Speakers Sydney 2

higher resolution image to read score

iPhone panorama captured Thursday 19 November 2015, performance recorded Sunday 22 November 2015, presented at AAANZ conference Wednesday 25 November 2015.

Speakers Sydney 1

higher resolution image to read score

iPhone panorama captured Thursday 19 November 2015, performance recorded Sunday 22 November 2015, presented at AAANZ conference Wednesday 25 November 2015.

Artwash

This arrangement of Artwash was recorded before the version that appears on the Surplus EP. It was recorded before I had decided to eschew the use of conventional 'spatialising' echo and reverb effects, and to mix all the songs to mono. The version of the song on the EP was also played and sung live, direct to hard drive, without any effects. It's been something of a characteristic of my song writing and recording processes that they often begin with more complex instrumentation arrangements before arriving at more minimal finished versions. This isn't so much an 'essentialist' exercise, I'm not attempting to get to the 'essence' of a song, it's more that complexity is an early stage in the compositional process, and simplification is a development of that process.

Storm Bugs and Film of the Same Name along The Wire

The Wire 380, Oct 2015, pp12 - 13

read it here

Surplus

Life of Barrymore

I am pleased to announce that my new record LIFE OF BARRYMORE is available as a mini-CD and download from Linear Obsessional Recordings. Linear Obsessional supremo Richard Sanderson describes it on the Bandcamp page, and this is as good a description as it's likely to get, as:

Extraordinary EP of new songs by the New Cross based sound/visual artist and composer Steven Ball (a member of the influencial DIY electronics group Storm Bugs with Philip Sanderson). "Life of Barrymore" is a collection of songs with lyrics transcribed from verbatim recordings of specially selected snatches of British television. Haunting, and occasionally uncomfortable, "Life of Barrymore" treats these found texts with utmost seriousness, and are sung by Ball in a moving and mesmeric fashion over specially created beds of electro-acoustic construction. "Life of Barrymore" is a gripping and unique experience.

Listen and download from the player above, or at
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/life-of-barrymore
where you can also order the physical release which consists of a numbered, limited edition of 50 mini-CDRs. High-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more, is available on Bandcamp and includes a full-colour PDF booklet with notes, lyrics and artwork.

Recorded 2014 - 15, Steven Ball sings, plays guitar, accordion, software instruments, Candy Crush (stuck on level 29), radiosonic and televisual ambience.

Linear Obsessional Recordings LR065
http://www.linearobsessional.org

Speakers Too

originally performed with images by Martin Blažíček on 20/06/15 at the no.w.here tenth anniversary party, these versions recorded live and direct to drive 23/06/15, no fuss, no edits, no post-production, now on Bandcamp

"...as local as it gets..."

I'm very pleased to note two positive reviews of Collected Local Songs within a few days of each other.  The first by a singer/musician whose work I greatly admire (and one-time local), Sophie Cooper writing for Radio Free Midwitch 

"The songs are like perfect postcards picturing small details of everyday life seen through an appreciative eye."

and the second from local Deptford/New Cross blog Transpontine

"...an album that is as local as it gets..."

Thanks people!

A collection of local songs, poems, &c. &c. by William Oliver, Newcastle, 1829

 

at archive.org
William Oliver on Wikipedia

genre vagrancy

from The Wire, April 2015
 
Steven Ball

Collected Local Songs

Bandcamp DL

Steven Ball is one half of Storm Bugs, a South East London duo who played a key role in the late 1970s/early 1980s cassette movement. Bending circuits, scratching vinyl, mutilating melody: they created a strangely liberated form of proto-industrial arte povera that, rediscovered and reissued over the last decade, has held up remarkably well. Loosely affiliated with that period’s DIY groups, Storm Bugs still feel uncaptured. Ball’s subsequent activities, moving across spoken word, video and installation, testify to his restless energy and genre vagrancy.

Collected Local Songs, while quieter in register, is equally intriguing. It's a drifting, sometimes aleatory assemblage of signs and signals encountered in South London's Deptford and New Cross. Ball sees the city as plunderphonic terrain, and this music is built up from layers of centifugal texts: ghost signs, ringtones, viral marketing skywriting, fragments of overheard speech. "Cloud Of Dreams" comes across like an old blues song written by conceptual architects Metahaven: "Woke up one morning/Singing phrases from a dream/Into his mobile phone".

