So … the new Krom Monster record is finished and available via iTunes. We’re looking into a wider commercial release, but in the meantime this is your best way to get the whole thing.
Its probably one of the first examples of a record using khmer instrumentation extensively within experimental music, and we’re very happy with the results. Go purchase, play, pass on …
So we were recently asked to write an essay on our “Open Cities” project (with Guillermo Brown) for the upcoming Futureplaces book, and i figured we might as well share it. Its kinda long, and doesn’t really lend itself to blog format, but its a reasonable distillation of a lot of the ideas we spend our time thinking about over here … Begin the transmission …
And 1913: Charley Patton sits, exhausted, in the boarding houses of Will Dockery’s plantation. Playing for a crowd of workers, dancers and drunkards. Playing all night straight, singing songs he does not own. Singing fragments known to all, age-worn couplets and tired bawdy jokes. Resequenced volk. Playing from early evening to mid-morning the next day, to an audience hopped up on booze, crown and opiates. To an audience that does not care. By the end of it, his hands are bleeding and he can no longer play, reduced to simply banging his guitar rhythmically as the crowd dance on, oblivious to his “art”, to his intention. Oblivious so long as the party keeps on going.
Cadiz carnival, 2002. My first time in the city, and everyone brings drums. There are musical performances, of course, but these are side events, irrelevant details. Sat with strangers and friends, drinking until I find myself in the first light of morning, in the middle of hundreds of people, clambering onto the monuments of Plaza de España. Everyone has a drum, banging maniacally. There is no wrong beat. Each individual action is simply one more element, infinite offbeats and deviations in the writhing muscle of rhythm. There is no audience, nothing that sits outside of the moment, of that shared sound. Dancing until we fell off and the world returned.
Artists, galleries, ticketed venues, the commissioned work, the artistic vision. These are specific occurrences situated in space and time. Arriving before us, they often seem so familiar as to be immutable, but things were not always so. There are other balances, other powers. Dockery, 1913. Cadiz, 2002. The dominant modes of contemporary popular performance should not occur as a natural given, as they so frequently do. The phemomenon must be interrogated as a historically situated concept. Tested and changed. Undermined and overwhelmed. Exhausted and left for other lands.
Open Cities is a little project. It is one approach to this idea, constructed from performances occurring at infrequent intervals and in different places. And each show is contingent, partial, failed. Each show is an attempt, an experiment that leads a little closer to the imaginary centre. For a long time, we’ve have been asking the question “what does a digital folk culture really look like?” And i’m not thinking about postured brut or outsider art, about breathless Wired aesthetics or the thin walls of Adobe veneer. I’m talking about the accidental pirates in all of us, inadvertently rip, burn and linking ourselves out of the sad pact of the 20th century, waltzing back to some future land where creativity is not an occupation and the owning isn’t the all.
That, i guess, is sorta where we came from. Where we are trying to get to. OC Porto was show number two. It went like this: Recording devices of varied quality are distributed amongst project participants. Phones, dictaphones, field recorders. Participants wander their city, each free to document any sounds and images they find. Interviews with street vendors, the sounds of water and of fountains, of unidentified machinery. The fragments they record are collected and a show is constructed using only these raw materials. During the performance, real-time decisions are juxtaposed with stochastic fragments and sequences drawn from the same source. Performances within performances.
Intentions within intentions, and always something that escapes, always a spilling over, always another who walks beside you. And so forth and so on. Some things are probably too obvious to say, but here goes: process matters. The process is as valuable as the result, always, and one is unavoidably coloured by the other. The thing is not the thing. So we were there with long-time residents of Porto, we stood around with them, asking them to record the things they ignore every day, to re-adjust patterns of habitual response. And doing the same for ourselves - always avoiding the rote paths of institutional soundwalk and facilitated action, the creative practioner sales programme LLP. Trying always to find once again the play in your lost world. In many ways, the performance is only the pale afterglow of these moments, the necessary pretext for the real deal. Wandering around bashing wood and locks, splashing water, stalking rabid dogs through the confusion of the Ribera. Locating phased reverberance in empty dustbins. Starting conversations with people you have passed every day for years without a word or glance. A rediscovery of street-level scale. Distant rivers echo passages underground.
“Open cities” … there is an ideology here. More than anything else, it is about the importance of maintaining a certain contingency at a structural level. The ability to remain at a variable angle of incidence to the conditions that surround you. Or follow Bataille: figure out how to spend the excess before it spends you. Or maybe even the old Gysin / Burroughs ramble: cut out cut in cut up. Old clouds on the predestinate river. And so on and so forth.
