Throw Them Up and Let Them Sing

a film about Kurt Schwitters

Maggie Nichols, Molde.

Just listening to Maggie Nichols on radio 3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tt0y

Extended vocal technique and improvisation. Massive overlap with tradition of sound poetry.  And she is featuring in a synposium at Tate Modern today called “Her Noise - Feminisms and the Sonic.”  I used to go to her gigs when I was a young angry feminist who loved weird music.  I now have filmed her many times.  Fab.

Finished the picture edit.  Now starting the sound with Dave Hunt.  But back to Cumbria tomorrow for a rest as exhausted.

The Molde Jazz Festival and the Romsdal Museum are definitley hosting a day of tribute to KS on the 15th July on Hjertoya (the island in Norway where Schwitters lived).  My film will be shown and Han Bennick is playing.  More info when I get it.

Sylvia Hallett playing Hardanger Fiddle for the film (its not in the final edit but so good I am posting it here.)

Leaving the Lake District and Back to London

Its getting very busy now and I have not kept up to date on the blog.  I left Cumbria in tears mainly because the dog insisted on sitting in the car while I packed it.  She wanted to come too. Though when I said “stay” to her she got the message and went off to chew a bone.  It made me cry a lot as I left - then I realised later that it was the week before Easter and my former partner Nick Houghton died then.  I always over react to any loss at that time of year.  I do really miss the dog though.  And the village - and the rather eccentric local pub which seems to operate as an animal shelter as well (see above). It was amazing watching the landscape come alive again after the snow.  The buds growing, and the lambs (who really do have some inner vertical propulsion mechanism).  I saw a woodpecker on the bird table on my last day and a buzzard being attacked by crows above the house. And lots of baby rabbits.  Like at the Merzbarn.

I came back to London to film Sylvia Hallett do the music for the Norway section of the film. The Hurtigruten boat trip (bowed bicycle wheel - a recurring Schwitters image) and the Djupvasshytte mountain sequence (hardanger fiddle).  Sylvia herself works in Norway a great deal as both a musician and composer.  She’s doing something with a choir in Trondheim at the moment.  I find her so easy to work with.  A couple of years ago we made a little film together for Matt’s Gallery and Anne Bean’s show TAPS - Improvisations with Paul Burwell. I knew she was the perfect choice for this project.

Then I got the wonderfully bonkers Adam Bohman in to do some sounds/music for the interior of the Schwyttershytte (the Merzbarn in Norway where I filmed last summer)).  Lots of little scratchy noises made on found objects with contact mics attached.  Dave Hunt did a fantastic job of the sound recording.  He’s mastering the sound on the final thing as well.  

But I’ve been massively distracted with lots of admin stuff - press releases, listings for the concert, booking train tickets, planning the installation, etc, etc, etc.

Here’s Adam Bohman who is doing the music to go with the interior of the Schwyttershyyte in Molde.  That’s the tiny hut that KS lived in first as a holiday, then during the years of exile in Norway.  

Abbot Hall, Loughrigg, bats and moles

Thank God its coming together at last.  In fact I am very pleased with the way the editing is going.  So much so that I decided to have a few days off and have a couple of friends from London to stay.  We had a great time, ate loads of food and I took them for a walk up Loughrigg Fell which seems to be my default walk at the moment.  Its totally Schwitters’ fell and I like just repeating the same walk - noticing changes and differences in the light, the vegetation and the wildlife.  The bats in the cave where he went for picnics with Wantee were nowhere to be seen this time (are they still in hibernation?). The weather is getting positively warm now.

Just went to visit Nick Rogers - the curator I am working with at Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal.  We did a technical try out in the room I am showing the film.  It looks great. Very happy.  Nick lives in Cumbria and is a keen walker, so its great to talk to him about that side of my project.  He’s also a musician. Looks like the show there will open on the 15th September.

Getting to know the neighbourhood here in Dacre.  Went for a walk on the Dalemain estate and saw these moles on a fence.  Creepy.

