SUBCINEMA Melbourne screening 18 December 2017

SUBCINEMA

Steven Ball

8pm 18 December 2017

Artists Film Workshop

Arena Project Space

2 Kerr Street

Fitzroy 3065

Australia

Screening Notes

Steven Ball has been working in audio-visual media since the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he accidentally migrated to Melbourne, Australia, where he continued his practice making a number of film, video and sound and installation works, as well as engaging in various curatorial, administrative, teaching and writing activities, the most significant of which was several year’s deep involvement with the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. He returned to the UK in 2000, and since 2003 has been Research Fellow in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, where he has been instrumental in establishing the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.

Since returning to the UK his projects have included Deep Water Web, an audio-visual installation and online collaborative work with John Conomos at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2016); Film of the Same Name (video, 2015) with Philip Sanderson; Concrete Heart Land (video, 2014) with Rastko Novakovic; the screening exhibition Figuring Landscapes, which toured the UK and Australia (artist and co-curator 2008-2010). His publications include ‘Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film’, Tate Publishing, (co-editor and author, 2011) and writing for journals such as Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and Senses of Cinema.

Most recently he has concentrated on music projects, as a member of Storm Bugs (post-punk DIY outfit since 1978) with Philip Sanderson recently releasing ‘Certified Original and Vintage Fakes’ (CD and download, Snatch Tapes, 2017), and his new solo album 'subsongs.' (CD and download, Linear Obsessional Recordings, 2017), which has been described by Radio Free Midwich as “The missing link between reductionist improv and the intimate breathy song cycles of a Robert Wyatt.”

This screening brings together a selection of film and video works made over a span of some twenty years. The work covers a range of territory and approaches, in particular concerning spatiality and landscape in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere, often through the filter of his relationship to what might be thought of as a post-colonial position. The works integrate structural and materialist techniques, they are variously essayistic, experimental, rhythmically abstracted, and occasionally immersive.

Programme

Periscope 180°
(super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1992)

The title indicates the scopic and conceptual topography of the film. The film starts in Fremantle, West Australia, with nautical references (seascapes, masts, lighthouses). The second part moves in East Gippsland, Victoria, alternating indistinct images of beach, sea and sky with black and white footage of fishermen on a beach. Taking up notions from Deleuze & Guattarian deterritorialisation, and including lines taken from Stanley Kramer's 1959 film On the Beach, the voice over narration resounds with ironical autobiographical suggestiveness, “...he’s English and he’s here on some scientific job, or was it geographic? What does he do exactly?”, becoming a poetic speculation on the uncertainty of migration towards a nomadic condition of continual departure and the paradox of return: the refrain. The third and final part in aerial transit, an arrival denied by the film's ending.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island
(digital video, 8 min, UK, 2008)

This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first-person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90°, between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.

However, the Autodidact
(super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1994)

frame enlargements by Arthur Cantril

From my small back room in Elwood in 1994, with super 8 camera taking revenge on the helicopters which I was convinced might have been spying on me; not paranoid, just healthy suspiciousness. The film was then reshot through several generations of just out-of-date super 8 film given to me by Marie Craven. The variations of grain and colour determined by the stock, which included Kodachrome, Agfa Moviechrome, and Ektachome. I devised an editing structure determined by the ideas that perception of the 'present moment' lasts for around three seconds as theorised in The Dimension of the Present Moment by Miroslav Holub. The soundtrack is constructed using a similar schema, made entirely of extracts from quarter-inch tapes found in a second-hand shop, included a teach-yourself-French tape, which inspired the title.

The Defenestrascope
(digital video, 6 min, UK, 2003)

Throwing the view through windows from monumental towers in contemporary medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space revolves around a setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song Go from the Window. The melody reconstructed from an ensemble of samples from a variety of sources, determined the choice of a series of views from 'the window' and elsewhere. Framed by a fragmented clapping rhyme it echoes Music Hall and anthropological folk recordings in a neo-rococo vaudevillian romp for the surveillance age.

Aboriginal Myths of South London
(digital video, 10 min, UK, 2010)

Aboriginal Myths of South London adapts world views associated with indigenous people of Oceania to an interpretation of the space and social history of places in South London. As the first manifestation of the project, this video is presented as its prelude and explores New Kent Road, a major road close to the artist’s home. This application of attitudes to the status of the dead and human relationship to the ground, becomes a materialist alternative to the concept of the genius loci and the familiar. The approach is measured and austere, employing an arrangement of animated photographs and voice texts that becomes a poetic essay.

