We did a class called Bring the Noise last week, for which I asked students to bring an example of, you guessed it, noise - however they wanted to construe it, not the genre noise but anything that irrupts sonic business-as-usual.
One student came up with the goods - an artist called Justice Yeldham (quel nom!) who uses shards of broken glass as a sound-making medium - miking it up and putting it through filters and wotnot.... but the catch being that he blows on it to start the vibrations off... and what with it being serrated, often ends up with a cut lip and blood streaming down his chin and throat.
Talk about suffering for your art!
In the grand tradition of Blixa "my body is a test case" Bargeld
The audience suffers too, sometimes - in this video he mentions one gig where he caused a woman to throw up!
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Avant-gardists using glass as a sound source has something of a scattered history
Experimental music sharity blogger Continuo had a whole series of posts on glass music, for which he made compilations - I think the links are expired but the blogposts are full of pointers to crystalline malarkey
I can't remember if he includes the Cristal Baschet as made by the Baschet brothers - it involves glass rods that got suggestively rubbed.
A little thing I wrote about it and them:
Les Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet
Starting in the early 1950s, the sculptor François Baschet and his engineer brother Bernard built a range of “structures sonores” – a term variously translated as sound structures or sonorous sculptures. Among their creations was the poetically named Voice Leaf, a glossy metallic shield that transformed the performer’s voice into an unearthly keening wail. Most famously there was the Cristal Baschet, a glittering array of glass rods that produced piercing drone-tones when rubbed by the performer. Teaming up with the composer-musician Jacques Lasry and his organ-playing wife Yvonne as the ensemble Lasry-Baschet, they performed concerts and made records like Chronophagie. This TV program appears to date from the late Fifties and unless you understand French, your best bet is to skip to about six minutes in, when Monsieur Lasry appears looking a bit like a Gallic Keith Moon. Duetting with his wife, Lasry showcases the shimmering sight-and-sound of the Cristal in operation, his fingers periodically dipping into a bowl of water to keep his tips lubricated. If you are of a puerile, Viz-reading mentality, you might well find all this stroking of perpendicular rods suggestive and snigger-worthy, despite the angelic purity of the tones generated by the frotting fingers of the Frenchman. Among the many Baschet-related videos on YouTube, look out for a recent, full-colour clip of the Hope Ensemble performing Erik Satie’s Gnossienne no. 1.
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A song with glass smashing in it
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The first time I came across the idea of music made from glass - unless we are counting novelty acts on light entertainment shows, New Faeces etc - would be when Paul Oldfield picked this record from a second-hand store in Oxford back in the early '80s.
They mis-spelled her name on the cover - or did she add the 'e' to Annea Lockwood later?
This week in the class we are doing Bring the Quiet.... you guessed it, ambient and adjacent soft-slow-still-serene musics... I could bring some of this along, it would fit fine
The Glass World was reissued by Lawrence English's Room40 label not so long ago
Release rationale:
“I have become fascinated by the complexity of the single sound.” - Annea Lockwood
A note from Lawrence English
To attempt to summarise the journey of Annea Lockwood’s life, as a composer and performer, is difficult if not impossible. For six decades now, she has carved out a multifarious and fluid existence that has orbited various musical movements and approaches. Hers is a life led by intuition, curiosity and listening, one in which passion is paramount and wonderment abounds.
If you were to reflect upon one aspect of her way of being that holds the greatest gravity in her day to day, it is perhaps listening that resonates most vibrantly. It is a practice that she has sought to deepen, with an unwavering dedication across her life, and a it is practice that has sustained her in the absolute. It’s here that Glass World comes into focus for it documents some of her first significant studies into sound, object and listening. It is a recording that captures her in a moment of profound fascination with a rather familiar material, glass.
This recording celebrates many things, amongst them Lockwood’s willingness to allow single sounds to resonate, fully. Across each of the twenty three vignettes captured here, Annea Lockwood invites us to lean into the material nature of sound with her. Glass World shimmers with an almost fanatical incandescence. It radiates a vibrational intensity that holds as strongly today as it did upon its original release in 1970 on Tangent Records. I had the privilege to re-master these recordings, under the guidance of Annea, and sitting with them so intensely was nothing but a delight.
In tandem with this project, Annea and I have undertaken a long-form in conversation, which is collected in the book which sits alongside this edition. The conversation splays outward from Annea’s work on Glass World and it deliberately seeks to visit upon her interests and passions, and through doing so revel a certain perspective that has guided her ways of being, and ways of making.
It’s an honour to have the opportunity to share this edition with you. I hope you too can catch Annea’s resonate curiosity and be as captivated by these sounds as I (and many others) have been.
I remember when Justice Yeldham was playing frequently at avant-rock type gigs a few years back... TBH, I deliberately avoided ever seeing him because I thought his performance style sounded quite upsetting (or at the very least, a bit gross).
ReplyDeleteIn retrospect, I probably should have given him a go at least once, in order to have an informed opinion - seems hard to imagine someone would subject themselves to that night after night if the result wasn't musically rewarding / interesting.