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.)

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?

BRISTOL DUO, 04/07/2010

Second Sine Language Duo between David Grundy and Mark Anthony Whiteford. Guide Hut (Jack Brimble Hall), St Werburghs, Bristol, 4th July 2010.

01 'independence day' (35:44)

melting: saxophone into electronics/ electronics into saxophone.
moulding: electronics shape saxophone/ saxophone shapes electronics.
bleeding: saxophone into electronics/ electronics into saxophone
feeding (into/back): electronics/ saxophone. voice/ percussion. stasis/ activity.

curtains – shut. light – a pink, filtered glow. live sampling, layer on layer, obscuring, blurring the lines – what is played when and by whom. at times, it's almost as if just one instrument is playing; moments when the origin of the sound you've just heard becomes blurred. where did that sound come from? who made that sound? perhaps it was you yourself.

(sample towards the end of the track - delia derbyshire, interviewed for bbc radio scotland in 1997.)

Email Exchange Re. Bristol Duo

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Subject: thoughts on our duo‏
From: David Grundy
Sent: 20 June 2010 14:53:56
To: anthony whiteford
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The Sine Language Project: Collaboration

I’d thought of doing a duo as part of the ‘Sine Language Project’ (provisional title to cover a proposed series of collaborations, with me on sine-wavey-style electronics.) The idea behind the ‘project’ is it to collaborate with performers who’ll add something different and unpredictable – even seemingly incompatible – providing new perspectives and forcing new accommodations and meanings to the ‘sine system’. (This ‘system’ is a kind of constant, I suppose – a static, stark, ‘pure’ constant – which will of course be modified by what goes on around it.) I’m also interested in working with people interested in expanding or altering the clichés of concert format/ perhaps with movement, spatial perception (I might try to work with some dancers)/ with actors/ with musicians interested in theatricality, self-reflexivity, the notion of *performance* rather than just sitting there and playing some music.

Flow and counter-flow

What I liked about your playing in the duo last Wednesday was the way you simultaneously went ‘with a flow’ – as in the bits where we had vocals working with the drone, the sax and recorder meshing with the electronics too, hovering around, roundabouts a single pitch (in the second part of ‘Witches’)– and did things which were potentially disruptive – cut-up, musique concrete, anti-flow; speech fragments, often self-reflexive, referring to what’s going on and the thoughts and reasons behind musical actions (“I plan at some point in the future to knock over the other bell. Can this really be improvisation?”); readings from feminists texts; bursts of radio – often classical music, during this session – miscellaneous percussion. This is tied up, I suppose, with your refusal to be a conventional instrumentalist, tied to one instrument – it’s not saxophone + misc percussion, the saxophone is on the same level as the voice and the percussion and the radio – just another element in the mix. Was it 45 minutes before you even touched it? At certain points the radio seemed to ‘distract’ from the sine stuff – but the nature of the sine stuff is to fade in and out of background and foreground, after all – and this is free improv! Radio is simply a different element (& used differently from the usual Keith Rowe method as well). And it’s intriguing to have a clash between reactive and unreactive things – the way the electronics often don’t change in reaction to radio etc, and the way that radio doesn’t change in relation to other things.

Witches’ Dance

But *of course* there is interaction, communication. Not as polite ‘exchange’ but as swarming crawling overlapping frequencies, textures, bursts, drones, voices, voicings. “They howl, they gasp, they babble, they shout, they sigh…unable to speak straightforwardly, logically, geometrically, in strict conformity…” The Xaviere Gauthier text you were reading set off some strands in relation to this – notions of shamanic ecstasy (the bits with drumming, vocals + a few times I sampled shamanic ceremonies, glossolalia recordings); the use of technology/electronics to create an experience related to far more archaic forms of thought – ceremonial, ritual function. But *not* in some bullshit nostalgic way; not as regression. And if at times I hear the music as shamanic ceremony, at other times it’s radio crackle, white noise, interference, the hum of machines, of technology; leaves and twigs, grit spurting up from the road, burned out car tyres, nuts and bolts, factory engines, the hum of the computer hub.

Music and environment

The way you play could be described as self-critical/ self-reflexive, but not through hang-ups, through guilt, or through facile post-modernism. Indeed, the self-reflexivity occurs in a *relaxed* way (not sure if that’s the right word), where environment is truly accepted and brought into the music, in a really organic way – nothing is ‘wrong’, nothing is resented, nothing ‘intrudes’ – or if it does at first, it is incorporated into the flow of things. Music is not something which has to be put in a glass case, away from what happens around it, but reacts to it, impinges on it and is impinged on by it. But there is also a real focus, a real inward tone, when the saxophone eventually does come in – a sense (even) of emotion, fragments of delicacy and melody which are in no way sentimental or, in the clichéd sense, ‘oases of calm’, but which *do* possess a lovely simplicity.

Collaboration Once Again

What the session showed me was the ‘sine language project’ might end with a series of wildly diverse collaborations – will almost be a thought experiment for me, a means of, amongst other things: demonstrating and analysing free improv’s adaptability; the nature of personal and musical interaction; inter-disciplinary crossings/sharings; the role of environment. This is all stuff I’m interested in and think about with regards to free improv anyway, but the ‘project’ puts it through a prism which makes the issues stand out clearly, in a way that can be analysed – not systematically, theory abstracted from practice, but nonetheless with some sort of comparative structure built into things.

