Bow Gamelan Ensemble - Great Noises That Fill The Air

Great Noises That Fill The Air Taken from our second Random Spectacular journal (published in 2014), Julian Cowley invites Anne Bean and Richard Wilson to recall the creative alchemy and spectacular magic of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble.

Random Spectacular is the publishing imprint of design collective and print gallery St Jude’s. The imprint was launched in 2011, providing the opportunity to explore further collaborations in printed and audio form. www.randomspectacular.co.uk

Great Noises That Fill The Air Julian Cowley invites Anne Bean and Richard Wilson to recall the creative alchemy and spectacular magic of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble.

“There were remarkable, eerie sounds on the river,” sculptor Richard Wilson reflects. “Barges rubbed and bumped together – great hollow resonating chambers.

Pipes uttered gurgling noises. Welders worked on the shore.” During the late 1970s, when Wilson moved to Butler’s Wharf, near London’s Tower Bridge, he discovered a strong affinity with performance artist Anne Bean and drummer Paul Burwell, who were already based in that exploratory artists’ space. Wilson owned a rowing boat and Burwell, who had been a naval trainee at Greenhithe, had intimate knowledge of the Thames.

Together, the three friends spent hours on the river, watching and listening. “Something was building, without us recognizing what it was,” Bean acknowledges. “We were excited by the constant changing of sounds and light, and we tried to find a way to be part of that.”

In 1983 they founded the Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Bow, identifying the area of East London where they lived and worked; Gamelan, alluding to the mesmeric metallophone ensembles of Bali and Java. Over the next eight years they immersed themselves in sound and light, creating a series

Photo credits Top left: Ed Sirrs. This page and bottom left: Images courtesy Alter Image (stills from Channel 4 commission)

of spectacular events that left audiences across the globe thrilled and astonished.

Burwell, who died in 2007, liked to point out that darkness and silence formed their canvas. That was accurate, yet teasingly understated. Galvanising, with the charge of their collective imagination, materials foraged from scrapyards and workshops, the trio seemed to tap into elemental forces and unleash wild energies that led one onlooker to describe a Bow Gamelan event as a cross between Turner and Apocalypse Now. “There was magic,” says Wilson. “While performing I’d often stand back in awe, watching this thing; the dare, the danger, the energy.”

When Bean met Burwell, in 1976, she was experimenting with metal sticks that activated lights when they touched drum-rims or cymbals; playing shadows, not just sounds.

Soon after Wilson joined them at Butler’s Wharf they made this flashing kit the focus of an event beneath Tower Bridge. Bean plunged into the river wearing a costume with flickering lights attached. Burwell, perched

on Wilson’s boat, launched a barrage of thunderous drumming. The authorities, taken by surprise, joined in with searchlights, sirens and police-boats. A foretaste of things to come – the emergency services would often attend Bow Gamelan performances, unwittingly supplying their coda.

Bow Gamelan’s debut as a named ensemble came when the London Musicians Collective hosted an evening devoted to self-made musical instruments. “We didn’t have any money,” Wilson admits. “That’s why we went to a scrapyard and took things out of the river. It wasn’t a statement about industrial noise, or society’s detritus ... it was what we could afford to do on the evening. Our situation was, where can we find the sound in that? And how can we illuminate it so our audience can see where the sound is coming from.”

In their use of lighting and fire the Bow Gamelan took a lead from their close friend Stephen Cripps, a pyrotechnic sculptor who died in 1982. His spirit of salvage and spectacle lived on through their performances, in their deployment of sparking angle-grinders, flaring blowtorches and their riotous firework displays. Wielding an arc-welder, rather than a conventional instrument with a musical history and protocols, proved liberating. There were no proper procedures, no inherited criteria. The trio could discover their own freedom.

“We’d find a metal resonator, cut it in half, hit it – and carry on until we found sounds,” says Wilson. “That was our instrument, suddenly. On one occasion the idea was to press a switch and a motor would wind string over a pulley and raise a light bulb, that would turn off at the top. But the jolt at the top threw the motor into reverse

and the bulb came back down. It kept going up and down, filling the room with shadows. We had found something.

That was the ethos of Bow Gamelan – you went on a hunch, and often got more reward than you expected.”

