this is the time for reenaction

A piece at The Quietus on reenactments in art and in music.

With Jo Mitchell and Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard interviewed, it's something of a reenactment of the last third of the first chapter of Retromania.

Which is sort of, kinda, not really, acknowledged in this paragraph:

"Simon Reynolds covers art reenactments of musical events in his book Retromania, and rather sniffily he concludes that "no matter how much research and preparation goes into reenactment, it is doomed to be an absurd ghost, a travesty of the original". And yet the motivation of the conceptual artists themselves doesn't appear to be about nostalgia at all. The ultimate goal is surely failure, because the attempt to recreate a carbon copy of an event is - and will always be - a futile one."

What's particularly amusing about this is that the third sentence is more or less a reenactment of the Retromania quote from the first sentence -- but with the alleged "sniffiness" removed. 

There is much talk about "failure" as an explicit aim with reenactments (again, rather familiar if you've read, or indeed written, Retromania).

Of more interest is the stuff on The Musical Box who reenact The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway with Genesis's blessing. The Quebec quintet managed to get hold of the original slideshow used on the 1974 concert, which suffered from technical problems and poor ticket sales. They also faithfully recreate the costumes, the choreography ("the show was less spontaneous gig than scripted rock opera so most moves were choreographed"), and the stage positions of the musicians in Genesis.

Jeremy Allen writes that "the motivation to re-enact a concert that so famously floundered is unusual enough to grab one's attention, but then the mind boggles when you start to consider the complete immersion required, the effort researching equipment and learning the parts and the untold hours spent assiduously perfecting what is essentially an illusion. The players in The Musical Box would have had no memory of the show on account of being too young to have seen it, so any charge of sentimental yearning for halcyon days must surely be a false one."

This warding-off of the spectre of nostalgia recurs repeatedly through the piece, gets almost frenzied  in the final stretch.
 
But surely even if not part of the mindset of the artists, it feeds into the bottom-line viability of these event in terms of their ability to draw audiences? Not just with the rock audience ones like The Musical Box's, but the art world ones too. Getting bums on seats, selling tickets.

And you can of course be nostalgic for something you didn't witness or experience. That vicarious, second-hand nostalgia is one of the most interesting syndromes to me, and I say that as one who has succumbed to it at times. It blurs into but it not the same as an interest in History or antiquarianism. It has a much more wistful / wishful tinge to it.

To me though the most revealing thing about the reenactment trend is that it is a distilled form of the  essence of the wider, sprawling retromania phenomenon:

Once, music made history.

Now, music comments on that history; or it's a replica of that history-making sound.

In the process, it forgoes the possibility of even connecting with current history-in-the-making, let alone intervening in it.

"a hauntological last hurrah"--The Quietus reports on The Ghosts of Bush House, a project in which a  fellow who works as a studio manager tat he BBC World Service, which is being decimated by huge cuts, went around its soon-to-be-closed HQ at Bush House on the Strand and recorded nocturnal atmospheres and reverberationa, which he then wove them into a H-ological mood-piece. He also worked in elements taken from "the World Service’s ancient reel-to-reels", an echo perhaps of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.  This chap usually goes by the moniker Robin the Fog but the artist name he's going by for this project is The Fog Signals.



"I was working a lot of nightshifts... and as a result would often have the place largely to myself during the small hours of the morning. On my journeys around Bush House...  I used to love listening to all the sounds around me: the creaks and rumbles of the old building echoed up and down the stairwells and through the corridors, even the most mundane of noises suddenly taking on a new significance in the half-light. Like so many historic buildings around London, Bush House is constructed of Portland Stone, which is a wonderfully resonant material to work with... the stone construction of the walls coupled with the high ceilings gave you this extraordinary reverb. I would whistle to myself on the landings and then listen as the whistle fluttered round the space for what seemed like an eternity, transforming as it did so into something much stranger, as if the building was adding a few tones of its own. I liked to think these were the sounds Bush House made when it thought nobody was listening!

"No artificial echo or electronic effects were used in the making of the album... These are genuinely the sounds of the space."

Ghosts of Bush's chimes with the H-ological preoccupation with the Public Sphere as something that's faded away, something to mourn... but also to celebrate/cherish/protect as per Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony.

"I’m an ardent believer in the World Service and in public service broadcasting in general. It’s an incredible ambassador for British affairs and is renowned for its integrity and trusted the world over."

"The nicest compliments of all have been those who compared it to the produce of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an organization which has been a huge influence on my work and which I always used to fantasize about joining, despite its closing almost a decade before I joined the BBC."

You can listen to and name-your-price purchase The Ghosts of Bush House here. "All proceeds will be donated to BBC Media Action (formerly The World Service Trust), helping in their mission to 'harness the power of media and communication to help reduce poverty and assist women, children and men to claim their rights'."

ElectroRetro

1/  Purple Legacy

As Angus Finlayson notes in his review of this comp for FACT, it does seem a trifle premature to doing a retrospective on a sub-flava of post-dubstep that was in vogue only three years ago, But that's what Purple Legacy: A History of Purple Wow is doing viz-a-viz the sound invented by Joker, Guido, and Gemmy.

The hallmark of genres in the age of hyperstasis/atemporality is their accelerated life-arc and their inconsequentiality: they disseminate superfast, but burn out quick, leaving little trace in terms of influence...  that's what seapunk was parodying


2/ Electrospective

A website launched by EMI, as part of their campaign  to celebrate the legacy and living-ongoing history of electronic music (which involves a double CD compilation, promotion of classic albums, a round table discussion event, competitions, etc). Skewered here by Rory Gibb at the Quietus, who also invokes the dystopian image of the future: "Imagine crap trance riffs and recycled one note basslines stomping on a human face, for ever."

Personally I think EDM / Skrillex-Deadmau5-Bassnectar-stuff, as a bastardising/popularising move that brings out yet again the buried rock-ness of rave,  may well be a positive development.  After all, they dissed ardkore as "heavy metal house" in 91-92, you know!  Devolution of a style actually still represents a linearity, a kind of forward-logic, as opposed to the endless recursive involutions of hyperstasis (postdubstep, post-mnml, etc). Certainly I  wouldn't be surprised at all if this EDM moment had more fruitful and consequential reverberations than pico-genres like Purple.  

Keep stompin', you bastardisers!

sacre bleu ! / sacrilege?

Radiophonic Workshop to be reopened

"Yesterday it was announced the renamed New Radiophonic Workshop will compose fresh work as one of the highlights of The Space, a new freely-available digital arts service. Part of the London 2012 Festival, The Space will offer a platform for contemporary artists as well as historically important archive film, accessed on mobile and tablet devices and Freeview. The New Radiophonic Workshop (NRW) will be led by Matthew Herbert, the electronic composer who has collaborated with Björk and been nominated for an Ivor Novello award for his soundtrack work"

Matt H is great, but can this really be a good idea?

The Space are the outfit responsible for the archive-febrile idea of turning John Peel's home office and record collection into a virtual museum -- you can look but not listen to the records

(at Quietus David Stubbs reviews the discs under 'A' while  Everett True reviews the discs under 'C' )

(sweet that Peelie clung onto so many albums by Camel)

they also have some Peel shows, but not many


meanwhile at Pitchfork,  Eric Harvey has a think about what the Peel collection and Dilla's collection mean in this age of music as dematerialised data