Corriedoo

 

This week I was pleased to receive the first issue of the Corriedoo newspaper. Back in 2017, Helmut Lemke and Kerry Morrison moved to Scotland, and by 2022 they had renovated and launched the BYRE in Corriedoo as an innovative artspace, hosting exhibitions, performances and residences. The Corriedoo newspaper is the new platform to communicate news about the BYRE and their practice; a practice, as the paper notes, of “Improvisation is not a skill but an attitude.” I have proffered previously my view that Helmut is the John Cage of our time, while it over-eggs and distorts the analogy to imply that Kerry is the Merce Cunningham, I believe that the creative partnership and expressive dialogue between Kerry and Helmut carries that significance, qua vision and the importance of their life in art. Of course, we live in world of such barbarous temper a Cage figure is outright marginal. Maybe that is why the BYRE is so important. 

I joked with them that the BYRE is in ‘the middle of nowhere’, but on reflection, looking at the state of the world and the state of what Marcuse called ‘the commodity form of culture’ – maybe the reservoir space for art’s unfettered autonomy is the middle of nowhere and in the era of surveillance capitalism, nowhere is the liminal space of least constriction. But the dynamic has to be more than simple withdrawal, indeed in pursuit of art as truth-value rather than exchange-value, “art as human activity [happens] in a political context with political consequences.” In this sense “a place is not a statement of localisation; it is, in fact, to the contrary, a statement of de-localisation.” (Sylvain Lazarus)

The peripherality of Scotland is no accident; similarly our relocation to Portugal was a move to an edge space. I’ve not written about this here, and will expand on it in a future blog, but it is our plan to move to a property with land, accommodation/workspace for artists’/writers’ residences and an exhibition space. We have in mind something more like Safn than Little Sparta, or Corriedoo Byre.

Anniversaries

It’s been a busy year so far, so I haven’t got round to blogging much, but I do intend to mark some key anniversaries over this and the next couple of years. One I missed, which is entirely personal, comes from something I started doing in 1995. Whenever I’ve mentioned it, different people have said that they wished they had done it but if you didn’t do it, it’s too late now. Namely, 30 years ago I decided to record every book, film, exhibition, piece of music, performance or other artwork I experienced. I only realised when mentioning it to Helmut Lemke and Kerry Morrison who are currently visiting Porto that the continuous record has hit its anniversary. The system of noting my experiences was deliberately straightforward, simply the work, the venue/medium (if relevant) and if I thought it was good or meaningful/useful for me at the time I colour coded the entry in red. My only regret over the years was that I should have had a code for things I thought were bad, but once it was started, retrospectively changing past entries doesn’t seem in the spirit. I remember in the 2014 Text Festival I did an interview on Radio 3’s ‘The Word’ Programme, and having mentioned the record in conversation while the mikes were off, the producers insisted on me reading one of the year’s listings as a ‘performance’. I have no idea whether they broadcast it, probably not.

Anyway, two of my favourite artists, Helmut Lemke and Kerry Morrison, who are visiting us this week raised the question of whether I had thought about also recording who I was with when I had the experience. I didn’t but it was never meant to be a journal as such, just a list. Most often over the years it’s only use, apart from the act of recording itself, has been being able to look back to remind myself if I am rereading or rewatching something I’ve previously experienced but forgotten. However, since Helmut raised it this week with him and Kerry at the Serralves Museum, I saw exhibitions by Avery Singer, Mounira Al Solh, Francisco Tropa (which I also saw when Christian Bok visited) and various sculptures in the Serralves grounds, then we saw the Sculpture Trail in Santo Tirso, a lovely walk but nothing stood out to mention in the works themselves. And a delightful photography project in Bolhao Market called Faith in Donkeys As a footnote, the very first entry in 1995 was The Graphic Language of Neville Brody.

Identity and Genius (Writing 2023)

Is 2023 a year in some form of demonic possession? It’s been pretty dark for us so far but strangely one of my most productive writing periods for years. The metaphor of the band continuing to play as the Titanic sank comes to mind, but more positively maybe the writing was a way of getting through.

Identity Theft Poems

One of the major horrors has been a sophisticated Identity Theft fraud - malevolent actions full of unpleasantness and threatening developments every day for literally weeks. In poetic terms it raised all sorts of issues about identity and the experience of identification of self, generating material questions about the nature identity itself, material turned into poems. I wouldn’t recommend fraud as a way of kickstarting a project, and it didn’t exist in my work plans in June but now I have more than half a book’s worth of intense poems with more in urgent draft.

