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Home , AMM (group), Barry Guy, Bomb Culture, Daphne Oram, Dave Smith (composer), Derek Bailey (guitarist)

CD COMPANION INTRODUCTION Not Necessarily Captured, Except as a Fleeting Glance

Fear not; be not afraid, for the recordings I have collected as a companion to this issue of writings about British music are the imperfect documents of a volatile, fugi- tive, now quite ancient history. Listen, not even particularly closely, and in many cases you will hear distortion, hiss, rumble, skewed stereo or blunt mono, vinyl crackle and worn grooves, tape dropout and oxide erosion, the traction of obsolete recording devices, faint movements of the sound recordist, coughing, poor dynamic range and rock-bottom fidel- ity, all to a degree quite incomprehensible in our digital age. On a more positive note, what you will also hear is documentation of an extraordinary burst of musical experimentation that touches upon the overlapping practices of live elec- tronics, improvisation, free , free rock, tape music, experimental and revolutionary composition, sound sculpture, sound poetry, and a few pieces that refuse to confine themselves even to these unruly categories in order to explore the outer limits of free folk , symbolic table tennis, and similar improbabilities. Archiving is a strange activity. During a telephone conversation between and myself, Derek suggested that it might be psychologically harmful. Certainly it entails a deep archaeology of memory that reveals much about the fragility and subjectivity of re- membering, not to mention difficult negotiations with the malign forces of nostalgia and self-deception. The earliest piece represented in these two CDs of British dates from 1960: ’s remarkable tape piece entitled Four Aspects; the latest pieces were recorded in 1977: ’s improvisation for amplified springs and ’s Campiello Band. This is a timeline that stretches back almost to the middle of the last century. Though Daphne Oram is still alive at the time of writing she is no longer active and the complete account of her fascinating life has yet to be told. Hugh Davies and Michael Nyman are still commanding presences in their respective corners of what experi- mental music has become, and so there is a continuity and persistence that most of us in- volved in these early recordings may have doubted in our less optimistic moments. My own relationship to this history is complicated, anyway. In 1966 I shared second prize for my entry to a poetry competition and spent the meagre winnings on an LP, This Is Our Music. Psychedelic rock by The Seeds, Love and The Mothers of In- vention was the listening choice of a tiny cult at my school, and in 1967, between school and art college, I went to an all-night concert at the Roundhouse in north to see Cream headlining a bill that also included Geno Washington and the RamJam Band, a soul group popular with the declining Mod movement. Neither nor the post-blues rock of Cream quite prepared me for my first exposure to AMM, who played in the disorder of the early part of that evening. I am sure that most people in the audience believed that they were technicians struggling to fix faulty electrical connections or setting up instruments for the bands. At some point during a set that I later learned was profoundly unsatisfying to AMM, I realized that this seemingly disconnected group was engaged in a kind of impro- vised performance using electronics, a drum kit, a saxophone and a guitar. AMM—during that period Eddie Prévost, , , and Lawrence Sheaff—represented a convergence that was momentous, for me at least. The idea that a performance could be so atomized, so unfocused, yet so cohesive, the fact that it veered between silent and raucous, controlled and random, or that it drew upon tech-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780746 by guest on 30 September 2021 niques developed within jazz, from Louis Armstrong to , and the line that could be drawn from J.S. Bach to , rich in the implications of contemporary painting, performance and ideas, was a breakthrough. From that point, the boundaries between all these zones were erased. The German born artist Gustav Metzger had shown his liquid crystal projections at the Roundhouse rock concerts of 1966, where , The Who and The Move had played concerts that aligned them, albeit temporarily, with the avant-garde. In conversa- tion with Metzger in 2000, I asked him about the concert I attended. I remember seeing projections at that event, but Metzger suspects they were not by him. Still a schoolboy and taught English literature by the sister of Peter Wynne Wilson, the man who projected bubble lights onto Pink Floyd at venues like UFO and the , I had bought the August 1966 Auto Destructive issue of Art and Artists magazine and discovered DIAS, the Destruction In Art Symposium. Convened in London in September 1966, DIAS was organized by Metzger, along with John Sharkey; Ivor Davies; Dom Sylvester Houédard, a Benedictine monk and concrete poet; and , a sound poet who managed in the Charing Cross Road at that time. The artists who took part included Yoko Ono, John Latham, Wolf Vostell and Herman Nitsch. In Art and Artists I was thrilled to read accounts of Jean Tinguely blow- ing up his constructions in the Nevada desert, or John Latham burning towers of books in a communicative transmutation of their significance as compact data carriers. I was equally inspired to see a photograph of Activities by Philip Corner, an event at which Fluxus artists destroyed a piano according to a specific program of instructions. The documentation was