Fergus Kelly

New releases on Room Temperature

2009-10-02T23:02:00.011+01:00

Fergus Kelly: Swarf (2009)

Fergus Kelly: Fugitive Pitch (2009)

The culmination of about six months work has borne fruit in the form of two new CDRs on my Room Temperature label this month. Swarf is an 20 minute EP of four compositions created with acoustic recordings of bowed steel rods with sheet steel resonator.

I improvised with four six foot steel rods bolted to a free-standing steel sheet which acted as a resonator, using a double bass bow. The recordings were edited into a series of loops varying in length between a few seconds to about 20 - 30 seconds. These loops were then edited together in a series of cross-fades. No processing was used. No need. The variations of tone, texture and timbre through differing applications of speed and pressure resulted in a sound palette of a roughly hewn beauty. There was plenty in there. The compositions came together quite quickly. They felt right. I let them sit for a number of weeks. They still felt right. After a few months I still felt the same way. The work was finished.

Swarf part III by Fergus Kelly

A full length album, Fugitive Pitch was different kettle of fish entirely. Worked on over about a six month period, this was created from recordings made in cellars underneath Dublin's Henrietta Street, featuring myself and David Lacey improvising with assorted metals, plastics and drums. This material was extensively edited and processed to create the raw material that would be shaped into the finished compositions.

Disembodied by Fergus Kelly

Cellar percussion set-up:

(click on images to enlarge)

Currently I'm working a series of solo compositions using studio improvisations, electronics and field recordings as raw material, with a view to putting out a full length album in 2010. The process behind this, which is outlined below, is very similar to that behind the creation of Fugitive Pitch.

Improvisation I see as composing in the moment; an immediate interplay between gesture and surface, touch and texture. Though I have performed solo, I've not done so for many years. I usually improvise in a group context as I enjoy the interaction with the various sounds and approaches of other players, as it often draws out unexpected elements. So improvising solo, I'm playing against myself, so to speak, there's no-one else to respond to. Derek Bailey called it 'that manic dialogue with the phantom other.'

Improvisation is also a constant process of self-questioning and re-invention, as materials are deployed over a period of time and pushed to the limit of what can be drawn from them before repetition sets in. Naturally, certain gestures and approaches will become habit to a certain extent, but one always endeavours to push past this to keep things fresh. Whatever contraption I'm working with will generally have a certain lifespan before I get tired of it, then everything is dismantled and reconfigured.

Lately, I've been trying to reduce the set-up to absolute essentials, and draw out a lot more subtlety from fewer elements. Often too many choices just results in option paralysis on stage. Limits can be more creative, enforce a bit of lateral thinking. The question is: what do I need ? And what's surplus to requirements ? A good dynamic range within the set-up is the first thing, and a manageable array of tools. Are there a number of tools that do the same thing essentially ? Chop 'em out ! One will do ! Why clog things ? Even just a clear arrangement of paraphernalia can help with a clarity of approach.

Bringing the recordings into Protools I regard as an extension, over time, of the compositional process, where material can be further edited, shaped and variously treated. There is a school of thought that would regard this process as a dismantling of the integrity of the original improvisation. But what are the various tools in the editing process other than more ways to form the material ? Software as expansion of improvisational tools. Some of the live gestures involve circular motions on surfaces to create kinds of loops, albeit with subtle variations. The only difference between live and studio electronics is the degree of control and time spent tweaking the processed material.

Under the sonic magnifying glass of pitch-shifting, subtle nuances and harmonics can be amplified and extended, and broaden the dynamic range within a composition. Arranging material can be conceived of in painterly terms: sound as a series of marks and textures, colours and forms, all of varying intensity and subtlety, and the laying out of this material across a surface, except instead of a surface, it's across time. The aim is to strike an interesting balance between these elements.

The visual nature of computer editing allows the material to be easily grouped and arranged, chopped back, shifted, and scrutinized with forensic clarity. Looping is like patterning: the repetition of forms draws out subtle details. I generally like the loops to sound as organic as possible, not machine precise, but a little frayed at the edges. The only machine precision being the edit point that allows it to flow without immediately sensing the join. Looping can also be used in such a way that it doesn’t seem like looping in the more regulated sense, but with loops of longer duration layered together staggered, so that the changes occur much more loosely and gradually - a slower overall rhythm - with phase changes owing to the different loop lengths, creating subtle variations over time, not unlike the music of Morton Feldman.

The arrangement of forms and sections have parallels with film editing, with ‘jump cuts’ to emphasise contrast and keep material fresh, ‘lap dissolves’ (cross fades), to make smooth transitions, maintain apparent continuity. Some jump cuts can have an almost sculptural presence, where a block of dense material, rising in volume, suddenly gets chopped, and the split second transition, the synaptic leap, to silence, or subtler sound can have a kind of gravitational pull, almost like teetering at the edge of a precipice and peering into the void.

There’s also the horticultural parallel when composing, where ‘slips’ are cut from the main body of material, which are ‘seeded’, grow, and are then harvested into new forms. These forms, in turn, can be broken down, ‘decomposed’, composted (processed to within an inch of their lives), to provide a rich soil for new blooms. Interesting how the words composing and composting are right next to each other in the dictionary. John Cage noticed how his two principal interests, music and mushrooms, were also near each other in the dictionary.

Composing also involves a lot of close listening over extended periods, away from the computer, where tracks are put onto CD and listened to at home, to gain a fresh perspective. The difference between studio monitors and home stereo is an instructive one, and a truer indication of how an audience is likely to experience the work. Also, it’s very useful to be unchained from the screen, where events unfold in front of the eyes as much as the ears, as ‘watching’ the material, anticipating edit points as the cursor glides across the waveforms, is a kind of distraction to pure listening.

When the tracks have been listened to extensively, returned to after a period of time to gain a fresh perspective, and I feel there’s no more changes to be made, then it’s down to the business of arriving at satisfactory titles. This process will have partly begun anyway, as I become familiar with the material and it suggests certain images and sensations.

Titles are important as I feel they finish the work, seal it, give it a certain identity, and hint at ideas and associations outside of the purely sonic that broaden the scope of the work. The sounds can suggest certain words or phrases, or I can make note of certain words and phrases at another time that subsequently seem to 'fit' the work. Material can jump out of something I'm reading, which in turn can suggest variations or further ideas. Generally I like titles to be sufficiently open ended to allow for various interpretations, yet still feel somehow specific to the work.

Wire: The Scottish Play

2009-09-30T11:37:00.005+01:00

I decided to add some old reviews to the blog, starting with this one of Wire's DVD The Scottish Play, originally reviewd for Wireviews in February 2005, including some of my photos of the gig:

Fire burn and cauldron bubble! Praise be to Pink Flag for pushing the boat out on this one: film-maker Tom Gidley's record of Wire's Triptych Festival gig at Tramway was a big outlay, but one viewing of the goods and it's clear that it was definitely money well spent.

Gidley and his crew (Andy Cooke and Julian Emens) captured this outstanding performance in Glasgow, in 2004, and here is documentary proof of a band at the peak of their powers, playing to one of their largest provincial UK audiences with merry abandon. What Gidley has done is to bring out the intensity of Wire's performance, the ferocity of their velocity, by adopting an up-close-and-personal approach. Bar a few master shots, this film is, for the most part, in close-up. Gidley and his crew have abstracted heads and hands hard at work, cutting back and forth between the players, at pace with the action, but avoiding an MTV-style vortex of hyperactive edits. Stalking heads. Rendered in shadow. Statuesque.

