Live
Here’s a summary of my thoughts whilst on the train to Liverpool yesterday:
All in all it’s a relief to take off the big heavy coat of other stuff that needs doing all the time and spend a week immersed in creativity and with creative people. I feel some difference with the others, I think we all did a bit, shyness at first and the feeling that everyone must be better somehow etc. The perceived or real differences are very useful though, and don’t have to come into it when you’re inspired by other people and the various things they’ve been doing. 24 hour subversive performance acts in supermarkets, of a dance version of plus minus(I witnessed Tamara and Mat put plans for this together in 5 minutes, given a venue etc - great when things come together so fast), and of course all the time spent together in the halls, making & editing music until 3 - the stuff I usually do isolated and somehow thinking no-one will like it.
On night 2 we piped my guitar through a max msp program that Mat had written on night 1 and prepared it with a pen clip, banged it with pencils, as well as singing and making noises. Hopefully it will make it’s way here as well. We recorded 2 tracks, and I have a 3rd, london bridge played on beer bottles.
Last night (day 3), I got back from Liverpool to find everyone editing the binaural samples and loops we’d made, creating something that sounded to me like a fork factory that drops forks into a conveyor belt, shreds them, and finally melts them. We wanted to call it “Free battery chicken with each copy” but Mat won out in the end and called it L.A.W. VS Stockhausen.
Lifting the persona of father, community/eco activist, programmer etc and seeing the creativity there is a bit like the pyramid of wants - but with creativity right at the top, if there’s time after everything else.
But maybe art is actually a document of all the levels of the pyramid. Older practices: Storytelling, ritual performance, epic songs, poetry etc are all documents or intended as such - documents of what came before, and somehow still resonate with people at all levels of the pyramid.
I’m a Nichiren Buddhist, which is based mostly on the Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana scripture that was passed first orally, then written in various languages, until now being available online even. It exists as a document of a teaching, but it’s passed through all the media that at different points have been the best way to get it across to people. I think it even says you should memorise, chant, recite, teach etc - all forms of representation are encouraged. Nichiren was around at a time when chanting was really popular, and allowed lay people to practice buddhism in a much more simplified form. So he adapted an earlier lotus sutra based teaching to this, and it became very successful.
Equally, art speaks deeply and teaches also, and we follow a tradition in making it, that was passed on by seeing art in other ways, and adapting it, creating new things, spreading them etc, and you could say that throughout the process there’s a teaching taking place too.
So to find the best media to use to interface with people could be important, but then I always think of Varese who spent years unable to make music because the technology wasn’t there, and certainly the people were probably not appreciative then either. But maybe it’s not the medium itself, but the wisdom you can apply as a performer or artist to interface with reality. And popularity isn’t everything - sometimes you just want the teaching to be transferred, which might just mean making a document of it. You might say that Varese was composing for future audiences, which then came and took his music further. Or you could say Shakyamuni taught the lotus sutra for future audiences as it trashed all the previous sutras and he even said there was no-one around at the time who would understand it, but predicted that there would be a time for that.
And then the difficulty is how to keep something alive even when it’s filtered down? Maybe the answer is to view the document as art. Then you can say that each filtered version, copy of a copy, is actually still a slowly mutating process that is at the same time teaching the present generation, and carrying things forward to the next. I like the Lotus Sutra because it was at it’s time universal - it was known in China, India and Japan… the entire known world, and it got a bit of the culture of each place. And I only know about Varese because of Frank Zappa. I’m probably only even interested in him, because Frank Zappa’s memory of finding out about Varese was so significant to me, so his music, life etc doesn’t really matter -what matters is Frank Zappa’s memory of it.
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The modular sound monster is a physical representation of all the man-made sounds around us everywhere. I keep hearing it.
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So, on to today: LAW-CSI. We went to some rooms run by the forensic investigation people here, one decked out as the house of a family with a young child, a builder’s house, a murder scene in a pub, a satanist weirdo with smelly shoes and another house that we couldn’t access which was said to be much more horrible than any of the stuff we saw.
We split into 3 groups: the performers, witnesses and investigators. At first, I felt really close to my role as a witness. By the time we had to investigate, I already felt more like a performer and we used some bits of the modular sound sculpture to collect evidence, collecting resonance from the scene, and I attempted to gather brain waves from Daisy’s head using a big metal object. And I think it’s useful in devising to get people to split roles and do it all together as a group - maybe not always, but it’s useful to know you can do it. It has the effect of fusing all the personas - investigator witness and performer, sometimes difficult to shift between them. If I had a group of film makers and musicians, it could be an idea to get them to switch places, if the point is collaborating fully and getting fresh ideas from people.
Some of the evidence we gathered:
Sounds like what happened was they were doing a seance, with lots of details in it that were lost, based on the severed head that was already there as part of the crime scene.
But what I got from it was that they took instruments into that bathroom, made a “godawful” racket and tried to wrap people up with clingfilm before throwing or dropping it down the stairs.
Here’s a picture of the people being raised from the dead:
And the same wool, applied to the severed head:
Similarly, we did a procession through a neutral space in the building, a lane (Ginnel) between the houses, a kind of ceremony for the people who died in the house we weren’t allowed to go into. But when later investigating this and in court, the whole thing was lost, and they tampered with the evidence to convict Siobhan of obstructing the passageway with a broken lighter.
Oh and just to clarify - here’s proof of what a ginnel actually is.
Interesting to see the performance and chatting about it in the courtroom later: got me thinking about what happens when you do a performance within a performance, so you’re not the audience, so you’re not allowed to participate by clapping. That’s the audience over there… Like the that Miguel de Unamuno wrote, where characters escape from one performance or medium and go into another wider one around it(or completely unrelated one). I love that idea, blurring the lines but also bringing the audience into it, a modular social sculpture.
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