LMJ 11 CD COMPANION

Not Necessarily "English Music"
Contributors' Notes

Wind Flutes Urban (1975)
Sound sculptures constructed by Max Eastley
Note by Max Eastley, c/o David Toop, 7 Topsfield Road, London N8 8SN, U.K.

In July 1975 I made a set of three Aeolian flutes. I had not heard them sounding, as there was little or no wind on the day they were finished.

However, I remembered that the Aeolian harp can be fitted into a sashcord window by closing the window to just above the strings and allowing a draught to be created by opening other windows in the house. My studio had such a window, so I arranged the flutes in a similar way and waited. Night came and everything was hot and still.

At that time my studio was in the house where I lived. The bedroom was across the landing. The next morning, in that half-waking state between dream and deep sleep, I heard something. Then there was silence. It was like hearing a wisp of smoke that vanished into darkness. Then again, it was flowing like water, stopping, increasing, waiting, a thing that was alive. As my hearing left the dream world, I opened my eyes. Seeing the familiar room in the half-dark dawn light, I knew that the flutes were sounding. I lay listening to them, to a sound I had never heard before.

A little later I realized that this sound would not last forever, so I got up, went to the studio and set up my recording equipment. As the light became stronger, the dawn chorus of starlings, blackbirds and sparrows became louder. The curtains moved gracefully, like weeds in waters, mirroring this unearthly music. When I hear this recording now, I realize that this is not just a unique event in musical terms for me, but also it poignantly highlights the tragedy that such dawn choruses of birds in London can't be heard anymore.


Performants (1971)
Performers: Intermodulation---Roger Smalley, Tim Souster, Robin Thompson, Peter Britton
Note by Simon Emmerson, Music Department, City University, London EC1V OHB, U.K.
E-mail: s.emmerson@city.ac.uk.

The original programme note reads: "This type of group composition has grown up out of a need for the group to find consistency of style. The danger of pre-conceived ideas upsetting the balance of live improvisation, has to be overcome."

Intermodulation has recently been working on live manipulation of formants (a term used in acoustics to describe overtone structures) in attempts to develop an instrumental type of playing but with a flexibility comparable to that of singing.

The original performance lasted 14'15", of which the track on the LMJ11 CD edits together two extracts totaling 6'42".

Intermodulation was founded by Roger Smalley and Tim Souster in 1969, while both were based at Kings College, Cambridge. The group approach centered around live electronic treatment of instruments, with tape and amplification also playing important roles. Their work covered the complete range of notated and improvised music. Intermodulation performed regularly throughout Britain, including three performances at the BBC Proms (1970, 1971 and 1974) and an Arts Council Contemporary Music Network Tour in 1975.

They also worked with Stockhausen, for example as part of Sternklang, which they recorded under the composer's direction. The group's final concert was in February 1976.

Further information and discussion of Intermodulation's work may be found in Tim Souster, "Intermodulation: A Short History," Contact 17 (Summer 1977) pp. 3--6; and Simon Emmerson, "Live Electronic Music in Britain: Three Case Studies," Contemporary Music Review 6, Part 1 (1991) pp. 179--195.

Acknowledgment
The recording and this note were prepared by Simon Emmerson with thanks to Penny Souster and Peter Britton.


Wedged into Release (1971)
Composer/performer: Frank Perry (percussion)
Blowin' in the Wind (1971)
Performers: Frank Perry (drums), Mongezi Feza (trumpet), Chris McGregor (piano)
Note by Frank Perry, 3 Drake Close, Ringwood, Hampshire, BH224 1UG, U.K.

Until February 1969 I had been drumming in a band called Black Cat Bones, a Chicago-style blues band with the late Paul Kossoff (guitarist with Free) playing lead guitar, but my jazz techniques finally got the better of me. I opted for jazz. However, my introduction came from Mike Sullivan (alto sax) who was an ardent follower of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME). So I went straight into avant-garde jazz. We formed a trio with George Jensen (a bassist friend of mine) called Musicians Union and began playing free-form group improvised music in March 1968. I'd been playing drums for 4 years. I also joined Mike in attending the Little Theatre Club every Friday and Saturday evening for over a year. It often happened that after the gig the whole audience (fans) went with John Stevens to Ronnie Scott's or 100 Club, etc. John would waltz up and say, "They're all with me," and we'd all get in free. John would make somewhat derisive comments regarding the music---it was true that what he was doing was more original, new and very different. Mike particularly liked SME's intense listening style.

By October of 1968 I'd had to move out of London to Mildenhall in Suffolk with my parents. After a while, I'd go down to London on weekends either to listen to SME or to play on the scene (at Peanuts---a club run by Harry Miller at a pub just over the road from Stockwell tube station) with musicians such as Elton Dean, Gary Windo, Nick Evans, Harry Miller and Mike Osborne.

I regularly practiced each weekend in the Mildenhall factory's canteen for up to 13 hours a day. My father had a reel-to-reel that he'd recorded the Black Cat Bones on, and I used to record some of my practice sessions or rehearsals (Musicians Union) to gain objectivity, to analyze for improvements and simply as a record. In 1970, I'd done a summer season in Penzance, Cornwall, with The Jazz Roots and had bought a Philips cassette recorder for the reasons given. I'd also record my solo work and the rehearsals with Balance (co-founded with guitarist Ian Brighton) at my bedsit in Crouch End, London, until the tape recorder was stolen.