One of the poems ‘Hymn’ is a eulogy for the loss of Barney and will form part of a forthcoming exhibition by Wayne Warren at the Cowper Newton Museum (by evil coincidence, the Fraud attack began the day we brought Barney home from hospital to die.) 

In similar vein, though not part of Identity Theft, I've been invited to write a 'Psalm' to form part of a sound installation by the John Cage of our Time, Helmut Lemke, at The Byre, @ Corriedoo Forest, addressing the hewing negation of Scottish Forestry Strategy. 

Novels

Working on the novels has been harder, due to impossibility of creating the time and mental space needed while shit things happened. It’s mostly been research and mapping out stuff. Though again something unexpected occurred. The logic of the Urim novel required that I rewrite the Christian Gospels, which I started with no great enthusiasm, it being just world-building background, the text of which will not be an undue presence in the final novel. However, in the other novel that I am fired up about, ‘Singing Voices’, I needed a character to be eavesdropping on Ezra Pound sitting in his cage writing the Pisan Cantos. As I needed to use a fair chunk of Canto LXXIV-LXXXIV, it occurred to me that I could face copyright issues; having already committed to rewriting the Gospels in the other novel, rewriting the Cantos was the obvious solution.

Genius

BUT Bob Perelman observed in The Trouble with Genius  “No one but Pound could write The Cantos”. As I reread them for “Singing Voices”, I was struck by how many points of Pound’s reference coincide with my experience. My answer to Perelman’s observation increasingly turned into a skeptical question “Is he though?” Putting aside some affected OULIPO reinterpretation or meta-rewriting from the Conceptual Poetry School, (see Derek Beaulieu’s impressive ‘Flatland’  or Simon Morris’s ‘Re-Writing Freud’ etc, etc.) I needed my Cantos to dovetail with the requirements of the novel, so it had to be written in Poundian terms.

Like Pound, I have spent a lot of time writing in Venice (and married Sue there). When writing the Venice section of 50 Heads, though I didn’t realise immediately, I often sat on the bench which Pound had sat on when he considered throwing his first book into the Grand Canal rather than sending it to be published. In Cantos LXXVI, he records the moment, and, as if planting a seed for myself, 4 years later when in Florence I wrote ‘Benches’ (sitting on a different bench beside the Arno) which was published in Space: the Soldier Who Died For Perspective in 2009. The first stanza is quotation of Pisan Canto and the second is my response.

Benches

shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water?

                        le bozze ‘A Lume Spento’/

                                    And by the column of Todero

shd/I shift to the other side

                                    or wait 24 hours

 

shared benches, A Lassitude Seed

anticipate other my Arno

outside/Armani Time

can’t/I face

the moment of nowhere in particular

only be sobbd/

quietly

 

My last book, The End of Poetry had the subtitle ‘Other possible Trehys with Leibniz’ referencing of course other worlds, so this would appear to be the world in which I rewrite the Pisan Cantos. The things that are supposed to make the Cantos difficult such as the interweaving of histories & mythology, the culture of China, the renaissance, multiple languages, turn out to directly paralleled in my own lifetime research trajectory: in my teens I was obsessed with China, and had studied multiple translations of Confucius Analects, Menius, the Buddhist Scriptures, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and many Chinese poets; for many years, I was never without the Wilhem translation of the I Ching – all the sources Pound used. 

“Bartok’s Fifth Quartet … is the record of a personal struggle, possible only to a man born in the 1880s. It has the defects or disadvantages of my Cantos” - Ezra Pound.

In one respect in relation to Pound’s Chinese, I have the advantage of having visited and worked in China on many occasions. He frequently name drops restaurants he ate at around the world and artists he hung out with in London, Paris etc. I can go some better, name dropping say the best Italian restaurant in Shanghai or the great French food in Taipei and my years of curating international contemporary art, sound art, Text, dance, etc, mean I can anecdotalise and appropriate stride for stride with Pound. He wrote once: “blessed are they who choose the right artists and makers” – which I used to use as my joke defence when taking curatorial risks. Similarly, when I was doing my art education the Renaissance was the key period of study – it’s probably not nowadays. My first ever published poem (in Chain) was ‘de re aedificatoria,’ which uses Leon Battista Alberti’s Renaissance treatise (in Latin) on Architecture published in 1452. And of course, my title ‘Space: the Soldier Who Died for Perspective’ is the art historical epithet for the dead soldier at the foot of Paolo Uccello’s 1438 painting ‘The Rout of San Romano’. My favourite biography in Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects’ (1568) has always been Uccello’s and the opening of this was the postscript in ‘…the Soldier Who Died for Perspective’:

“Paolo Uccello would have been the most gracious and fanciful genius that was ever devoted to the art of painting from Giotto’s day to our own, if he had laboured as much at figures and animals as he laboured and lost time over the details of perspective.” 

I’ve always had a ‘gracious and fanciful’ fascination with the idea of the failing genius. After modernism, genius is a problematic idea, only useable without irony to describe sportspeople. However, as Perelman writes “Genius is not simply a critical demerit to be applied whenever a writer oversteps generic and aesthetic boundaries.” What does it mean if a ‘genius’ could overstep and doesn’t? To paraphrase Alain Badiou in ‘The Ethics of Evil’, to fail to live up to a creative fidelity is Evil in the sense of betrayal. So my ‘Cantos’ is called ‘Genius’.

 The Pisan Cantos opens:

 The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent

            shoulders.

 Genius opens:

If Mycerinus and his wife is no longer categorically possible,

            revetment

 

Don’t get me wrong, Pound is not a hero of mine. Another reason for taking on the Cantos is to confront his fascism with my militant communism. Politically, I would have supported his execution in 1945.

The character in ‘Singing Voices’ novel will hear Poundian writing of this contra-Cantos, the poem will be ‘Genius’ and that as a stand-alone work will be a poem including history.

Winter with Helmut Lemke

the WINTER on Vimeo 

Helmut Lemke posts 'Winter', the last in his seasonal art 'lectures' featuring his reading of my specially written poem: 

Zugzwang as the Fourth Part registering Transition to Rumours of Winter and End 

Transition from rumours of winter, positional to suns rising over there (points in that direction) rather than over there (points in that direction).

Record suns replace cold lyric frost

Counting as

Drift

As Autumn’s pension arrangements are now irrelevant to the quartet. To hang on . . .                                                                                                    to hang on

To the field of action mostly taking place at night or winter daylight, passed celebrating the cold last day,

The series addition delays to die in the gap, immortal but only by implication, by hope, by leaving the new clear to go on

precarious in Queue Theory

waking each morning darker

our moment of inertia and the failing capacity to self-heal telomere degradation

This rhythm of fourths, a promise we aim to break, weakened, diagnosed, conditioned to lose

winter as weary

our Lévy Flight bouncing between this point and that point

frantic without knowing

the unannealed countdown

…eighth, twenty-ninth, thirtieth, thirty-first.

Listen Backwards to Advance

Today Helmut Lemke launched Listen Backwards to Advance (LBtA) in Bury. For the whole of 2017 he will work from the starting point of an archive of all his previous work to move his practice forward. He has moved everything that has anything to do with his artistic activities into the basement of the Fusilier Museum, opposite the Bury Art Museum – a process of creating a public archive, investigating a 40 year career in sound art as a durational public performance. It examines a European sound art practice through rigorous investigations of past work. This project unpacks one person’s creative practice and collaborations across Europe.

LBtA will be performed in two stages – a research and development stage from Jan to June and a second stage where he will follow questions that have been identified in the R&D stage.

The R&D and critical investigation will be public for 5.5 months in Bury Art Museum (Jan-17 - June-17) investigating and questioning issues that have determined and driven his practice.

As a performative event and ongoing exhibition he will create a publicly accessible Archive (1977-2017): Objects, Photos, Videos, Sound Recordings, Writing, Publications, Drawings, Sound Machines.

He will:

• ·      Hold a series of PUBLIC consultations and round table discussion to focus on elements of practice,
• ·      Catalogue previous work and documentation,
• ·      Reconstruct installations as temporary experiences,
• ·      Perform extracts of work,
• ·      Invite experienced practitioners and thinkers (1 individual and 1 panel per month) to:
• ·      exchange knowledge and experience
• ·      define relevant historic steps and developments in sound art
• ·      extrapolate and critique significant chapters of his artistic journey.

