DANCEHALL 10 by Psykick Dance Hall Recordings

D AN C EHALL 1 0

3 Getting in on the fun: notes on Ursula Bogner Irene Revell

9 THE GREAT BEAUTY Daniela Cascella

15 TWO THINGS HAPPENED Joe Posset

D AN C EHALL is a DIY journal of exploratory sound & music, produced since 2010. It was established to explore how we frame, discuss and come to understand our experiences of sound, and came out of a particular interest in underground experimental music. We are interested in opening up that discussion, thinking about our encounters with music in relation to our everyday sonic lives - how it arises from that experience, responds to it and intersects with it - across different contexts. It is produced and edited by Psykick Dancehall, a collaboration between Hannah Ellul and Ben Knight. Initially based around a label and events it has subsequently expanded to incorporate other activities, often in collaboration with different artists along the way. CONTACT US: journal@psykickdancehallrecordings.com

YOU CANâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T WIN THEM ALL, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN Jenny Moore

23 WALKING THE CITY READING RUSSOLO Aonghus McEvoy

28 drawing each other over Amelia Bywater & Rebecca Wilcox

32 The Samsonite Philosophy of gwilly edmondez & POSSET

IRENE REVELL Getting in on the fun: notes on Ursula Bogner For a brief while in 2011 I had the privilege of working for The Wire magazine â&#x20AC;&#x201C; primarily in the distribution department. It was at this time and in this capacity that a curious private view invitation came into my hands, Ursula Bogner / Melody: Always the Art of Others, from a French arts center, CEAAC Strasbourg. It was somewhat less usual to receive information from visual arts institutions, more likely Japanese noise labels or Polish music festivals. More extraordinary still was the little pin badge that fell out of the envelope, bearing just the face of an odd-looking bowl-headed, bespectacled older woman, in sepia tones and wearing incongruously flamboyant furs: reminiscent of Gertrude and Alice, both austere and jolly.

(L-R) McCullers; de Beauvoir; Stein; Höch

The invitation seemed to be heralding a remarkable exhibition uncovering the archive of an outsider female composer, Ursula Bogner, curated by Jan Jelinek, an electronica producer whose name I could vaguely place, in his capacity as her estate’s archivist since her recent posthumous discovery. As well as joining a pantheon of other recently re-discovered female electronic music pioneers (Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Eliane Radigue, Franca Sacchi, Else Marie Pade et cetera), the project’s mode of presentation, epitomised in badge-form, also seemed to evoke the legacy of riot grrrl, lady idols from the past with severe hair (Gertrude herself, Hannah Höch, Carson McCullers, Simone de Beauvoir et al), librarian chic. I have since many years worked on a project called the Her Noise Archivei which is itself

invested in the exploration of such historical ‘blind spots’, looking to give more emphasis to historical women whose work may have been forgotten or underappreciated, in dialogue with contemporary practitioners. At my desk job, I had only time to briefly look up this new discovery: Ursula Bogner, even her name so promising. There seemed to be a couple of recordings online, which I couldn’t give my attention to at that moment. I pocketed the pin badge, took it home and, I’m ashamed to say, forgot entirely about her, relegating Bogner once again to the shadows. The months passed and come 2012 I was working hard with colleagues at CRiSAP,ii Cathy Lane and Holly Ingleton, on a series of events at the Tate Modern, Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic, to mark the donation of the Her Noise Archive from Electra to University of the Arts,

London Archives and Special Collections. It was a chance to honour some of our idols: Pauline Oliveros, then celebrating her 80th birthday; and also Meredith Monk, with a project by Isla Leaver-Yap.iii We worked very hard on the subsequent symposium, vacillating on the thematics for many months: which discourses and histories we wanted to emphasise, what kinds of approaches should be visible, what kinds of approaches we might be ignoring or forgetting? These things are always hard work and even harder work when the precious, personal, yet joint, politics of feminism is invoked. Throughout this process I did not once come to remember Ursula Bogner. The pin surely got buried in my jar of pins. The over-production that has seemed to increasingly mark the working process in London must have obliterated any spare time where I might have pursued research into such a new discovery. Probably the story of Ursula Bogner felt too familiar to truly draw my attention in the first place: somewhere between the garden shed amateurism of F.C. Judd and the domestic solitude of Daphne Oram, both of whom have enjoyed a flood of renewed attention of late. Some months later, and already into the stride of a shared events programme with Cafe OTO where we would host talks by certain performers and I received an email of some new suggestions. One in particular jumped out: Jan Jelinek on Ursula Bogner. YES! Finally a chance to get down to it with Bogner. For some few minutes I know I must have felt a run of work-pleasure-emotions. Pleased to have something new and interesting to offer up. Stupid for not remembering to follow up on her previously: I distinctly recall feeling how insane it must be to have just organised a whole major event around these questions, and not once remember this newly uncovered, forgotten figure.

