I am posting from a new UK domain set up by Lisa’s brill brother – https://www.mediamarmot.com/
I will maintain the US one until its all settled down and tested.
A couple of people requested a bit of an explanation of the Easter Christmas thingies.
Good art requires no explanation – somewhat dodgy art does – as my efforts are currently on the dodgy side it would churlish to mount my high horse and refuse to explain what i am trying to do – so here goes.
btw the way i will post about my new treatment soon – nothing exciting to report though other than keeping track of the 10 different medications requiring different doses on different days at different times of the day, pre meals after meals without meals – Art set up an App for me – the reminder alarm sounds like an angry cat and consequently frightened the fur of Vinnie cat who was sitting on my phone at the time – but without that i would probably have overdosed and died – arghhh
The Easter thingy
The Christmas and Easter pieces are both about the absurdity of religious festivals, religious myths and religion itself (I am aware that not everyone shares this view and that’s just fine by me – there are centuries worth of creative works that provide a more positive take more persuasively than I can ever hope to counter). The 2 pieces try to make the point by making as little sense as their intended targets. The vocal characters are all played by me either live, pre-recorded, digitally processed or synthesised. By offering this range of different versions of me the authenticity of the content becomes difficult to discern. Is this authentic, serious, silly, truthful, original, derivative, meaningful? – the listener may ask of the work and thus by extension of the Easter/Christmas story they depict. The setting is always the same – a telephone box from which disembodied voices may be discerned. Evoking a stable or a tomb I suppose in this case. In the background randomly sequenced echoes of previous broadcasts may be heard as well as extracts that may not have been previously heard in other pieces and may or may not be ‘meaningful’ to me or any other listener as well as randomly generated ‘spot’ effects. In the Easter piece a tribute is played in the background to Mahler’s resurrection symphony, but the original instruments are changed to electronic instruments (reflecting similar changes to those imposed on my voice) along with time signatures, keys, tempi, sequencing and the layering of phrases. The music also acknowledges Berio’s Sinfonia which happens to also be a reworking of the same movement of Mahler’s resurrection Symphony and from whom I stole the idea. In the Christmas piece references are made to Away in a Manger which the synthesiser read as manager because of the spell check function insistence that i missed and created quite a nice random gag. Repeated characters add the illusion of purpose and structure but really there is none – Making the point again that any quest to find sense, particularly in the mythologies propagated by religions, is as foolish as dinosaurs playing the flute, campaigns to return magic rings to little girls from Cadbury’s chocolate adverts or efforts to decode my two pieces. Everything is just daft and pointless except the actual act of making the art – the point made by Andy Warhol and oft repeated by me.
“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art
sources and inspiration; Berio’s Sinfonia, Dada collage and bricolage, some Charles Ives songs, 19th century melodrama (ie spoken text combined with music) Thomas Edison’s ‘Spirit Machine,’ Henry Hunning’s carbon granule transmitter (used in some early phones until Edison commercialised his own) (yes he really did live in Bolton Percy our nearest village), John Cage’s use of chance to create musical structures, David Bowie’s cut ups to create lyrics. – i cant face formally referencing these so just google the keywords and phrases above
Hope that is interesting