Bollokscraft Xine Vol. 7 by Bollokscraft Xine

BolloksCraft Xine

Vol.7

December 2013 Editor Rónan McGrath Layout Crew Contributors Graeme Ayu Hannah Boyd Kristina Bradshaw Lee Giddens

Merzbow Day... Pg 5 Sea Turtle... Pg 4 FFA Art and Music Show... Pg 13 Abstract... Pg 2 Salmon... Pg 23 Anyssa Gill Banal Existence... Pg 3 Anthony Haley Gypsy Eyes... Pg 12 Colour Traffic... Pg 19 Rae Imeson Untitled... Pg 8 Jessie Kobylanski Face... Pg 1 From Bollokscraft... Pg 2 Tympanum... Pg 20 W. Lincoln Various backgrounds... Pg.s 1, 3, 6, 8, 13, 14, 16 Frank Luca Analogue... Pg 18 Sean Luciw Stuff We Like... Pg 22 Monica McGarry Cathy/Is the Dungeon Scary?... Pg 21 Rónan McGrath Face... Pg 1 Imaginary Colours... Pg 19 New Reissue... Pg 20 Doodle... Pg 22 Stephanie Patsula Mug Shot Collection... Back Cover Insert wiL Shulba Chromesthesia... Pg 6 Melaina Todd Friendly Neighbourhood... Pg 5 Tape Transfers... Pg 10 Richard Tronson Cannibals... Pg 9 Viola Green River... Pg 24

Andrew Hood Jessie Kobylanski Frank Luca Rónan McGrath Stephanie Patsula Melaina Todd Richard Tronson

Designers Jessie Kobylanski Frank Luca

THANK YOU BCX Made Possible By: Anonymous Andrew Blackwell Kristina Bradshaw Marlaina Buch Mairi Budreau Bobby Case Ben Eastabrook Bruno Mazzatto Siobhan McGrath wiL Shulba Raeli Warcoye The ECHO The Art We Are The Grind Hello Toast The Kamloops Art Gallery Movie Mart Red Beard Roasters Zack’s Coffee and Teas

From the Bollokscraft Xine Crew The Bollokscraft Xine Vol. 1 was launched in February 2013 in our beloved community of Kamloops and online through issuu.com. We can say with a strange humble-pride that the Xine has brought about exactly what we were hoping for: shared ideas and a growing collaborative community. In your hands is the 7th issue - a sort of culmination of a year’s worth of ideas, efforts, group projects, sharing, hard work and good times. You’ve probably noticed that this issue is also in full colour and the cover is handmade. In the summer we were approached by Marlaina Buch (the star of our first feature article in issue 1, Hunter Rapper) who, with the backing of the Kamloops Art Gallery, asked us if we wanted to do a collaborative print night with the KAG. Thanks to her support and combined generosity with the KAG, we were able to publish this issue in all its colour-blasted glory AND create these 50 entirely unique and hand-made covers. So, here’s a very heart-felt THANK YOU to Marlaina and the KAG - we really appreciate what you’ve done for us. The future of this xine is bright, and evolving fast. For 2014, the BCX crew has decided to publish as a quarterly and under the rotating curation of one or two different Bollokscraft group members, so expect a new issue with an exciting and different flavour in March 2014. The submission guidelines and mandate will remain more or less the same, but each issue will surely reflect the curator and his or her particular aesthetic. To Kamloops and our online friends, thank you for reading, engaging and taking home copies of the xine. We’ve had a great year of collecting submissions, hosting get-togethers and brainstorming solutions to all kinds of interesting problems. This has been an incredible experience, and we are so excited to see what comes next. Thank you for your art, your words, your weird, your donations, your readership and your interest. Humbly and gratefuly yours, Jessie and Rónan of Bollokscraft Ventures

