Readings at The Mutual Assembly

Along with other members of the Glasgow Open School and contributors to the Glasgow Review of Books, I will be reading selections from the poetry of Fernando Pessoa tomorrow evening at the Ironbbratz Studios at 84 Miller Street, as part of The Mutual's week-long Assembly. The event begins at 7pm and will also include workshops, discussions and a potluck supper! Come on down!

More info can be found at the Mutual's website.

New Type

I'm in the new volume of Type Review, along with erstwhile friends and colleagues Henry King (not as kind his listing makes out!), Ryan J Davidson and Tom Coles, who's incredible-looking writing makes him the featured writer for this issue. There are some pretty great pencil drawings in there too.

You can buy here, as well as peruse their always-entertaining blog.

Bustin the Airwaves

I was on Sean's show The Co-Operative this morning, very early. It was fun, we played some good music. Here's a link.

Shiggajon @ 13th Note

Ben put on another gig last night. Saw a band called Shiggajon, from Denmark, who were incredible! They "combine lucid string drones with ritualistic atmospheres and a wild free jazz stance" according to Volcanic Tongue (record shop in Glasgow), and that's pretty much right.

They added Ben and Hannah and Greg (Helhesten) to their number and began with a raucous cacophony of the aforementioned free jazz, crazy-loud and wild, wailing, banging of gongs, a tenor sax, everything. Everyone was pummelling the nearest instrument, dancing about, hair flowing all over the place, with the sax player, staring straight ahead, perfectly still in the middle of it all. The fact that these guys, with their hollow cheeks, wild stares and mops of blonde hair look like a religious cult just adds to the atmosphere.

It slowly simmered down to a drone, brilliantly sustained, a real solid, full sound, encompassing the whole room in its atmosphere, as if it were reaching out and pulling you in physically, grabbing you and ushering you towards it. Every now and again it was supplemented with tinkling bells and little fills of clarinet, that wafted up like smoke from the centre of a ritual in the middle of the night in an Arctic forest. It went on for ages, like they were calling something up or trying to time travel or disappear or something! with a few yelps from Ben.

It slowly, slowly petered dDwn to nothing. Literally nothing, all the instruments stopped. We all clapped, thinking it was the end. Then slowly it started back up, through the tinkly bells and an Arab-horn type thing that sounded like a call to prayer, to an amazing, timpani-drum-style-led crescendo, which was Arab-sounding and mysterious, propulsive and crazed, then a thundering beat when everyone went crazy again.

Es @ CCA

Our friends Ben and Hannah put on another gig at the CCA on Wednesday. I left before Ignatz played, which is a shame going by this video, but I did see this guy, Es:



I think it's absolutely wonderful! Didn't realise he was the guy that runs Fonal records...

Goings on at the 13th Note

Me and Lil went last night to a gig our friend Ben had put on at the 13th note. It featured a Glasgow band called Nackt Insecten, Ben himself doing a free-vocal performance with his friend Pascal and calling themselves Electric U-Boat for the evening, a Belgian guy from Ghent with a little electronic box of tricks and a band whose name I don't know at the end.

I'm not going to review them all, in fact not really going to review any of them, but rather note down a few thoughts that occured to me whilst watching and which I quickly typed shorthand into my mobile phone.

We came in halfway through Nackt Insecten's set. Featuring a guitarist, a knob-twiddler and a drummer they played a jazzy-droney-improv set that I enjoyed a lot. Particularly the drumming, which reminded me of reading about syncopated jazz-style drumming rather than pounding rock-n-roll drumming and kept the wilder parts of the improv/wall-of-sound stuff connected to something other than their own wildness. Of the experimental-improv-drone scene stuff I've seen recently -- and that's quite a lot, always on Ben's recommendations -- I find myself gravitating more to the jazzy end, especially if that jazz influence is filtered through percussion. Nackt Insecten's set reminded me of seeing Chris Corsano at the CCA a couple of years ago, which I really loved, and really opened my eyes to this music.

Ben was on next. His main band, with his girlfriend Hannah and friend Greg, is called Helhesten but this was just him on vocals and Pascal on drums. We'd gone round to Ben and Hannah's the night before for dinner and to meet their two new kittens (called Robinson and Friday, v. cute!) and he was rather nervous, not having done a stripped down vocal improv set before. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about, it was great, perhaps the best set of the evening.

He had two microphones, wired up slightly differently, and would switch between them, sometimes putting one in his mouth and sometimes using one against the other, creating mini-feedbacks. I wrote in my phone "connects sound and body". I think what I was thinking was how it singled out the human voice and by extension the body and used it as an instrument. Not in a way that R&B singers modulate and whatnot but in a more instinctive way, conjuring up strange repetitions, interesting one-offs, veering between garbled words in (invented?) languages, low groans, high shreaks, long drawn-out moans and clicking, tapping percussive sounds. It made me think about improvisation and decision-making, how apparently unconscious and random sounds are actually split-second choices, not necessarily of the conscious kind but of a sort of body memory or intelligence, as if it knows what it's going to do without the brain having to tell it. Or perhaps it's a question of getting the body into the right context or atmosphere, controlling it from afar so-to-speak, assuming that if one creates the right conditions for it, it will create different and interesting sounds, almost like writing a computer programme.

The Belgian guy -- whose name I will get from Ben -- started his set with an impromptu Ivor Cutler song about bees, which moved into a set played entirely from a small box with lots of knobs, and which reminded me of shifting the radio tuner or a kind of aural equivalent of image-overload. In a good way. Every now and again techno-ish beats would rise out of industrial sounds, only to be distorted and sped up. He was a very skinny guy, and his arms would flail out like a conductors after getting the precise knob-twiddle he wanted. He looked very nerdy, and was a very shy microphone presence, but very nice too. I should get his name.