A vertical torch flare bisects the screen in sync with the guitar lead earthing that ignites 99.9. Wire's name, lobster red, appears and disappears, followed by the date, 30.4.04, in pastel blue: a point in time, a place in history. Mark it. (Technically speaking, though, as the gig kicked off well after midnight, it was the first of May 1.5.04—neat little synchronicity that...)

In a series of cleverly synched edits, pinhole beams penetrate the pitch black like a gaggle of drunken lighthouses. Come thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. The atmosphere crackles like electricity: there's an urgency, a sense of emergency, as a lone figure hares about, ranting like a lunatic. This song has a powerful audiovisual presence, which Gidley has further accentuated and animated like a Conradian journey to some dark core. Uncertain mood mirrors uncertain times. Out, out, brief candle.

As the set progresses, Tim Anderson's lighting is reasonably constant, alternating between red and blue washes. A little unadventurous, perhaps, but it has generally been Wire's agenda throughout their career to keep lighting effects to a minimum; "It's the songs that are lit," as Bruce Gilbert once said. There is no distraction: our concentration is on theirs. The epitome of absolute concentration, Bruce is rooted to the spot, the only movement apparent that of his hands. And his teeth. Inside his cheeks. Grinding. Milling through the grinder. Grinding through the mill. He solemnly surveys the scene like The Grim Reaper. Guitar as scythe. Cut the atmosphere. Loop it. Distort it. Mercilessly.

Grey the gearstick, axle of acceleration, more than mere timekeeper: he is time. Metered. Calibrated. Faultless. The light that models Robert's head seems to draw it out of the shadows, Caravaggio-like. Stubbled scalp container of clockwork code. Synapses arc, signals glide the lightning fast nerve paths, muscles engage, bones articulate. Fists grip sticks - hit snare cracks.

One plosive pluck, and Graham plunges the depthcharge bassline that anchors Mr. Marx's Table — dare I say it: it's a great rock 'n' roll moment. Close-up on pulsating strings. Sweaty frets. Everything's humming loudly. His performance on The Agfers Of Kodack can only be described as possessed: eyes popping, with prodigiously perspiring pate. Dewy dome, like misted Velcro. At one point, he appears to be practically strangling the bass, wringing it dry.

Meanwhile, with a spring in his step and a song in his heart, Colin can't stop those bunny hops, or stooping as though stalking some invisible prey. Lost in music. Especially when, after encoring with a few old classics, Wire plough through Pink Flag, and the music seems to be playing him. This is the closest Wire come to improvising, and it's one number they really like to do a number on. Bruce actually starts to move a few inches and appears to be enjoying himself. Then he's tweaking effects. Good Lord. There's no stopping him. Now he's really milling through the grinder. Graham's grimacing as he alters the pitch of his tune, and Robert accelerates a roll that seems to catapult him back from the kit as though his seat went into eject mode. That's it. He's thrown in the towel. He's out of the ring.

As a record of Wire Mk III, it doesn't get much better than this. Hats off to the New Man for an excellent sound mix: well balanced, crisp, clear, with a touch of post production to further hone things. Gidley's approach has us not merely observe the band—instead, we feel up there with them, in the throes. Thankfully, track markers have been used this time round for separate song access; and the addition, once more, of a CD version of the gig, is a great bonus.

Four songs filmed by a static camera from the second half of Wire's flag:burning performance in The Barbican in 2003 have been included with the disc. This feels like more of an afterthought in lieu of something else, and, in contrast to the original theatrical experience, is remarkably flat as a TV experience: all sense of scale and impact is lost. Movement barely registers as the band is so far away.

Taken together, as contemporary and archive documents, The Scottish Play and On The Box are witness to the fact of Wire's innate ability to burn bright and thoroughly engage an audience, to connect. The 25 years that separate these performances illustrate how time has not dimmed the band's spirits in the slightest. Inspiring.

London trio 2009

2009-09-29T21:57:00.000+01:00

Fergus Kelly (cabinet of curiosities), Mark Wastell (tam tam), Max Eastely (stones, arc).
Filmed at St.Mark's Church, Islington, London 27.3.09, by Helen Petts.

Darklight duo 2007

2009-09-29T21:50:00.001+01:00

5 minute edit of duo gig for Darklight Festival, Dubin, 23 June 2007.

Presence

2008-08-24T16:43:00.007+01:00

The spark for this collaboration ignited several years ago when John Duncan saw Graham Lewis perform with Carl Michael von Hausswolf in Vienna. Having been very keen on Dome, John suggested working together by using recordings of Graham's voice as a springboard. This continues his vocal manipulations with Elliot Sharp and Asmus Teitchens.

Originally from the US, now based in Italy, John Duncan is a high calibre sound artist. He has a substantial catalogue of work published by Staalplaat, Streamline, Touch, Trente Oiseaux, Die Stadt, and his own label, Allquestions. He has worked with Andrew McKenzie (CONTACT) Francisco López (NAV), Bernhard Günter (HOME: UNSPEAKABLE), Max Springer (THE CRACKLING). Mention of these names alone is a good indication of the radical sonic territory being mapped out.

Along with his trademark use of shortwave signals, Duncan's modus operandi is to abstract source sounds quite considerably, creating smeared masses of sonic granulation, like vapour trails. It is only on the opening and closing tracks that Graham's voice is recognizable, bookending the whole with typically intriguing texts. Elsewhere, it's completely ground through the mill.

PURPOSE STIMULATED opens, like some kind of perverse prologue, with a rippling, buzzing, texture out of which emerges a slithering timestretched text. Both liquid and brittle. The beheaded Ian Holm in Alien. A slippery soliloquy. Ventriloquised verbals. On valium. This makes way for FALL, a gateway into the abyss. This substantial track (33' of the album's 46') evolves like a colossal wind, rushing the listener headlong into a vast open void, to arrive, about half way through, into a more meditative space created by the warm crackle of shortwave signals that fluctuate in a strangely reassuring way, punctuated by various pops and cracks. A lively medium. A carrier. From virtual space to radio space. Ether. The invisible flux out there. An energy field. A space that Duncan has been navigating for many years, once described as using the tuning band like a divining rod. Duncan's digital dowsing locates resonant spaces. Finely formed frequencies. The listener bobs like a cork in a pond. The source sound for a significant part of this was a minute and a half recording of a controlled rant by Graham on foot of meeting a rather objectionable character. Not that you'd remotely recognize it as such though. Anger vented becomes vent (drone).

On CYCLE, from a recording of a heavily hungover Graham 'wailing' in the bath, comes a frothing mumble of heavily processed signal, very visceral, the body reduced to a gurgling essence. A gargling broth of digital garble. Slo-mo swallow. In reverse. A sonic spin cycle. STEP closes the album in a kind of exhausted epilogue. The background is a field recording of the Emmanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo. A deeply reverberant space. Cathedral-like. Whispering voices heard in the background, occasional footsteps, a door closing. In stark contrast, Graham's voice is a very close-miked confidential whisper, drawing the listener in to an almost confessional space, his words with us almost before they are uttered. 'Take a step forward and tell the truth'.

Conceptually the album is like a series of rooms the listener is taken through. A narrative of sonic architecture and architectural space, vocal presence and human resonance. Occupancy. Absence. Trace. The shorter tracks orbit like satellites around the massive gravity pull of FALL, undoubtedly the piece de resistance of the album. Even to the extent that the shorter tracks seem underworked by comparison. More like sketches even.

Less of a collaboration in the strict sense, this is more of a John Duncan album that Graham guests (or ghosts) on, his presence flitting in and out of the frame at the beginning and end, elsewhere stalking unrecognized like some undead condemned to wander. Invoked as spirit presence. A haunting. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but there is the inescapable feeling, interesting as the fruits of this collaboration are, that there's more potential here, considering the pedigree of the protagonists, something which might benefit from working together more closely, over less protracted periods, rather than one largely being the source for the other's manipulation.

