During the festive season. I’m staying with my mum and dad over the holiday. It’s in Wales, as Bridgend, or thereabouts. That is to say, Ewenny. Oh, Ewenny, right – anyone who knows the area will put two and two together. One way or another, there is no point at which I’m not socialising, which is slightly disappointing because I brought this John Irving book to read and I’m barely 60 pages in. I never read normal fiction like that. It’s either hard-ass critical sustenance or high fibre American crime novels. While I’m wiggly in the turns of chit-chat, though, I’m nipping back and forth upstairs to my computer to change the minidisc that’s being USB’d into to it. On some ‘Hang on a minute’ shit.
I’ve accumulated so many hours of recorded effluence during the past few years, it has become a soggy burden, the amount of minidiscs stacked up in boxes. Just over a year ago I switched to hard-disc recording where you just USB direct to your hard drive and edit, delete or store straight off the bat. That in itself made me sick, the amount – I recorded every improv class and every gig, racking up hours of half-steppin’, randomly aimless noodling around a stick drawing of modernist gesture. Then, of course, my lesson learned, not recording the classes, I miss out on rehearing the magic of this year’s sessions (like the one I describe in A Beautiful and Legendary Season of Improv).
Much of what I’ve not brought with me to transfer from minidisc is certainly of that drossic ilk. What I have brought ranges from the complete Lazy Old Woman sessions though the Leeds Louds projects (to be edited for ON ON ON ON, eventually), the two key sessions that make up the Cheeky Slipper album Rude Messages, which MUST be released, and various improvised sketch-outs of SU10 collage. And it’s these last that have amazed me. I’d forgotten about them, but apparently, in 2002, I was in the habit of assembling a bunch of samples on the SU10, then recording solo work-out jams that threw the sounds up against each other in increasingly an fluid multi-juxtaposition.
The one session I listened to while transferring was based around a handful of piano and brush-kit drum samples from this George Shearing trio album I picked up on MPS. I’ll always buy any MPS LP simply because I know the sound will be mentholated, utterly eucalyptus. The Shearing was supplemented (on the same bank) by some ‘interesting’ percussion sounds I got off a 70s teaching record. Yes, 70s, where the bedrock was a bedframe stretched between bolshevism and the liberal, and the Pelican books would bear this out. Even the housewives, for fuck’s sake. Incidentally, this SU10 was the one used by Radioactive Sparrow on the We Are The Professionals sessions recorded in the kitchen of the Welsh Council For the Blind – obviously I’m hoping I come across another session where I work out on the Minder theme that Tony Gage uses so well on ‘How Good Can A Band Get?’ Anyway, these Shearing samples made up the rhythm section for ‘Happy Hour At The Jazz Club’.
Three groups of samples thrown together, then. The way I play them, play with them, is to seek out a continuity in a given pair, then work up sort of a groove with that, but not in any regularly looping sense. Once in place, that groove is challenged and spiked by any of the other samples, though usually focusing on just two or three at a time, so that this quartet/quintet texture develops which seems to be driven by a neurotic obsession with one particular passage of expression. Like four or five telepathic eleven-year-olds frantically trying to make up for a week of laziness by cramming all their practice into the hour before a lesson. And then some: as if charged with LSD and dream logic.
The neurotic obsession lends it a character quite unlike anything else I’ve heard in music. Its solipsistic reflexivity renders an uncomfortably point blank encounter with the monologic banter of the artist. Hovers on a squalid limbo between the conscious and its un-. A surprisingly virtuosic depiction of unbridled horsing without the knob of a puissance to convince you this is even music or art. For some dumb-ass reason I always try to imagine my stuff coming out of a high-spec hi-fi system in the lounge of a modern (well, post-Frank Lloyd prosperity crib) house, grabbing the passing ear of a slim, blonde woman in a flowing cheesecloth dress (like Stockhaisen’s) [sic (it’s Newc)]. I figure that if it sounds good in there, then I’m hitting the spot. But why? Why not coming out of the mean speaker of a little radio on the 17th floor at Hackney Wick? In fucking February 1985, when the Syphilitic Cock was just starting to really throb. Because in my ‘I’ve-made-it-post-Pelican-book-on-world-famine-and-Castro-biog’ house by the sea with cheesy cloth ex-model wife, it’s September, the month of self-pitying reflection on middle-class leisure accomplished. Sigh in the sweetly sour decay of delights partaken. Partaken – a band.
But, anyway. In that house by the sea, these phrase sampler monologues sound alien to all musics yet done. And yet, as I listen to them now, in the fizz of rediscovery four years after the fact, they are impossibly attractive. And I’m thinking along four years of wasted time, in a way: wasted by not realising then and there that I’d hit on something. Trouble is I was at the start of a period where I tried to convince as an orthodox improvisor in the (literally) post-modernist (i.e. re-modernist), non-idiomatic manner. Non-idiomatic? How idiomatic, ultimately, is Stockhaisen’s cheesecloth? We know we’ve all been there, but does that make it idiomatic?
I think what’s crucial about these SU10 sketch-offs I’ve rediscovered is how the single-layered juxtaposing, cohered (cohesiated) by the energy of neurotic soliloquy, are so like Merzbilder. Merz doesn’t indulge the representationism of depth so craved by an electroacoustic, acousmatic music so in love with software. Neither does it fastidiously spurn bald quotation like the non-idiomaticists do. Merz deals in an immediacy that plays the intensive desire of creative expression against the intrinsic dialogue of the assembled parts. And yields an unbridled entertainment that has shed the sludgy sleepers of idea.
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