'SILENCE'/ GNOD/ THE NECKS (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES CONTD.)

‘SILENCE’
Black Rock, Brighton, Fri 24th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

Teatre Biuro Podrozy (aka Travel Agency Theatre) is an alternative theatre company, operating from Poland since 1988. The publicity reminded me of those Nineties-era performance outfits that came out of squat culture, such as the Mutoid Waste Company or the Dogs of Heaven, some hallucinogenic blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Mad Max set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Yet squat culture was essentially extinguished by Britain, by the simple if brutal expedient of extinguishing squatting. But the Mutoids themselves left the UK for less oppressive climes, so perhaps all that survived elsewhere…

This outdoor performance was described by the progamme as concerning “the continuing story of refugees and migrants caught up in a spiral of war and the dream of escape”. They specified this was in relation to the Middle East, but I was soon wondering whether that was being filtered through a Polish experience of history, a country in Sylvia Plath’s phrase “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.

The fiery wheel from the publicity image soon appears and becomes a defining metaphor for what followed, as settlers were plagued by successive waves of marauders. The first batch (seen in the illo) look Medievalist, but are soon replaced by a more modern army - as if we’re watching history on fast forward. While the settlers inhabit the stage the marauders often raise themselves off the ground, through stilts or wheels.

The performance well employs the physicality of the theatre. We’re well used to upsetting images shown via a screen, to the point they don’t upset us any more. Whereas you have quite a different reaction when the smell of real fire reaches your nostrils.

But the circularity of the fiery wheel, while driving force, also become a confine. It’s a short show, less than an hour. But to escape repetition each iteration has to add new props. Which at times make it one of those theatre shows where everything is doubtless symbolic of something or other. (Those metal poles, presented by the marauders as if a gift? Not a bleedin’ clue, mate.) Not performed with direct sound, the show had to be highly choreographed, which might well have added to this ritualised sense.

But there was an effective ending, largely through presenting so seemingly prosaic an image. The settlers, presumably realising their only choice has become to flee, made paper boats. A Council worker in high-vis then ambled on to hose the stage down. It’s an open note to end on. Was this the boats finding a tide so they might set sail, or just being washed away like street litter? Something no refugee can know before they start their journey.

It has not, to be honest, been a great Brighton Festival. I found there was less I wanted to see than normal, and from my admittedly limited perspective general attendance seemed down. It’s not that stuff was bad, so much as promising but with promises that were continually not fully fulfilled, the cumulative effect of which is frustrating.



GNOD
Patterns, Brighton, Sat 25th May

Gnod are a band I’ve meant to catch live long before now. But somehow events have conspired against me, and things got to their thirteenth year before it happened.

The gig starts with the double drummers predominant, pounding a circular motif around which the rest of the band arrange themselves, almost like the Butthole Surfers. But the combined force of three… yes, three guitars soon kicks in in earnest. Gnod are, it would be quite hard to miss, a heavy riffing band. Their riffs are powerful and yet unpropulsive. They effectively hang in the air. They’re not just heavy, they’re dark and viscous. Tracks don’t progress so much as thicken.

There are vocal sections, but they don’t really seem the point of the exercise. The music itself does the talking. The set runs all the tracks together, joining them by patches of feedback, which adds to the overpowering sense. The set seems a single thing, a black monolith.

Though at times they lay on repetition to insanity and beyond, just like Sabbath back in the day they’re able to throw in unexpected changes. Guitars gang up in the onslaught but can turn against one another, less counterpoint than counter-forces in grinding tectonic plates of sound. It feels entirely unpredictable at the same time it feels unescapable.

Getting all carried away in the heady atmosphere, I came to see the set as like falling into the power of underworld demons, being smashed into pieces then reassembled in a different order. And, reading a few online reviews, I don’t seem the only one to go in for such fancy talk.

They have a (kind of) religious name. But perhaps more importantly like Swans, who they to some degree resemble, their music isn’t just powerful but overpowering, essentially oppressive. Yet, like Swans, people often talk of it in quite spiritual terms. It’s like the act of surrendering to its onslaught is in itself quite blissfull, as you trust it to take you where you need to be.

Nigh-on thirty minutes of earshred from London the following night…



Then after something that could scarcely be any more of a Saturday let-rip, along came Sunday and...

THE NECKS
St. Luke’s Church, Brighton, Sun 26th May

If I’d not had the pleasure of knowing Gnod before now, in happier news I’ve managed to catch the Necks numerous times, stretching back to Lucid Frenzy’s Ye Olde Print Days. (Even if I missed the last show.) They come self-described as “one of the great cult bands of Australia. Not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz, the music of The Necks is possibly unique.” As ever the trio provided two long, improvised pieces separated by an interval.

The first was perhaps the classic Necks experience, slow to find its way but progressing like a trickling stream with soon becomes a surging torrent. Lloyd Swanton’s hands on his double bass neck proved almost a timeline for the piece, initially providing brief snaps on the upper neck, slowly migrating down before finally starting with the bowing. Much of Chris Abraham’s piano was quite Minimalist in nature, short phrases played circularly.

Yet, however good it is to hear more Necks, the second piece was more unique and so the one which really made the night. It got going much more quickly, with Swanton bowing from the start. Abrahams played longer, more rolling melodic passages while Tony Buck largely kept to percussion. Combined with Swanton’s slow, measured bowing the effect was mesmerising.

Despite originating in Jazz, surely one of the more urban music forms, and in Sydney, not the smallest of towns, nature analogies do seem to lend themselves to the Necks. Partly to do with their unhurried pacing, partly to do with their music having a kind of understated might.

