Ginsberg : Moloch
Another snippet from Daisysaint – from the BBC4 docu Selling the Sixties – Ginsberg on top form (abridged version of the poem from Howl)
Archived entries for music + soundscape
soundwalk at shanghai expo
Soundwalk are audio tour. Their new work Ulysses’ Syndrome is possibly their best work yet.
We’ve been interested here at fromztoa in the med since reading Miro’s quietly-spoken understatement of revolution – Down With The Mediterranean. As cradle of, well, something close to civility for some at least, this was a subversive thought of a high order, as Breton and Picasso recognised. Soundwalk understand where Miro was coming from.
Atlantis and the Atlantean bus (Edinburgh’s equivalent of London’s Routemaster) feature centrally in PsyGeo Edinburgh – an analogy and shadowplaying reality that fits well with Auld Reekie’s Athens-of-the-north-schtick and Leopold Bloom. Fares Please!
malcolm mclaren : dead, dangerous still
Mclaren was probably the only person since ’68 who really embraced the situationist wholeheartedly – at a time in the uk when everything was stale. His re-appropriation and timing were perfect.
Like partner Vivienne Westwood, his approach was chaos out of chaos; then overthrow; then re-invention and capitalisation. They knew what they were doing – we just responded at 14, innocent to the deeper machinations of turning a dime thru yoof and body image.
An enormous weight of people can trace their creative beginnings to this pair. Although the situationist is rarely mentioned now, it was a grenade in their hands, spawning punk and barney bubbles, DIY fashion and hip hop to anti-globalisation.
So thanks Malcolm, and Vivienne – for the tartan trews…. I thought of you earlier today when listening to bowwowwow – never realising you’d be dead by the time I got home.
Highly recommend this interview with Malcolm by momus.
believe in better (hurrah the butter is unbelievable)
Seen on a Sky TV 48-sheet somewhere in Greenock from the 906 bus, believe in better is the total corporate statement.
It is firstly plusgood – fascination with fussball and celebratrons is normal – The People’s Choice. Secondly, there is conjugal entropy implicit – advertising and lowest common denominator make good sofacitizens, sliding down the back like forgotten pennies and the remains of carelessly-oven’d pizzas (and that is precisely where they want you – pinned down by obesity, eyes forward, remote and card at the ready).
A day later than later, believe in better still pings me around the pinball plane, but in ways thankfully the cool dudes at Sky (hold the Sky – peeps like these are driving all this) have unforseen. BiB is the media equivalent of holocaust denial done daily on a daily basis…
…yeah, hey, like (adopting TBlair patois) we know that statement is, like, utterly devoid of moral traction, BUT… y’know, we, BELIEVE it brings a solution that IF repeated oft enough WILL achieve (grips podium, slight pause) IT’S aims… no, really, ha ha : : – we feed YOU, uh, 5-minute slices of filler, you SHUT up and, er, ACCEPT the 8-minute collateral cultural AND societal shrapnel. Um, OK? Yeah, think that worked. Uh… who am I? I shattered all your dreams, did I not?
Some continue with the delusion that x-factor is infantile, EastEnders a highly damaging psychological influence saturation-broadcast to keep the majority of us labratted sofasaps, constantly fighting plasma ghosts rather than the reality of present times. This time around, there is no solidarity in the valleys, no Jarrow. But it is The Peoples’ Choice not to see. And so the strategy is brandengineering; pluralisation; dilution of difference – happy little-voice bunnies one and all, endlessly needing a little help with our groceries. Still confused/frustrated/angry? Easy – get on those Daily Mail comment boards – it’s what they’re there for.
Now, what happens when we have to discern, quickly, the difference between truth and “truth”? What and who will we choose? Diana or Jessica? (guys you can have that gameshow concept for gratis).
image : John Heartfield : Hurray, the butter is gone
magnificat
Last year whilst writing about geomagnetism in birds, I listened to Messiaen much more carefully. This year has begun with Arvo Part, starting with Bjork’s late 90′s series on Minimalism. The second clip, Part’s Magnificat (paired here by the youtube poster with 50s stock footage from Philadelphia, sourced from the excellent Internet Archive), becomes eventually like a Diane Arbus homage. The religious aspects of Part’s aural lullabys to the ineffable cease to matter, under the influence of humanity’s river – time, inference, memory – as it converges into a koyannasquatsi-esque lament to the impatience of the seconds into minutes into generations timeline we’re all being conveyed on.
the mathematics of place and space
I’ve just finished Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (a standard work that most arts students globally will have had to read). As a primer on the quattrocento, it does make plain a few home truths about the relationship between painter and patron; and of course makes some obvious and less-obvious points about the first stages in the post-mediaeval development of a euro-centric, figurative fine art.
