TRACKLIST Ansuman Biswas “Klytaimnestra Washing Herself” Jem Finer and Jeremy Banx “Tarred and Feathered Heart”
03. 2’08”
Dryden Goodwin “Extract from City Theme 01”
04. 1’59”
Dryden Goodwin “Extract from City Theme 02”
05. 1’59”
Alex Rodgers “An ‘evil’ is a hay fork with 3 prongs”
06. 5’11”
Band of Holy Joy “Cold Blows the Wind”
07. 3’33”
DM Bob and Jem Finer “She’s so strange”
08. 4’02”
Christian Garcia “Air”
11. 4’29”
John Irvine “Drunk and running around the town”
12. 3’33”
John Roseveare and Andrew Kötting “Song for Eden”
13. 5’04”
Matt Hulse “Louyre”
14. 3’41”
NG Smith “Yes, my god – The Maurspechte at work – 1989 Berlin Wall”
15. 1’42”
Max Richter “Fragment”
16. 3’17”
Run Wrake “What Is That?”
17. 2’30”
Nicky Hamlyn “Braun 4729, stereo”
18. 2’34”
Toby McMillan “Mapping Perception”
19. 2’02”
Andrew Kötting and Toby McMillan “Nucleus Ambiguous”
20. 5’16”
Tony Hill with Sally Goode “A Sense of Place”
21. 3’56”
Joey Kötting “D...E___A...D”
22. 2’08”
Bell Helicopter “Enough’s enough”
www.sonicartsnetwork.org the jerwood space . 171 union street london se1 0ln . uk t +44 (0)20 7928 7337
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InsideOut: a psyche and its geography charts the inscape of one of Britain’s most celebrated artists and experimental film makers, Andrew Kötting. This CD and accompanying publication mirrors the ‘highly idiosyncratic’ style he has become known for; experimenting with format, texture and sound to “transport an audience to a place...where possibly they’ve never been before”.
Gamine “A Good Hand” {Extract} Sukhdev Sandhu and Scanner “Tomorrow Muffle”
This CD is a soundtrack. Self-contained dramas that coagulate into the shifting and amorphous structure of Kötting’s psyche-ever present in his own work. Contributions from film makers, poets, artists, musicians, friends and family create something beyond just a collection of music chosen from personal taste, but a document of an artist’s life.
09. 4’50” 10. 4’29”
www.sonicartsnetwork.org
01. 4’08” 02. 4’31”
A psyche and its geography. Autumn 2008 Curated by Andrew kötting
InsideOut 1/10/08 14:43:08
Sonic Arts Network Established in 1979, Sonic Arts Network is a UK based organisation that promotes and explores the art of sound through a programme of performances, commissions, education projects and releases. Sonic Arts Network believes in the unique capacity of listening to enrich people’s lives. This publication is part of the Sonic Arts Network guest-curated CD series. For more information visit www.sonicartsnetwork.org. Sonic Arts Network is changing. Visit www.soundandmusic.org for more information All images Andrew Kötting, Eden Kötting, Joey Kötting and Edmund Monseil.
Andrew Kötting was a lumberjack, street trader and then a painter and decorator. He is now an artist, film maker and confabulator. www.deadad.info
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“Andrew Kötting is one of Britain’s most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker currently practising who could be said to have taken to heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. Formally exploratory and aesthetically innovative, like Jarman he is also a great collaborator, building around his various projects a community of shared interest, while anchoring his prolific production in an ongoing report on the lives of those closest to him.” Gareth Evans
Design: Joerg Hartmannsgruber [ www.white-card.co.uk ]
Mastered by Chris Branch at Brains & Hunch, London www.brainsandhunch.com. Disclaimer: This is a guest-curated publication and therefore the views and opinions expressed in this release are not necessarily the views and opinions of Sonic Arts Network. We have made every effort to contact all individual copyright holders and obtain their permission for this release. Printed on 100% recycled paper
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In his writings, Gerard Manley Hopkins often used the terms inscape and instress. These were words which always had a hold on me; they beguiled me and confused me. Did he mean that mindscape, which we carry around with us from day to day and moment to moment, that safe haven and inspace that works as an antidote to the great-out-of-doors, Herzog’s ecstatic truth space, Beckett’s cerebral hinterland, Tarkovsky’s zone, Sinclair’s thinkspace or John Clare’s headtalk? Perhaps by inscape he meant the unified whole of things that give those things their uniqueness and that makes each thing different from other things.