And the very last sighting, in fact, I was comparing their sound to wide open spaces. Which well matched the first section of this second number. But like a river the Necks can take strange curves. And from there it grew sharper and tighter, like a panorama shot across rolling hillsides which then shifts into close focus. (And if that seems a curveball, wait until you hear what happens mid-way through their latest DC, ’Body.’
There are several bands who could be said to match John Peel’s description “always different, always the same”. But the Necks must be prime among them.

A nigh-on seven minute excerpt, a mere smidgen of a track in Necksland…



… plus the trio in fine form in their home town. Forty-plus minutes duration, but worth staying for…

Coming soon! Blog hols...

FORT PROCESS/ HUGO TICCIATI'S 'LOOPING TIME' (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

FORT PROCESS
Newhaven Fort, Sat 22nd Sept



So happily, perhaps the only music and sound art festival to be held in a Napoleonic fort got a sequel. (Actually a second sequel, alas I gormlessly missed the first occurrence.) Again it promised to “cover the cornerstones of improv, experiments, dance and noise”. With multiple events going on simultaneously, I can only concentrate on a few highlights here. Someone else’s path might not have crossed mine at all.



Most accounts I read from the last event focused on how brilliantly inappropriate it was for such an event to take over a venue based around war defences. Perhaps “make weirdo music not war” could be its slogan. But as I watched a sound installation emit spectral bleeping from the fort’s ramparts(‘Arpeggi’ by Mike Blow, handily pictured) I think I find it more splendidly appropriate.

Perhaps I just spent too much of my seventies youth watching ’Doctor Who’ and the like. But those were the days when budgets for location shooting stretched no further than Surrey, while the Radiophonic Workshop was at the show’s disposal. So the alien was often conceived of as a sonic aesthetic, strange sounds that required decoding. While the military provided the role of controlling parents, locking the weird away from us, causing us to seek it out. (Perhaps significantly, another of Blow’s installations, ’Arpeggi’, “uses hacked ex-military hardware to create music.”)



Many installations worked interactively, as what Blow called “automatic music”, collaborating with either the audience or the venue. In Adam Bastana’s ’A Room Listening To Itself’ (also handily pictured) microphones were arranged radially, to pick up from speakers. To add some audience involvement I lightly tapped one speaker, to hear a drum roll slowly spread round the room.

At other times it was the other way, the venue seemed to interpret the work for you. The sub lows of Disinformation’s ’National Grid’ were smartly located in the deep Caponier tunnels. So, while the indicia spoke of links between the grid network and the human body, I thought more of the echoes and resonances in caves which are supposed to have stimulated the first human music.

Maria Marzaioli’s ’PWM’ used four audio loops culled from improvisations. With each loop of a different length, new combinations were constantly being created. But, particularly with the use of recognisable instruments, it was almost impossible not to listen to as a ‘real’ quartet. This time the work may have influenced the setting. For I found the sound bleed (particularly between the indoor works), not distracting but enhancing of the overall effect - as if the whole festival became one meta sound art work.

The programme described Ore as the “originator of the truly singular genre Tuba Doom”. Ah, those genre tags always start off as a gag! But give it six months and at a gig you’ll run into some bozo insisting he was into Tuba Doom before anyone else. In fact, he will probably turn out to be me.

Wandering, soaking stuff up, I stumbled upon their set mid-way. A tuba and trombone player were working just slightly out of time with one another, creating an enticingly ‘bent’ effect. Already pretty minimal, that actually proved the dynamic centre of the piece as they shifted into unison for the finale. It seemed forever half-emerging out of drone, as if something shifting into view. Minimalist in the Morton Feldman sense, where the sombre meets with the serene. If music like this doesn’t progress much, it’s because it marinades. Like a fermenting spirit its taste becomes stronger and stronger.

Franco-Finnish trio Ritual Extra were similarly minimal, in fact so slow to start you wondered if they’d resolved to play only for the super-patient. (Compared to these guys, the Necks plunge straight into the deep end.) Luckily, the wait was worth it. The drummer struck his cymbals softly but so rapidly as to produce a shimmering tone. While an acoustic guitar took up a more percussive role, strumming and thwacking, as clear-voiced folk chanting sailed across the both of them.

The absolute absence of any performance element was striking, each person’s movements economically concerned only with playing. The singer sat stock still, gazing into the middle distance, shifting only his mouth.

Alas this time I missed the ending, heading off as I was to see Rhys Chatham. Who marks a different strand of Minimalism again. Having previously worked with La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Glenn Branca, tonight he was playing alongside only himself. In ’Pythagorean Dreams’, he’d switch between guitar, flute and some kind of mini-trumpet, looping down layers of himself as he went. The effect was rather like that game where you keep placing one hand atop another, ceaselessly giving off the effect of building up to some crescendo. Minimalist and musically rich at one and the same time.

I romantically imagined each loop had some in-built half-life, so nothing decayed away but each new element added to the expanding richness of the underlying sonic loam. He was probably just fading them down himself as he went, but that’s what I liked to think.



I’d watched some vidclips of AJA (above) before the day, which at the time I dismissed as “just a performance”. And true, her noise electronica is serviceable but bog-standard beat-bashing. (Certainly nothing to compare with Ewa Justka’s merciless intensity from the last event.) But, when you see it live, you can only conclude - what a performance! This time rather than work with the setting her act burst beyond its confines. Despite playing in a small and crowded room, lacking even the most basic stage, she came on as if she had Iggy Pop in her blood.

Noise music is notoriously for being ‘manpainy’. Think of the characteristic hunched pose under hoodie and over microphone. By way of cheery contrast, AJA sports - and fully inhabits - the most outrageously flamboyant costumes, from which she engages fully with the audience. After Tuba Doom perhaps we’ve hit on another new genre - Glam Noise.

In may day, women would often tell each other the expression “nothing better than having a good cry”. Yet of course there’s something better, and her whole act seems intent on proving the inherent value in having a good scream. So, despite all the volume, or more likely because of it, it’s a wholly uplifting experience to witness. The programme described her act as “cathartic”, not a word they were using in vain. And in this day and age, it’s often appealing to discover something where you do have to be there, which isn’t YouTubeable.