 I wrote the following essay for Helmut Lemke’s installation during the 2013 Venice Biennale, and thought now is a good time to repost it (with a slight edit) to explain the important of his researches in Bury in the coming year:

Since the 1970's Helmut Lemke has developed site-specific concerts, performances and installations. His endeavours have taken him to concert halls and outdoor markets, to Galleries and Museums and to the frozen seas off Greenland, to Function Rooms of Pubs and to International Festivals. He has presented his work all over the globe, collaborating with other Sound Artists and Musicians, with Dancers and Scientists, Visual Artists and Architects, Poets and Archaeologists, Performance Artists and Wildlife Rangers. He has experienced many audible sounds as well as those made audible through creative interventions, and fundamentally come to understand the site the sound requires.

Through these investigations into sounds, some obvious, some familiar, some to be found, he has become a Cageian presence, not in the sense of musical or poetic lineage but as the value proposition conduit for a contemporary insight into sound itself. Lemke has observed that sound is behind you when you gaze toward the horizon: he places us in that moment, and constructs for us the awe of our relationship between the sound he unveils and the phenomenology of presence in that environment. This pursuit and representation of the fundamentals of sound is driven by his conception “über den hörwert”, a Marxian analog of the surplus value of hearing. His aim to represent a specific environment through its sounds at a specific moment requires listening with all senses. Accepting the impossibility of resonating the actual sounds heard in the moment he heard them, he constructs a conceptual aural present. Lemke talks about the tools he uses to communicate sounds heard to non-witnesses of the original, the remarkable articulation of his line, - raw and skeletal - poetry, visual poetry, onomatopoeia, soundpainting, photography and sound recordings, uncovering the democracy of microphones. He states his attempt to describe, to reproduce the experience of sound itself, its thickness, the ontology of being in sound, but this is not accurate: in fact, he becomes the act of hearing. In the offering of his approximations, objective and subjective improvisations, Lemke evokes memories of sound, and more, posits the second hearing, ours, in a new existential space, as a synesthetic osmosis. His quiet declaration of inwardness tunnels us into him and our ears are replaced by his. To know of the source of a sound helps to imagine it. Lemke is the source of the sound because whether or not his listeners really hear what he has drawn, written and document, verification lays in his trust in the audience’s willingness and capacity to absorb the inspiration and imagination of being. Reflecting declarations of purpose from Lawrence Weiner, William Carlos Williams et al., Helmut Lemke makes art useful to us, we can cross the bridges he has made for us.

Lemke has made himself the disembodied microphone, the universal hearer/ signifier of the sounds in the forest that no-one is there to hear, the teacher, the artist, the beekeeper. 

Sequester the Bile

Combined with the Brexit vote disaster, Donald Trump winning the American election makes it clear that we have arrived at an historic moment when the idea of Progress itself is being turned back, when truth no longer matters, when the existence of humanity itself faces the abyss (Fascism, climate change, nuclear war, you know the list). As you know, I am dismissive of the portentous claims of Poetry, but there is a certain attraction to the Romantic image of the heroic poet standing against the apocalyptic storm to bellow ‘fuck off’ to the Darkness (I paraphrase obviously). In that shocking Trump week, I was reading a medical thing that talked about a process called sequestering bile. This seems obviously a metaphor for the requirement of this moment. It occurred to me that if poets were going to mean anything there had to be a global chorus that sequestered the bile of Trump etc on the 20^th January coincident with the Inauguration Ceremony. Poets would raise poetry to the status they historically claim with poems sequestering the bile; #SequestertheBile could trend alongside/surpassed the Inauguration hashtag. Anyway It’s there as an idea.

So in addition to the ‘Place’ collaboration with Jayne Dyer, I began writing ‘Sequester the Bile’ with the intention of publishing it on 20^th Jan.

A little after I started, I was approached by Tom Jenks and Steven Fowler to see if I would do something as part of the Enemies Project, a collaborative performance on 14 January at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester - http://www.theenemiesproject.com/northwest  The obvious collaborator for me on this is Helmut Lemke .

Having only just come out of poetry retirement, I am tempted to joke the Godfather3 line “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” or more recently from John Wick “You dip so much as a pinkie back into this pond, you may well find something reaches out and drags you back into its depths.” … on this occasion the something was the Enemies Project.