MZUI

2008-08-23T22:04:00.013+01:00

In August 1981, Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, and visual artist/designer Russell Mills decided to expand the Dome methodology away from concert situations into something more ambitious. They did this with a one-month run in the artist-curated Waterloo Gallery, and created a constantly evolving audio-visual installation called MZUI. A former meat-packing warehouse, the space became, in their hands, "a flexible recording studio environment" that was "as much about noise as about visual constructive things". Edited highlights took the form of this LP, produced by Cherry Red in May 1982.

Workmanlike, they came in six days a week and created instruments and environments from raw materials that lay about the site. The public was free to interact, and the results were recorded and played back into the space. The accompanying photos show various views of the installation and present an intriguing world of rough hewn constructions and environments using metal, wood, wire, glass, smoke and fire in a darkened space. Some areas were roped off, lending the whole an atmosphere somewhere between an autopsy and an archaeological dig. Strange hybrid forms such as the 'xylo-trapeze' and 'drip drum' lurk in the shadows.

As the needle settles into the groove to begin its inevitable spiral toward the core, a large reverberant space opens up; desolate, bleak and industrial, with the sounds of raw materials in a state of flux. The first side presents a series of isolated incidents, presented as fragments or 'reports'. Parts of a larger whole, these forensic documents animate a dead space. The building becomes a sounding board. The sounds are very textural, and visceral, often like electrified dust, and at other times percussive and abrasive. Random clangs echo through the space: metallic booms roar in the distance. Some sounds are more close-miked—humming, buzzing and volatile. There's a ritual quality at times with spartan rhythms beaten slowly on various surfaces. At a certain point one of them can be heard explaining to people (presumably on the opening night) "we did have the facility to mike... certain areas... four wires... three which picked up vibrations, one which (obliterated by noise) we also sent(?) tapes, two sets of tapes..." Some of these tapes lend a subtle, ghostly colouring that hovers delicately in places. Others present harsher, brighter textures.

The second side presents longer, more worked sections with a strong narrative thread. Distant, almost angelic vocal drones are overlaid with what seems like very delicately controlled feedback. This is then underscored with deeper horn drones, with little flecks of higher-pitched feedback. The raw edge quality of the recording adds to the sense of drama of this passage, with incidental sounds of occasional footsteps, coughs and indeterminate sounds. It's haunting and grimly beautiful, melancholic and grainy, like old film. I imagine harsh neon illuminating the space at night—some bulbs broken and malfunctioning, a large gathering of people, cold breath fogging, and plaster sweating.

Toward the end, a slowly unfolding loop is subjected to a changing series of effects, rendering it utterly unrecognisable. This is actually the voice of Marcel Duchamp saying "In spite of myself, I'm a meticulous man", which seems quite fitting. This segues into a simple rhythm beaten out slowly in the distance on two alarm bells a semitone apart. A final metallic boom creates a full stop and sense of closure and exit from the space.

This record was an epiphany for me. It made connections on a few levels: the notion of sound as landscape, the narrative qualities of sound—the idea of sound articulating a sense of place. The simplicity of using the space itself as the source was really appealing. There was a certain DIY punk aesthetic to that, which is, of course, predated by the idea of the found object in various twentieth century art movements. Then there was the nature of the sound itself: cold, gritty, matter of fact. It's very evocative—there's a sense of the inevitable somehow, the feeling of events overheard almost, rather than recorded specifically. It often has an icy, brutal, almost terrifying beauty, wrought from the simplest of base elements—industrial alchemy. The record is seemingly random at times, yet at others carefully composed and intelligently articulated. There's a wonderful sense of depth, like the deep shadows of a Caravaggio painting, with some sounds occurring very far away, whilst others literally brush past the microphone. One particular sound seems like a microphone swung pendulum-like over a speaker to create a subtle feedback 'sweep'.

There are certain parallels with Eno's On Land, which came out the same year, although they obviously sound quite different. Eno, in his liner notes, speaks specifically about the idea of landscape, memory, and a sense of place. He also mentions the notion of psychoacoustic space—the idea of using recording technology to create imaginary spaces and atmospheres: the suggestive power of sound. Where Eno creates exterior, rural, and perhaps more lyrical spaces, Dome's world is a wonderfully forlorn, and distinctly urban interior.

These two LPs really opened my ears to the idea, not only of landscape and narrative, but the idea of listening to the world in a musical way—everything becomes potential material. MZUI is a major landmark on a journey to a more expanded and exploratory form of listening, and a more active, engaged relationship with the soundscape. In many ways, it's Dome's finest hour, as their ideas found forms unavailable to them in the studio, and got developed over a longer stretch, pushing them into ever more inventive areas. It's like a favourite haunt I like to visit: I feel in my element. It's somewhere I'm always returning to.

Drowning In A Sea Of Hiss

2007-01-21T21:53:00.000Z

The cassette culture of early Touch releases

Panni Charrington

"They're all armed to the teeth, and that's my kinda people"

A friend remarked to me recently that Mute was the most influential label in terms of his musical education, with the coterie of artists it introduced him to. This got me thinking: who would I rate in this way ? My influences came from very diverse sources. It seemed hard to pinpoint one label, till I realised - there was one publisher, Touch, established in 1982 by Mike Harding, Jon Wozencroft, Garry Mouat and Andrew McKenzie. They started with a series of cassette compilations that certainly broadened my horizons.

I first encountered them quite by chance, in the summer of 1983. I was just out of school and the ailing Irish economy had forced me to travel to London for summer work to fund materials for art school, which I was beginning in September. I hated it there, and was pretty homesick and lonely most of the time, but my saving grace, the little carrots that kept me going, were record shops, galleries and gigs. There were things happening in London that could only be dreamed of in Dublin. I was to spend, or rather, endure, a further four summers there, and each time I’d come home with a case full of LPs and tapes, some of which would be sure to fetch a good price on ebay now..

Russell Mills

“Well, what do you think, will psychiatry help ?”

Meridians One was the first Touch tape I bought, can’t remember where, possibly Rough Trade or the ICA, but it opened up a new landscape to me. Before you listened to anything, the first thing that struck you was the highly individual character of the design, which, in the early days was by Garry Mouat, with photo manipulations by Panni Charrington. It was unlike anything else at the time. It created a very fresh visual identity that really drew me in. Charrington seemed to have a thing about eyes. Disembodied, floating. I had no idea what to expect from the music, recognising only a couple of names in the compilation, such as Graham Lewis and John Foxx, but I was hungry for new stuff, and soaked up whatever I thought looked interesting.

And sure enough, this was a fascinating bunch of musicians and composers: AC Marias, aka Angela Conway, friend of Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert, who I was to later hear on a Dome LP, Simon Fisher Turner, a greatly underrated composer who went on to create beautiful scores for many Derek Jarman films, Current 93, Test Dept., Ludus, and others who’ve since dropped off the radar, or changed aliases. Previously, the work of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell had introduced me to the notion of psychoacoustic space — the idea of using recording technology to create imaginary spaces and atmospheres: the suggestive power of sound. This lot expanded the parameters a good deal further. It was uncharted terrain.

Panni Charrington & Garry Mouat

“It would have been impossible had you not been dead”

What unfolded was a Ballardian interzone of ritual sounds and atmospheres, sticky with slap delays, gated reverbs and ping pong echoes. It was like going upriver to meet Kurtz. Featuring a lot of electronically processed sounds and percussion, the tracks were bracketed with intriguing media clips, field recordings and loops. This created a certain kind of skewed continuity to the proceedings. These were soundtracks that created their own films in your head. Ear theatre. It was a new world to me, difficult and challenging at times, but engaging enough to go the distance with.

