Recently I listened back to Glenn Gould’s influential 1967 radio documentary The Idea Of North, part of his Solitude Trilogy. It features the voices of people who have had a ‘direct confrontation’ with the remote northern region of Canada’s vast wilderness, describing the practical ins and outs of living there.
Gould was known as one of the greatest interpreters of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But he famously retired from live performance and instead spent long hours locked away in a studio, discovering ever more minute scales of perfectionism while cutting together choice recordings of his playing in an effort to create the most honed versions of the Variations.
He made the Solitude docs using what he called a ‘contrapuntal’ editing technique which mixed together multiple voices. It can sound noisy with the voices cancelling each other out in a kind of disorientating babble. But sometimes certain words and phrases leap out in quick succession, “endless”, “ice”, “nothing”, “year after year” etc, creating a montage of verbal images.
At first it sounds odd that these intimate and warm voices are talking about such an expansively inhuman and cold place. Further into the recording a voice says: “You can’t talk about the North until you’ve got out of it.” And here’s where the listener’s journey enters into a more fictional space, the idea of The Idea Of North. Not only is the doc about hearing first-hand accounts of what the ‘real’ North is, it’s about remembering it, re-imagining it and re-telling it from a distance.
Throughout the hour long broadcast the sound of a train rumbling along leads the listener towards this idea of North. There aren’t any noises of nature like biting wind, wolves howling or footsteps crunching in the snow. Just the muffled sound of the Muskeg Express chugging its way further north along the tracks. The voices could have been recorded anywhere, but Gould places them inside the sonic and psychological space of a train. It’s a space loaded with symbolism about fate, destiny, migration and nationhood (much like radio is too in the latter case). This mental space is also akin to that of Gould’s perfect Goldberg Variations: it’s a close, intimate and even claustrophobic space where one can focus intensely to the point of an epiphany (or hallucination). And though the people in the Idea Of North go to lengths to debunk myths about the north and of a macho ‘northmanship’ seducing travellers further and further north, the doc still creates a fantastical space, or at least a space where most anything could happen. For Gould, the north, is “a convenient area to dream about, spin tall tales about, and in the end, avoid.”
In his book The Spiritual History Of Ice: Romanticism, Science, And The Imagination, Eric G Wilson writes about this blurred borderline between real and imagined spaces: “Fantastical worlds can become real in two ways – in the systems of the tyrant or the visions of the liberator. Likewise real spaces can become fantastical in a twofold fashion. On the one hand, a tyrant might fictionalise a physical space so that he can exploit it [...] On the other hand, a liberator might transform a humanised region into the sublime laws sustaining the cosmos. A poet might release chthonic energies underlying city grids.”
Mercator's Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio, map of the Arctic, 1595 (click to enlarge)
The Idea Of North documents first hand experiences with the real north, but it also documents Gould’s journey towards a productive north, mapping a place of serenity and contemplation over vast and empty tundra. Surrounded by frozen calm, Gould’s single-track journey is drawn towards an imagined centre point where the constraining delineations of reality cease and imagination can take over. It’s at the centre of the world where the mind can focus on smaller and smaller points of attention, tapping into the creative chthonic energies emanating from the magnetic zero degree. But for Gould it’s a place best visited rarely as an obsessive mind is easily subsumed by this vast fantasy, no matter how far away the body is.
Adventures In Modern Music tonight features 90 minutes of brand new and unheard music as Derek Walmsley flicks through the upcoming Autumn releases, with fresh releases from Joe Colley, Mark McGuire, Ahleuchatistas, Francisco Meirona & Dave Phillips, Bjørn Fongaard and many more, all culled from the ever-bulging shelves of The Wire’s office. AIMM is broadcast every Thursday 21:00-22:30 (BST) at 104.4 FM for Londoners, streamed live at resonancefm.com for the rest of the world.
Experimental arts space Area10 is calling out for support to secure a longer term lease on their premises at Eagle Wharf in Peckham, South East London. Their lease is set to run out on 15 July.
Area10 have been in the warehouse space behind Peckham Library for the past eight years. Along with studio and rehearsal space for artists, they host and organise a wide variety of international art exhibitions, workshops, performances, and Audiovisual Art Lab, and other collaborative events.
They’re currently working with the local council, Southwark, to gain a longer term lease so as to keep – and increase – their activities: They’re asking their supporters for help and to sign a petition, along with a testimonial http://www.savearea10.org/
Sound artist Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize this year (along with The Otolith Group, one half of which is The Wire contributor Kodwo Eshun). It reminded me that we shot some footage of an installation of hers at the ICA back in 2008.
