Word As Bone

The Seduction of the Last

I tend to buy records in 5s. That is to say, when I am visiting regular sources of supply where I can guarantee rich diversity and low prices, I tend to buy records in 5s. One-off freak occasions, like a particularly good car-boot sale or a trip abroad, are the exception. I can get into trouble then.

Yesterday I went to this secondhand record and bookshop I’ve been frequenting, or, rather, I was on an errand that took me past it and I nipped in for five: minutes and vinyls. There’s just so many shitloads of album-stuffed racks in there that I usually look at two or three and it’s not hard to find 5 useful LPs with that restriction. I’ve long since given up that neurotic, paranoid approach to crate-digging whereby you can never leave an outlet, or walk past one, without checking every title, just to make sure they aren’t hiding the holy fucking grail in amongst the Jim Reeves and Roger Whitaker dross. This calming, this maturing, in me grew from two factors, probably: Harrison Maudlin’s take on sampling that he can build a track out of anything – Roger Whitaker being a case in point, of course, the classic 2006 Maud cut ‘Who Reg Tit Raker’ being built out of a small grabbing from the bespectacled prick’s back catalogue. And Vicki Bennett’s recent (ca 2005) flogging of all CDs and vinyls on ebay, committing herself henceforth to gathering material from digital sources. Besides, there are thousands of anoraks out there who are looking for Alan Tew’s soundtrack to ‘The Hanged Man’ or Ray Davies & the Button Down Brass’s ‘Funk In Hell’, just so they can scan the cover, slap it on a vinyl-geek fansite (www.vinylvulture.co.uk) and ‘Fnar, fnar’ about how amazing the grooves on it are. And have they yet to produce a track like ‘Who Reg Tit Raker’? I very much d-fucking-oubt it. Meanwhile their hogging all those LPs, getting into Help The Aged at 9.00am sharp to… whatever.

Anyway, yesterday’s stop-off was a good one because of one or two LPs (among my 5) that I got (sadly) very excited about. Vinyl Vulture have a small section on James Last. Before they posted it, I offered to write this, but then I couldn’t be bothered. It has most things of note on it, although it missed out his ‘Copabanca’ LP quite conspicuously. Well, one of the key James Last titles for crate-digging is ‘Well Kept Secret’ which, notoriously, features ‘proper’ fusionist/jazz rockers like Larry Carlton, Lee Ritenour and Ernie Watts. The album is generally spoken of/documented as a freak one-off (recorded in 1977). Which is why I was so excited to find ‘Seduction’ (1980) with the same cast of hotshots, supplemented here by Michael Brecker (among others). And it’s a fantastically horrible album, which makes it even more of a delight. One of the problems with ‘Well Kept Secret’ is that some of it is almost respectable. He does away with that ghastly, 4-square brass-section melody technique which he employs on just about everything he ever did. Not here, though: you can hardly make out the vain attempts by Ritenour and co to bleed some musical credibility into the plastic trousers. That said, from a sampling point of view it’s as barren as ever – you find yourself sampling drum hits and a couple of loops, before erasing them in tactically digital chunder. Has anyone ever got satisfactory results from a James Last record? They’re the musical equivalent of a blow-up doll. Not that I would know, of course, Jesus…

Anyway, the best purchase, right, in case you thought it couldn’t get any worse, was ‘Shadow Dancing’ by Andy Gibb. Now this LP I am going to sample like fuck – it’ll be a job not to just record the whole thing from start to finish and present that as your own work, just for having the perversion of thinking of it. The whole album is a misty-lensed journey through the sentiments of MOR adult relationships. No hard-ons, just hugs and understanding. With a little bit of endearing self-doubt for good measure. And the musical arrangements are just so lush – I can’t wait to get looping on those ponderous keyboard intros just so I can go ‘BzzXzschT!’ over the top of them.

Jesus, like anybody could possibly want to know this shit. And I never even talked about the Nile Rodgers-produced Outloud album ‘Out Loud’ which features a song titled ‘Kak’. I shit you not.

A Billy Joel’s Christmas Reflex In Welsh 2006: Merz As Entertainment

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.