This was a space I wanted to inhabit. The Borroughsian cut-up of information, the interaction of media - written, graphic and sonic - created intriguing synergies, ideas in flux, capricious, unstable. Co-ordinates were thrown down for you to navigate the terrain. There was layering, overlap, jump-cuts, odd juxtapositions. It was rich and filmic. Eisenstien meets Brakhage. Dada for the 80s. Alien broadcasts. It wasn't a conventional narrative. The sense of the material lay in the way you chose to order it. It was heuristic. Touch's modus operandi always encouraged further investigation.

Allied to my interest in punk's DIY approach and spirit of experimentation, this was my introduction to the more obscure areas of sonic exploration – the industrial scene protagonists like Einstürzende Nuebauten, Test Dept., z’ev, Dome, Bow Gamelan. This really ignited my own explorations into sound and related visual experiments. Sound as sculptural element. Non-musical soundsources. New mental maps were being charted with this music - outer limits, nameless zones. This fed into my visual work with an exploration of the suspended time zones of derelict spaces that Dublin was once so full of. All hoovered up now of course, in a squeaky clean future of chequebook modernism* and Euro ennui.

Malcolm Garrett & Roger Cleghorn

“And I don’t want any escape routes out of that, I want to keep looking at the human”

I caught up on the previous two tapes (Feature Mist & Touch 33) and other releases followed, some in beautifully designed plastic wallets, with looseleaf artwork and writing, some in boxes that were like tiny videotape cases. I always found their visual side an utterly beguiling parallel to the music. It was a time when some others took a similarly creative approach to design - the likes of Greater Than One, Test Dept., and :zoviet*france: (who really pushed the boat out with LPs in foil, string-bound hardboard and roofing felt). It was a golden era.

It had a fairly significant effect on my approach to working with images in art school. It inspired a kind of lateral thinking. I was hardwired to my walkman most of the time, and spent long hours painstakingly designing not just elaborate tape covers for my own collection, but artwork for the cassette shells aswell. It was completely obsessive. The forensic scrutiny of scalpel and Rapidograph pen. It was also a time when I didn’t fully grasp the long term value of these releases: Feature Mist had a very long New Order track that I hated so much I taped over it, using a tape counter to fit the material recorded over it and not lose what came after it. It never occurred to me to copy the entire tape and leave out the offending track.

Nocturnal Emissions: Drowning In A Sea Of Bliss

Narodna: Music from Albania, Croatia, Macedonia & Serbia

There was also a third strand: high quality creative and critical writing on contemporary culture from the likes of Jon Savage, Jamie Reid, Raoul Vaneigem, Simon Frith, Paul Buck, and Griel Marcus, amongst others. One double release, Magnetic North, was quite ambitious. A C90 featuring Gilbert & George, Biting Tongues, Nocturnal Emissions, Einstürzende Neubauten and Camberwell Now, amongst many others, was accompanied by a lavishly designed magazine (featuring different paper stocks) on the theme of ritual and its relationship with contemporary society. There was a particularly prescient essay by Jon Savage on the nature of mass media rituals and the cult of celebrity, which still strikes a chord today:

"The celebrity is a person tuned into an abstract. Their status has little to do with their achievement (or lack of it) but everything to do with their ability to fit in with the demands of the new mass media ritual. This involves availability, accessibility, pliability and respectability - 'shocking' people are carefully dropped in to add spice or to populate ghettos. As they parade across the surface of the electronic media, celebrities become symbols (and, occasionally, victims), members of the televisual elite encouraging emulation and aspiration - the modern call to prayer."

Sums up 'reality' TV...

Touch's editorial outlines their approach:

“With Touch, we have endeavored not to force thoughts to our readership on each magazine’s overall content, preferring to leave as opened and still detailed a collection of ideas as possible – even though, in the real sense everything through to the choice of colours is “editorial”. With this double edition “Ritual” we paint a large subject whose omissions determine some dispensations; parts of these gaps are suggested by quotations elsewhere, bearing in mind EM Forster’s words that signposts should not be confused with the destination itself...”

This is what differentiated Touch from other labels. Though they were no mere 'label' – they saw themselves as “audio-visual publishers”, doing limited edtions for a specialist audience. They could also be regarded as curators, tapping into the culture with a keen eye and ear for fresh and innovative work. Exhibitions for speakers and coffee table. Or headphones and travel. Their passion for the various projects was infectious. They mostly worked at a loss in the early years - their approach to publishing would have been viewed by others in the trade as commercial suicide. Not that they cared. These genuinely interactive documents were produced as a labour of love, with a forensic precision and attention to detail when it came to editing and design. To me, this made the product deeply satisfying, and inspiring. Touch's choice of presentation and dissemination was an implictly political act, a subtle subversion of accepted modes. It was an oppositional and healthy alternative to the mainstream, and the indie market, which itself was to become another mainstream, a different behemoth.

Neville Brody & Chris Moretone

“And lastly, we’ve got six divided by two – now that means six divided into two equal amounts, and I’ll do that”

Touch were consistently interesting and took risks. Lack of familiarity was no barrier to trying something out. On the contrary. The material was highly eclectic and featured a fair sprinkling of excellent ethnographic recordings which enhanced the sense of richness and diversity in music making. Touch definitely seeded my interest in this area. The world was a fascinating place if you listened: from street sounds to Gamelan orchestras to contemporary composition and noise music, all had parity of interest - Touch’s approach was panglobal, pantheistic, polymorphous and pluralist. I had started reading John Cage’s writings at this time, and his dictum that all sound could be music found sympathetic resonance in Touch tapes.

The walkman was in its early days and these tapes took you places that formed a fascinating overlay to the humdrum of the daily commute. Acoustic psychogeography. Travel whilst traveling. Or stay at home and be an armchair traveler. It also got me into field recording. I remember Mike telling me that their Indonesian-based travelogue Islands In-Between was recorded on a walkman. I was amazed. In my innocence, I had visions of someone hoofing something as unwieldy as a Nagra around. That particular summer (1986) I picked up a second hand recording walkman, and a whole new world opened up to me, one which could be framed simply with the discreet use of microphone and headphones. Working with a clip mic was especially handy as you avoided the nerd factor of standing around pointing a mic at things... Nowadays binaural mics make it even more discreet.

Meridians 2

One release, Travel, actually covered the theme, with artwork and writing on stock that folded like maps. Alongside David Toop’s recordings of Yanamamo shamans were Balinese cremation rituals, South American zampona players, Cologne church bells, 3 Mustaphas 3, General Strike (Toop & Beresford), rain on galvanized metal, London Underground recordings, Jon Keliehor’s Percussion Research Ensemble, and Eithne Ni Bhroanain, shortly before she anglicised her name to Enya and disappeared into a new age mist. Touch went on to champion particular non Western musicians and groups from places like Indonesia, Egypt, Africa, Albania, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia. They also made features of some essential work coming out of the underground – in particular The Hafler Trio and Strafe Für Rebellion, who, between them used a combination of field recordings, electronics, prepared instruments and obtuse texts that had a profound effect on my approach to sound. Praise be to Touch for having the vision to support these people…

Mooie Charrington

"Cool in the north, and very warm in the south"

Recently I transferred most of these tapes to hard disc and made CDs of them. I hadn’t listened to these tapes for years (I don’t listen to tapes anymore), and it really brought me back, entering into them again. It was interesting how fresh a lot of it still sounded, how well they’d aged. Interesting too how much I noticed the artifact of tape hiss. At a time when surface noise has ceased to be an issue, having grown so used to digital purity, this phenomenon seemed curiously heightened (especially when I was topping and tailing the tracks). It reminded me of the vicissitudes of analogue tape, and how precious items could blighted by dropout and wow and flutter.