There was a show. And sure, to some extent the old audience / artist dichotomies returned. But lets be realistic: no one project can do it all, nor should it. We run other projects, and each has its own vector, its own logic. Sometimes inside out, and others outside in. Or as old man Frazer wrote it - contagious magic / imitative magic. Each has its place and each its power. And i’d almost even go as far as to say the old performance paradigm is qualitatively no worse nor better than any other, given the right time / place / morals. Maybe. Though my instincts always lean towards the gradual disassembly of the ArtistKoncept. But beyond that, it is simply a question of maintaining the angle of incidence, keeping the valencies intact and visible. Like Heitor says: calibrate. Keep things at a distance from themselves and never forget the shtick. Nothing is natural and there is always a shtick.
We had fun. We think and hope that everyone else did, too. Fun is important, too important to be ignored. Critique is deathless and bored, pale through over-use and distance, too tangled in the whole morass of late capital, critical distance, the aesthetic milieu. Bad drone, endlessly dislocated from people, places, from love. Bad credit and bad dirge. This does not interest us and never has. We are interested in an aesthetics of celebration. Degenerative disco, smudged and blazing. Cthonic hydro-boogies and troubadour ghosts. “Wierd dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies”. And so forth and so on. Other versions are always possible. Other openings, other cities. But what it comes down to is this: figuring out how to cultivate a certain sense of constant play. Figuring out how to dislocate yourself and the walls around you, how to keep moving towards the imaginary centre. So get the hell out there - record your cities and hit the streets, literally. Beneath the pavements the beats.
David Gunn , London, July 2010
We’re just starting a new project in Wales - working in the old mining communities with salvaged metal, scratch orchestras and digital software design. More on that soon, but we thought its worth sharing this first. Big Pit was an old mine, now converted to a museum. This is the sound of original braking system (still in use) as they shuttle people down the lift shaft into the depths of the mine.
Last week we began the install for the final chapter of Roads & Flowers, our community project based in Sheffield. For those of you who are new to Incidental, this project is a durational project based in a new housing development, on the site of one of England’s first garden city developments.
Among other things, the project aims to address the notion of “authentic stories” so prevalent in community arts. The dangers that surround notions of authenticity are one our ongoing concerns at Incidental. Authenticity is a strangely widespread default when dealing with more deprived communities - it often seems that under the guise of “empowerment”, fixed, historico-cultural identities are imposed upon such groups by middle-class cultural organisations and communities … whilst the latter have no need or desire to be tied to such identities themselves. What is often presented as empowerment operates more like containment, aestheticisation or suppression.
This project employs a “swerve” to that process - by taking fragments of stories that do relate to the area, but then subjecting them to a bunch of transformations - mainly by melding them with wilfull fictions, fantasies and distortions told by local school children. We’ll shortly be exploring these ideas more expansively in essays elsewhere, but in essence, it seems to us that the fictions and lies a community can tell are as interesting and as important as any apparently verifiable facts. For anyone interested, its worth noting that our thinking in this area is strongly influenced by Michaul Taussig’s excellent writings, particularly The Magic of the State, and The Nervous System.
Anyway, this is the fourth and final chapter of the work, each of which has been published in physical space in the area. The first three were temporary (on the bricks of demolished houses, winter lanterns and treasure-hunt wood blocks, respectively), and the fourth is installed permanently around the new development - a distributed poem that you read as you explore the site.
The idea is that these four chapters will now be gathered together and publishd in book form to create a kind of magical-realist narrative, told entirely through the text in the photographs. A proto-photo-graphic novel, or something similar, i guess. Should be published by the end of the year, so more soon on that one …
We’ve recently come back from Burning Man, and i thought i’d share a few reflections on the experience.
As an organisation that works with participatory processes and creativity, Burning Man has long been of interest. For the first time, we went along this year, and were interested to see it all in person.
A number of brief observations:
1. Artwork as an “peripheral” element.
What interested us most was not the artworks themselves, but their collective function in transforming the event. Whilst sometimes engaging, the individual works often fell back into relatively established desert/land art motifs. However, where the artworks really counted was ability to collectively transform the playa into an archipelago of ludic, social spaces.
Throughout the week-long event, people wander out into the desert, ostensibly to view the art, but this becomes a necessary pretext for a range of other experiences. The joy of cycling in solitude, of playful conversations with strangers, of getting lost in dust and wind.
This notion of art as “the necessary pretext” is something we’re increasingly interested in, and the festival was a great example of it. In its oldest forms, creative endeavour generally existed as a pretext, in some form or other, to access a range of social or individual experiences. This seems to be a lost tradition - contemporary forms of culture generally mistake the means for the end and, wandering through galleries and exhibitions, we stare at pictures and enact largely predetermined interactions, generally ignoring other people or fugitive thoughts, and passing by exactly those kinds of transformative experiences we hope to experience. At Burning Man, 500 years of museum theology is brushed away, and the artworks transform open desert into a social field of open possibility.
2. Open & Sacred Space
One of the most interesting examples of this kind of “open field” was the Temple. A large, open structure made of sweet-smelling wood (featured in the pictures above), the Temple gets written, drawn and decorated throughout the week, with tributes to dead lovers, cheap jokes and everything in between. This sounds simple enough, but it is one of the key social spaces of the festival, and a place of considerable emotional power. What was most interesting to me was the way in which it seemed to be able to contain anything, without losing this power.