Quayside Muroclasm

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

In Spain Volume One

P-D I In Spain Volume One (Fenland Hi-Brow FH-B 030 (CD) July 2003)

Aw, they suddenly all immense up in this Madre-Facta, where you wan’ it like that. What gorgeous space they have acquired, where fool-heads nurture a faggy bronze.

SPANISH CASTLE RHETORIC is how they slipped the legend into your bark-packet. ECM uses reverb to sooth the bitter obviousness of class oppression. What they capture here is material dialogue balmed in glittery-dark character distortion: but they’re collaborating with space, as they always do, of course, but here the space to hand oozes delusions of aristocracy.

Deft naughty clappers.

He is clearly inspired by the local ornithol, how in Southern Europe, the air feeds the heart in 4-Dimensional music. Can this be Messaien done Miro? And She’s doing it, too, no doubt, that way it’s they in absolute.

Listen, right? What music do you know about that actually deals fully with atmospheric temperature, with heat and cold, specifically? Obviously there’s an element of Mahler’s 3rd, in that he makes it all about weather – and doesn’t fail to notice that birds poeticise the material. Just like they drew a definitive social inversion out from Bonfire Night, here they deliver embroidered steel out of the apricot-sweet vocabulary of holidays!

[‘Interlude’]
Conversation. Sparrows guff their reflection of what He did. For Llanca & Elsewhere, She got bricks: because She ‘plays bricks’. By now, though, She must surely be grouting flamenco rats, thru’ ubiquitating roof-scrape.

Canny ubiquitateuse [‘Mawz?’]

And you know it fits and weeps you. Of course, He is flurried up by this for a while, having to dry his nibbly-nobbly leopard with anti-phosphate matches. This is after all a country where they really had a war between left and right, writ large, with the fascists babied into the cushy keep for, like, 40 fucking years. He knows they can still taste it, that they can be asked to ponce about celebrating the failure of a fundamentally shit idea in the first place. This is also before fucking Operation Hooride-Islam Endeavour.

BIRD-THING HORN RECONSTRUCTION actually is that – I ain’t shitting you. But [D]he remembers only the bits he has to, in order to rattle. It’s on this track, then/though, that you realise that P[she] is playing with such lucid ease that she’s at home or something. Her delicate rides give her bebop hat-card, no doubt, but she has absolute claws of evanescence, marking each crucial with an almost-nonchalance that is gaspful!

I couldn’t fucking believe it when I first heard ‘COL-I Whistling’. I still can’t believe it, but I’m very, very happy! ‘Vee used to have koncertz like this in Chermany’.

HETROTRAP his hard, now, given the circus: taken the charge. It’s very as-if they hit the Balearics hard to flag the ‘scene’ for kicks. But it’s OK, just in case you thought they were coming up the drive to stag the grille, they raise the beats to material lamping, inside on the cool, revised tiling. It’s exquisite and magnificent.

P-D I is captivating and rigorous. But when it’s also entertaining they deffo park yo bike in the crack: What I love about the simple beauty of ‘Concepts Of Liberty - II’’s thematic reprise is the genuinely moving and earnest attempts by the poor, whining property-rotator to mimic the daft nuances of Concepts of Liberty Over Nearly Everyone.

Catching the mood swiftly, T[He] breaks out for a wicked-ass solo [‘GIRONA SALT ANGLES’], which M[She] maps gaspingly with both support and bumpy asides.

Hey, I want to fan you. Down on the fan. When does the fan break?

Just by the by, how many soloists do you know, right, that carry a dialogue off with this much focused diversity? I mean, it’s just a fucking tape, right?

You can buy this album, and others like it, from www.fenlandhibrow.co.uk

The Labour Party Conference Commemorative CD-R

PLEASURE-DRENCHING IMPROVERS - The Labour Party Conference Commemorative CD-R (2004; unreleased)

Hey! Drenno be Pignosin’ right here. To my self-inflating ears the album they’ve got going here is out the same cloth as Wreckin Trust, but this is, like, two years on and plus. Cause of that, you really get to feel how fluid they got now. Plezz-u is rampant on surface charges, she corrugates timbre with the lightness of touch of a R-Ali and the plum of Williams.

