sound art
Tonight santiago was with friends Helen and Gary at Islington Mill in Salford for “…the body without organs whose ears are filled with noise…”, part of Christopher Gladwin's MA show. Also featured were Helmut Lemke, Ben Gwilliam, Skeksi, North Mancs Beds and Espen Jensen (can't bring up his page http://www.espenjensen.com/ so the other link will have to do. As friends were tired and had to get up early, and since santiago is both very shy and not feeling too good we left after only seeing Christopher Gladwin, Helmut Lemke and Ben Gwilliam.
Christopher Gladwin made a combination of electronic and acoustic noises. He started out by using one of his 'squealers' to start the audience participating in making a piercing, 3-dimensional noise rubbing polystyrene on damp glass. Like all superficially penetrating or abrasive sounds, when it's at high volume, and/or everywhere around you, it stops being so difficult and becomes an environment instead. When the squealer signalled the end of that part of the performance he moved on to generation of electronic sounds. Unfortunately my electronics is very poor, and even after checking out his website I'm not entirely certain how the effects were achieved. It appeared to be a version of the circuit bending on his website, only using a potato instead of a sausage. But it wasn't so simple as using a potato to make a circuit across the innards of a radio, the set up also appeared to be reactive to light, and built up some punishing noise to match the strobing. Finally some metal tone generators were set going. These can be seen and heard on the website and myspace, but a hollow metal base has a vertical bar affixed, with a wire stretched between the top of the bar and the middle of the base. Fixed to the wires are electric razors which oscillate and make the apparatus generate noise. Clips can be fixed to the wires to alter the tones. Overall it was closer perhaps to performance art than what you might call a music performance, and all the better for it...
But then I'm of the opinion that all indie bands should be issued with guitars they can't tune, amps that only distort, fucked microphones and be forced to used effects pedals that are given to them at random. Repeat offenders like Elbow and Coldplay should be given a car battery, a bit of metal, a piezo electric element and an amp.
Anyway, enough shooting of fish in barrels. Helmut Lemke was up next, and equally great in a different way. It was hard to tell what was performance and what wasn't at first. His feet were mic-ed up, although whether with piezos or some other small mic I couldn't see. These were attached to boxes of fuck-knows-what, although they controlled the volume at least. Also attached to the boxes were speaker horns kind of like mini klaxons or loudhailers. All this was attached to his waist. He stood on an upturned metal bath tub and made noise by tapping and scraping his bare feet on the base, and by bowing the metal of the base. I couldn't see clearly, but I think he was using a hands-free headset mic to speak, mutter, and make tones n drones into. AND he had another more conventional mic around his neck which was connected to an amp on the ground, over which he swung it, generating moments of feedback. It was fantastic to watch, and probably even more fun to do. One of the things I really enjoyed about it was how he managed to create a piece with a coherence and shifting dynamic, that travelled logically from beginning to end (although at no stage was the next part of the piece obvious), without having to rely on conventional musical structures. I could easily imagine Stomp or the Blue Man Group making a bloody awful, glaringly obvious sound with the same set up. Thankfully they were nowhere to be seen.
Finally for what I was able to see Ben Gwilliam had a simpler set-up and concept, but just as effective. He had four upturned speakers minus the grilles, casing etc, so rather like metal dishes, over which were placed four mics. Tones were then generated through the speakers and fed via the mics to the PA. First rice (I think), then after several minutes sugar, and finally flour were dropped onto the speakers, where the sound agitated the substance, and it could be heard hitting the mics. I would have liked more variation, perhaps more substances for shorter periods of time, or different substances on different speakers. Nonetheless it was compelling, and good to watch the grains skipping on the speakers.
Overall it went a long way toward effacing any lingering memories that I might have of having once seen The Bluetones (they were shit). A few more scrubbings of this patented astringent and I shall be a new man.
.
Christopher Gladwin made a combination of electronic and acoustic noises. He started out by using one of his 'squealers' to start the audience participating in making a piercing, 3-dimensional noise rubbing polystyrene on damp glass. Like all superficially penetrating or abrasive sounds, when it's at high volume, and/or everywhere around you, it stops being so difficult and becomes an environment instead. When the squealer signalled the end of that part of the performance he moved on to generation of electronic sounds. Unfortunately my electronics is very poor, and even after checking out his website I'm not entirely certain how the effects were achieved. It appeared to be a version of the circuit bending on his website, only using a potato instead of a sausage. But it wasn't so simple as using a potato to make a circuit across the innards of a radio, the set up also appeared to be reactive to light, and built up some punishing noise to match the strobing. Finally some metal tone generators were set going. These can be seen and heard on the website and myspace, but a hollow metal base has a vertical bar affixed, with a wire stretched between the top of the bar and the middle of the base. Fixed to the wires are electric razors which oscillate and make the apparatus generate noise. Clips can be fixed to the wires to alter the tones. Overall it was closer perhaps to performance art than what you might call a music performance, and all the better for it...
But then I'm of the opinion that all indie bands should be issued with guitars they can't tune, amps that only distort, fucked microphones and be forced to used effects pedals that are given to them at random. Repeat offenders like Elbow and Coldplay should be given a car battery, a bit of metal, a piezo electric element and an amp.
Anyway, enough shooting of fish in barrels. Helmut Lemke was up next, and equally great in a different way. It was hard to tell what was performance and what wasn't at first. His feet were mic-ed up, although whether with piezos or some other small mic I couldn't see. These were attached to boxes of fuck-knows-what, although they controlled the volume at least. Also attached to the boxes were speaker horns kind of like mini klaxons or loudhailers. All this was attached to his waist. He stood on an upturned metal bath tub and made noise by tapping and scraping his bare feet on the base, and by bowing the metal of the base. I couldn't see clearly, but I think he was using a hands-free headset mic to speak, mutter, and make tones n drones into. AND he had another more conventional mic around his neck which was connected to an amp on the ground, over which he swung it, generating moments of feedback. It was fantastic to watch, and probably even more fun to do. One of the things I really enjoyed about it was how he managed to create a piece with a coherence and shifting dynamic, that travelled logically from beginning to end (although at no stage was the next part of the piece obvious), without having to rely on conventional musical structures. I could easily imagine Stomp or the Blue Man Group making a bloody awful, glaringly obvious sound with the same set up. Thankfully they were nowhere to be seen.
Finally for what I was able to see Ben Gwilliam had a simpler set-up and concept, but just as effective. He had four upturned speakers minus the grilles, casing etc, so rather like metal dishes, over which were placed four mics. Tones were then generated through the speakers and fed via the mics to the PA. First rice (I think), then after several minutes sugar, and finally flour were dropped onto the speakers, where the sound agitated the substance, and it could be heard hitting the mics. I would have liked more variation, perhaps more substances for shorter periods of time, or different substances on different speakers. Nonetheless it was compelling, and good to watch the grains skipping on the speakers.
Overall it went a long way toward effacing any lingering memories that I might have of having once seen The Bluetones (they were shit). A few more scrubbings of this patented astringent and I shall be a new man.
.
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