Harmonic Three Three
(super 8, 23 min, Australia, 1991)

frame enlargement by Arthur Cantrill

The originating super 8 film was shot on Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland. The relatively firm sand of the beach provides one of the main roads on the island as the interior tracks become unpassable due to the loose sand. As we drove north up the eastern side of the Island we came across the rusting hulk of a ship wreck; one of the more accessible of many such wrecks dotted around the Australian coastline. The former luxury New Zealand trans-Tasman liner Maheno was sold to Japan for scrap metal. On July 9th, 1935, while being towed north by the Oonah, it hit unseasonal cyclonic conditions off Fraser Island. The tow rope snapped and it was driven ashore on the 19th July. It remains there to this day, slowly disintegrating in the salty tropical sea water. I reshot subsequent generations of the film on super 8, off the screen, concentrating on the abstraction afforded by the increasing graininess and contrast of each generation, concerned with the grain, the light, or lack of it, and the degradation of visual information. Much of the film is dark, unreadable, ghostly, shadowy. Occasionally orange light bursts through the silhouetted contrasty skeletal image of the wreck. I used all of the film shot in the re-re-re-reshooting in the final version, which results in long dark sections throughout the film. The experience of watching the film is dense, intense, quite dramatic. This is in part due to the dark ambience of the soundtrack, which was composed entirely from a recording of waves on a beach, slowed to a fraction of its original speed, employing varispeed manipulation, delay and phase effects, which were all improvised ‘live' to tape while watching the film.

81 mins total

Subsongs by subsong: Passing Place of the Seat

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

The denial of food and drink to a traveller would have been a rare occurrence. The breaching of that code of hospitality brought an uncanny revenge on the women of Allt Beithe township on the coast south of Tarbert. The day was in July, 'a blazing hot summer's day', and a man came down the hill to a house in which the women only were. He stood at the door and said: 'I've been walking since yesterday morning. I've had nothing to eat and nothing to drink. Give me a drink of milk.' The head woman of the house replied: 'We can't give you anything. Go to the burn and take a drink out of that.' - 'Yes' he said, 'is that so?' He stepped into the house and put his hand under his oxter where there was a small leather pouch, and he pulled a hazel twig out of the pouch and began stabbing at the thatch of the ceiling with it. And all the time he was doing that the women could not stop dancing, and he carried on without stopping until they all fell down exhausted. He put the twig back into the little pouch, and he said to them: 'The next time a man comes to this house for a drink of milk, you'll give it to him.' With that, he 'disappeared over to Skipness'. His name was MacFarlane, and he belonged to that family in Tarbert which was distinguished by its reputation for sorcery.  

Kintyre, the Hidden Past, Angus Martin, The Grimsay Press, 1984

Traditionally the dominant land use in the area is sheep grazing on the rough open hill-land.Increasingly, due to the favourably high rainfall and low land prices, commercial tiorestation hasspread and covers more than 50% of the project area. The woodland is densely planted conifer, whichrestricts physical access to some areas. 

The Knapdale area is underlain by metamorphic rocks of the Dalradian Supergroup, a Late Precambrian to possible Cambrian shelf-sediment and turbidite assemblage. This succession accumulated during the progressive rifting and deepening of extensional basins. The older Appin Group rocks, which do not outcrop in the Kintyre Peninsula, comprise quartzite-shale-limestone sequences laid down in a shallow-water shelf environment.

A suite of metabasic sills (formerly termed ‘epidiorite’) is intercalated within the upper Argyll Group metasedimentary succession in the south Knapdale area. These rocks are predominantly dark, fine grained and massive, although both foliated and coarse-grained varieties are found locally. The sills, which vary in thickness from 0.5 to 250m, are mostly concordant but are frequently disrupted bylater, north-west faulting. In areas of relatively shallow dip they occupy broad, elevated areas withgood exposure. 