There's drift and ambulation here. Memories, fragmented and not always lucid, act as bulwarks against capitalism's amnesia. The city is battered but not down for the count. It recalls the cussed melancholy of Jem Cohen’s films, or Stephen Dwoskin's Jesus Blood, the South London film best known for its Gavin Bryars score. Sometimes Ball’s vocals are a touch too measured, making "Deptford Flea Market lnterlude" - comprised of found sounds such as junglist beats and street stall patter - all the more potent. Collected Local Songs may be a discographic side swerve for him, but it's a resonant and very effective one.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Collected Local Songs

thanks to dubdog 

This Surface

The following is my introduction to the film This Surface by David Hall and Tony Sinden from the David Hall: Video Art Pioneer tribute event at Tate Britain on Thursday 5 March 2015.

In 1972 Mouldy Old Dough, was one of the most popular records in the UK. It was number one in the pop charts for four weeks in October, making it the second biggest selling UK single of the year, behind only The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards' bagpipe version of Amazing Grace. 

The song was written by Nigel Fletcher and Rob Woodward, and first produced by them as the band Stavely Makepeace, subsequently released under the name Lieutenant Pigeon. The song was recorded in the front room of Woodward's semi-detached house in Coventry, and features his mother Hilda on piano. Played in a boogie-woogie, honky-tonk, ragtime style, the only lyrics growled by Fletcher are the title "Mouldy Old Dough" and "Dirty Old Man". As well as the boogie-woogie piano the song also contains a military-style drum and recorder melody, which acts as an intro and middle eight.

It is one of a number of early seventies novelty hits, which are mostly characterized as being records by hitherto (and often subsequently) unknown eccentric artists, unusual enough to capture public attention, or humourous songs by known artists whose work rarely graces the pop charts, such as Benny Hill's 1971 chart-topper Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) and Chuck Berry’s 1972 hit My-Ding-a-Ling.

Indeed one of David Hall’s ex-students would later achieve the heady status of having a novelty hit record with a cover of an old Barrett Strong song.

Mouldy Old Dough has the whiff of an old-time knees up about it, and as such it’s a natural accompaniment for the age-old traditional party trick of balancing a pint of beer on the head while dancing.

The film This Surface (David Hall & Tony Sinden, 11 minutes, 16mm, 1972-3) thus locates itself firmly in the popular culture of its time, in an ordinary setting, with an ordinary activity, in a pub around Christmas time with one of the most popular of current hit records playing in the bar.  Perhaps significantly it avoids the then voguish nascent glam rock genre or teeny-bobber hits (for currency it could equally have been a record by T. Rex, Slade, Gary Glitter, or the Osmonds, for example). So the film starts in a setting steeped in everyday working class and popular culture, as far removed from the usual settings or concerns of avant-garde film as could be imagined in 1973. 

This indicates part of the intent of the Five Films collection, of which this is one. David Hall and Tony Sinden’s intention was to take the conventions of film as a starting point for a series of exercises in what would later become known as Deconstruction. Not for them the then avant-garde orthodoxy of establishing new and alternative aesthetic constructions, or as the term suggests, forming an advance movement that would invent forms for the future. Nor for them the context of a small but elite site of reception, populated by an audience of cognoscenti.

The other films in the Five Films variously deconstruct the relationship of the actor to the viewer (Actor), or spoof Spaghetti Westerns to playfully undermine the inadequacy of the frame to encompass pro-filmic scenes (Edge), and like Hall’s other works, particularly those made for TV such as This is a Television Reciever and the TV Interruptions, these films use the juxtaposition of the familiar with the strange to present the problematic that reveals the construction of the illusion of cinema.  But they do this in a way that doesn’t require any specialist knowledge of film semiotics, they provide the keys for this as part of their own conditions, assuming a non-specialist audience, one that might otherwise be alienated by unfamiliar experimental aesthetics.

