March 17-21 2019
I was never quite sure I was going to get there until I had actually got there. John's communication since Christmas was a mixture of vague optimism, concern, and worry that I wouldn't have a good time. I calmed him and said I had other jobs to do so he wouldn't have to entertain me the entire time.
I had expected to arrive and all day in a studio, moving and experimenting, leaving John to work on some material that I would then try out the next day and we'd continue like this, forming some ideas for how the piece would work. Much like if I were a Violinist requesting a new concerto, I would bring my Violin and maybe we'd try a few of the trickier passages or see what key the main theme sounded best in. None of that happened. I thought it imperative to come though, I was sure John needed to see how I moved and was in real life. I came away with no documentation of my rehearsals, just a log recorded half-drunk every night.
What did this mean about my communication? Is my process not as flexible as I think it is? I guess the collaborative in-the-room process is unique to me and my colleagues as composer-performers. The proof is in the pudding, however it makes it hard to share insights into the compositional practice, although for this project, it will be more about my authentic experience as a performer, not so much about John’s compositional process.
John is a recluse and steals away in his studio, a tiny 60 euro a month smokey room in a huge cooperative owned building called Zentralwerk. They asked me to help their renovations, jokingly, I realised. Marie, John’s girlfriend, a music therapist from Dresden was very nice and hosted me the Sunday night whilst John cooked Chili.
The next day John was up late as he'd stayed awake watching videos about Nixon; I didn’t hear from him until towards midday. Zentralwerk was a factory before the wars and made typewriter parts. Its manager Niki, who is very tall, was telling me about it and how he set it up. He masters a lot of John's audio, which I found interesting. He runs the association that rents the space from the cooperative that he also runs. It's part of Trans Europe Halls.
We then talked politics for a while and of course Brexit and Trump. Then Niki told us how the Nazis used Jews to make munitions there in the factory and once the war was it over then it became a plant for printing a prominent east german newspaper for many years. It was never firebombed by the British. He said Jews had felt safer working there than at their camp. They would have to walk 2 kilometres back to their camp where en route they'd be spat at and forced to walk in the road, banned from Transport. Niki and Zentralwerk recently instigated a march, a remarking of the route they would have had to walk twice or more daily, and only after that did the local council and government get interested in it and agree that this route was actually a piece of Dresden’s history.
John is in awe and wants to show me Dresden and how interested he is in these characters that form his community. It has also shown him warmth and a place to call home and continue his career from.
The collective memory of this is still fresh and it's memorialised through the newly reconstructed Altstadt of the City.
Ruins and recordings - traces of a person and traces of Dresden.
Though these were not exactly ancient Roman riuns, insofaras they were buildings in living memory, the rebuild really only started in 1994, the city was destroyed. And so I found myself in a strange place: with an American, in Dresden, as a British person, dealings with traces and essences and ruins of people and characters. Ruins, echoes, and resonances. This might be common to all aspects of life however this was the first time the echoes resonated with each other so richly and in so many areas of the same activity that I was there to do.
John is an American from Nebraska and moved to New York when he was young, knocking on composer Philip Glass’ front door. Amazingly John then lived with Phil for years behind his couch, Phil even gave John an allowance and various opportunities as a young composer. During my stay he would often share an anecdote about Phil and do a very amusing impression of him. John is interested in capturing “getting” people and things through their sound and physicality.
His main idea for the piece he would be making for me was this sort of portrait of Dresden that would feature “characters”, both personal and dramatic, and people who had been so kind to him and those he admired. So his approach is to sit down with someone who he wants to record and use as audio material. This can of course be a slow process as people typically aren’t themselves when they know people just want them to be themselves. His first subject was Constanza who is a shy painter with two young children. She is German and is very happy to be featured in this piece. John said he has experience "getting" people and using them in pieces then, on one occasion, the subject found themselves gotten so well that they found it slightly uncomfortable. However Constanza is happy to do it and she reiterated that with me.
