The event was designed to spark discussion of the issues raised by Angus and Rupert’s Air Pressure project, currently installed at the Whitworth. An immersive video and multi-channel audio work, it centres on a site in Japan where the runway of an international airport has been built right beside a traditional organic farm. Two farming families refuse to move, despite pressure from the authorities to re-locate, and the intense noise at the site. The exhibition is on until the 12th of February and is well worth a visit.
I presented some thoughts about about art-geography collaborations, of which there have been an increasing number in recent years. I spoke about a project I’m just starting, The Invisible College, a collaboration with public artists NVA (more on that soon; for now see NVA’s website). I also made some more general comments about four issues that seem to come up when academics and artists work together. These are:
1. Epistemology
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2. Evaluation
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(I would add to this that in my view, the lack of established criteria for this is a good thing; the resulting sense of uncertainty seems productive and useful.)
3. Politics
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The other contributions spun together a vast array of approaches and topics. From the Japanese side, there was a talk about noise around the airport from an acoustics and health perspective, and presentations about Minamata disease, the history and politics of a radiation poisoning incident caused by US nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, and the Fukushima disaster. The UK presenters covered the future of waste (including some stuff about a Finnish project to build a permanent nuclear waste storage facility that will be sealed for 100,000 years), collaborations between arctic scientists and artists, a wonderful story weaving together the September 11th attacks and HIV, John Wynne presenting his work with sound in a transplant hospital, and Peter Cusack airing some recordings from the zone of exclusion in Chernobyl, and some wicked drone action from shipping in the Thames estuary.
So, a mind-expandingly diverse melting pot of ideas. Thanks to Rupert and Angus for the invite, and to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for funding such an interesting event.
Some friends of mine recently made a documentary about DIY/noise/experimental music/sound. It involves interviews with, and live footage of, musicians based in the central belt of Scotland, mainly Glasgow, but I have a strong sense that there are similar kinds of activities going on all over the world. There’s lots of stuff in there about sound, but of most interest to me are the insights into the attitudes, practices and values associated with a certain kind of culture – whether we want to call that experimental, DIY, underground, marginal, subcultural or whatever.
The film itself has a pretty DIY, low budget aesthetic, in keeping with the subject matter. It’s available on Vimeo in two parts:
I was interviewed and appear briefly a couple of times. A full transcript of my interview can be downladed as a PDF here. Again it seems interesting not for what it says about me, or about the kind of music I make, but more sociologically, as some reflections on how someone ends up experimenting with sound and audio media, and what sorts of attitudes and values that entails.
Looking at the age range, it seems they want someone for an 80s style band who was born between 1983 and 1993. In other words, someone who, at best, would have only early childhood memories of the 80s, and at worst would have no memories of the 80s at all. I had to check out their Myspace page. Anyway, kudos to them for the DIY advertising technique.
Where to start? Perhaps with my sense that the sheer accumulation of dramatic events, both in the UK and far beyond, demands some kind of response from an academic in my position. And a growing concern that my research interests in sound and audio media might be, to put it bluntly, irrelevant to the pressing matters at hand: a nuclear disaster in Japan; uprisings, unrest and civil war erupting across North Africa and the Middle East; drastic cuts to UK public services; riots and looting in England; crisis and debt in the Eurozone; the phone hacking scandal; the list goes on.
I find myself living in a nation governed by a privileged elite who insist that ‘we are all in this together’, when it is plainly obvious that they have sufficient personal wealth and connections to shield them from any significant downturn in their own economic fortunes. Under their rule, the UK has become a place where a girl who stole a mismatched pair of trainers from a smashed up shop has been given a 10 month jail sentence, yet no grounds can be found to prosecute (b/w)ankers like ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin, whose reckless mismanagement of the Royal Bank of Scotland led to a bail out in which an incomprehenible £25 billion of government money has been lost. Goodwin has walked away with a £16 million pension, and our legal system is apparently unable (i.e. unwilling) to do anything to prevent this. That money would buy nearly 140,000 pairs of Nike Air Max trainers. Matching pairs.
And yet much of my time in the last six months has been spent adjusting to a new job in Glasgow, writing funding applications for research on sonic geographies, making audio recordings, taking photos and making minimal techno music. On recent excursions, I’ve found myself recording the sounds of a modernist ruin, the howling of the wind in fences around my local sewage works, and the fizzle of metal-studded winter tyres on cars in Finland.
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Is this pure escapism, a kind of apolitical aestheticism? I have a weblog, and I have strong opinions about the unfolding economic and political mess – surely I should be speaking (or writing) up?