Gold mineralisation in the Dalradian rocks of Knapdale-Kintyre, south-west Highlands, Scotland, A. G. Gunn, M. H. Shaw, K. E. Rollin and M. T. Styles, British Geological Survey, Department of Trade and Industry, 1996

Following a visit to Kintyre in Scotland, I was interested in new approaches to writing landscape which might consider it in materialist rather than romantic terms. It seemed to me that all or any of the aspects of a landscape contribute to its constitution. In human terms this particular area of Scotland is marked by waves of migration bringing with them different agricultural, fishing, religious, and cultural practices, languages, and so on. In particular the Irish, the Gaelic language, travellers, the ‘Coasters’ who withdrew from society and lived by the coast, but also, the sheep, the goats, rabbits and other wildlife. 

Landscape as a form is conventionally marked by human occupation and activity, becoming a record of that activity, framing views of the place, making some claim to it. Landscape frequently describes its human history, while the romanticism of the awe-inspiring, the sublime, offers a way for human contemplation to contain what is beyond itself, but is ultimately, like ‘nature', inevitably a human invention. But of course it’s not just a human or even animal space, it’s geological, it’s as old as the hills, the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, beyond the timespan of human lifetimes and cultures. 

This song was an attempt then to integrate the human in the form of elements of the myths and stories, which had been formed within and by this place, with the geophysical descriptions, and to invoke them on equal semiotic terms.  While the song restricts itself mainly to the mythical and geophysical, it might offer a proposition which suggests a continuum of description so as to not discriminate against or privilege any aspect of what makes up ‘landscape’, and perhaps could be applied to any other represented form or subject.

Some of the geological names were particularly delicious to sing "the metamorphic rocks... the turbidite assemblage", set in a backing track of sustained guitar drone loops.

Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

Subsongs by subsong: Subsongs

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

intense concentration at the ArtsCafé, photo: Richard Sanderson

Subsongs, the album, seems to me, after the fact, to be thematically disjointed, lacking any real conceptual underpinning. But that’s OK. The ‘subsongs’ suggested by the title, draw on something of a miscellany of subjects preoccupying my reading and interests during the more than a year over which it was written and recorded. The title of the album was always going to be ‘Subsongs’, after the song ‘subsong’, and while that song played with reflexivity, it didn’t propose a processual or conceptual grounding which could be applied to the rest of the collection of songs as a miscellany. Can miscellaneousness effectively be a unifying factor?

As the last song to be written for the album Subsongs took the role of title song away from ‘subsong’, but more than that, in the face of the aforementioned lack of conceptual or thematic unity, ‘Subsongs’ was written as a a song about the album, its subject is the songs alongside which it has its own place, in its own words “situated somewhere almost in the middle, like a progress report in a formless lyric”. It refers to some, if not all, of the songs on the album, for instance "landscape, myth, material, the present situation, other times, other places, other persons beyond the sixth extinction”, and I'll leave the dedicated reader with too much time on her hands, to work out which songs are referred to, one has to maintain some mystery!

The song acknowledges the nature of where songs are, subsongs in the air and on the page, and the more metaphysical question of what a song is, which is to say if it can’t be described, it doesn’t exist, and vice versa, because songs, these songs at least, are, if nothing else, descriptive. Arguably any text, even the most fanciful and imaginative, is a description of something, even if that something has no basis in any kind of reality, it has a basis in that text, which brings it into existence, which is to say brings the thing brought into existence, because if it couldn’t be described, it wouldn’t exist. This is to describe song-writing as world-making, metaphysics as the creation of a reality system, technic as cosmogony, metaphysics as the creation of a reality system.

Musically the song consists of guitar, bass and drum loops over which I recorded my vocal and improvised piano flourishes.

Like the song 'Inside', it had not initially made the first cut of the record, but also like that song I decided to reinstate it after its enthusiastic reception at the Linear Obsessional ArtsCafé gig. There I played it accompanying myself only bass, creating the looping pattern with a looper pedal.


Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

Subsongs by subsong: Of The Yard (After Terry Ball)

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

I didn’t write the words to this song. The most that I can credit myself with is transcribing and setting them. They are taken from a notebook that my brother gave me that had belonged to my uncle Terry Ball who died in 2011. The notebook had been found among his belongings when his house was being cleared. As well as being an accomplished painter Terry had written poetry for most of his life, and this notebook was clearly one that he used for his poetry notes. The address in the front of the book was his most recent, but the first page is headed with the words "Jerusalem June 1967".