I’m sorry, but this is fucking astounding. Driddle lamping is D.I. like this comes of like when Bailey was loud-vaunting his fragile skits, what made you see he actually out-played all comers. Can I be so fluffy and ambitious as to claim Drench and Pleazsj as the most uncompromisingly non-idiomatic improvisors since Derek, and as such, thank fuck for all of us else that at least we have them! There won’t be another John Peel, after all. Not even I could do that.

Which brings us to the subject matter, right? Because who can have resuscitated Maggie’s cultural agenda so stealthily as Bleurgh?

PLP, right, is obviously all I’ve been writing to so far, but checkit: the space and time theez nutz can carve out for themselves now is astonishing. I love this level of clarity. What they are doing, you see, speaking as a experienced practitioner who dearly covets they moves, is managing to see with their 3rd eyes, effortlessly, a eagle’s overview of what they have set in motion. 12-minutes-in, we’ve been dropping our jaws while Dren-the-bandit Weberns his nuts loose, dropping out for a delicate solo off of Sonique-the-Charge-Hog which nods a compressed eternity: I love this pace-shifting space-grab! Having chopped the administration to confetti, Tee-Haitch-Eff unplugs the fuck’s line connector to-

The dialectic zest of this shit provides like the relief of greeting the longed-for application of charcoal phallus to the British queen (“Fuck right off, your lubricancy!”), mourning from the crouch. But the zealous dialectix of our lovely Pleasure-Drenching Improvers also scours foundational crud from the rosy-encrusted discharge of Labour’s collusion with the American obscene (incl.  Fallujah itself just a low budget admin-directed sequel to collective performances of such utter depravity). Are we living in a proper word?

The duo’s sharded blunts of PLP were necessary: no one can shout loud enough to pierce the marshmallow pineae of luridly.

Can I be the arse to call this a symphony? Because for TUC, the boys again ruggour up the challenge for 4.54 more sweet minutes, both of them theming rather than riffing. Driggle-Mac gives us a more scrutinous look at his elements: the gorgeously-edged sustains, the Berg-Splaks and that reciprocal scrape-off he doubles with Moosey-Lynne. Not only that, he lifts them all deftly, part-part, and suspends them naughty for your savage voy to expect. Dunya’s mum prods as the dad’s over-heated rhetoric here: yes, he’s getting flushy and gushy, but don’t forget- Madame de P-D is Hindu-inflected – she slaps and bournes Drekk-n-Drekk’s baconed outbursts with actual grace, gymnasiated with rude clangers and lewdly-surfaced bangers! (Hidden amongst the Rashied of her ground-jip).

The Pleasure-Drenching Improvers are by far my most favourite group of music. I love all their albums at the same time as being able to objectively recognise in them astounding artistry and aesthetic focus. But this album, THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE COMMEMORATIVE CD-R 2004 will be a current smash in my heart for a good while. Yes, it’s clearly marked and dragonly structured: in that way it’s straight-up Varese-meets-Enter-the-36-Wu-Tang. And I guess that makes it commercial, too, in that gritty blew-off-your-headphones-jack way that all classics ultimately are.

Jah Bless Pleh-Dren Imprs. By fuck, who would I be without this, in the end? And let us pray for all those who end up without this – which is most of you! Because it ain’t coming out. You need to go away and ask yourself if I really deserve this. I think I do, actually, because I love them and I work hard every day to follow their example, like some fucking zealot.
Get the fuck out of here!

You can buy this album, and others like it, from www.fenlandhibrow.co.uk

The Rural Poor

PLEAURE-DRENCHING IMPROVERS - THE RURAL POOR (Fenland Hi-Brow, FH-B 032 (CD) 2003)

Sitting No. 1
Yeah, it seems like they should be all sheddy, but there’s an acoustic of empty Sunday-wife arena here – the fading nous lemon squash, a favourite. And the dreadful reconjuring of misogynist graffiti by some proud upper-nazi.