I decided to move back down to London in January of 1970 and on the evening of the move I had a gig at Ray Man's club, The Crucible. I began at 7:30 P.M. and emerged "house drummer" at 7:30 A.M. Evan Parker played as part of SME and also happened to live down the road from Mike Sullivan's place in Kilburn. We'd often go down there, so I got to play with Evan, then formed The Frank Perry Trio with Derek Bailey and we did a few gigs.

Being part of the Beat generation, I'd been listening to modern jazz (Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc.) since 1963. I'd also gone out and bought Spirits by Albert Ayler, being interested to read that he thought of the recording session as a kind of séance (I'd discovered that I was a "trance medium" in 1965) that brought another energy to the proceedings. I dug what Albert was doing but never thought of playing that music myself! Who would I play it with? Then I discovered the improvised music scene as it was happening in London. Yet, whilst SME was free, it wasn't the same style as Albert's.

By playing regularly at Ray Man's Crucible, I got to play with many individuals. Ray's stayed open all night---so players would often come over after playing at Ronnie's (wherever), which closed at 3 A.M. One time Chris McGregor and Mongezi Feza popped in and asked if I wanted to jam. Actually, I'd never heard their music and didn't have any idea who they were. We played a remarkably "happening" set---a kind of spiritual unity reminiscent of Albert Ayler's music---and so I've titled this piece: Blowing in the Wind. Whenever I met Chris he'd always say that we must release that jam.

After that initial meeting, Chris often booked me to play in various groups.

Harry Miller was bassist with Chris at the time and had suggested that Keith Tippett check me out. Keith rang, then came and visited. We talked and he asked me to join his group, The Keith Tippett Trio, which we soon co-founded as Ovary Lodge. We did a couple of gigs, and then it was into the recording studio to finish what was to become the album Blueprint.

Keith's style was mostly about getting into an emotional groove, and I sometimes found that frustrating, being as I was more sanguine and enjoyed making music of the "Now"---where the music was free to change at any one instant. At that time I was more familiar with that particular way of listening that was of a more intensely intuitive, psycho-spiritual nature.

I never did find a group to improvise with that could embrace all of the areas/styles of playing that I empathized with, and this was one of the several reasons why in 1974 I focused more upon unfolding my solo direction.

I had one such attack of frustration during the Blueprint recording session where I felt that both Roy Babbington and Keith weren't listening to my "suggestions" and somehow couldn't hear what I was "saying." So I adopted a disruptive manner of playing---eventually they stopped playing altogether so that I moved into a short solo that allowed me to get it all off my chest. Luckily, the engineer gave me a tape of this "blow" with the solo on the end. My horoscope has a pattern named by Dane Rudhyar as the Wedge, or Funnel, pattern. For these reasons I've named this short piece Wedged Into Release.

In principle, I stopped playing with everyone in 1974 to "woodshed"---to totally rethink my musical vocabulary. I did a few Ovary Lodge and Ark gigs and around 1977 formed a duo with David Toop (Tee-Pee). But largely I've pursued my solo direction---unfolding meditative soundscapes utilizing various combinations from around 700 of my instruments, overtone and undertone chanting and boo flutes, appearing on around 60 albums.


Piece For Cello and Accordion (1974)
Composer: Michael Parsons
Performers: Michael Parsons (cello), Howard Skempton (accordion)
Note by Michael Parsons, Flat 4, 148 Fellows Road, London, NW3, U.K.

After the break-up of the Scratch Orchestra and the split between its "political" and "experimental" factions, there was a regrouping of composers (including Howard Skempton and myself, John White and Chris Hobbs) who did not wish to associate themselves with the political line adopted by Cornelius Cardew and others. We also reacted against the more anarchic aspects of early Scratch performances and became interested in a return to elementary musical procedures. At around this time I took up playing the cello for a while, in order to take part in performances with groups of art students in Portsmouth, where I was a visiting lecturer. Although my bowing technique remained rudimentary, I found that I could play plucked notes with reasonable accuracy (especially if some of them were on open strings).

In 1974 Howard Skempton and I formed a duo to perform our own pieces (mostly for voices and percussion). I was attracted by the contrast of sonority between the cello's low pizzicato notes and sustained sounds in the high register of the accordion, and this piece, written in February 1974, was one of the first results of our collaboration. It is harmonically static, using a limited selection of pitches in the cello part, which are gradually extended and shifted in relation to the accordion's sustained sounds. The process is fairly transparent; it reflects our association at the time with Systems artists such as Jeffrey Steele and Peter Lowe, who used a similar kind of repetition and displacement of elements in their visual work.

This performance was recorded by Dave Smith at the British Music Information Centre in London on 8 August 1974.


Four Aspects (excerpt) (1960)
Composer: Daphne Oram
Note by Hugh Davies, 25 Albert Road, London N4 3RR, U.K.
E-mail: hugh-davies@beeb.net.

This excerpt consists of the final 5 minutes of an 8-minute electronic composition, starting near the end of the second variation-like aspect. It is probably the most interesting of the earliest British tape compositions for concert performance, from around 1960 (several years later than in many other countries). No doubt fortuitously, the main thematic material and atmosphere of the work uncannily anticipates that of Brian Eno's first recorded ambient work, Discreet Music (1975).

Daphne Oram was born in 1925. Following her musical studies she worked as a music balancer for BBC radio in London. Her unperformed, half-hour-long Still Point (1950), for double orchestra, prerecorded instrumental sounds and live electronic treatments, may well have been the very first composition in any country to incorporate live electronic transformation. In the mid-1950s, having failed to convince anyone at the BBC of the importance of the recently introduced electronic music and musique concrète, she began with Desmond Briscoe to assemble a temporary tape studio at night after broadcasting had finished, producing in this manner, both independently and in collaboration, background music for several radio and TV drama broadcasts. This led in 1958 to the foundation, primarily sponsored by the drama department, of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, of which she was the first director. However, unhappy with the lack of interest in the musical possibilities of the medium, she left in 1959 to set up her own private Oramics studio.