Perhaps by instress he meant either the force of being which holds that inscape together or the thingy majig from that inscape which carries that thing into the minds of others i.e. musical,
technological, performative, theatrical, textual sculptural, structural, formal, nostalgic or memorial. And I think that the works I have chosen all express an inner character or charm. They are the result of mental analysis and perception, some beguiling some touching some absurd. Whatever Manley Hopkins meant, for me inscape is the metaphysical manifest, the interior noisescape, the inside sent out or the outside brought in.
There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.
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That silent space that exists in and around the words that silence the glue that holds the hubbub together informs a life and this my fucking writing together.
Eden embodying and generating an instinctual tolerance. Offering thresholds for ventures into the very core of consciousness and perception. Eden, As A G E N T and catalyst, is essential to any opening up and then there is this my Albion, the longer, older, wilder island, Anglican Gothic. But England is the place from which much of the work is lovingly pulled. The ongoing relationship which makes it the tick-tock: an ironic celebration of things past, things Anglo that allows for absurd affections to dance a pier-end afternoon waltz with occasional vehemence towards insular narrowmind, but more likely amused observancing of island ways and folk. Time Based Media as hymns to ‘Ancient and Modern’ madness.
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Absurd Couldavists Shouldavists Body Cradle
A
is for the anthology of my psyche and its geography and B is for the beginning and the buzzing of the bees. An. Absurd adj. 1. at variance with reason, incongruous; ridiculous. 2. ludicrous. n. 3. Philosophy: the notion, chiefly in existentialist thought, that the world is neither designed nor predictable but is irrational and meaningless. Academics and Advisers, Couldavists and Shouldavists, Historians. They are there not because they have special access to the truth but because they have been around and can read.
B C
is for the Body, bloody hell and blimey O’Riley.
is for “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” – Vladimir Nabokov.
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Family, the very being of this project and tribal without the fences, acknowledging the extension, the social constituency of being that then allows the private visions to blossom from the head out, meeting the wider air, changing and being SAN_Kotting_Text.indd 5
Where there is family or dys-family, let it be used. Vistas are larger there: a refuge and safe-haven outside the gulag that is the mainstream pantomime. But it’s not just choice. It’s necessity, a stratagem by which to reach the future of one’s own life. Without others the self that is known might stop. Thema tically, solitary figures in the oeuvre are de-centred. They only stabilise into (eccentric) order in the orbit of others.
Bodies Family
They collaborate on the business of being.
Vessel and votive, subject and object. The physicality of the work, text, image, language, subjects, cannot be under stood separate from an appreciation of how the maker views flesh. From micro to man-tall, sphincter to six foot, its trajectory, provocation, context and fallout are the steaming plots at the root of all manifest. And there is a flabby democracy to bodies. From Brakhage and the act of seeing with one’s own eyes to a Stelarc suspension. They fuck and fart, bleed, pus, puke. They also come in all sizes and with all adornments.
On surviving existence. Liquid mundane ity is fluid modernity. And happenstance and bricollage. Structuralist, post structuralist, essayist, non-sequiturist, modernist, post modernist, late modernist and hypermodernist, actionist, narrativist, antinarrativist, implied narrativist and thus Hybrid. n. an animal or plant resulting from a cross between genetically unlike individuals. Hybrids between different species are usually sterile. Not always, infact always room for the notalways. The more you imagine, the more difficult it is to find words for what you’re imagining. Because of the
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Family Mapping Perception Matter Margins Louyre, home
interest in things; both irreverent and kneeling at the altar of a life-given seriousness, a creative urgencyimperative; work in all disciplines, media and weathers; build no fence between life and work; thread a personal mythos with that of a hybrid nation; dig into place but think wide; layer intent; shredders of linear time; hymn the margins; speak in ‘folk’ languages; go find the challenging, never comfortable with the comfortable; a threat even, by much of the state cultural apparatus; funding is not a given;
family and friends are central to the practice and project; they are the glue and they make a fine photo.
Language, lingo, gramlot, verbiage: formulation of the current in relation to the historical. Word as a new strain of imagemaking. Visuals in the sonic as in the seen. Respect for place, personality and the social. The constantly mutating rituals of the daily. Let it all out of the mouth and in at the ear. Never Oxford English, but multilingual ease. Gramlot and cant. Lived lipwork. Biodiversity of the tongue. Mapping Perception. The beating core of how brain makes mind, makes consciousness, makes things and makes things up as it goes along? Makes it matter, makes critical text and makes matters worse. How it magpies things for use. There is, in mind and work, a constant re-incorporation of the stuff across time and place. I keep
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trying love poems to a daughter whilst swimming in cold water. Margins are central. Edgelands are normal. Louyre, home and man-in-themountain dereliction. A mountain think-tank bang in Ariège timber territory.