The lads have assembled a standard line-up for this visit to the edge: Drezzy is housing his open ornithol, arpeggiating temporality, of course; Sonny starts out cottaging the barn, only to agricate the roofing the master had strictly instructed NOT to be used unless under severe section.

The silences are deep, like ghastly revelation, mouthing horrid facts your parents still deny. Who is your parents? How did they come to form their wicked collusion in the face of it all? Don’t correct me, smiling, you sour frock.

THF DRENCHING is distinctly more birdy on this session, while the PLZA harks more sternly to the industrial ur-purpose of her kit. More Elvin than Max, you gate? The birds are trapped in the technology, yet speak to bondage of endless possibility found in first nature. Birds generally manage to riff tirelessly on the intangibility, the absolute ungraspability of freedom. And love. And drugs. Cartoon warblering, palette-slapped guitarring. “Stop the guitarring!” Says the drums which come in on bricks and action-man farm essentials. The guitarring is excellent, so shit: no strings.

Sitting No. 2
… has it all to do. Drenno’s announcement is sardonic: libido plays backwards. He gets music stuck between his teeth now: great. Of course, you know what he’s telling you: arabs are popularly perceived as unnecessary, even by the reasonable (“reasonable people: Ram of Dusk”): your renaissance perspective still has the cards it wants. Ken Bigley disappeared to Iraq, leaving his catalogue wife in retail-storage, while he deferred all responsibility to they he gathered at go. According to a British love of freedom he is worth half-a-miilion Iraqi children any day.

The Rural Poor is hard as a brick, these days, an album luridly terse, with no lies to prefabricate. DRZA’s birds are watched by the fish, schenkled out of air-where, bumming to trance.

You can buy this album, and others like it, from www.fenlandhibrow.co.uk

Wildlife Producer Is A Story Part One

Wildlife Producer is a story. When it began in 2004, Wildlife Producer was supposed to be about architecture and socio-environmental space. A lot of Lefebvre informed it and there was also this idea that it had something to do with skateboarding and graffiti. More than anything it was inspired by the mad, irrational collision of architectures in central Newcastle – partly the legacy of T Dan Smith’s wild ambition.

At first it seemed essential that the films were shot from a tripod, a pocket-size one, to convey this sense of naughtiness, of doing something furtively transgressive. But already at the legendary Starbucks session, the need to change camera angle was obvious. Once we did our first summer 2006 sessions, it suddenly seemed too limiting, the tripod. DavidFloat had been frequently offering to film our sessions, so by the time we started back in September 06, he was part of the team.

One of the most noticeable changes straight off was the way Float’s involvement did away with several ideas and preconceptions. Ideas are limiting, of course. Wildlife Producer was always meant to go beyond improv – by improvising the performance context and the setting each time, it was inevitable that comfort zones would be further dismantled. But the furtiveness of the earlier films was definitely a defining characteristic. Now, with the active observer built in, the openness of the agenda was further exposed. There was never an prescription (set up somewhere and make noise) and there was never a sense that there ought to be content as such – just activity.

Of course that’s all bollocks really. The idea cannot be abandoned, but its primacy can be marginalised. DavidFloat quickly took on a directorial role, choosing settings and making various suggestions. There was only one outing with just D*v and Gwilly before Fletch joined, which was the Monument (with the park tagged on at the end). Typically, Floatsworth’s first challenge to the performers was to set up and play in the busiest spot in town. So that was the first big change – crowd participation. Comments, green and both red, irate buskers coming to appeal to the Producer’s good will and turn it down. No such. But of course that was an issue raised immediately. A simple one, of course: how much less of a right do the samplers of Wildlife Producer have to play in a busy public place than a couple who have very self-consciously done themselves out like some imagined 60s free-livin’s, further polluting the consumerscape with vague-ass, folk-inflected positivity. Harmless and bland.

Consumerscape. Culturescape. Urban equiviscape. Sheepscape. Shitscape. The quiet coach. The setting for Wildlife Producer performances is the human. The social. The fucking gnat!

