Konitz, whose “Subconscious-Lee” and “Ice Cream Konitz” have a purpose beyond what we call word play.

And if I listen I am in-close and personal to spit, reed and tubing, to the face and mouth, to the rumble of steel through tunnels under the last substratum of reality’s realm, the friction of expulsion into restless air, the softness of an instrument that gives itself up to all those vibrations to which it is subjected.

 

 

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Skin and Bone Listening

Posted on December 15, 2014 by

Cranc 1How to be, where to be, in a space, with sound, with other bodies? For me, in relation to what performance is becoming, this has been the biggest question of the past year. What does it mean to hear? What does it mean to be present, in relation to others (close proximity), to see, to perceive the temperature and extent of a space, to feel surfaces (floor, chairs, the pressure of sound) in relation to the body? What does it mean to be arranged in a formation, either as performers or audience? How can we change orthodoxies that have become so deeply embedded in the social ritual of performance, particularly when performance is becoming something other than performance?

The only chair I could find at Cafe Oto was at the far end of a crescent, in the negative centre of which lay a dark void. Cranc, the performers, had arranged themselves at the deepest part of the arc: Rhodri Davies with horizontal electric harp, Benedict Drew with mini-synth, laptop and projector, Nikos Veliotis with custom amplified cello, pre-amp and bass amplifier, Angharad Davies with amplified violin. They worked in darkness, facing Drew’s projected film, a flat screen that closed off the empty segment of the crescent.

For the first piece of the evening they began without projection – long tones, initially across a wide range of pitches but quickly converging on middle to low. The dominant tone, from cello, settled itself in a bandwidth that opened up the question of hearing. By lifting a paper mask from the projector lens, Drew created a new focal point, a circle of light and colour in which small lines reacted as if under intense stimuli. Those sitting close to me directed their eyes to this circle, as if drawn there by hypnotic compulsion. I did the same but was distracted by my perception of this dominant tone, a ‘hearing’ that was felt in the jawbone primarily. As Veliotis changed the timbre and frequency it moved up into my cheekbones, then down into the softer tissue between chin and breastbone. This was precise resonation – ‘skin and bone’ listening – in which the ears played very little part.

Cranc 2 The specificity of seeing and the processing of conscious thought that goes with it seemed externalised, embodied even, by these small particles, creatures of line and colour, dancing on the screen; it was possible to find a bridge between the screen – a kind of raw active life – and the particularity of the violin’s confident long tones and agitations. The amplification of the violin was clearly audible in my right ear, the acoustic violin in my left, so my gaze was pulled slowly back and forth, to watch an action (in the semi-darkness, where player sat in close proximity to audience), to hear its consequence (and so to see the screen, in close proximity to loudspeaker). Slightly discomfited by this swaying motion and the vibration of my lower skull, I settled an uncertain gaze on the window ahead of me, a misted rectangle whose upper part was divided by the canopy outside, winter shadow of a skeletal tree projected on its canvas ‘screen’ by street lights, its lowest edge undulating gently in the wind. Any connection to the music was coincidental yet here was another site for visual perception, opening up correspondence at a different level, slower, less specific, drifting rather than teeming and so reflecting the way the music slid through frequency and timbral spectra.

Oto window 2 To use a detestable shorthand, this was drone music, a genre (if that’s what it is) with which I have lost much of my patience. The excitement I experienced when hearing The Velvet Underground and Nico in 1968 or buying La Monte Young’s so-called black album in the early 1970s has been vaporised by hearing too many men in black hunched over electronic equipment in the gloom, pouring out long tones of indifferent interest. Yet there was an improvising sensibility and musicality in this group, a recognition that drones should not be a strategy simply to establish and sustain safe ground through fixity. Thin tendrils of distortion drilled into the core, wisps of feedback sparked off the substrate. There was perpetual movement and in the second section of the evening, moments in which all cohesion was lost, in which the whole piece threatened to subside, maybe collapse. By this point the room felt lighter, the audience less tightly packed, the void less empty. The involuntary poetry of the window remained as a reminder that the boundaries of performance extend beyond its physical perimeter.

Cranc were live at Cafe Oto, London, 14.12.2014.

