W riting by Ed Baxter Clive Bell Paul Burwell Sylvia Hallett Maggie Nicols Annabel Nicolson Robin Ramsay Richard Sanderson Richard Scott - and many more

+ double CD featuring David Toop Ground-Zero Bing Selfish Hugh Davies ISSN 1352-772X Steve Beresford Peter Cusack Mummy 977135277299007 Alterations Paul Burwell Sylvia Hallett Al Dente Toshimaru Nakamura 9 771352 772990 Steve Noble Chris Newman and many more ances. O ne night I turned up and poked Maggie telling a story about a dancing my nose in to see what was happening and My favourite LMC moment female slug in the candlelight and going was lured in by a man playing serene C A R O L I N E K R A A B E L completely beyond improvisation into a meditational music by applying a piece of sort of egoless free association that held expanded polystyrene to a rotating glass the listeners embarrassed and enthralled, table [B a rry Leigh]. Max Eastley’s long almost frightened. bowed instruments and mechanical opera Keiji Haino’s acoustic percussion solo at characters were as amazing to see as to one LMC festival. Haco’s microphone hear. I remember a performance by what feedback in a teapot - along with Charles may or may not have been the Bow Hayward’s Doppler on a cheap cassette Gamelan, where Paul Burwell and a machine, the only LMC performance I’ve woman coated each other in gloss paint - personally witnessed that really dealt in any having found it hard enough to clean my way with the BASIC paradoxes of own body o f a coat o f acrylic after an electricity and music. LMC do, I wondered how they ever got Charlemagne Palestine condensing the clean. air in the Purcell Room into ever thicker Annoyed at times with Collective cross currents of vibrations from the politics I wandered away and then acoustic piano: the extraordinary moment returned. Because the space was cheap to when the piano strings broke and whisked hire it was som ew here w here my friends those currents - made us hear the identity and I could risk new ventures and not between string shape and sound wave. need to recoup a lot of money on the A ll of Resonance FM, but particularly door. As such it was a space that saw me being called by the radio authority to wander a strange musical path from rem ove S te w a rt H om es’s uptight, self- industrial noise to solo improvised vocal serving smug obscenities from the air and performance and storytelling to breathing a sigh of relief... and hearing the (incompetent?) avant-garde folkie. An A DUO BETWEEN SYLVIA HALLETT AND sound of my own heartbeat, broadcast event that sums up what the place could Sainkho Namchylak, using both voices plus live... and getting to listen to be for me was a Door And The Window violin - unearthly purity and blending of play solo from right close up. gig in 1980 or 8 1. A t the time there were tone, glissandi. And finally the pleasure of Ed Baxter’s 3 of us in the band. We organised an Maggie Nicols’s solo at the end of a gig readings from his uninhibited letters to evening w here T D A T W played, and as with Lindsay Cooper (pictured) and the various arts funding bureaucrats! support acts the three of us each formed French accordionist Michelle Buirette: CAROLINE KRAABEL another band. Mark Perry played avant rock with members of the Transmitters, I Paul Lytton, Max Eastley and the late Stuart formed a trio w ho im provised a mini My favourite LMC moment Marshall. Italian composer Albert Mayr opera based on Samuel Beckett’s That DAVID TOOP was out on the streets of Camden, Time’, and Nag played odd pop songs with persuading passers-by to broadcast their Giblet (the man behind the glorious 49 feelings about the sound environment. Americans) and David Toop. Memorably, his interaction with the British After everyone had run across to the sensibility ended thus: MAN: ‘Eh... th’ Engineer to refill their beer glasses state’s paying millions of pounds out to TDATW played. The last song was called people like you... why don’t you fuck off!’ ‘Swinger’, and we had a minimally planned CRUNCH (tape recorder thrown to the structure around which to improvise. Nag ground at this point and broken). Others extemporised what turned out to be a had happier experiences. Camden Canal very long list: ‘Everyone joined the LMC buzzed with activity, including that year... Except fo r A lb e rt Camus... playing saxophone from behind bushes, Everyone joined the LMC that year... Steve Beresford playing euphonium from a including Igor... oh w hat a year that was... rowboat and Stuart Marshall sounding the Everyone joined the LMC... ‘ echoes of resonant bridges with fog horns. Because of the number of different Primrose Hill resonated with Whirled people who had been playing that night Music, and Parliament Hill hummed with there were a number of spare M y favourite LM C m o m en t lasted fo r a the sound of Max Eastley’s aeolian harps. instruments around. I saw David Toop in week. It was the Music/Context Festival O f The climax to the week was Circadian the audience strid e fo rw ard w ith a Environmental Music that I organised in Rhythm, a 24 hour concert convened by determined expression, pick up, plug in a August 1978. Paul Burw ell and I had taken Evan Parker. As it turned out, we couldn’t guitar and join in. G radually others joined part in a festival of environmental music in manage the full 24, though Lol Coxhill in, until most of the audience had becom e Milan and I felt that the LMC was an ideal woke up at one point and swore that in his the band. centre for this kind of work, ranging across hypnagogic state he saw an angel. That in Those who hadn’t been drawn in improvisation, sound art, musical activism, itself seemed to justify the state paying headed off fo r last busses and tubes instrument invention, musical ecology and millions of pounds (a few hundred was finally leaving a hard co re o f about discussions. The participants included Alvin closer to the mark) to people like us. G3 twenty people in a long jam: ‘Everyone Curran, Frank Perry, Feminist Improvising D A V ID T O O P joined the LM C th at year, oh w h at a year Group, Lol Coxhill, Michael Parsons that was.. m (pictured), Albert Mayr, Hugh Davies, John BENDLE Latham, Annabel Nicolson, Paul Lovens,