(I’m told afterwards by the gardener here that a mole catcher is paid by the number of animals they kill and they always line them up like this to prove how many they have nobbled.)

 


 

Point of Departure magazine article by Stuart Broomer

The music magazine Point of Departure have done an interview with me. (Click on title above to view it). It was a bit of a last minute rush job and I didn’t get a chance to discuss how the work would be shown or which work.  But its a good article and Stuart Broomer has really done his homework. Thanks a lot Stuart.

The concert, editing and a dog with a phantom pregnancy

I’ve been in Cumbria for 3 weeks now and I still don’t feel I have got started with the editing. There have been meetings at the Hatton Gallery and phone calls and my Mum’s 80th birthday.  It was freezing at first and lots of snow. Then I thought the dog was pregnant (turned out to be a phantom one - poor girl), and lots needed sorting out in the house. Then I got a cold which made the M.E. worse and I don’t edit when I feel bad as I make mistakes - like deleting files by accident.  And which bright spark at Youtube decided the whole site needed to be redesigned?  I’ve just spent all afternoon sorting out my Youtube site just as an article about it is about to come out.  Its was fine as it was boys!  (…I am sure they are boys).  

So now - hopefully - I can get the editing done. But after lots of logging - I do know how I am going to edit it, so I am not so worried. We have finally sorted out the concert and the line-up, the billing, the accommodation etc. Its been a job in itself. Thank God Paul Bream at Jazz North East is helping on that. But we are now having the Bohman Brothers and my friend pianist Steve Beresford doing a funny piece with a prepared grand piano, text and amplified found objects about Stefan Wolpe’s piano music for Schwitter’s poem An Anna Blume. Its really, really hard to play apparently. So they are going to do a piece about that. They are brilliant, funny, creative musicians and performance artists who between them have performed at the Barbican, The Royal Festival Hall, Tate Modern, The Louvre, and our gig Mopomoso at the Vortex. Then Phil Minton will do a more musical version of the Ursonate with German vocal artist and sound poet Ute Wassermann who is coming from Berlin. She has a major commission for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival this year. Sylvia Hallett will do a solo on bicycle wheel and hardanger fiddle. The wheel sounds just like empty Norwegian fjords. Phil Minton (who has just performed at Aldeburgh in an opera about Dracula) and Roger Turner will also do a voice and found objects improvisation and anything else that we think of on the night… Its the 30th June in Hall 2 at the Sage Gateshead. I also had a visit from Lorna at the Cultural Olympiad last week and Ann my Arts Council officer. I think they are happy with everything. It must be hard for them to know. I was hoping to make it to the Sage next week for the John Cage evening, part of the AV Festival in Tyneside. But I think I have too much work to do.

Zurich, Point of Departure and the Cultural Olympiad

Where is all the time going to?  I have to get the film edited in the next few weeks as the sound edit will be quite complex I imagine. 

I got a bit distracted in January.  I had a new bathroom installed which is great.  I spent ages doing an online interview with music writer Stuart Broomer for Point of Departure magazine, an international music magazine devoted to serious study of free improvisation and free jazz.  He is doing a feature about me and the films I make - including the Schwitters project.  It will be in the March issue.  It actually took me a long time to complete as I put quite a lot of thought into what I wanted to say about myself.  It was a lot of work but really useful to think about what I am doing and great to be taken seriously. On the same front,  I went to Switzerland to show 3 films I made with Phil Minton at a music festival in Zurich.  Tzwei Tage Zeit.  Because they were being screened in a big theatre with a very good sound system I decided to re-master the sound on all of the films with Dave Hunt.  It was really worth it - especially with Sea Shanties.  The stereo separation is much more enhanced in the tiny sounds, the quiet stuff. I’m very happy with it.  And it will now be included in the Hatton Gallery exhibition.  The other two films I screened are The Cutty Wren  (Phil singing a traditional English folk song, but in his own way, with gorgeous piano accompaniment by Veryan Weston) and Two Figures in a Vortex  (Phil and John Russell live at the Vortex Jazz Club but filmed very blurred and abstract, on a slow shutter speed).  

