salford + that

Okay, apologies that the priorities here are really screwed, but it's too late to do anything about it now. First up are a sequence of pictures from the studio space at the Mill, which is looking kind of empty at the moment. It does however have the really cool casing from part of some machine in one of the corners, in the first picture below. It'd be really great if anyone had an idea what it actually was.

Seen again below with a bag hanging next to it.

The space currently looks pretty spartan - although since I'm mainly working on the visual poem boxes that's not entirely surprising.

Significant amounts of the crap below are notebooks. My street cutlery is in a box there - I still haven't decided what to do with it. Some of it has been boxed individually, and I had planned to redo it, but I don't really see the point of more boxes. I may pierce them through a piece of hardboard in some way.

It's just a view from round about the door.

And below is a column next to the door.

I really like the window, even though I expect it might be quite a hazardous operation to actually close the damn thing. Not a problem at the moment, but it could be important in winter.

So, all those photos of a pretty small space that's still quite empty. Then I go to the launch event for menu for murmur and only get two shots of Mick Beck performing with the exhibits, neither of which is as good as I'd like. I'm going to pretend it's deliberately designed to encourage you to go along to the exhibition yourself, and to see Mick Beck whenever he next performs near you.

What you can see from these shots are the tables suspended from the ceiling at different heights, although not really any details of the exhibits. I'm not sure that matters too much. Some of the pieces are quite visual, but the sounds are the point of the exhibition.

Mick performed around the space in response to the works, while the works were sounding. Some make noise more or less constantly, but the rest either require audience participation/activation, or are on timers and come on briefly at intervals. I will write a more detailed account of the exhibition and the performance later.

Matt Wand performed a version (I think slightly longer) of the piece he did with gameboys, speakers and jars at the text festival last year. It was as beautiful and physically overpowering as the last time I experienced it. Weirdly a lot of people chose to sit round the edge of the space or even stand by the doors, when to experience the piece properly I think you really need to be within the space, surrounded by the sound.

On a completely unconnected topic, I am documenting my big clear out of years of accumulated crap. I'm aiming to get rid of around half my stuff. So far I've done maybe a quarter of the room and got rid of 9 bin bag's worth, in only two hours.