From the under-tree, the root expanse, artesian influences feeding in through the practise itself. Trunk, to the work’s arching network of boughs, branches, foliage. 1/10/08 14:44:22
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Baobabs: anti Ubermensch Gamine Nomadic
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Hubub in the Baobabs: shelter and story. Often weather-shaped and shaping, focusing, patterning the surrounding area, it acknowledges dependence while simultaneously standing clear. For John Fowles, JG Frazer and Robin Hood the tree is the prime imago of creative endeavour. anti Ubermensch and useful. ‘It’s in the most unlikely places you’re likely to find things.’ Gamine and Undermine (the self). Mongrel.
Deploy multiple styling for the multiple realities, audio/visual dysfunction, fissures in sequence, cutaway from the linear, everything is possible.
Hubub in the
Nomadic. Keep the human story turning. Tell tales from the end-zones, fire yarns for gathered folk to stave off the night (but dig into it also, like darkest peat, damp to touch). The tales told might be flawed (like life is flawed), ruptured and veering, but the pure - or quest of it - is dangerous, it could kill us with its fundamental claims. Mongrel futures are the only workable ideal. This mongrel is the shape the nomadic makes when photographed or filmed. Reclaim the current in relation to the historical, mine the deep strains of popular experience and folk memory represent them for the digital age. O is for …ö, Umlaut and Kraut. ‘I don’t know where I originated from but he’s been sound in our family for years and years and years.’ Occitania, Cathars and the French folk of Oc. A radicalism of people, culture, lifestyle, belief and geography. Peripatetic bandit country. Tunnels, subterranean and the underground. An influence on the work. Orient and exotic; alternative culture as early Moorish spices and Turkish delight instead of boiled potatoes and Bakewell tart. The hippy valley, lumberjacks and wild horses. Post Cathar and pre eminent evaluation of
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So not really place as landscape at all, but more of Manley Hopkins’ inscape, consciousness as it might look if it were dimensioned into say video or film. Searching for works that have been to the edges and looked over, shamanic flights returning from the far reaches with word of the void’s whistling rim. Paradigms to be tested. Sans Soleil? Pan’s People not Top of the Pops. The school of anarchic Arcadian genius loci Pan. Work can challenge pretty Pastoral, never the Merchant Ivory or Eagles Harmony. Always a streak of debauched fertility and the wildness of woodland. Non-urban and definitely not happyclappy; rather it’s where the bestial occupies folk and bloodletting. Politics. It does not have to be placard politics but the vision must be inherently committed to degrees of dispossession and the reverse – reclamation. No heritage car park, no tweeded nostalgia,
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product.
place other Pan’s people folk Prank Process Punctuation regurgitation
process as framed
They bring other places to other people, who then take a little of the weight and mix it with their own longing to create narrative or form.
but lived experiential body and heart lineages that challenge the packaging of memory and the betrayal of futures. Less the megaphone, more the hope of ‘politics’ and ever the Prank. n. a mischievous trick or joke, esp. one in which something is done rather than said, or is it? Process. The work is In constant flux, images and sounds migrate, are curious about the elsewhere, are remixed, lose titles and gain new labels briefly; fixity is not the spine here; things arrive into being, are held like water in the hand, then pass on. Are flawed and unfinished. This is how the work is like water; ‘We’re crossing the river to get to the other side, don’t ask me why, the river’s not wide.’ It holds light like mercury. It pools and spreads. Being the layered reading of territories, urban and other, via signs of all kinds and without prejudice as to the source or status of the prompt. Being the eyes and all senses of a conscious drift through space, time, architecture, experience, history, the latent future. Punctuation. Commas, semi-colons; colons even: springboards of suspense, breath held a beat. But full stops. Never… rather a trinity of stepping stones to futures. Assimilation, collation and then the regurgitation, contingency a must. People are the bedrock of the landscape, from which grow the weeds and the needs of ideas.
as much
the impact and role of the artist; always has been and always will be. The placeless place and the coordinated zone share the projection when it comes to territory. We move through it on our ceaseless journey towards understanding. Some people carry it, like a burden or a memory, or both.
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Family, friends, strangers all bring worlds, more or lessdelved in.
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The moebius strip of relations.
