Imber Village & The Delaware Road

So Ian and myself set off from Cornwall on  a Saturday morning to Salisbury Plain - bright and early as the A303 is likely to be gridlocked. Traffic was pretty slow, we took the turnoff past the horror that is the Stonehenge Experience,and then...after a while..
  along this single track road across the Plain, on roads that are built for tractors and moving troops around.

There’s a lot of vintage  red double decker London buses out, and lots of people out for the day. This is the one weekend of the year that the public are allowed into the Imber ghost village.

This village was evacuated in 1943 - and has been used for military training ever since. There’s lots of signs up telling you not to pick up anything that might be an unexploded bomb..well I go for a pee in the bushes behind the car park and find this little unusual metal kind of thing, that looks like it may be some sort of a detonator, er maybe the sort of a thing that a person might pick up and it blows their arm off…so maybe I won’t take that home with. me.

So there’s the village of Imber, presenting very post-Brexit image of rural England, families picnicking by the barbed wire that surrounds the 16th century  church, a windowless pubs and farmhouses..the militray industrial complex rooted in the chocolate box rural.










Somehow there’s a bit of  a Scarfolk vibe going on ---  time has become a loop – and we’re living through a time of power cuts and UFO sightings and cold war paranoia and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
So after while, we set off to the New Zealand farm, where this Delaware Road festival is happening in - just back down the track a bit. It's a military training site surrounded by barbed wire & surveillance towers . My bag gets  checked over by security --- no they aren’t suppositories, they’re earplugs----


The hidden history of the 20th century....

The camp site is good and has clean enough portaloos. There’s a couple of spent bullet cases where we pitch the tent.

 I’m guessing there’s an air of paranoia in the concept behind this festival, but I have to say, in the past I’ve been to some seriously bleak and fairly scary  pop festivals, this was in no way one of them.. This one is lovely, there’s a set of concrete buildings, called STONE TENTS, with some spaces as big as a sitting room, some as big as maybe a classroom, and a biggish Nissen hut for the main stage. And most of it is indoors, so there’s very little sound leakage form one venue to another. It’s ideal for left field electronic music and sound and video installations, and that’s what there are here.


A beautiful re-purposing of a space normally used to train people to kill other people. Well, if you don’t think too hard about that, it’s great.



The beer is good and there are number of trajectories I could have taken.. there’s a few faces I recognise: snookering synth superstar Steve Davis is here, the Well Weird West crew from Yeovil have a bunker to themselves, there's people we see on the weirdy music circuit - if there is such a thing..

Theres' something strange set up in the back of a van:




















There’s 40 acts in 10 hours, and mostly there’s about three things I want to see on at once.

Best thing is to give up on planning and just wander around....

 Here’s some of things I did see:
Alison Cotton – melancholic viola
Cukoo –great  synth pop 










Penny Rimbaud doing a Q;A about the old days in Crass and then some of his beatnik poetry


















A documentary film about Wally Hope (that voice on the phone sounds familiar)



Sarah Angliss gives  talk on a man who sold fall out shelters in the 80s and the ridiculous Protect and Survive monthly magazine.
Ian Helliwell – with some sort of tiny video projecting sound to light &;what looks like a battery powered interociter  on his desk.



Howlround –– in a room crammed with people and tripped out projections. –















Sequential – a  video installation , mesh screen and normal screen with soundtrack left running. Blurry mix of mayday, folk festivals, fires, and flashes of magical symbols and map references and computer code on mesh screen

Kemper Norton – the missing link between Cornish folk and techno youth on mushrooms
Ekoplekz –– I hope somebody recorded what he was doing
Cattle (heavy metal two drummers & very popular here)
Lone Taxidermist – very very loud and playing two human spines

..a siren goes off... a procession with green faced morris men ...

A’Bear  -lovely happy uplifting dancey stuff, this fixed my aching back.

it's all a blurr..but..

An amazing bit of organisation by https://buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com/.
All in all a brilliant weekend!

Chemical Seascapes in Paris

Installed in a squatted venue for Festival Serendip.

* installation sonore par NIGEL AYERS aka Nocturnal Emissions (Pionnier musique industrielle et artiste multimédia / Royaume Uni)

« Chemical Seascapes », installation - NIGEL AYERS (UK)
Depuis la fin des années 70, Nigel Ayers est l'homme derrière le collectif anglais Nocturnal Emissions, qui développe par le médium sonore des réflexions autour du contrôle social par la musique. En plus de trente ans, Ayers a contribué a repousser les limites des musiques expérimentales, avec des releases qui explorent le bruit, la musique industrielle, le drone, la techno d'avant-garde... Dans cette installation multi-écran, nous plongeons dans un océan de plastique, entre paysage psychédélique et peinture vidéo en train de se faire sous nos yeux. Des field recordings spatialisés viennent donner toute leur dimension aux images. 

Learning about Space Cornish in Redruth

Photos by Rupert White http://artcornwall.org/exhibitions/Inland2016pt3.htm
See also: http://nigelayers.com/pages/spacecornish.html
and http://www.lulu.com/shop/nigel-ayers/a-dictionary-of-space-cornish/paperback/product-1540240.html

Art installation at Tintagel Castle

New Art installation at Tintagel Castle:

Sackcloth wrapped stones at King Arthur's birthplace.

!!!This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius suirauqA fo ega eht fo gninwad eht si sihT!!!