Looking around, however, there is no shortage of half-baked, narrowly informed, pre-fabricated analysis being rolled out on all sides of every debate. The danger of saying something stupid and unconstructive seems particularly high. As does the danger of speaking about things of which one has very limited experience or knowledge. For example, why did the BBC decide that David Starkey, a celebrity historian and TV presenter, should have anything worthwhile to say about rioting and youth culture? Or that Jeremy Clarkson – a man who has made a successful career in the media by performing an exaggerated caricature of insensitive, chauvenistic, materialistic masculinity – would be worth quizzing about public sector strikes?
I have a background in social research with children and young people, including on issues of participation and inclusion, and I’ve also spent some time as a youth worker. Yet when it came to the riots in England I genuinely didn’t know what to make of them. The immediate responses on both the right and left seemed inadequate. David Harvey’s commentary, for example, was pretty much exactly what you would expect him to say based on his previous work. Blame global capitalism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s such a familiar diagnosis that I’m left wondering whether it really adds any insight.
What seems more useful at this point are propositions for action, and in this respect a recent public speech by Harvey seems more constructive, particularly towards the end:
Meanwhile, most mainstream politicians and commentators are offering solutions that seem incredibly negative. The rhetoric is all of necessity, difficulty, tough decisions, limitation, reduction, deficit, essential measures. A miserable, miserly discourse that makes me feel shrouded in permanent drizzle, even when the sun is shining outside. What about joy, hope, fun, play, freedom, life, love? Surely these are things we need most of all right now.
So, here is my end-of-2011, ramshackle, recycled, rehashed, cobbled together, incoherent, poorly-thought-out five point plan for growth – some things that I, you, we could do that might have at least a small chance of making a positive difference.
1. Pay less attention to the mainstream media and party politicians. Both have become largely theatrical, about performance, maufacturing spectacle, entertaining an audience, and the production of celebrity personalities. I don’t know about you, but for me much of the information I’m receiving about the various unfolding crises is being mediated by this process. It’s easy to slip into taking it seriously. Incessant hyperbole and graphic images can seep into the unconscious. Turning off (the radio, the TV, the internet) becomes a survival strategy. If in doubt, do it! We’re also lucky in that the internet has massively diversified the forms of mediatisation available to us. After the riots, I found the London Sound Survey’s recording of looting – which, to my ears, sounds a bit like a rowdy street party – to be an interesting contrast to the looping helicopter footage of burning buildings on the TV news channels.
2. Believe that Babylon shall fall. I’m talking about Babylon in the Rastafari sense of institutional oppression, the various forms of government and policing, and the bureaucracy, lies and corruption they engender. It’s very difficult at the moment to resist thinking in terms of ‘us and them’, and a revolution that will happen at some particular point in history. Babylon fits with that, but I have a different interpretation, of Babylon as a system that we’re all enmeshed in, all reproducing, but that is also continuously falling. ‘Shall fall’ then becomes less a prophecy of some future event, and more a recognition of the inevitable failure that is endemic to processes of control and domination. Check out my current favourite downfall of Babylon anthem, an absolutely deadly Rhythm and Sound track from 2003. It’s the perfect mantra for our times:
3. If you live in England, consider moving to Scotland. The Scottish Government is as problematic as any parliamentary system, but the level of bullshit appears to be several orders of magnitude lower up here. Alex Salmond is certainly a celebrity of sorts, but to nowhere near the extent of Cameron, Clegg et al. We have some sensible things like proportional representation, free prescriptions, ambitious green energy targets, and the government will pay your fees for higher education if you’ve been living here for 3 years or more. It’s by no means perfect but right now it feels way better than what is going on down south. The weather can be hard work, but things like mountains, beaches, islands, wildlife, fewer traffic jams, plentiful clean water and stunning whisky more than make up for that.
4. Do as many fun things that involve no exchange of money as possible. Yes, this is flippant, yes it’s frivolous, and yes it’s the sort of trite bollocks you’d find in a self-help book, but: every time you have fun without exchanging money, you are actively chipping away, albeit in a tiny way, at the whole crisis-deficit-fear mentality, reminding yourself that your personal happiness does not depend solely on money, and flicking two fingers at western societies’ ludicrous, obsessive, crippling subservience to financial markets. The more of that the better in my view.
5. Finally, let’s resist, in all possible ways, big and small, the appalling marketisation and consumerisation of UK higher education. If you’re based in the UK, consider signing this petition in defence of public education. It’s going to Westminster so it probably won’t make a blind bit of difference, but it might help raise the profile of the issue a bit. The full text of the White Paper being opposed by the petition is here. Thinking a bit more widely, the Globalise Resistance website seems helpful. And there are obviously all kinds of more direct actions that academics can take, and in many cases are taking: informal peer support, giving free talks and public presentations, freely distributing electronic copies of publications. So here’s an offer: if anyone wants any of these things from me, get in touch.