Fletch’s first session was the Rydale Bridge. Float’s first directed setting. At rush hour, the traffic is constant and fast, whooshing by, no mercy, but no congestion either. That time of day, too, in late September, the light is keen, cutting across, but never mean or unforgiving. The video captures the sense of desperate urgency that fuelled the performance. An urgency that betrays an all-too-obvious lack of necessity, the impertinence of its all: there is virtually no way that a meaningful dialogue can develop between the musicians. D*V and Gwilly were on their SP404s, FX-tweaking to an absurd extent, crush delays, moong reverbs. Fletch was the virtuoso in this set, digging into the circuit board of his SK1 with a pair of screwdrivers, sampling himself shouting ‘Wanker!’ and ‘Bollocks!’ to be spangled at a particular kind of passer-by.

The bridge session was the beginning of Wildlife Producer’s dialogue with disconnection. From that moment on there would never be anything remotely like a fixed agenda. Wildlife Producer is a story. And it will continue to tell a tale of engagement and dissing, a child remorselessly plugging in and unplugging out a Christmas Tree’s worth-per-second of energy like the one you never encountered or even dreamt of. When Fran began her participation in this Beatrix Potter inflected cultural insurrection, she found it to be this way, and that is why the whole thing continues to explode and expand. But that, my mice, is for another instalment. Wait for it.

The Spread Eagle Nov 30th 2006

The landlady provided sandwiches and pork pies, homemade by the landlord. Unprecedentedly gracious treatment of free improvisors.

Unbornbundygein (Karl DSilva – alto sax & clarinet; Ben Woodrow – guitar; Gwilly Edmondez – SU10 & dictaphone) opened the night with a meandering 15 minute set, consumed in one go, that conveyed a cataloguer’s terse rendering of emotionally tampered itineraries. There was also a distinctly episodic character to the way the trio delivered each texturally defined lasagnitude. Woodrow was a revelation particularly, his vocabulary finding surprising new concatenations, while the increasingly broad fridge of his reference (like DSilva) proposes recontextualizations of alarming grace.

A duo followed of Jez riley French and Charlie Collins. This was the first time I’d seen Charlie playing other than sax. He sat, his beard as magically realist as ever, on a small bar stool, central, with the waterphone between his legs and began to conjure a ghostly throb, a watery depiction of bare commuter anthropology. Jez was almost out of site, tucked away on this sideboard thing by the arena of the corner of the space. No-one could see what he was doing, but he looked interested and sounded gorgeous through the amp. In direct contract to the restless nailing of expressive territory expounded by the previous group, Collins and Jez kept their eyes on the mysterious recess, only occasionally showing us the glow of a fag tip, or the occasional shard of torch bars when Collins bowed his fingerly crown. Eventually we were drawn inside to witness for ourselves the glistening folds of their ancient, tide-ravaged surfaces. This is music that neither thrusts out nor denies self, but simply immerses itself in a sensual engagement with the properties.

Then 7Hertz came on with something much more made out of sticks and paper, and graphite scribbles that contain accidental insights. [???] The trio of … on bass clarinet, … and … on violins built extraordinary mock palaces and mausoleums on and around Seth’s double bass. They did four tracks, the first two of which were filmed, each one steeped in narratives ribbed by austere and quirky harmonies, now teased out of the Arnold Schoenberg Real Book, now from an Eric Dolphy Compendium of Western Appropriation. 7Hertz seem to work from a knotted, gnarled glossary of encounters with the other, whose reflexive disenchantment with the signifier has been left achingly in tact, offered inflamed.

The closing set was immense. The Navigators (John Jasnoch – guitar, ukulele, oud; Charlie Collins – vibes & assorted Metal crafted resonancies; Beatrix Ward - violin, handheld perc & theremin) played it. Their set was an assuredly brave departure into pitch-lattice discourse, sparked by a lone, angular hexachord from Collins’ vibes, which the others responded to with an almost serially disciplined concurrence. What followed, though, was a mischievous parlay between the atonal and the modal, Ward’s violin seeming to act the paranoid arbiter that fails to keep its cool in the moment of fiercest antagonism. At around four minutes the trio descended into an all-out scrapping that yielded a far more boisterous set of currents, as if there was carpet, then cleavage and now, to the end of the set, chorus, which initially came over as a kind of balsa wood Steve Reich, then an adolescent AWOL, before Collins insisted on deconstructing the trio to introduce a contrapuntal pooh-party of scatological breadth.

