many joys to pass on from today; first, a mini-blog from Nina Whiteman, who'll be joining us from Saturday evening for the 2nd week of the installation:
**** I'll be joining the project tomorrow for the final week and I'm interested in exploring traces of the activity of the two collaborators who are departing as I arrive. These traces might be sound recordings, fragments of scores, found or created objects... I will also be thinking about creating auto-destructive work that will break down or disintegrate over time, and about the local fishing industry and the objects and rituals associated with it. Nina Whiteman (composer/voice) **** Then a super-packed day: a coastal walk, a big push on the making side of things (with Sarah & Gary departing Sunday morning, they are deeply into getting as much creative activity done as they can); this followed by an afternoon with some really engaged Tate Members & both an afternoon & evening performance (including live painting by Clare Wardman to sound by the musicians). Our audiences have been a real pleasure - curious, engaged, discursive. We share some of their photos in the post following this, but first a piece of writing from one audience member, Rod Griffiths, who puts into a few words a lot about what we're trying to do: Trace What is a trace? A slight thing, a remnant, a copy made on tracing paper? Or reins to hold horses together, cutting those traces, lets the horses run free. Are all these the same thing? Is there a deeper meaning, a common thread of shared understanding? Tracing can be a process, following something that came before, like a detective. Beneath that following there may be finding; revealing lineage, events, history; traced, or perhaps gone — without trace. Traces matter, they hold us together, reveal a shared history; cut those traces and will we be free or will we be lost? Rod Griffiths a packed day today - our own work is accelerating, proliferating, interpolating; spaces are evolving, becoming richer whilst still leaving possibilities for next steps: but for a big chunk of the day, including the performance, we were joined by some great art folks from Falmouth University: Bianca Cocco, Rosie Goss, Rusne Stankeviciute & Jane Birbeck joined us to explore the themes of the installation & make work for us to perform. It was a real pleasure for us to have them in, & the results can be seen below, & heard in the recordings here, here & here. Special bonus coffee audio courtesy of Mr. Farr here. the day (or night in fact) was polished off with a fantastic trip to FRUG, an informal open performance evening for local poets & musicians helmed by the legendary Bob Devereux. We enjoyed great readings+music by Bob & guitarist Adrian, plus poetry by Evelyn Holloway, guitar blues from Mr. Moon & piano blues by Jack. We had the pleasure of both presenting our own sounds, & performing with Bob (along with Adrian & Jack), & enjoyed hearing a different side of Gary as he stepped across into the blues for Mr. Moon. A really grand way to end the day & our thanks to all & to Phil for getting us along in the first place. Our previous performances have been several shorter improvisations; today, we explored a full 30min session. The entire performance will be posted later in the month as part of a general uploading of larger size materials from this installation, but 4 excerpts can be heard here, here, here & here.
Plus a bonus extra of Sarah & Rachel testing an approach (with added canine improvisation) On Sunday, my first full day here in St Ives, I got to work on a composition I had been planning which involved listening to the sea and writing down the ‘sound traces’ as musical notation. By the end of Sunday, the piece was finished. This didn’t seem right to me. A few years ago, I would have spent hours agonising over the layout of the score, how the notation should look, whether all of these things ‘looked’ how I wanted the piece to sound. Finishing a piece in a day and being happy with it was too easy. I realised that these kinds of open-scores had become my comfort zone...and in my comfort zone, my works can become repetitive and less creative. So it was lucky to be working on this project, where I can step out of my comfort zone in many different ways. On Tuesday, I started on something as far out of my comfort zone as I could - hanging objects from the beams, a 3D work rather than pencil and paper. As my interest for this project is the traces people leave, I found items left behind on the beach, including a glow stick, a bit of frisbee and the sole of a shoe. Although the majority of these things are recognisable (because they had been left that day and had not yet been in the sea), some of the things I found had been eroded so much that I could not tell for sure what they had been. Even the objects that were recognisable were incomplete (the glow stick being the most intact). When I returned to the earlier composition, considering how I could include it in the installation, I was still contemplating these objects, wondering if I could incorporate an aspect of them into the presentation of this score. And so I began experimenting with eroding the notation. I will be leaving these score traces around the installation in Studio 10, like debris washed on to the shore.