 

 

 

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that lead beneath brambles to the bodies and minds of others

Posted on September 7, 2014 by

Death of the MothThe book jacket is designed by Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Her drawing for the front of the jacket is of trees and grasses, many black pen lines pulling and curling in vortical movement, little differentiation made between figure and ground.
Shelley Hirsch was in London for a short stop and we talked of stream-of-consciousness, her speech by way of illustration of the process and its importance to her singing suddenly branching into organic, unpredictable storylines that in their density came close to Vanessa Bell’s drawing. Shelley then talked about an essay she had come across at the beginning of her life as an improvising singer: Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting: a London adventure. Woolf sets out to buy a pencil, the excuse to immerse herself into human life, its grotesques, the passing snatches of its exchanges, its glimpsed scenes, overheard chatter, press and movement within the atmospheres of the city.
I told her I knew the essay well. I have a copy in The Death of the Moth, collected essays published by the Hogarth Press in 1942, tattered now, barely retaining its book jacket by Vanessa Bell. Woolf urges walking as an opening of the senses but the movement is through streets and over river into the strange digressions of her own mind. Nothing in life repeats. “The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past,” she wrote (and this was in 1930); “nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now.” She experienced all of these bodies as a potential dissolution of the self: “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?”
After the conversation, Shelley and I walked over the road to Cafe Oto’s project space to hear a septet of string players: Jennifer Allum, Bruno Guastalla, Guillaume Viltard, Hannah Marshall, Tim Fairhall, Angharad Davies, Ute Kangiesser. They present themselves in a horseshoe shape in that order, from left to right, taking half the building; the other half occupied by a small audience so predominantly made up of improvising musicians – myself and Shelley, Steve Beresford, Eddie Prévost, Marjolaine Charbin, John Chantler, Daichi Yoshikawa – that a mirror septet is within the bounds of possibility, should anybody wish to suggest it.
I listen closely for a while, studying the sandbagged air-raid shelter ambience of the Project Space. Then as Guillaume squeezes a second bridge between the fingerboard and strings of his double bass I open my notebook. Sometimes to write is to listen closer, if only because each moment of listening and observation demands a fitting language but also suggests its own digressions. Angharad flicks the strings of her violin and I think of school and those incidents of minor bullying when a bigger boy flicks his victim hard to the head or arm with an audible pop. From outside we can hear a loud Jamaican voice. Periodically trains pass close by, their rushing metallic roar wadding the room like an abrupt influx of iron filings within which the music’s flinty intensity is momentarily buried. Can we talk about surface and depth, a constant movement of small cries, whistle tones, dark notes and silver? I am struck by the sight of so much grained brown wood – two violins, three cellos, two double basses – and how the swirling grain is a static echo of the physical movements out of which musical form is developed. Sliding, striking, flicking, muting, bounding, abrading, tapping, snapping, drawing and pulling. The angularity of an arm moving according to its nature as a hinge. The spring of horsehair held in tension. A bow moving elliptically, as if stroking the stomach of a placid bear.
Then there is the doing of nothing, inactive, silent, looking up at the corrugated plastic skylight or down at the floor. Ideas move in contagions: bass sneezes; cello catches a cold. Shouts penetrate the sandbags from outside. Many years ago these would have been bothersome. Now the music absorbs whatever infiltrates its space (already the bodies and minds of others). Then a sudden cessation during which quieter voices can be heard from the street; a long pause, intensity trembles in the air until released by subtle shifting of body language. The heart of the music falls silent once more, covered as it must be by the brambles and thick tree trunks of ordinary living.

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Automatic writing

Posted on March 9, 2014 by

IMG_1470Robert Ashley’s death last week gave me the odd feeling that I should have been listening to more of his music. Absurd really, to self-impose a kind of obligation to consume. The truth is I loved his work but never felt much of a compulsion to listen to the recordings. They seemed beautiful shadows of something genuinely new, something he spoke about, wrote about and enacted: a different way of being within music.