Overall Fort Process is one of those labours of love and (the right kind of) lunacy, put on by afficionados for afficionados, just to see the thing happen. It’s proof corporate crap hasn’t colonised the whole of our lives just yet.

Photo of AJA from the event’s website, other snaps mine. More where they came from here.

Some proper photos from Agata Urbaniak here

Last time I managed to post a video of the previous event. So let’s keep that tradition up…



‘LOOPING TIME’ BY HUGO TICCIATI + O/MODERNT CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Kings Place, London, Fri 21st Sept



This concert, part of the Time Unwrapped season, focused on string-based Minimalist music.

‘Shaker Loops’ (1978) , while an early work of John Adams’, is regarded as something of a classic, and rightly so. It contains many Minimalist elements, including a basis in a pulsing beat and an ability to keep things simple. In the second movement, a double bass plucks at a solitary string at regular intervals.

Yet, perhaps in retrospect, it’s easy to hear how he was already moving into Post-Minimalism. An earlier version in Adams’ own words “crashed and burned”, partly because it restricted itself to a string quartet. Adams responded by ramping up the number of players, first to a septet and (as performed here) a full string orchestra - “thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power.”

But rather than Post-Minimalist it should be thought of as Just Romantic Enough. The reference to the Shakers, a religious group from the American Pioneer days, already gives the music more of specificity than normally found in Minimalism. What amounts to a violin solo appears midway. It very much builds to a climax, even though it continues from there and ends somewhere much closer to the beginning.

And what could be more Romantic than imitation of nature? Adams has said himself the first movement in particular was inspired by the rippling of water, the surface refracting the sunlight caught by those amassed shimmering strings.

But ultimately, as is typical of him, Adams makes the unlikely combination virtuous. Much like nature, the piece belies our constructed notions of what’s simple and what’s complex and involved.

Angel’s Share by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, was a UK premiere. As anyone who’s seen the Ken Loach film knows, the title refers to the amount of whiskey which evaporates during distilling.

The piece is full of ideas, and has some great sections. It opens etherially, with the violins and violas creating the most disembodied sounds. Quite late on, it suddenly breaks out into a folk dance rhythm. Yet overall it didn’t hold together. I found it kept slowly losing my interest, then doing something to suddenly grab it back, only to lose it again a short while later.

While the other three composers were still with us, Perotin’s ’Viderunt Omnes’ stems from the Twelfth Century. The ensemble entered from all four corners of the auditorium already playing, and segued surprisingly neatly into Philip Glass’s Third Symphony.

Symphonies may be antithetical to the strictures of high Minimalism, and indeed Glass didn’t embark on any until the Nineties when he was already leaving that behind. (This was composed in 1995.) It does make a good companion piece to ’Shaker Loops’, there’s even a violin lead in the third movement. (The programme uses Classical terms, such as “chaconne”, which I don’t claim to understand.)

But it remains a blend rather than a break, Glass finding a sweet spot where Minimalist mantras combine with rich and resonant melodies. And the Minimalist spirit may be retained most in it’s unhurried pace, creating something stately without any pomp.

ELIZA CARTHY & THE WAYWARD BAND/ STOCKHAUSEN: ‘TRANS’ (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

ELIZA CARTHY + THE WAYWARD BAND
St. George’s Church, Brighton, Fri 8th Dec

After a slightly mixed response to last seeing Eliza Carthy, I was in two minds over seeing this show. Then more recently, when seeing her in a duo with her father Martin, she thrust a flyer into my hand. While saying “I do hope you can come. My father and I never miss an update of your most splendid blog.” I have, I suspect, made some of that up. But it was still enough to make me go.

It was as different to the duo as grand is to intimate. With Martin, the times the two played together you were abundantly aware the sound was doubling up. While the Wayward Band number twelve, with two … count ‘em!, two accordion players. They line up on the back photo of the CD like the amassed servants of some old country house.

They pile into reels, jigs and shanties, lurching and careering to the point you expect the stage to start tipping. But alongside folk they draw on that other pre-rock music tradition. They can sound like a big band pounding out show tunes, even sporting that most un-folk possession a horn section. Their version of ’The Fitter’s Song’ must be the most big band an Ewan McCall song’s ever sounded. Though they wring musical variety from the multi-lineup, and ’Hug You Like A Mountain’ is as plaintive as any folk song you’ve heard.

It becomes a virtuous combination. You get the oomph and pizazz of the big band, but it never evens out the unruly raggedness of folk. Perhaps partly because the big band stuff veers to the more raucous, less refined end of the spectrum. In perhaps my most lowbrow comparison of all time, I was more than once reminded of ’The Stripper’.

It doesn’t sound much like Tom Waits, but has the same ability to punch out thumping beats or serve up killer tines while still coming from left field. The Wayward Band, I suppose I am trying to say, are wayward and band-like.

Official BBC sessions! (No shonky i-phone footage)...



STOCKHAUSEN: ‘TRANS’
Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London, Wed 6th Dec

Stockhausen seems to have had something of a penchant for formal structures, with opening piece ’Zodiac’ divided into a series of mini-compositions representing each star sign. This unfortunately gave it a bittiness, and overall it became something of a B feature. The programme explained it was originally written for music boxes, back in ‘74, and only much later reworked for orchestra. (So much later that there’s only ten movements, him dying before he could complete them.) And perhaps it worked better in that original format.

Anyone foolish enough to follow my infrequent forays into contemporary music will be aware I’m a know-nothing on music theory I just jump straight to the more subjective question of how hearing it makes me feel. Happily, then, that would seem about the best approach to ’Trans’ (1971).