I really enjoyed being at the Swiss arts centre - the Theater Rigiblick - in Zurich, but I found it hard to imagine Dada being born in such a nice, neat, tidy respectable city and there was very little acknowledgement of this legacy in the city itself.  The Cabaret Voltaire “Museum” in the original venue was nothing much but the cafe was nice on a horrible, cold, wet day.  The best thing was meeting the musicians playing at the festival and the people at the Theatre.  I love the free improvised music scene in mainland Europe as there are always visual artists there as well, who know the music and who understand what I am doing.  I always have an interesting dialogue about my work and you get the impression that the musicians do also go to art galleries and art house cinemas.  Like the musicians I work with - my films are taken far more seriously and I am given far more respect - outside the UK. 

I filmed two percussionists on the first night as I liked the lines of the sticks and reflections as they were playing.  Sylwia Zytynska and Fritz Hauser.

But the best thing about the whole weekend for me, was seeing my films on a big screen with fantastic sound.  For anyone who has only seen them on a computer  - they look and sound great.  Its a massive thrill for me. 

Then I delayed my trip to Cumbria and editing for a week in order to go to a Cultural Olympiad drinks party at Tate Britain.  This is the arts festival for the London 2012 Olympics and they funded my project.  Here is my link on the website.  I met Lorna Fulton who is the Cultural Programmer for the North East part of the festival. She’s great.  Everyone was laughing about the BBC4 sitcom “2012” and pretending to think it is really accurate!  Lots and lots of jargon and pointless bureaucracy.  But Lorna isn’t remotely like that. And her boss Nigel Hinds is brilliant.  He knows all about the music I am working with and used to promote such concerts.

I’m finally in Cumbria and really need to just concentrate on editing the film now.  But tomorrow I am driving to Newcastle for a meeting about the workshops that the gallery are running with Newcastle University Music Department.  And I need to sort out somewhere to stay while I am there in June.

 

 

Zurich, Point of Departure and the Cultural Olympiad

Dacre, dog-sitting and the Northern Art Prize.

I’m lying in bed in Cumbria in my new room in Celia Washington’s house.  I’m going to be here until the end of March, editing the film and dog sitting for her Patterdale terrier while she supervises the move of Kathmandu Contemporary Arts Centre to the wonderful Patan Museum.  Being here, my mind is so much clearer and my health is better already.  I’m re-reading Gwendolen Webster’s biography “Kurt Merz Schwitters” and its giving me even more ideas.  Every time I read it, it inspires me again.  So much so that I have now finally decided I should actually use some of my Arts Council grant to buy my own copy instead of constantly renewing it for what is over a year now from Kensington Library.  Its out of print , so I have had to pay £60.  Someone please re-issue it at a lower price.  Its a corking read, it really is.  Roger Turner lent me it first.  He found a cheap copy but they don’t exist now. 

I went round this old house yesterday collecting furniture for my room and creating my own space here.  It now feels really nice and comfy and as I write there are two butterflies here with me, one at each window.  Both Red Admirals I think.  Brilliant.

You can hear the rain outside and the stream just below my window.  And someone is chopping wood - with an axe not a chainsaw thank God.  I will complete the editing here no problem.  I find it so hard to concentrate in London.  The M.E. is worse there and I get bad ‘brain fog’.