Like Raymond Scott in the same period, Daphne Oram combined her work as a composer with developing a specialized composition machine; they both financed their studios by concentrating on commercial work, in Oram's case primarily for television and documentary films. Her only commercially recorded work is Electronic Sound Patterns (1962), in the series Listen, Move and Dance. A working version of the Oramics machine, involving drawn sound techniques, was completed in the mid-1960s, so it did not feature in the creation of Four Aspects. This machine was overtaken by digital developments in the 1980s, and Oram spent several years working on a computer-based system to replace it. Following two strokes in the mid-1990s, she has sadly been unable to continue any of her work.

I now manage the archive of Daphne Oram's papers and tape recordings; my first experience of working in an electronic music studio was as a guest at her studio in 1962. It is likely that a recording of her electronic compositions will be released in the future.


The Judith Poem (1973)
Composer: Bob Cobbing
Performers: abAna---Bob Cobbing (voice), Paul Burwell (percussion), David Toop (electric guitar)
Note by Bob Cobbing, 89A Petherton Road, London, N5, U.K.

This is one of my Girlie Poems done between 1969 and 1977 and published by Good Elf in 1982. It is for Judith Walker, and the poem is made of the letters of the name Judith. It was intended to be somewhat dramatic in form and was one of the first poems to be performed by the group abAna (Bob Cobbing, Paul Burwell, David Toop, plus Christopher Small, Lynn Conetta and Herman Hauge). It dates from 1971.


Note by Paul Burwell:

Some Recollections on the genesis of abANA, the sound/text collaboration revolving around Bob Cobbing, David Toop and Paul Burwell, and including at various times, the musicologist/composer Christopher Small, alto sax player Herman Hauge, poets Peter Finch, Paula Claire, Lilly Greenham, Laurence Upton, Bill Griffith and Lyn Connetta., and occasional sitting in with others at various Sound Poetry Festivals at the Poetry Society, the London Musicians Collective, Glasgow's Third Eye Centre and other places.

I had been going out with Sheila Cobbing for a year or two, and she was pregnant with our first son, Piers. David Toop, on becoming acquainted with her family name, asked her if she was any relation to the sound poet. Bob turned out to be her father. Subsequent conversations revealed more about her family background. Bob had once been a Quaker lay preacher. He had once painted their front room with printing ink instead of emulsion, and the walls never dried.

Our first son was born in 1971. In those days a father's attitude towards someone who had got their daughter pregnant out of wedlock was meant to be angry (as he was a Quaker, I assumed he wouldn't shoot me). Our first meeting, with visibly pregnant daughter, had such a potential for mutual embarrassment that I think we both took the coward's way out. We have never touched on the subject from that day to this, but instead talked about Bob's work and how he was attempting to get at the sounds of words themselves, to liberate words from the tyranny of semantic meaning. He was examining them for what they were, not what they were symbols of.

He showed me how he was exploring this through visual or concrete works and through sonic or recorded means. He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder he took around on a little luggage trolley, and he played me examples of this sonic work which incorporated vocal interpretations of his visual texts. These were themselves subjected to tape manipulations such as editing, splicing, layering, cut and paste, speed changes, slowing down and speeding up, in order to bring out sounds and frequencies latent in the words. He explained that he was frustrated with playing tapes at live readings, and had been learning to reproduce these sounds, with sub and high frequencies, rumbles and so on, with his own voice. The tapes of his own voice were used to extend the possibilities of that same voice.

This approach had similarities with the work David Toop and I were engaged in at the time as Rain In The Face: an interest in the microstructure of sounds, dissecting sounds and structures, and trying to de-condition ourselves from unconsciously acquired preconceptions of what sound, music, creativity and art were about. David was later to write a booklet, called Decomposition as Music Process, that I published under my Mirliton Publications imprint, inspired by the small press publications that Bob was introducing me to. Rain In The Face and Bob arranged to work on some material together. The collaboration wasn't easy, as we were approaching similar sonic material from different directions, but there was sufficient promise to encourage us to make a commitment to regular workshop sessions and work though our ideas.

Quite a few of these sessions were at The Department of Music at Ealing Technical College. I was a student at the Art School, and had become friendly with Christopher Small, senior lecturer in the music faculty at that time and later the author of books such as Musicking and Music Of The Common Tongue. The same classroom we used for rehearsal was also used for John Stevens' first workshops, in which he worked out the ideas that would become his ground breaking improvisational workshop pieces. David and I attended most of them as well.

Our first public performance was at the Almost Free Theatre, Rupert Street, London,in April 1972. The original name of the group was meant to be ANA, but Time Out listings magazine misprinted "a performance by ANA" as "a performance by abANA" so we stuck with it. Over the next few years we performed in England (particularly at the Poetry Society in Earls Court), Scotland, Wales, Holland and Germany, mostly as a trio. As a sextet, with Herman Hauge, Lyn Connetta and Christopher Small, we performed in London and Birmingham and broadcast a session for BBC Radio 3 in 1973. The working relationship of the trio (with the occasional decade's rest from each other) has continued until the present. Performances to celebrate Bob's 80th birthday took place in late summer 2000, along with a recording of new material by the abAna trio. I have done the occasional duo performance with Bob, (and other poets) over the intervening years, including a two week run with Bob as a guest performer and wordist with the Bow Gamelan (Anne Bean, Richard Wilson and myself) in a show called "In Sea and Air" at the ICA in London.


