That silent space that exists in and around the words that silence the glue that holds the hubbub together informs a life and this my fucking writing together.

Eden embodying and generating an instinctual tolerance. Offering thresholds for ventures into the very core of consciousness and perception. Eden, As A

G E N T

and catalyst, is essential to any opening up and then there is this my Albion, the longer, older, wilder island, Anglican Gothic. But England is the place from which much of the work is lovingly pulled. The ongoing relationship which makes it the tick-tock: an ironic celebration of things past, things Anglo that allows for absurd affections to dance a pier-end afternoon waltz with occasional vehemence towards insular narrow-mind, but more likely amused observancing of island ways and folk. Time Based Media as hymns to

Absurd Couldavists

Shouldavists

Body Cradle

Vladimir Nabokov.



Vessel and votive, subject and object. The physicality of the work, text, image, language, subjects, cannot be understood separate from an appreciation of how the maker views flesh. From micro to man-tall, sphincter to six foot, its trajectory, provocation, context and fallout are the steaming plots at the root of all manifest. And there is a flabby democracy to bodies. From Brakhage and the act of seeing with one’s own eyes to a Stelarc suspension.

They fuck and fart, bleed, pus, puke. They also come in all sizes and with all adornments.

family and friends are

central to the practice Language, lingo, gramlot,

and project; they verbiage: formulation of

are the glue and they the current in relation to

make a fine photo. the historical. Word as a new strain of image-making. Visuals in the sonic as in the seen. Respect for place, personality and the social. The constantly mutating rituals of the daily. Let it all out of the mouth and in at the ear. Never Oxford English, but multilingual ease. Gramlot and cant. Lived lipwork. Biodiversity of the tongue. Mapping Perception. The beating core of how brain makes mind, makes consciousness, makes things and makes things up as it goes along? Makes it matter, makes critical text and makes matters worse. How it magpies things for use. There is, in mind and work, a constant re-incorporation of the stuff across time and place. I keep



trying love poems to a daughter whilst swimming in cold water. Margins are central. Edgelands are normal.

Louyre, home and man-in-themountain dereliction. A mountain think-tank bang in Ariège timber territory.

From the

under-tree,

to create narrative or form.

 

So not really place as landscape at all, but more of Manley Hopkins’ inscape, consciousness as it might look if it were dimensioned into say video or film. Searching for works that have been to the edges and looked over, shamanic flights returning from the far reaches with word of the void’s whistling rim. Paradigms to be tested. Sans Soleil? Pan’s People not Top of the Pops. The school of anarchic Arcadian genius loci Pan. Work can challenge pretty Pastoral, never the Merchant Ivory or Eagles Harmony. Always a streak of debauched fertility and the wildness of woodland. Non-urban and definitely not happyclappy; rather it’s where the bestial occupies folk and bloodletting. Politics. It does not have to be placard politics but the vision must be inherently committed to degrees of dispossession and the reverse – reclamation. No heritage car park, no tweeded nostalgia, but lived experiential body and heart

lineages that challenge the packaging

of memory and the betrayal of futures.

Less the megaphone, more the hope of ‘politics’ and ever the Prank. n. a

mischievous trick or joke, esp. one in

which something is done rather than

said, or is it? Process.

The work is

In constant flux, images and sounds migrate, are curious about the elsewhere, are remixed, lose titles and gain new labels briefly; fixity is not the spine here; things arrive into being, are held like water in the hand, then pass on. Are flawed and unfinished. This is how the work is like water; ‘We’re crossing the river to get to the other side, don’t ask me why, the river’s not wide.’ It holds light like mercury. It pools and spreads. Being the layered reading of territories, urban and other, via signs of all kinds and without prejudice as to the source or status of the prompt. Being the eyes and all senses of a conscious drift through space, time, architecture, experience, history, the latent future. Punctuation. Commas, semi-colons; colons even: springboards of suspense, breath held a beat. But full stops. Never… rather a trinity of stepping stones to futures. Assimilation, collation and then the regurgitation, contingency a must. People are the bedrock of the landscape, from which grow the weeds and the needs of ideas.

product.

process as framed

as much

place other Pan’s people folk Prank Process Punctuation regurgitation



Family, friends, strangers all bring worlds, more or lessdelved in.

