BRISTOL DUO & TRIO, 16/07/2011

Duo, and then trio, between David Grundy, Mark Anthony Whiteford and Itta Howie. Guide Hut (Jack Brimble Hall), St Werburghs, Bristol, 16th July 2011.

DG: laptop, voice, percussion, drawing
M.A.W.: voice, kitchen ware, tapes, alto saxophone and chain with padlock
I.H: dance, voice, drawing

beginning as a duo for the first half hour, before we were joined by our third collaborator, itta (mostly silent here, moving rather than speaking, drawing, sometimes singing too). involving step-ladders, broken water jugs, dictaphones, voices and samples as personal memory and as social memory. memory of what? partly – previous sessions, nearly a year ago, over a year ago, years ago, the beginnings of this project, the first sine duos. 'i remember we were rocking'. we were rocking in a place which has now been emptied of art, cleared for business – slash any possibility of creative expression and education, we don't need it, get rid of the photography studios and the animation studios and that space where we used to make improvised music as if it meant something. and another phrase, not heard here, but it could have been; maybe it's the unheard phrase behind everything that's said or done or played in this session: 'smash it all down'. brighton, december 2010. another set of sine waves, another release of voice, another lament or record of the passing of time and loss and change. act of love. 'smash it all down.' and today we broke glass. we didn't mean to, but glass was smashed. we were using a glass jug as a percussion object and it cracked. if you break a window they send you to jail. The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.

the voice is alien. it is manipulated, spun down, round wound, slowed down, sped up, turned into something other than itself. these voices, human and mechanical, electronic and acoustic, digital and analogue, real and imagined, in a dance, a tarantella, or a disintegrating death rattle. now i listen back there is sometimes a sense of desperation to the music, voices straining to be heard over electronic wail (which is itself a kind of mutant non-human voice). perhaps this has something to do with the mugginess of the mini-disc recording, which can't always cope with the volume and depth of sound. because i remember that when we played there were bits of conversation, talking over the music, those things we wouldn't do in public, at a 'gig'. making tea, people coming in and out, debating the merits of john cage. i have been reading greil marcus writing on what bob dylan could do in the basement recordings that he couldn't do in that summer of confrontation with a hostile audience of folkies. the importance of this sort of private space for the conjuring up/ exploration of a different kind of community, unburdened by the usual social pressures - a place of no obligation. digging into history and memory, masks and personas and suddenly the real face beneath. dylan's gone electric. the whole world's gone electric. what is this obsession with step ladders. singing a charles mingus tune as if you were in the bath. wailing, again. open your throat and the voice comes out, unadorned. singing a tea cup. singing into a tea cup. the tea cup has a banksy picture reproduced on it. in the streets nearby there are dozens of original bankskies on the walls, all worth a few damn thousand pounds or more. the art world recuperates, recovers, swallows up all that threatens it. graffiti is now just another accessory, resistance and subversion commodified as art product. i look at the graffiti on the underpass on the way to the guide hut and i think that it has more to say or do than work in a gallery because it has nothing to do with money. someone put it there because it has to be there. soon it will be washed away. 27 minutes in (if you get that far!) the mini-disc recording must have cut off. the recording equipment inserts its own silence into the flow of the music. it seems to fit.

(hey, you don’t need to listen to the last 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is. it’s just talking. it’s still recording. thank you, and good night.)

OXFORD SOLO, 29/05/2011

My first proper public solo performance (not strictly true: I did a short (15-minute) ambient laptop set in 2009, but for some reason that felt much more relaxed and private), this took place at an evening called ‘ACTS’, which I curated in the Oxford Brookes Drama Studio (a small, stand-alone building on the Headington Hill Campus). The solo came first, and was followed by an improvised duo between butoh dancer Macarena Ortuzar and cellist / bandoneonist Bruno Guastalla (with lighting by Dariusz Dziala), a performance of John Cage’s Four6 by The Set Ensemble (on this occasion, Guastalla, Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes & David Stent), and a final improvisation by all six performers. I found the solo set slightly unnerving, not only because it was the opening item of the evening, but because of its exposed nature – the fact that there is no one else to back you up or ‘cover up’ for you if something goes wrong. In the end, the performance itself contained something of a drama between machine / electronic elements (the inscrutability and physical stasis of laptop performance (one can see no physical connection between the sounds being produced and the actions of the mostly motionless performer) and small acoustic interventions (the use of a roll of gaffer tape and a small wooden stick, as well as the sampling of a spoken word recording). I guess such tension can be fruitful – it prevents things from stagnating, and introduces that important risk of failure. (I did feel that the piece could have been longer, and didn't really have as clear a trajectory as the private solo recordings or collaborations I've done.) One thing I wasn’t expecting, though, was the birdsong-filled ‘silence’ at the end: as if my contribution to the piece was done, and it was the members of the audience who were now creating this final coda, by choosing not to applaud, talk, or get up and move around.

