Click. And.

Steven Ball · Click. And.

image: two small wine glasses bought for £1.50 at The Well charity shop, Creek Road, Deptford on Saturday 24 October 2020.

[Guitar seance. The dictation software renders "guitar sounds" as "guitar seance", what is it trying to tell me?]

Guitar sounds, compression, tremolo, pedal noise, wah-wah attenuation, harmonics, resonance, improvised pick up selector and tone control.

Strum. Twang. Pluck. Thump. Ring.

Onomatopoeic text read over the guitar recording, with room sound. new para.

It starts here in this room, with nothing more added than small sounds, occasional hesitant voice, the beginnings of a set of new songs in progress. Perhaps. This will be edited. Maybe. Micro-selection, looping, repetition, and other processes. The text will grow into a lyric, built upon, forms of syntax, sign systems could arise from this simple list of onomatopoeic sound words which satisfy the mouth, to speak or to sing.

Other songs may follow, perhaps using similarly improvised techniques, perhaps using texts that are written before starting the song, starting with guitar and voice, in the room. There is no particular initial idea or conceptual framing for the songs, except to start with what comes to mind, or the hand, in the first instance, in the moment. Working in and around other projects this may take some time, or no time at all.

Out of Time: on 'Even On A Wednesday'

The first of a possible series of pieces about the songs on my new cassette/download album All Living Can Anyone Be Here. 




I was determined for this album to specifically not be my ‘lockdown record’, mostly as it was made in exactly the same place as most of my work, my studio at home, so the lockdown situation had little bearing on the conditions of its recording. However, the circumstances of the coronavirus became impossible to ignore and a couple of the songs inevitably reflect that directly. Looking back on this song now, from a point where lockdown is to be relaxed with Boris Johnson referring to the coming weekend as though it will be a kind of liberation, a 'Super Saturday', it's hard not to think that it could also be a super-spreading Saturday, and we might soon be plunged back into the kind of lockdown conditions imposed in March. Whether that would precipitate the experiences as recounted in this song all over again is unlikely, at that time the situation was pretty much unprecedented and it seemed all the more intense for it.

Set firmly in a domestic temporal context, the concerns of the song are signalled in its first line “...time here in the front room…”, and I’ll return to that in due course. But 'Even on a Wednesday' originated, in the first instance, before its coronavirus inspired concern with time and space arose, from my admiration for the Basque singer Mikel Laboa, in particular his 1969 song ‘Baga Biga Higa’, which for some time I'd harboured a desire to perform. 



Laboa starts the song in a somewhat hesitant, almost mournful tone, later becoming more animated. The lyrics are, on the face of it, somewhat simplistic, but also subject to some debate as to what might be their references and their interpretation, particularly in their translation from Basque, to Spanish.


“The lyrics do not have a logical translation, because in reality it is only a phonetic sequence . However, the following elements can be found: the first two letters of the first ten words (ba ga, bi ga, hi ga, la ga, bo ga, se ga, za i, zo i, be le, ha rma) coincide with the first two letters of each of the first ten numbers in Basque 4 (ba t, bi , hi ru, la u, bost, se i, za zpi, zo rtzi, be deratzi, ha mar). In addition the corresponding word bederatzi (nine) is bele (Crow) and the corresponding hamar (ten) is harma , meaning in Basque and Castilian match: gun , shot , bam! . Finally, it is possible to recognize the following Basque vocabulary: gerrena plat ( BBQ 5 and plate , in Castilian, 6 respectively), olio zopa (oil 7 and soup , respectively, 8), kikili salda (respectively chicken , with the sense of a coward , 9 and broth 10 ), edan edo klik (literally drink or swallow : edan is to drink , or absorb , 11 klik is the onomatopoeia of swallowing in Basque, 12 while edo is the disjunction or), ikimilikiliklik: tongue twister that includes the words above, kikili and klik.”  Wikipedia (auto-translation from Spanish)

So in essence the song could be thought of as a kind of counting song, however there is further discussion elsewhere that suggests that while it is indeed a kind of ‘nonsense’ poem, there could be more to it, there is some suggestion that it references occult activity, so that in addition to being a “…traditional phonic poem, based on onomatopoeic elements , without specific content. The numerical sequence 'bat', 'bi', 'hiru', 'lau' ..., becomes 'baga' 'biga' 'higa' 'laga'..., apparently used in rites of witchcraft, 'akelarres'.”  Also that it is “…a song to "pronounce", to train the child in a kind of pre-speech. The sense or meaning of the words is secondary". But it might also refer to “…covens, witches, potions ... Baga-Biga-Higa!” eu.musikazblai.com/traducciones/mikel-laboa/baga-biga-higa/ (Google translation from Spanish)

I have also been told anecdotally that Laboa’s use of the Basque language was in itself a radical act in Franco’s Spain; a simple children’s counting song used to smuggle in the language of a suppressed culture.

‘Even on a Wednesday’ doesn’t engage in the same kind of wordplay, or have such layers of possible contextual relevance, the Laboa song is primarily more of a musical influence, my melody in part follows his, but I do include a nod to it as a counting song in the lines “...one two three four five six, lasting through the front room, everyday is Wednesday, seven eight nine ten...”, and to a children's nursery rhyme “…when the ticking clock, comes to a stop, dickory dock…”.