In the eARTHOUSE Manifesto, it is counselled that there be an obligation to spend time with arms or feet insideanother sentient being, alive or dead.This is a more or less accurate description of relations with folk as much as fauna. This is instress The stories and histories are inhabited by,and lived within; people. Come up to me on the street people. The world breathes through people. Through what they do and fail to do; what they reach and fail to reach. From home-movie to Imax spectacle, let it all settle. No place is less than any other place. In potential. And Ritual.

The functional symbolic. The acts that	people
explain lineage, thresholds, group	Ritual
identities and their reasons; to them-	reflection
selves if nobody else. The oeuvre, and	flux
the actions of those drawn into its web,	So
is one of accumulating; acquired and	Sound
observed ritual. Ritual is the psycho-	Time
geography of personality and
community. It layers identity so that it
can be read and mis-read. The reflection
as an attempt to rationalise and locate
the work within an historical canon. So
to Scale. Scale shifts, accompanied by
similar strategies in sound and thematic.
They are central to the operation. The

spectrum ofsensual awareness that acknowledges continuous fluxfrom macro to micro is seen as simply being the case of things. It is less an aestheticchoice (while being one) than anaccurate response to things on theground. It’s in the nature of attention. The seamless story.

The moebius strip ofrelations.

The hall of mirrors. What one startswith, goes on with; picture after picture after picture, sound after sound aftersound whatever the ‘per second’ or decibels. So to the Sound the world makes.

Not just music, not just ambience, not just voices, not just found sound, archive echoes, signal spillage, technical accidents, hiss, guffaws, foley and radio. But all of it and also the silence and also the gaps in the silence and what cannot be heard. It’s the sound the world makes.

Without sound, vision is stumbling in the dark. And anyway, there’s a prize: Noise Drives the Devil Away. And melancholic melodies evoke the muck of memory, which is always a good thing. A painful yearning gnawing thing. Time. Hurry up gents,it’s body time vs. geological time, the rock against the public clock, the seasons stirring it up with ‘living memory’.

Sculpting in time is the aim of thegame, whether in Bence House council house or with Gorges de La Frau continental reach. The timepiece has human hands, its face is the sky

Bodies Vagabond Voices ambiguity Words Works

at dusk and its numbers a tree’s banded

years, ringing in the changes. The seas

vast coldness, channels to cross and

the deep voidic chuntering that accom

panies you when you’re fifty yards out

and barely hearing. Bodies. Matter.

Clutter. Consumer ephemerals. Landfill.

Mindfill. Stuff. The Real. Where ideas

live. Whether it be a borrowing from

John Berger’s Pig Earth or digging deep

into Zola’s La Terre. It all lives absolutely

in a material world - bull and man,

sperm on the hands, pigs in branches,

rooms like caves or armpits, piss in

graveyards, phlegm, pus, shit, rock, rain,

mud, mud, salt, blood and heart burn.

Institutions are built of walls.

A vision for the differently sighted.

Assemblage.

Traces and smidgeons, a little bit of

Picking them up, putting them on.

Transportative: Cy Twombly, Samuel

Beckett and Bela Tarr; ‘I’m going to take

you to a place where you have not been

before’. Kevin Coyne or the Band of

Holy Joy. Tree. Lumberjack (of all trades

and master of none); trees as plankage

and life-force. Certain doubts should

prevail in the work. Change. It helps

humanise those lofty intentions. It

helps to protect from those that take

everything that little bit too seriously.

Serious nonsense. Therefore Vagabond.

