I think it’s a combination of the generic song structures, cheesy, low budget instrumentation and distorted, noisy and effect smothered production that makes this music so intriguing. You could take it as a comment on the increasing pervasiveness of low quality music reproduction, the ease with which music can be made, distributed, reproduced and heard (increasing the prevalence and availability of generic, cheesy, effect laden and low quality tracks), and the lack of attention that’s generally paid to the fidelity of the reproduction, or the extent to which one’s fellow humans might, or might not, want to be exposed to it. You could also take it as some slightly rubbish songs which have been badly recorded. The Rangers interview in The Wire a while ago certainly indicates that, from the creator’s point of view, it’s just some songs.

As with the Real Estate record, I think it’s the tension between naiveté and consciousness, or between resistance and celebration, that makes this an interesting listen. It could be dismissed as the poorly rendered backing track to some generic but inescapable corporate intrusion into an otherwise ethical life. It could also be taken to be a comment on exactly that. However, the fact that it’s so listenable makes me feel that, much like the Real Estate record, it’s a means of coming to terms with something that should be resisted, a panacea for the auditory manifestations of corporate neglect.

The music itself is unassuming at first. It sounds largely a cross between later 80s and early 90s indie pop (sarah records especially) and some hold music or mall muzak (as it might actually be heard* on a phone or in a mall – echoic, reflective, distant and close, partly submerged). Whether it’s actually worth listening to or not is decidedly ambiguous (it does feel a bit like a bit of a guilty pleasure listening to it, like finding a likeable Dire Straits track). After all, it is just some nice verse chorus verse tunes. However, it did make an otherwise impersonal environment seem a little more bearable than it might have done otherwise.

I think that it might be something related to this that makes this music a curious listen. I think the interest comes from its ambiguity, and from the fact that it’s unclear whether it’s worthy of attention or not, just as it’s unclear whether these liminal, unintended, functional corporate collage environments are worthy of attention. Is it a good thing that this music makes them comprehensible and bearable? Perhaps they should be unbearable. Perhaps they should arouse feelings of resistance and stress rather than surreal feelings of complicity. I think it’s that tension that makes this music work. That said, I might just have been woozy in the extra daylight from the clocks going back.

*[having now listened to this same record on the bus on the way home, I'm finding this statement a little odd. It's really well recorded so it lacks the foggy tape manipulations and effects of James Ferraro or Rangers. However, there's something about it that's unclear; Partly, I think it's the use of a lot of phase, flange and chorus effects on the guitars. This wobbly, shimmering and swirling aspect muddies the water a bit and causes everything to bleed together. In addition the vocals ar not massively present and are always harmonized, a little akin to the first Ride album. There's a similar lyrical vacuity also, furthering the bland, mall-hypnosis.]

Why do you make music?

How are improvisation and repetition involved in your music?

This is what they said:

Fraser Burnett (FRU, pjorn72)

1. ego-stroking, attention-seeking emotional venting

2. i don’t, but if i LIKE it then that’ll do for me

3. i make something up, then play the same thing for ages

Drum Major Russell MacEwan (Black Sun)
1.I joined the Boys Brigade pipe band when I was ten years old and I was a big fan of Adam & The Ants – who had two drummers during the ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’ chart success album. I remember playing gigs at that young age hitting me like a ton of bricks and I’ve never lost that excitement for writing, recording and playing. And I’m still a member of Adam & the Ants inside.

2. My first assessment is if I enjoy playing it. Sometimes you birth a monster which is an absolute fuck to play live but you’re stuck with it for the duration of the tour/record. After a while you judge the response of the audience matched to your continued enjoyment – or not – of playing it live. I mostly collaborate in music so the opinions of band members are equally as valid.

3. I use repetition as the basis for my drum patterns and allow time to pass while playing them in order to adapt and develop. I find it very freeing indeed. It allows me to fling in something off the wall now and then in terms of improvisation but in the main heavy rehearsal form the basis to my live shows so that they remain fun to play too.

John P Cromar (Noma)
1.I do not make music,music makes me….just a wee Mahler quote.I make music because it is the only real constant urge I have all the time.I want to make music that I want to hear and it makes me feel alive,in the moment etc..without music my life would be even more of an accident than it already is.