I came up via my family in Yorkshire for Christmas and called off at Leeds City Art Gallery which is currently hosting the Northern Art Prize.  One of the short-listed artists who makes sculptural pieces out of ordinary furniture, Richard Rigg, was nominated by Emily Marsden my curator at the Hatton Gallery.  I really like her taste in art.  Quiet, quirky and deeply intelligent.  She’s a bit like that herself actually.  There aren’t many working class girls from Sheffield who went to Cambridge University in the art world.  Actually the whole show is brilliant. Speaking as someone who comes from the North but lives in London and who finds the London art scene often pretentious and deeply depressing, both this year’s Turner Prize show (mainly Northern and Scottish artists and currently at the Baltic in Gateshead) and the Northern Arts prize are very different.  Much quieter and less showy.  Much more intelligent without wearing some deeply self-conscious imported conceptualism as a fashion statement.  Really nice show the Northern Art Prize.  Here’s the website.  There is a slide-show of photographs by Leo Fitzmaurice that is very Schwitters-esque.  Found every day images that emphasise formal relationships and chance visual coincidences.  A line or a colour or a texture in everyday life.  Loved it.  And work by a woman called Liadin Cooke who is obviously a massive Eva Hesse fan - like me.  In fact as a film-maker I can say that the Hesse’s textures are way more of an influence on me that any films I have seen.  Roger Turner’s tiny percussion sounds are the same actually.  Small, quiet textures and surfaces of percussive sounds. That’s why I asked him to be in the film.

Looking at the dvd of the footage I shot with the the musicians, I know that in spite of my complaints of no pre-planning (they are free improvisers girl! - the clue is in the title) they are totally right for this project and worth any headaches they may cause me.  They look and sound so Schwitters-esque just being themselves.

I showed a little of their footage to Paul Bream from Jazz North East last week.  He’s going to partner me as they say in Arts Council circles for the concert at the Sage in Gateshead of Schwitters inspired music on the 30th June.  He will help keep away the organisational hassle , so I can get on with making the actual art work.  I thought it was a great idea to have a concert of the musicians in the film but its turned out to be quiet a lot of work and I don’t have the time.  So hopefully I can just swan around like Lady Muck now and be the curator while Paul books the train tickets, etc.  Somehow I doubt it will be quite like that!  I really liked him though and we know many musicians in common and we had a good gossip about the free improv music scene.  Including me telling him that the Molde Jazz Festival will have a day’s tribute on the island Schwitters lived on in Norway this year, to celebrate the installation of a reproduction of his Large Merz Sculpture.  Han Bennick is playing and the Globe Unity Orchestra (Wow!) and I hope my film will be seen as well but they have to check out the power situation as there is no electricity on Hjertoya.  Its where I filmed this summer so would be very disappointed if my film were not included.  Especially as its has such brilliant musicians.  Fingers crossed.  There is talk of solar power being installed. Its the 15th July.

I can hear a pheasant outside now. Crikey - there are 6 pheasants on the lawn!  Its New Year’s Eve today. Its been a great year for me.  Staying in with the dog this evening. 

 

 

Never work with children, animals and free improvising Musicians!

I’ve just finished the main part of the filming with Roger Turner and Phil Minton and I am really pleased with the results.  I have filmed them both many, many times and almost always the results are wonderful.  Not just the music but my visual interpretation of it.  They inspire me. My Youtube film of Phil singing the Cutty Wren  (which was a drunken chance event where we both made mistakes and was never meant to be taken seriously) has had over 20,000 hits and been linked to many other websites and blogs.  We were commissioned by Anne Bean and Matt’s Gallery 2 years ago to make Sea Shanties for the exhibition “TAPS - Improvisations with Paul Burwell”.  I am showing 3 films made with Phil Minton at Zwei Tage Zeitung, a festival of free improvised music in Zurich in January.  But this is the first time I am asking them to do something specifically for my film, my idea, my commission. And it hasn’t been easy. They agreed months ago to do the film but apart from booking a gig they don’t really do forward planning.  I’ve tried sending them the proposal, tried having a meeting to discuss it, tried sending them videos to look at, asking them to read the blog, the Arts Council grant application - torn out my hair.  But they just didn’t seem to get what the film is about and I can’t tell them what to do.  It has to come from them. I was in a complete panic as they just didn’t seem to be responding to my ideas at all.  I had a contract with the Cultural Olympiad to make a film with them (with a decent fee attached) but they just didn’t seem to be taking any notice.  I did ask myself if it was because I am a woman or if its to do with the size of the camera and the way I like to work.  Like Schwitters I like to work small and with what is with me at the time.  I hate having a crew and all the palaver that involves - I did that for years - and nowadays I’m really interested in new little cameras and what I can do with them. (I also like to put my work online which also maybe makes it appear less serious, but I love getting emails from teenagers in Kazakhstan saying how much they like my work.)  But in the end I asked the brilliant sound engineer Dave Hunt to do the recording so that I wouldn’t have to worry about sound quality and also to make them realise it was a serious project.  It was a good idea.  His sound recording is much better than mine anyway.