Hither and dither, upstairs and down

stairs and in the lady’s chamber. The

rationale is not to locate the work

within any historical bloodline but allow it to exist within its own poxy poetic reality. Voices. In the head, throat and chest, on the tongue like varieties of honey. Archive accents,

society sounds. Knocking up against local crackle, the chatter of place and profession. Stories told in the timbre they happened in.

The (Hoi Polloi) poetry of necessary phrasing.

 

An island’s audio

bank of tales tall and true.

Listen closely and you’re half way there; watch carefully; here he goes here he goes, he’d just launch himself off, falling tit over arse but always landing in the same place. What might be its covert moral? Are we fish out of water? We live in the lives we live in. Somehow, there is a surreal making do, a strange survival. A world in which ambiguity might reign supreme. The wisdom of concise thinking, of experience compacted into essence. This might be at the heart of the work.

Set these to dance with digression, wilful extension, waffle, natural curiosity, distraction and a sometime reluctance to discard and you have the oeuvre I might be considering. W is (other people’s) Words and Works. They are important and they are gathered here as testament to time gone and time going on. Creation myths.

The fragmentary and

‘unfinished’, thefleeting and the found.

This collection is the shared, seen dreams of tribe, family and selves. Rooted in fables of the de/re-construction. Looping lines of narrative out of ordered time and territory. Undoing things to make new things, new arrangements of people and place. Pissed sometimes a priority. To Cut-ups; and perhaps a being-closer-to reality. No singular grain of truth. Digression. If you don’t leave the path, you won’t see the waterfall. Alphabetically ordered Bits and pieces gleaned from a set of contexts and practices. They are no longer bound to any prescriptive reading of the term Inscape or inStress, but instead exist on the edges of the discipline. There is too much ‘seepage’ and there is no longer a ‘given’ or

‘self-evident’ context. This work has a

difference engine. A vehicle into other

ness and revelation. Aesthetically, bodily,

mentally.

Corporeal.

Everything present and accounted for?

Never.

Everything Normal?

No.

Everything out of order?

Yes, because of you, you wanker.

1

I was walking inside my head Memories of a darkened room a little bed Seething one day smiling the next I realise my problems are a little vexed It’s not so funny it’s not so sad But you know I’m feeling I’m feeling bad about heaven And I don’t know what to do.

Kevin Coyne with Brian Godding

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and wilderness ye

Andrew Kötting 2008 From an alphabetarium of Kötting with Gareth Evans 2

1

Family, friends, strangers all bring worlds, more or less delved in.

TRACK 01:

Ansuman Biswas

Klytaimnestra Washing Herself 4’08”

2008

Victim and perpetrator, mistress, mother and murderer, Klytaimnestra is drenched in blood. In the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides she is a noble lady and tender mother, inextricably entangled in the knots of lust and violence that constitute society. Her pain is an inescapable part of the logic of the world. Bodies crave and hate. Comprehension of this fact, however, can bring about peace. The way out of pain is in. In the mythic theatre of ancient Greece, music, dance and storytelling are means of public recognition of our entanglement and also means of transcendence. It is through communal convulsions that society achieves inner peace. The art of tragedy shows that all worldly relationships are in a state of flux. There can be no rest, no lasting contentment, in them. The outside world cannot be controlled, even by the most powerful king. Peace cannot be won by States, since peace is a state of mind. Klytaimnestra, having stabbed her husband in the bath, now washes herself in his blood. Seeing her dripping with gore, drowning in the dissonance of vengeance and desire, we are cleansed. On the outside it’s all a bloody mess, but then catharsis cannot be seen, only felt.

www.ansuman.com

1

TRACK 05:

Alex Rodgers: All NoisesAn ‘evil’ is a hay fork with 3 prongs 1’59” 2008

If you want it, could I have this pomposity for text ; Human thought is the most attenuated product of the decay of the sun. Eh. ?