Very few minutes after my confirmation that, yes, we’d love to host a talk by Jelinek on Bogner, it makes so much sense, I received a flooring email: ‘You do realise Ursula Bogner is a hoax?’ * To briefly recap what I have since learnt:iv it seems that Jelinek released an initial Ursula Bogner album, Recordings 1969-1988, in 2008 on his own Faitiche label, accompanied by a backstory departing from his chance meeting of Bogner’s son that had lead to this recuperation project. In 2011 the hoax was reinvigorated by a second release, Sonne = Blackbox, by which point it seemed clear that Bogner was a fiction of Jelinek’s. A hoax indeed, but one in which Jelinek’s profound investment is clear – stretching the work beyond the two recordings and into the fabrication, and exhibition, of an archive. Inevitably this project has thrown up critical writing: both through the invited sleevenotes of the second recording, and from the words of reviewers. The preoccupation of the latter has been largely to ponder what the hoax means about the resultant musical output. Apparently the recordings are redolent enough of Jelinek’s own oeuvre to provoke the suggestion of a cheap trick. Whilst this must be a consideration – the strategy has clearly been successful, not least in my own attention to Jelinek, a figure whose work I was barely aware of hitherto – I don’t fully buy into this particular line of cynicism. I’m not so much interested in the recordings at all here – and I’d like to credit the whole assemblage, not merely the music, with rather more consideration. A more engaging line of argument expands on the implicit transvestitism – or rather as Nick Currie / Momus contends in his text on Bogner,v ‘inside every synthetic man there’s an electronic woman’. There is certainly a history

of male musicians with female alter egos to be developed here, as Currie too contends. In the intervening period I also encountered the story of psych synth fiend Pat Prilly, female pseudonym of Jean-Jacques Perrey – allegedly created in order to dodge union royalties, any other tendencies of Perrey’s aside. But perhaps we can return to this question of the nature of Jelinek’s identification with Bogner later. I feel there are several far more interesting and interrelated points at stake which don’t seem to have been afforded consideration amongst this writing. Firstly, and most immediately in my experience, the hoax plays into a swollen desire for expansive and increasingly obscure knowledge. An ever-prescient reminder to heed the advice of Oscar Wilde and be not ‘[a] man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. My Bogner experience was perhaps extreme: both the set of circumstances that led to my under- or non-researched belief in her; contrasted with my own commitment to such an area of historical work. The experience was rattling but I’m not really interested in expiating my ‘crime’, rather in using my embarrassment to understand what is at stake in such a hoax. In fact, I’m quite taken with this aspect of the project, a subversion of our unquestioning appetite for knowledge. Obviously I should have looked her up more closely before saying yes to the talk (or even upon first laying eyes on the badge, asked around the office about Bogner) – instead I entered into a series of trusted situations at the heart of which was the face of a female outsider pioneer, my familiar yearning for these histories. And it’s this final point, I think, that is the most interesting: that the hoax draws on, manipulates, and possibly exploits these very particular desires. The part that has both troubled and fascinated me is Jelinek’s choice to make Bogner female: the gendering of the hoax. It seems to exploit my fandom, my over identification, through drawing on my desire not so much to