Though they dropped the cross-media presentation of old to concentrate more on the music, Touch continue to bring the work of quality sound artists, composers and musicians to the attention of a wider public, and still continue to produce beautifully designed CDs with the visually arresting photography of Jon Wozencroft. They celebrated their 25th anniversary last year, a long time for a business of this nature to last. Well, happy birthday lads ! Here’s to the next 25 years… ;-)

*Iain Sinclair: Downriver (Granta 1991)

Apart from Nocturnal Emissions and Narodna, the artwork pictured above appeared originally as part of Meridians 2

For more artwork and liner info, go to Touch, click on Touch 25 and scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says "Early cassette culture"

Past shadows present

2006-12-15T16:50:00.000Z

How much of a shadow does the past cast on the present ? Or have we disconnected completely ? This, I hasten to add, is not in the sense of wanting to hang on to the past in some dubious heritage ideal of ‘the good ‘ol days’. Merely to wonder: what are the meaningful ways in which a connection can be kept, without preserving everything in aspic ? The problem, as I see it, is the more we demolish and replace, the more we erase and replace collective memory, and our sense of ourselves becomes less defined. And the risk inherent in this, it seems to me, is that the model becomes more and more ahistorical and apolitical, and we continue to sink into a bland state of homogeneity, undifferentiated from other states.

The Spire would seems to be a particularly salient example of this. What does this say about Dublin in the third millennium ? Apart from its formal elegance, what is its connection with the landscape ? Why has it been decided that an outdated model of a la carte modernism be the order of the day ? Do we not have a strong enough sense of ourselves to accept something more… relevant ? Less monolithic ? Though I don’t want to get into any particularly hide-bound notions of nationhood here.

In 2003, RTE created an animation as a continuity filler, in which Nelson’s column morphed into the Spire. It was as though the shift from colonized country/second city to secular society/Europeanised multiculture was a smooth and unproblematic transition, reducible to such graphic abbreviation. You can’t help but think: hey - hang on a sec ! Let’s bring this back down to earth for a minute. Nelson gets shafted. Instead of being toppled from his perch, he’s impaled from below on a giant hypodermic and whisked up into the clouds. Excuse me while I kiss the sky. RTE’s special effects version of history. The past conveniently smoothed over. Streamlined. Inoffensive. Infuriating.

Obviously development, by its very nature, looks ahead, and the reconfiguration of the modern metropolis is an ongoing and natural occurrence. Well it should be anyway. Though Dublin’s development has been more ad hoc than organic. But is it to be at the expense of severing ourselves completely from the past ? It’s curious, all the same, how the tramlines are being reinstated. The past returns in the future tense. A future which is indeed tense given the budget overruns and delays of the Luas project. Interpretive centres miss the point. What animates and makes the landscape vital is a feeling of connection with the historical layers that lie like so much temporal silt under the present – what’s brought us to where we are now.

Some parts of Dublin still have this. Certain streets you feel a connection. What’s interesting looking at archive photos of Dublin is the fact that, historically, they’re not really that old. Yet they feel centuries removed. Very hard to make the connection. Like trying to pull together two magnets by the same poles. Like realizing that you recognize someone, but you just can’t place them. Obviously so much of this is tied up with the massive sea changes in Irish society across this time, socially, politically and culturally. If we don’t know where we’ve come from, do we know where we are going ?

Photography, once the great arbiter of truth, has long since lost that authority in our digital age of endless image manipulation. Though even as far back as the war of independence, the radical women that were a very significant part of the motor for change were airbrushed out of photographs. In our present interrogation of the image, through the digital dialects of drag and drop, scan and save, a language so alien to those that wander the street in this photograph, we delve into the very fabric of the image, pull it apart pixel by pixel, shift bits of information around with a cartoon hand. The pixels, the building blocks of the image, its cell structure, are ironically also the very thing used to blur identity when the occasion is called for.

Dublin’s history of development over the last forty years is rife with examples of pig-headed notion of so-called ‘progress’ run roughshod over history. One of our major points of connection with the old city, the very foundations of the Medieval city, was in Wood Quay. And what did we do ? We built over it ! Not without a protracted public protest though, fought to the bitter end. Development wins out over history in a depressing show of power gone ape. A show of attitude that’s worse than Medieval. It’s Neanderthal.

Outside The Trains Don't Run On Time

2006-12-03T01:02:00.001Z

“Woe is us, said Mercier, we’re in the slow and easy.”
Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, p.39

Turning the page on the calender to the last month of the year, I’m presented with an image of the last train to leave Dublin’s famous Harcourt Street line, at 4.25pm on New Year’s Eve 1958. A detail strikes me. I’m surprised how small the station staff are. I mean, they’re tiny. Not quite Lilliputian, but the average height seems to be no more than about 5’ 2”…

As a regular traveller on the Harcourt Street line in his early years, Beckett made many references to it throughout his writing. Eoin O’ Brien, in his book The Beckett Country, relates how, ‘In the Harcourt Street terminus, it was the staff who gave the place its character –

Watt bumped into a porter wheeling a milkcan. Watt fell and his hat and bags were scattered…
The devil raise a hump on you, said the porter.
He was a handsome if dirty fellow. It is so difficult for railway porters to keep sweet and clean, with the work they have to do.” Watt, p.22

And the newsagent Evans merits detailed description, not only because of his saturnine temperament, but for his ability to master a bicycle despite deformity. A talent not unusual in the Beckettian character –

He seemed a man of more than usual acerbity, and to suffer from unremitting mental, moral and perhaps even physical pain … but one thought of him as the man who, among other things, never left off his cap, a plain blue cloth cap, with a peak and knob. For he never left off his bicycle-clips either. These were a kind that caused his trouser-ends to stick out wide, on either side. He was short and limped dreadfully. When he got started he moved rapidly, in a series of aborted genuflexions.
Watt p.23-24

One passenger, Mercier, was not at ease on the ‘Slow and Easy’ –

You remain strangely calm, said Mercier. Am I right in thinking you took advantage of my condition to substitute this hearse for the express we agreed on ? Mercier and Camier, p.41

His pessimism was not unfounded. Some extraordinary events had befallen the locomotives of the Dublin and South Eastern Railway. In 1900 the up-train went too far and crashed through the end-wall of Harcourt Street station. Some twenty years later ‘somebody, from sheer wantonness, set an engine going just outside the station. Full of the joy of liberty, it puffed forth. For ages it had longed for an excuse to get away from those shining tracks – anywhere, anywhere, off these black tracks – it pointed and flung itself wildly into an astonished backyard somewhere in Albert Place’.

Beckett’s sadness at finding the station closed on a visit to Dublin is reflected in the poignant voice of That Time –

No getting out to it that way so what next no question of asking not another word to the living as long as you lived so foot it up in the end to the station bowed half double get out to it that way all closed down and boarded up Doric terminus of the Great Southern and Eastern all closed down and the colonnade crumbling away so what next That Time, p.231’

If Beckett were alive today, he could look forward to travelling this line again, as it will be re-opened to run one line of the Luas tram system. What would he make of the contemporary environment and its characters, surrounded by mobiles trilling like canaries in a tropical aviary. Disembodied, one-sided conversations, the IV drip-feed of iPod insulated passengers. The title of his prose work, Texts For Nothing could read like an ad for free text messages…

Googling “Harcourt Street line” I come across a curiosity from a discussion forum called p45.net:

Blather, High Priest of Ambiguity says:

Heard a mad story yesterday from someone, who heard it from a builder who's worked on sites in the area. Here's the story she was told:

'The Harcourt line was built across a fairy fort. When the station was being built, they had to bring in workers from Donegal, because none of the Dublin lads would work on the site. When the line was eventually running, the train drivers used to hoot the horn just before arriving in the station, to warn the fairies, and to avoid pissing them off. One day, a driver forgot to hoot, and the train crashed - the famous Harcourt crash. The Luas is now running on the same bit of track. The stretch of line is supposed to be haunted between Harcourt Street station and the canal.'