Merzbow Day - December 19th December 19th is World Merzbow Day: a celebration of the birth of Merzbow! In 2011, I had an idea of creating a holiday to celebrate the birth of the God of Noise and to honour his contributions to the noise world. Japanese artist/musician, Masami Akita has released well over three hundred records, tapes, and CDs under the pseudonym Merzbow since 1979. Originally inspired by surrealist and dadaist art movements, he began his career by making music with garbage, broken electronics, and whatever he had available on a broken tape recorder. Over the years he has expanded on his original ideas by adding a large range of effects pedals, synthesizers, special home made guitar-like instruments, software music programs, and even drums. Merzbow identifies his early inspiration stemming from fetishism, pornography, musique conrete, and avantgarde art but he would later find inspiration in grindcore, metal, and other extreme genres of music in the 1990’s. In the past decade, he has drawn a lot of influence from the animal rights and environmental movement and has dedicated many albums to birds, chickens, dolphins, and even an elephant seal named Minazo. I had several things in mind when I had the idea of creating a holiday to honour the great artist. Firstly, I intended to promote a more creative way of thinking of and making music. Even if you don’t like what he does, you have to admire his ability to think outside the box; this is something every artist should consider and appreciate. Secondly, I thought that it would be an excellent way to promote the animal rights and environmental movement. I felt that it would be great for everyone to try out a more ethical level of consumption by trying a vegan diet for a day. Thirdly, I just think it would be a great fun way to unite noise lovers from around the world. I have been a noise fan for a very

long time and felt that it was quite a small isolated and even lonely community to be a part of (when I created Merzbow Day, there were only three other noise lovers in Kamloops that I knew of). So how do you celebrate World Merzbow Day? I had a few basic suggestions for people to try. Consider eating vegan for the day, making some noise music, or simply listen to some Merzbow. A few more specific and wackier ideas I throw out there are to bake a chicken shaped vegan cake, drive around town blasting Merzbow for everyone to enjoy, or just throw a Merzbow themed party. I’ve been thrilled that people have shared their activities and some of them had been rather amusing to read. Someone in Germany made a jacket with the Pulse Demon artwork (look it up!) and walked around town wearing it (it makes me sick just to look at it). In New Jersey, a bunch of people parked there cars at Wal Mart and played several different albums simultaneously. My favourite was when someone simply suggested “I had never been banned from a town hall meeting before”. There were many Merzbow Day specials on independent radio stations around the world. Many people recorded and shared their tributes to Merzbow. Really, you can do whatever you want to celebrate Merzbow Day. For this year’s celebration, I hope to assemble a tribute compilation for a free release online. I’m looking for submissions from noise artists all around the world. I hope this year to be the best Merzbow Day ever! Recommended releases: Remblandt Assemblage (1981), Batzoutai Memorial Gadgets (1986), Pulse Demon (1996), Hybrid Noisebloom (1997), 1930 (1998), Merzbeat (2002), Minazo Vol. 1 (2006), Lop Lop (2011)

Chromesthesia Synesthesia is a curious neurological condition in which a seemingly normal person under normal modal conditions experiences a sensation when another mode is altered or stimulated (Ramachandran, 2001; Ward, 2007). Chromesthesia is a type of synesthesia that relates a sound to an individual’s involuntary experience of colour. This has been studied for well over one hundred years (Galton, 1880) and has been used to stimulate artistic expression since. The most common example is Scriabin’s Keyboard in which he thought, in a symphonic work, colour would be “a powerful psychological resonator for the listener.” Chromesthesia is subjective however, as it is relatable to the listener and the prospective results thereof can be as broad of spectrum as the electromagnetic expression of colour itself. This is to say, a practitioner of music may have a much different experience of Chromesthesia than an inexperienced or atonal listener. Beethoven proclaimed B minor to be the “black key”, Schubert claimed E minor “a maiden robed in white with a rose-bow on her breast”, and as seen in the keyboard figure here Scriabin perceived middle F to be a deep red, where the adjacent F-sharp is a bright saturated blue (Peacock, 1985).

Musical note frequency is not the only parameter that can affect visual characteristics of music. As seen in the figures at the top of the page, different timbres create different complexity of waveforms that will skew the colour spectra. As a pure sine wave will offer the truest hue, a complex waveform will produce a colour that is less refined, pushing it to gray (such as percussion or guitar). Furthermore, the amplitude of the note (think: plucking a guitar string with hard a metal pick vs. finger picking and nylon vs. steel strings) will produce a white/light colour at high amplitude and dark luminosity at low amplitude. This brings up the thought of why the big white lights are often turned on the crowd at a crescendo’s peak at a rock concert.