http://www.mediafire.com/?x7i5os6lttajwmt

VIRTUAL DUO (SWINDON/BRISTOL), 23/05/2011

The fourth (and first virtual) ‘sine language’ duo between David Grundy & Mark Anthony Whiteford. Solo home performances in Swindon and Bristol, recorded on 22nd and 23rd May respectively, and subsequently combined.

I had been recording a couple of solos as preparations for a live performance (see next post), and M.A.W. made a real-time improvised response, on recently-acquired bassoon, to the first 20 minutes of this recording. I’ve chosen to post both solos as stand-alone pieces, along with the virtual duo. Following the tracklist is a subsequent exchange (slightly revised in ‘post-production’) based on this virtual collaboration:

D.G. Solo, 22nd May (28:26)
M.A.W. Solo, 23rd May(20:20)
Virtual Duo, 23rd May (20:19)

D.G. : thanks for this - reminds me of our virtual collaboration on my first ever sine solo a few years ago. listening to the two pieces at once, it strikes me that the contrast between electronic continued/droning sounds and bassoon ones shortened by breath (and often more staccato than with your saxophone playing) in some ways totally changes the complexion of the original. (at first i was going to say that it did this by adding 'tension' - but i know you don't like that word - and after a while what seems like tension becomes more like a rejection of linear/narrative logic than 'tension-and-release' in any case. 'uniformity and depth' as you say in your improvisation.) did you listen to the solo piece before playing along, or was this a 'real-time' reaction?

M.A.W. : mmm yes it was real time response. i particularly like the lo-tech talking in the midst of it all [i.e. in DG’s piece]. i like the animal/human sounds alongside the electronic and I like the incoherence. were you incoherent when speaking, or is that just the listening experience?

D.G. : the spoken word bit in the middle was sampled from something i recorded a few months back when i had a cold and was feeling a bit feverish - so it's originally fairly incoherent, but rendered even more incoherent by being cut up live. i have been thinking about that contrast between physical actions/ speech / 'human' things and machine/electronic sounds (which isn't a simple binary opposition). and i read this from one of our email exchanges:

"i was probably quite aware that the text was speaking of sentiments seemingly far removed from sine waves and yet at the same time i'm very aware of how the likes of Sachiko M have reinvented/ reinstated the female wail with the cry of fucked machines and i'm very much reminded of other high tech associated witch wailers such as Amy Yoshida. and it occurs to me that the sine wave and electronic sounds are voices that have lost the ability to communicate logically or properly and instead hum or stutter beyond the supposed/mythic intelligibility of words."

also relevant: nathaniel mackey's idea of 'telling inarticulacy' in relation to african-american music - and simone weil: "and even in those who still have the power to cry out, the cry hardly ever expresses itself, either inwardly or outwardly, in coherent language. usually, the words thru which it seeks expression are quite irrelevant."

M.A.W. : maybe it 's a mistake to think that machines are not speaking sentiments? maybe they are screaming at us and we dont know it? and yes i feel that when we communicate depth or complexity there is no rational sense to be found. because feelings/spirit are outside our rational reality. i find it easy to imagine emotional landscapes beyond our ken within the music of sachiko m at times. it's the rustling and stirring of neurones and nerve endings. the gap outside of our perception where shadows and scratchings occur. i enjoyed the cut up text. and i enjoyed responding with my own speaking echo in the response. maybe sine waves ache with angst? who knows? maybe they create sine universes once we release them from the machines?