Naturally the plan is not to mock the subject but rather to capture them and celebrate them. A conversation from the first evening with John and Marie wound up talking about people with Dementia. John had worked in a care home when he was younger and noted that people with that disease become abstractions of themselves and get caught in loops. The loops often often ended up just with “ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma…”.
John's documentation of work from a whole ten year period was lost and he says that people still have it somewhere and won't give it to him. He fears working collaboratively based upon these experiences and particular circumstances whereby "Directors" would put their name on his ideas. He also shared about his tape machines and sequencers getting stolen in New York by homeless people. The Police told him that they could tell what drug the person who broke in was addicted to; Heroin was sloppy and the person normally hurt themself barrelling in; Crystal was precise and light.
From on point of view, this is, so far, an unique collaboration as we didn't really do any work, just did a getting to know each other. Through sharing about the only collaboration that had gone badly for me, we created a context that arguements were good for a working relationship however this might have been a defensive move.
On day two we met at Zentralwerk, I had a hangover. We had planned to do a sharing of works and processes in John’s little studio. I showed him my pieces FEED, Tro//ing, and Ravel, which are all in different states of completion.
He suggested something about Bastard Assignments’ performance style and technique then offered feedback for FEED such as adding additional musical counterpoint to the foley section, a change I have since implemented.
He then showed me a DAW session on his computer for his piece “Everyone” for three dancers and audio, everything is on this grid, to beat, it's very musical as soon as you put a click behind it, very composed and nuanced. Its sole function being to create a trance and give a tempo. Samples are also in a key, he explains; he might pitch shift the sound of a door creaking or a vocal utterance up or down a semitone the create more consonance or dissonance presumably, mood-depending.
We stepped out for a cigarette. Then I was worried Tro//ing would be too similar to John’s piece Dive Bar, from Book Of The Dead that featured narration by Uma Thurman, that it would be glaringly obvious I’d borrowed an idea from it but I showed him anyway. He said it was neat and that there could be more tension in a particular moment.
Then we walked to Constanza’s, whom I’d heard so much about, for an afternoon coffee. She has a natural awkwardness whilst being totally welcoming. I was trying to absorb her body language as this was important to John, to try and “get” her, this could have been uncomfortable and I wasn’t sure if she could tell that I was observing her. There was a moment when her son shouted into the room we were in, John and I exchanged a look, sadly we weren’t recording yet.
On day three I explored Dresden further and ventured into the Aldstadt, the old town that has been rebuilt. It appears grand and there are large pedestrianised squares although it lacked the decrepitude of other cities like Berlin or Brussels due to its recent reconstruction. I went to John's for dinner and he asked why I had asked him for a piece. I said that I wanted a rounded view of composing through being a performer and that I had wanted a piece from him for a couple of years. We agreed to have it done by Autumn 2019 and that I would probably revisit at some stage to try it before some final changes were made. None of this was what I was used to. I had never solely commissioned a work before and work of this nature is not simply summed up in a phrase like “Piano Sonata” or “Violin Concerto”. We have to use more words. This time we didn’t work with our bodies in a space physically so even more words had to be used. Whether he asked me what I wanted the piece that he was making for me to be like, I’m not sure, but I told John that I wanted it to be difficult (for me), challenging (for the audience), mysterious, and complex. By difficult, I mean that there requires some effort from me and considerable practice to convey and do justice to the idea.
I also said that I often threw too many ideas at my own work, only implying that I don’t think it would need loads of ideas. And that I wanted to perform it a lot, be it around Europe, London etc. ideally alongside his latest piece Everyone.
John shared his idea that he had been turning over in his mind about an immersive theatre event that he might devise in Dresden. I shared with him my knowledge of Punchdrunk and even my own extensive experience of working on You Me Bum Bum Train’s 2015 epic London show. Asking where the looping came from, he replied that he had acquired an early fascination for fair-ground rides, ones that went around a circuit on a set time to set audio cues and the complexity of that, its synchornicity.