He was one of the few composers of his generation (and subsequent generations) who fully understood that after Cage, electronic music, free jazz, pop music, happenings, proliferating media and all the rest of it, you couldn’t just carry on as if nothing untoward had happened, making your ‘experimental’ music with all the formal constraints and solemn ritual still in place. There’s an interesting essay Ashley wrote for the CD release of Alvin Lucier’s Vespers and other early works (New World Records, 2002). You can’t hear Vespers on a recording, he says, because the experience of hearing the music comes from the space in which it’s performed. He also talks about attempts to subvert the concert hall or redesign concert halls specifically for experimental music, as if it’s going to stand still for another hundred years to please the architects. He talks about fire marshalls. Basically, if you think you’re being subversive but at the same time pleasing the fire marshalls then you’re not subverting much at all.

A lot of composers and musicians shared that sentiment for a while but then turned away into less problematic territory – back to the 19th century or to a vision of jazz bars as they were prior to the 1940s, wherever their spiritual home might be. Robert Ashley worked out ways to make a piece that could be heard on television, or heard in a public space as if you were in a hotel room alone, hearing some other guest’s discarnate mellifluous speech rhythms coming through the adjacent wall and by putting a glass up to the wall and listening hard you could eavesdrop on this man’s muffled monologue about the particles of life, recited to the accompaniment of a radio broadcast by Liberace or one of those early New Age composers from Los Angeles, but Liberace after his audience has departed the building and his secret deepest vision of a cosmic music is finally given a silence in which to float like a voluminous sun bed on a Hollywood pool.

There was a stillness or stasis about Ashley’s pieces that demanded some new venue for listening that just doesn’t exist. In a way, television (arguably the most important medium of the 20th century but a wasteland for almost all composers) was the best way to encounter what he did, a box in which dreams spewed forth as if mind itself; now television is pretty much dead in the aether so there’s a moment that won’t come back.

IMG_1467In what setting should music be experienced? The question resurfaced, as it does in every exhibition that demands listening, while I walked around Cevdet Erek’s Alt Üst exhibition at Spike Island in Bristol (15 February to 13 April 2014): the video of his fingers attempting to tap out a sonic translation of a timeline of life-related events; the measures, markers and cycles alluding to sound’s temporality; the rooms called Üst and Alt – day and night, up and down, high and low, heaven and underworld. Blue LED lights and bass beats measure time in the murky claustrophobia of Alt, and in the dazzling sky light of Üst, a cardiac pulse of a low beat emanates from under the feet as if seeping upwards from the underground below. All of the ideas within the exhibition came together in that moment of being within the shock of daylight, the emptiness of a room, sound coming from elsewhere.

Later that afternoon (04.03.14), I gave a talk at Spike Island about music and time, playing tracks like Joe Hinton’s “Funny How Time Slips Away”, Sly Stone’s “In Time”, Felix Hess’s frog recordings from Australia, an exceedingly slow, sacred Javanese gamelan from Jogjakarta (“Sekatan Kyahi Guntur Madu”), Arpebu’s “Munsta from Kavain Space” and Ryoko Akama’s “Jiwa Jiwa”, created on the Max Brand synthesiser during a composer-in-residence programme at IMA in Austria. Ryoko’s recent CD – Code of Silence (www.melangeedition.com)  – gives no information about the latter piece other than its title so I asked her for some thoughts. Her return email spoke about sine waves and beat frequencies, sustained tones, other worlds with the emptiness of sonic ‘surfaces’ and an aesthetic that arises not from duration but the complexity of listening and its context and conditions.

She translates “Jiwa Jiwa” as “slowly but certainly happening”, giving the example of finding a water leak coming through the ceiling, the stain gradually growing in circumference: “You might say – it is getting jiwajiwa there, water is permeating jiwajiwa.” So the sound is a type of sculpture (maybe like the slower kinetic sculptures of the 1960s by Pol Bury, Gerhard von Graevenitz and David Medalla); change is taking place but at a rate that is hard to discern, closer to stasis than movement.

In the same week (07.03.14) I gave a talk in the Royal College of Art’s Vocal Dischords symposium, using the technique of automatic writing I’d tried once before at Bristol Arnolfini’s Tertulia – Writing Sound event, a set-up in which I write without a script and whatever I write can be seen on screen by the audience in real  time. The question of whether automatic writing is possible in these circumstances becomes part of the performance, not least in the sense that fluidity of so-called inner thought is hard to realise except in private. The pace is slower than speech, more stilted or inhibited by observers, subject to error and revision. At one point I played an extract from Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing and in that heightened, stressful atmosphere heard it as unvoiced thoughts bubbling out of the eyes like soap, seeping slowly from the pores of a face.

