ICES 72 and Harvey Matusow Portal
January 2012

Poster for ICES 72 by Gee Vaucher (of Crass)
Find out more about Harvey Matusow, American ex-Communist and McCarthy collaborator-turned-avant garde impresario. Matusow promoted the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES) at London's Roundhouse in 1972. ICES 72 – which involved AMM, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Annea Lockwood, Steve Beresford, Lol Coxhill, David Bedford, Charlotte Moorman, Penny Rimbaud and many more – is featured in an article by Julian Cowley in The Wire 336.
Harvey
Matusow Interview with Charlotte Moorman, 1970
Charlotte Moorman gives Harvey Matusow some food for thought as she
looks back on the Festival of Avant-Garde Arts she ran in New York.
Harvey Matusow on
ICES ‘72, and other international endeavors, 1972
Harvey launches his ICES mission on a wave of hot air; Charles
Amirkhanian hosts the show, Source editors Stan Lunetta
and Art Woodbury lend their support. Lars-Gunnar Bodin of
Stockholm’s Fylkingen Society and Robert Ashley are also present.
Ashley seems to suspect that a critical distance is required.
Amra/Arma
comic book Stan Lunetta’s site, offering a chance
to enjoy the comic book created to commemorate the adventures
surrounding his group Amra/Arma’s ritual performance at the Rüne
House of Flun Doon.
Harvey Matusow archive An introduction to the
Harvey Matusow archive held at the University of Sussex in
Brighton, UK. Part of the archive contains a collection of papers
about McCarthy’s Communist ‘witch-hunts’ of the 1950s, with another
dedicated to underground art, magazines and music from Matusow's
time in New York and London in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Jacques
Bekaert The website of the truly remarkable
Jacques Bekaert – composer, graphic artist, photographer, writer,
gourmet, journalist and diplomat. Bekaert met Harvey Matusow in
1970 while Matusow was first planning the ICES concerts. Bekaert
later attended ICES as a member of Transition, an improvising group
with Belgian pianist Michel Herr and Takehisa Kosugi and Ryo Koike
of The Taj Mahal Travellers.
Stringless
Yoyo Excerpts from Matusow’s unfinished
autobiography, Stringless Yoyo.
Harvey Matusow's Jew's
Harp Band, 1969 A track from the 1969 LP The
War Between Fats And Thins by Harvey Matusow’s Jew's Harp
Band. The group included Ann(e)a Lockwood and Leslie Kenton,
daughter of jazz bandleader Stan Kenton.
Comments
Yet more can be learnt about Harvey Matusow in my one-man stage show The Trials of Harvey Matusow, premiered at the 2010 Brighton Festival and described, by Plays International, as "the best one-hander I have seen this year". The show is set during Matusow's years of English exile, and though it focuses primarily on his past McCarthyite infamy, there's also a strong flavour of his avant-garded artistic endeavours, including Ices '72. Performances are somewhat intermittent, but there are updates at www.bobbycohen.co.uk and there's a trailer at http://youtu.be/Vtjo-XbaSro
Robert Cohen
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