Or

Sometimes there’s some men mending a road. Deep in the hay by the lane is some secret centre. We had ‘rustic pornography’eh us forty-plus old people, from the country, that is. Men ditched their collections and then hunted for other mens. You could see them from miles away, remember? I remember a german girl the they called turkey’ she said her brother dried books in the oven. Fudge, fudge, fudge.

TRACK 03 & TRACK 04:

Dryden Goodwin

Extract from City Theme 01 2’08”

1998

and Extract from City Theme 02 1’59” 1998

Made with my Grandfather’s violin, an old squeeze box, a Wok and other utensils from my kitchen, I originally composed, performed and recorded these two sound pieces. They were for my first video installation ‘About’ in 1998, commissioned by Kettles Yard, Cambridge. These are two of what were four sound pieces, each with distinctive atmospheres, orchestrated to explore fluctuating experiences of the city and encounters with people within it; longing, exhilaration, connection and alienation.

www.drydengoodwin.com

TRACK 02:

Jem Finer and Jeremy Banx

Tarred and Feathered Heart 4’31”

2006

A paragraph; Sometime in the mid 1980’s I was working on a soundtrack for an Australian film about dustbin men, “Garbo”. This consisted of my taping bin men at work in Camden Town and creating rhythm tracks from their banging and clanging. In the middle of all this a friend of mine, Jeremy Banx, came around. Jeremy is a cartoonist and at the time was working on a deranged tale about a toxic Texan cowboy. He’d written lyrics for a song that was playing on a jukebox in the story and asked me whether I’d write the music and record it. I collided some of the dustbin drums and a wheezing compacter loop with a Hank Williams-esque melody to create what seemed like a new genre, Industrial Country and Western. The whole thing was recorded on a 4 track cassette portastudio in my bedroom. Is this ok?

www.elrino.co.uk

1

0

TRACK 08

Christian Garcia

Air 4’50”

2008

The idea was about outside/inside, I tried to find the sensation of breathing from outside and from inside the body, and then we can always ask ourselves what is inside, and what is outside? I tried to make something the most organic as possible. Well, it’s hard to describe with my poor English. The title was “air”.

Christian Garcia is a part of Velma B

TRACK 09:

Gamine

A Good Hand 2007 4’50” {Extract}

2008

Ian Williams (Music) Claudia Barton (Words)

Here are the promised words, I hope they are up to scratch:

‘A Good Hand’ takes its own sweet time, a laid back and passive expression of the self-destructive impulse. More epic, we think, than long, it is one of the culminating pieces from our lovely debut album,

‘Sabotage’, which was written at a time of prolific self-sabotage.Actually, the lyrics in ‘A Good Hand’ are comparatively joyful in their insouciant disregard for conformity. It is about disentangling oneself from a place of respectability in the fabric of society, and casting off in search of intimacy with the unknown. Security is such a flimsy old bag anyway, a cheap substitute for contentment. But change we can rely on,so it is sought valiantly and faithfully in each verse. Choice is also one thing that should belong to us, although a liberal use of it is so often met with disapproval. In the end, this song is supposed to lend a little courage to listeners, who may be on the edge of some sort of precipice: we say, “Jump!” (metaphysically). Fearlessness, recklessness, discretion and disgrace, now thats worth singing about!

www.gamine.net www.myspace.com/gamineuk

TRACK 07:

DM Bob and Jem Finer

She’s so strange 3’33”

2008

Here you go; I wrote this song a long long time ago. I remember lying on the sofa and listening to the rain when the first line popped into my head. The rest followed without too much fuss. There is an old version I recorded, accompanied by out of tune radio and guitar, but the version here is a new one in which DM Bob and I took full advantage of a leap in recording technology, to an 8 track tape recorder, to try and further create the static landscape, the “inscape”, of the subjects addled brain. Some people think it might be aboutthem but it’s not.

www.elrino.co.uk

TRACK 06:

