Monthly Archives for February 2015

3 Galleries.

At the end of last week I found myself visiting 3 galleries in less than 24 hours. Each visit had a musical dimension:

The Horse Hospital. X-Ray Audio. I read about this in the Guardian in the morning and discovered that I was already too late to get tickets for the planned performance but I thought it would be worthwhile to drop by. When I got there they were setting up for the evening and trying out a couple of odd-looking discs – both from Ukraine. One was a 7” transparent red flexi with an illustration of a swan in a pond…the audio was a cheesy folk song…this one had to be taped onto the deck to stop it from slipping. The second was a postcard disc…it looked like it was of a painting of an old church in Kiev and the pirated audio was the Beach Boys ‘Good Vibrations’…

good v_edited-1

Here is a scan of the beer mat of one of the Soviet era records cut onto an x-ray plate:

x-ray001

www.x-rayaudio.squarespace.com

Drawing Room. Chromosome Damage Listening Session. This should have been really interesting. The artist of the current show, Daniel Guzmán, had selected a bunch of records that he listens to while he works in his studio in Mexico City to be played in the gallery. These were to be combined with some music from his own band, Pellejos. I liked the idea of listening to the music while looking at the drawings. For some reason only 3 people were present at the event and this took the edge off the whole thing. Still, I heard Jorge Reyes for the first time…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUfz1cXBMcg

White Cube, Bermondsey. David Toop at the Christain Marclay exhibition. The second gig in a series of performances in the gallery. This is a generous undertaking on both Marclay’s and the gallery’s part. Toop’s considered and exploratory sound making and his fragile delineation of a ‘stage’ drew the audience into an intense dialogue with the space and the music despite the austere surroundings of the White Cube white cube.

The audience

The audience

IMG_8071

David Toop in performance.

David Toop in performance.

An absurd way to spend an evening…?

At the O2 for ‘Ennio Morricone; My Life in Music….

em001

I’ve been avoiding places like to O2 and am spoiled by the scale of Cafe Oto and the Union Chapel. So coming to see/hear Ennio Morricone is an exception to my gig-going habits. Something of a pilgrimage I suppose. I think the event only began to make sense to me during the second part of the first half when the orchestra was joined by the chorus and a solo soprano (Susanna Rigacci) performing a suite of Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtrack material. But even then it wasn’t loud enough and the space was just too big…

image

Repetition (again)

A reader asks:

‘Hi,
about Brian Eno – when you listen to this locked groove does it play smoothly or can you hear the needle kind of popping after each circle?
Best,
Jacek’

Here is a recording of my copy…I would say that this pops too:

And for all you locked groove fans out there….you should probably head over to RRRecords from Lowell, MA and get a copy of this:

RRR-1000 1000 lock grooves – 20 artists, 50 grooves each – AMK, Aaron Dilloway, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Drumm, carlos Giffoni, Incapacitants, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Jason Lescalleet, Francisco Lopez, Lasse Marhaug, The New Blockaders, Jerome Noetinger, Prurient, RLW, Damion Romero, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Sudden Infant, Keith Fullerton Whitman, C.Spencer Yeh, Otomo Yoshihide RRR LP $20.00

You can also find it here:

http://ubu.com/sound/rrr-records.html

But frankly the digital version just doesn’t do it.

Over and over and over and over and over…..and out.