It seems quite fitting that the music venue, Tripod, situated at the Harcourt Street site, will, this coming Sunday, host a band who wrote a song called Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time. Even more fitting as the construction of the Luas has certainly not run on time - not by a long shot. 'Slow and Easy' indeed !

Bend It Like Beckett

2006-10-12T23:29:00.000+01:00

This summer I was invited by Danny McCarthy to compose a piece to celebrate Beckett's centenary, for a CD of 100 one minute pieces, produced by Art Trail, who are based in Shandon, Cork City. On Beckett's taking leave of Ireland he made a final call to Cork, to Shandon, to visit the grave of Francis Sylvester O'Mahoney, aka Fr Prout, a writer he greatly admired. This compilation, "Bend It Like Beckett" is now available from Arttrail and Aphasia.

Here's some background to my contribution:

Fergus Kelly: Ebb (2006) 58"

There are various starting points, interactions and associations for this piece. My first starting point was the use of Dun Laoghaire pier as a location that had resonance for Beckett, famously referred to in Krapp's Last Tape as his site of epiphany, when it was "clear to me at last" what he had been searching so long for as the subject of his work. Though the actual truth of this revelation is rather more prosaic, as it occurred in his mother's seaside house in Greystones.

The pier is a significant site for me too as I grew up nearby and it was a favourite haunt. God knows how many miles I clocked walking its stretch over the years. I loved the sound of the foghorn, how it could be heard from afar, defining a particular sense of the landscape with its long melancholy drone, like some large beast exhaling. This particular foghorn was replaced by a far less interesting one years ago, but, thankfully I managed to get a recording of the old one in 1986. A fragment of this recording briefly appears, low in the mix, about three quarters of the way through.

The main sound that occurs throughout is a gong sound made from a sample of a saw blade which as been pitch-shifted. Beckett was a keen music lover, and his sole musical foray was in 1966, when Claddagh Records made a recording of Jack McGowran reading from Beckett's work, with musical accompaniment by John and Edward Beckett. Beckett himself played gong to mark the division between passages.

Morton Feldman was in the back of my mind whilst assembling this piece. Feldman was a great admirer of Beckett, and wrote an orchestral work, For Samuel Beckett, and dedicated his String Quartet II to Beckett. He managed to get Beckett to write a libretto for his opera, Neither (both of them disliked opera).

There are parallels between Beckett and Feldman, as they both worked with extremely simple ideas which were constantly being whittled down to simpler and more elegant forms over the years. The silence between words and sounds were of equal parity to both. Hence the use of silence as an active element in this composition - breathing spaces for the decay of the sounds. Beckett's phrasing and timing was always very musical. Feldman also scored parts of his work to be played very quietly. Hence the low volume of this piece.

The third sound is made with a prepared bass, used simply because it worked, no other conceptual agenda. The title relates to the natural phenomena of sea movement and sound decay. It was also the original title for Beckett's radio play, Embers.

It's all... history !

2006-06-24T11:01:00.000+01:00

Twenty years to the day today - my first experience of Wire on stage, the stage being a small one in an upstairs room in a hotel in Hammersmith. A lonely young art student adrift in an anonymous metropolis, I knew no-one. Forced to decamp to London for summer work. Events like tonight's were one of the few trade-offs in an otherwise interminable summer serving beer.

Visual memories very dim, not helped by the fact that I stood right down the back, as I was recording the gig on my walkman, and was afraid it would distort if I was too close to the PA. Automatic record level. It distorted anyway. In my innocence I was also afraid of being seen with a clip mike on my lapel. No-one would have either noticed or cared if they had. I'm sure I was one of many recording. I only wish I'd brought my camera. Though that would have meant a compromise with the recording - camera clicks right next to the mike. Wouldn't be an issue nowadays with digital.

The band played raw versions of what was to appear on The Ideal Copy and A Bell is a Cup... Some of the titles were slighty different to what they became: The Point Of Collapse was called Three Legged Waltz, and Over Theirs was called Nuisance Over Theirs. This material was all new to me, so it was a real treat. I loved it - simplicity and intelligence delivered with nonchalant aplomb. Interesting to hear the beat combo still capable of creating engaging new shapes with the minimum of means. The songs had an immediacy that got squeezed out on the overproduced records—technological teething troubles well documented in Kevin Eden's biography. I remember being very impressed with Robert's stripped-down kit: snare, bass drum and hi-hat. The simplicity really appealed to me; there was something very workmanlike about it—a craftsman's touch.

Couldn't get over the ignorance of some members of the crowd, who stood with their backs to the band, chatting loudly. Then, when Come Back In Two Halves began but fell apart, before it was quickly counted in again, some porridge-for-brains sneers, "Play some fackin' mew-zik..." I wanted to thump him. Give them a chance for fuck's sake ! The song was announced by Graham as though each word was punctuated with a full stop. Elsewhere, he camply exaggerated his intros: "Cheeking Tonguesssssssah.." (touch of the Mark E Smith surplus syllables) "Kidney-(feedback flare)- Kidney.. BINGossssss..." I seem to remember him getting rather annoyed at some feedback problems that dogged him at various points, the amp wailing like some rusty old elephant.

Regarding that stupid heckler, doubtless today it would be the cursed mobile phone that'd be the distraction. Harold Pinter, interviewed by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight last night, described them as "an excrescence", "a disease", and bemoaned the collapse of communication into a series of meaningless shorthand gestures. He speaks my language. Doubtless Wire could write a tune about that. He had written an hilarious two-hander called "But apart from that", which he performed with a young actor, revolving around a mobile phone conversation that goes: "Hello ! How are YOU !" "I'm fine, how are YOU ?" "No, I'm fine.. and you ? " "Very good. Really good" "Really ? Considering all - " "Yes, despite everything" "Really ? No, how are you REALLY ?" "I'm losing - " "What ?" " I'm losing you" "What ? What do you mean you're losing me ? I'm still here !" and so on...

I sometimes wonder what Wire's set would've sounded like if they'd gone into a very basic studio right after that gig and committed these tunes to tape, how fresh they'd be. None of that sequencing lark to wring the life out of them. Of course, some of them ended up on the magnificent Snakedrill EP, and that production was just right. This outstanding record seems to get overlooked in dismissive debates about Wire's 80s output being substandard. It would've been interesting if Wire's first hiatus neatly covered the period when the newer production techniques were past their difficult first stage. Of course, life's never so neat. Apparently they were within two weeks of playing in 1983, then Colin went to India. I wonder what a record would've sounded like then. One can only wonder.

Looking at the remains of my gig ticket, carefully conserved in the tape box over the years, it's tempting to retrospectively view the band name without the last letter as predictive of the the change to the short lived WIR trio of the early 90s - itself an outcome of both production and creative issues that rendered Robert redundant. The ticket shows that the door charge was a mere £4.50. Seems so paltry. Well, it was twenty years ago.

The Long Good Friday

2006-04-17T19:43:00.001+01:00

The Pelligrini Quartet take a bow after performing the marathon 5.5 hour String Quartet 2 by Morton Feldman. John Field Room, National Concert Hall, Dublin 14 April 2006.

"The point of course is to listen. There's no final information to be conveyed... Listening to this music is like looking at a star-filled night sky, anything else is material for an astronomy lesson."