Maybe I was saved by a journalist called Stuart Broomer who wants to write an article about me for the very serious online music magazine Point of Departure.  He really likes my work and sees what I am doing with free improvised music.  He wrote to Roger and PhiI and asked them about how they collaborate with me.  It seemed to work. They suddenly realised that actually they do collaborate with me - and took it seriously. Roger read the new Schwitters book I had lent him and put some serious thought into the project. They turned up and were brilliant.  Absolutely brilliant.  They may have been anyway. They just work in a different way.  No planning.  No research. No dialogue. I just have to accept that. And its what I set out to do with this project.  (And lets be honest, they are both abroad on tour most of the time. Roger is now massively busy in Germany and France with Konk Pack and his duo with Urs Leimgruber, and Phil is now in Australia).

Roger Turner’s website.   Phil Minton’s website  

Click on the links to see the films mentioned.

 

Just started filming with the musicians in my flat (that’s me with a tiny camera).  Phil Minton on voice and Roger Turner on my paintbrushes and pallet knifes.  The sound engineer is Dave Hunt.

Video editing, Apple operating systems and painting

I’ve pretty much finished all the filming and now have something like 10 hours of footage to edit down to about 20 minutes!  Its on many kinds of formats from my professional video camera, through to high end stills cameras (which shoot video nowadays), to my iphone.  And some is in NTSC – the US video format because I use that little stills camera when filming music as it doesn’t cut out after 30 minutes like similar ones in the EEC do - something to do with tax on video cameras.  Yes I know - baffling. I was worried it might not be easy to edit the different formats together and I would get stuck in all sorts of technical problems.  But I’ve just done a test and it works fine and has a wonderful collage-like feel to it of different visual qualities.  (My other fear was that it might look like a tourist board video – it doesn’t; its way too odd.)

Having overcome a technical problem caused by upgrading my new Macbook Pro (thank-you Arts Council) to the new Lion operating system which doesn’t work with tape based cameras! (No thank you Apple) -  I spent a week re-installing the old system and lost many emails in the process but it was rather liberating.  I recommend it when you are overwhelmed with office work and can’t can back to the creative stuff.  Just loose everything!

I’m pretty much self taught on the editing – though I did a few short workshops.  So I am delighted its working OK.  But I have just started an advanced video editing course at the Film and Video Workshop in Islington and I discover that I already know quite a lot of the first day’s stuff, but its great to have people to compare notes with.  They are all working in commercial video production.  But I used to be a TV director of arts programmes – though not for the last 20 years – but that experience is still in there when I work.  I know instinctively where to cut and I have a great sense of rhythm and timing which I don’t believe you can be taught.  But I’ve now also been a painter more recently.  And now - beginning to edit - I am working in exactly the same way I do when I paint.   Applying, erasing, wiping, leaving traces, layers.  The movement has its own rhythm and texture and I use that as the guide. I am also subtly altering speed and tempo, colour, and sometimes inverting shots which is interesting (an idea I have stolen from the artist Guy Sherwin who is a friend and I love his film landscape work).  

Loughrigg Fell

This is probably a bit too Cumbria Tourist Board to end up in the final film, but here I am at the summit of Loughrigg Fell near Ambleside. Chatting to 2 lecturers from Newcastle University (where the Merzbarn Wall and the Hatton Gallery is). You can see Ambleside, Windermere, Elterwater, Chapel Style, the Langdale Pikes, Grasmere and Rydal Water.