April 5th 2019
I was struck by an image, after seeing Otto Ramstad’s show at KHiO, of myself performing this piece I had commissioned. I had had it filmed and edited professionally with three cameras. I had then performed it live in sync with this high quality video edit rear-projected onto a screen behind me and I film myself doing this. To this film I then attach the high quality audio of the track, not simply what the camera recorded. And I back-project this new video and repeat the process and repeat the process so that there are multiple iterations of this performance or is it rehearsal or is it documentation. There may also be a slight zooming out each time I edit the video, so that each is zooming out for the more full view, the wider perspective on what is really going on. I imagine as each iteration is fossilised in the proceeding that there is a degree of desynchronisation between the audio and the picture, synchronisation being precisely what the piece is concerned with. This might just exist as a fictional, artistic concept though, a description of a hypothetical process.
April 6th 2019
I had a dream last night about what John had made for me, except it was for a group of us rather than the solo that I had asked for. There was one movement I remember that was part way between a baby and a sumo wrestler consisting of lifting each leg out to the side bent knee, and slamming it down, twice each side after the other left right left right and then whilst the left was lifted for the third time you lean right and hop five times to your right, being carried by the momentum of the lean. This is funny because I the only thing I don’t like about John’s work is his use of baby sounds and childish affect.
April 11th 2019 (Night)
After Dickie Beau, my co-supervisor, had talked about 18.9hz bar and sound and the death of my uncle the day before, I dreamt that I turned on a speaker to resonate at 20hz and then it began affecting my sight if I found a particular space in the room in my dream that was say 20 metres from the speaker. I then went into a moment of sleep paralysis and knew that my Uncle’s ghost had somehow inhabited my dream and that this resonance within my dream had allowed this to happen. This the same day that the first image of a black hole had been made by Katie Bouman. And as I struggled awake from the nightmare, the Central Line of the London Underground rumbled directly under Nathan’s place in Bethnal Green, where I was sleeping for those nights.
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I planned to tell John about Dickie’s suggestion about low frequencies and wondered, whilst zooming out to look at the situation, to what extent was I trying to compose the piece? I had chosen John Moran to make it, had set the duration, had tried to organise workshops sessions for it, had suggested material (like Glenn Gould), and was now talking about a specific frequency that John might use! John was also quick to mark the borders though, clearly expressing that he won’t compose with me in the room and was wary of people laying claim to his ideas.
April 28th 2019
John sent me a rough demo of Constanza waking up and there being a background of 741 hz = cleansing, morning frequency, he’s now interested in this subliminal frequency idea. So to what extent am I composing this piece actually?
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There is a perceivable lineage from Philip Glass with regards to loops. John uses loops of time in his work to create a sense of hypnosis and also allow for the audience to get all the detail.
It should be said that obviously John won’t work with a score and instead works using a DAW session dealing with sound. Like most of my project, the removal of the score draws attentions to itself and raises further questions about the difference between documentation of performance and means of transferring and storing of instructions for performance or practice. In this situation I imagine John will create a video of himself, although we will meet again before I start rehearsing by myself properly alone, that will act as a reference point.
Do these observations on these few days where nothing happened have any validity, relation to the work, or relevance to the activities I undertake now as an artistic researcher? If they do and the more subjective avenues opening up and being paved by others working like me in the field of artistic research allow for the validity to be increased, can these observations and opening up of avenues be of value to me and my peers?
And am I in a way interested in removing hierarchy?
As is now a feature of my style, my pieces like Tro//ing, Planet:Dysphoria and FEED use Lipsync, in this case extending the idea to the whole body and unseen things, simply we are synchronising bodily actions live to prerecorded sounds. What interests me so much about this is that it gives the audience an opportunity to project, perceive, remember, and transform what they are seeing as they want to.