The hall of mirrors. What one starts with, goes on with; picture after picture after picture, sound after sound after sound whatever the ‘per second’ or decibels. So to the Sound the world makes.
people Ritual reflection flux So Sound Time
Not just music, not just ambience, not just voices, not just found sound, archive echoes, signal spillage, technical accidents, hiss, guffaws, foley and radio. But all of it and also the silence and also the gaps in the silence and what cannot be heard. It’s the sound the world makes.
In the eARTHOUSE Manifesto, it is counselled that there be an obligation to spend time with arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead. This is a more or less accurate description of relations with folk as much as fauna. This is instress The stories and histories are inhabited by, and lived within; people. Come up to me on the street people. The world breathes through people. Through what they do and fail to do; what they reach and fail to reach. From home-movie to Imax spectacle, let it all settle. No place is less than any other place. In potential. And Ritual. The functional symbolic. The acts that explain lineage, thresholds, group identities and their reasons; to them selves if nobody else. The oeuvre, and the actions of those drawn into its web, is one of accumulating; acquired and observed ritual. Ritual is the psychogeography of personality and community. It layers identity so that it can be read and mis-read. The reflection as an attempt to rationalise and locate the work within an historical canon. So to Scale. Scale shifts, accompanied by similar strategies in sound and thematic. They are central to the operation. The spectrum of sensual awareness that acknowledges continuous flux from macro to micro is seen as simply being the case of things. It is less an aesthetic choice (while being one) than an accurate response to things on the ground. It’s in the nature of attention. The seamless story.
Without sound, vision is stumbling in the dark. And anyway, there’s a prize: Noise Drives the Devil Away. And melancholic melodies evoke the muck of memory, which is always a good thing. A painful yearning gnawing thing. Time. Hurry up gents, it’s body time vs. geological time, the rock against the public clock, the seasons stirring it up with ‘living memory’. Sculpting in time is the aim of the game, whether in Bence House council house or with Gorges de La Frau continental reach. The timepiece has human hands, its face is the sky at dusk and its numbers a tree’s banded
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Voices ambiguity Words Works
years, ringing in the changes. The seas vast coldness, channels to cross and the deep voidic chuntering that accom panies you when you’re fifty yards out and barely hearing. Bodies. Matter. Clutter. Consumer ephemerals. Landfill. Mindfill. Stuff. The Real. Where ideas live. Whether it be a borrowing from John Berger’s Pig Earth or digging deep into Zola’s La Terre. It all lives absolutely in a material world - bull and man, sperm on the hands, pigs in branches, rooms like caves or armpits, piss in graveyards, phlegm, pus, shit, rock, rain, mud, salt, blood and heart burn. Institutions are built of walls.
A vision for the differently sighted. Assemblage. Traces and smidgeons, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Picking them up, putting them on. Transportative: Cy Twombly, Samuel Beckett and Bela Tarr; ‘I’m going to take you to a place where you have not been before’. Kevin Coyne or the Band of Holy Joy. Tree. Lumberjack (of all trades and master of none); trees as plankage and life-force. Certain doubts should prevail in the work. Change. It helps humanise those lofty intentions. It helps to protect from those that take everything that little bit too seriously. Serious nonsense. Therefore Vagabond. Hither and dither, upstairs and down stairs and in the lady’s chamber. The rationale is not to locate the work within any historical bloodline but
allow it to exist within its own poxy poetic reality. Voices. In the head, throat and chest, on the tongue like varieties of honey. Archive accents, society sounds. Knocking up against local crackle, the chatter of place and profession. An Stories told in the island’s timbre they happened in. audio The (Hoi Polloi) poetry bank of of necessary phrasing. tales tall Listen closely and you’re and true. half way there; watch carefully; here he goes here he goes, he’d just launch himself off, falling tit over arse but always landing in the same place. What might be its covert moral? Are we fish out of water? We live in the lives we live in. Somehow, there is a surreal making do, a strange survival. A world in which ambiguity might reign supreme. The wisdom of concise thinking, of experience compacted into essence. This might be at the heart of the work. Set these to dance with digression, wilful extension, waffle, natural curiosity, distraction and a sometime reluctance to discard and you have the oeuvre I might be considering. W is (other people’s) Words and Works. They are important and they are gathered here as testament to time gone and time going on. Creation myths.
The fragmentary and ‘unfinished’, the fleeting and the found.
Bodies Vagabond
This collection is the
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shared, seen dreams of tribe, family and selves. Rooted in fables
of the de/re-construction. Looping lines of narrative out of ordered time and territory. Undoing things to make new things, new arrangements of people and place. Pissed sometimes a priority. To Cut-ups; and perhaps a being-closer-to reality. No singular grain of truth. Digression. If you don’t leave the path, you won’t see the waterfall. Alphabetically ordered. Bits and pieces gleaned from a set of contexts and practices. They are no longer bound to any prescriptive reading of the term Inscape or inStress, but instead exist on the edges of the discipline. There is too much ‘seepage’ and there is no longer a ‘given’ or ‘self-evident’ context. This work has a difference engine. A vehicle into other ness and revelation. Aesthetically, bodily, mentally.