2.I think the process of making the music is when I feel good and the end result may not be that important.If I sit in the park with a new tune on my earphones and feel serene,relieved or disturbed then I guess that I like the music.I love most of my music BUT do not know if that makes it good.

3.Improvisation and repetition are used a lot in my music.ImproVisation and repitition are used a lot in my music.ImProVisatioN AND rePITition R used A LoT in mY music.A lot of improvisation+repitition can be found in my music.

Nick Herd (Red Death, Braw Gigs)
1. I’m under the belief that real musical expression is that of catharsis and necessity. If it isn’t compulsion then it isn’t worth doing – time to do something else.

2. I don’t think anyone could answer that question without sounding like a total dick. I think the trick is to definitely hone your musical knowledge and to immerse yourself into what you think sounds good, I suppose. And then just copy them, for lack of a better word – or the bits you like and just try to make it your own. I’m very wary of so called “experimental” musicians who aren’t obsessive music nuts themselves. Avoid those people like the plague.

3. I’ve never fully improvised, maybe about 30-40% of performances have improvised elements or i just fuck up and it sounds more improvised – but it’s mostly prepared. It’s getting less repetitive these days, due to my thimble sized attention span.

The improv word gets thrown around willy nilly these days anyhow. Ayler, Mikawa, Bailey – all great and authentic improvisers. The Scottish underground scene has very few full-on improvisers, in my honest opinion – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Don’t fear the rhythm!

As you’ll have read in Barry’s responses below, the workshop organisers, mattin especially, were “interested in thinking about the social relations in groups and seeing how they play themselves out or emerge outwith any kind of dominant structure or hierarchy already set in place.” Consequently, as little as possible was done to pre-define what would happen at the workshops. Times and locations were set for 3 sessions of 4 hours, plus the performances over 3 hours, and the first session began with Mattin and Ray Brassier giving an introduction and a little context (a lot of which related to some texts that had been provided and which no one seemed to have read). After the introduction, it was basically up to us. The default format seemed to be a large discussion circle with 60 people in it. We began this way and spent an unbroken 4 hours like this on the Saturday. After it became clear that it was going to be difficult to generate a consensus, the Sunday session fragmented after it was agreed that every idea would be considered as viable for the evening performances. We each made a personal decision to get involved in some or none of the performances. In the end, we all did what we wanted. We came to an agreement to do this. It was a collective decision. But did we not collectively choose to abandon our collectivity? Why shouldn’t we? After all, we’re all individuals, free to make up our own minds and do what we want. I guess we collectively agreed to be individuals. What else could we have done?

Getting 60 people to agree to anything via a group discussion is incredibly difficult. The conversation has a habit of veering wildly from topic to topic as each contributor responds to the point made immediately before them. As a result, it’s difficult for any one idea to gain any momentum. In addition, as only one person can speak to the group at a time, progress can be painfully slow (so much so that I decided not to return after Saturday’s often excruciating session). Although everyone had an equal opportunity to contribute to the discussion, some people said a lot while others said very little or nothing at all. As a result, many people appeared to be left out of the debate. So, a group discussion involving 60 people seems to make reaching a consensus rather difficult. It’s unfocussed, slow and unfair.

It’s was rather like a group improvisation, constrained by the social norms that dictate that only one person speaks at any one time and that they try to respond to the point made immediately before them. Within those parameters, this was a completely open situation in which each of us could do as we wanted and, as a consequence, we reverted to doing what we are most used to doing. As we are most familiar with a way of living that is individualistic, we reverted to this mode and this carried through to the final decision regarding the performances.

Or, as Mattin has put it, “During the workshop, it proved impossible for the group to arrive at any consensus about what to do or not to do. So the last day it was decided that every proposal would be accepted…instead of collectively achieving something radical, we merely reproduced the paltry freedom of expression which neoliberalism accords to the individual subject, no matter how false this ‘freedom’ turns out to be. It seems that capitalism has conditioned our subjectivity to the longer willing to give up anything individually, even if this entails a bleak future for everybody.”

