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Not Necessarily Captured, Except As a Fleeting Glance

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Not Necessarily Captured, Except As a Fleeting Glance 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 jazz, free rock, tape music, experimental and revolutionary composition, sound sculpture, sound poetry, minimalism and a few pieces that refuse to confine themselves even to these unruly categories in order to explore the outer limits of free folk blues, symbolic table tennis, and similar improbabilities. Archiving is a strange activity. During a telephone conversation between Derek Bailey 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 experimental music dates from 1960: Daphne Oram’s remarkable tape piece entitled Four Aspects; the latest pieces were recorded in 1977: Hugh Davies’s improvisation for amplified springs and Michael Nyman’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 Though Daphne Oram is still alive at the time of writing she is no longer active and the complete account of her fascinating life has yet to be told.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 Ornette Coleman 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 London 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 free jazz 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 tenor saxophone and a guitar. AMM—during that period Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, Cornelius Cardew, Lou Gare 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- © 2001 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 11, pp. 89–94, 2001 89 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 Albert Ayler, and the line that could be drawn from J.S. Bach to John Cage, 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 Pink Floyd, 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 London Free School, 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 Bob Cobbing, a sound poet who managed Better Books 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 Piano 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 Dada, 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 Jeff Nuttall called “bomb culture”) 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 England 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 John Stevens, 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- 90 LMJ11 CD Companion Introduction 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.
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