I was walking inside my head Memories of a darkened room a little bed Seething one day smiling the next I realise my problems are a little vexed It’s not so funny it’s not so sad But you know I’m feeling I’m feeling bad about heaven And I don’t know what to do. Kevin Coyne with Brian Godding
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and wilderness ye G.M Hopkinks
Corporeal. Everything present and accounted for? Never. Everything Normal? No. Everything out of order? Yes, because of you, you wanker.
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PS: Seek simplicity and should you ever find it distrust it. PPS: Internal monologues Infernal rackets Seas crashing against the cortex Flotsam and jetsam Crisp packets Treading water out at sea Please someone Look at me.
Andrew Kรถtting 2008 From an alphabetarium of Kรถtting with Gareth Evans 2 15
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Family, friends, strangers all bring worlds, more or less delved in.
TRACK 01: Ansuman Biswas
Klytaimnestra Washing Herself 4’08” 2008
Victim and perpetrator, mistress, mother and murderer, Klytaimnestra is drenched in blood. In the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides she is a noble lady and tender mother, inextricably entangled in the knots of lust and violence that constitute society. Her pain is an inescapable part of the logic of the world. Bodies crave and hate. Comprehension of this fact, however, can bring about peace. The way out of pain is in. In the mythic theatre of ancient Greece, music, dance and storytelling are means of public recognition of our entanglement and also means of transcendence. It is through communal convulsions that society achieves inner peace. The art of tragedy shows that all worldly relationships are in a state of flux. There can be no rest, no lasting contentment, in them. The outside world cannot be controlled, even by the most powerful king. Peace cannot be won by States, since peace is a state of mind. Klytaimnestra, having stabbed her husband in the bath, now washes herself in his blood. Seeing her dripping with gore, drowning in the dissonance of vengeance and desire, we are cleansed. On the outside it’s all a bloody mess, but then catharsis cannot be seen, only felt. www.ansuman.com
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Sometimes there’s some men mending a road. Deep in the hay by the lane is some secret centre. We had ‘rustic pornography’eh us forty-plus old people, from the country, that is. Men ditched their collections and then hunted for other mens. You could see them from miles away, remember? I remember a german girl the they called turkey’ she said her brother dried books in the oven. Fudge, fudge, fudge.
Or
If you want it, could I have this pomposity for text ; Human thought is the most attenuated product of the decay of the sun. Eh. ?
2008
Alex Rodgers
An ‘evil’ is a hay fork with 3 prongs 1’59”
TRACK 05:
Jem Finer and Jeremy Banx
Tarred and Feathered Heart 4’31” 2006
TRACK 03 & TRACK 04:
Dryden Goodwin
Extract from City Theme 01 2’08”
1998
and Extract from City Theme 02 1’59”
1998
Made with my Grandfather’s violin, an old squeeze box, a Wok and other utensils from my kitchen, I originally composed, performed and recorded these two sound pieces. They were for my first video installation ‘About’ in 1998, commissioned by Kettles Yard, Cambridge. These are two of what were four sound pieces, each with distinctive atmospheres, orchestrated to explore fluctuating experiences of the city and encounters with people within it; longing, exhilaration, connection and alienation.
www.drydengoodwin.com
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TRACK 02:
A paragraph; Sometime in the mid 1980’s I was working on a soundtrack for an Australian film about dustbin men, “Garbo”. This consisted of my taping bin men at work in Camden Town and creating rhythm tracks from their banging and clanging. In the middle of all this a friend of mine, Jeremy Banx, came around. Jeremy is a cartoonist and at the time was working on a deranged tale about a toxic Texan cowboy. He’d written lyrics for a song that was playing on a jukebox in the story and asked me whether I’d write the music and record it. I collided some of the dustbin drums and a wheezing compacter loop with a Hank Williams-esque melody to create what seemed like a new genre, Industrial Country and Western. The whole thing was recorded on a 4 track cassette portastudio in my bedroom. Is this ok? www.elrino.co.uk
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2008
TRACK 07:
DM Bob and Jem Finer
She’s so strange 3’33”
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Here you go; I wrote this song a long long time ago. I remember lying on the sofa and listening to the rain when the first line popped into my head. The rest followed without too much fuss. There is an old version I recorded, accompanied by out of tune radio and guitar, but the version here is a new one in which DM Bob and I took full advantage of a leap in recording technology, to an 8 track tape recorder, to try and further create the static landscape, the “inscape”, of the subjects addled brain. Some people think it might be about them but it’s not.