David Hall’s practice was not avant-garde, this is not film aspiring to high art, it is not bravely carving out a new visionary utopian space which might not yet exist, if anything it is anti- or ante- avant-garde (which is to say both in opposition to and beyond the concerns of), it was plugged right in to the present situation, and the common, recognizing that film, and video, and TV, are socially and technologically part of an entertainment culture and industry.

Perhaps the fact that the Five Films have been generally overlooked as works of critical experimental cinema, and rarely screened as individual films let alone in their entirety, can be attributed to their refusal to conform to the rarefied concerns of the avant-garde, and their suggestion that ‘deconstruction’ can be performed within the site of popular forms.

Having invited us in to this party, the film abruptly takes us on a drive around Brighton, starting with a seascape from a moving car, a seascape and horizon as precisely framed and as measured as might be a structural landscape film, and in that regard reminiscent of David Hall’s experiments with landscape production and framing in Vertical. However here the message of the film starts to become explicit; the words of the title, which form the first two words of a mini-essay, are hand written in red felt pen, apparently on the car window; the exterior and the text (which I think of as a kind of diegetic text) pull in and out of focus. The film essays a play of surfaces, layers and image planes: drawing attention to both the screen as surface of projection, the film surface (both as image and subtitle text), the text on the car window, as well as the surfaces in the technical apparatus of filmmaking.

Brighton, a seaside town, a place with a royal history and a popular resort for summer holidays, with the End of the Pier and House of Wax entertainments, which is where the film comes to rest, beside a Sword of Damocles amusement, and here it is worth watching for another play of surface self-reflexivity through self-reflection.

I’ll stop there in the hope that I haven’t over-described the film with too many spoilers.  Each time I see the film I notice something new. The Five Films are films in which, I believe, every element is meticulously intentional, the play and balance of humour, self-reflexivity, and nuance are exquisitely crafted.

Before he died I was working with David Hall on ways of resurrecting the Five Films, the existing available prints had not aged well and David was reluctant to have them screened, and we were working to producing new digital masters.  With funding from the Henry Moore Foundation, Lux is in the process of getting the films digitized, and as such the copy of This Surface screening tonight is hot off the surface of the scanner…

 

Collected Local Songs

Collected Local Songs is a new digital album of a collection of songs of quotidian and local reflection, mostly constructed from everyday language, observations, overheard conversations, encounters, signs, community notices, announcements, phrases from historical texts about Victorian social life; from around and about the neighbourhoods of Deptford and New Cross in South London; using simple compositional structures, recorded with minimal instrumental setting.  A prelude to this has been the 23 minute long song Signs and Wonders, which I released as a single song digital EP in September 2014, and the Cloud of Dreams single released in January.  The former forms part of Collected Local Songs, while where the Cloud of Dreams single release breaks the song into its two constituent vocal and instrumental parts as separate tracks, it appears on the album in complete form.

The album is a selection from songs I’ve written over the past twelve or so months. In July last year I presented some other song recordings at a Domino Nights event at Banner Repeater, and wrote that a “...concern has been about what a song might be, their ostensible ‘content’ in the lyrical textual source and form.” This has been in part prompted by the fact that I find even the most ‘experimental’, interesting, or innovative of contemporary singer/song writing, often slipping too easily into convention and romantic poetic and lyrical tropes in form and language. Whether I’m succeeding in making something more interesting than this is of course probably best assessed by others. 

The songs are informed or influenced as much by concerns beyond the usual conventions of songwriting, as they are by other songwriters. For example, there is the abiding influence of the Oulipo writers, in particular, Georges Perec, whose notions of the infra ordinary and project of exhausting a place, have been close to Collected Local Songs. Also the language and approach of a number of modernist and contemporary poets, from Francis Ponge and J. H. Prynne, among others, through to more recent forms of conceptual writing as promulgated by Marjorie Perloff in her book Unoriginal Genius, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, while wary of Goldsmith’s occasional totalizing anti-expression evangelizing.

The next set of songs to be released later this year will include those premiered in early versions at the Banner Repeater event; these do in some ways follow a more conceptual approach, being sourced from what might best be called ‘appropriated’ texts. And so to avoid the risk of over-analysing and giving too much away, I’ll leave it there...

Collected Local Songs is available to stream or purchase download from 2nd February 2015 at: https://stevenball.bandcamp.com/album/collected-local-songs