know everything – to be totally honest if she had been male I may not even have read the press release, I doubt I would have taken the badge – but on my feminist desire for unearthing and reviving marginal female figures of the past, described by art historian Catherine Grant as being a ‘fan of feminism’,vi aptly reinforced here by the arrival of the pin badge. And a desire born out of, at times violent, historical erasure; the need to see oneself reflected: the most basic politics of representation. Jelinek’s deployment of Bogner as female, looking as she does, does not exist in a vacuum; rather it draws resonant energy from these other female pioneers, Oram et al, and rests on these recent (feminist) restitutions for its own success. What, then, is at stake in Jelinek invoking these specific marginal histories? If the project relies on these feminist victories – the wonderful extent to which these series of women have more recently come to be recognized and celebrated – then it seems to be wavering on a knife edge between two possible sets of politics and two quite different readings. On the one hand it would be easy to read the hoax as a rather rude occupation of space, taking up the desire that has been created for these lost female pioneers, an appropriation of this historical work, and a manipulation of our desire for these figures. On the other hand, while the project implicitly acknowledges these figures, is it not then a mimetic celebration of these successes, ‘getting in on the fun’ in a way that could be interpreted as reinforcing of these desires? Whilst entertaining the latter, more generous, interpretation, there are nonetheless aspects that cannot be ignored. Can Jelinek wholly speak to these politics of exclusion? What does it mean that Bogner was only uncovered upon her death; is the project a strategy that breaks this pattern? We are told that Bogner attended the Summer School in Darmstadt – as did doubtless other women, some of whom have been largely obscured from history (for instance

From the pantheon of recently re-discovered female electronic music pioneers: Derbyshire; Sacchi; Pade; Radigue; Oram

Else Marie Pade), maybe some of whom are still to come to light. From this anecdote alone it seems evident that if one were truly invested in this project of restitution it would be more fruitful to research the women of Darmstadt rather than to fictionalise them.

of composition (Ximena Alarcon, Ellen Fullman, Brenda Hutchinson, Maria Chavez, Jaclyn Heyen and Andrea Zarza). In her choice to use this platform and this allotted time accordingly she effectively problematised her own canonical status, whilst offering us an alternative future.

However, as much as I can feel an easy kneejerk irritation at the taking up of these historical struggles to ultimately form a part of Jelinek’s own work, I still feel an explicit veneration of these women. After all it is allegedly Jelinek himself, posing as Bogner in the furs. Whilst I’m not sure we could quite ascribe this project within the terms of ‘temporal drag’, the radical queer practice of embodying of historical figures coined by Elizabeth Freeman,vii Jelinek does make a rather lovely connection with Bogner in her outfit: the transgender possibilities suggested by Currie is pleasure that I certainly wouldn’t wish to deny Jelinek.

Whilst Ursula Bogner may be generously understood in feminist terms as a celebration of the entry of women into the canon of the avant-garde, she certainly does not offer any problematisation of, nor alternative to, that canon, nor could she; let alone any ‘pushing towards a [future] paradigm shift’.ix

Yet whilst the proposal of temporal drag draws attention to overlooked figures of queer history, or equally Catherine Grant’s notion of ‘being a fan of feminism’ creates links between past generations of feminist artists, the problem here is that Bogner’s fictive nature surely ultimately can only return us to Jelinek. I’d like to cast a final light on this from Pauline Oliveros, perhaps the greatest proponent of a feminist philosophy of music.viii Oliveros’ keynote talk, Archiving the future: embodiment music of women, for the aforementioned symposium in 2012 exemplified what is at stake in the ‘taking of space’ in its very form and content: she chose to speak briefly about her own relationship to feminist thought and practice, and of her work that was to be performed later that night in the Turbine Hall, To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, in recognition of their desperation (1970). She then gave the majority of the remainder of her talk over to the introduction of six younger female composers whom she described as not fitting conventional forms, yet shifting the paradigm

i The Her Noise Archive emerged from, and documents, the Her Noise project, curated by Lina Džuverović and Anne Hilde Neset. See hernoise.org ii Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, London College of Communication, UAL. iii See voiceisalanguage.wordpress.com iv For a starting point see Jelinek’s Bogner description: http://www.faitiche.de/index.php?article_id=9 v Please see http://imomus.livejournal.com/413554. html vi Grant, C. (2011) ‘Fans of feminism: Rewriting Histories of Second-wave Feminism in Contemporary Art’, Oxford Art Journal 34 (2): 265-286. Oxford: Oxford University Press vii Freeman, E. (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham: Duke University Press viii Mockus, M. (2007), Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality, London and New York: Routledge ix For Pauline Oliveros’ Archiving the future: embodiment music of women please see http://vimeo.com/43535557

JOE POSSET Two things happened.

It was a Saturday afternoon in 1984 and I was browsing in my local WH Smiths. There wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t much to do where I grew up; a trip to a shop that sold stationery and books was pretty much as good as it got for me. After checking out all the highlighters I picked up a modest little book for no reason at all. It was called Interference by a bloke called Nick Rhodes. Inside was a set of the most amazingly abstract, glossy, mysterious images I had seen.