www.elrino.co.uk
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TRACK 06:
Cold Blows the Wind 5’11” Band of Holy Joy
2008
Louise (Piano); Alfie (Texture); Johny Brown (Vocal); Inga (Visual)
Taken from ‘Punklore’, a rural narrative on a manufactured landscape.
www.bandofholyjoy.co.uk
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Air 4’02”
Christian Garcia
TRACK 08
2008
Christian Garcia is a part of Velma B
www.gamine.net www.myspace.com/gamineuk
‘A Good Hand’ takes its own sweet time, a laid back and passive expression of the self-destructive impulse. More epic, we think, than long, it is one of the culminating pieces from our lovely debut album, ‘Sabotage’, which was written at a time of prolific self-sabotage. Actually, the lyrics in ‘A Good Hand’ are comparatively joyful in their insouciant disregard for conformity. It is about disentangling oneself from a place of respectability in the fabric of society, and casting off in search of intimacy with the unknown. Security is such a flimsy old bag anyway, a cheap substitute for contentment. But change we can rely on, so it is sought valiantly and faithfully in each verse. Choice is also one thing that should belong to us, although a liberal use of it is so often met with disapproval. In the end, this song is supposed to lend a little courage to listeners, who may be on the edge of some sort of precipice: we say, “Jump!” (metaphysically). Fearlessness, recklessness, discretion and disgrace, now thats worth singing about!
Here are the promised words, I hope they are up to scratch:
Ian Williams (Music) Claudia Barton (Words)
2008
A Good Hand 2007 4’50” {Extract}
Gamine
TRACK 09:
The idea was about outside/inside, I tried to find the sensation of breathing from outside and from inside the body, and then we can always ask ourselves what is inside, and what is outside? I tried to make something the most organic as possible. Well, it’s hard to describe with my poor English. The title was “air”.
Track 11:
John Irvine
Drunk and running around the town 4’29”
2008
I could alternatively offer the already finished track “Drunk & Running Around The Town” which is about a compulsion to explore real space and mind space simultaneously. While pissed. Middle-aged, middleclass rapper Mr Irvine, walks 1,000 every week.
www.entrances2hell.co.uk
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Track 10:
Tomorrow Muffle 4’29” Sukhdev Sandhu and Scanner
2008
Sukhdev; A drifted prose-offering to those, myself included, buffeted and dislocated by sleeplessness, who are struggling to gauge what is in and what is out, who can barely tell the difference between sunshine and moonshine.
Robin; Yes, that’s Sukhdev reading in the park close to Brick Lane in London, many sounds unintentional but fitted well into the abstraction of the sound. Can’t wait to hear the finished result.
www.nighthaunts.org.uk www.scannerdot.com
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www.roseveareprojects.com
To be honest I’ve struggled with Manley-Hopkins inscape and instress. This morning I think I worked out what my misgivings are. My feeling is he wants to give inanimate objects human qualities. This might have worked during the gush of high-Victorian romance and spiritualism, but as you know, having grown up with supernatural explanations that emanate from this period, they leave me weary these days. So I guess I took a more material approach to insideOUT, using two cues: the Xhosa proverb “people are people through other people”, and Robin Dunbar’s question in a discussion about language & human evolution: “How may this remarkable capacity for language in fact be intimately tied up with several other equally unique, but often ignored, aspects of human behaviour, namely laughter and music?”John is massively indebted to John Leiper and Paul Greendale for helping get these fragments in some sort of recorded shape.
2008
Song for Eden 3’33”
John Roseveare and Andrew Kotting
Track 12:
www.maxrichter.com
From the album ‘Songs From Before’, released on Fatcat Records (2006) and available at fat-cat.co.uk.
Since I work without any sense of a plan, ideas arrive unbidden, unexpectedly and in many different forms they are all fragments to begin with. Some lead nowhere, others lead on to bigger structures or extended forms, accumulating more material or more density as they go (and, in a way, I expect that to happen), while others seem to be complete immediately, needing no further interventions from me. I wrote ‘fragment’ in a few minutes one evening while sitting In a room staring Out of the window – which is what I mostly spend my time doing – and then I worked hard at trying to make it into a bigger piece. There are maybe a dozen extended instrumental renderings of this material in the heaps of paper on the studio floor – the bigger they got the worse they seemed – so, remembering my hippocratic oath (don’t kill the material) I returned to the original version for the album.