A central conceit is that many of the musicians are hidden. You see the amassed string players, holding a tone not much more than a drone, while the brass are invisible to you. The rock music equivalent would be spotlighting the bass player while the singer and lead guitarist still do their stuff. Like a twist on a film, ideally you wouldn’t know that in advance. But even when you do, you cannot help but keep trying to reconcile what you see with what you hear. And that, somewhere between an interchange and a mismatch, seems where the work is set. The brass would rise above the strings but never quite break away from them, as if unable to finish what it built.

In a piece inspired by a dream, the string tone is reminiscent of the high-pitched whine films often employ to signify dream states. But also, with the many players repeating the same single movement like automata, it became like one of those fairy stories where the people of a land are placed in a bewitched stupor.

To which is added the regularly repeating thud of a loom. In a neat piece of sound design, while all the music comes from the stage this seems to break in from outside. To me it became the voice of the spell they were under, not any commanding individual but the crack of the whip made animate.

Individual players would break away at intervals, like a child playing up in class. They’d be looked upon uncomprehendingly by the blank-faced others, before resignedly falling back in line. It was suggested in the programme this was in part a parody of the workaday world of professional orchestras. Indeed, one player brought sheet music suddenly burst into a flurry of expressive playing, only to stop suddenly as the music stand was snatched away from him again.

In a piece set in a world between, it seems significant and appealing there’s no way to label the piece. The visual elements and sound design are significant enough that merely listening would not give you the full picture. The programme calls it “as much a piece of theatre as… a musical composition”, which doesn’t sound quite right. Instead imagine an installation work which is fixed in duration.

...which makes four Stockhausen pieces in recent weeks, of which three were not only extremely inventive but highly distinct, almost entirely different to one another. What little Stockhausen I’ve heard has suggested to me it runs the full gamut, from sublime to unlistenable. But there’s treasures in there, it seems.

Coming soon! Something other than gig-going adventures...

‘ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’

Tate Modern, London

Another in a long and noble series of art exhibitions reviewed after they close

”A picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”
- Rauschenberg

The Start Was Anti-Art

Robert Rauschenberg is an artist who can be hard to place. Arriving in New York in the Fifties - after, and in vivid contrast to, Abstract Expressionism - he’s often associated with it’s successor Pop Art. And he can seem to match Pop’s philosophy, as expressed in my recent review of the Academy’s Abstract Expressionism show: “You didn’t make art by contemplating the depths of your soul, but by taking surface features of the world around you and recombining them.”

And this is emphasised by his bold use of colour. Eschewing any intricate tonal qualities he usually picks the bright primary and secondary colours a child would choose – bright reds, full blacks and whites, bold greens, solid oranges.

Yet Pop, particularly American Pop, is cool, neat, smooth – and ultimately detached. Warhol’s silkscreens are like the mass produced products lined up neatly in a shop window, whereas Rauschenberg’s paint-spattered assemblages resemble the broken-down stuff slung out the back. A look normally achieved by his making art from objects thrown out in the trash. (Notably, though the Tate’s mailing called him “a Pop Art pioneer”, the show itself stays away from the term.)

Certainly, this singularity is part of his appeal. He was not just a contemporary to Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly but had romantic relationships with both. Yet neither of those artists appeals much to me. But he’s not quite the one-off he appears. And in fact the start of this show does much to reveal his secret origin. His roots lay in what, at least in my mind, was the most important Modernist movement of them all. In a word, it’s Dada.

In 1947 he enrolled in Black Mountain College, described in the indicia with rather English understatement as “an unconventional institution”. With John Cage and Merce Cunningham as tutors, it was effectively Hogwarts for anti-artists. (It even has that numinous Lynchian name, making it seem still more the stuff of fable.) And, like a story which began in legend even then, Cage and Cunningham, were themselves disciples of Marcel Duchamp. (Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg all featured in the Barbican’s ‘Bride and the Bachelors’ exhibition of 2013, on Duchamp and his successors).

Much of this early work is conceptual in nature, even if the term doesn’t come up. It doesn’t matter much what for example ’Black Painting’ (1951, above) looks like. It’s more the fact that he painted it. It’s the size of a vast Ab Ex work. But unlike, say, Barnett Newman’s smooth surfaces it’s rough and uneven, made of scrumpled newspaper soaked in black enamel.

Two things to note: though Rauschenberg was officially a student of Cage and Cunningham’s, it seems they soon embarked on collaborations. And the fairly self explanatory ’White Painting’ (1951) is believed to have been an influence on Cage’s ‘silent composition’ ’4’33’’’ (1952). Plus the provocative refutation of Ab Ex sometimes seems openly intentional. ’Automobile Tyre Print’ (1953) was made from tyre tracks as Cage drove over lined-up pieces of paper. It seems a wilful parody of the Ab Ex notion that artworks were about capturing the gesture made by the artist.

More notorious was ’Erased De Kooning Drawing’ (1953) in which he… well, the title gives the punch line away. This could be seen as an antagonistic gesture, literally rubbing out the opposition, as a Dada prizing of negativity over creativity, plus a Modernist desire to be forever in the moment and starting from scratch. (Though the history of the piece is strangely complex. De Kooning had given him the drawing, precisely for that purpose, but later objected to the exercise being publicised.)

But possibly more important for his subsequent development are the Personal Boxes and Elemental Sculptures. (See for example, ’Untitled’, 1952, above). These were made from found materials, a practice Rauschenberg cheerily admitted was due to his straightened financial circumstances at the time. (On moving to New York in 1949, he subsided in a condemned building with no hot water.) But what’s significant is his uninterest in disguising their origins or even their weatherbeaten appearances. 

