At a Distance: on 'Private Ambulance'

On songs on my new cassette/download album All Living Can Anyone Be Here.

'Private Ambulance' started as a rhythm, a shuffle beat, inspired perhaps by Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock n Roll Parts 1 & 2’, beat out on the furniture, edited into short loops in Ableton Live, replayed in random groups. 

This is the first version:

Another influence was ‘Excerpts From Blue Tongue Corroboree’, sung by Yinmalagara and Nalbared with Djawida on didjeridu, recorded in Oenpelli, Western Arnhem Land (Australia) in 1962, from the album Songs from the Northern Territory: Aboriginal Music from Western Arnhem Land (Corroboree Songs with Didjeridu; Some Speech).

Their song starts out quite polyrhythmical but becomes more like a ’shuffle’ beat from around 1:56. I was interested in how the players use material and objects close to hand to make the instruments, that the sound is materially deeply integrated with the place, both in terms of being from and of that place. The low synth drone of my recording echoes the drone of the didjeridu, a low grounded tone that seems to be speaking as much to the ground as emerging from it, with the circular breathing loop creating the continuity of the drone. Of course I’m not recording in an outback clearing, I’m in a room, the furniture I’m banging is in the room. I imagine a live performance situation where the audience is encouraged to participate by ‘playing’ along, adding the sound of beating their chairs and tables to the mix in the room; the sound in the room, and of the room. 

My rhythm track sat unused until I started to work on ‘Private Ambulance’ and was looking around for a rhythmic base for it. I slowed it down and changed the time signature, which produced a more loping and occasionally stuttered rhythm.

The lyrics that I had been working on for the song were a kind of companion to ‘Even On A Wednesday’, dramatising the experience of the coronavirus situation but on the other side of the front door, the ‘boundary situation’. What happens when one goes into the outside world? This was at the height of lockdown when provisional, often tentative, information about the behaviour of the virus and its transmission was being circulated, its influence on the behaviour of humans in relation to one another became the subject of 'guidance'. It was a 'live' situation, government advice was ambivalent and ambiguous, the epidemiology was developing. The song was a way of internalising and speculating about how one should behave in relation to the proximity of other people, how one was to conduct oneself in public, who and where the airborne virus might be coming from, how one might encounter it out there in the world, how far the virus might travel through the air on a cough, in a sneeze. How close is too close? If I can smell you are you too close? The experience of space became infused with strange new intensities, from caution to paranoia to fear. Would other people be aware of their own proximity to each other,  to you and me? How was their proprioception? What have I touched? Who else has touched it? Or coughed near it? The abjection of the infected imbued the perception of nations, infected communities, and individuals alike. Pulling all these impressions into a lyric was a fairly easy task, it almost wrote itself. 

The intensity of the situation was heightened by unseasonably warm and sunny weather, accompanied by a lack of air pollution due to the absence of road and air traffic: the virus had influenced the weather it seemed. On one of those clear and sunny afternoons, I sat in the park opposite my house editing the lyric, when a large black van with the words 'PRIVATE AMBULANCE' drove past, there, with it’s medical connotation as well as the notion of  ‘ambulation’, to walk and move being both a private and spatialised social activity, was the song's title.

I accompanied the recalibrated furniture loops with loops of the sound of my breathing, the impact on respiration being one of the effects on the body of the virus, which brought a visceral intensity to the sound. I added a couple of tracks of sustained and glitched guitar, as well as a homemade Shepard Tone, further ramping up the claustrophobia, before recording the vocal track.

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.