Reading through the notebook I was struck by the repetition of passages which appear to describe a very specific situation that Terry would have encountered daily when he worked as a stonemason in Jerusalem. The passages describe how the sun rises, floods the yard in which the stonemasons are working with light and heat, making it necessary for them to shield themselves; this is accompanied by descriptions of the way the shadows play on the architecture, and includes some complex metaphysical imagery involving the sun slaking its thirst on the shadows. Each iteration of the description takes a slightly different form of words to describe the situation, with crossings out, rewritten phrases, words in brackets, all things that might be expected of the compositional process of a writer trying to construct the right form of words. Except in this case the work continues through the notebook, sometimes with very small variation, sometimes with entirely new lines and images inserted. The image above is a small collage of samples of the written text. 

This form of text fascinated me. On the face of it Terry was perhaps simply trying to hone the poem until satisfied with it, but from the evidence of the notebook this point was never reached. Another reading might suggest that this continuous return to the description, and how to formulate it, reveals much about the working of memory: the text not only describes a situation that occurred some fifty or so years earlier, but that also the writing of it becomes the memory itself. Memory as thought without material expression, such as a text, is unreliable and fugitive, and so giving it such form implies constant revision. Perhaps the expression of memory and the writing of the place necessitates that it takes slightly different form at each iteration, precisely because of the unreliability of that memory, so what is being performed through such iterative writing is memory's mutability at each of its occurrences. I’m sure that Terry was thinking of Proust, of whom he had been a lifelong reader, and I was reminded of the writing of Francis Ponge and his attempts at the description of objects which consist of numerous repetitions and revision, all of which become component parts of the finished written work.

Much of my own work has been engaged in the transcription and re-articulating of extant text, such as the television and radio broadcast material which forms the lyrics on the Life of Barrymore collection of songs, or my spoken word pieces in the Speakers and Speakers Too projects. Part of the methodology has been to perform this work in as straightforward a fashion as possible, remaining faithful to the original text, resisting an approach which might over-determine my relationship to the text by injecting any sense of irony, or implicit critique. Of course, this presents something of a paradox as it inevitably will be filtered through the ‘grain’ of my voice, and it is the turn of that paradox that keeps the practice vital for me, the question of what this work thinks it is doing. I think that it’s somewhat different to the approach of conceptual writers like Kenneth Goldsmith who presents his use of any text whatsoever as a kind of radical attempt to destabilise received notions of the status or value of one text in relation to any other. My project doesn’t aim at any such totalising destabilisation, I can’t think of it in such (self-) important terms, I’m not on a mission to reinvent the terms of literature, or song writing. If anything, it’s a concern to attend to the the specific, the situated in the text, that by transforming it into song form, for example, the mode of attention to the form of the text itself, and the possibilities of the language of song, might become reconsidered and expanded, as an experimental practice.

Of course, Terry’s text was already written as poetry, as descriptive, ‘imagist’, and so making a song of it might not have the same disjunctive kind of effect as using other forms of text. The challenge to the song form, in this case, comes from the lack of consistency of scansion, meter, and rhythm, elements which usually commend poetry to song. I had already decided to follow my usual practice of transcribing the text verbatim, and in keeping with most of my own lyrics the poetry didn’t follow a rhyme scheme. But the result of the use and reuse of similar words and phrases being modified, extended, rearranged, at each iteration, is that each ‘verse’, as they might be considered, varies in form to greater or lesser degree. 

After the event of transcribing each of the fragments, the song had 39 distinct verses.

I set the song to two guitar drones made from loops of layered continuous sustained chords, with a rhythm mimicking the ‘hammering of chisels’ described in the text. The 39 verses were recorded, sung in one take, I had to improvise variations of the melody to accommodate the varying lengths and meter of the lines, and later in mixing ride the levels and play the synth bass line to fit the variations in the verses as sung, so effectively, and perversely, the backing track follows the singing.

Ultimately, I can never know what my uncle’s intentions were for this writing, if indeed he had any. It is clearly something that had occupied him for some time, and it seems to me that, from the evidence of the trouble he went to troubling over the lines, a simple poem would never have sufficed to encompass the senses of the situation that he was attempting to write. The materiality of that place and the experience of the working there cutting stone would perhaps be best embodied within the repetition, alteration, reiteration of the description as it recurs and changes through pages of the notebook, and the best way to do justice to this, to pay tribute to him as a person who had a profound and early influence on me as an artist, is to perform it in this way. I think he would have understood.

Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

Radio Free Midwich reviews subsongs

"The missing link between reductionist improv and the intimate breathy song cycles of a Robert Wyatt."

read more here:
https://radiofreemidwich.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/dense-as-blood-rfm-on-maalem-mahmoud-gania-baccamchayer-and-broken-shoulder-ij-grey-guides-and-steven-ball/

Subsongs by subsong: subsong

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

I don't want to write too much about the content of the lyric because I think it is self-evidently a reflexive song meditating on its own existential condition. The song speaks of itself, it asks where it will go, and then sets out a number of ideas, with a little semantic play around the materiality of a song, this song. It is, in one sense, the epitome of a 'subsong', in the sense that it is a song yet to reach complete form, it is yet to exist as a song. Of course this is an ironic conceit as it is, by the fact of being written, set to music and sung, already a song, has already become a song. So this is, by extension, an ironic conceit that underlies all of the songs on the album, if you take the title literally and consider it to be a collection of 'subsongs'.

The song started life with its melody, a simple sequence picked out on the guitar, and in musical terms goes little further than that. I wanted to keep it simple, strangely melancholic, as though there is melancholy in reflexivity. It was recorded live with voice and guitar, with some guitar overdubs. I made several recordings of the song, including one version with quite a lot of instrumentation, such as keyboards, bass and rhythm. The version I used for the album isn't necessarily the best of them, it seems to me that in this case that's not so much the point, this is a song that should always be in progress, never definitive...

I included some 'field recordings' in this version, in particular a recording of a cellist playing on the riverside footpath under the south side of Blackfriars Bridge in London. By chance the cello melody is in the same key as my song and therefore provided a found cello solo. I had intended to include more such 'found' recordings on the album, and spent some time recording musicians playing in public, or publicly audible, on my phone or a Zoom recorder secreted under my jacket. In the end I only used one other recording, on 'Garage/Band', which we will get to later.

Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

Subsongs by subsong: Off Off On

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

'Off Off On' is one of two songs on the album which harks back to Super 8 films I made in the 1990s in Australia. The other song is 'Periscopic', which I will come to eventually. 'Off Off On' takes its title and refrain from a film of the same title I made in 1992, embedded above for reference. The main text of the lyric, however, comes from another film made in 1995, 'Difficult Beauty'. 

The phrase "off off on", came from an Aboriginal man I saw on a bus in Melbourne. He was sitting on the back seat flicking the side of his face and repeating the words "off" and "on", over and over. He was clearly disturbed by something which I couldn't see, or probably know, but this performance of his disturbance seemed significant of something to me. It's impossible to think of the disturbance of the individual without thinking of it against the background of societal, cultural, and political contexts, and in the case of indigenous Australians the context is all too clear: a couple of centuries of abuse of indigenous people at the hands of colonialism. Whether this is being directly played out in the mental health and behaviour of any one individual must remain a moot point, and not to dismiss or diminish the distress of the individual, but to shift emphasis from the neoliberal tendency to individuate, is to acknowledge the culpability of the historical colonial context. The film's voice-over text placed this man's words alongside lines appropriated in part from Paul Virilio's Aesthetics of Disappearance, a dromological analysis of what it feels like to live in the society of speed. In the case of the film, this involves a retreat to a kind of hermetic claustrophobic perceptual state.

The text from 'Difficult Beauty', in retrospect, seems quite compatible with the idea of the mental state of the individual being determined by society. Part of the soundtrack was a text which I'd given to three people to record themselves performing; it is this text which forms the basis for the lyric, the extract below illustrates its original form, the instructions to the performers was simply to perform it as they saw fit.

that     with    with

with    how     how

what   what   with

when  .           why     what   .           .

where .           with    with

with    that     why

how     this      with

with    and     this

what   with    and

with    that     that

why     what   with

with    with    this

this      this      what

and     and     when

that     that     with

It would be easy, and perhaps accurate, to describe it as a text playing with words attempting, but failing, to describe a situation, text as symptomatic if you like. Returning to this text twenty-one years later, it seemed to me that socio-political conditions have accelerated to a point where the performance of inarticulate absurdity could become a perversely reasonable response to the world: the text still resonates. I fine-tuned its shape, added words like 'chaos' and 'form', 'truth' and 'justice', notions that seem to have become even more pressing and precarious. I also played with the alliteration of 'w' words like 'warp', 'woof', 'weft', and 'weave'. All of this performed in deadpan expressionless speech. The weaving wayward baselines were added late on in its recording.