Unlike the hermetic spaces of Joseph Cornell, packed with secret chambers, Rauschenberg’s assert their materiality. Cornell magically transforms, takes twigs and suggests mighty forests. With Rauschenberg twigs remain twigs, thorns stay thorns and dirt is just dirt. There’s anti-art here, but also a back-to-basics assertiveness. And it may be Rauschenberg was also channelling another Black Mountain current. For his tutors also included ex-Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, who emphasised the “natural properties of everyday materials”.

Duchamp is not stuff which washes out, and and his provocative conceptualism recurs through Rauschenberg’s career. ’Shades’ (1964), for example comprised six prints on plexiglass arranged before a bulb, re-slottable into any order. When having agreed a commission for a portrait of Iris Clert then promptly forgetting about it, he sent the show a telegram with the message ’This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So’ (1961).

But from this point on he stops making art purely to illustrate points and instead hits on aesthetics. There’s still a heady dose of anti-art, as if he’s defying us to take his output as finalised works. But they are, if you follow, anti-art art. Cage’s commitment to conceptualism, his fixation with the process and indifference to how the finished work turns out, all that is left behind.

And perhaps that’s what you need to do with Cage – make him your tutor, but remain aware at some point you need to graduate. The composer John Adams has remarked how he initially found Cage’s all-embracing theories of music liberating, but after a while those strictures came to be confining and he had to break from them. Cage is like the Grand Master in those kung-fu films, who the hero goes back to after some setback to reorient himself. You take on as much Cage as you can, but from there you need to clear your own path.

The Splatters That Matter (Going Red)

Once in New York, Rauschenberg embarked upon the Red paintings. ’Yoicks’ (1954, above) is built around a contrast between regular patterning (the stripes and green dots) and the random (the roughly applied, dripping paint.) It could be read as art (form) and anti-art (formlessness) set against one another in some ceaseless, Manichean struggle. Each trying to overcome the other, while being reliant upon it’s existence.

And much of the idea here comes from the understanding that art is not merely the realisation of your intention. Even as you paint the brush will always take its own direction, and that should be acknowledged and made part of the work. This juxtaposition recurs frequently, for example in ’Bed’ (1955) when he daubed and trickled paint over the patterned squares of his own quilt and pillow.

’Charlene’ (also 1954, above) incorporates photos (including of other artworks), newspaper clippings and found objects – including reflectors and an umbrella. Some of these are visible, others semi-buried under great occlusions of paint. Yet at the same time the division of the work into panels, and the incorporation of a flickering light in a frame, is almost a reference to Renaissance art.

It was this incorporation of objects into paintings which would soon develop into his best-known works, the combines. He would walk the streets of downtown New York, finding and utilising discarded objects. He rarely needed to go further than a couple of blocks. Findings included a door, a handle, a metal bucket, brackets and what look like pram wheels, all of which summarily show up in ’Gift For Apollo’ (1959, above).

But it’s ’Monogram’ (1955/9) which is one of his best-known works, and a crowd-puller for the show. The tyre, a perfect man-made object, is placed around the goat with horns and painted face. This combination would seem to make up the monogram of the title. The combines often add physical objects to a flat painted surface, but unusually with ’Monogram’ this is placed on the floor. A shoe heel planted in the board (to the goat’s left in the illo), emphasises this.

What to make of it all? While Rauschenberg was gay, Robert Hughes’ theory that it’s all a metaphor for anal sex is now pretty much rejected. It seems a trivial biographical detail shoehorned onto a work, and besides in the piece’s long gestation the tyre was added late. The wildly painted goat’s head recalls to me both the phrase “painted savage” and the donkey’s head atop a piano from Dali and Bunel’s surrealist film ’Un Chien Andalou’ (1929, illo above). Above the dead painting rises the savage spirit of art, untrammelled and ready to inhabit pastures new. And those pastures are things society has thrown out, like the return of the repressed.

Or something like that. But really, I’ve no idea. Like much anti-art, the work is volatile and inchoate. It seems to simply shrug off analysis. You’re never even sure of its tone, whether to find it compelling or mischievous. And that’s probably the point. As Adrian Searle wrote in the Guardian, “Rauschenberg kept definitions at bay throughout his career, allowing himself less the task of understanding than that of making. Sometimes it must have seemed as if his art almost made itself. He never tried to sew things up.” Art is often about trying to bring order to the world, through the manipulation of symbols. Rauschenberg reminds us we can’t even bring order to art.

And that’s inimical to his lineage. Anti-artists are often accused by smart-arse know-nothings of failing to recognise a basic contradiction. But what dim bulbs perceive as a weakness is the very point, the contradiction is precisely the thing you want to raise – artworks which clearly exist, but your brain doesn’t know what to do with them. His combines contain objects, recognisable things, bits of the world. And yet for all that they’re ultimately inexplicable.

Radical and innovative artists are often said to have divided the critics. Rauschenberg united his, and they were united against him. With the heady, metaphysical world of Abstract Expressionism all the rage this out-of-towner, hauling bits of trash into galleries, ran counter to ever fashion. (His comments at the time seemed to even invite this polarity: “I want my painting to look like what’s going on outside my window, rather than what’s inside my studio”.) But perhaps his indefinability had something to do with this too. Unlike Rothko’s colour fields, there were no metaphysics to float off into. His metal buckets and painted goats left critics without a role, something unlikely to go down well.

Images Rub Off On You

I earlier compared Rauschenberg’s combines to Warhol’s silkscreens. Yet of course he not only turned to screen-prints himself but at roughly the same time as Warhol – in 1962. Though there’s debate over who influenced who, this show contains transfer drawings of his going back to ‘58. (Transferring magazine images by oil rubbing, the way the ink from a wet newspaper will come off.)

Ostensibly easier to read than the combines, it was these screen-prints which cemented Rauschenberg’s popularity. And they do look very Sixties in their immediacy, their ‘fastness’, compared with the multi-layered works of earlier. But is that look misleading? Does it confuse our propensity to scan images with our ability to read them? Are they not less challenging but more beguiling?