For all I know this live performance of writing may be painful to watch but it comes, in part, from an active questioning of spontaneity in improvised performance, along with a questioning of the voice-as-sound, the droning seducer that transmutes ideas into theatre (or so it hopes). What are voices in the head? In pursuit of the origins of spontaneity in 20th century music I have been reading largely forgotten writers who experimented with automatic writing and what William James described as stream-of-consciousness. Mary Butts is one of them, an author whose short and turbulent life included the largely thankless task of assisting Aleister Crowley with the editing of Magick in Theory and Practice. Her novel Armed With Madness (1928) opens with a sentence that makes you want to love it – “In the house, in which they could not afford to live, it was unpleasantly quiet.” A description of listening and silence as uncanny and occult follows, not dissimilar to passages written by Virginia Woolf at almost exactly the same moment in history.

Dorothy Richardson by Man Ray

Dorothy Richardson by Man Ray

Dorothy Miller Richardson is another. Her Pilgrimage series of 13 novels, the first published in 1915, was a meticulous, if highly selective recording of a life, each instalment given an enticing title, each of which could be the name of a film I would pay to see: The Tunnel, Pointed Roofs, Honeycomb, Deadlock, Revolving Lights, The Trap, Dawn’s Left Hand. The protagonist – Miriam – lives a modest, unspectacular  life. In The Tunnel (1919) she is ecstatic to be renting a dingy room that gives her some measure of independence. Time barely seems to move, yet the cycles of life, day and night, the cruel measurement of work and time off, drudgery, disgust and tea, the tasks to be performed at a given time within the patterns of her job, her walks through a London that feels both hostile and magical, the surging and ebbing of feelings, convictions, confidence and often silenced opinion open out, fold upon fold, light and dark as she learns how to live and finally to write. The reader is caught in the streaming of this interior monologue (as Richardson liked to call it), absorbed, like Robert Ashley, in the particles of life: “As she began on her solid slice of bread and butter St. Pancras bells stopped again. In the stillness she could hear the sound of her own munching. She stared at the surface of the table that held her plate and cup. It was like sitting up to the nursery table. ‘How frightfully happy I am,’ she thought with bent head. Happiness streamed along her arms and from her head. St. Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune in single firm beats with intervals between that left each note standing for a moment gently in the air.”

An ordinary life; a dull life even, yet the polyphony of emotions and sensations is hallucinatory in its measured precision and accumulation of bliss: “The lecturing voice was far away, irrelevant and unintelligible. Peace flooded her.” Why do we have to spatialise time, sound and thought, reducing all three to a manageable linearity and locus that has nothing to do with the way we think or hear? Because they are elusive, everywhere and nowhere. The pouring of thoughts, thoughts under thoughts and other inexplicable murmurings of consciousness may take place in a dark room of the imagination within the body as if a kind of ectoplasm gushing out of some hidden spring and dispersing into nothingness, into the blood or becoming a sound recognisable as audible words, the marks of writing or some other signs on or from the body.

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Who will go mad with me

Posted on November 24, 2013 by

sheep wind fence copyWe were on Dartmoor, Brent Fore Hill at Ball Gate to be exact. The date was the 29th July, 1971, though there was little evidence of summer to be heard in the howling wind. During the same year I was given access to the BBC Sound Archives. Among the treasures of that vast collection was a song from Barra by Mary Morrison, an ecstatic Gaelic clapping song whose title was printed in English – “Who Will Go Mad With Me” – an invitation to entrancement I assumed at the time, given the song’s shamanistic repetitious circularity, the singer’s breathless air of abandon and a ragged communal accompaniment of voices echoing her lead, whooping at the joy of it.