Kathmandu, Loughrigg and Mary Burkett

I went back to Cumbria last week but forgot to write the blog.  I know I am making a fuss, but I feel like I’ve been inundated with admin since getting the Cultural Olympiad commission.  Its all to be expected but it was a bit distracting and I felt a bit derailed.  So I went back to Cumbria just to get away from all the emails and forms to fill and remind myself of what I am doing.

This time I stayed with Celia Washington.  I met her last year through my trip to Nepal.  I googled art and Kathmandu and found the Kathmandu Contemporary Art Centre which Celia runs.  She is a painter who went there to do a residency at the University and ended up starting a centre to introduce contemporary art to Nepal through inviting foreign artists for residencies and giving exhibition opportunities to local artists.  They also have a very good library of art books, mainly donated by the Tate.  I had no idea she came from Cumbria until I got an email asking me to take part in a sponsored dog walk in Cumbria in aid of the KCAC.  There are lots of Cumbria/Nepal connections because of the mountain climbing community but that isn’t Celia at all who spends a lot of time in the Chelsea Arts Club, or did until she recently inherited her mother’s house in Cumbria.  She is living half in Kathmandu and half in Cumbria now and invited me to stay at her house near Penrith. 

 This project has been blessed by many coincidences and chance events and this time it turns out that Celia is an old family friend (“my second Mother”) of Mary Burkett.  As director of Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal in the 60’s, Mary was responsible for rescuing much of Schwitters’ work from Cumbrian attics.  She curated the first exhibition after his death and wrote the catalogue.  Celia took me to meet her which made my day.  I was so bowled over to meet this extraordinary woman who lives in a fifteenth century keep with “rather nouveau Elizabethan additions” that I forgot to take any photos.  It would have seemed rather crass I think.  So here is one from the Isel Hall website.


 

And Mary was delighted to meet me.  I showed her some unedited footage of the Norway trip – the Schwittershytte in Molde and the Djupvasshytte and the landscapes.  “Why has no-one told me about this?” she asked.  I hope to go back and visit her again after Christmas.  Her home is amazing and full of treasures from all over the world.  I may be back in Cumbria in the spring for editing which will be brilliant to be on the spot.

The next day was glorious sunshine all day and I felt great and got to do some more fell-walking in Schwitters country.  I parked the car on the edge of Loughrigg Fell and walked along to the tarn and then up to the summit.  It was like Victoria station in rush hour up there on the peak, it was such a glorious day.  But I managed to get some high shots of the lakes, Elterwater, Rydal, Windermere – a long panoramic tracking shot with the wind gag in vision all the way!  It’s a bit Cumbria Tourist Board so here it is as it may not end up in the film.  I’ve bought a new professional camera and it is lovely and makes great pictures but the really interesting ones are all done on the tiny cameras when things go a little wrong or I forget to switch it off!  Pretty much all the sound recordings I have here are unusable because of traffic, wind or aeroplanes.  I worked as a sound assistant on Mamma Mia the film - so we have lots of sound effects of wind, trees, forests and birds that will be recycled. I’m sure Mr Schwitters would have approved of that.

On my last day in Cumbria, I get an invitation to have dinner that evening with the current director of Abbot Hall and Richard Long, the walking artist who’s work I love.  His show at Abbot Hall is opening that night.  But I can’t make the dinner invitation as I have to drive to Yorkshire that evening – and I’m exhausted from walking the previous day.  Shame.

The last day is spent in Newcastle at a meeting about the concert at the Sage (which is actually across the river in Gateshead) and then back to the Hatton Gallery to discuss the installation and how big a space I need to be constructed for the show.  (Calling in at the Baltic on route to check out the Turner Prize show which I thought was great.)  Its nice to be in such a vibrant city.  I am always completely torn about living in the city or the countryside.  I am getting older though and not sure I can cope with Notting Hill much longer.  My health is definitely better in Cumbria that’s for sure.

(I’m sorting out my shelves and throwing stuff away.  I’ve just found some still photos - black and white - I took in the Lake District when I was about 21. They are exactly the same as what I am doing now.  Abstract reflections, dead tree shapes, textures, water surfaces, explorations in abstract form.  Don’t know why I spent all those years at art school!)