Personally, I have experienced chromesthesia in many cases, the most powerful instance occuring while in attendence at a Godspeed You Black Emperor concert in 2011 in Vancouver with R.McGrath and RRTT: I was in a lack of sleep drone trance – asleep with my eyes open, lost in some type of post-rock nirvana during the opening of Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls and a crescendo of deep Red Bombs of F flooded my mind’s eye, filled the Vogue theatre and the amplifiers screamed drone phased sounds in the key of F. References : font: OpenDyslexic – opendyslexic.org Caviano, J.L. (1994). ‘Colour and Sound: Physical and Psychophysical Relations.’ Journal of Color Research and Application. 19:2 Ward, J. et al (2007). ‘Synaesthesia for Reading and Playing Musical Notes.’ Journal of Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition. 12:1 Ramachandran, V.S. (2001). ‘Synaethesia – A Window into Perception, Thought, and Language.’ Journal of consciousness Studies.8:12 Galton, F. (1880). ‘Visualised numerals’, Nature, 22, pp. 494–5. Peacock, K. (1985). ‘Synesthetic Perception: Alexander Scriabin’s Color Hearing.’ Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2:4

HOW TO Tape Transfers !! YOU WILL NEED: One or any combination of the following:

A) OLD MAGAZINES, THE INK ON THE PAGE WORKS BETTER THAN SLICK NEW GLOSSY MAGAZINES, AND AT BOLLOKSCRAFT WE ARE ALL ABOUT MAKING IT WORK FOR YOU (*coloured tape transfers ) B) PHOTOCOPIED IMAGES WITH LOTS OF BLACK TONER FOR IMPACTFUL IMAGES, LESS TONER FOR FUZZED OUT IMAGES. C) LASERJET PRINTED IMAGES (*coloured tape transfers ) A SINK FILLED WITH WATER, ROOM TEMPERATURE A ROLL OF PACKING TAPE SCISSORS

STEP 1 - Decide on your image, print, photocopy or collage it. STEP 2 - Once your composition has been made, cut some long strips off your roll of packing tape. Lay the strips of tape flat on top of your image and press it so there are no air pockets. STEP 3 – Once your image is completely covered in tape, put it in the sink of room temperature water. Let it soak for five minutes and make sure it is fully submerged. Put something on top of it so it does not float to the surface. STEP 4 – Some magazine papers need to be left in the water longer. Test it by rubbing the paper off the back with your thumb. If it does not peel easy than leave it in the water another five to ten. STEP 5 – Find a flat surface to lay the transfer on. Peel or scratch the paper off the back to your heart’s content. This takes a while so be patient. Little fibres of paper can be tough to completely eradicate, so re-soak the transfer if it’s being difficult. STEP 6 – If STEP 5 is not working for you, scratch the paper off while the transfer is in the sink. The water will get pulpy and muddy but it works better for me doing it this way. It’s really trial and error depending on what kind of paper you are using. STEP 7 – If you’ve scraped off all your paper you will notice the ink is still on the tape! Congratulations, you have made a tape transfer. Now what? TAPE TRANSFERS LOOK GOOD ANYWHERE, I HAVE A BUNCH STUCK ON MY WALL AT HOME RIGHT NOW! THEY ALSO LOOK GOOD ON SIGNS, WALLS, APPLIANCES, STATIONARY, WINDOWS, SKETCHBOOKS, ARTWORKS, INSTRUMENTS. THEY STICK WELL TO MOST FLAT SURFACES AND CAN BE RE-ADHERED RELATIVELY HASSLE-FREE. YOU CAN ALSO

A Conversation Between Painting & Music

I recently attended a creative anti-mine protest event hosted by the Femme For All Collective at which two audio artists (Rónan McGrath and Graeme “Pike”) and two visual artists (Stephanie Patsula and Andrew Hood) performed as Mondo Nadir - an improvised performance involving simultaneous creatio of music and painting that they presented live without prior rehersal. While I was watching and photographing this performance I couldn’t help but have many questions regarding how each of the artists experienced the event running through my head. A few days after the event I sat down with the two visual artists and the two audio artists separately to discuss how they felt the performance went and to get some of my questions answered. The following interviews are paraphrased from the actual conversations: Visual Artists Both Stephanie and Andrew have had a small amount of experience being in front of audiences in the past but are mostly visual artists. This performance was their first time painting to live music.