Band of Holy Joy Cold Blows the Wind 4’12” 2008

Louise (Piano); Alfie (Texture); Johny Brown (Vocal); Inga (Visual)

Taken from ‘Punklore’, a rural narrative on a manufactured landscape.

www.bandofholyjoy.co.uk

Track 12:

John Roseveare and Andrew Kotting

Song for Eden 3’33”

2008

To be honest I’ve struggled with Manley-Hopkins inscape and instress. This morning I think I worked out what my misgivings are. My feeling is he wants to give inanimate objects human qualities. This might have worked during the gush of high-Victorian romance and spiritualism, but as you know, having grown up with supernatural explanations that emanate from this period, they leave me weary these days. So I guess I took a more material approach to insideOUT, using two cues: the Xhosa proverb

“people are people through other people”, and Robin Dunbar’s question in a discussion about language & human evolution: “How may this remarkable capacity for language in fact be intimately tied up with several other equally unique, but often ignored,aspects of human behaviour, namely laughter and music?”John is massively indebted to John Leiper and Paul Greendale for helping get these fragments in some sort of recorded shape.

www.roseveareprojects.com

Track 11:

John Irvine

Drunk and running around the town 4’29”

2008

I could alternatively offer the already finished track

“Drunk & Running Around The Town” which is about a compulsion to explore real space and mind space simultaneously. While pissed. Middle-aged, middleclass rapper Mr Irvine, walks 1,000 every week.

www.entrances2hell.co.uk

Track 10:

Sukhdev Sandhu and Scanner

Tomorrow Muffle 4’29”

2008

Sukhdev; A drifted prose-offering to those, myself included, buffeted and dislocated by sleeplessness, who are struggling to gauge what is in and what is out, who can barely tell the difference between sunshine and moonshine.

Robin; Yes, that’s Sukhdev reading in the park close to Brick Lane in London, many sounds unintentional but fitted well into the abstraction of the sound. Can’t wait to hear the finished result.

www.nighthaunts.org.uk www.scannerdot.com

1

Track 14:

NG SmithYes, my god – The Maurspechte at work – 1989 Berlin Wall 3’14” 2008

Voices: Anita Some of the field recordings have been taken from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall circa 1989 and constructed using a Casio SK/1

Mining for god deep in the recesses of the mind, looking for safe haven from the unpredictability of the world outside. I am left touching the absurd and futile. Flies circle the rotten thoughts and excavated waste as the gems of wisdom are impossible to find.

www.nickgordonsmith.com

Track 15:

Max Richter

Fragment 1’42”

2006

Since I work without any sense of a plan, ideas arrive unbidden, unexpectedly and in many different forms they are all fragments to begin with. Some lead nowhere, others lead on to bigger structures or extended forms, accumulating more material or more density as they go (and, in a way, I expect that to happen), while others seem to be complete immediately, needing no further interventions from me. I wrote ‘fragment’ in a few minutes one evening while sitting In a room staring Out of the window – which is what I mostly spend my time doing – and then I worked hard at trying to make it into a bigger piece. There are maybe a dozen extended instrumental renderings of this material in the heaps of paper on the studio floor – the bigger they got the worse they seemed – so, remembering my hippocratic oath (don’t kill the material) I returned to the original version for the album.

From the CD ‘Songs from Below’.

www.maxrichter.com

Track 13:

Matt Hulse

Louyre 5’04”

2008

Recorded inside and outside a large farmhouse called Louyre, situated deep within a ravine in Southern France. Sometime home and hidey hole for the clan of Kötting. To spend time alone at LOUYRE is to surrender oneself to a benign bedlam of the imagination. Late one stormy summer night I discovered that I was in fact two people - ‘myself’, a rather pathetic selflimiting man, and ‘the other’ – a breezy, cheerful woman writer. She’s still around, I rather like her, she helps me out. This audio piece, constructed from sound sourced inside and immediately around LOUYRE, attempts to articulate that benign yet slippery grip on reality.