So where do we go from here? I believe there’s a significant difference between a situation in which a dominant structure is not provided at all (as happened in the workshops) or when it is suddenly removed and one in which the structure is removed gradually with a view to agency being transferred to a group*. As the workshops have demonstrated, absence or sudden removal is likely to result in a reversion to an improvisatory state and, as a result of the broader structure of our society, to the learned individualism of the participants. A more gradual transition is likely to facilitate a move towards another outcome. Obviously, the particular outcome achieved will be directly determined by the structure put in place by the organisers. If a desirable outcome is for there to be a transfer of power to the group and for the group to work towards becoming a collective then a particular kind of structure will need to be put in place to allow this. Here’s a suggestion for how this might be done.

[*This is more of an intuition than anything else. I don’t have any specific evidence to back this up at this stage, although I’m working on it. It seems pretty reasonable to me though; if you help people become a collective then the will be more likely to become one. If you don’t, they are less likely to.]

Goal: To decide what we are going to do (or not do) together during the last 4 hours of Instal.

I’ve tried to apply the following principles
1) Workshop organisers’ role is to define the structure of the social relations within the group.
2) Allow the group to take increasing control of the process (i.e. provide a structure only up to a certain point in time).
3) Vary the formality and size of the discussion groups to allow people to contribute in a social environment in which they are most comfortable.
4) Provide a structure for escalating and collating ideas via reps elected by small groups. (Reps status is time limited).

Meeting 1 (2 hours)
Initial meeting in advance of the festival (perhaps 1 week before) – dissemination of reading materials & encouragement to read them prior to the first full session. Initial outline of remit by workshop leaders. Group discussion (focussed on process and format) 1-2 hours total.

Meeting 2 (4 hours)
a. Initial, brief discussion in group of 60 people to outline and clarify process and format – 20 mins

b. 60 people break up into groups of 5 (randomly selected). Each group of 5 discusses the issues at hand and selects a representative. Representative to note points discussed and any conclusions reached. 90 mins

c. The 12 representatives meet in 2 groups of 6 to discuss the points raised. Key points noted. They select 2 representatives from each group (everyone else is provided with an informal area to mingle and continue their discussions informally) 60 mins

d. 4 representatives meet to discuss points raised in the two groups. Develop an initial set of conclusions, processes and ideas. Select two representatives. 40 mins. Informal discussions continue.

e. 2 Representatives feed conclusions back to all 60 people. Group discussion. 30-60 mins.

Meeting 3 (4 hours)
Same format as Meeting 2 but with different groups of 5 (i.e. re-randomise the groups). People who were reps yesterday are not allowed to be reps today. Outcome – to have developed a format for the final session.

Meeting 4 (4 hours) Final 4 hour session – format to have been decided in previous two sessions.

Performance/s (3 hours) – to be decided by the group.

The problem for us is that:

• We’ve done enough work and thinking over the years to have a decent idea of what the limitations are that might be holding music back, seen from our particular political, philosophical, aesthetic view point.

• That critique necessarily has to start with a ruthless self-critique, and so we have to look at what we’ve done in the past, what we would continue to do, and what we have to change.

• So your question is in fact the question we have to keep asking ourselves: how can our activities contribute to a broadening of the usefulness and radical potential of music as a means by which we frame and engage in the world and with each other. I think the notes above while not in any way being comprehensive, and very definitely not formalised or structured, point to the fact that there were successes and failures in the workshop discussed, and INSTAL in general, and that we need to keep working and learning and developing from there to instigate or take part in processes that take on board the ways in which we’ve succeeded or failed in the past.

• And that’s going to be hard to do, as it’s obvious that there is a fair bit of mental heavy lifting involved in going beyond what you describe as “the implicit and explicit assumptions, mindsets and ideas that attendees bring with them” and that kind of work is not something that’s normally associated with festivals or even really music or with large audiences going to gigs. So we have to find ways to undertake this work together with people who are willing to commit to it, shape it or lead it.

• And at the same time we still want to be presenting work to audiences, recognising that a lot of people don’t want to have to commit to that heavy lifting, and also that there is great stuff out there that rewards just seeing/ listening to it.

• So we have to think a lot about how we construct situations, and how we manage to create for ourselves room to do this hard work with also having fun, listening to other peoples work, not reducing the impact of the artforms we want to promote by making everything too serious all the time, while remaining serious in what we do.