This also acts to introduce the theme of the relationship between counting time, clock time, and duration. The song is a reflection of how the subjective experience of both time and space became affected during the coronavirus crisis, when lockdown imposed a ‘virus time’ wherein the suspension of the usual demands of time, regulated clock time, such as regular work hours, have been abandoned. With this experience, exacerbated by the cessation of social activity and its attendant necessity for timetables and appointments, the measurement of time becomes more loose, if not completely abandoned. This is accompanied by a contraction of space, when everyone is obliged to socially isolate, to stay at home; it might as well be some uneventful time of the week, in a domestic setting, say Wednesday afternoon, all the time, even on a Wednesday. The extent of spatial experience becomes the distance from the front room to the bedroom, the cubic space of the kitchen, the front door becomes a boundary, the world beyond, the world outside, is a more dangerous place, a place to be avoided if possible. We are floating around our houses, on virus time, quarantime.  The confusion of time with its measurement is dismantled along with ‘just in time’ supply chains and delivery models, employment which dictates temporal conditions on workers, and of course ‘zero hours’.  Virus time is not clock time, it is zero hours all the time, now or perhaps some time on a Wednesday afternoon.

These experiences reminded me of the writing of Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), which characterises duration as an unquantifiable continuous flow, as distinct from the more scientific conception which spatialises time. As a contemporary of Einstein, Bergson was critical of the idea of relativity, claiming that objectifying, regulating, mechanically measuring time, distorts the flux of consciousness, the subjective experience projected into space. For Bergson duration is qualitative, it is the continuum of ‘lasting through’ as experienced by a conscious subject. In bringing together these new spatiotemporal experiences, the recalibration necessitated by lockdown becomes a reflection of Bergsonian time and space; ‘Even on a Wednesday' reflects the subjective state of living inside the materialisation of this that the coronavirus brought with it.  (see Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889, and Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, 1922).

In constructing the music track I was particularly interested in the way Terry Riley, in particular in 'A Rainbow in Curved Air', 1969, constructs looping repetitive patterns which sound simultaneously as though they achieve a kind of stasis within duration. Unlike the more regimented repetition of the related music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, there is a loose rhythmic loping quality, a not-so-strict meter, which might better reflect the experience of temporality as duration as distinct from mechanical time. I arranged samples of plucked arpeggio guitar chords over several rows in an Ableton Live grid. These were based around A minor and F, but juxtaposed with a number of other chords which when played together in different configurations produce differing and sometimes unpredictable discordance, particularly when enhanced with decaying looping effects. I recorded the song singing the lyrics while playing through the Live session sequence, which has the effect that the melody occasionally deviates from the chord structure. 

It is, in effect, out of time.

Suspension

Recorded at Strange Umbrellas, Café Oto, 18 August 2019. A live version of a song from the album 'Abstract Vectoral Landscapes', forthcoming on TQN-aut.

Pattern Accumulation Dub

A 'dub' version of a song recording work in progress, with shortwave interference, drum and bass.

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.

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.

seasonal song 2

On the Wyrd, in which we plant the tree, drink mead and ale, and smear the hlaut... honour Odin, and Wudan the reborn great horned hunter, the goddess Berchta... belsnickel, banquet on herring and gruel, with kindred, hearth, our godhi and gydhja… we wear our valknuts hung low like a pendant, in the wheel of the year and the wyrd of community… 

Made for Xmas Messthetics from Radio FYTINI

seasonal song 1

 
I was almost too late with this. 

Last year Richard Sanderson invited people to make a two-minute piece for Button Box based on any element taken from his Air Buttons album, for which I recorded the song Polka Faith. 

This year Richard extended a similar invitation for a new compilation Two Minutes Left, with particular criteria:

My two rules were that the works had to be exactly two minutes long, and that at some point in the recording process a microphone should have been used - in other words, before the sounds presented here reach your ears they have, in some way, travelled through air. 

I made a new recording of a song from about twelve or so years ago which, titled Microphone, seemed a suitable choice. Originally written and recorded while I was jet-lagged, it has a vaguely melancholic lyric, which elaborates a pun on the words 'micro' and 'phone', and woozy melody.

I was almost too late with this, I recorded it the day before the deadline and submitted it just in time. Impressively Richard had 87 submissions, resulting in a substantial collection of two minutes, downloading now, and looking forward to hearing.

Two Minutes Left is available as a free download from Linear Obsessional Recordings on Bandcamp.

he's a Christian man because he's doing what he can, because he's doing what he can he's a Christian man...

I made this song last week following an open invitation by Richard Sanderson to create something responding to his album Air Buttons, which would then be collected into a complementary collection. I looped a section of one of his tracks, added some mouth percussion sounds, recorded myself singing a little lyric, and added a sample from Dear Black Eyes by Slim Doucet for good measure. The lyric was inspired by a conversation I had recently with an ordained Anglican minister, about his responsibility in an ostensibly secular community for helping people with matters of spirituality, whatever their own beliefs.

Richard has now compiled the responses, the astonishing number of 46 tracks, as the free download Button Box.