An artist friend Kirralee asked me about the divide in my practice between art and music. “are they separate projects or are they all together like one big bowl of spaghetti?”
My answer was they are all one big bowl of spaghetti. Because I liked the picture that made in my mind, maybe I was hungry. It also made me think of a Kippenberger spaghetti painting, and a brief thought about his particular attitudes toward social pasta and social activity generally. The more I think about it though, maybe it’s more like lasagna with parallel layers of activity in close proximity to each other. I do keep projects quite separate but they have to be related because I am the one who’s the custodian of the practice.
Art and music are both, I assert, communal activities that require more than one individual to make them happen. What we experience as either art or music in the world, mediated or otherwise always requires community. They are separated culturally, often as disciplines, and yet there are numerous cultural formats that bring visual and audio forms together such as; opera, ballet, movies, installation art; all bowls of visual and audio spaghetti or lasagna. And yet weirdly it does feel like one has to justify mutli-form art in the contemporary art world in a way that it is not really culturally or historically as necessary in these other worlds.
This may also be related to the tendency of commercial spaces to require obnoxious and some times meaningless categories of identification. Painting, sculpture, performance etc house, happy house, drum and bass, these words can determine people’s entire lives and life projects and be meaningless to somebody who is unfamiliar with these categories.
For me also the studio is a place for subjective construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. A big part of what that means is sitting and talking to yourself asking “what do I want to actually do here? What is important for me to be doing here, right now? And even, Why are the results of this is activity a potentially significant experience for someone else? Along with this, time spent in the shed at Sculptors QLD, I have taken on a process of self evaluation and care by regularly visiting a psychologist. As I have been dealing with what I believe is depression brought about by trauma and the pandemic. Trauma, I have noticed has a way of destabilising ones sense of self, problematizing the above. So I am sitting there thinking, “what am I going to use this space for?” and at a certain point I stopped asking, “what do I want to do?” and started asking, “what have I been doing?” and “what is worth continuing?”
One of the things I have done quite a bit of over the years is find ways of making music with other people in my studio or theirs. I have been exceptionally lucky with some of the people I have had the pleasure to make sounds with, some of these people are: Stephen Parrino, Marco Fusinato, Suzanne Howard, Elizabeth Pulie, John Nixon and many others. So I am sitting there weaving in the studio at the back of the old Museum, it is very noisy because there is construction happening constantly out the back and thinking, “this place would be ideal to make a lot of noise in. I should organise some secret jams with people who I know but have not had the opportunity to play with much or at all”. I thought immediately of Lawrence English and Naomi Blacklock. I originally thought about arranging these as separate one on one sessions. But when I initially ran the idea by Lawrence on the phone he was interested in an all together thing. Max Fowler-Roy joined on double bass, gadgets and effects. The jam went very easily, not surprisingly in one way given the collective experience of the people in the room, there were two 40 – 50 minute sequences below is the last 5 minute section. I was really happy with the performances not so much with the recordings that I made.
On one level the afternoon was kind of low key business as usual and in another it was completely overwhelming and magical.
In the back of my mind I had been thinking about magic and the supernatural world. You see I have a Korg Volca FM Synthesiser that I bought for Suzanne a few years back. Recently in my home studio it stopped working, it kind of blew up. Smoke came out of it, for some reason I had decided that it was cursed. This was my way of trying to fool the spirit world, that it was not me, it was the Synthesiser that was cursed. I had decided it was cursed after taking it to a guy to fix it and the power supply for the unit started fusing other things, so I decided “wow the korg synthesiser has cursed the power supply and now the power supply is fusing anything it comes into contact with”. something about this seemed analogous. Another thing about this unit was that it was the centre of my current setup for Weekend Immendorff, and when it stopped working I felt like it was a message form the other world from Suzanne saying “no, you are not going to do this anymore, you can’ t do this anymore”. So I decided that this machine object was cursed and it could not be fixed, so I then thought, “how do I contain the bad magic here in the box?” Well, I thought, I could encase it in concrete, along with the notorious power supply.
The SQ studio was utilised also for Weekend Immendorff practice, I describe this project as a musical collaboration that honours KrautRock, German Electronic Music and the spirit of Suzanne Howard (1962-2018) my partner in life and art for 21 years. Currently and for the last 3 and half years my collaborative partner in this project has been Callum Gallertly.
Finally I have maintained a band with my friend Archie Moore called ∑GG√E|N. This project in some ways has been the most important for me and like a surrogate family through a period of deep grief. For the past 2 years throughout lock downs and travel restrictions and complete blackout for live music we have managed to keep the ∑√ rehearsals and jams happening with a stable line up. Myself playing guitar as David Ethix, Magus O’pus voxing, Max Doubt Bass and Cal C Um on the drums, we were able to add Sylva Vy to this line up on piano for the recording of our recently launched album 1.1% Didication that we recorded at Alchemix studio in West End. For the launch at Backbone and subsequent Pandemic Gig at Chardons corner Back Room we brought in another guitar player Jackson Perrot. A big part of this process was also producing the physical object of the CD itself, which included CD packaging, lyric sheet, poster, tote bag and eventually a line of t-shirts. For this ∑√ worked with artist Summer Hiskins-Ravest who designed and produced the prints.
∑GG√E|N 1.1% Dedication
Numbered Limited Edition Multiple,
Includes: 50.36 minutes of epical and yet deeply miserable music on a compact disc, individually screen printed cd covers, lovely Ltd screen printed poster, Lyric sheet and a silk screen printed tote bag.
Total package is yours for forever for only (everything but T-Shirt) $30
Just the cd $15
just the Poster $10
tote bag $15
T-Shirt $30
Launch 6 November 2021, East Brisbane Bowls Club (Backbone)
you can buy stuff here: https://3ggve1n.bandcamp.com/