Anyway, the poem-writing has started. At the moment I am investigating two motifs: the Nazi policy of killing ‘Useless Eaters’ and the megalomaniac architectural dreams of the 1000 year Reich, specifically the proposals to build a triumphal arch in Berlin under which the Arc de Triomphe could fit and the Volkshalle Dome which would have been so huge that the breathing of the crowds it could hold would have created weather.  The useless eaters language resonates with the murderous Tory welfare policy which except for the absence of lethal injection is evil in plain view: google death rates from the ‘Fitness to Work’ test and compare with Nazi Aktion 14f13 criteria for murder.

And the grotesque gigantism of Volkshalle starts with a gold elevator.

As I say above I am under no illusion that poetry offers real resistance to the evil we face, but as I recently blogged about Paul Hindmith’s Mathis der Maher, the artist’s responsibility at times like these is to make art that contributes to the resistance. To belt and brace it though, I am actively working in the real world too.

(Venice Biennale): Helmut Lemke: the Surplus Value of Sound

On Tuesday, I head off to Venice for the Biennale - lots of previews, parties and meetings planned. I have a particular interest in the show at the Palazzo Bembo as I wrote the catalogue introduction for Helmut Lemke's exhibition there.

Here is that essay: 

Since the 1970's Helmut Lemke has developed site-specific concerts, performances and installations. His endeavours have taken him to concert halls and outdoor markets, to Galleries and Museums and to the frozen seas off Greenland, to Function Rooms of Pubs and to International Festivals. He has presented his work all over the globe, collaborating with other Sound Artists and Musicians, with Dancers and Scientists, Visual Artists and Architects, Poets and Archaeologists, Performance Artists and Wildlife Rangers. He has experienced many audible sounds as well as those made audible through creative interventions, and fundamentally come to understand the site the sound requires.

Through these investigations into sounds, some obvious, some familiar, some to be found, he has become a Cageian presence, not in the sense of musical or poetic lineage but as the value proposition conduit for a contemporary insight into sound itself. Lemke has observed that sound is behind you when you gaze toward the horizon: he places us in that moment, and constructs for us the awe of our relationship between the sound he unveils and the phenomenology of presence in that environment. This pursuit and representation of the fundamentals of sound is driven by his conception “über den hörwert”, a Marxian analog of the surplus value of hearing. His aim to represent a specific environment through its sounds at a specific moment requires listening with all senses. Accepting the impossibility of resonating the actual sounds heard in the moment he heard them, he constructs a conceptual aural present. Lemke talks about the tools he uses to communicate sounds heard to non-witnesses of the original, the remarkable articulation of his line, - raw and skeletal - poetry, visual poetry, onomatopoeia, soundpainting, photography and sound recordings, uncovering the democracy of microphones. He states his attempt to describe, to reproduce the experience of sound itself, its thickness, the ontology of being in sound, but this is not accurate: in fact, he becomes the act of hearing. In the offering of his approximations, objective and subjective improvisations, Lemke evokes memories of sound, and more, posits the second hearing, ours, in a new existential space, as a synesthetic osmosis. His quiet declaration of inwardness tunnels us into him and our ears are replaced by his. To know of the source of a sound helps to imagine it. Lemke is the source of the sound because whether or not his listeners really hear what he has drawn, written and document, verification lays in his trust in the audience’s willingness and capacity to absorb the inspiration and imagination of being. Reflecting declarations of purpose from Lawrence Weiner, William Carlos Williams et al., Helmut Lemke makes art useful to us, we can cross the bridges he has made for us.

The Palazzo Bembo approximation is a remarkable opportunity for a duplicate experience. In the unique of the Venetian city soundscape, we experience Lemke’s hearing of the site in the site. By stopping to hear and becoming the well, catching all of sound, Lemke has made himself the disembodied microphone, the universal hearer/ signifier of the sounds in the forest that no-one is there to hear, the teacher, the artist, the beekeeper. 

Bird Sheet Music

Bird Sheet Music by Kerry Morrison, Helmut Lemke & Jon Hering

Discordant nature in harmony

Performed live – for one day only – in the Foyer, Tate Liverpool

Sunday 20^th January

Performance times: 2.30pm, 3.30pm, & 4.30 pm

Live performance by a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra with Helmut Lemke

Sound installation by Helmut Lemke and Kerry Morrison, The Art Dock, Tate Liverpool

fourmill plus quarterinch

Performance and CD Launch of Lemke/Gwilliam’s fourmill plus quarterinch

Castlefield gallery
Thursday, November 26, 2009 (18:00 - 20:00)

fourmill plus quarterinch is the duo of sound artists and improvising musicians Helmut Lemke and Ben Gwilliam. In this collaboration the two artists use different formats of audiotape; pre-recorded, prepared and unprepared. From individual banks of sound recordings on tape comes a subtle and often dense music that is both composed and improvised in concrete time.