reproduced in Jasia Reichardt’s account of Destruction in Art, printed in the Architectural Review of December 1966. This notion—that violence, decomposition and elemental forces such as fire were legiti- mate processes, or activations, in the making of art—was a revelation. Metzger linked physical destruction, such as his own paintings using hydrochloric acid on nylon, to , Italian Futurism, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the Cubists and their fragmenta- tion of form and Yves Klein’s dematerialization of the aesthetic experience. He also pointed to deeper issues. World War II and the Cold War (what the poet and author called “”) penetrated every aspect of the art practices and general mood of this period. For Metzger, there was a direct connection to Nazi Germany and the Eastern Bloc. He had grown up in Nürnberg and was sent to in 1939, a Polish Jew rescued by the Refugee Children movement. His parents died in the Holocaust. In 1957 he became a founder member of the King’s Lynn Committee for Nuclear Disarmament and throughout his life’s work there are political links to be deciphered, along with a fas- cination with contemporary art’s relationship to twentieth-century science and a belief in its potential for transforming social aggression. In a 1965 lecture to the Architectural As- sociation in London, Metzger spoke with remarkable prescience about issues that have since come to pass: environmental pollution, the toxicity of food, the destruction engen- dered by capitalism and its ruthless expansion. In the aftermath of the war, a number of the musicians who were important to my per- sonal musical development—drummer , for example—had learned the rudi- ments of group playing as members of military bands during their National Service. As for my generation, we were baby boomers born to parents in their first flush of optimism and homecoming after surviving two world wars. Many of us grew up reluctantly immersed in a stream of cathartic stories about war and its chaos, destruction and death, yet we were cosseted in an environment that aspired, quite understandably, to permanent stability. This contradiction, given the dramatic social changes of the 1950s, was certain to lead to a kind of cultural and political anarchy. Despite being relayed across the Atlantic, the im- pact of the civil rights movement in America was profound. I read Valerie Wilmer’s stories about Albert Ayler and Sun Ra in Melody Maker, listened to radio broadcasts of the new jazz on Voice of America, and gave a sketchily researched talk at my school about the eco-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780746 by guest on 30 September 2021 nomic conditions of African-Americans and their relationship to urban blues. Naturally, there was not a single pupil of African or Asian descent in the school at that time. With some notable exceptions, the media landscape was deeply conservative, the suburban at- mosphere a stultifying monoculture. In 1967, my foundation year of study at Hornsey College of Art, in north London, I had the good fortune to share a work table with Stuart Marshall. Stuart later became an assis- tant to Alvin Lucier and a sound artist in his own right, then a video artist, educator and theorist, and finally a gay filmmaker, before succumbing to AIDS in 1993. In an act of re- ciprocal education that had a far greater effect than the official curriculum, he introduced me to the work of LaMonte Young, and I loaned him my free jazz records. In 1971 we ac- companied each other to an AMM concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was a surpris- ingly upscale venue, though the group had been profiled in Vogue in 1967. AMM were still wearing modernist suits and polo neck sweaters during the psychedelic Summer of Love, yet experimentalism was also dressed in ruffled paisley shirts that year. Pink Floyd’s claimed to be influenced by the guitar playing of AMM’s Keith Rowe, and in the live shows, if not so much on record, Barrett could produce a spectacular wall of noise. Concert-going offered plentiful adventures. The South African expatriate musicians— Chris McGregor, , , and —could be seen at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, often playing their infectious mix of free jazz, roman- tic ballads and Kwela from the townships, alongside groups led by pianist or guitarist Ray Russell. Perhaps in the same week, Jimi Hendrix, or American visitors such as Moby Grape, The Fugs or Freddy King would be playing at a London venue. At this point, it should be said that a less clearly evident musical influence had made its mark on post-war English youth, even before the onset of adolescence. Without being aware of , my generation had absorbed tape manipulation, musique concrète and funny noises through the innovative work of the BBC Radiophonic Work- shop. The Workshop was founded in 1958 as a dedicated unit for “radiophonic effects.” Original members such as Daphne Oram, and Richard “Dickie” Bird would invent unusual soundtracks for radio and television dramas, with some of their most experimental sounds being devised for the shows that were popular with boys like myself in the late 1950s. A science-fiction television production called was particularly frightening. For a sequence in which diggers burrow down below an underground train tunnel to find a buried spaceship, the Radiophonic Workshop mixed the noise of amplifiers being connected and disconnected, tape recorders self-oscillating and other basic techniques. For the long-running radio comedy, The Goon Show, they were called upon to recreate such esoteric effects as the internal commotion of