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Re: thoughts on our duo‏
From: anthony whiteford
Sent: 20 June 2010 19:13:59
To: David Grundy
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hiya david see below for my quick kneejerk response

yes indeed. thanks for your thoughts/text on the music of the other day. i am instantly embarrassed to be reminded that you had some kind of preordained experiment in mind, a follow on from some previous activities which i conveniently forgot, so attended the session with a clean slate and thought we were just making duos. i have a keen ability to lose all focus on thoughts or preordained ideas discussions once the music ensues. i'm sure this is a good thing for ensuring unconscious in the moment improvised music. although i recognise it's also a potentially annoying trait for others to deal with. it was one of those sessions when i almost never thought 'what's david doing? or what's going on? in that case i need to bring in such and such a thing.' i was mostly on a very unconscious wave of activity quite oblivious to the meld or sharp contrast of things i might create alongside your creations. i'm not sure i was that conscious that you were using sine wave. when i picked up the book i immediately thought of the text ‘why witches’ without really knowing if it was a direct response to the sounds already ensuing. but i seem to recall the text 'why witches' came in almost immediately or very early on and seemed to suggest something eerie or telling under the electronic sound you were making. 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. the bit where we both start stuttering in response to the text was magical and emotional i thought, and at the time seemed in sharp contrast to the electronics and yet now i see that electronics are broken communications too.

yes. lots of strongly contrasting radio/tape sounds. and lots of classical. somehow i just felt to let things come in randomly and also felt to leave them there however starkly contrasting or insistent they were. sooner or later even dominant aspects break down in the sound don’t you think?

and now i suddenly recall how in our original sine wave and response musics there was almost exclusively saxophone. how embarrassing. no i don’t think of myself as a saxophonist when i'm improvising. picking up the saxophone is like picking up a bell or radio only more limiting and demanding than either of those two. it comes in or not when it happens. i was really not thinking much at all during that first piece. i was bunging things into the mix like a baby throwing things out of a cot only with no intention or desire. i was in the sound of things falling and happy throughout the entire peice. relieved to be outside my fucked up head for and hour or so.

thanks for your comments regards the voice commentary thing. i like what you said. i dunno when it started to happen, but i guess in response to the still ongoing mystification of so much improvised performance wherein musicians create sounds as if in some magic inexplicable realm – so speaking out loud what is happening and what i'm thinking feels like a very very natural element to add to the sounds. and often my ongoing life creeps in too. at one point i recited/hollered my maternal grandmother and my maternal great aunts names prompted by gauthier's text and by recent decision to drop my father's surname and adopt my matriarchal grandmother's name instead. the reading of texts is so weird cos it's fixed, it's on the page and yet what we read and where/how is so utterly improvisational isn’t it?

i need to reread your text now. as this was simply a knee jerk reaction to one quick read.

thanks for the music on wednesday. you saved my life again, lifting me from ongoingly bleak mind terrains. i also thank you for being you and being so unerringly there and up for it and committed to the art, you give me hope in an otherwise hope-drained landscape. thanks

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Re: thoughts on our duo‏
From: anthony whiteford
Sent: 20 June 2010 20:07:47
To: David Grundy
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(I might try to work with some dancers)/ with actors/ with musicians interested in theatricality, self-reflexivity, the notion of *performance* rather than just sitting there and playing some music.

LOVE THIS statement: "Rather than just sitting there and playing some music." we need to make this an album title for the future.

the use of technology/electronics to create an experience related to far more archaic forms of thought – ceremonial, ritual function.

YES electricity/static subliminal activity audio {buried voices ghost sounds warped life sounds reinstigated from beyond the grave of the day on which they occured and died} and visual are all part of shamanic ritual in my experience. electronics and technology have the shaman's ability to shapeshift sounds, or if you prefer = soundshift!!!!

Music is not something which has to be put in a glass case, away from what happens around it, but reacts to it, impinges on it and is impinged on by it.

YES i agree. i think this says more eloquently what i was trying to say about transparency as opposed to mystification. and yes i like the idea of magic/sacred/ritual being actually merely constructed from what is, which is for me as sacred as it gets anyways? so yes things impinge. or we are forced to impinge upon things in our environment that we didn’t create [other musicians / guide leaders!!!!!] questions such as when does it start or end so valuable to critique challenge open up improvisational process as opposed to performance in the tradition of 'good evening ladies and gentlemen it's 8pm and we are on stage so it starts just after i stop speaking and we put our instruments to our mouths hands'

BRISTOL DUO, 16/06/2010

The first 'Sine Language' duo between David Grundy and Mark Anthony Whiteford. Private peformance at the Guide Hut (Jack Brimble Hall), St Werburghs, Bristol, 16th June 2010.

01 'Witches' (part 1) (36:29)
02 'Witches' (part 2) (30:36)

a continous piece, just over one hour long, broken down here into 2 parts. voice spoken word shouting and singing wailing/ poetry. reading from books. electronics. samples.archive sounds/music concrete. radio.percussion.tapes. alto saxophone. and maybe other things. (text - 'why witches' by xaviere gauthier)

03 'dedicated to bill dixon' (10:56)

a vocal piece made in the guide hut by david and mark. we discovered afterwards that bill dixon had died.

04 final piece (8:44)

a short vocal and percussion piece replete with girl guide lady interuption

(track descriptions by mark anthony whiteford)