Contact Highs

In the cluttered front room of his house in North London, Hugh Davies opens Volume 13 of The Library Of Knowledge, plugs it into his hi-fi, and begins scraping away on the contact miked objects glued inside. The volume hasn't contained any pages for over 30 years; just a star map, on top of which, in 1968, David's hardwired a handful of contact mics, insulating 'islands' of plywood and foam rubber, a furniture castor, fretsaw blades, springs, fusewire and other components. This instrument is now something of a cult object in the brief history of improvisation, live electronic music and the netherlands inhabited by a worldwide network of instrument builders. He calls it the shozyg, because the volume covered the sector of the alphabet from SHO to ZYG, and it was as good a name as any. "Not knowing what to call a stereophonically amplified collections of found objects mounted inside a book cover without pages, I took that to be my name," he says. "And shozyg has become the name not just for this instrument, but has expanded to become any instrument I built inside a container that would be unusual for music: an old radio, disembowelled television sets, a plastic bread bin with a sliding cover. The latest big one, the multishozyg, isn't inside a container; it's mounted on a stand that came from a kind of tailor's dummy that my mother used to have."

Potting-shed aesthetix it may be, but Davies has devoted most of his mature life to developing these instruments, playing a key role in the formative years of British and European free music; contributing to various reference books and journals on experimental music and composition; and working as an educator, composer and prolific solo performer. He's also managed to 'be there' on some truly historic aural documents" the first recording of Stockhausen's Mikrophonies I & II, made under the auspices of the composer; playing live electronics and organ alongside Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Jamie Muir on Music Improvisation Company 1968-71; appearing with David Toop and Max Eastley on their 1975 New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments; and he even turned up as a guest musician on Talk Talk's 1988 Spirit Of Eden ("They looked in the Musician's Union directory for unusual instruments, and asked: 'What are shozygs?" he explains). Plus one that tantalizingly eluded the microphone: "About 1973, Peter Brötzmann asked me as one of two guests with the Brötzmann Trio with Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, and the other guest was Don Cherry. Unfortunately none of our concerts were recorded - they started recording everything just after that, because they certainly would have brought out an LP of that. We did a couple of concerts in the evenings, and at least one projects for children - Don Cherry ran that."

The second half of 1997 saw the release of Interplay, Davies's first full length CD, which Wire critics voted one of the three best improvisation releases of the year. The variegated sounds of his main concert instrument, the multishozyg, are applied liberally all over Interplay, on which four trios with guitarist John Russel and percussionist Roger Turner are interleaved with duos featuring Hans-Karsten Raecke, Hilary Jeffery (trombonist and collaborator with Tim Wright's York-based Electronic groups Germ and Sand), and sound sculptor Max Eastley. Assembled during the early '90s, the multishozyg is a composite of most of the elements Davies has developed over the preceding 30 years. The delicate looking layers of wood, brass clamps and circuit boards stack up into a versatile sonic workstation. Davies talks through it: "The circuit boards, like everything else, are just amplified surfaces, they're not plugged in. On the top, 'penthouse' layer are sections of an instrument based on fretsaw blades, not tuned to precise scales. There were two previous instruments which used this principle, which I call Concert Aeolian Harps: you blow on the fretsaw blades. What's interesting about the blades is that you can play them in all four ways that exist for playing musical instruments: you can pluck them, or bow them, you can hit them, like percussion; and you can blow on them, like woodwind, or the traditional Aeolian harp - I used tubes, sometimes two, so I can blow two notes at once." Moving down to the 'tabletop' section of the instrument, he says: "I originally made it for a festival which featured a conference of pioneers of tape music and electronic instruments, so there are various references: this is a knob from a VCS3 synthesizer which makes a few scratchy noises. Here's a quadrant cut from a 45 record - you can scrape across the grooves with a fingernail. There's a length of computer cable with rainbow strands; and the circuit board from a digital organ. So there are references to the whole history of electronic sound making, for fun. Then there are springs amplified by four magnetic pick-ups from old telephones; furniture castors again; metal rods fixed at one end and free at the other - a principle that never caught on in mainstream musical instruments."

The beauty and range of sounds Davies achieves with this delicate looking assemblage is breathtaking. When he scrubs torsion-compressed guitar strings with his bouncy-ball capped sticks, he gets whalesong. When he blows on his sawblades, it's like panpipes made of glass. Amplified springs deliver super attenuated deep drones: Goliath's tambura.

"Whatever objects you use," he says, "there is some sort of acoustic relationship to existing instruments. They may not relate to European instruments, they might relate more to an instrument that's common on Pacific islands, or Latin America, or something like that. As soon as you start using vibrating materials, you can find some sort of kinship with something that exists already."

Hugh Davies has made a study of the garrison of unconventional performance practices and non-standard instruments that have been ranged against tonic harmony during the last 100 years, and he views the present as a time when all these inventions are becoming synthesized. "In the 70s I pictured myself sitting in front of an orchestra with a sampler playing a concerto, and in the 90s I wrote a piece like that." Sampling, in effect, allows a return to musique concrèe techniques, allied to the vast array of sounds which can now be captured on tape or squeezed out of synthesizers; although, as Davies comments, "I'm sure there are lots of possibilities that aren't made available, because the designers don't think it's important enough to do that. Or they don't know the potential market enough."

Despite his immersion in some of the century's most 'difficult' music and practices, the sleevenotes to Interplay reaffirm his belief in making the process of live electronics as open and accessible to audiences as possible. "I'm trying to make the gesture of sound work properly, and not get mystified more than necessary," he says. "I used to play lecture recitals where I would play a piece, describe everything I'd done, then talk about the next instrument. Certain colleagues would never explain anything they did: mystify them for no obvious reason. So, knowing the problems people have with new sounds, new instruments, there are other things that are very important, like the relationship between sound and gesture. With a lot of small computer set-ups, you just hit a button and all hell breaks loose, or you can type in a lot of things and not much changes. In my case, because I'm using smaller objects and instruments, my gestures tend to be more fingers and hands rather than arms and the whole body. Whenever possible I try to ask for a video camera and a couple of monitors at the front of the stage, so people can see me and my hands on the table of the instrument."