In reality it seems the madness referred to romance rather than trance, a song about boys, a tease, a release shared by women after a hard day of waulking the tweed. But an inherent sound, its uncertainties and disturbances, a more than historical remoteness for which the crude reverb added for unknown reasons at a later date seemed to locate Mary Morrison and her companions deep underground in chthonic ritual space, all of this complemented by the surface noises of its transfer onto crackling 10” vinyl, then the hiss of my cheap mono cassette machine, a layering of effects converging into a tangibility of being in a place both known and unknown as if to form a shadow or echo, which is how a recording might be described, of the pagan moor, its legendary mists and bogs, its standing stones and bleak horizons leading not to 20th century roads and seaside towns but to the edge of the world. We were walking and marking places as if building a henge without form, Marie Yates placing fragile sculptures of twigs and muslin, their life as short as the temper of the weather (http://marieyatesblog.wordpress.com/). I was marking invisible boundaries with flute sounds carried away by the wind. Field Workings, Marie called these activities, and that is how they seemed – walking and working from within the self and under the sky, deeply private even though conducted on open land and documented. From this remove an intentionality or conscious method seems apparent but at the time it was all instinct, a response to the volition of unstoppable forces. At one point I took advantage of another boundary, hanging my microphone on a wire fence, then walking away as I played sounds that were snatched from me as if by invisible hands.

Later I listened to the recording and felt a shift away from the centrality of myself as singular humanity, beginning to hear sound as an ear, like a shell – the wind’s course over rough land and stone walls, the rattling fence, the bleating of the sheep, all opening up and gathering together the sounds passing through, brushed away, dying away with my slivers of breath only a part of this flow of forces. Other examples of Mary Morrison’s remarkable singing have been given an afterlife, notably a recording by Alan Lomax of her interpretation of canntairreachd, the mouth music used in the oral teaching of Pibroch, an astonishing virtuosity of voice and line, again relocated to an echo chamber as if the hard notes of some unknown archaic instrument were rising up from the burial chamber at Ball Gate on Brent Fore Hill, then falling, as Adorno wrote, stars down to earth.

Jung & flutes

Who will go Mad with Me (a question of post-alchemical objects), (2013)

David Toop: string/winds/analogue and digital electronics/objects

Alasdair Roberts: voice/guitar/hurdy-gurdy/objects

Sylvia Hallett: strings/hurdy-gurdy/objects

Luke Fowler: film/analogue electronics/objects

performed at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Bates Mill Loft, Huddersfield, 24 November, 2013.

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Sound Thinking: Stuart Marshall’s Idiophonics

Posted on July 10, 2013 by

heterophonicsWood striking wood, quick, hard, BOK! Impact sound sprays out, an omni-directional striking of all reflective surfaces and returning through time to the distributed centres of listening, the BOK-space of audition. This is the basis of Stuart Marshall’s composition known as Idiophonics or Heterophonics, a piece performed only occasionally in the 1970s and now about to be revived.

I was present at a 1976 performance that began in 2B, Butlers Wharf, then spread out along the Thames and over Tower Bridge. Memories of the event are foggy (that may also have been true for the winter weather) but I wrote a contemporaneous account in Readings magazine (edited by Annabel Nicolson and Paul Burwell, 1977). In that essay I described Stuart’s work with sound as being “fairly unique in this country”. Of course he could be unique or not unique, not “fairly unique”; what I was trying to convey was an emergence of sound work, an engagement parallel to contemporary art practices such as structural film and video with their intellectual preoccupations (notably Lacan) that rejected the rituals of music. As an approach it was rare though not unknown.

The piece began with three people – Stuart Marshall, Jane Harrison and Nicolas Collins – striking closely-pitched woodblocks, moving away from each other every time their strikes coincided. In a second phase they took up aerosol klaxons (“used in America for scaring off intruders and bears”, as I wrote in the Readings essay) and moved out into the freezing night: “One of the players stayed close to the building, one moved along the river to the right and the third walked out over Tower Bridge. The sounds bounced back and forth in a most spectacular way for quite some time – after a little while most of the audience left the rather precarious platforms which jut from the doors and huddled around an electric fire. Conversations started up and the piece took on the dimensions of a social gathering punctuated by alternately mournful and strident honking from outside.”

David Cunningham was present – his photograph of a murky Tower Bridge was used to illustrate my writing. Nearly 40 years later he recalls as little as me. “I remember talking to Gavin Bryars,” he tells me in an email, “as the ship approached Tower Bridge which remained closed until the last possible minute. There was a possibility that the klaxons were confusing whatever signalling system the bridge uses and some speculation about another maritime disaster for Gavin to turn into a score. I have a feeling the ship sounded a klaxon too.”