Music for Three Springs (excerpt) (1977)
Performer: Hugh Davies
Note by Hugh Davies, 25 Albert Road, London N4 3RR, U.K.
E-mail: hugh-davies@beeb.net.

This excerpt consists of the first 5 minutes of a 13-minute studio performance. The recording contains only what was heard over the loudspeakers (the live sound is almost inaudible), and was made directly from mixer to tape recorder without use of additional microphones.

As with its companion pieces, for one and two springs respectively, this work uses part of an amplified instrument called My Spring Collection. The three springs, which are 20, 25 and 38 cm in length, are amplified by means of four magnetic pickups arranged in a square; two of them are connected to the left channel and two to the right. The springs are moved around in different combinations and positions above or directly on the pickups and are played by the fingers and a variety of small implements.

Out of more than a dozen significant solo pieces of mine for my invented instruments, this is one of only two that have not already been issued on a recording or will appear on a CD in the course of 2001.


Plum (1973)
Composers/performers: Lol Coxhill/Steve Miller
Note by Lol Coxhill, 17 Laney House, Portpool Lane, London, EC1N 7UL, U.K. Steve Miller (deceased).

During the 1970s, continuing into the 1990s, pianist Stephen Miller and I worked together on many occasions, either as a duo or with the group Delivery, or with other musicians. This track is an excerpt from an improvisation during an early 1970s tour of colleges in Britain. Steve plays electric piano, and I play saxophone with a Watkins Copycat echo unit.


Part 3 (1968)
Performers: The People Band---Terry Day, Mel Davis, Lyn Dobson, Eddie Edem, Tony Edwards, Mick Figgis, Frank Flowers, Terry Halman, Russ Herncy, George Khan
Note by Terry Day, The People Band, 80 Bulwer Road, Barnet, Herts, EN5 5EY, U.K.

The People Band was an amalgam of the personnel from five to seven regular bands that played at the Starting Gate pub in Wood Green, north London, circa 1965--1970. The original name of the band was the Continuous Music Ensemble, the concept of continuous music being a primary tenet of its philosophy, which it consistently held and pursued. The notion was that "music is in the air"---all one has to do is plug into it and catch it, for music is continuously there, all around.

At around this time, John Stevens called his various groups the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The Continuous Music Ensemble decided to change its name to avoid confusion. From 1965 the Continuous Music Ensemble had been collaborating with the People Show (an alliance between music and theater) on the underground/alternative circuit. This included Middle Earth club, Drury Lane Arts Lab and so on. These were the days when collaborations between the arts became "events" and "happenings," involving musicians, painters, poets, actors, dancers, environmentalists, installationists, etc.

These were also the days of audience participation. Many were the gigs when audiences would gradually move forward during the evening and sit in with the band. The audience had little choice. The whole space of an environment became the stage. Musicians playing non-fixed instruments would wander around the space. At times, only a few would be on stage, only to desert it. The sound was dispersed everywhere and everybody had no choice but to be involved in making music of some kind. The band would swap instruments and the audience could see a leveling effect between musicians that included them also.

1968 had arrived, along with anarchy and turmoil. The People Band played in all the major European cities of strife---Paris, London and Amsterdam---during 1968--1969. It appeared that the music reflected the spirit and mood of the times, and in response the Continuous Music Ensemble elected to change its name to The People Band---a kind of political statement and recognition of The People Show's political stance.

Other memorable collaborations included a chaotic concert with MEV at the Purcell Room in London. As to wanderings, events and happenings, critic Charles Fox "particularly liked the bit at quarter to eleven" during a gig at the north London Roundhouse, where the band wandered through the auditorium. Throughout the "performance" the band would alternate between grouping together and dispersal. The music was continuous, non-stop, with no breaks. Gigs averaged 3 hours. The music was fast, furious, like a sizzle cymbal pulse, at times frightening in the ferocity of its intent and sound.

Sometimes it was like a monster, at other moments like the dew on the grass. Sometimes, audiences ran screaming to escape whilst others swooned and swayed to the sublime. Whatever, the music pulsated in a celebration of the joyous.

The People Band was, in essence and intent, the precursor of Alterations (the 1978--1986 quartet of Peter Cusack, Steve Beresford, David Toop, Terry Day), with its mix of styles, idioms, genres, anarchy, collision, confrontation and "anything goes" action/performance.

However, each was a product of its times. The People Band had a tribal nature and was anarchic to the extent that it was physically forced to stop playing at the Anarchists' Ball.

There were about 16 to 20 floating, peripheral members of the band, held in a continuum by a loose nucleus of 9 to 12 members. The trouble was, one never knew who would appear on a gig but as every instrument was doubled plus, there was always a People Band gig on the night. I even did a solo gig in Brussels billed as The People Band---not that the people there were too happy, having expected 20 musicians to arrive.

This was the time of free jazz, and The People Band was formed from musicians who leaned towards jazz, rock & roll and classical music. Rock was going through Jimi Hendrix and other experimentation. Improvisation was perhaps the root of them all---the grand finale of a rock piece was the starting point for free jazz.

By the early to middle 1970s, the band began to splinter into smaller groups, and some of the personnel began moving into the realms of rock, theatre, film, etc., while others went back to their former musical worlds. Ian Dury's Kilburn and The Highroads, for example, was formed mainly from The People Band. The first line-up was George Khan, Charlie Hart, Davey Payne, Russell Hardy, Terry Day, with Russell Hardy composing all of the early Kilburn material and Ian writing the lyrics. Davey Payne survived and became Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and on a few occasions the Kilburns and The People Band played on the same bill.