Major Bloodnok’s stomach (a military man with a taste for fiery curry) and the ascent of a rice paper balloon into the sky. In late 1969 I began playing with percussionist Paul Burwell (detailed by Paul in his notes to the recordings included in this issue). During Paul’s subsequent studies at Ealing College, lecturer Christopher Small invited John Stevens, founder of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, to hold weekly improvisation workshops in one of the classrooms. Paul and I both attended regularly, and in May 1972, John invited the workshop band from these sessions to take part in an SME broadcast for BBC Radio Three. The work, for a group of 20 musicians including , , Paul Rutherford, Derek Bailey, Lou Gare and , was called Encompass. John Stevens died at the age of 54, in 1994. In the late 1960s he was looking for ways to communicate approaches to improvisation. His background was in jazz, but he had begun to listen to archaic ceremonial musics such as Japanese Gaguka and the fluid sonic and so- cial interactions of hunter-gatherer Pygmies from Central Africa. These ideas were formu- lated into exercises that encouraged a philosophy of listening. The liberating influence of free jazz was enormous, yet that musical movement seemed so closely aligned to a specifi- cally African-American struggle of identity and expression. John had initiated a departure

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780746 by guest on 30 September 2021 from the compositional models of Ornette Coleman, and George Russell with a less structured approach that had parallels, in my mind at least, with the theories of Gustav Metzger. Music had to be taken apart to make sense in new conditions. European post-war division and reconstruction was dramatic enough to demand its own musical identity. Improvisers still drew upon the high-energy fire music of ’s Ascension to produce fierce political statements such as Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun, recorded in 1968 at a moment of political turmoil, but a mineral-rich torrent of conflict- ing or complementary influences—John Cage, Zen, Confucianism, psychedelic drugs, minimalism and conceptualism, rock music, live electronics, sound poetry and mixed-me- dia performance, musical comedy, ethnomusicology, anarchism, new technologies, medi- tation, kinetic art, cybernetics, community theater—was flowing into late 1960s experi- mental music. Maintaining an integrity to any one genre seemed impossible and pointless. One of the most engaging questions of the time centered on a paradox: how could form be broken down completely, yet still remain coherent and identifiable as an expres- sion of group unity? The turbulent parallel histories of The People Band, the Spontane- ous Music Ensemble and the lay bare the ultimate implications of ask- ing the question in the first place. Implicitly, this was a social issue—how to live in communities in different ways; a political issue—how society as a whole might be restruc- tured; an aesthetic issue—could satisfying new musical forms emerge from co-operative dynamics? The boundaries of these issues were as blurred, however, as were the divisions between musical genres or art forms in general. Another collapsing boundary was the one that separated high art and pop. In England, this was one of the most clearly articulated representations of a meticulously differenti- ated class system. Jazz musicians tended to come from working-class backgrounds, and so were treated with the bare minimum of respect within the arts, education and media es- tablishment. The composers were invariably middle class, and although their position of privilege remained relatively intact, there was a feeling that their audience was slipping away from them. Attitudes to instrumental virtuosity and theorization were complex and covert in their deference to this hierarchy, and many groups working in experimental music began to challenge these attitudes. By the 1950s, with the aristocracy in decline and a surburbanized working class aspiring to home ownership and other middle-class values, class divisions were becoming less defined. Many of the musicians of my genera- tion who became involved in experimental music seemed to come from middle-class lib- eral homes or from parents whose roots were working class, yet who thought of them- selves as superior to what they perceived as a lumpen proletariat. In 1971 I taped a remarkable talk given by Cornelius Cardew for the weekly BBC Radio Three program, Music In Our Time. He used this opportunity to make an attack on the BBC and its contemptuous attitude to the new music of and , then concluded by performing Michael Chant’s Prayer, simply recording the scratching sounds of writing on a drum (regrettably, too expensive to license from the BBC, as was the SME broadcast mentioned above). As a lecturer in fine arts at Ports- mouth Art College, Gavin Bryars had been working with students on a conceptual piece, The Sinking of the Titanic, and an ensemble called The Portsmouth Sinfonia (again, regret- tably, no recordings were available for this compilation). The aim of the Sinfonia was to play popular classics to the best of each player’s ability. Since abilities were mixed, to say the least, the results were hilarious, although assumptions that repertoire workhorses like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were played for laughs were misguided. Everybody tried hard, even when lost beyond recall. In their very different ways, the Portsmouth Sinfonia and the Spontaneous Music En- semble workshop, also known as the Spontaneous Music Orchestra, mounted