Avoidance of non-acoustic amplification was one of their few specified ground rules. At a Bow Gamelan event you would find no standardised black boxes projecting sound, but you might witness filing cabinets being battered by jets of water from a powerful hose; droning vacuum cleaners, suspended from cables; bagpipes fashioned from lorry inner tubes; shrill industrial whistles; a thudding road-pounder; empty milk churns or fire extinguishers lashed by a motorised flail; a tower of window-glass, toppling when car tyres beneath it were inflated; vehicle springs resonating like gongs; thundersheets bowed, oil drums beaten; light bulbs dunked into boiling water, shot at with air rifles or crunched underfoot.

In the early days they would respond to a commission by filling their van with a selection of ad hoc soundgenerators. “Once, driving to a gig the van’s exhaust gave out,” Wilson remembers, chuckling. “So we broke up an instrument and mended the exhaust.” Increasingly the Bow Gamelan gravitated to a site-specific approach, finding their instrumentation in the vicinity of the venue.

“We never practiced,” Wilson continues. “We made something, and that evening it got played. We would choreograph the performance, but that would happen immediately before we started and would resemble a shopping list, the names of instruments to be used – they all acquired extraordinary names. Then it was a matter of improvising with them, until we felt they had contributed enough. We were like technicians.” In time they came to adopt a distinctive uniform of nautical

sou’westers and oilskins. “We wanted to be anonymous and synonymous in that way,” Bean explains. “Just operators keeping this entire orchestra going. You didn’t have your own style, so you could work in many different ways.”

Preparing Offshore Rig they moved onto Lot’s Ait, a small island in the Thames, and transformed its old boatyard with three enormous sheds into their performance space. They found in place an industrial air-hammer – a gigantic readymade drum-machine – and they engaged the assistance of the Thames Steam Launch Company and other operatives on the river, evolving a flamboyant, uproarious piece that channelled energies directly from the surrounding environment. They lived on the river for weeks while developing The Navigators, assembling a flotilla of vessels for performances between Bow Creek and Richmond Bridge, where a giant hot-air balloon ascended, with passengers in its basket sounding foghorns.

One of Wilson’s favourite events was A Damned Near Run Thing – its title evokes the battle of Waterloo – staged on the South Bank of the Thames. “Visually it was stunning.

Like an urban jungle, beautifully lit. Enormous steel megaphones, bolted to instruments, fired sounds at the Shell Building across the river. Echoes reverberated around us as we rumbled thundersheets and sounded pyrotechnic whistles. Musically it was beautiful.”

By the early 1990s the Bow Gamelan Ensemble were heavily in demand. They had worked their heterodox magic in many kinds of venue, in galleries and television studios, at a port in Japan, in a disused silo in Norway, in a footing of Brooklyn Bridge. “We recognised,” Wilson says, “that either it was going to become a full-time activity, an industry with a convoy of trucks, or it was time to pull out and say it’s got too big – which is what we did.”

Bean, Burwell and Wilson cast themselves as technicians, but there was a special artistry in their ability to take discarded, redundant or stolidly functional materials and mine their potential for spellbinding spectacle, sculpting air, channelling water, projecting fire with industrial intensity or with the thrilling delicacy of – to invoke an image Burwell found in Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks – “a perfumed fog shot through with lightning.” Looking back Bean recognises that the real adventure was the miraculous way each event would come together. “We never felt hindered at all by impossibility,” she says.

“Everything was possible.”

Anne Bean has worked in installation/performance for 45 years. In 2009, she received a British Council Creative Collaborations award for ongoing worldwide work with women. In 2010, Tate Gallery and LADA granted her a Legacy: Thinker in Residence Award, resulting in a major work, TAPS, to which over 80 artists, engaged in improvisatory experimental practice, contributed. This award inspired further works, including A Transpective, shown in Venice 2013.

Richard Wilson’s fascination with architectural and perceived space has resulted in a 40 year body of work where our accepted comprehension of space is questioned and subverted. These interventions are characterised by concerns with size and structural daring and the fact that he’s not cheap but he is slow.

Julian Cowley lectured and wrote on English and American literature before becoming a freelance writer, primarily on contemporary music. He is a regular contributor to The Wire (London) and Musicworks (Toronto).

Photo credits Opposite top left: Courtesy The Scotsman.

Opposite lower left and right: Ed Sirrs. This page top: BGE score courtesy Richard Wilson. This page bottom: Bow Gamelan Ensemble poster by Jane Colling.