m60 walk art stuff - where recent song fits in

I think that my song from the other night previously linked here, I Have Come Down, is the beginning of a way into my audio piece about the M60 walk.

 

There's a lot to be decided of course. Do I use the initial rough recording or make another? Will it go at the start or elsewhere? How many other songs, and how much actual language will be in the piece? I already know that neither the audio nor the video pieces will track either the walk or the poem closely. Rather they'll jump-off from those starting points, though likely maintaining at least some thematic similarities.

 

Which is where I Have Come Down fits in. It's a continuation of the Icarus strand in my (still untitled) long poem, not to mention a close relative of the songs Did The Morning? and Green from a few years ago. More importantly it feels like an opening, one that I can relate field recordings, spoken word, found speech, improvisations, and a range of other noises to.

 

Additionally, it is personal, introspective, and very much a comedown song, but it also has the faintest whisper of politics. Sure, saying 'Sometimes I can't afford to eat' is a pretty general and politically neutral cry, but the intention wasn't actually to be political. That hint, however, gives me all the (flimsy) justification I need to get deeper into political issues.

 

Which is not to say I have any intention of producing a political manifesto, more that small hints like this also allow me to dig into a range of ideas. Not just political but aesthetic, spiritual (though this from a materialist, rationalist atheist who hates woolly and nonsensical concepts like spirit and soul), social and cultural ideas and more.

 

All of which sounds incredibly ambitious, but the bulk of the material will be field recordings and wordless vocalisations. And most of my more high-flown ideas are already pretty well buried in the long poem. Add in the further abstraction of minimally processed sound with only occasional forays into actual language, and the end result is likely to be opaque.

 

I suppose the point of all this is to shed light on how ideas come about, and change and develop. The walk itself has long roots, particularly in Walksongs, my CD for zimZalla, in which I physically exerted myself until I ran out of breath. From there I had a number of ideas for related projects, including last year when I intended to do a 24-hour walk. That never happened, but the idea for the M60 walk eventually came out of it early this year.

 

The idea was to gather material on the walk from which to create work. I did this, but was well aware I had insufficient material. The walk will be revisited in two halves, along with a number of other long walks in Greater Manchester over the next fortnight, and more audio and video recordings made. But before that the problem was how to approach ordering the material.

 

Since the M60 is circular there was a natural analogy with the stations of the cross, but as already noted I'm an atheist, and know next to nothing about the stations anyway. The solution came almost from desperation - I wrote a short fragment of poetry, and wondered if a text piece might help form a template to construct my response around.

 

From there I dug out all my fragments from the last 5 years and realised they were mostly the same poem, and with some rearrangement might form a coherent whole. As it turns out that also required a lengthy bit of new writing - the Icarus sections of one-word lines. That seemed to turn out fine (news on that at a later date), but it wasn't clear how to set about beginning to edit and structure my video and audio recordings.

 

I Have Come Down was written and recorded with no idea it would have anything to do with the M60 work, but from a desire to record something new, and from having recently listened to Richard Youngs - specifically Spin Me Endless in the Universe (album version here once I get home and have a chance to add links) and Story of Jhon. As a quick note, I'm aware my writing in the song is pretty pedestrian and literal, and the tune isn't anything special.

 

Having recorded the song and listened to it a couple of times I suddenly realised it would fit in well with the structure of the poem. It's dumb that realisation came so late, since I intended to write a comedown song, and was consciously aping both the poem and my previous songs mentioned earlier.

 

And as I've said, the idea is now to spin-off other audio from that. Not to structure them around it, not to create a full set of songs, not to try and retell the poem, but use it as a seed, a germ for other ideas to grow from. Given the mutations and influences mentioned so far, and the even more numerous influences not mentioned, I fully expect both the sound and video pieces to mutate even further.

 

This is likely to be a lengthy process, and I don't currently to expect to finish much before September.