And in fact Rauschenberg handily proves what they’re not by providing one standard photo-collage - ’Signs’ (1970, above). We’ve all seen such works, images from magazine covers distilled into one frame. And indeed it was originally intended as a magazine cover, for ’Time’. (Though rejected due to the incorporation of a bloodied civil rights protestor.) We don’t question why Kennedy and Joplin are adjacent any more than we question who they are. The medium naturalises their association, because it’s expected to act as a précis of its times.

The screen-print ’Retroactive II’ (1964, above) even incorporates some of the same elements, such as Kennedy and an astronaut. But with this medium we cannot help but be more aware we are looking at a reproduced image of Kennedy. The image being less perfected makes everything looks so much more in flux. (These images, remember, stem from the still more ghostly transfer drawings.) 

And what about those points where Rauschenberg has directly applied paint? The show comments how he’d “unite disparate printed imagery with gestural brushwork”. While David Anfam, in his book on Abstract Expressionism, describes the two styles as “colliding sign systems”. In a way they’re the reiteration of the stripes and splodges of earlier. One we associate with mass production, with disseminated information, and the other with personal expression. It’s like reading a letter which shifts between an official-looking font and spidery handwriting. 

The prints are placed in an adjacent room to ’Oracle’ (1962/5) a multi-part sculpture of scrap metal parts and wireless mikes. This includes a detuned analogue radio, switching continually between static and snatches of stations, providing a companion in sound for what the prints are doing.

Rauschenberg would also reuse images from print to print (trucks, military helicopters) in different contexts and combinations, as if turning the images of the mass media into personalised motifs. Sometimes he would employ his own photos among the media images, such as ’Scanning’ (1963) which incorporates an snapshot of the Cunningham Dance Company.

Ultimately the screen-prints seem less to do with Duchamp or even Cage, and more an analogue of William Burroughs’ cut-ups. The everyday reality we experience is not just used as source material for the artist, as it is with Schwitters' bus tickets. There’s also the sense that it’s an obscuring fiction which, when cut up and reassembled, will start to tell the truth.

The prints were so popular that Rauschenberg won the Grand Prix at the 1964 Venice Biennale. In a story now well-know, he called his assistant the very next day with instructions to destroy all his remaining silkscreens, resolving it was time for something new.

Creating A Performance

The Surrealists liked to see mistakes as “sacred”, providence in action. And, appealingly, it was a mistake which led Rauschenberg into his next endeavour. A 1963 programme had accidentally credited him as a choreographer, which suggested to him he take up performance.

Except that chess move, however appealing a story, isn’t quite true. As ever, finding out about an artist undermines their myth. And the reality cannot help but feel a little disappointing by comparison. Rauschenberg had always built on what had gone before. He had made giddying leaps, yes, but had always leapt from where he was. And even burning the screen-prints, though the biggest leap yet, didn’t take him back to square one. 

He had often provided sets and backdrops for Cage and Cunningham, often of such a speedy and extemporised nature that they were essentially part of the performance. Plus he’d at times worked performance into his art. ’First Time Painting’ (1961) had been painted on stage with microphones to pick up his brush strokes. When an alarm embedded in the canvas rang, the work was declared finished. While this description might sound gimmicky, a performance disguised as painting, the resulting work is one of his best.

Performances included ’Elgin Tie’ (1964, still above) where he descended from a skylight on a rope, finding and responding to objects tied along it as he went. Finally he climbed into a barrel of water and was led off by a cow. Except the cow flunked it on the night, and just shat on the floor. Or ’Spring Training’ (1965) which included turtles being unleashed with torches on their backs while Rauschenberg wheeled a shopping trolley through the audience filled with ticking alarm clocks. The group set up to perform these, the Judson Dance Theatre included Tricia Brown, providing a direct link to the Seventies Downtown scene.

Generally the performances are situational, about setting something up then seeing what happens, so are less parametered, more free-form and anarchic than the chance scores of Cage and Cunningham. Yet they’re also too clear-cut a ‘performance’, with defined roles before a set audience, to be Fluxus happenings. They’re mid-range crazy.

Playing With the Box (Flat-Pack Art)

To reinvent himself Rauschenberg clearly needed to burn things down. Yet every time he does it a little of him gets lost. The show peaks early, with the combines, and from there declines. At first very slowly, and the enticement of the new prevents you noticing. But from this point on the seams are starting to show.

In 1971 he relocated to Captura, an island off Florida. Though the show slides over it, this was a virtually enforced move - to overcome his escalating alcoholism. Yet what was good for his health was not so invigorating for his art. You get the idea that to Rauschenberg the trash of New York was simultaneously poison and fuel. His art was a response to how he found the city, both literally and metaphorically. 

In fact his new practice became to display the used cardboard from the mailing packages he received. It’s like he was in exile on Captura, and all he could do from there was fetishise his connection to the outside world. These displays get us to focus on something we would normally see as incidental, and often employ the distressed nature of the boxes. But overall the main thing in their favour is comparison to the bypassable textiles from the same period. Ideally the show would not devote so large a room to these when the highly productive early years are run through so quickly. But you can’t win ‘em all.

Art of Our Ruins

Happily, exile was temporary and Rauschenberg’s fetishisation of the outside world became interaction. He founded ROCI, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (1984/9), where he’d visit a country, stage a responsive exhibition, donate the work to a native museum and move on to his next stop. There is at times something slightly worthy about all this, betraying its roots in the Live Aid era. But it’s a Rocky comeback compared to the cardboard boxes.

Notably the best work from this era came from a place he had more of a personal connection to. In 1985 Rauschenberg returned to his home state of Texas, to find it impoverished by the end of the oil boom. This inspired his Gluts series. “Greed is rampant”, he commented, “I want to present people with their ruins”. Though this included latter-day combines, incorporating rusting highway and gas station signs, the best of the work is photographic.