Ward was a astonishing, hopping from erudite, earnestly pitch-driven bowings, through an adventure in Moorish percussives, to a ten minute exposition of spell-binding and utterly pertinent theremin airplay that had the audience’s nose open, and wags from the front of the house stopping in to video her manoeuvres on their mobiles, giggling in text.

The trio probably meant to play through without a break, but there was a moment after 26 minutes when it seemed they’d finalled a joint and Gwilly screamed ‘Yeah!’ (Schrimshaw style), triggering embarrassed applause from the most of the rest who could see (while Gwilly couldn’t) round the recess wall, that Collins was taking up the reign with (probably) another he-he-hexachord. This tearing up of a set precipitated Jasnoch’s excursion on the oud, supported by Ward’s castanets, a languidly undisciplined awning from Mediterranean mode-shells, so fresh you could sup the bromide.

Best part apart from the music and the surprise catering, was the stress-free and overkill-free set-up of no PA, lots of acoustic instrumentation among which the electronics were borne across small, stand-alone amplification. I told David De La Haye about this later, and he told me about healthyconcerts.com. But I was thinking also of Irene Moon, and of Lightning Bolt’s Lubbock, Texas kitchen date.

It was all good: you see, Karl had went and invited a bunch of Sheffield’s hardest improvisors to play in York. And we all know Sheffield is like the Vatican in the improv community, which makes the current pope either Mick Beck or John Jasnoch. Probably Mick, although John is utterly mentholated. Watch the chimneys, anyway. Whatever, you can’t have Martin Archer because he’s always too prone to go off on one, right? Kaoss Pad etc. Plus, when he came to play the Rebol IMF some while back, he set up all his kit then handed us a 2-foot long phono lead which clearly wouldn’t reach the desk. We had to move the whole set-up to right next to where he was.

Anyway, DSilva set this up and then asked Edmondez to get a venue. Who promised to find one and told him to tell the musicians it was definitely on. City Screen, Judges Lodgings and Black Swan (the three regular spots) were all booked. Edmondez remembered Nathan McWinnie going on about The Spread Eagle during the Poemgranite days. Landlord said, ‘How much is it going to cost me?’ ‘Nah, nah, it’s a DIY thing we just want a place to play,’ so he said, ‘Fine.’

Turned out to be the back bit of the ground floor, the bar – surprisingly, Jasnoch was amazed to be playing in what he called ‘the body of a pub.’ No upstairs room or function suite. And it was really cramped in there, but cosy, too. I spoke to one of the women from 7Hertz and she said she’d looked the pub up on the net and it said Thursday night was ‘jazz night’. Great. About 8 people came to watch the event expressly – no publicity at short notice – and about 15-20 regulars came round from the front in twos and threes to see what jazz had become since last week. There was no aggro, except for the barmaid, Janet, making mildly antagonistic comments between sets. The landlord apologised for this, saying, ‘That Janet’s on her last warning.’ Well, we wouldn’t want to threaten her livelihood.

I would like to suggest that this was the first Pocket of Potential Madness, a series of nights (or afternoons) (or mornings) starting from next September (07), which are much scaled down from the Rebol IMF evenings – no PA, small, informal spaces (including kitchens, front rooms, bedrooms). Acoustic meets electronic on level terms. Maybe we should join healthyconcerts.

A Beautiful and Legendary Season of Improv

The final session of the semester for MUS3045 took place today, December 12th 2006. No sessions this year have been recorded, but today it was a crime no-one was taping. Parkinson suggested that each member of the class play under a ‘band name’. We worked in trios, the most frequently taken configuration. They were as follows:

Syphilitic Cock of Thatcher (laptop & walkstation)
Speckled Dust (electric guitar)
Fly Spy (radios, FX and amp)

The David Smith Foundation (electric guitar & FX bank)
Mary Phipps (assorted found percussion)
Tomato (shopping, utensils & rubbish)