A church can be a pretty affecting place, but the minute the hush is broken by a shouting child, or the incursion of “real world”, something gets lost. Not here. Often filled with people, moments of deep personal contemplation exists alongside naked exhibitionism, bad hippie dancing alongside remembrances of times and people past. Laughter and tears, dancing and silence. The space somehow able to contain all of this, and to imbue it with coherence. A more basic sense and powerful sense of “sacred space”. An open space that seemed able to include and refract the whole gamut of human experience.
In both cases, the festival seemed to helpfully enable (but not dictate) the dissolution of a lot of traditional categories and assumptions (art & audience, sacred & profane, the increasingly unhelpful notions of critical and aesthetic distance, and of people and places as specialised, rather than generalised, functions etc etc) and to thrive in the spaces left behind. There was other stuff too, for sure. For one thing, the festival seems to operate as a large-scale embodiment of a pretty simple maxim: treat others like good people and they tend to act the same. A one week festival with over 50,000 people and i didn’t see a single piece of trash. Or a single piece of aggression. Compare that to Coachella or Reading. But this is a blog post, so … that’s all for now.
I took a few pinhole photographs during the event, a few of which are included here. For future visits, i’m not sure trying to take and develop this kinda photography in the middle of a sun-bleached desert filled with dust storms is necessarily the most practical means of documenting the event. But hey, sometimes the long road ….
Echo Archive software now available for download from the Incidental website.
This short demo uses audio taken from Peter Cusack’s “Your Favourite London Sounds”, but you can select any audio you wish. The idea being, of course, that you create your own unique compositon / workshop / educational tool. Have fun …
Demo version of Chapei Song from the upcoming Krom Monster Record…
And here’s a teaser of the new, open version of the Echo Archive software.
For those who missed it first time around, this is a piece of custom music software we designed for Opera North a while back. The idea was to create a simple, visual tool for electronic composition to be used by schools, educational facilities etc etc. Its based around words - with visual placement allowing you to control volume and panning of the associated sounds. If you want an idea of how it works, there’s a short video of the original version.
This new version resolves some of the compatibility issues first time around, but most importantly, its completely open, so anyone can upload and use their own recordings, creating their own tools for classes, workshops, compositions etc.
This should be out in a week or so - we’re currently looking for some beta-testers for the Mac version, so if you’re interested, please get in touch!
With the first phase of Neak Ta now over, the site will slowly be evolving into a more general update on all of the Incidental projects as they progress. First of all, here’s some pictures from “Doctor Doctor”, a new project in Sheffield, led by Jeremy Hutchison.
This commission is to create a combination of temporary events and permanent works for a large new surgery development. The main theme of the project is humour - finding playful ways to reinvest the experiences of a surgery with communal, light-hearted sociability.
The construction site is currently an empty lot, a vacant space covered with Japanese Knot Weed and concrete slabs. In the months before work begins on the new development, we ran a short public event, taking this ‘non-space’, and investing it with a sense of place, filled with the colour and identity of the local community.
There is nothing more specific to a community than its sense of humour. In our jokes, we reveal our politics, our histories, our cultural references, TV shows, our accents, our fears and our hopes. Jokes are very personal things.
And so jokes were collected from local residents who were visiting the surgery, and were then placed were placed freely across the site, with set-up dislocated from punchline - to cause passers-by to stop and gaze, matching up jokes, and visually exploring a long-forgotten space.
This is, of course, only the beginning. The project also includes extensive workshops with local secondary students, and we’re just starting to explore the form and content of the permanent works.
Anonymous asked: Thanks for sharing :) Love your music :D From cambodia
The first five minutes of the CCF show. We had some issues with the lighting, so the visuals are pretty dark (me and Phaneth are hiding on the left of stage) - but hopefully it gives you all an idea. I’ll be adding some additional footage in the coming weeks.
And thanks to Dan Schwarzlose for the videowork.
Anonymous asked: great stuff , new khmer remix .. nice one ,
Dickie )
Another raw, unedited recording from the rehearsals.
Again, this actually documents the compositional process of the rehearsals - and is the moment when this track came together.
I had a loop of a Chapei (stringed Khmer instrument), recorded from another CLA musican, Ouch Savvy. In the rehearsal, i played it back to them (an octave lower), Punisa started to toy around with a little loop on the Roneat, Vanna embellished on the gong, i stuck some beats behind them and off we went…
And Phanith’s rhythmic use of Ksae Diew in this track rocks, too.
I wanted to briefly share two nice articles that came out in the last week in two of Cambodia’s major dailies. They’re both sensitive, well-written pieces that give a great overview of the project.
One of the articles can be seen online over at the Phnom Penh Post.
There was also a great piece in the Cambodia Daily’s weekend section. This isn’t currently online, so i’ve uploaded a scan of it - click the image to enlarge.