assaults on the authority of musical competence. What seemed to matter was playing with integrity to the intentions of the performance, or creating a strong group interaction, rather than demonstrating technical skill. This is true of many of the tracks collected for this compila- tion. Michael Parsons is explicit and typically humble about his limited ability on cello in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780746 by guest on 30 September 2021 the note written to clarify the circumstances of his duet with Howard Skempton on Piece For Cello and Accordion; is now celebrated as a leading virtuoso of the saxo- phone, yet in 1971, his duo with seemed intent on dismantling each particle of sound as it rose from the instruments. The elements of music were set on fire. Similarly, there is a striking contrast between Cornelius Cardew’s contribution to the harsh cries, strikes and sudden silences of AMM’s 1966 gig at the Royal College Of Art and his astonishingly fluent piano playing in the Chinese song performed with Jane Man- ning in 1974. According to the recordist of this latter piece, composer , Cardew was highly rated as a Bach interpreter during his student days. The virtuosity was displaced by listening skills during the Scratch Orchestra and AMM period, then returned as Cardew felt a pressing need to create music with a more popular appeal and defined political purpose. The more ambitious events of the time were amplifications of all these trends. I remem- ber the Wandelkonzert at the Goethe Institute in Kensington—Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars and his orchestra on the terrace at 9:15 P.M. if the weather was good (and I seem to remember it was); a group including , Bryn Harris and Michael Nyman playing the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” and Harry Champion’s Music Hall song, “Any Old Iron,” at 8:15; Intermodulation performing at the same time in a different room; Gentle Fire in the Main Hall at 9:05 and P.T.O. with , Chris- topher Hobbs, Hugh Shrapnell, Brian Dennis and Alec Hill squeezed into the library at 8:30. For the sprawling Art Spectrum at Alexandra Palace in north London, the Scratch Orchestra built a ramshackle house and garden where performances were given by Scratch members David and Diane Jackman and Private Company. The original edition of Michael Nyman’s book, Experimental Music (London: Studio Vista, 1974), shows a photo- graph of the house on its back cover. Something is going on in the garden involving clari- net and violin, while Paul Burwell is just visible at the bottom of the photograph, taking part in a completely unrelated performance by poet Carlyle Reedy’s Monkey Theatre. Musicians who would never have entered each other’s orbit found themselves sharing ideals, at least temporarily, or occupying the same stage. I played flute in two perfor- mances of Eddie Prévost’s composition, Spirals, in 1973. The other participants in a group of 37 players included John Stevens, , Frank Perry, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, Gavin Bryars, , John Farley, Michael Nyman, , and Michael Parsons. The personnel of The People Band or Portsmouth Sinfonia would throw up similarly unlikely juxtapositions. This willingness to abandon a fixed sense of place or identity within the cultural map is a legacy that remains with us today. If a single word were needed to sum up this period of English experimental music it would be “informal.” After all the rigorous, radical and exclusionist music theories that slugged it out during the twentieth century, English music allowed things to happen.

POSTSCRIPT Almost all of the tracks I have collected for the double CD that accompanies this edition of Leonardo Music Journal are previously unreleased. The few that have been issued before on record or cassette tape are now almost impossible to obtain. As far as I can tell, only Derek Bailey’s track is easily available on CD—on Solo Guitar Volume 1 (Incus CD 10)—and that is because archivists have been assiduous in finding, and releasing, every inch of Derek’s early tapes. As he put it, the barrel has been scraped. Of course, my selection misses many important musicians and composers, not because I disregard their work but because there are physical limits to these projects. I am grateful to LMJ for allowing me the luxury of two CDs, but it could have been far more. I am sorry that failed to discover any tapes of her early work and that could not locate his first tape experiment in his archives. Hopefully, they will turn up at some point. For their help in a labyrinthine journey lasting six months, I would like to thank all of the musicians who took the time to find and transfer old and precious tapes. The detec-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/09611210152780746 by guest on 30 September 2021 tive work of tracking people down, finding tapes or collating information was helped im- measurably by the following: Hugh Davies, Dave Smith, Simon Emmerson, Howard Skempton, John Tilbury, Trevor Taylor, Michael Parsons, Paul Wilson at the National Sound Archive, Martin Davidson and Louise Stevens. I would also like to thank Patricia Bentson at LMJ for her patience and encouragement and to Nicolas Collins for asking me to take this project on. At times it has seemed like a poisoned chalice, but in the end, I hope this has formed itself into a valuable record (in all senses) of a previously poorly documented yet endlessly fascinating era in twentieth-century musical history.

DAVID TOOP LMJ11 CD Curator 7 Topsfield Road London E-mail:

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