Jagged forms were swollen, like electricity frozen in aspic. In a pre-glitch world the very wrongness of the fizzing TV static was heady, almost overwhelming. And the pink/ beige blur matched the American Tan fleshtones thirstily gulped from the Kay’s Catalogue to complete my sensory buzz. I had no idea Nick was a paid member of the New Romantic set. On that day up became down and things would never be the same again.

It’s 2013. Through an unusual sequence of events I find myself the grumpy owner of one of them new ‘smart’ phones. I’m pretty nonplussed about the whole thing. Firstly, I’m paranoid about carrying round something so expensive... I mean, like what if I lose it? I’m bored with the apps after 20 minutes and the touch screen thing just seems like a clunky novelty. If this is the future you can stick it mate... it’s simply not good enough. Wake me up when you’re wearing rocket boots.

But... it’s got a camera on. I’ve never owned a camera before. No reason why; just never got round to it. So, I figure if I have to use this phone and it’s got a built-in camera I might as well take some snaps. What a brave little solider, eh?

After a few days of taking pictures of nothing in particular I find myself watching Glastonbury on the TV. I’m happy; no, I’m fucking delighted to slag off each and every act that dares to interrupt my solo-drinking kvetch-fest. The Rolling Stones are boring the tits off me and everyone else Bloody Mick bloody Jagger is prancing like a parody of a parody when I whip out the phone and take a couple of snaps of the old duffers off the TV like. I think no more of it, open another can and settle into a thermo-nuclear strength rant about Elbow.

The next day I’m forced to get the phone out to do something pedestrian and discover a dozen vibrant shots full of unnatural colour and sharp, dog tooth angles. The brightness and visual fuzz take me back to WH Smiths and my first peek at Nick’s skin-coloured book. God... I’ve not thought about those photos for years. But there is something – some part of my teenage brain – knocking on these here-and-now lobes saying, ‘Hey, you. You’re onto something here. Take more snaps... preferably when soused’. So I did.

AONGHUS MCEVOY Walking the city Reading Russolo

Sitting reading The Art of Noises beside an inadequately sealed, single-paned window in the centre of Belfast City, my focus keeps returning to the line ‘noise reigns supreme over human sensibility’. The words cast my ears beyond this building: the rumble of a waste truck, whirring as its arms lift a bin, the rhythms of crunching waste and the slam of plastic on concrete as its aria of stench comes to an end, trundling on for a few seconds just to begin another. Further away a chorus of sirens wail in support; phasing in and out of each other, they haven’t learned to sing in unison. My awareness moves back to the house I am sitting in, its structure has its own song, the creaking of pipes and floorboards; the machines and inhabitants contained here overshadow this from time to time, at other times I can’t move my ears away from the high pitched tones produced by the light-bulbs and computer and other permanently left-on yet rarely used pieces of digital technology scattered on each floor. Russolo’s ‘intonarumori’ sought to transmit and control the sounds of urban space in a concert setting, but his letter pushes my ears outside of the concert hall and towards the sounds I cannot control, the internal sonority of his words drifting out to my external perception. When I listen to what is beyond my control it makes me question his concept of noise: by refining and controlling does it cease to be noise? To gain meaning from the noise of urban space does not require me to abstract and control; its meaning is unveiled in the manner and place of its production, the way it exists in this way in everyday life.

My line of thought is not radical or new. A lineage can be traced from Russolo to Pierre Schafer’s conception of musique concrète, to John Cage through to the World Soundscape Project. Returning to the text in front of me, I think about its ability to create links between itself, my ears and the surrounding city; reading Russolo’s manifesto in this present space is more powerful than its literal realization. Belfast is far away from the notions of beauty and nature presented by acoustic ecologists and deep listeners; oppressive grey buildings, flags to mark territory, the sound of traffic a constant presence. ‘One day we will be able to distinguish among ten, twenty or thirty thousand different noises. We will not have to imitate these noises but rather to combine them according to our artistic fantasy’. Distinguishing noises lead me through memories of the city; they push my mind towards what sound events unfold there presently. Moving from my chair, I pick up some microphones and a portable recorder, fold my copy of Russolo’s manifesto and place it in my pocket. Departing from the house to the street, I move through the cries of children and the familiar slow grind of wheels emanating from the walking frame of the man who enjoys afternoon cans of cider near my home. This is not the first time I have heard those wheels, and also not the only walking frame I have heard this noise emanate from. This sound became a lot more disturbing in my mind after reading a history of vigilantes and punishment beatings in Northern Ireland. It hits me on an internal level and is not