The People Band LP of 1968 (The People Band, Transatlantic TRA 214, released 1970) was produced by Charlie Watts at The Rolling Stones' Olympic Studios. This was a selection of musicians from the nucleus of the first generation. Second-generation arrivals included Charlie Hart (fresh from Arthur Brown's psychedelic band), who went on to play with Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance, Eric Clapton and others, as well as playing in Mike Figgis's film Stormy Monday alongside People Band members Mel Davis, Davey Payne, Paul Jolly and Terry Day, plus Ed Deane on guitar, in the guise of The Krakow Jazz Ensemble.

Mike Figgis joined The People Show and later went on to direct films such as Stormy Monday, Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs and Timecode. Now of international repute, he composes scores for his films as well as acting and directing. Another People Band member, John Porter, came from Roxy Music and later went on to produce The Smiths. Saxophonist George Khan joined The People Show, where he remains to this day. George was formidable. I'm sure that Evan Parker would agree that George was a force to be reckoned with---on a par with Peter Brotzmann, John Surman and other contemporaries. Among the band's earliest luminaries were Glen Sweeney of Third Ear Band fame and Barry Pilcher of Hydrogen Jukebox.

However, the magnet and prime mover was Mel Davis. An unknown and unsung hero of the times, and of improvised music, Mel was that core element---untamed, tribal and instinctive. He abandoned free jazz to play Nigerian Highlife music, and what a delight his tunes are. He was the essence of The People Band's tribal nature, mixed with sophistication.

The myth continues because of a lack of recordings, as well as the quirks of the day.

I dedicate this article to Mel Davis, Davey Payne, Paul Jolly, and in particular Mike Figgis and Charlie Hart, both of whom have People Band material from the 1960s and 1970s sitting in their archives.


Toy Piano (1975) and Voice (1974)
Performer: Steve Beresford
Note by Steve Beresford, 62 Oxford Gardens, London W10 5UN, U.K.
E-mail: s.Beresford@amserve.net.

Because Calibre Auto Recording 45s are only 6 inches in diameter, they often get lost---sometimes for years---in my large collection of 7-inch singles. They periodically come to light, usually in the middle of a frantic search for a Lee Perry B-side.

I recorded one in 1974 and one in 1975, both in "Record Your Own Voice" machines set next to photo booths on, respectively, York and London Charing Cross station platforms. I think that the idea of these booths was to record a greeting to a loved one. But the sheer novelty of being able to produce a proper record, albeit one-sided and the wrong size, was the main attraction, I'm sure.

The booths closely resembled photo booths, and one could record around 2 minutes of music. I think there was a clock which counted down the time. Maybe the machine played it back before dispensing it. I don't remember which year Gavin Bryars devised his version of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room, involving recording something in a booth and then re-recording over and over. I think that my main attraction to the machine was that it produced an artificially aged artifact, like a Joseph Cornell, although I doubt I knew that name in 1974.

I envisaged showing up with an acoustic guitar and recording a pseudo-blues that I could pass off, because of the inevitable scratches and low fidelity, as an undiscovered 1930s blues classic. (Years later, a colleague called Danny Adler sold an archival blues record company a whole album of ersatz early blues, but without---as far as I know---using a station recording booth.)

Even in 1974, the records looked very old-style with the legend "Calibre" in joined-up writing. I never attempted the blues, but I did record a solo voice piece. That surprises me now, but reminds me that the first improvisation group I was in---Bread and Cheese with Neil Lamb and Dave Herzfeld---used a lot of what we would call "extended vocal techniques." I think we listened to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia a lot. So my voice is on the first disc recorded, as my 24-year-old self noted for posterity on a label on the back, on the 21st of April at 11:45 P.M.: "After first gig at Leeman Hotel . . . next compartment white flashes."

The Leeman Hotel is next to the river---doubtless it was badly flooded in the recent bad weather---and in 1974 we ran a little music club there for a while. Bread and Cheese played there, as did Jan Steele's band F&W Hat, and we invited several London musicians to play, including Lol Coxhill, with whom I still work.

The second disc has a label reading "Sorry Records 001. Steve---toy piano solo. Charing Cross Station. January 18, 1975. 9:30 A.M. (before gig In Greenwich)." This certainly was the only record and the only copy of it ever issued on the little-known Sorry label. It was named after a duo I had with drummer Dave Solomon who was always saying "sorry" in an accusing manner. I had dropped the avant-garde singing by then but had taken up toy piano, mainly due to the dearth of real pianos in any of the tiny rooms we played in. I have no memory of any gig in Greenwich and no one I spoke to does, either. I imagine I had to rest the small piano on my knees whilst standing in the small booth. Quite an uncomfortable position.

The Museum of Communication in Den Haag has the most beautiful "record-your-own-voice" machine. It is in the shape of an art deco skyscraper. Two vertical metal plates can be pulled out to shield you from ambient noise whilst recording your message. A tiny record player is set into the side so that you can check the result. And a slot in the other side dispenses cardboard sleeves.

Size-wise a halfway point between singles and CDs, these two singles make me think of how quickly CDs are losing their magic. My house is stuffed with one-off CD-Rs. Will they become collectors' items, like rare acetates? My 7-inch collection has more potency for me. Or maybe we can stop fetishizing the object and go back to hearing the music?

In 1977, Dick Jewell produced a little book, Found Photos, of rejected pictures left outside photo booths. One or two recall Rodchenko's forced obliterations of disappeared Soviet bureaucrats. Most are a reminder of how ghastly most of us looked in 1977.