This was one of the earliest songs written for the album and it went through a number of iterations and instrumentations, at the end of this post is a link to an alternative version performed accompanied only by 12 string electric guitar.

Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

Subsongs by subsong: Inside

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

I had rejected ‘Inside', and one other song, from my first cut of the album. When I played the Linear Obsessional gig at the ArtsCafé in Manor Park a few weeks before the release of the CD, I had resolved, perhaps perversely, not to play any songs that were on the album, except for those that I had rejected. However one person in particular was so complimentary about this song, and about ‘Subsongs’, ostensibly the album’s then missing title track, that the next day I decided to include both. So my decision not to play songs from the album was undermined after the fact. What’s more I then decided that this song should open the album. I liked the idea of something so slow, and downbeat, employing such an economic use of words, unfolding gradually, offering such a singular introduction, quite different from what would follow.

I was intending to write something about the idea of the experience of interiority, subjectivity, not a disembodied consciousness, but reflecting on its embodied nature; the brain as an organ, fleshy, bloody, very much a corporeal thing, the locus of the experience of subjectivity, and therefore the experience of the personal and individual consciousness. I imagined this as something like a sense of waking unconsciousness, something like the subjective isolation and suspended animation of being on a long-haul plane flight, with lingering jet lag. In fact the sound at the end of the song is indeed the sound of the low rumble and hiss of the interior of a passenger jet, recorded somewhere over the Himalayas, en route from Australia.

I had recorded the music track as a long looped sequence of dubby reverb and echoey bass, with occasional chiming 12-string guitar diminished chords. The words were not originally intended to be the final lyrics, they were simply a set of keywords used as conceptual place-markers, and my singing them into something of a melody was the first take recording. I did try writing and recording other, more complex, associative, suggestive, poetic lyrics, but kept returning to this original first semi ad-libbed version. I’m not usually given to the ‘first thought, best thought’ school of thought, but in this case the simple keywords seemed to be all that was necessary, and now I cannot think of the song taking any other form.

Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

where will, it go, such song sung low... beyond right now, where will it go

I am pleased to announce that my new full-length album subsongs is now available on CD and download from Linear Obsessional Recordings.

subsongs is a new collection of nine songs written and recorded between 2016 and 2017. The lyrics are plucked from various themes and sources, employing diverse, sometimes reflexive, often experimental approaches to writing. These are 'almost songs', never rhyming, and rarely forming a conventional structure, such melody as there is often relies upon repetition and reiteration, all set to a musical palette of guitars, software instruments, samples, and occasionally field recordings.

subsongs

Steven Ball

nine songs, 66 minutes

CD/download

released 19 September 2017

​Linear Obsessional Recordings LOR095

download includes a PDF booklet of lyrics

available at 

https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/subsongs

CD purchase includes unlimited streaming of subsongs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. 

More about subsongs:

Unlike my previous collection for Linear Obsessional Life of Barrymore, there is no particular over-arching theme or concept to subsongs, rather it draws on something of a miscellany of subjects which preoccupied me during this time. The two 'title' songs are reflexive exercises; the first (subsong) is about what the song itself might be or become, the second (Subsongs) reflects more upon the album, and the songs on it as a whole. Other songs are concerned with a wide variety of subjects: of corporeal subjectivity and the inner voice (Inside), of mythologies buried in landscapes (Passing Place of the Seat), of the nostalgic mythos surrounding punk (Garage/Band), of post-extinction humanity (The Sixth), and two of the songs rework textual material from my early 1990s super 8 film work (Off Off On and Periscopic). The latter draws on themes of migrant isolation in Australia, through the filter of lines taken from the 1959 film On the Beach. Pivotal to the collection is Of the Yard (After Terry Ball), which is a setting of poetry sketches transcribed verbatim from my late uncle’s notebook, relating to his time working as a stonemason in the Middle East during the 1960s.