What was it like as a visual artist to be in the spotlight both physically and metaphorically? Stephanie: The spotlight was nice, it adds an element of an audience but it was interesting because in a sense it separated us from the audience. Since we could not see anything past the bright light, it allowed me to be more “in the zone” even though I knew I was being watched while I painted. Andrew: Although the spotlight and the audience created a performative component the act of painting still remained very intimate for me.

How did the colour/direction of the spotlight change the way you painted? Andrew: The colour of the light wasn’t much of a problem. Hoewever, I did have to react to the shadows and shapes created from it which was difficult is some situations. There were times when I would have to completely block the light or get out of the way and paint from the side to avoid weird shadows.

Stephanie: I feel like my painting became more of a performance in the sense that I had to move my body around more and contort in order to avoid painting in the shadows. It was interesting to work in strange positions that I wouldn’t normally paint in.

Was it intimidating to paint in front of an audience when the act of painting is normally personal and private for many people? Stephanie: At first I was totally fixated on the audience. It was a little intimidating because I didn’t know what I was going to paint yet and I knew everyone was watching and waiting for me to do something. However, once I started to get paint on the panel and my ideas started

flowing I just stopped thinking about the ‘act’ altogether. I didn’t feel like I needed to engage with the audience like a musician might feel the need to - I didn’t even notice the photos being taken after awhile. Andrew: I was mostly “in the zone.” I didn’t care much about the audience really, I was just focused on the task and the music.

It’s interesting that both of your works turned out so differently, Stephanie’s being more representational and Andrew’s more abstract.

How did you feel your painting and your experience responded to the music? Stephanie: I did have an image of a place in mind before I came to this event that I wasn’t sure I was going to call upon. I feel sort of like I cheated because I was recalling a place I had been to recently when I started to paint but I felt like it fit the music. However the music judged how frantic I painted in certain areas of the panel. If the music was very calm I tended to spend more time doing details and slower brush strokes on an area before moving on. Andrew: I just sort of jumped into the feeling of the music with my painting right away. At the start it was very calm and so I painted what seemed like calm shapes and colours and then when the music changed I tried to change my painting to resemble the change of pace. The ideas were like many fleeting and momentary images pieced together . . . I wouldn’t say there was really a coherent message in my painting.

It’s interesting that you would say you feel like you “cheated” by referencing a specific place, Stephanie. In my experience, music has always been an audio and visual combination. I often think of specific places or situations in my mind when I hear different music or sounds so maybe it’s not “cheating” if you hear something and it evokes an emotional or visual response for you. Personally, I find that auditory stimulation is a strong trigger for memory recall. Do you two have any other parting thoughts from the performance? Stephanie: There’s an interesting difference between what we were doing as Mondo Nadir and how I usually see musical performances happening. Normally musicians seem to know the music at hand; they know what goes after

what in their set. When we performed I didn’t know what my composition would be but I knew that I wanted to produce something and I felt like I would just know when the painting was complete. I guess that is why this was so interesting: for this performance the musicians and the painters were improvising similarly so we were all sharing the same sense of uncertainty.. Audio Artists Although both Graeme and Rónan have experience improvising sounds and music live, the Mondo Nadir performance was the first time either had performed along-side live art-making.

How did you feel being literally BEHIND the spotlight at a music event instead of in front? Rónan: Well, the spotlight was sort of a last minute idea. We had noticed it was kind of dark in the space so I asked Andrew to nip back home and grab his floodlight. I definitely think it helped to create a feeling of “spectacle” toward the visual artists while taking the focus off Graeme and I. I really enjoy this kind of emphasis displacement sometimes with live music. Graeme: I felt more relaxed without a bright light on me while I worked; I was able to focus on music and not on just being the centre of attention.