• With regards to the transience of events: our festivals have stretched over time. The first INSTAL (in 2001) was a day long and had 7 performances. INSTAL 10 had 2 weeks of workshops in advance and a week of discussions afterwards and had over 50 events. Right now, we’re trying to learn from how our activities had worked out over the last 18 months, and what shape would be most useful for future ones in the next 18. We only have so much time, capacity, money and so on, but we’re trying to work out how we can present a more consistent programme of activities, that might involve some key public events (kind of like an expanded or exploded festival over a couple of months) while also (if we can arrange it) a longer process of co-investigation that maybe runs through the year.

We were hoping that this group might be able to form a kind of collectivity through an investigation of their situation, and that if they did this in relation to a music festival and with enough musicians in the room, the outcomes of this investigation would in some core ways be considerable as music, but music that had been directly informed by a collective process that had artificially heightened the social tensions or relations of that group and so maybe was more informed by our extended social context than most other experimental music. The example of KYTN and the kind of performance Mattin, Emma, Howard, Liam, Laurie and Anthony did maybe indicated that we weren’t so interested in a ‘performance’ that was instantly recognisable as music, or rather, it wasn’t a pre-requisite. And we were interested in throwing up some problems and trying to have to work them out afterwards.

I think we were hoping that this co-investigation could be self-organised and emerge from the people in the room, through a hashing out of their tensions and differences and why they might even be there at all. Which was maybe a lot to ask in 4 days.

How successful do you think the workshops and resulting performances were and how have you gone about judging this?

I think the first (and difficult thing for us at least) to do is to draw a distinction between an aesthetic judgement and one based on the process of investigation. If we look at the process first, then I think there are things we would do differently if we did this again:

Some process problems (not all of them, I’m sure):

4 days is not a long time for 60 people to come together, work out differences and come to some common understandings that allow them to put aside individualistic behaviour and act collectively.

It’s also clear to me that such a large group in that time period was up against it in terms of structure: it might have been more productive to have set out a structure by which the investigation was facilitated over the time together.

To rely on a structure emerging meant that there were some really productive conversations, tensions and arguments, but also some age old problems of certain voices dominating, an inability to agree, or to even agree on how the group might go about agreeing and so on…Facilitation of such a process is important and might have led to more progress on some fronts. But it might also have cancelled out some of the tensions which were hard at the time but also very revealing in retrospect.

We had hoped that we would circulate a text in advance that set out what we were all singing up to. Ray and Mattin did put one together, but I think it could have been circulated earlier, so that we all knew what we were getting into: I think a lot of time was spent on conversations around subjects that I really thought would be taken for granted but which people needed to argue over. Maybe we could have either spent more time on these arguments and accepted that we would not cover so much ground, or had a set of assumptions listed in advance that people were asked to buy into or to not take part if they didn’t agree with them sufficiently to get involved.
I think giving over the whole festival to the group was too much pressure that led to some false resolutions. Undoubtedly the biggest ‘failure’ of the process was that a lot of the activities on the Sunday night could be characterised by people reverting to individualistic behaviour: doing what they wanted to do as an expression of their own creativity, taking the opportunity of the festival/ tramway/ audience to do things they always wanted to do, and had maybe even come into the workshop wanting to do.
But that ‘failure’ is a productive one, in that it pointed to how hard it was to work in this way, how much people are invested in their own creativity and individualism and how much work is needed to structure, undertake and collectively investigate some of the problems we see in music. the failings of the group investigation very definitely pointed to other processes that might be needed, as well as deepening the understanding of a lot of the people involved.