Jonathan Prior and I have produced a five minute audio piece documenting the workshop led by Chris Watson earlier this year. It’s a mixture of recordings we made on our trip out to the seaside at North Berwick and a few clips from an interview we did with him at the start of the week:
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I live on the route of the Edinburgh Marathon, so a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see and hear around 27,000 people running down my road. Here’s a recording made from my window:
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As in previous years, I enjoyed being able to hear something other than motor vehicles, which are sonically dominant on my street every other day of the year. The road was officially open in one direction, with cones down the middle, but before long the volume of runners was such that they took up the whole of the street. You can hear a distant car horn in the recording, presumably coming from a frustrated driver trying to come up the road.
This is a little late notice, but I’ll be presenting at an event at CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) in London tomorrow. Info as follows:
the uses and abuses of field recording
June 9th, 2011, 3pm to 6pm
Podium Lecture Theatre
London College of Communication
SE1 6SB
On the 9 June this year CRiSAP is holding its fifth research symposium. In celebration of the beginning of our two year EU Cultural Partnership Project, the event will explore the role of field recording in artistic practice. We have invited eight speakers who all, in different ways and for different reasons, use microphones to capture something of the world around them: Viv Corringham, Peter Cusack, Felicity Ford, Michael Gallagher, Ruth Hawkins, Bill Thompson, Salomé Voegelin and Mark Peter Wright.
For this symposium we wanted to try something a little different and adapt the PechaKucha format where, while presenters are talking, their chosen 20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds. According to its originators this “makes presentations concise, and keep things moving at a rapid pace”. We want to spice the pot a little by asking the presenters to conclude with 2 minutes of recorded sound.
This exciting event will conclude with tea and cakes and a concert featuring Viv Corringham (voice); Peter Cusack (guitar, saz, samples & electronics)
Viv Corringham and Peter Cusack perform songs, mixed with improvisation, and soundscapes created from environmental recordings – all controlled live. Songs are from the Eastern Mediterranean area, including Greek rembetika and Turkish folk, others are self written. They will be joined by flute, shakuhachi and ney player Jan Hendrickse.
“Interesting, challenging stuff…” Folk Roots
“ingeniously crafted settings… make for fascinating listening… unorthodox yet entirely persuasive arrangements” Julian Cowley, The Wire
An interview with Ian Rawes, who runs the excellent London Sound Survey, an archive of field recordings made in and around London. Read the full interview here. There are some recordings from the London Sound Survey embeded in the interview. My favourite was this recording of echoing oil refinery sirens from Essex:
One for the ornithologists and twitchers: in the interview, Ian mentions Xeno Canto, an international archive of bird sound recordings. There are currently 7339 species represented in the archive. According to the site, that’s an impressive 69% of all known species.
4 hours of drone: my repetitive/experimental band Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo are taking part in a gig entitled ’4 hours of drone’ at the CCA in Glasgow on Saturday 4th June. We’ll be inviting the audience to join us in using lots of small cassette recorders to make a drone. More details here.
Debby Harry was on BBC Radio 4′s Desert Island discs this morning. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the show, each week a different guest is asked to choose eight pieces of music that they would take with them if they were going to be a castaway on a desert island. The person is interviewed about their life and their record choices, interspersed with clips of the music. Because it’s Radio 4, the guests are sometimes famous, sometimes not quite so well known, but they’re always people whose reputation is based on notable achievements – actors, sportsmen and women, artists, musicians – rather than that bloke off of Big Brother series 37.
I really like the format – I like how the social, historical and biographical context gets woven around the music, and I like idea of choosing music to fit an imagined place – but I usually find the choices made pedestrian and predictable. Most people go for stuff like the Beatles, Elvis, Rolling Stones, Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, James Brown, the standard canon of popular music classic, with the occasional fairly obvious jazz or ‘classical’ choice. Not bad music necessarily, just not very exciting. One of the most disappointing I’ve heard was John Cale (viola player who played in the Theatre of Eternal Music with Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, and then formed the Velvet Underground). I’d have thought of all people he might come up with something a bit more unusual, but again it was all Beatles, Dylan, Leonard Cohen. Yawn. I guess that’s Radio 4 for you.
So thank God for Debbie Harry, who was on the show this morning. Her choices weren’t exactly radical in the scheme of things, but I found the music she picked more interesting to listen to than 99% of what normally gets played. She’s 65 – that’s nearly as old as my mum – and there she was choosing Fever Ray and Peaches, swearing a bit (a very rare occurrence on Radio 4) and talking about the Blondie gig where she wore a dress made of razor blades. Is Lady Gaga going to be this cool in 40 years’ time? By the end, the fact that she referred to Mahler 5 as ‘the music from Death in Venice’ grated my pedantic sensibilities only slightly. To listen to the show, and search through an archive of previous epsiodes, go here.