How do you feel the paintings reflected the music you were playing? Graeme: I didn’t go into this show with a lot of sounds recorded but the ones I did have (sky train, radio, organ) seemed to be reflected in some way in both paintings. The sounds I thought I would be producing were oily, dark and anti-fracking since that is what the event series that weekend was all about. Rónan: I think each panel represented half of the music quite well. Stephanie definitely seemed to connect well with the murkier sounds I was producing through my rig, while it appeared that Andrew really related more strongly to Graeme’s more ecstatic synth sounds.

Did you find that you began responding to the artwork that was being produced? Or responding to the other musician? Graeme: I didn’t spend a lot of time observing the painters for the most part, I was quite focused on the music and collaborating with Rónan. However, I do remember looking up and seeing Andrew’s work being quite colourful and thinking to myself “am I playing colourful music? Should I play more colourful sounds?” Rónan: It’s hard for me to say whether I was influenced or not. Going into the event the idea was to stay spontaneous and work intuitively so I’m sure there was some degree of influence from the painters. However, I

would say I was more influenced by what Graeme was doing. I think it was interesting that the artists couldn’t help but pay attention to the music around them but that Graeme and I could ignore the specifics of the paintings for extended periods of time and focus on the music. Maybe in this way we were less effected by the art minutiae.

Was it intimidating having someone “paint your sounds”? Rónan: There was definitely a certain level of pressure that I felt mostly to do with keeping a continuous sound. I kept thinking “if I change my sound will the artists have to change their whole painting?.” You might say that there was sort of a tenuous “unspoken conversation” going on between the four of us. I also feel like the artists had more freedom to create in that Graeme and I were limited to what samples we had with us and how our rigs were set up - all of which determined the types and range of sounds we could create. As visual artists can produce any colour or shape that came to mind, colour and form can be more free.

How do you feel about the idea of sounds being interpreted as images? Do you personally ever experience images in your own mind while you are creating music that influence your sound production? Graeme: I am not sure how I feel about sounds being able to be interpreted as images. Personally the act of creating music is mostly about how the sounds play off other sounds. I don’t really have a picture in my head or a scene I’m trying to define - I just pick sounds and then find other sounds that I think compliment them. I have often collected field recordings of random places and then listened to them later and I am usually unable to determine what or where the place actually was just from the atmosphere of the sounds.Sounds don’t have an image for me usually.

Rónan: I sort of disagree with Graeme. I find that the best zones I can get into while jamming come when I am not distracted by the world and I can fixate on terms more than on images. For example I might think about the term “ripped-off” and then space out on create sounds that get at the feeling of the term for me. However, I don’t usually experience an overwhelmingly visual response to music either.

That is really interesting to me because my own experience with music is very heavily weighted in visual imagery. It is hard for me to listen to music and sounds without producing an image of a place in my mind that the sounds remind me of. Graeme: I guess it’s not impossible for music to represent visual things for people. When I started work on the split cassette that Rónan

and I put out through Bollokscraft in the summer, I saw the sleeve design and art ahead of time.The piece is very green and grassy so I worked on music that I thought sounded green to me. So it is possible, it’s just not the way I usually work. Rónan: I think that if you can have music that represents a certain period of time or location then you can certainly have music that creates visual images for people as well. For example, music from the 60’s or 70’s can certainly sometimes recall hippie movements and flower-power stuff and that clearly evokes specific paisley and psychedelic imagery for many people. If people can imagine imagery linked to sound, who’s to say that newly improvised sounds won’t have the same effect on a working artist?

For Stephanie it appears that the music of Mondo nadir evokes representational memory imagery whilefor Andrew it relates to colours and movement. While the two audio artists talked about different types of experiences, Graeme’s audio-begets-audio way of producing or Rónan’s experience of terms and themes associated with improvisation it appears that there are many different ways we can all experience the same phenomenon andd this will always be a fascination of mine to examine. Expect more performances from Mondo Nadir in Spring 2014.