Some ‘successes’ both in terms of aesthetics and process:

The chat upstairs about the Cardew piece “The Great Learning”, it’s relation to the text by the same name by Confucius, and improvisation and noise today was really rewarding and in fact might have been a really great place for the whole investigation together to have started.
The re-presentation of two works from the festival by the group on the Sunday night was very productive in terms of ideas: one group of people re-presented Mattin’s ‘Object of Thought’ performance from the Friday night, in which Mattin had set up a very simple, elegant investigation into the social dynamics of the room: he’d used Lucier’s “I’m sitting in a room” cyclic procedure of recording the sounds of the room and playing them back into the room and re-recording them, but altered it by talking about how he was feeling in the situation, describing the situation and slowly (as the audience figured out what was going on) being drawn into conversation, until over time an awkward quiet reflection of a personal situation (mattins’) was transformed into a loud and chaotic collective noise gig in which about half the audience were involved, on stage, talking, reacting, dicking about. The re-presentation of this piece involved 4 of the investigation group undertaking the exact same procedure in a smaller room in the Tramway. While they were performing the piece, the max MSP patch that made the recording/ re-recording process work failed, and so the ‘performers’ had an awkward situation to manage: they dealt with it by becoming more informal (they’d started by being very ‘performer’ like, taking it seriously and trying to see how the formal concept would work out), as if the spell of performance had broken and they could be more informal with the audience. When the max patch eventually kicked in again, they responded by snapping back into being more formal and taking the process more seriously again and trying to ‘perform’ more. In the process I think this tension between audience and performer, and the desire to create sound that reflects this tension and the social space of reception of music was, rather than being diminished by the technical fault, heightened: there was a flow of focus and conversation that ebbed back and forth between audience and performers and made this social space all the more obvious.

The other re-presentation of work from the festival involved a reading of Vanessa Place’s ‘Statements of Fact’, a seemingly simple but in fact ethically complex and productive re-reading of legal documents taken from Vanessa’s day job as a lawyer defending convicted sex abusers in LA. One of the major concerns of the work in the complicity of intellectuals within and without a political system, with that system, and the complicity of artists with the subject matter they might address: is it right to observe difficult ethical situations from a safe distance, and what happens when you’re involved in the very real concrete problems of trying to resolve those difficult situations. A member of the investigation group was nominated to re-read Vanessa’s piece. He’d not seen the original performance, but was given the text to spend some time with in advance. During his performance, he became very obviously upset at the content of the text he was reading: legal statements aims at establishing the ‘facts’ of sexual abuse cases, and so containing some very difficult and upsetting descriptions. But his uneasiness with this text and subsequent distress seemed quite conflicted to me and problematic. On one level I’m sure he was genuinely upset, but on another level, maybe subconscious, it didn’t seem to me that this distress was both about the content of the text he was reading but also about a need to distance himself from being complicit or seen to be endorsing such activity. Nobody at the festival was endorsing such activity, of course, but the piece does insist on art being able to address such difficult and complex issues. So his distress contrasted very clearly with Vanessa’s own reading of the piece, and also pointed to the real problems of complicity and worries of artists (and if extended further maybe a index of the kind of dishonesty of artists operating at a safe distance), in productive ways. After the performance there was a conversation between the investigation group and people from the audience that without any prompting got stuck right into these difficult problems and I though was extremely productive.
One criticism of the festival as a whole was that it was perhaps too cold, direct or didactic, and could have done with some more softer, more subtle elements, and some more fun or easily rewarding performances. Another piece on the Sunday night that I think you could read as being useful and interesting was the collective, 20 piece covers band made up of members of the investigation group. They set themselves the task of covering any song suggested by the audience, from memory, immediately. The performance was an exuberant, slightly perverted rendition of famous pop song after famous pop song. Aesthetically, it was very difficult for me: a series of chaotically covered pop songs within a serious experimental music festival. But in this precise sense, it was great: I felt embarrassed, out of place, worried that it wasn’t serious enough or was out of touch with what the festival was about: that what they were doing was totally unwanted in the situation. In that sense of course, it acted as a noise gig. Noise is supposed to be about the focusing on what is unwanted in a situation, about superabundance and about exceeding the limits set for you. In the context of our overly serious investigation of conceptual propositions about music, this overabundance of expression, of enjoyment, or excess was a kind of perverted release valve, as well as a fair conceptual riposte to the festival. it didn’t sound like a noise gig, and I imagine most noise fans would have hated it, but it did all the things a noise gig is suppose to, but rarely ever does, do.

