Quayside Muroclasm: A Sound Derive
Friday 13th October 2006
Weaving and steering abrupt undulations and inept meanderings from. Choosing distractions fashioned from old bits of wrapping and board in an indifferent attempt to follow a mummy in her fair-trade awareness campaign through. Goofish dialogue concerning filters, delays and pitch-shifting, the stuff of local inspector’s banishing of collusion from the ‘home’, waxy grimace his kids’ compromised consolation. Beginner rock wool heads making a fatuous pilgrimage, only to be critiqued by gaily sardonic chavs.
The thing was to do a Wildlife Producer filming, then screen it as part of On The Outside free jazz festival, with Caroline Kraabel as a special appearance. Festival cowboy P Bream had gotten prior to the notion that Caroline did a lot of street with her sax. He also invited Pat Thomas because Pat’s an adventurist and SU10ist and dictaphonist, the time sponsored by accurist will be.
As it turns out Caroline’s approach involves moving about spaces and resonating her alto against/between/through different architectural surfaces/creases/crevices. It’s an exercise in blowing and listening in the same movement, an intense manner of practising the art of collective free appropriation. Her engagement with architectural space, then, was very much akin to the Wildlife Producer aesthetic, but the encounter was potentially problematic within the context of Wildlife Producer’s spectacle for the sake of.
Here’s the programme note for the festival installation at Dance City:
Quayside Muroclasm: A Sound Derive
(Video & installation, 54mins loop, produced and directed by DavidFloat, 2006)
Caroline Kraabel – alto sax
Pat Thomas – SU10 & Walkman
D*Vid JC De La Haye – SP404 & acoustic bass
Gwilly Edmondez – SP404 & TCM20DV Dictaphone
A beautiful Oct morning seized and lovingly manipulated into a means to countering endemic ignorance. Yeay, bother to flick the crass from my gaze, the rust from my lens and dismiss the repression of that arsed flecking you spam. Newcastle is the Venice of the Brazilian imaginary, a haunt that has yielded the fiddly nuts that so frequently poke a hole in your savvy. With the help of special visitors, Wildlife Prod, )prd..prd..prd( used their knowledge of a male-squared Saturday (a bitter misnomer, the original *Paul* would wretch in his creak at the flabby recuperation Christian-belched ritual has had us all guff around) to reclaim the erotic adventure-plate of what can still be a real day. Friday 13th 6 – larkless Voorhees constructed for once boom-proper by McTiernan (Welcome to the party, pal!)
End.
DavidFloat’s film Mini Mini Tour (FTG Studio; 2006) tells it from the start: the four noisers finishing a cup of coffee at the Starbucks opposite Newcastle station, Pat sparking a shard-waft of SU10ery even as we have barely left the seating: the staff’s eyes reflect the bony, residual ignorance. Bleuragghcht!! The film goes on to deliver a real-time account of a would-be derive that winds its way to the Quayside and ultimately the Baltic/Sage patio, ultimately chatting with a couple of cheerful charvers on bikes, mitching from school, with Pat telling them, ‘You should be at school, learning Maths!’
The music on this outing was the worst, by far, that Wildlife Producer had yet tasted. It remains a creative low. The whole thing was rescued by the fact that Float’s film is so good and entirely watchable: its screening on the Saturday evening of the festival was much admired by the gently excited rabble, hobbers who were beering their knobs in the encounter. And maybe that’s the best way. (This despite the latently aggressive tension generated by the arbitrary officiousness of the two pricks who tender the technical needs of Dance City: no, there are good people around, but these two have given up the ghost on their chance to counter the fear within). Anyway - because the film’s content, what the group offers the listening viewer, is constantly awkward and unsettled, the electronic trio following a Kraabel that seeks to dissociate herself from the event at all moments of apparent arrival. And she’s right, of course. D*Vid and Gwilly never get it together, resorting mostly to twisting the knobs on their 404s, demonstrating at once their as-yet unfamiliarity with the kit and their inability to deal with the intensely non-idiomatic vocabulary of Pat Thomas. Kraabel works in ontology and teleology, representing an account of human engagement with first and second natures. Thomas has begun a few spheres beyond, from his years ago, and has never been compelled to compromise a regression to dual exchange. This truth essence of his love action was so breathtakingly enshrined by Kraabel/Brand/Ulher’s crib-crab during the middle session of that Friday’s of the festival, after. It had the clarity of a first and last delicious cigarette. But I’ll try and write about that set another time. I’ll need to travel back to it, literally, to catch the wisp of what it woke in my person.
Thing is about this particular Wildlife Producer outing was its position the little canon as a half-step. Despite what Kane or Meth or anyone else might say, half-steppin’ is a necessity, part of a necessary evolution. To avoid a wrong ‘un is to bow to the rod that ribs the quo. The artist ought to be happy to plunge the good foot firmly into the cheese of plop, wherever it might appear unexpectedly. The careful careerist will evade the embarrassment and pursue the path of sanitary equivalence. ‘I keep my breath smelling like SHIT/So I can get funky…’ What else can ODB have been saying? Sheeit. Because now, Quayside Muroclasm, depicted so stylishly in Mini Mini Tour, the movie, lends a deft shading to the scattered mount of Wildlife Producer’s subsequent endeavours. They probably would have got the whole Paris excursion wrong for a start. Of course they didn’t get it right either – that would have been disastrous.
Look at some video clips: www.myspace.com/wildlifeproducer
Or search exactly for them at www.youtube.com
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