Also, the BBC is giving all of us a chance to choose our own Desert Island Discs. This is my opportunity to make some more interesting choices! Except so far the first two things I’ve come up with are Beethoven 6 and West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys – again, these are fairly safe choices, but they’re important to me for personal reasons. Maybe in the end the set-up encourages a certain middle-of-the-roadness. If you’re going to a desert island, you need stuff you know you can listen to repeatedly, and for most people that would probably exclude the extremes of their record collections.
The other thing to say is that, by coincidence, next week’s guest on the show is Roger Waters, who I was writing about in my last post. I bet he picks one of Pink Floyd’s early hits with Syd Barrett, like Arnold Layne, plus some Beatles/Stones/Hendrix. I’d love to think he’s going to get some Krautrock on there, like some of that pre-Kraftwerk stuff from Tone Float; being slightly more realistic, perhaps some Velvet Underground or a bit of prog stuff like Soft Machine or Led Zep. Somehow, I think even that might be wishful thinking.
In January this year whilst visiting London, I found myself inside the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush on a Saturday lunchtime. It’s one of those flagship biggest-shopping-centre-in-the-UK developments, a 1.6 billion-pound retail cathedral stuffed full of gleaming glass and just about every chain store that has ever existed. It’s so big that they have computerised touch screen information points, mounted in futuristic white pods, which you can use to search for the shop you want and get directions to help you find it.
My reaction to the place was an odd mixture of awe, excitement and dismay that I often feel when experiencing the excesses of capitalism. I have to admit that the awe and excitement outweighed the dismay on this occasion: despite the ludicrous, hyperbolic architecture, the comic timing (it opened in late 2008 at the height of the credit crunch) and the fact that I couldn’t find a pair of jeans that would fit me, I was overwhlemed by the light, the scale, the space and the massive wall of tesselated angled mirrors outside the toilets.
As I was taking in the scene in the main atrium (pictured above, photo by WiNG), I noticed that the PA system was piping in a Pink Floyd song, Wish You Were Here. It’s a rather maudlin song about longing and loss, with references to Syd Barrett, who had previously left the band in tragic circumstances. As far as I could tell, no-one but me was paying any attention to this unexpected soundtrack. I had a digital recorder with me, so I quickly got it out and managed to catch the end of the song, which then segued into a much more upbeat piece of bland pop music. It was as if DJ Westfield had accidentally tuned into a prog rock station, then realised his mistake and switched swiftly back to Shopaholic FM. I have no idea what the legal implications are of uploading a recording of a soundscape in which copyrighted music can be heard. Anyway, here it is:
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I have very ambivalent feelings about Pink Floyd. I confess that I was a fan in my teenage years, whereas nowdays I find most of their music overblown and difficult to listen to. But as a group they hold a certain fascination for me. They seem to represent the epitome of the dysfunctional stadium rock band, and a model of music making that may be dying out, if it isn’t dead already. As far as I can make out, a combination of personal emotional troubles and massive commercial success seems to have led the band’s members into a catalogue of bitter acrimonies, drug and mental health problems, broken relationships and legal battles. The band’s Wikipedia page makes for grim reading at points. If any further proof were needed that money and celebrity don’t necessarily lead to happiness, then Pink Floyd’s story surely supplies it in bucketloads. Thankfully, the surviving members seem to have finally made peace with one another, but only after decades of conflict.
What I find even more compelling is that they seem to have had sufficient awareness of what was happening to them to sing about it in their music, but not to actually do anything about it. In terms of their public trajectory at least, that’s how it appears. The most obvious example is Money, a song about the hypocrisy and vacuity of wealth. That song appears on Dark Side of the Moon, an album whose sales brought to the band exactly the kind of immense riches that the song ridicules. The last lines point out that, whilst people may agree that money is the root of all evil, ‘if you ask for any rise, it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away’. Roll on to 1987, and in an interview with Roger Waters, when asked about what problems were brought on by that album’s overwhelming success, he replied: ‘Mainly the one of what to do with all the money! You think of all the good you could do with it by giving it away. But in the end you decide to keep it!’ The lyrics also sneer at people who buy new cars; yet the drummer Nick Mason subsequently started collecting racing cars, and now has so many that they have to be kept in hangars.
Against that background, hearing Pink Floyd’s music in Westfield felt both incongruous and strangely fitting. There was something quite resonant about standing in a shrine to capitalism, surrounded by bustling shoppers, dazzled by plate glass and consumer outlets, listening to a millionaire singing about his sense of alienation from the world. Perhaps the last laugh goes to the band, who will, I imagine, have received a royalty payment for the public airing of their work.