The idea of synesthesia (a mixing of your senses, ie. seeing sounds or smelling colours) was very much on my mind during these interviews and I found it interesting that the topic came up in the abstract while talking with the audio artists. I think that all of us can experience a certain degree of synesthesia when we are being creative.

Chirstopher Merritt’s Imaginary Colours listen @ bollokscraftrecords.tumblr.com Like an enormous spread of tonal spillage, synthesized frequencies shift and dance all together good-naturedly and with confidence. As dreaming and zone-out vibrations go, CHRISTOPHER MERRITT graces this sonic canvas with harmonious poise and flow while subtly abrading the surface with demolished rhythms that peek from behind the composition of benign release. You can hear it; all the imaginary colours conjured herein surf the melting point but carve deeply in eschewing the ‘ambient.’ A distinct and textured experience that is perfect for a bliss-out session with words, views or transcendental alterations.

Bollokcraft Records NEW REISSUE KALEIDER // DENORMALIZER BCR C004 : (BCR003 Reissue) Back in November 2011 we put out KALEIDER’s debut DENORMALIZER as a ‘glorified download code’ - the third overall in our ‘art edition’ release series. Now, more than 2 years later, we’re finally giving the bombastic and over saturated slab of sound that is DENORMALIZER proper representation on cassette. The album has been chopped into two halves – the traditional A/B butchery – and KALEDIER has added a few minutes of new heavy, heavy sound into the mix as well. For those who missed the original release, now you too can experience the propulsive evolving noise-arps that phase back and forth between cheeky street bumps and dense, tangled waves of drone that makes up the 30 minutes of DENORMALIZER. You can find copies of the DENORMALIZER reissue in the KAG gift shop alongside our other recent releases in the BCR cassette series. This thing is a limited edition of 25, so act fast. Buy online by visiting bollokscraftrecords.bandcamp.com Support local, support art, support weird and boost the wonderful! Buy a tape and get groovy – saturated groovy.

Stuff We Like Digitech iStomp As a guitar beast and an iPhone junkie, I got rather excited about a year ago when I learned of this little gadget called the “iStomp” by Digitech (the same people who brought us the infamous Whammy Pedal). It’s a pedal that can change its effect function simply by loading a new sound from the phone! Basically it’s 47 pedals in one. It comes with a few free sounds (a couple of distortion sounds, some chorus, echo, etc.) with the ability to try out all of the others before buying, with prices ranging from a buck to about 20 bux. However, Digitech recently decided to make all of the iStomp effects available for free, with only one exception - the “Impossible Pedal” which was designed as a team effort with Adrian Belew and features two switchable pitch shifters. Apparently, the price of the pedal itself has also been drastically reduced. I’m assuming this is because of some lack of popularity, which I find surprising (maybe it’s the dull grey dress she wears - some people can’t see past this sort of thing). The sound quality and studio useability of the iStomp is top notch, I say! Sometimes digital effects sound flat and cold, but not the iStomp. It sounds tasty, clean and clear, and doesn’t obliterate the guitar’s natural tone. And you can twiddle the knobbies with pleasing results. Titillating! My only wish is battery power. For whatever design-related reason, the iStomp requires Alternating Current, which really feels at odds with all the rest of the futuristic amazingness. Another minor complaint: the loading time when changing to a new effect is about 30 seconds, which seems like an eternity because I WANT CANDY, GIVE ME MY CANDY NOW. WWWAHHHHHHHH!!!!!

My favourite effects so far include the Rotator (a Leslie simulator), the Unplugged (acoustic simulator), the Lexicon Hall Reverb (an amazing classic, downright surreal, I had no idea), the Vanishing Point (modulating delay), the Angelic Choir, the Death Metal distortion, the Double Cross Delay... bah, this choosing of favourites is a futile pursuit - all of the ones I’ve tried are great. There are emulations of old classics, like “Rodent” and “Screamer” and “Stone Phase.” There are even a few DOD-licensed presentations, such as the Gonkulator Modulator and FX69 Grunge. I just wish the iStomp could do 9V so I could jam in outer space with the rest of my battery-powered stuff.