The very real tensions and failings of the larger group to be able to agree on certain processes, or find ways to come together, and the instances in which people did continue to think in pretty individualistic ways very positively helped us understand empirically the tensions and hurdles of collective working, and point to real, concrete steps and processes we can adopt in the future. This isn’t a glib claim either: I really do think the most productive success of the whole process was the learning and knowledge produced though instances where (if judged on purely traditional aesthetic terms) what appeared to be going on was an artistic failure. The commitment to learning and investigating together to try and solve some very real problems of music is only served by trying to do such a tack, failing, and trying again.

How do you feel about Mattin and Ray Brassier’s online comments (http://www.mattin.org/essays/METAL_MACHINE_THEORY_4.html) about the workshops?

I’m broadly in agreement with both Mattin and Ray’s take on proceedings, and we’ve spoken with them at some length about it. I think where the text you cite differs from our conversations with them face to face is that it focuses on the failure of the process without having the space to set out how it failed in particular reference to what it set out to do and how those failures are both productive of new ideas and new ways of working; nor does it focus on the small ‘successes’ either. But what it does do (and it’s worth checking out all 5 parts of that interview, not just part 4) is set out a very productive possible framework for how to address some of the failings of the process and how we might try and undertake collective investigations in the future. The challenge now is to try and create situations that do allow for the investigation of the problems we’re all concerned with in a productive manner.

Why did you include these workshops in the festival?

OK, so maybe I could start by saying a little about what we’re worried about and what we’re trying to do.

We have worked for 10 years now in promoting forms of experimental music and film, and increasingly, how those artforms interact with other practices (other artforms (poetry, visual art, performance) or other practices (geography, political organising, philosophy…)). Over those 10 years we’ve worked with hundreds of artists, non-artists and specialists from those other practices just mentioned. And over that time we’ve built up a fairly detailed understanding of what we see going on, and the limitations (as we see them) of music or film. So while we have a problem with much of the activity that falls under the term ‘experimental music’ for e.g., we still have a strong fidelity to music and what we think is its potential.

Our Basic Concerns
In more detail, here’s a summary of some of our concerns:

• Music is a process of actions and discourses through which we are capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them. It is one of the way by which subjectivities are produced.

• The basic components of our subjectivity (the structures of our thinking, our languages and habits, our perceptions) have been grossly corrupted by manipulative impersonal social structures and come to us in prepackaged form, not as something that we can act on or transform but as languages, habits or perceptions which can only be passively consumed and which positively contribute to a normative cultural intellect of possessive individualism.

• Experimental music is very often complicit with this normative process, and whilst tacitly claiming artistic autonomy or subversive intent, produces a great deal of reactive and conservative, obscurantist and individualist subjects.

And so here are some of the questions we ask ourselves:

• What can we do about this?

• If we recognised alienation not as something unique and personal that we have lost, but as the loss of our connection to what is most generic and shared, what kind of music would we make?

• Is there a musical process that could contribute to the production of self-less, de-personalised subjects, instead of unique expressive ones; a musical process that allows us to become objectively aware of our alienation as a manifestation of the tension between current possessive individualism and the collectivity that should replace it?

• What would be a music that refutes artistic autonomy in favour of a political autonomy and a process of militant investigation; theoretical and practical work oriented to co-produce the knowledges and modes of an alternate sociability; a music that produces critical knowledge and critical consequences?

I should say that obviously I’m writing this now (June 11) and that we might not have formalized our concerns in this exact way before we did INSTAL last year. And of course INSTAL helped us to come to certain conclusions, make specific mistakes, learn with others….

So anyway, with others, we’re going to try and address ourselves to these and subsequent concerns over the next few years. We made a start with thinking about some of these ideas at KYTN, UNINSTAL and INSTAL last year, although we did so slowly and while trying to create events that we’re not too didactic and still had some of the good things of past festivals we’ve organised.