something I have discussed with friends. I wonder, does this noise hold the same meanings for others living here or am I being melodramatic? Maybe I’m mistaken, but a lot of men of a certain age make this sound and walk in a similar manner. This mechanical noise could not be further from those described in the manifesto; its creak is downtrodden and utterly human, it conjures images of a bleak past, not futurism’s triumphant tomorrow. Detached from the context of this space, its history, and my present experience, this sound holds little meaning. Returning the noise to its place, the quiet squeaks and creaks become grinding and inescapable. The stories of this place that have been left unmentioned are recounted by it. Crossing a nearby bridge all I hear are car engines and wind in my ears, I have recorded here before, no need to do it again. This space is a boundary between two communities broken along the sectarian divide. All I notice here now is the lack of passers-by and the bizarre creationist murals painted upon walls in the distance. My mind goes back to memories of moving to this city… Five minutes of hastily pulling out leads and setting up a microphone. Walking towards my home I approach a bridge and am immediately struck by the sound of sirens and a distant clatter, the origin of which is not quite clear. I look up to see a line of police vans barricading a road. My ears paying closer attention to the distant rumble, its sound-source of drums is revealed: I remember that it’s marching season. My only exposure to and knowledge of these marches has been via news footage taken in close proximity to participants. Standing at the bridge I hear a slow and gradual rise in volume. Though the road is straight, allowing me a long vantage point, the marchers have not yet en-

tered my visual field. The militaristic rhythm of the drums approaching has an intimidating effect, never represented in the footage I have seen. The lack of visual presence combined with this slow and steady crescendo shows me a new aspect of this annual occurrence in the city. The increasing volume of drums gives me a sense of apprehension about recording marchers close by and I look towards a nearby park. From here I can stand at a distance from the parade and still manage to record the event. Moving into the park drums and sirens are still heard, however I begin to notice couples walking normally, children playing football and others enjoying their evening. Their disregard of the invasive sound of the march leads my focus onto the chirping of birds and laughing of children, my changing experience of space affecting what is in the foreground of my auditory experience. Sounds of the parade and police return to the fore as I remember what I have come to record, and hurry towards a point where I can hear the event clearly, without dragging bulky equipment into the milieu of police and marchers. I switch the recorder on. Moving the microphone around I focus in on the crescendo in more detail, rising and rising, simultaneously entangled with the relaxed sounds of those using the park. Later I listen back to the recording. I think about how music is used by marchers to temporarily dominate space, echoing through spaces in which they are not physically or visually present, the wail of police sirens alongside those playing in the park; one aspect heightening a sense of danger while another expresses total indifference towards the event. I question my apprehension about taking a recorder near the parade, wondering whether this is just naivety; perhaps I’m just an outsider...

The memory lasts past the long road into the city, past more flags and murals into a space where these symbols have been removed, to the rumble of machines and people in a space not broken along these lines. A space that imposes a vision of a synthetic present upon an unsaid past, a synthetic form of progress.

Falling water dominates this space, more invasive then any of the vehicles I see gently trundling off from the car-park entrance. Over time my listening changes, water here moves from noise to noises, millions of sonic shards formed from the collision of tiles and liquid.

Concealing my microphone, flicking on my recorder and confronting the roar of the street, I remember a conversation with an elderly lady. She spoke about the changing sounds of the city centre, Belfastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transition from a vibrant city to one surrounded by a steel ring, and the eerie silence of moving through these places. The memory relents with my focus turning to snippets of present conversation, street musicians and machinery.

Standing on an escalator I listen intently to its mechanical squeals and rhythms, propelling my body into the chatter, echoes, artificial light and open space of the shopping centreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ground floor.