Blank (electric guitar)
Wicker Basket Shoes [said in Selkirk accent] (violin & saw)
DJ Pitta Bread (piano)

The Scrog (bass)
Honda Peenies (semiacoustic guitar)
The Bennett Hogg Experience (electric guitar)

The form was that a designated member of each trio would play alone, while the other two listened a while before joining in. Each next trio would begin with the soloist intercepting the previous group, again, by listening critically to its narrative before offering a music as critique in itself. The whole process happened in circle three times. At the obvious closing of the final trio (the list above is in order), Dr. Queer Ass leapt to the floor to start a two-cymbal improvisation. It didn’t take long for the whole class to join Dr. Queer in a free conclusion that lasted some 15 minutes and was brought to an end only by the head of department coming in to tell us to turn it down, following some ‘serious complaints’ in the history department downstairs. It’s a treasure to think what it must have been like in the history offices while Dr. Queer Ass was whacking the floor repeatedly with large-headed beaters.

This was some of the best improvising ever in MUS3045. Each trio made its mark in fantastically different, yet uncontrivedly contrasting ways, non-idiomatic attentions to gesture and statement clashing effortlessly with generic reference points. Some of DJ Pitta Bread’s piano effusions were shockingly violent and melodically contrapuntal in a greatly Cecil Taylorish manner. Speckled Dust was exquisite, proving again that years of spontaneous performance of pop/rock structures leads illustriously into the open discipline of free.

Syphilitic Cock of Thatcher’s laptop delivery was astounding, getting to grips at last with what he has clearly sought all along with this piece of hardy softness. Sypho demonstrated, too, that laptop performance isn’t all office clerk rhetoric and bland posture, but can genuinely titillate the lardish tract from on of off the avant.

The most spinewall outfit was the one of Blank, Wicker Basket Shoes and DJ Pitta Bread. Three of the most advanced practitioners of their sphere in different ways. Blank was the least amenable when this whole adventure started. His desire was the furthest to walk to for to bring back into in front of his gaze. But then, once retrieved, it was there in less questionable a way than among any or all of his peers. And today he weaved and laced, avoiding the kind of narrative thrust he so clearly expounded at the last Comfy Chairs (when-in his trio with Jonny and Ashleigh was a gorgeously shaded study in supine orientals). Wicker Basket Shoes was as hauntingly poetic as ever with her combination of fiddle and saw. The saw was the first thing she interjected to the previous trio. The second time around she percussed her fiddle in lap-horizontal, delicately sparky and bitternly bolden.

The trio that followed them each time was, though, extraordinary. The Scrog’s bass and two guitars, Honda Peenies and The Bennett Hogg Experience. What you had with the first two was earnest, modernist enquiry into a jagged improvised textural sonority that was rewardingly roughneck and post-pubescently decon. But binding that together in frayed gaffer was The Bennett Hogg Experience’s guitar steeped in irrecuperable history, onyx fashioned from flesh and charcoal, language with no holes, barred with scalded tendons after the fact. That was the detail, of course, if you were insisting on it. Yes, the overall convergence made for a rock that no-one had realised about, incredibly subtle use of the big and the bold, authentic subversion not even the sharpest of them had found before. No, really, it really was like that. Like I say, a disaster not to have recorded this. Actually, now I’m trying to describe it, I’m almost crying to think we lost it. We might have woke up at least 20 multinationals. Cause that’s what it all is, right? A playing possum in received manoeuvres. Sleep. Cause sleep is the cousin of death.

The session was man in its woman, no doubt. All involved had journeyed through self to a new wealth of perception. And that couldn’t be stopped, for sure. That’s where Boss:IDB stepped in and told us that complaints had reached an unsupportable intensity and frequency of reiteration. Real-life lecturers in History and Business, laboriously maintaining a garland for stasis, had been raising a clamour for the repression of the improvisors’ fluid whisper. It’s OK. We stopped, not least because it was time to. Promised to decamp. But didn’t.