Duet for One String Banjo and Water Cistern (1971)
Composer/performer: Ron Geesin
Note by Ron Geesin, Headrest, Street End Lane, Broadoak, Heathfield, E. Sussex, TN21 8TU, U.K.
E-mail: ron@geesin.demon.co.uk
Website: http://www.rongeesin.com.

Let's start at the top. The water cistern was the main water storage tank in the attic of 208 Ladbroke Grove, London, W10. In 1969, my wife and I bought the house in conjunction with the graphic designer and avant-garde filmmaker Steve Dwoskin. Since he was disabled from the effects of polio, he had the bottom half and we had the top. (What's amusing now is that Gavin Bryars took over our half of the house, and the musicking of Dwoskin's films, after we'd left for Sussex in 1971. The water tank was then over Bryars's head.)

Ever since I got my first tape recorder in 1965, I've recorded interesting found environments. This piece was one of the last I made in the padded cell at the top of that house.

The banjo instrument form has fascinated me since I was 15. In its origins I see the African-American rightly laughing at the whites, only to be stuffed by it later. My first one was actually a three-string guitar I made in the shape of a banjo from soft wood and plywood in my Dad's garage. The wire frets were held on with Sellotape, and I used the instrument used to earn some money at Halloween from neighbors in Bothwell, Scotland. Later, when I was performing my one-man surreal eruptions on larger stages, I used several modified banjos as part of them. One was a Rekkia banjo (old Glasgow joke, usually applied to "pianas") on which I replaced the tuning pegs with a wooden lever: a kind of very coarse "Scruggs" peg arrangement. Pitching---Ha! Ha!---was done entirely by manipulating the lever. The instrument existed partly as a humorous comment on the absurdity of posh instruments and partly as a demonstration of a real "talking" banjo.

One of my compositional techniques was, and always will be, to take an audio line, whether chord progression, melody or found environment, and challenge myself to put something else with it. The cistern seemed to be furiously stuttering some kind of message, so I talked back on the banjo. I think it ends in an argument.

The piece was made as one of a set of five for John Peel's Top Gear program on BBC Radio 1 to be broadcast on 19 June 1971. It attempted to push the boundaries of radio acceptability and to coax a bit more of a tone out of Peel's then much-mumbled monotone. According to these archive papers, it looks as if this piece was never broadcast, so I found the barbed wire fence, something I've always tended to do---for fun, you know!


Group Composition VI (Unfixed Parities) (1974)
Composers/performers: Gentle Fire---Richard Bernas, Hugh Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones, Michael Robinson (all: voice, live electronics)
Note by Hugh Davies, 25 Albert Road, London N4 3RR, U.K.
E-mail: hugh-davies@beeb.net.

Group Composition VI was the last collaborative composition in Gentle Fire's pioneering live electronic series (see Hugh Davies's article in this issue).

This excerpt consists of the final part of the performance given at the Gawthorpe Festival (Burnley, Lancashire) in July 1974. The recording contains only what was heard over the loudspeakers (the live sounds---speech---were considerably quieter) and was made directly from mixer to tape recorder without use of additional microphones.

The listener is urged to listen to the recording of this track before reading the rest of this note, which explains the performance situation and how the complex gating and filtering processes (reminiscent of early demonstrations of the vocoder) were created.

Five performers sit around a table at center stage. At different times and in various combinations, each of them holds a normal conversation with an non-existent partner over one of four telephones (the now old-fashioned black Bakelite dial-operated model). These unscripted, one-sided conversations are concerned with financial matters, often negotiating on behalf of the group with a concert organizer in Britain or on the continent or chasing up unpaid fees. The casual appearance of the onstage activities could often appear to the audience to be at odds with the sounds heard over the two or four loudspeakers. The only slight visual discrepancy is that the performers are busy dialing throughout their conversations, and in fact each person talks into someone else's handset while dialing on the telephone in front of him.

In spite of what one might imagine from listening to the recording today, the processing used no sophisticated electronic devices; it was achieved by modifying the functioning of certain parts of the telephones. With Michael Robinson's assistance I removed the magnetic pickups used in the telephone earpieces and mounted them in the empty mouthpiece position. The thin metal disc diaphragms that were originally fitted centrally above the magnetic pickups were again used with them, placed on specially built-up rims in the mouthpieces, and without the original screw-on covers they could now be shifted off-center to give a less faithful filtered vocal sound; even minute alterations in their positions could produce a new filter setting. These filtered sounds were routed through two terminals on the telephone dials in such a way that, after the dial had been wound away from its stationary position (as in dialing a telephone number), the sound would be interrupted once for each intermediate number on the dial that was passed on the way back to the stationary position. In some cases real telephone numbers were dialed, but mostly the maximum range was used by repeatedly dialing "0." After each interruption, the noisy attack was somewhat reduced by a capacitor, and the normal, regular speed at which the dial returned to the stationary position could be avoided by keeping a finger in the selected dial hole and manually traversing each off/on interruption.

We recorded each performance (directly from the mixer output), and in each concert the recording of the previous concert was played back and mixed together with the outputs of two of the telephones, thus processing those sounds a second time, producing some depth of background. The present excerpt is taken from one such recording. Some acoustic feedback from the diaphragms was inevitable, as it could be triggered by the slightest displacement. Because the dialing activity on a telephone was separated from the person speaking into it, some of the chopped sounds contain no speech, only the resonance produced by the particular diaphragm positions.


"Instant Composition #1"
Rain In the Face (Paul Burwell and David Toop)
Note by Paul Burwell

In 1969 I was working as a garden labourer on the River Thames and taking drum lessons from a dance band drummer named Max Abrams. I was desperate for people to play with: a drummer needs o be able to play with other musicians in order to learn how to play. The only person I occasionally played was a bass player called Tim Lebrun with whom I had played in a short lived trio.