Looking through the entrance of a large shopping centre, disembodied industrial sounds creep out towards me: the rhythms of machinery, collages of shop speakers and the reverberation of its occupants morphed by the cavernous, open plan building. I am now standing between a car-park entrance and a plastic sign detailing information for each floor of the shopping centre, the bottom of a water feature pouring down from above crashes beside me, chatter, the distant murmur of engines. I begin to feel self-conscious standing still in this space seemingly doing nothing, people glance at me, I pull the copy of Russoloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s letter from my pocket and unfold it, pretending to scrutinize the text as if it contained necessary information for me to carry on my way. I scan the text;

The sound of water engulfs this space as well, though the acoustics of this floor transform it from an invasive noise to a more naturalistic sound. Perhaps a man-made attempt to induce sonorous reflections of relaxation: recreational space sounding against the noise of labour.

Voices echo forming an acoustic layer, some speech can be deciphered, most is a blur. A shop alarm beeps. The collage of noise produces no thoughts, focusing on the sonority of the spaceremoves me in a strange way,

so many simultaneous events it is difficult to decipher. Another escalator, a similar set of squeaks and rhythms, this time scattered with snippets of conversation, I try to detect the rhythms of the mechanism and those of language simultaneously.

I have moved to another floor, some teenagers shout nearby, their noise makes me look towards them. Their volume signals their feelings towards this place. Its sleek design and advertisements attempt to present the building as a new departure for the city, inclusive of all, a space to socialise in... a security guard approaches the group.

I pick out some sentences as the sole of a running shoe squeaks against the polished floor. I can detect all these sounds around me, combining into a blanket white noise as the architecture reverberates and muddles their sources. It is a constant mechanical drone, a mechanism absorbing all sound events, machines, movement and speech, transmitting the intersections of their echoes, swallowing and regurgitating all. Recording from this vantage point becomes tiresome, too repetitious, I move up. Standing in a viewing gallery looking across the city skyline I hone in on the noise of an elevator, its taut metal wires vibrating. A giant metallic being beating out ascending and descending rhythms as it moves from floor to floor. A disembodied female voice announcing its arrival.

I look out upon the Harland and Wolf shipyard which now remains silent, its industrial clamor replaced by camera-clicking tourists. The rhythm of the elevator brings past conversations to my mind: a woman describing the march home of hundreds of shipbuilders in hobnail boots, steel hitting concrete gaining volume as they approached East Belfast, a signifier of her father’s return home. A man from North Belfast described the intense noise of his work in the yard beating steel; getting used to the volume of his workplace took a long time and then, ‘well, you just learned to forget about it’. Samson and Goliath, the famous cranes from the yard stand above the rest of the city, I have never heard them, I begin to imagine their song. A whistle sounds, it reminds me of a train, not one I have ever been on, perhaps the noise presents itself this way in relation to these recollections of recollections, present correlations with a past noise I have never heard. Children run and play near me, their exclamations removing my mind from this imagined past, they stand out against the roar of the building. Their utterances move from laughing to shouting, disheartened responses to their parents’ scolding;

Surrounded by trees I have followed the Lagan river which cuts through the city along to its valley. The walk here did not take long. This valley is contained within the city but has no resemblance to an urban space. I stand in a forested area listening to birdsong, grazing cattle can be seen in the distance, I look at

Russolo’s letter again;

It extends my listening outwards to the faint hum of traffic dissolving the boundary between this space and the rest of the city. The words draw my ears to the noises created by people. I notice a plane pass overhead. A memory of being lost in these woods and following the sound of cars to find a way out returns to me, climbing a gate and descending upon a motorway. I sit and record, tired from moving around the city. The sounds here are easily singled out, an acoustic space unlike any other I have been in today. The disappearance of the noise of people and machines cuts me away from the text; ‘noise’ has revealed human stories, the most ‘natural’ space I have visited today leaves me with little to say, little information about what its sounds mean. Human action I can pick apart; bird call and the movement of water have no regard for this.

This text emanates from a paper presented at a conference celebrating 100 years of Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noise manifesto. I decided to read his manifesto and let it guide me on a walk through Belfast City. In some spaces I made field recordings, in others I read excerpts of the manifesto, while in others I simply wandered around and listened. At the time I had just finished working with various communities living in Belfast on a project which sought to document and explore their day-to-day sonic environments; this ended up becoming as much of a cue as the manifesto for my exploration of the city.