Thus begins Christian Wolff's programme notes for Morton Feldman's monumental String Quartet 2 (1983), dedicated to Beckett, being performed as part of his centenary celebrations. An experience most likely never to be repeated. Five and a half hours uninterrupted. Whatever about the audience's commitment to listening, it's an incredible commitment on the part of the players. They take their places on the small stage at midday, strangely without any form of introduction for such a significant event, and, once comfortable, eye contact made, cue given, simply start playing.

I wondered how the audience, who are free to come and go, might negotiate this. I wondered how I would deal with it. I brought my lunch of course, and thought I was smart packing some reading material too. Would I really, otherwise, just sit and listen ? Well, as it happened, yes. As the work unfolded, I found time started to change shape. The first time I looked at my watch it was about 1.30pm. A whole hour and a half had gone by and it felt like 40 minutes. Regular as clockwork, my stomach was starting to grumble. Though I didn't quite want to leave for grub just yet. I was compelled by what I was hearing. However, come 2pm, I really had to exit, as my stomach was starting to soundtrack the strings (I was sitting in the front row), and I certainly didn't want to distract the players from their epic task.

I sat in the foyer and worked my way through my lunch. I then ambled out to a deserted Earlsfort Terrace, and strolled to an O'Briens at the end of the road and got a latte which I drank on the steps of the concert hall, reflecting on the strangeness of this event, and the somewhat paltry turnout (even though tickets were a mere fiver). There couldn't have been more than about 50 people there. Well, here we are, I thought, the hardcore Feldman enthusiasts, willing to go the long haul with this one.

Back inside about half an hour later, it took quite a while to really get inside the work again, to reach the level of concentration necessary. I noticed how the players would occassionally take a mint from their music stand and slip it in to their mouths. A little sugar hit for energy ? After a while you can't help but frame the music within what you are witnessing onstage: how these men can go through this so incredibly professionally. What levels of discomfort must they feel ? How do they prepare themsleves physically and psychologically ? How do they stop from getting dehydrated ?

The sense of duration and stamina becomes encoded in the music. A narrative writes itself, despite Feldman's non-linear approach. His soundworld is very pared and precise, working deliberately with a limited palette, subjecting it to minor variations over time, drawing out fresh nuances with each new configuration. The analogy with his fondness for finely patterned antique Turkish rugs with their small descrepancies is clear to see. Or rather, hear. Not wishing to overstate the case, but what he creates is profoundly beautiful and moving, without the material itself being emotional, or emotionalist.

There are moments when it feels the material is being finely hewn over time, constantly forming and reforming itself anew, till it reaches an incredibly tight pitch, as though it were a hard surface being worked up gradually to an intense shine. Burnished by bowing. Sometimes it feels like the music is taking you somewhere you're not entirely sure you want to go, certainly not in front of an audience. Superificially, it might sound depressing at points, but what it does is far more complex than that. The music works away at patterns for various durations, then takes sudden swerves in dynamic. There are some extremely quiet moments. Patterns and repetitions are constantly revisited and reworked till you think you are hearing the same thing from earlier, but can't be quite sure, the duration does things with your memory. It throws up all sorts of questions: how long do these sections actually need to be ? How many reworkings can they be subjected to ? Do we hit a point of diminishing returns ? Curiously, I never felt remotely bored.

As the afternoon wore on, I found myself really drawn in, and time seemed to slow right down at certain points. Half an hour seemed to elapse when in fact only ten minutes had. Not half as uncomfortable as I thought I'd be. My body just seemed to settle. The thought of reading now seemed, frankly, a bit silly. It would push the music into the background, I'd lose concentration. Some passages were so quiet that I daren't move let alone take something from my bag. This was a crucial aspect of the performance that gets lost in the experience of the CD: you are with it all the way through, you experience all the detail. Some passages are just lost or are too quiet to compete with other environmental sounds no matter how minimal these seem to be, even the central heating can remove a layer from this music. Headphones would be the best option of course, but ideally I don't like cutting myself off from my surroundings.

When the players reach the end, finally lifting their bows to an incredibly pregnant silence, longer than usual, as it seemed the audience were either unsure that this was definitely the end, or stunned to have actually reached the end. However, a sustained standing ovation ensues, and the quartet take a few bows. Standing chatting in the foyer afterwards, I notice the players stroll through with their violins on their backs. Some smiles are exchanged, thank yous offered, then they disappear out the door, presumably to their hotel. It all seemed so ordinary, yet it was truly extraordinary. I felt the praises of these men could not have been sung loudly enough.

Fail again. Fail better.

2006-04-13T23:48:00.000+01:00

CENTURY OF SAM

Samuel Beckett 13 April 1906 - 22 December 1989

"You first saw the light in the room you most likely were conceived in. The big bow window looked west the the mountains. Mainly west. For being bow it looked also a little south. Necessarily. A little south to more mountain and a little north to more foothill and plain."

Company (1980)

In Iain Sinclair's recent book on the poet John Clare, he finds a connection to Beckett, through a relative Peggy Sinclair, whom Beckett had an ill-fated affair with. In typical Sinclair fashion, he remarks on the street where Beckett's father had his office, and where Beckett did some writing in the early days in the garrett above - it was no.6 Clare Street. My own connection with this street could be said to be memorable, though I don't remember it at all.

September 1988: I was mugged on Clare St and knocked out. Money and walkman (with tape of Dome) stolen. Two women standing outside The Source nightclub across the road called the cops and I was taken to St James' hospital. Apparently, they had only gotten as far as taking my details when I simply exited the hospital. No idea how I got home. No money for a taxi. Did I hitch a lift ? No idea. Did I walk ? Probably. Takes about two hours. My only memory, to this day, is of walking down Nassau Street towards Clare Street, and then getting into bed sometime later.

Woke up the next morning with clothes in a pile. Not like me. Something wasn't right. Jacket pocket minus walkman - shit, I've been robbed.. but when, where.. ? Mother, after recovering from the shock of my bruised face, had the presence of mind to call the cops and a report had been filed. It was from this that the details were cobbled together. I had a bit of reconstructive dentistry. The dentist remarked on my teeth by saying, "Have you been mainlining Mars bars ?"

The whole event is completely wiped out of my memory, which, perversely, might just have been the best way to experience it. City streets normally leave impressions over time. Clare Street completely erased the impression of one very specific time ...

Not present in the present

2006-03-11T22:44:00.000Z

This blog has become like an untended garden... time to fix some of those stray thoughts that have been sloshing around the brainpan. Tickle the synapses. Dabble in the wetware. Trap thoughts in Blogger's digital amber.

Presently wading through hours of accumulated field recordings for usable material to compose new pieces for the follow up to UNMOOR. Waveforms stretching across the screen like frayed rope. Outside of focussing this work, my mind wanders back to earlier in the day, or to later. Past or future. Rarely does it settle in the present for too long. I feel constantly pulled back to one or forward to the other. The past being such a vast archive to be endlessly trawled. Snapping out of a reverie is like being jolted back from time travel. Initial disorientation. Then things coalesce in the banality of the present moment.

Some of the recordings go back 20 years, and listening to them really takes me back: London, summer 1986 - a lonely art student adrift in an anonymous metropolis. Long walks with my recording walkman. Foraging for scraps. Microphone as dowsing rod. The roar of the Underground. The wash of the Thames. Boats and planes droning through the landscape on a bright June afternoon. Much later, exhausted and footsore, flushing urinals echo in the bowels of The Barbican. It's all there in detail, all its precise texture imprinted across the spooled magnetic tape for endless retrieval. Now transferred to the digital domain for greater longevity. The cassette a memory tablet, deteriorating over time.