Tim got in contact with me and asked if I would like to play in a band with a sax player called Geoff. He was a jewellery maker who lived and worked in a little garden shed in the Roundhouse theatre, north London. We could play all night in the building, after the Roundhouse Christmas show on ice finished. Naturally I jumped at the chance. The 'group' was a five piece of Tim. Geoff, myself, an American 'singer' whose name I can't remember, and a longhaired guitarist named David Toop. As I wanted to be the Albert Ayler Trio, I didn't give him much thought. We would play all night, frightened to go though the cavernous darkened building, as the security guards sometimes used to leave off their card playing and shoot at rats.

This went on for a week or two. I physically couldn't hold down the day job and the all night sessions. My girlfriend was expecting a baby, and the job was the only money we had. I was determined to learn to play and in spite of the unpromising state of this weird group of musicians, it represented the only game in town. I was forced to give up work. We were offered a gig and that meant we needed a name. Geoff suggested Hoterie and the guitarist wanted Rain in the Face (not after the Indian Chief, but after the physical sensation). A compromise of Hotree in the Face was ruled out, so Rain in the Face got taken up by default.

For some reason we were headhunted by a singer/songwriter called Simon Finn, who asked us to accompany him at a pub gig across the road from the Roundhouse. After the gig, a record studio owner and engineer called Vic Keary quietly asked David and myself to accompany Finn on a recording for his new record label, Mushroom, but not to tell the rest of the band. Simon Finn had been working at the Stock Exchange as a runner. He had picked up enough gossip to make a bit of money dealing on the side. This financed his musical career and the proposed record.

We had to rehearse in other places and people drifted away. David and I found we were the only ones who would turn up for rehearsals. Thinking of ourselves as two fifths of a five piece, we kept trying to recruit more people. Various musicians would come along , the music would change to accommodate the new line up, we would start up in new directions, the others would drift away. After a year of this we decided that we would better off thinking of ourselves as 100 per cent of a duo, and add on other people whenever appropriate.

Left to our own devices we were free to develop in our own direction. We were, and are still, both very determined which is why we found ourselves thrown together. We were both only about 20 years old when we met, and were in the process of developing ourselves and our tastes. We listened to lots of music: ethnic musics, Iannis Xenakis, free jazz, avant-garde classical, everything we could find of Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, the Instant Composers Pool from Holland (especially Han Bennick), Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey. We worked very hard to get at the ideas expressed though music, as Webern put it. As well as listening and playing, we talked a lot together, and wrote quite a lot too. Our creative tastes in general led us to an interest in, and involvement with, Performance Art. We collaborated with the poet and performance artist Carlyle Reedy, and with Mitsutaka Ishii, the first Japanese Butoh dancer to perform in the West and one of the three main founders of the Butoh movement.

We got involved in the Free Jazz scene, not because we were free jazzers, but because this was the only scene that would accept us. John Stevens gave us our first gig at the Little Theatre Club, off St. Martins Lane in London, where we subsequently played frequently. We started working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, and later worked with Steven Berkoff on his Greenwich Theatre production of Agamemnon. We got involved in making instruments and sound sculptures which led to work with Max Eastley , Hugh Davies, Stephen Cripps and others. Later, both of us were deeply involved in the founding of the London Musicians Collective, and MUSICS magazine. The Rain In The Face recording included is from an early session. It sounds like it was recorded in a different century (which, of course, it was). I can hear us trying to break out of our limitations, our world view, our perception of music into another , greater understanding, but like philosophers of the middle ages attempting to understand the world but only having the language of Christianity with which to describe things. We are struggling to get away from fixed respective rhythms, harmony, melody and form with those elements as our only tools. The piece is like a journey. We battle through our musical landscape, fighting through all our difficulties and limitations, break through to where we want to get to, and stop.


Nona Meyeah Teay (1967)
Composer/performer: Ranulph Glanville
Note by Ranulph Glanville, 52 Lawrence Road, Southsea, Hants PO5 1NY, U.K.
E-mail: ranulph@glanville.co.uk.

The CD contains a short electronic piece, Nona Meyeah Teay (the name's a sort of anagram) composed and made in the spring of 1967 at the request of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. It is obsessive and in three clear sections that are, I guess, rather straightforwardly classical in form (I guess I wasn't too interested in form: just stick the blocks together). It's a little difficult to remember how I made it, at this distance. The first section is made from several loops (isorhythms, apparently first used by the thirteenth-century English composer John Dunstable, a fortuitous fact since my collaborator John Pitchford lived in Dunstable), played with the volume at different levels on the various repeats. It has a sort of syncopated upbeat and it's very fragmented. The second section is a slow movement, quieter and more lyrical. Singing trains can be heard; there's a lot of environmental sound in this section, overlaid with the yodeling of feedback at that point where the sound breaks, like a boy's breaking voice.

I am fascinated by such difficult, uncontrollable, transient sounds, and want (contrarily) to keep them forever. The third section is a vast crescendo of one block of sound. It was meant to be white noise, but I couldn't get anything that was quite right, so I overlaid several loops of pink noise, which had the advantage of giving the sound form and rhythm. I would be interested to substitute white noise from the new technology, to see what difference it would have made. I think the approximations I had to make actually give (as is so often the case) a better result than what I had in mind. The piece seems to me now to make sounds that one can get lost in: the first section is as with more recent rock music or the Rite of Spring, the second is hypnotic and the third so unfamiliar and without form that there are no signposts, no familiarity.

