hiss heads

Friday through Sunday was Hiss Heads - three evenings of sound art/noise/music at Rogue Artists' Studios.

Hiss Heads came about while Florian Fusco was Kraak Gallery's first artist in residence. I blogged about the exhibition SAFE he worked on last year.

While he was in residence Florian also undertook a project to interview and photograph a number of north west sound artists - including me.

The outcome of that project was Hiss Heads One - the zine whose cover's pictured below - and the three nights of events and exhibition of photos around the space.

I missed the Friday because I was at Kraak for We've Got An Elaborate Light Show to see Gary Fisher perform.

Gary was really good and actually pretty loud. He played a quite abstract set concentrating on beats and seemingly consciously making clear that this was sound art rather than music. The set was also pretty short, a second part being abandoned.

I left after Gary's set because I was quite tired and a bit irritable. I also got the impression that large sections of the audience there had no idea what it was Gary was actually doing.

I did manage to catch both Saturday and Sunday of Hiss Heads.

On Saturday Ratfangs, Ceramic Hobs and Stuart Arnot performed (sorry, no MySpace links - it makes Safari freeze every fucking time so I refuse to use it).

Ratfangs made interesting sounds using guitar, loop pedal and some kind of keyboard/synth. There was a superficial similarity in sound to David Thomas Broughton because of the set-up although I felt it lacked a little edge. I'd definitely like to hear more.

Ceramic Hobs had somehow passed me by until now. The sound was interesting and hard to pin down. At times Krautrock-ish, at others closer to post-punk, and sometimes venturing into improv and noise territories. There was even an interesting diversion into a Deep Purple cover. I am not a musician but the cover appeared to give the band a chance to relax and do a bit less. I preferred their own tracks, and I will track down some of their stuff.

Finally Stuart was the highlight of the evening (and the weekend) for me. I've seen him three, four, maybe five times, and each time he seems to be doing something slightly different. On this occasion he had a set up of pedals, keyboards/synths, and at least a couple of tapedecks. The cassettes had compilations of (predominantly eighties) tracks on them.

Stuart set the tapes playing, sometimes slowing them down, and then introduced sounds and music over the top of them. The introduced sounds often drowned out the underlying track, or introduced a beat over the top. Describing it like this really doesn't come close to capturing the experience and the sound. It was really fucking great and a lot more complex and interesting than I've made it sound. It really wasn't just someone playing tapes.

Sunday was a slightly quieter evening with a slightly smaller audience. It opened with Florian reading a found poem that sounded in the beginning like the outpourings of someone's paranoia but actually turned out to be a leaflet for some Christian group.

Then Debbie 'Elvis' Sharp played an all-too short set, which I think she recorded so may appear on her website at some point soon. She used a tiny guitar with what looked like a piezo attached to the body as a pickup, melodica, and keyboard, as well as singing. Unlike most of the other performers across the weekend Debbie was happy to leave spaces and silence. The track was propulsive and involving, and not in any way fragile, but more nuanced and intimate - even uncomfortable - than anything else across the weekend.

Finally I closed out proceedings with a 16 minute set. I started with a revisiting of my 2009 sound poem tear, went into a four minute improvisation using no-input mixing board and loop station, and finished with a version of the Child Ballad Prince Heathen derived from Martin Carthy's version of the song. This introduced a loop that started out sparse and quiet but gradually built up to deafening levels (intentionally) drowning out the song. I'll post the audio shortly.