The Samsonite Philosophy of gwilly edmondez & POSSET What’s it all about Gwilly? ...the ongoingness of music that comes out of social practice – i.e. I guess above all dance/beat cultures and improv/jamming/sounds/noise. The bent I’m straining is grounded in my ongoing thing for constant making-doing, never letting the big framing of a finished work interfere with the continuous process of producing more-new-new-more-wow-yah. Posset non-thoughts... Document, document, document. Write it all up, take a picture, make a recording. Take that recording and add it to another recording. Excavate layers of bus noise, soundchecks, kids’ games, vocal jaxx to make another thing. Push and pull together – all at the same time so the cancellingout action becomes delicious quivering. Edmondez sez All this has finally been reinforced by loading my iPod the past week with a stack of Trilogy Tapes mixes which most habitually seem to move from the bedrock of reggae/dub through beats, noises and environments a) as if it’s all the same thing (which it is) and b) because no one provides a track list, everything seems to pour from this endless relentless effusion of universal beauty wherein humankind are most closely reintegrated into infinite context – music is everything and is starting to behave as such… Waxings of P... Make your body go limp and your mind go blank. The pre-ritual of mental evacuation helps to rid you of bad airs and graces. Above all: Be proud to be boring Play the glitch/slip/gibber Don’t rest until you have scared yourself Make yourself laugh like a dirty joke The sound of shame is not well-thumbed. Finger it! [laughs] My Cool Parkings On… … all comes down to mule-husband quartets gawping at you through the glaring foil umbrellas (bands… bands… bands… bland-boy syncing jobby coppers). Each new impulse to tape-that-shit_scope-thatsnip_blast-it:- you hair-sellotape little truths that never need to amount to some great STATEMENT or DICTATE perpetrated like smeared dogma at the carpet-bombed inanity-inertia foisted on all, feasted off of in wretched gags. What I’m on about is this romantic/utopian framing of the kind of things we

do as bacterial germ-fare that could, in theory, penetrate the fabric of a ghastly world of men bands daddying a population into lad-lady stupors. And it can happen because it does: it just takes one livid-headed youngster to catch a whiff of them smoke fumes that rise from the flaming groove of a Luke Poot, Wrest or Alan Silva and we’ve got a human head turned deftly away from the big-evil-arse that guffs holy spirit into helled lounges like in Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales. Do you know what I mean? Flu-jab brings on melancholy... 1978. Sunday. Cross-legged on the floor. Ravi Shankar on some comparative religion chin-stroke (BBC2 natch). My ears fairly bulge with the familiar yet other-worldly fandangle. I know from then on things will never be the same again. I was right. 1987, slouched in a corner. ‘Wasted’ by BLACK FLAG roars out some girl’s speakers. The ferocity flips another switch. Never wanted to punch anyone in the face ever. But now I’m exploding with dark crackling energy. It lasts for the rest of my life. Wandering round the aluminium crocus in Gateshead less than 10 years ago. Some skinny hippy gives me a CD-r. It says Wazhoola in Arabic script. The bloke says ‘It’s free. It will always be free.’ Takes me about 3 weeks to play the shifty bleeder. A most intense D.R.O.N.E. I have now made contact with Blyth UK. The inevitable will follow. All important formative experiences. Add yours here: ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ After Lieutenant Pidgeon, then Where else was going to be real enough? The piper at the gates at the age of seven, just three years before the ecstatic trauma of my new album played all day long on mainstream radio, DJs gushing forth lavish altercation with the 13-note riffs, the seven-bar refrains, the 27-second chorus peddling all manner of emotional ideo-plop years before they even vaccinated against the feverish adventure of getting lost in Kizz Alyve! Against getting ring-walled by a mole house band working the shifts