2006
Fragment 1’42”
Max Richter
Track 15:
Track 14:
NG Smith
Yes, my god – The Maurspechte at work – 1989 Berlin Wall 3’41”
2008
Voices: Anita Some of the field recordings have been taken from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall circa 1989 and constructed using a Casio SK/1
Mining for god deep in the recesses of the mind, looking for safe haven from the unpredictability of the world outside. I am left touching the absurd and futile. Flies circle the rotten thoughts and excavated waste as the gems of wisdom are impossible to find.
www.nickgordonsmith.com
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Track 13:
Louyre 5’04” Matt Hulse
2008
Recorded inside and outside a large farmhouse called Louyre, situated deep within a ravine in Southern France. Sometime home and hidey hole for the clan of Kötting. To spend time alone at LOUYRE is to surrender oneself to a benign bedlam of the imagination. Late one stormy summer night I discovered that I was in fact two people - ‘myself’, a rather pathetic selflimiting man, and ‘the other’ – a breezy, cheerful woman writer. She’s still around, I rather like her, she helps me out. This audio piece, constructed from sound sourced inside and immediately around LOUYRE, attempts to articulate that benign yet slippery grip on reality.
22 www.idlevice.com
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www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/andrew_kotting/index.html
2002
Nucleus Ambiguous 2’02”
Andrew Kötting and Toby McMillan
My sister and Andrew had Eden. I have my kids with Andrew’s sister. If you reduced Eden to maths she was a one in sixteen chance of being mine. For the multi-media project Mapping Perception and from the CD; ‘Bloodline’. 2002
Mapping Perception 2’34” Toby McMillan
Track 18: Track 19:
This is about the nucleus of a solitary tract and taken from a looping single screen video projection.
www.mappingperception.org.uk
Track 17:
Nicky Hamlyn
(preferably for headphone listening)
Braun 4729, stereo 2’30”
2008
The Braun electric toothbrush generates a steady drone that is modulated by my playing it over my teeth. In a give and take game of motor torque versus hand-brush pressure, the tone is lowered and returned to normal level, although no attempt at melody is made. The brushes also transmit variations in the surface with which they interface, and the mouth cavity - the “Inscape”- functions as a natural resonator, in a similar manner to the way it does for Jews Harp. Let me know if this is the kind of thing you want. Do you think it’s too didactic?
www.arts.ac.uk/research/filmcentre/bibliographies/hamlyn.html
Track 16: Run Wrake
What Is That? 3’17” 2000
Put together as my first film at the helm of a mac around 2000. An exercise playing with the potential as I saw it then, animation via After Effects and Photoshop and the audio mixed using Premiere from samples taken from my record collection including such gems as Dupont’s “Step Up Your Selling – A Study In The Art Of Carpet Salesmanship” and Jack Hargreaves “Know Your Fish”, alongside a plethora of Sound Effects records. Unintentionally evolved into the beginnings of a loose narrative featuring Meathead, at which point I ended it realising the need for some kind of script, which will hopefully be about to get done. www.runwrake.com 23
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Track 20:
Track 21 Joey Kötting 2008
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D...E___A...D 3’56” It’s a riff on that old D.E.A.D. chestnut done by just about everyone. Mine, of course, interspliced with ...__ _... the code/call used by mariners for “in distress” or “please help” or “is there someone out there who can come and give me a little assistance?”. I like that in reality dotdotdot dashdashdash dotdotdot happen to be the letters S.O.S, which in turn have been remembered as “save our souls” or “save our ships” they are but a mere “backronym” so that people can remember the morse code for dotdotdot dashdashdash dotdotdot. The same can be said of the piano notes that I have used for the piece, D.E.A.D. The other main sound/source is: INSIDE: from a video that I made of gaffer-taping up my own head, photographing it and then taking the tape off...this was all done in vain - an attempt to remove my facial hairs! OUTSIDE: what you hear from my studio when I was taping the video - the dog’s barking, the thunder etc. www.larissagoldston.com/artists/joeykotting/bio.aspx 24
Tony Hill with Sally Goode
A Sense of Place 5’16” 2003
Sally Goode has been blind from birth. I took her to a location unknown to her and recorded her describing what she found. By touch and sound she learns about the place and, with imagination, simplicity of expression and a joyful openness she articulates her findings. The sighted must see through her hands to experience this place. Objects, normally recognisable at a glance, become stranger and less identifiable when described by touch and without the vocabulary of vision. ‘A Sense of Place’ was originally produced for the Audible Picture Show, a programme of short audio works made for presentation in a darkened cinema. www.plymouthartscentre.org/film/tonyhill.html www.audiblepictureshow
www.artistsinthecity.org.uk/reading/projects/details. asp?proj_id=37
Conor Kelly and Sam Park formed Bell Helicopter over ten years ago. As a band they perform live and in the studio and have developed their distinctive style through numerous collaborations in film and theatre. Conor Kelly is also an artist and composer. From the CD ‘Hit and Run’. 2002
Enough’s enough 2’08” Bell Helicopter
Track 22
Sonic Arts Network Established in 1979, Sonic Arts Network is a UK based organisation that promotes and explores the art of sound through a programme of performances, commissions, education projects and releases. Sonic Arts Network believes in the unique capacity of listening to enrich people’s lives. This publication is part of the Sonic Arts Network guest-curated CD series. For more information visit www.sonicartsnetwork.org. Sonic Arts Network is changing. Visit www.soundandmusic.org for more information All images Andrew Kötting, Eden Kötting, Joey Kötting and Edmund Monseil.