The Internationale was shown for two days at the ICA in central London off The Mall, a wide boulevard leading from Trafalgar Square up to Buckingham Palace (monarchs use The Mall to impress during state visits and other ceremonies). To experience the piece, a small group of visitors were led to the rear of the ICA and up a ladder onto the bare roof terrace. A single loudspeaker attached to the façade of the grand building broadcast Philipsz’s voice softly warbling its way through the anthem of international socialism, blending with the background drone of city traffic. Philipsz’s work takes the form of a series of cover versions; studies in how particular songs can mutate, displacing them from their own time, projecting them via a different voice (usually her own), and mixing them into different spaces (usually public, transient ones). Filter, one of her better known works, has the artist singing pop songs by Radiohead, The Velvet Underground, The Vaselines and The Rolling Stones through the public address system at a supermarket in East London. An earlier version took place in Belfast’s main bus station, both installations eliciting a wide range of responses, from interested to irritated (as covered in Cross Platform, The Wire 244)
Philipsz has presented several versions of The Internationale. The first was in a pedestrian underpass in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1999. Another took place in 2000 at Berlin’s Friedrichstraße Station, a notorious border crossing between East and West Germany during the Cold War. Both of those installations, situated in the former Eastern Bloc, would seem to turn the song into an elegy for a time when international socialism was a reality. It’s less certain what’s happening in this London version though. Situated in the heart of the old British Empire and current capital of finance, the displaced Internationale has either lost an authoritative voice or is just being drowned out by the city’s noise.
The Internationale was made as part of Out Of Bounds, a short series of artists interventions in the private spaces of arts institutions around central London.
elnicho, a mail order project for experimental music (who co-curated the recent Radar festival in Mexico City), has curated an evening celebrating the musically omniverous, globe-spanning Sublime Frequencies series. The evening will feature tunes and projections culled from the extensive Sublime Frequencies catalogue, along with wild dancing. It all takes place on 13 May at the Galeria del Comercio, a gallery for free public art projects on the streets in Mexico City (in this case, one particular corner).
Sound poet Christian Bök performing at Flarf vs. Conceptual at NYCs Whitney Museum, 2009
A precursor to the INSTAL festival of new and experimental music and sound (scheduled for November), UNINSTAL, kicks off 9 May with the first part of a walk/screening event, In The Shadow Of Shadow, led by artists organisations The Strickland Distribution & Ultra-red. The walk focuses on the gentrification of Glasgow.
Following this, field recordist Eric La Casa and musician Jean-Luc Guionnet present House, one-shot subjective sonic portraits of four houses, their inhabitants and their relationship through sound, 13 May.
On 14 May, philosopher Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet and percussionist Seijiro Murayama present Used Sound
15 May hears Loïc Blairon’s, It Doesn’t Say What It Says, followed by ‘conceptual improvisor’ Taku Unami’s Inferno Quiz Show
The folks at Soul Jazz Records have organised a night at Cafe Oto to celebrate the life and work of the late drummer Steve Reid, who over the course of his long career worked with a wide array of artists including Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, James Brown, Fela Kuti and Sun Ra . Details on the flyer below.
• Read the introduction and a sample chapter from Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, And The Ecology Of Fear published by MIT Press.
•Projects page of the Institute For Creative Technologies – an institute set up to bring military planners, games designers, Hollywood SFX people and experts in interactive technology together.
After being grounded in London by an erupting volcano in Iceland, the Marshall Allen-led Sun Ra Arkestra, added two extra evenings to their residency at Café Oto, both of which sold out in hours. Now, news from the BBC Radio 3 twitter feed tells us that they’re continuing to make the most of their London, Earth-bound hours by heading in to the Jazz On 3 studios to record a special “Volcanic Session” for the show…
Flying Lotus will be DJing an internet broadcast to mark “4/20“, an annual celebration of the Cannabis plant taking place today (20 April). Lotus will be joined by members of his Brainfeeder crew, including The Gaslamp Killer, Ras G, Daedelus, Teebs, Matthewdavid, Dr. Strangeloop and more. Tune in to the session at flying-lotus.com/radio, 20 April, 12pm in Los Angeles, 3pm in New York, 8pm in the UK and 4am in Japan.
The set is also in anticipation of Flying Lotus’s forthcoming album, Cosmogramma, out 4 May on Warp Records. Cosmogramma is on pre-sale for 24 hours from the time of the broadcast. Buyers of the album also get a free art print by Flying Lotus along with the chance to win the original.
2009