from obliteration to mind camps. All of them probably aclypsed by Ha Ha the Electorate playing at the Star Tandoori in Bute for a Howard Gardens Hallowe’en party, more raw, more closer to the core of where I’d been humming on the agitated grips of excapingly buoyant ankles on legs belonging to none. But then what about Bolt Thrower at the Clwb Ifor, with Mari Sheard supporting and Shane Embury fuzzing his gaze from the ranks? Our glare hinges extensivist lipsy, Gustav Thomas waking to feel the snake and his gun playing with itselves. Cod this have been a spelling mistake? Dog Faced Hermans at the New Ocean, Alan Silva, again, again, Ingrid Laubrock last week even. Moments as mountains, for sure, but really it’s the encounter with material tussle made marvellous by the extent to which someone utterly driven by a quest for the impossible can engage in the shard clap of ideas so real they bolt to the floor through its pelt flashing indecent luminosity back up out through the young soles of lilty spirit masons who’ve all paid long ago in far more than bland currency. (leaked memo from office of national solipsism) Officer Wetlook. ‘i love wolf eyes’ he muses riffling thru a pile of tapes, ‘but i sometimes worry about their quality control.’ The idiot-broth. ‘Humph & Pumf. The power of prolifigacy uncorks the bottle, shakes it about and allows one to gush forth like dirty milk.’ Both nod, sagely. Then they turn to face you. This is a challenge dear reader. “Whatyougonnadoaboutit?” To they that scorn the page One line: you forgot that people are people who give off a bent funk and they home in on cracks with the love termites have for unadulterated globes Fews Never forget the rush of amp-fuzz, ‘vuhvuhvuhvuhvuh’, the smell of burning dust and yet… Hay Infusing the coils embedded in the solid fly of technik anticipating lunges through fuel! Military hardware …softens a loneliness? Please Friends: Taste the silence.

Contributors AMELIA BYWATER & REBECCA WILCOX’s collaborative practice aims to give precedence to processes of understanding rather than a tangible, known object of interest. These processes are often reliant on the spaces between two people and expressed through words and movements. Using forms of language that are both written and spoken, they are interested in the possibilities of disturbing the fixing and linear norms of text. This has come about through wanting to explore how a ‘minor voice’ might refuse or deliberately pass through normative ways of speaking. dAnIELA CASCELLA is a London-based Italian writer. Her research is focused on sound and literature across a range of publications and projects, driven by a longstanding interest in the relationship between listening, reading, writing and in the contingent conversations, questions, frictions, kinships that the three practices generate, host or complicate. Over the last few years she has practised and theorised Writing Sound in connection to reading, memory, personal/collective histories, and the interplay between fiction and criticism. Her new book, F.M.R.L. will be published by Zer0 Books in 2015: a recording of a three-year long improvisation in writing, F.M.R.L. is a collection of beginnings, footnotes and ‘deranged essays’. www.danielacascella.com gWILLy EDMONDEz committed himself to pop by only ever making it up on the spot in 1980 with the formation of Radioactive Sparrow. Since then he’s played constantly in a variety of contexts. Right now he is the denial of a hidden pop star lurking in regular folk. Which is why, in his duo with Elvin Brandhi (Yeah You) he takes the name MYKL JAXN. ALEX HUMPHREyS uses two dimensional imagery with high emphasis on the use of colour and composition. With the enjoyment of combining bold shapes and techniques of mark making, Alex aims to work in an experimental, abstract outcome. All of Alex’s work is hand screen

printed and lies heavily in the form of traditional print. Contact: a.humphreys.a@gmail.com W: Alex-Humphreys.co.uk AONGHUS MCEVOY ‘My work is primarily concerned with everyday life; analyzing and exploring seemingly mundane experiences to expose latent surreal or hallucinatory qualities. I am a musician, ethnomusicologist and artist utilizing composed and improvised music, collage, sound poetry, installation, text, and field recordings. For the past few years I have performed and toured as a musician on a regular basis with groups such as Woven Skull, Primal Barber Trio and various improvising ensembles. Recent sound pieces include belfastsoundmap. org and Sounds of the City Belfast (a collaborative community based project shown in N. Ireland and Brazil).’ JENNY MOORE is a Canadian artist and musician based in London. She plays in the all-female, all-drum band Charismatic Megafauna and makes collaborative, sculptural & musical performances. She is currently the producer and host of You can’t win them all, ladies and gentlemen, a live, travelling radio show exploring the insane neo-liberal demands that artists be everything to everyone - part two of which will be made at Butcher’s Tears in Amsterdam, early 2015. www.jennymoore.co www.youcantwinthemallladiesandgentlemen.hotglue.me Joe Murray performs as POSSET: a glum improviser with Dictaphones. He’s a frequent musical collaborator, enthusiastic blogger and noise-traitor. Doofus tape fiddle/skronk/scribble. IRENE REVELL is Director of Electra. Projects include Someone Else Can Clean Up This Mess (Flat Time House, 2014). Slow Runner (Badischer Kunstverein, 2013); Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic (Tate Modern, 2012), Sound Escapes (SPACE, 2009). Irene is also a member of the Cinenova Working Group; writes, mostly for The Wire magazine; and plays music with queer punk band Woolf.

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