Andrew Kötting was a lumberjack, street trader and then a painter and decorator. He is now an artist, film maker and confabulator. www.deadad.info
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“Andrew Kötting is one of Britain’s most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker currently practising who could be said to have taken to heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. Formally exploratory and aesthetically innovative, like Jarman he is also a great collaborator, building around his various projects a community of shared interest, while anchoring his prolific production in an ongoing report on the lives of those closest to him.” Gareth Evans
Design: Joerg Hartmannsgruber [ www.white-card.co.uk ]
Mastered by Chris Branch at Brains & Hunch, London www.brainsandhunch.com. Disclaimer: This is a guest-curated publication and therefore the views and opinions expressed in this release are not necessarily the views and opinions of Sonic Arts Network. We have made every effort to contact all individual copyright holders and obtain their permission for this release. Printed on 100% recycled paper
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TRACKLIST Ansuman Biswas “Klytaimnestra Washing Herself” Jem Finer and Jeremy Banx “Tarred and Feathered Heart”
03. 2’08”
Dryden Goodwin “Extract from City Theme 01”
04. 1’59”
Dryden Goodwin “Extract from City Theme 02”
05. 1’59”
Alex Rodgers “An ‘evil’ is a hay fork with 3 prongs”
06. 5’11”
Band of Holy Joy “Cold Blows the Wind”
07. 3’33”
DM Bob and Jem Finer “She’s so strange”
08. 4’02”
Christian Garcia “Air”
11. 4’29”
John Irvine “Drunk and running around the town”
12. 3’33”
John Roseveare and Andrew Kötting “Song for Eden”
13. 5’04”
Matt Hulse “Louyre”
14. 3’41”
NG Smith “Yes, my god – The Maurspechte at work – 1989 Berlin Wall”
15. 1’42”
Max Richter “Fragment”
16. 3’17”
Run Wrake “What Is That?”
17. 2’30”
Nicky Hamlyn “Braun 4729, stereo”
18. 2’34”
Toby McMillan “Mapping Perception”
19. 2’02”
Andrew Kötting and Toby McMillan “Nucleus Ambiguous”
20. 5’16”
Tony Hill with Sally Goode “A Sense of Place”
21. 3’56”
Joey Kötting “D...E___A...D”
22. 2’08”
Bell Helicopter “Enough’s enough”
www.sonicartsnetwork.org the jerwood space . 171 union street london se1 0ln . uk t +44 (0)20 7928 7337
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InsideOut: a psyche and its geography charts the inscape of one of Britain’s most celebrated artists and experimental film makers, Andrew Kötting. This CD and accompanying publication mirrors the ‘highly idiosyncratic’ style he has become known for; experimenting with format, texture and sound to “transport an audience to a place...where possibly they’ve never been before”.
Gamine “A Good Hand” {Extract} Sukhdev Sandhu and Scanner “Tomorrow Muffle”
This CD is a soundtrack. Self-contained dramas that coagulate into the shifting and amorphous structure of Kötting’s psyche-ever present in his own work. Contributions from film makers, poets, artists, musicians, friends and family create something beyond just a collection of music chosen from personal taste, but a document of an artist’s life.
09. 4’50” 10. 4’29”
www.sonicartsnetwork.org
01. 4’08” 02. 4’31”
A psyche and its geography. Autumn 2008 Curated by Andrew kötting
InsideOut 1/10/08 14:43:08