Leonard Bastard’s monologue: “see if that fat bed-presser no longer comes around with his purple nose and his clinking coins.”
Muirhead’s family life…
Muirhead and Leonard head into the wilderness in search of a new world.
This morning I was told about Xtranormal, a site for making instant movies. This afternoon I present Part One of an occasional series starring Muirhead Bone and Leonard Bastard:
Be careful.
Last night’s concert by Iva Bittová was superb. The Czech / Roma violinist and vocalist was performing at the Polish Combatants Hall as part of Toronto’s X Avant festival. Bittova’s voice is a magnificent thing, moving between lullaby and glossolalia, between gypsy song and sound poetry, between amplification and not-amplification (traveling towards and well away from the microphone to produce strange swells of sound).
Bittová’s songs channel a whole history of human folk song but also music from the animal world, and were played with great skill and inventiveness (so what?) but also (ah!) a lot of warmth, wit and comic timing. Warmer still, there was also a guest appearance from Bittová’s son, a solemn young chap playing the grand piano before heroically overcoming youthful embarrassment to join his mother for a little kazoo duet. Chris Cutler’s opening set was a clever arrangement of sounds schizophonically wrenched from their percussive sources, but while the pleasures in Cutler’s music are all about amplification and alteration, there was a playfulness compelling unmediated in Iva Bittová’s performance.
Here’s Iva performing a few years ago in Prague:
Next month I’m privileged to be involved in Sound Unbound, a symposium on the aural avant-garde at University of Toronto Scarborough. My part in this will be a little Idle Tigers concert; happily, I’ll be performing in an art gallery at mid-day, which is so much more suitable than performing in a bar at 11.30pm.
Mostly, though, I’m really excited about the other speakers and performers who’ll be there, including text-sound performance by Gerry Shikatani, improvisation by Bonnie Jones and Chris Cogburn, a discussion of Toronto’s rich history of sound poetry by my friend (and at times my collaborator) Katherine McLeod, and a performance by Nobuo Kubota, who you can see in all his splendour in the video below.
After all, isn’t there something arable about the idea of broadcasting, the sowing of seeds, scattering around, casting broadly? In the BBC’s Broadcasting House stands the sower sculpture by Eric Gill (who, incidentally, hated electronic media).
For the last couple of days I’ve been living inside the little universe of Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age. Here’s what I’ve found.
I’ve admired Broadcast for quite a while, without really knowing why, but I suppose that I liked that I couldn’t quite place them – in the late 90s they certainly didn’t sound like all the other main artists Warp, sounding folky and ethereal rather than cold and logical; then after the turn of the millennium Broadcast’s singer Trish Keenan was talking about, and sounding somewhat like psychedelic folk singers like Linda Perhacs just before all those New Weird America people made it fashionable to do so (and by that point Broadcast had made Tender Buttons, an album stripped down to the sparsest analog synths).
The Focus Group, meanwhile, is a fellow called Julian House who designs record covers for Broadcast, at the same time as releasing records on the Ghost Box label. I wrote about Ghost Box close-relatives Moon Wiring Club quite a bit ago, and many of the things I enjoyed in Moon Wiring Club’s fictional village of Clinksell – the spooky kitsch, the haunted domesticity – are also features of Ghost Box’s own imagined place, Belbury. This might all sound like frivolous playtime stuff, but really I feel that music that doesn’t try to create its own little world – or should I say art that assumes it can occupy this world, with no effort to create a new world in turn – should be ashamed of itself.
I like what’s happened to Broadcast, on their passing through Belbury. A feeling of warmth towards elderly electronics, a haunted English folkiness (drawing on the pagan or pastoral folk themes that are keynotes in classic British horror) – these things have long been latent in Broadcast’s music, but under The Focus Group’s examination these tendencies become camped up, playful, grotesque. Which is appropriate.
Prior to listening, I did have my reservations about this record. The last time I anticipated an album about witchcraft on a classic label (They Were Wrong So We Drowned, by Liars, on Mute) I was disappointed by that record’s bludgeoning rockish textures. Witchcraft aside, Broadcast and The Focus Group have produced something much more welcoming and homemade.