Evacuation:
At our other festival, KYTN, earlier last year we ran a number of week long projects we called ‘investigations’, each led by different artists, musicians, writers, etc… one of those projects was with Mattin, Emma Hedditch, Anthony Iles and Howard Slater and consisted of a 2 day workshop, which culminated in a hour long performance that closed the festival. Here are some excerpts from the notes I wrote on that project afterwards for a publication Mattin is doing:

• At our Kill Your Timid Notion festival in Dundee this February [Feb 10], Emma Hedditch, Anthony Iles, Mattin and Howard Slater initiated a short collective process involving a changing group of about 20 local artists and art workers, education workers and some of our festival audience members, culminating in a performance. Titled UNSTABLE, FRAGILE BUT DARING TOGETHER, it proposed ‘a simple, but complicated, being together’. Over 2 day-long sessions and subsequent shorter meetings it opened up ideas of noise and improvisation and collectively investigated those in relation to how members of the group found purchase on those ideas from their own personal experience or learning. Without a predetermined hierarchy or structure, this immanent process collectively produced explorations of language, vulnerability, subjectivity, of ungrounding oneself, of the body and expressiveness; it attempted to create a collective environment for this exploration in full cognizance of the groups extended situation, as strangers working together, and; it took the material of specific artistic practices, treated them as symptoms of the problem, disorganised them and tried to find some new arrangement of core ideas that might have some relevance today.

• As the very final action of the festival, members of this collective group (Emma, Anthony, Mattin, Howard, Liam Casey and Laurie Pitt) staged a performance. The large gallery space had been rearranged so that small groups of audience members were unevenly clustered throughout it. A ‘house of safety’ had been constructed in one corner (to which performers could retreat at any time). Each of the 6 performers had a microphone, connected to a speaker some way from where they were sat, together, in the gallery. In response to our normal practice of documenting each performance at our festivals, Vilte Vaitkute (one of the filmmakers we were working with at the festival) was asked to move about the space and record what happened, at times interacting with (in particular) Emma. Within a strict timeframe of 60 minutes, each member spoke; initially they each ‘checked in’ (a process from counselling in which people introduce themselves to a group and how they are feeling at that moment in time) and hesitantly started to develop a kind of phenomenological conversation about how they were experiencing the situation as it developed, unscripted and improvised. Everybody was hesitant, considered and careful, but also clearly exposed within a musical context with apparently nothing musical to offer. As the performance developed, members of the audience started to ask questions, pose problems and react: the power dynamic in the room shifted and several of the audience members positions started to become clear (from cheery consensualism, passive enjoyment, to irritation, boredom, a sense of ‘creepiness’). After a predetermined period (an hour) of (increasingly uneasy) dialogue, I brought the performance to a close.

• The more I think back to this performance, the more I feel it has consequence. I’ve spoken to people who found it relaxing and open, and to others who found it to be unlike music at all. One person told me it felt like a group therapy session. I’d like to argue that it was all of these things, but also, in its radical fidelity to the force of though of both Noise and Improvisation, entirely musical. It seems to me that an attempt was made to collectively investigate the radical core concepts of Noise and Improvised music; to rethink both in terms of today’s situation and from the specific situations of the people taking part. A genuine fidelity to those ideas was established, which took little regard of how those kinds of music are supposed to be created today, but which instead rationally obliged a certain kind of action in the performance.

• It was Improvised music in that: it created a social space which was produced as a process of mediation between all the people invested in that space (importantly, this started out seemingly as the construction of the performers, but over time, as the audience asserted their investment in the situation, this social space was explicitly modified by more and more actors), and it’s means of production were a rethinking of specifically musical ones (improvisation), filtered through the experiences and additional context (both brought to it and immanent in it) of the people involved. It took the force of thought of Improvisation seriously, and applied it afresh [without trying to make improvised music as the set of musical gestures and actions instantly identifiable as ‘improvised music’ by anyone who’s spend any time with it].

• It produced a Noise concert in that: it engendered a sense of peril – people were genuinely nervous, hesitant and affected by the situation, and made uneasy by it (which is to say that a self-created situation obliged them to act in ways that put them at risk) and; the group presented something within a specific context (a music festival, to which people had paid to come, with certain expectation – for entertainment, for provocation, who knows…) which was in stark contrast to what was expected and which focused on the all too often overlooked and unwanted remainder of music today – it’s foundational ideology, it’s social mechanics, it’s relationship to it’s situation. It took the force of thought of Noise seriously, and applied it afresh.