What was most interesting about the book for me though was the exploration of mathematics – in terms of the financing of projects, essential; but also the underlying geometry of the picture frame that was carefully formulated to create the illusion, for the masses, of perspective/depth in the painted scenarios. As with Leonardo, the artist Piero della Francesca (who seems to be getting increasingly namechecked here at PsyGeo Towers) was pretty good at sums. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many musicians and artists have a fundamental understanding of maths – it’s why science and the arts often go together fruitfully.
So the renaissance put in place a practical as well as theoretical understanding of the underlying grid that shapes our daily reality – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the virtual and the real – the representational and the factual – will become commonplace this decade, as Augmented Reality (hope somebody invents a better name) goes mainstream. For Psychogeographers the rebirth of perspective and overlaid meaning, via a handheld, will open up many new ways of being creative with urban space.
But we focus too much on the visual I think – sound can be a more subtle, more intimate method of creating a thinking and imaginative place. The people at soundwalk deserve attention, if you’re interested in audio (note: the site is a bit sluggish – that’s flash for you).
aerial : kate bush
Kate makes xfactor stars look like karaoke rejects. And whilst she remains well-known, Kate was never really part of pop’s populism, even in the early days.
That independence of thought continues with her most recent album. Aerial is domestic and universal : secretive and romantic : an unformula. In other words – intelligent, critical, independent. And psychopolitical – a constant theme in her work, usually not recognised. There is no vacuum here. She is articulate where others are merely shells regurgitating other peoples’ directions.
The double album format of Aerial links the day to night and the everlasting – to paraphrase the Edinburgh-born artist and Piero della Francesca fancier, Craigie Aitchison : “those same birds have been in those same trees from time immemorial”.
Aerial has helped me enormously this year : it is not music to walk to, more music to travel with. The best mistake.
sense, sight, sound : Uluru : Cassini
I’ve been thinking about sound (and blindness) a lot recently, and May Miles Thomas’ work on Glasgow’s Secret Geometry brought this to the front – when the soundscape works, the film is heightened hugely, it becomes something else, a power of two. Start slipping into the frame.
Stevie Wonder’s not my kind of music but it’s utterly remarkable what he’s achieved – not just the musicianship, more the life experience brought into the sound and lyrics from someone who’s had his main source of comprehension about the world denied him from birth.
When writing the PsyGeo books, I’ve kept it open regarding which sense method is used for each journey – maybe all six together, maybe one, maybe three. But like Stevie, having one denied strengthens the others – the book explains all this simply over six pages, a call and retort beyond sense, sight, sound; the visible is not the point.
Although this blog is a grazing of variables, some not seemingly connected with psychogeography, there is a common centre; and that is, it’s not enough to rely on your senses, all fully present or not. There has to be more than sense, sight, sound; we might like to learn to transmute the invisible more often.
Unheimlich.
richard wright :: turner prize winner 2009
Richard Wright, who studied at Edinburgh college of art and lives in Glasgow, is one of those artists a lot of people just will not get. It’s their loss – his work has evolved to become highly graphic yet ultra-detailed – a beautiful contradiction, for the sake of beauty. More of that then please – I think the brilliant (as good as J. Winterson) Carol Ann Duffy got it.
Plus, he’s not trying to push a personality or get himself on some bonehead celeb’s walls – a relief after all the YBA histrionics of the past decade.
Everyone will now know about how the works, once their time and space are up, are usually painted over by a gallery technician with a can of matt white emulsion. So here’s something different – him playing guitar with the group Correcto, a spinoff of Franz Ferdinand – he’s the one on the left playing the Telecaster.
waiting for your taxi
As I’m using public transport exclusively and expensively these days, I am taking time to note the soundscape of street and station, snatched conversations, odd bass notes on the distant peripheral of hearing and the sound of wind and rain on objects. A heightened awareness of sound is one of the six methods I use in the PsyGeo guides – look out for sound images from Glasgow and Edinburgh soon.
The idea that sound could transport you in imagination as well as form part of the verite of the moment, came from here – in 1979, I bought Ian Dury’s album Do It Yourself and listened to it constantly. The track I kept coming back to was Waiting for your taxi, which is partly a recording of a snatched moment by the kerbside, enhanced by the sound of screeching taxi panned across stereo speakers. It is totally real; it’s not a sound effect scratched on a piece of plastic. Close your eyes and you really are on Kilburn High Road or Old Kent Road.
A new digital recorder is now definately on the card…