Happily, Witch Cults… is meant to be a mini-album but has twenty-three tracks on it. This seems to be something of the Belbury / Clinksell way – perhaps the interest in library music provides the prompt for producing archives instead of albums; or perhaps it’s a taste for the macabre dictating that the artist should present a cluttered box of collections. Either way, this bittiness, this not presuming that every piece of music should take up five minutes of our time on this earth, or another, is to be admired.
Broadcast are playing in Toronto this coming Saturday night, but (unfortunately) won’t be there, because (fortunately) I’ll be at the Polish Combatants Hall to see the avant-garde violinist Iva Bittova… well, radio age witchcrafts broadcasts be damned, I can’t be in two places at once.
Few words today, but some images. Today marks the opening of a new online picture gallery, where Kate Wakely-Mulroney will be showing her drawings. The above images either recommend or reject (I’m not sure which) that no man is an island, and that you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. In these pictures, gnomic utterances or sayings that have come to belong to proverbial wisdom emerge from their rest in the family wordhoard and act all quietly unfamiliar. Go to Labouring Beasts to enjoy more.
1. It’s Canadian Thanksgiving, and I’m in Moncton, New Brunswick. I’m enjoying this gentle stretching of my legs, beyond Toronto and beyond the little bubble that sits over it. In a way Toronto’s most appealing characteristic – its successful multiculturalism – also means that if you’re a foreign visitor, like me, then you need never really face up to the task of becoming more Canadian.
2. I thoroughly intend to become more Canadian – first, imaginatively artistically, and then (this will always be completely secondary) in life itself. I’ve been reviewed in Toronto papers as a local musician, but not one of those reviews has failed to mention my Englishness. Considering the kind of songs I’ve made, I have to admit I’ve brought that on myself.
3. My current album, Persisting Like a Racehorse, might sound completely resolute in its Englishness – in its recitals of pastoral moods, in its reawakening of the English village or the cheerful, horrific seaside holiday. It’s only having finally released the thing that I’ve started to hear something else in the record. What I hear is the grim conclusion of Englishness. Never again will I revisit these lands… in art.
4. What then? I intend to make some Canadian music. When I think of independent “Canadian music” right now I think of all these bands that play in Toronto venues, singing songs about geography and recycling – bands with outdoorsy, camping-trip names like Rural Alberta Advantage and Wilderness of Manitoba and Forest City Lovers and Muskox and Saskatchewan Seal Farmers and Olenka and the Autumn Lovers. Apart from Olenka, who I once shared a bill with, I haven’t listened to any of these bands (and by the way I wish them all well). It’s not a flaw in my critical method that I haven’t actually listened to these bands – quite the opposite, because I’m talking about the cultural atmospheres that are created when thousands of bands choose a way to present themselves to millions of people who will or will not ever hear them. I associate those Canadian bands with a lot of beards, a lot of flannel, a lot of acclaim from the music prize panel.
5. I don’t think I will make that kind of Canadian music. For a start my Canadian music will involve much less music.
6. I also want fake Canadas. Quite recently I linked to some recordings of Celtic mouth music that I’d been enjoying, so imagine my delight when yesterday I got to listen to some Acadian diddlers while eating fish and chips. I’m a susceptible tourist at the moment and might have been fobbed off with reality, but I hope that they were totally inauthentic. That calculated mix of the east coast’s French, Scottish and Irish voices gets me thinking.
7. During this trip I’ve been reading Damian Tarnopolsky’s superb first novel Goya’s Dog. This book imagines an arch-modernist English painter called Edward Dacres, and sets him loose on second world war era Toronto. The grim and bitter Dacres is certainly the painting part of Wyndham Lewis (although Lewis himself was actually born in Nova Scotia), but there’s also, to my understanding, a bit of Fr. Rolfe involved too. What I find especially valuable about this novel right now is its ability to reimagine the strangeness of Canada in its earlier life, when the country was an enormous space with plenty of room to tell great immodest folk-lies. Horror also fills these spaces.