• Their obligation didn’t produce some finished article. I don’t think it drew any conclusions, or was a perfect realisation of some form or music to set in stone, or indeed a perfect process to be repeated unchanged. It didn’t change music in its entirety. But it did make a modest, but significant addition and contribution: a collectively developed (initial, emergent) mode of being together, and a process of critical consciousness building leading to public action. I felt it to be a concrete strategy for effecting (real, however modest) change, suggesting another set of cultural arrangements, other topographies and other mappings. And however unlikely and unmusical it might have seemed, (and I found to be almost unrecognizable as Noise, or as Improvisation as we hear it today), it was radically, immanently and exactly that; it was a noise concert, it was improvisation, and it was music.

• Something was put at stake, and I’ve not felt that in music for some time.

So I guess I could say that we thought this process had been very worth trying and wanted to try and do it again, but responding to a different context, at INSTAL. Emma, Anthony and Howard couldn’t make INSTAL, but Ray Brassier and Mattin had been doing a lot of work together, Ray had attended UNINSTAL, his philosophy is very central to both Mattin and our own thinking, and he’s invested in experimental music and prepared to be involved. So we tried to think together about an investigation led by Mattin and Ray’s concerns, but that responded to INSTAL and also built on what had happened at KYTN. We wanted to see if we could include more people in an investigation compared to KYTN, and in working with Mattin and Ray different organisational modes came about: it’s maybe a bit of a simplistic reduction on my part, but I think Mattin is more interested in thinking about the social relations in groups and seeing how they play themselves out or emerge outwith any kind of dominant structure or hierarchy already set in place.

So Evacuation of the Great Learning, as that investigation was titled, was:

• In advance of INSTAL, Glasgow Open School ran a number of workshops, talks and sessions that tried to in a way prepare for the Evacuation events by looking at their context, the way we (Arika) wanted to talk about them and so on…

• About 60 people signed up to the Evacuation workshop: (musicians, artists, political organisers, educators, students, cloakroom attendants, gardeners…. A pretty broad range).

• Mattin and Ray Brassier wrote a text in advance, and sent this round to everybody who had signed up.

• They met on Thursday evening, Friday at the festival, Saturday morning (then attended the festival) then Sunday morning.

• The group were given space and time to meet, and also given all of the resources of the festival for it’s final 3 hours on Sunday night in which to present back something that had come out of their time together.

• After INSTAL, Glasgow Open School had proposed to run a series of follow up discussions, which we did on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evening of the following week.

Oh, and we wanted to do all of this in the open, and to have it part of the core of the festival, to give it some importance, rather than to have all of this happen behind closed doors with nothing at stake (i.e. the lazy normal kind of workshop with not much at stake that you see at any festival these days): we were prepared to hand over a fifth of a major international music festival (one that we stake our reputation on and which pays our wages) to the group, in the hope that they too would put something at stake. Which is sort of to say, that we think it’s important to both think/ reflect on a problem, but also to try and put something into action, to do something as a result of the thinking and see what that throws up.

For those who don’t know us already, Psykick Dancehall began as a label documenting the obscure fringes of underground and experimental soundmaking in the UK. Now based in Glasgow, we have recently launched a publication, D A N C E H A L L, which we hope will harbour new, exploratory forms of writing about sound and improvisation. It is available in full online at www.psykickdancehallrecordings.com.

During October, Psykick Dancehall will be in residence at the Creative Lab in the CCA, Glasgow. The residency gives us the opportunity to set up concerts, listening events and workshops that will draw on a growing archive of experimental and improvised music. We want to map people’s responses to these sounds, and the ties they draw between the different worlds and places that the sounds are tangled up in.

To create the archive, we want to collect tracks suggested by people who are involved in experimental and improvised music, and make it publicly accessible during the time of the residency (in the CCA and, where possible, online.)

We would like you ask you what recordings or performances have been important for you in becoming involved with experimental or improvised music. It could be one in particular that has meant a lot, it could be more. You don’t have to explain why you’ve chosen them, but you can if you like, and your contribution will obviously be credited when we create the archive.

The recordings (or other recollections and recommendations) that we collect together will then be a starting point for the events that will happen over the course of the residency.
All responses should be sent to us here at creativelab@psykickdancehallrecordings.com.

Please forward this email to anyone else you think might have interesting suggestions for us, and be willing to share them.

Thanks very much, and we hope to hear from you soon,

Hannah & Ben”

Glasgow 280608 from Boom Video on Vimeo.