www.idlevice.com



Track 18:

Toby McMillan

Mapping Perception 2’34”

2002

My sister and Andrew had Eden. I have my kids with Andrew’s sister. If you reduced Eden to maths she was a one in sixteen chance of being mine. For the multi-media project Mapping Perception and from the CD; ‘Bloodline’.

www.mappingperception.org.uk

Track 17:

Nicky Hamlyn

Braun 4729, stereo 2’30

(preferably for headphone listening)

2008

The Braun electric toothbrush generates a steady drone that is modulated by my playing it over my teeth. In a give and take game of motor torque versus hand-brush pressure, the tone is lowered and returned to normal level, although no attempt at melody is made. The brushes also transmit variations in the surface with which they interface, and the mouth cavity - the “Inscape”- functions as a natural resonator, in a similar manner to the way it does for Jews Harp. Let me know if this is the kind of thing you want. Do you think it’s too didactic?

www.arts.ac.uk/research/filmcentre/bibliographies/hamlyn.html

Track 19:

Andrew Kötting and Toby McMillan

Nucleus Ambiguous 2’02”

2002

This is about the nucleus of a solitary tract and taken from a looping single screen video projection.

www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/andrew_kotting/index.html

Track 16:

Run Wrake

What IsThat? 3’17”

2000

Put together as my first film at the helm of a mac around 2000. An exercise playing with the potential as I saw it then, animation via After Effects and Photoshop and the audio mixed using Premiere from samples taken from my record collection including such gems as Dupont’s “Step Up Your Selling – A Study In The Art Of Carpet Salesmanship” and Jack Hargreaves “Know Your Fish”, alongside a plethora of Sound Effects records. Unintentionally evolved into the beginnings of a loose narrative featuring Meathead, at which point I ended it realising the need for some kind of script, which will hopefully be about to get done.

www.runwrake.com



Track 22

Bell Helicopter

Enough’s enough 2’08”

2002

Conor Kelly and Sam Park formed Bell Helicopter over ten years ago. As a band they perform live and in the studio and have developed their distinctive style through numerous collaborations in film and theatre. Conor Kelly is also an artist and composer.

From the CD ‘Hit and Run’.

www.artistsinthecity.org.uk/reading/projects/details. asp?proj_id=37

Track 20:

Tony Hill with Sally Goode

A Sense of Place 5’16”

2003

Sally Goode has been blind from birth. I took her to a location unknown to her and recorded her describing what she found. By touch and sound she learns about the place and, with imagination, simplicity of expression and a joyful openness she articulates her findings. The sighted must see through her hands to experience this place. Objects, normally recognisable at a glance, become stranger and less identifiable when described by touch and without the vocabulary of vision. ‘A Sense of Place’ was originally produced for the Audible Picture Show, a programme of short audio works made for presentation in a darkened cinema.

www.plymouthartscentre.org/film/tonyhill.html www.audiblepictureshow

Track 21

Joey Kötting D...E___A...D 3’56” 2008

It’s a riff on that old D.E.A.D. chestnut done by just

about everyone. Mine, of course, interspliced with ...__ _... the code/call used by mariners for “in distress” or “please help” or “is there someone out there who can

come and give me a little assistance?”. I like that in

reality dotdotdot dashdashdash dotdotdot happen to

be the letters S.O.S, which in turn have been

remembered as “save our souls” or “save our ships” -

they are but a mere “backronym” so that people can

remember the morse code for dotdotdot

dashdashdash dotdotdot. The same can be said of the

piano notes that I have used for the piece, D.E.A.D.

The other main sound/source is: INSIDE: from a video

that I made of gaffer-taping up my own head,

photographing it and then taking the tape off...this

was all done in vain - an attempt to remove my facial

hairs! OUTSIDE: what you hear from my studio when

I was taping the video - the dog’s barking, the

thunder etc.

www.larissagoldston.com/artists/joeykotting/bio.aspx



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