Because the second group was there and seemed serene and distinctly non-agitated. DJ Pitta bread and Honda Peenies stayed on for part two and were joined by the G-Lover, Jamie T and Dr. Queer Ass. The Bennett Hogg Experience was to sit it out in closed eye. And, yes, it was calm, and contemplative and sweetly nuanced, delicately the stamen, powdered with redeemed fibre, like the world was once was. But it couldn’t last, and the inevitable crescendo was rigorously measured, though irrepressible. And a half hour on the players were in a zone so darkly feathered with forms from the inner depths that they barely noticed when Boss:IDB was again at the door. Exasperated and awry, berated even further by the sickly gatekeepers of the 12 Gold Bars (oh crooked fingers of the festively sprayed guitarist!). And that was it. And we were all sorry. Not for the noise (such as it was received), not for the pedagogues of unquestioned ideology, but for the dear fellow IDB who was caught between the most bitter enemies within all cultural discourse.

But you see this wasn’t a thing. And it wasn’t a time. It was an irresistible becoming. Was. Is. Not-Yes. What was once a housing of men in their women no longer belonged to language. That’s why

Everyone Must Make Their Own Kind of Love

Everyone Must Make Their Own Kind Of Love
Wildlife Producer at Tripswitches, Cumberland Arms, Byker, 5th Dec 2006
(Gwilly Edmondez – SP404, dictaphone, voice & dance; DavidFloat – live visuals; Simon Doherty – Casio MT60, voice & AMP; Fletch – bass, amp & crisps; Fran Arnold – charcoal on fabriola; D*Vid De La Haye – absent on this occasion due to other commitments)

‘But was it just The Gwilly Edmondez show?’ Wildlife Producer seeks to afford itself the opportunity to occupy any available cultural context. So it’s film; so it’s video installation; so it’s telly; so it’s a band; it’s content, it’s form; it’s Celine for the eyes, Stewart Burrows for the poorer. Castle to Castle Bryan Ferry. You see it’s millions of people among which are the celebrated in gradations. Acceptance and acceptability. You act like you think you’re normal because your flat’s a mess and you took off your shoes and there’s a half-finished spindle of CD-Rs on your cheapo deskette. What does the world want? But you’ve accepted your acceptance because what you were doing all along was acceptable. You accepted growing up in Belfast where your piano teacher stubbed out fags on you. You accepted, but Jamie Thompson didn’t. That’s why he’ll continue to cut the surface of the possible, reach in and tug till the tendons come loose, spawning deeply sensual diagrams of dark, sinister violence. Music and the Dark Self.

Accepting your acceptance meant that you were ready to slip on the garment of equivalence rancidly goaded you. Fort ratio. Friends, colleagues, associates, people keeping from tearing each other’s eyes out by dealing in prefabrication. I love that you dress.

So Wildlife Producer can’t just turn up and play a gig, as if a band. Don’t you see? The whole thing is about spectacle for the sake of it. Where there weren’t any marks yet, Wildlife Producer will make some. Generating difference as distraction. There is a continuum that is so often inhabited by equivalence. Wildlife Producer kidnaps the continuum and paints it the opposite colour so it can never re-assimilate.

At the Cumberland gig a new and unexpected dynamic emerged, one that the Paris sessions hinted at. Unexpected and new within the discursive context that the artists themselves normally inhabit – an epistemological encounter with collective free improv and freely experimental composition. The dynamic: group performance that requires a central performer to act in a manner disconnected from the collective, undemocratically forging ahead, like a bad Shinto spirit, a megalomaniac shaman. The group ties its energies to the soloist’s back and scrubs it. The fact that key points in the music’s narrative are instigated by crate-digging dancer’s frenzy is irrelevant. Which is precisely how rock and roll has always worked. So maybe the implied protocols of free improv are just bland representational utopianism. Maybe Wildlife Producer are purveyors of material radical subjectivity. Gwilly’s manic selfism doesn’t cow the others into morose, stoic and resentful submission, but challenges their own subjectivity to afford the same degree of radicalism. And you can hear this and you can see it. Fletch and Doherty smirk at the pomposity of the spectacle while spraying their tags in yeah face. D*vid does as ever – places noise and music on its ledges and into its crooks. And Fran visualises the energy in as directly and material a way imaginable.