Within these accounts there are indications of a new way to be within the experience of a sound work. Nothing of the event could be conveyed through secondary media – you had to be there – but to behave as a conventional ‘audience’ was clearly silly. At the time, Nic Collins recounted the unfolding of a Connecticut concert hall performance, the klaxons growing fainter in the distance until inaudible, the audience sitting patiently in silence and then applauding when the players returned.

There are things that could be said here about the development of sound art, about the influence of Alvin Lucier, about echolocation, about bats and blindness, ships and sirens, temples and time, and those 18th century travellers in the Lake District who used cannon fire to enjoy the romantic sublime of echoes bouncing around the lakes. I think always of Giovanni di Paulo’s 15th century tempera panel, Saint John retiring to the Desert, Saint John emerging from a city gate, a small bag of possessions slung from a stick; in the centre of the painting he can be seen again at the mouth of a mountain pass, an echo of himself dwarfing the tiny buildings depicted on the plain below. This technique is known as ‘continuous narrative’. “The artist’s intention in showing the same figure more than once was clearly to indicate the passing of time,” wrote Alexander Sturgis in Telling Time.

paolo88Each medium is limited by comparison with the body’s versatility. For Aby Warburg, the inherent interest in Italian Early Renaissance painting lay in its attempts to represent movement, an evocation of Antiquity in which the body was caught up, as Philippe-Alain Michaud described it (in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion), “. . . in the play of overwhelming forces, limbs twisting in struggle or in the grip of pain, hair flowing, and garments blown back through exertion or the wind . . . He replaced the model of sculpture with that of dance, accentuating the dramatic, temporal aspects of the works.”

Music has fewer problems with time but its innate desire is to rigorously control space, to bring sounds together in coherence and spatial focus, as a kind of illusory object. Idiophonics, by contrast, pulls the elements apart to distribute them in space, leaving the more inert variety of audience stranded in time with only an empty object to contemplate. David Cunningham has recently noted my confusion of idio- with ideo- in the 1977 text. As he points out, the prefix idio- denotes uniqueness, privacy, a personal quality, as in idiosyncratic or idiomatic, but it also describes that which is distinct, unique or separate. Perhaps this latter meaning is what Stuart had in mind, a separating out of sounds, or like me, could he have been mixing up idio- with ideo-?

Stuart is not here to be asked – he died of an Aids-related illness in 1993. A strange thing: we were born within two days of each other in 1949 and found ourselves assigned to the same work table, same teaching group, at Hornsey College of Art in 1967, our first year of art school. Within that year we were the only students with a developed interest in experimental music so the coincidence, from this perspective of passed time, seems marked. Our conversations about La Monte Young, AMM and Ornette Coleman helped to make the prospect of this new venture, what we now call sound art or audio culture, more tangible than it might have been had we been alone in our enthusiasms. Stuart went on to study with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University, became a pioneer of video art, then an HIV/Aids activist and filmmaker until his death at the age of 44.

Read the online biographies or obituaries and they emphasise the latter stages of his career. This seems as it should be yet because of my personal contact with him and my predilections I consider him to be one of the unsung pioneers of sound art in the UK. In Musics 9 (1976) I reviewed a video screening of Stuart’s work at the London Filmmakers Coop; even from my brief descriptions it is apparent that video offered the technical means for him to explore interdependence of hearing and seeing: a bottle smashing in silence, the interior of a mouth and its ambient roar. In 1979, during the Music/Context Festival of Environmental Music at the London Musicians Collective, Stuart performed a solo version of Idiophonics from within a canoe paddled by Paul Burwell. I photographed the event as they glided off over the water, Stuart with an aerosol klaxon in hand. That photograph is not available to me at the moment but the memory is fresh enough, sound blasts ricocheting off the high walls lining Camden Canal. By that time, music was out of its box, sound thinking no longer “fairly unique”.

Idiophonics will be performed in Sculpture 2, David Toop and Rie Nakajima invite Angharad Davies, Lina Lapelyte, Daniela Cascella with a performance of Stuart Marshall’s Idiophonics.

Cafe Oto Project Space, 1-7 Ashwin Street, London, E8 3DL.

Thursday 11th July.

Performance begins 8.15 sharp.

http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/sculpture-2-rie-nakajima-david-toop.shtm

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=15043

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