Nice Portraits

Lil starting up a Flickr account made me have a look at the first ones I uploaded.

Bruce Nauman @ Tramway

The Bruce Nauman works exhibited were a selection from his career in various media as part of the Artist Rooms series.

A few words that came to mind whilst wandering the small room: questioning images & texts, wordplay, puns, working through puzzles, chance, formulae, the process of work.

It was mostly about repetition - one work called Raw Material Washing Hands, Normal was formed from two videos of the artist continually washing his hands for an hour (the length of the video tape). Another, a collection of metal blocks arranged in various ways according to various mathematical systems entitled Enforced Perspective. The great booklet that came with the show described the mixing of systems as revealing "absurdities in the work" and making "logical systems gradually come apart".

"The Beckettian theme of repetition is a constant throughout his performative works and videos", says the booklet. Nauman's neon works, featuring selections of words turned over and over, recalibrated and rethought and rejigged are (literally) shining examples of this.



All these repetitions increasingly appear to question the object's (or idea's) inherent-ness. What makes a word a word? What is the meaning of it? How are the meaning and its objectiveness connected? Are they connected at all? Nauman's pieces in this tiny exhibition seem to teeter on that edge of chaos - how far can one push a word until it's no longer a word, how long can one wash one's hands until the act is meaningless and counter-productive?

We also visited GoMA, currently exhibiting works from their modern art collection, and on a wall they had positioned a quote from Bridget Riley, in which she talks of "nature [as] not landscape but the dynamism of visual forces" and this, which chimes quite well with Nauman:

"colour and form as ultimate identities, freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles".

Best Line-up

Saw Lucky Dragons, Polar Bear and Dirty Projectors on Sunday night. Well worth rushing out from an 8 hour train ride for! In fact that doesn't do it justice - it was amazing! What a great collection of bands.

Dirty Projectors are getting ready to release a new album. Here's a SXSW report that has a couple of mp3s. The R&B track is great!

Nights at the Chapel

I've been to the university chapel twice in the last week. Last Sunday me and Erik went to a Haydn concert by the university orchestra and choral society, and last night was the first night of the Instal festival.



On both occasions I found myself thinking about the relation between the music and the space. At the Haydn I remembered a thought I'd had before, and which Lil had talked about, when we visited the cathedral in Florence: that religious or not, one couldn't help but be amazed and moved by the monuments that belief had built. The university chapel is not particularly remarkable, but in combination with the music - selections from across 40 years of Haydn's life - an atmosphere was created that reminded me of that thought.

Whilst overall it was a bit too religious for my taste, the piece I enjoyed the most was "Motet, Insanae et vanae curae" (which translates as "mad and groundless cares"). The "lyrics" are about sticking with God, and not being tempted by "earthly things". What I liked about it was its very dramatic opening which gave way to a much calmer middle section, before getting dramatic again at the end.

Having said that, what has stuck with me more than any of the music was this little story about the second piece, the Organ Concerto in C major:

"When he left choir school, Haydn remained in Vienna. He lodged with a wig-maker who had two daughters, Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia, who would later become Haydn's wife, and Therese, who was his true love. Sadly, Therese and her parents were determined that she, as the younger daughter, should become a nun. On 12 May 1756 she took her vows and entered the Order of the Poor Clares. The music for the ceremony was directed by Haydn."

I tried to detect moments of longing and sadness in the music, and thought of poor Haydn directing musicians playing a sort of farewell song to his beloved. I thought what a great film a depiction of that day would make.

Last night, I saw Toshimaru Nakamura and Jean-Luc Guionnet perform. Nakamura "is one of the great Japanese minimal improvisers" and Guionnet is "a French saxophonist/ composer/organist/field recording artist."



The Instal website describes them thus: "Toshi turns his mixing desk into an instrument of fizzing electric potential by looping the output back into the input, creating a feedback system. Jean-Luc's blasts of electronic sounding sax/organ always sit best next to the static fuzz of abused hardware."

The words I noted down on my mobile phone, knowing I'd write about the performance, were these: seance, summoning, scary, site specific. Now, apart from a strange conclusion that Nakamura and Guionnet's work conjures thoughts of the letter S, what I suppose these words mean is that the hard/soft dynamics - similar to Haydn - of the piece were attempting to call something up, to manifest something. It felt particularly apt in a chapel. Erik said their sound was like the walls crashing in. There was this curious miz of destruction and creation in their music. (You can hear it here).



The second performance last night was by Hermann Nitsch, "one of the great visual/live art/performance artists of the 20th Century". The programme notes detailed Nitsch's history as a founding member of the Aktionists (from Vienna, like Haydn), "who developed an artistic, critical response to the strict, conservative society of post-WWII Austria ... in a blend of shock, ritual, the ethics of religion and sacrifice, [and] our culture's fixation with violence", inticingly describing his performance art pieces as "juxtapositions of quasi-religious and ritualistic icons, including staged crucifixions, robed processions, nudity, animal sacrifice, the drinking of blood, drunken excess" etc etc.

We were given a specially commissioned piece for organ, the inspiration for which was "the almost presumptious task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space". (In fact, a Google image search for Nitsch comes up with lots of fairly hideous looking animal dissections). In practice it was a very old man playing great organ chords by putting planks of wood on the keys, helped by two middle-aged men. He kept stopping, and no-one was sure whether to clap or not. After clapping in these pauses twice, he leaned over from the organ balcony, and said, rather grumpily "my concert lasts for 1 hour, exactly 1 hour. You can clap then", rather wrecking an mood of cosmic contemplation he was attempting to create.