"...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!

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 

Myths of Social Capitalism screenings

Rastko Novakovic and I have made a new preliminary version of Myths of Social Capitalism.

It will be screening today in the Taking Place programmes curated by Duncan White and me for British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection in the Black Maria at Central Saint Martins, King's Cross, and at Self Organised London space at Eileen House in Elephant and Castle
 
This is a 'preliminary version', a work in progress if you like, because it bears little resemblance to what we are intending the film to become. This version sets out the stall of the project, introduces the context which is Southwark Council's woefully incompetent management of the Heygate Estate. The estate, which is now emptied of most of its residents, has been sold to developer Lend Lease for an absurdly small sum. Lend Lease plan to build a luxury residential estate on the site, and where there were once more than 1000 social housing households there will be fewer than 80 'affordable'.

This version of the film combines ensemble voice performances recorded on the estate which parody the language of regeneration planning as found in documents such as the Lend Lease masterplan, constructions of landscape images shot on and around the estate, and text outlining the estate's recent history and current situation.

Many of the details of the Heygate saga and other attempts at gentrification in Southwark can be found on the Southwark Notes website.

Myths of Social Capitalism

Elmington Estate revisited

Nearly six years ago, in December 2005, I posted this short sketchy video which animates views of council flats undergoing demolition. The photographs were taken in August 2005, the Elmington Estate being demolished is just on the edge of Burgess Park on Edmund Street, Camberwell, South London. I have just reposted it as part of an occasional series for which I plan to post 'archival' Direct Language videos as some of the links to the original videos at the Internet Archive seem to be broken.

Looking back at the video I was curious to see what had become of the site after the credit crunch. I was expecting to find the estate to be replaced by some kind of new development, hopefully retaining some social housing at the very least. I was slightly surprised then to find that, in spite of being demolished, as this view from Google Maps attests to

it has been transformed into a wasteland by Southwark Council, which has since handed it over to Notting Hill Housing for regeneration.

On the face of it Notting Hill Housing seems to be a perfectly responsible, local organisation with an interest in social housing, which is in some contrast with the global developers the council uses elsewhere for more lucrative high profile developments such as the Heygate Estate at Elephant and Castle. But after six years the site remains uninhabited, where the decanted residents are now who knows, or whether they to be part of the new community, and the regeneration plans as outlined by Southwark Council are ambiguous indeed.