And the strongest of these is ’Glacial Decoy’ (1979, above), a series originally intended as a backdrop for a Trisha Brown dance piece. Most are anonymised, de-contextualised close-ups - a broken window in a dilapidated frame, a stone on the ground. Some have moments of movement to them, such as water spurting or a solitarily American flag fluttering. But they’re eerily de-habituated, as though only traces of humanity now remain. We see the odd figure, one with their back to us as they paint a sign, but birds and animals are more common.

But most effective is the format. Four images are adjacent on a slideshow. But they are less juxtaposed than accumulated, running right to left across the screen. And this gives them a quiet inevitability. A panorama of desolation, however vast and huge, must by necessity have an edge. And then the ever-hopeful human brain soon goes to that edge, and tries to imagine things are better beyond it. Wastelands are barren, but have parameters. Whereas there's no edge to this slide show. Pick a card, any card. It doesn't matter which, there's no winning hand to be found here. Just endless reshufflings of the same bum hand in a card game you can't win.

Rauschenberg’s earlier screen-prints had been largely reliant on the mass images of the media. Many of his later works look back to them, but advances in photographic and print technology meant he could make more use of his own photos.

’Duet [Anagram (A Pun)]’ (1988, above), particularly with its title, seems to invite comparison between it’s elements. And unlike the photos or the screen-prints they’re signs and symbols, designed expressly to be read. Yet while meaning tantalisingly looks like it should be within reach, it never quite yields up. The musical bell could be said to be like the telephone and the telephone like the musical notation, itself comparable to the measuring rod. But the notation seems to also morph into contour maps and diagrams, while a chicken also cheerily appears. Rauschenberg remained cheerily inexplicable until the end.

Despite what some who practice it fondly want to believe, art does not emerge from the furrowed brow of the artist. It may be instanced through individual creators, but it’s always a social product. So it follows that the high point of Twentieth century art was when the conditions for creating art were the most promising. Effectively, this loads everything onto that century’s first half. Check how many blog posts I’ve written about the era before 1945, and how many after.

But neither is the story schematic, and Rauschenberg was not only one of the finest American artists - he came up with his best work in the supposedly staid Fifties. He kept the Dada tradition going, picking up the baton from Duchamp, Cage and Cunningham, then passing it on to Trisha Brown and the Downtown scene of the Seventies. What’s more he passed a magic shapeshifting baton, which transferred the anarchic spirit to it’s holder without ever degenerating into an orthodoxy.

It’s true, he peaked early with the red painting and combines. Though that peak was so high that his next wave of works, the screen-prints and performances, still stood tall. Admittedly with subsequent offerings the trajectory was noticeably downward. To the point you could claim his burning of his remaining screen-prints was more brave than smart. But a decline in quality is the career curve of the majority of artists. While Rauschenberg was back on the incline in later years. In word and deed, he was exemplary. If we were to think of the greatest post-war American artist, there is only Pollock to rival him.



Coming soon! Well I still seem to be seeing art exhibitions faster than I can write about them, so I guess what’s coming soon is more art and more belatedness...

SUNN 0)))/ SUN RA ARKESTRA/ YAMATO DRUMMERS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SUNN 0)))

Barbican, London, Tues 21st March

Waiting near me outside the auditorium, two vikings in black hoodies babbled away to one another in German. Every so often one would say “Throbbing Gristle”, they'd then drop back into German. Then, a minute or so later, one would say “Throbbing Gristle” again. While a sign on the door above them warned of impending “high level sound levels and dense haze”.

I figured I was in the right place.

This marked my second chance to see legendary drone metal band Sunn 0))), and while they inevitably don't have quite the same impact when not filling a small seafront club with their sonic force, so powerful as to be physical, they remain an unmissable live experience.

Vocalist Attila Csuhar opened the gig with some liturgical chanting, which he'd then mix in with more guttural tones - part-way to throat singing. This section did, if truth be told, go on a bit. In fact a fairly sizeable segment of the audience didn't show up until it was ending, presumably forewarned and forearmed.

But as that was the gig's only weak point, let's focus on another aspect. Despite the band's signature uniform of monk habits and customary banks of dry ice, I don't think the intent here is really sacrilegious – like the sonic equivalent of an inverted crucifix. In fact it's nearer to... well religious, those mixed-chant vocals more intended to compare than contrast. 

Despite the band having arisen from the black metal scene, despite their almost fearsome reputation as the heaviest of them all, their sound isn't really oppressive. Like a lot of religious music, it's actually elevating. Rather than relying on any kind of shock effect, it's involving and even contemplative. To the point where even us non-religious types find it takes us out of ourselves. It induces a kind of aum state without any of the dippy New Age shit.

For one thing, they don't let that heavy tag hold them down and are quite happy to break with expectation. In a lengthy mid-section the wall-of-noise guitars walk right offstage and a quite plaintive trombone starts up. And if sludge metal has already been made a genre, I suppose there's no reason why we can't also have sludge jazz.

Also, and more importantly, there's a solidity – a kind of one-ness - to their sound. It's pretty much pitched at the point where black metal becomes drone. It's difficult and at times impossible to pick out individual instruments. Even the keyboards, which are sometimes prominent, play neither above or along to the guitars – they more play along to the resonances between them.

While heavy rock tends to be blues music with added volume Sun 0))) seem unrooted in rock tradition. In fact in the programme they complain of how once-normal listening practices have been undermined in the past forty years, like a near-half century is just a bump in the road. Most noticeable by it's absence, with neither bass nor drums there's none of the release of rock music, none of the sense that music's a means to let it all out.