Rachel additional photos from Wednesday: our first proper day getting stuck into making the installation, working across both spaces, & also performing in both; here's a taste of what's been happening:
explorations of drift, plastics, shoaling, erosion & accretion, found sounds, seaweed scores, sand music, mapping, inking, found charcoal, template shadowing, & more. performances included acoustic instruments only, found sound & electronics with minimal instruments . excerpts can be heard here, here & here, & here. a few preliminary traces from Studio 10: Most of today was directed towards our workshop with a great Y6 class (the Brill class) from Newlyn, who explored Porthmeor Studio's active fishermen's net lofts (with many thanks to the fishermen of Porthmeor & shore captain Bish) & the flotsam of the beach, before making some great art & sound: Having waved goodbye to the Newlyn School pupils, we then had a few minutes t reorientate for our first public performance, for which we decamped down to Cellar 4. Gary, intrepid trumpeter, explored the dark of the pilchard brining tank, with the rest of us (violin, viola, flute, electronics & art-making/found sounds) above deck, to play 3 short sonic explorations for our audience. Our artist Clare produced ink-print drawings responding to our sound, which we in turn treated as scores, & also became a musician , investigating the performative possibilities of objects - in this case cling-film & a plastic bag (readiest items to hand). 3 short excerpts here, here & here. Excepts will be posted each blog, with full performance files & more coming post-installation. Tomorrow: our first full day gathering & making for the installation proper. Gavin a day mostly spent working to prepare for our first official action of the installation - a workshop for Y5 pupils of Newlyn School on Monday morning (to be followed almost immediately by our first informal performance) - attempts to trace possibilities of what might happen; time though for a few other found moments to register their marks:
Something I am really looking forward to in this project is visiting a place that is completely new to me and experiencing it with the perspective that what we create while we’re here will be informed by the location itself, so it will be a very pure immersion.
I have started to consider some of the guiding principles of psychogeography and how they can be applied here. Although usually in reference to urban landscape, the intention to ‘unify two different factors: the soft ambiance — light, sound, time, the association of ideas — with the hard, the actual physical constructions’ strikes me as being incredibly relevant. In Guy Debord’s 1958 ‘Theory of the Dérive’ he writes: ‘In a dérive [drift] one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…’ Apps now exist to track a dérive/drift and I shall experiment with them and post any interesting findings! Another aspect of psychogeography is learning about a building’s back story, its uses, to get a sense of its identity and its place in its immediate surroundings. Our Porthmeor studio and cellar was once used by fishermen for storing and sorting pilchard so searching for traces of its past will be intriguing. Then from a performer’s point of view, comes the alchemy of turning what I find while drifting into my own output. There will be space -both physical, in time, and in approach, to experiment in creating textures with the material of my fellow collaborators. I will take the sounds that leap out at me and explore them on the trumpet (soft ambiance) and experiment with physical interaction (hard, physical constructions) with meaningful elements: shells, nets, wood, metal, etc. These ingredients can also be used to create graphic scores, authentic tableaux that reflect the location in a microcosm. We’ll see what drifts our way.. Gary & here we are - after a long gestation, Sarah, Rachel & I arrived late afternoon in St Ives, with Gary joining us tomorrow night, & a convening with Clare at the Studios in the morning. The themes of our stay were making themselves present even during the day's journey: past Exeter, wrecks were visible in the estuary, half-submerged & corroded; sandbanks traced lines, barely breaking the surface, & parts of the coast were lined with fog. Tracks of birds sunk into estuary mud, mirrored later in gulls' tracks in the Porthmeor beach sand. Passing into Cornwall, the remnants of the mining industry are a presence against the skyline. Evening traces: prints of humans, birds & other animals on the beach; mounds of sand from the day's play; smells & smoke of barbecues passing over stubs of charcoal from other days. Distant laughter from farther down the beach; distant music. Later: sunset, the sun a glittering line, a golden finger tracking across the sea. Hidden rocks reveal their presence in eddies on the surface, & other rocks create wide-spreading circular ripples that pattern against a fractal stack of other wave motions. An absence - few juvenile gulls yet, so a sound is missing for those normally visiting later in the summer. Speck-scatter of gulls on the ocean. Residual cloud fire. Bat-flicker. Tomorrow, a first look around the Studio & Cellar for many of us; & preparations for our first workshop on Monday morning, & our first performance Monday afternoon. Gavin |
time-trace-place
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