September 1986: returning from an achingly slow and frankly depressing three months in a live-in bar job in London, wearing a black three-piece suit bought on the King's Road and recently scalped with my first number 1, Mother does her best to disguise the shock when this rather grim, funereal figure appears in the hall. She probably thought I looked like a Belsen escapee. And possibly I did.

Subsequent enquiries from friends into our family's welfare always included the phrase "..and Fergus got his head shaved, but apart from that, everything's fine ". Mother, so typical of her generation (b. 1925), could never stand to see my hair cut short, especially not such a brutal crop as a number 1. As far as she was concerned, I always had "such lovely hair", and, back in the day (as it seems aeons ago from my present perspective), I sure had a fine head of jet black hair.

The slideshow was always part of recounting travel experiences in our family, and, in my innocence (and enthusiasm for my subject of enquiry), I sat my parents, eager for entertainment, through a few rolls of bleak wastelands photographed on a day long tramp through industrial zones stretching from Battersea to Stratford. All unpeopled. As if the the city had been vacated. Accompanied by recordings made around these areas.

They pretended to be interested (bless 'em !), but when I think back on it now, in fairness to them, they must have found it depressing, and somewhat perplexing. What an earth could he find of merit in these miserable places ? Why are there no people ? Completely at odds with their notions of travel experience. I had no interest in shots of picturesque landmarks, people, or anything like that. Rust and ruin was (and is) my idea of beauty. Travel - real travel - was in the tradition of the flaneur: following my nose, finding out by getting lost. Staying well off the beaten track. Marathon solitary jaunts. Dehydration. Blisters. Psychogeography as city's imprint on muscle and bone.

Unpainted

2006-01-04T15:33:00.000Z

Gable & steeple
Originally uploaded by Lubert Das.

I've always been attracted to unpainted concrete in what would be referred to as 'period' residential architecture, the period covering the decades 1930s - 1960s. There's something very... reassuring about it. Solid. Wartime austerity. Deeply melancholic and grimly beautiful. No poxy paint jobs. No colour conflict. Uniformity across multiple units.

Illuminated

2005-12-23T21:18:00.000Z

Plug Pod, press play, push paint. And that's how the next eight hours went, pretty much, without interruption. Nothing else to attend to. All outstanding business tied up. No need to leave the building, or even the studio, except to void bladder. Nose to the grindstone under an anglepoise halo. Focus.

An uncommon quiet outside. Work stopped on the site at the end of the street. A merciful break from the cacophony. An eerie calm descends. Even though this 'clearance' is something I normally crave, there's something slightly unnerving about it today, I feel slightly on edge, as though I should be somewhere else. Of course I don't want to be anywhere else right now. I've a lot of ground to cover. It's a bit of a 2001 atmosphere.. "What are you doing Dave ? "...

In contrast to yesterday, the light is from an unclouded sky and brilliant winter sun. Everything is illuminated, almost glowing, there is so much light pouring into the room, picking out all the dust and detail. It's as though there's light reflected off snow it's so intense sometimes. It wanes in the afternoon, but the difference of mood engendered is remarkable.

The paint coverage is a very mechanical task, but, though tiring, rather meditative, and something whose progress can be quantified very clearly. A satisfyingly broad stretch covered today.

Inhaling light

2005-12-22T21:54:00.000Z

Lens becomes lightsucker with long exposures, hungrily inhaling all available light, draining dark. Time burnishes surfaces. Traffic smears into neon arteries. Buildings exhude a phosphoresence.

The older cameras had a part called the bellows, which neatly dovetails with the respiratory metaphor. Scene sucked in coats emulsion, ready for the chemical rinse, and the passing of light onto a different emulsion to leave a final trace. Phosphorensic. Light fingerprinted.

The light never lifted today. An oppressive grey clogging everything. It felt like 4 o clock all day. Grim. Melancholic. Choice of music occupying the end of the alphabet on the Pod: "Zuh !! Muttie !! Mum !!" by Robert Rutman, "Wings Of Desire" by Jurgen Knieper, "Warsaw Restaurant" by Francisco Lopez, "Weather Report" by Chris Watson.

Watson's layered field recordings map fascinating sonic territories of incredible dynamism and detail. The intelligent orchestration keeps everything fresh, avoids muddying the richness. I see no difference between this and music composed from 'conventional' instruments.

As former member of Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, and Attenborough's sound recordist for many years, Watson brings a huge wealth of experience and very finely tuned ears to the work. As Cage said, music is organised sound. All it takes is open ears and open mind to experience the world as an incredibly rich aural field to be stimulated by. Sound is an immersive experience, and something that we are surrounded by all the time. It's like the weather (can you imagine a day without weather ?). Crucially, we don't have earlids.

Cleaning my brain

2005-12-09T21:05:00.000Z

" I'm painting... I'm painting again !
I'm cleaning... cleaning my brain ! "

Talking Heads: Artists Only

These are the words that bounce around my brain today as I work on my first painting for 20 years. Damn, it feels good to be pushing this material around... a whole new timescale in image creation. Another object in the world. Another item to be stored. It's the physicality of the object that interests me, on various levels. Hence working on a reasonable scale, one determined by practical issues (any bigger and it wont fit in the car), whilst maximising those limits - 12mm MDF with a 2" batton on the back edges to lift it out from the wall. A solid object. To be further solidified with a steel frame.

I've been resisting the desire to paint for years as it just didn't seem relevant somehow. Over the course of hanging countless shows, I kept noticing myself being drawn to qualities in various paintings. I've always envied the apparent simplicity of the painter's lot: surface, material, tool to move material across surface. That's it. Well, technically at any rate. Of course this doesn't mean that it's a simple matter once the materials are in place, but all the problems to be addressed are within those terms of reference. No need to re-invent the wheel every day.

So why paint ? You've got to be careful not to be seduced purely for reasons of craft. Sure, those qualities are important, but they're not the be all and end all. Having worked (and continuing to work) on computer, I can achieve incredible levels of visual sophistication with Photoshop, but the end product, no matter how professionally printed, is still a single uniform surface. It's like formica. You engage with the image on one level: it presents itself as an image whilst seeming to remove all trace of its manufacture.

With paint, there's the solid fact of its immediate material presence. Layers built up laboriously. The gradual formation of surface over time. Zen concentration. The interaction of areas of light and dark pushing up against each other. Fluid and active. The push and pull of negative and positive space. The dance the eye does over this surface to make sense of it, pull it together. The interaction of retinal and physical pleasure of image and surface. How the latter heightens the impact of the former. A visceral connection. Gut response.

I've always been drawn to images that teeter on the cusp between abstraction and figuration. Initially it seems all surface, then there is the delay, until the brain makes sense of seemingly disparate elements, which then lock into place. Choice of music today pulsed with the physicality of sound: "Kajo" by Mika Vainio - all humming, buzzing, crackling and droning. The purity of electricity. "0" by Kontakte Der Junglinge - tectonic plates of sound colliding and scraping. Seismic low end eruptions. "Insulation" by Oren Ambarchi - charred lumps of processed guitar floating through ghostly orbits.

Obsolete

2005-12-06T01:20:00.000Z

A favourite old haunt of mine in Dublin in the 80s. Long since developed into apartments (surprise surprise!). Click on title to see full set.

A toe in the water...

2005-12-05T22:52:00.004Z

Well, a new unknown horizon for me this blog business, but something's drawn me to it... I'll give it a lash and see how it develops... frequency: random (I reckon). Throwing out commentary.. antennae tuned... prowling... looming... fishing for feedback...

Any fans of BBC2 programme "QI" ? Next to Have I Got News For You, one of my favourite programmes. Anyway, anyone notice how disturbingly like Tony Blair John Sessions looked last Friday (2nd)... ?