In fact, despite their strong overlaps with noise music, they demonstrate how rockist the noise scene can be. They don't just dress like monks, they're as disciplined as them. Though the singer stands to the front, neither he nor the others gives off any impression of individual personality. Even when they sup a beer on stage, a single bottle is passed between the lot of them like a sacrament.

Founder member Stephen O’Malley has described their sound as “more raga than … rock. And despite the fact that the walls were literally shaking from volume, it was actually quite a blissed out, psychedelic session.” (Though speaking of a particular album.) While in the programme Csihar compares it to “the music of the plants, and that's why it's so slow and enormous”. Which seems reminiscent of Andrew Marvell's old poem “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow”.

Let's jump from Marvell to Elvis Costello, who once sang “The truth can't hurt you, it's just like the dark/ It scares you witless, then in time you see things clear and stark”. He could have been thinking of Sunn 0))). There's a kind of double trajectory afoot. What might originally hit the listener as a sonic onslaught slowly transforms itself into something serene, pummelling fists morphing into massaging hands. 

Moreover, from what I know of the earlier albums, that also fits the history of the band - they were more abrasive and discordant at the beginning. Which also fits the history of Earth, enough of an influence for Sunn 0))) to name themselves in a kind of paralleling tribute. Or the way the doom metal of Sleep transformed into the trance of Om. To get to the light, it seems you need to go through the dark tunnel.

And that half-transfer, half-dichotomy is something you often see in art evoking the sublime. What first appears to you as an overwhelming, pulverising force soon comes to feel like rejoining where you really belong. Perhaps, were Turner alive today, he'd have ditched his oils and joined a drone metal band.

SUN RA ARKESTRA

Con Club, Lewes, Wed 29th March

”They say history repeats itself. But that's his story. My story doesn't repeat itself. Why should it? My story is endless”

Last time I was at this venue, to see Jah Wobble, I was committing myself to print in saying I am no fan of jazz. So what do I do but head back for what's unambiguously a jazz gig?

But then of course this is no regular gig. It's not a matter of public record how Herman Poole Blount's parents reacted when he told them he'd teleported to Saturn to commune with the spirits there, and been told to devote himself to music as a means to solve the problems of the Earth. They most probably thought it was an elaborate excuse to drop out of college, which was the first thing he was insisting on doing. But he went through with it, changing his name to Sun Ra in the process, and throughout his life stuck to that story and to his guns. (His discography is this big.) He was more or less to jazz what Lee Perry was to reggae, where there's no point trying to separate what was genius from what was lunacy.

And if Sun Ra himself ceased having even a tangential connection to this Earth back in '93, the Arkestra continues under the direction of Marshall Allan. (Who is himself 92, having played with the Arkestra for 57 years.) After two successive sell-outs, they ended up playing a three-night residency, of which I caught the middle event. Living up to their “my story is endless” promise they played for over two and a half hours, a completely different set from the first night, and cheerily announced at the end the third night would be something different again.

Those freak free impro days now seem done and dusted, with band members even sporting music stands. The set most matched Wikipedia's' Philadelphia period, a kind of cosmic jazz to match the cosmic soul of the times. (The era the classic 'Space is the Place' album came from.)

And in fact the downside of the gig wasn't it falling into indigestible squonk but becoming tasteful enough to have safely ported onto an episode of Jools Holland. There were, I confess, points where it lost my interest.

But the highlights were... well, befitting Sun Ra's cosmic aspirations I'd have to say higher than sky high. Despite their daunting reputation, the Arkestra have a strong melodic sense and the ability to form into a powerful rhythm section. For a jazz band, they sure are funky! The brass in particular seemed able to play along with the line, then each instrument find a way to veer off into it's own thing while still holding that line aloft. (And to think I once found Led Zeppelin tight but loose!)

The best tracks, for me at least, started off with a vocal – somewhere between a repeated spoken phrase and a chant. These were often cosmic aphorisms which would probably seem platitudinously New Agey out of context, but in context were like a foot sliding into a slipper. (And besides, the one quoted up top does have it's appeal.) The ensemble would then work around them, in a manner not entirely unlike Steve Reich's penchant for finding music phrases in the cadences of the spoken word.

Perhaps the main thing is convey is that it's not chin-stroking music to chew on, it's joyous, exuberant and energising. If it doesn't quite teleport you to Saturn you can almost feel your feet lifting from the ground. Space really is the place.

This was from the first night...

And after seeing Sunn 0))) and Sun Ra, of course I then went to see Sun Kil Moon again. No, actually it was...

YAMATO: THE DRUMMERS OF JAPAN

Brighton Dome, Thurs 30th March

After seeing the Kodo drummers some three years ago, I am it seems becoming something of a regular for Japanese drum ensembles at the Dome. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were many similarities between the two, above all the same combination of absolute discipline and unleashed frenzy. And it demonstrates what a timbral range can exist just from different varieties of drum.

But Kodo's art had been very much a martial one. You could imagine them arising as one at six AM on their South Pacific island, and starting their morning practice by twenty past. They were intent on what they were doing, single-minded to the point of being cult-like.

Yamato are much more showbizzy, sporting bright costumes over uniform black vests. There's stage antics, visual gags, acrobatic playing, ample audience participation and even individual personalities emerging from the players. At times it did become so circusy I half expected a guy with a moustache to come on, and hold a chair up to a mangy old lion.

But we're probably best taking that as description rather than criticism. Being structured unashamedly like a show gives things an ever-relentless dynamic. They barely stopped even for applause. Perhaps they had less musicality than Kodo, but they so successfully keep you watching you don't particularly notice at the time.

My favourite moment was when the drummers were joined by the Japanese banjo. (Which probably has some special name, which probably isn't “the Japanese banjo”.) It was an unusual pairing, which they were really able to make work.

This TV appearance is from some while back, but gives a good flavour for what they do...