FREE EVENT, BOOKING REQUIRED To book please call the gallery on 0161 832 8034 or email events@castlefieldgallery.co.uk with your contact details and number of places.

Castlefield gallery, 2 Hewitt Street Knott Mill, Manchester M15 4GB

If Not This and

If Not This opened as the audience entered the building with Helmut Lemke's "if not this...WHAT THEN & if not at this address...WHERE ELSE?" - a very witty durational configuration of Helmut sitting on a chair with a bucket on his head, a high up bottle of water slowly dripping down onto the bucket. Audience members were invited to drop written comments into another bucket beside him (my comment pictured above)

He picked up each written comment and mumbled it from inside the bucket and attempted blindly to scrawl on the outside of the bucket. A very amusing piece.

Up in the main gallery, I welcomed the audience and introduced the rest of the artists.

First up Ben Gwilliam: he performed molto semplice e cantabile. Prior to the gig, he had made a mould of a vinyl disc of Beethoven's Sonata No 32 and from this created casts in ice. Taking these from a specially brought in fridge, he placed them on turntables: abstract and swirling, the rhythm created by spinning discs was hypnotic and vaguely African, melting created an extraordinary counterpoint, with different pick-ups subtly altering the pace and nuances of sound. Suddenly the ice grooves would give up and the 'instrumentation' would become harsher, more mechanical, urban and then it slowly faded to a recording akin to applause like ice being swept away or paper torn, melting unevenly the discs undulated to become more like massive waves breaking. A new disc was added, a re-invigorated rhythm this time sounding more like series of explosions offered as variations.

Matt Wand began his untitled installation by locating and then turning on reprogrammed Nintendo Gameboys attached to equally sized amplifiers, the texture of sound built a futuristic industrial landscape; circulating in some pre-determined order, Matt then lowered the amps into various sized glass jars which had the effect of shifting the soundscape into a musical register more melancholy, reminiscent of the opening organ music sequence progression down the hotel corridors of Last Year At Marianbad. Adding lids to the jars dimmed the tone colours and altering the lid positions and a shift in the pre-programmes slowed the movement, became more melodic drifts, it shifted again to be up lifting and full of hope and after hope, the amps now on top of the jars so that they added resonance which with the contrapuntal threads moving, surpassing hope to celebration akin to bells ringing on a Dickensian Christmas Day happy ending.

Lee Patterson began his performance by dropping bicarbonate soda into amplified glasses of water, this initiated a collage of sound-cloud samples of underwater pre-recordings of a local canal, a local pond and a nearby wire fence, with live action of poured water from a kettle, amplified springs and assorted pieces of metal pinged - an overlaying, a gentle throbbing like a breeze in motion on the basilar membrane bends stereocilia. I was reminded of John Cage's experience when trying out a soundproof isolation tank - he reported listening to the boom of his heart and the rush of his blood.

(Ben and Lee preparing before the gig)

If Not This

Ben Gwilliam, Helmut Lemke, Lee Patterson, Matt Wand
Curated by Tony Trehy

Friday 4 September

19.00-22.00 FREE
Refreshments

As part of the Exhibition Not At This Address (1 August – 7 November), Bury Art Gallery presents an evening of new performances from four of Manchester's most active Sound Artists working today. If not this is a survey of works that explores sound in performance, crossing the terrain where music and sound often meet inside and outside of Contemporary Art.

Ben Gwilliam performs 'molto semplice e cantabile' a new work for ice records and turntables on the relationship between opus 111 and listening descriptions. Helmut Lemke will perform a durational piece specifically for the gallery that utilises live sound and amplification. Lee Patterson will present a new work containing pre-recorded and improvised elements, where the recordings used are sourced from wire fences in Birtle and within bodies of water in the Bury Metropolitan area. Matt Wand will probably perform 'I owe it to the girls'.

Lucid yet obscure, If not this overlaps durational performance, improvisation and structural scores as constructs in time and space – memory and the moment.