Some of the difficulties and limitations of the technology can be heard: hums, crackles, etc. One of the ways of mixing was to lay down two tracks on a four-track recorder and play them back on a two-track machine.

There's a lot of clipping: it was used to help make the sounds, giving them a harmonic richness that otherwise would be quite hard to obtain.


Pharoah's March (1970)
Composer: Mike Cooper
Performers: Mike Cooper (National Tri Plate slide guitar), Mike Osborne (alto sax), Harry Miller (bass), Alan Jackson (drums), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Geoff Hawkins (tenor sax), John Taylor (piano) Note by Mike Cooper, Via Vaglia 34, Int 18, 00139 Rome, Italy.
E-mail: cooparia@compuserve.com.
Website: http:/ourworld.compuserve.com/omepages/ooparia.

In the early 1970s I was still considered a "folk singer/songwriter." However, my recreational listening, record producer and musical friends were pulling me toward more exotic shores and away from the musical conservatism of the folk circuit. I wasn't alone on this wave, of course. John Martyn, Roy Harper, Davey Graham and Tim Buckley all had similar, different and radical ideas about where acoustic singer-songwriters might take their music. Davey had long been interested in non-European musics, experimenting with tunings etc. He had a number of jazz pieces in his repertoire, and was a huge influence on guitarists such as John Renbourne and Bert Jansch.

My tenor-sax--playing friend Geoff Hawkins had introduced me to the music of Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Lambert, Hendrix and Ross, and John Coltrane when we played together in my Blues Committee band in the mid-1960s, and by the late 1960s Peter Eden, in addition to producing my records, was producing some of the more interesting young jazz players in London, providing instant access to some great musicians to collaborate with.

I wanted to make a piece that would bring together some ideas that I heard in the playing of Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Sharrock and John Fahey.

Pharoah's Tahuid LP was a double inspiration with its Free Jazz/World Music/Exotica references and Sharrock's wild slide guitar. I had discovered the bizarre combination of Sharrock's scorching free guitar solos and Herbie Mann's flute on the latter's Latin/cocktail jazz records. Herbie had big ears.

The late John Fahey, besides becoming the father of, so-called "American primitive" guitar, also had an interest in abstract musique concrète tape-collage music very early in his recording career---something most people chose to ignore until quite recently. His composition The Singing Bridge of Memphis Tennessee from his Yellow Princes LP was my introduction to that side of his work. I wrote the central section of Pharoah's March with Fahey in mind. At the time of recording we had just met at guitarist Stefan Grossman's house in London.

I seem to recall that Mike Westbrook sat in the control room with Norma Winstone during the recording session, which leads me to believe that most of the people playing were perhaps members of his orchestra at the time. Amongst the people playing on this piece are Mike Osborne (alto sax), Harry Miller (bass), Alan Jackson (drums), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Geoff Hawkins (tenor sax), John Taylor (piano) and myself (National Tri Plate slide guitar).


Geese (c. 1974)
Performers: A Touch of the Sun---Peter Cusack (guitar) and Simon Mayo (clarinet)
Note by Peter Cusack, 79 Maury Road, London, N16 7BT, U.K.
E-mail: pcusack@btinternet.com.

Geese is part of a longer improvisation originally released on the LP Milk Teeth (BEAD 1) in 1974. The duo of myself (guitars) and Simon Mayo (clarinets, alto saxophone) was very active as part of the thriving London improvised music scene during the mid-1970s under the name of A Touch of the Sun. I continue to be involved with music and sound. Simon has pursued a career as a botanist.


Pilgrimage from Scattered Points on the Surface of the Body to the Brain, the Inner Ear, the Heart and the Stomach (1970)
Composers/performers: The Scratch Orchestra
Note by Bryn Harris, 122 Bullbrook Drive, Bracknell, Berks, RG12 2QS, U.K.

The concept of the Scratch Orchestra "journey" was introduced in Cornelius Cardew's "A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution," published in The Musical Times, June 1969, under the heading of Research Project: "From time to time a journey will be proposed (journey to Mars, journey to the Court of Wu Ti, journey to the unconscious, journey to West Ham, etc.). . . . A date can be fixed for the journey, which will take the form of a performance. . . . Research should be through direct experience rather than academic; neglect no channels. . . . The results of your research are in you, not in the book."

On this occasion, one important aspect of the preparations for the journey/pilgrimage was a private viewing of the science-fiction movie classic, Fantastic Voyage, in which Raquel Welch et al. are miniaturized and injected into the blood stream of a VIP boffin.

The pilgrimage was also characterized by the inclusion of four "popular classics" (also introduced in the Cardew draft constitution)---these were Mahler's 6th Symphony, Terry Riley's In C, the Eurovision Song Contest winner "Boom Bang-a-Bang," and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture---representing the four organs of pilgrimage respectively. Spot them if you can---hint: 18:12 is a fairly common score in table tennis.

The concert itself opened with Michael Parson's Mindfulness Occupied with the Body, and closed with Richard Ascough's Rationalisation of Realisation. The extract presented here is representative of the middle, improvisatory section of the Pilgrimage.

The body of the program notes for this concert, along with the Cardew draft constitution and other relevant material, were reprinted in the excellent 25 Years from SCRATCH (London: London Musicians Collective, 1994) [1].

Reference

1. 25 Years from SCRATCH (London: London Musicians Collective, 1994) is available from London Musicians Collective, 3.6 Lafone House, 11-13 Leathermarket Street, London, SE1 3HN, U.K.

LMJ11: Not Necessarily English Music

Updated 9 November 2005

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