As Hans Belting writes about in Image, Medium, Body there exists a mechanism through which presence can be achieved. Here he is discussing the notion of death masks.
“The triadic constellation in which body, media, and image are interconnected here appears with utmost clarity. The image of the dead, in place of the missing body, the artificial body of the image (the medium), and the looking body of the living interacted in creating [iconic] presence [as against bodily presence.]”
The image of the can, in this case the sound of the can
The artificial body of the image, the medium, in this case the mimed action of opening the can
The looking body, in this case the audience (and surely us as performers) watching
Here the image forms in (y)our minds and through its nature, the audience must do some work, whether automatic or otherwise. I find appeal for the way this leaves space for the looking body to fill in some information, such as the colour, texture, smell, background etc. for the image.
Practically, this is a technique, an instrument we could all play, if you like. I’m lucky in that everyone in the group was happy to explore it with me, learn how to do it, and practice it.
John also mentioned the artist Andrew Dawson and cited his piece Space Panorama. https://www.airspacemag.com/videos/category/space-exploration/space-panorama/
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I spent a lot of time preparing
Even up to the train from Berlin to Dresden
It was like the piece was a house and I was trying to guess the colour of the walls upstairs by looking through the letterbox. The information in the score is not sufficient, however it is necessary and a place to start.
John put quite a lot of emphasis on the video score. Even showing it to Moritz in November.
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November trip
Lots of convo
Degree to which I bring stuff and ideas
To John asking wouldn’t it be cool if I spoke over this section to full on asking me to write some music for Consnatze to saying he was even thinking of just giving me the tracks to smash up, to me talking about making a piece, and how we might make something in the future
This opportunity at Hellerau and Leipzig has emerged and possibly Ultima
Far less prescriptive than imagined, despite there being several scores that I feel sometimes composers use to wield power
the weed talking/helping the feel the beat in the silent tap bit
Difference between loops and repeats as loops are back to back
Idea of animation and the stretching ball, v dynamic movement, stretch the elastic all the way to 10 sometimes then back to 3 or 4
Last day really getting it, lots of things are just on the beat, I felt this inner music happening
Was filming myself, John never films self
He left things like twisting on the toilet open to me to make look good
I made Til Godzilla, Rosa’s book section, Constanze’s mic touching and knee holding, Til as superhero, what else? Door knobs, exact pen throwing was an agreement
We got then to designing gigs with Moritz very quickly and straight to me compsing with and around his work and a piece about us composing, as if he kind of read my mind a bit, and forming like a Dresden company
Fill the screen - something we said
He said I was most accurate lipsyncer he’d seen, whether he really meant that is debatable
So would he normally open this up to me or is it something that I’m bringing
I could not get the walks, my back looked so locked and straight
I notice that I get trapped in the loops, is this something to reflect on? I get lost and assume I’m wrong, is this a metaphor for the whole process, like Ivar Gryd
I made my FAKE, FAKE remake, need to redo, I decided that this is a partner piece and inspired by working with John, infiltrate the psycho bit a bit more, or literally add something insidious
I also want to make a skiing piece with Mima in it, how to make this reflective of Constanze?
Also the live video delay would be nice to try, and see if it goes out of sync, how can that be reflective?
Need to go through the audio material with John
Unethical to mention weed and Philip Glass stories
Compare this context to Stockhausen Inori or whatever and how everyone says how particular it is. However when one examines what he’s done, it’s actually very open.
Practice is hard to document in the same way as decisions about devising because they are so in the present and it’s unclear what will end up in the final thing when that decision is being made. It is always now.
Performance of Constanze in Dublin december was much better than Oslo Nov = https://vimeo.com/374144755
Robbie Blake wanted to work with me after seeing it
(can you collaborate in different times?) - Prince project
Piece - lip shapes to audio that match up but are not exact and then there is a layer of live sound made live by the mouth shapes and they also work and overlay
A lot of this is about performance practice - interesting to go into the difference - or just avoid