Sound Works at Generator

AllGold & Generator present: The Spatialization of Sound -
Multi-channel Soundworks

 Saturday January 17 Gen Ken Montgomery (USA)
Sunday January 18 Benoit Bories (France)
Saturday January 24 Heinz Weber (Germany)
Sunday January 25 Nigel Ayers (UK) 
Saturday January 31 Daniel Neumann (USA)
Sunday February 1 Conrad Schnitzler (Germany) + Frank Rothkamm Weiner Process

January 24th 12- 6pm Generator will present 6 hours of the 24 hour Wiener Process with a mini lecture on top of every hour. The “Wiener Process” is a 24 hour computer music initially developed as an antidote to Rothkamm’s diagnosis with the brain processing disorder Tinnitus in 2010 and completed in 2014. Seeded from a single quantum theoretical algorithm, the “Wiener Process” unfolds in 24 distinct 1 hour pieces and proposes the open source model of psychostochastics to gain a new understanding of our perception of sound, time and uncertainty. http://rothkamm.com/works __________________________


 Saturday January 17 Gen Ken Montgomery DRONE-SKIP-CLICK-LOOP The sound source for each of the four programs was created by typing random numbers representing acoustic specifications into a FM synthesis module for the computer. The resulting 1 or 2 seconds of sound was offset by random numbers into anoth-er channel and repeated for 17 minutes. This 17 minute 2 trackloop was overlapped in the studio 4 times to create 8 channels of sound. Each of the 8 tracks were processed slowly during their 17 minute length. They were then recombined into one stereo track. This was done 4 times to create 4 stereo programs. When these 4 programs are played back and mixed to a stereo recording the resulting sound is a noisy mess. However, by isolating the 4 programs and playing each through discrete sound systems, an interesting spatial listening experience unfolds. For optimal listening enjoyment place yourself in the middle of the 8 speakers. DRONESKIPCLICKLOOP was created in 1997 at Harvestworks, Inc. New York City for the Generator Sound Theater __________________________

 Sunday January 18 Benoit Bories Resonances Benoit Bories is a documentarist and sound creator. He produces audio documentaries for France Culture, Arte Radio, Radio France International, RTBF and ABC Radio. He also works sound creations in the field of the live performance and trans-media productions (web-documentary, installations). In 2009, he founded Faïdos Sonore with Charlotte Rouault. Together, they animate workshops of sound creations for different public (education, museum and specialized institutes). The physicist formation of Benoit Bories and his practice of the sound him allowed to acquire an autonomy and a report of autodidact compared to sound creation. Benoit Bories gained the Price Bohemia 2013, Special Commendation of the Price Europa 2013 and has been finalist at the Prices Italia 2013 and Sheffield Documentary Award 2014 for the documentary “Camp sisterhood » produced by Arte Radio. __________________________

Saturday January 24 Heinz Weber Guitar Piece #1 (2012) Heinz Weber (*1957) is a German sound artist and musician. He studied visual arts at the „Hochschule für bildende Künste“ in Hamburg in the late 70th and early 80th. His work is focussed on sound installations and research about the musical quality of space. In 2013, after a break of more than 20 years he re-started playing electric guitar. Heinz Weber lives in Berlin. www.klangkunst-heinzweber.de __________________________

Sunday January 25 Nigel Ayers Aquarius Suirauqa A three-minute vinyl recording of a Cornish male voice choir, the Raymon Hill Singers, performing the song "Aquarius" from the musical "Hair", has been subjected to a digital studio process known as time-stretching, in which the duration of the piece is extended whilst preserving the same pitch. The track is now 60 minutes long and has been overdubbed with the same time-stretched recording playing in reverse. www.nigelayers.com __________________________

 Saturday January 31 Daniel Neumann Title: PAST ONE CYCLE - a disembodiement http://danielneumann.org/ __________________________


 Sunday February 1 Conrad Schnitzler Generator presents a unique opportunity to hear Schnitzler’s compositions the way he intended them to be heard: the audience will be surrounded by 8 speakers, immersed in the physicality of S’chnitzler’s sounds, adding new depths to the compositions of this pioneer of the German electronic music scene. Sunday February 1st only, Gen Ken Montgomery will conduct a live Cassette CONcert, a boxed set of cassettes that Schnitzler composed with the intent that others could perform and listen to his octophonic Cassette CONcerts without him being physically present.

Open Provocation Festival

Polruan, Cornwall April 2013

Open Provocation was a festival of live sound art and performance, held over 4 evenings in April 2013, in the unlikely setting of Polruan Village Hall, near Fowey. Featuring 16 performances with artists from Germany, Italy, Australia, and across the UK and Cornwall, the festival was organised by Robert Curgenven, a Polruan resident.

Polruan Village Hall
Photo by Iris Garrelfs

It was a festival funded by benefit CD sales, which these days means that it ran on the good will of those taking part. Many of the performers had travelled across country and from across Europe to get here. It was a unique opportunity to see many performers together who are rarely seen in the UK.
I’d been to an event Rob had organised here last year. It was just three solo performers I'd not heard of before, two from Australia and one from Cornwall playing junk instruments, turntables, guitar feedback and laptop as the sun went down in this cold, scruffy village hall. And somehow it created something powerful and magnificent, a celebration of natural forces channeled through battered instruments as the the sun went down. And it wasn’t repetitive beats, folk music or covers bands or anything with any sort of tune, it was something else completely - a mind-blowingly brilliant music experience. Maybe half the people there were only there being polite because they were local, but for me it was probably in my top ten gigs ever. Top twenty at least. Anyway it was a rare event for Cornwall and I wanted more and was chuffed to bits to be invited to perform here myself this time round.

Although I haven't heard of most of the acts this week, one of them (Company Fuck) I played with in a club in Berlin last year and I'm very excited. Oh, and there's a founder member of Napalm Death on the bill. And two of the guys who were on last time, bonus.

With its steep, narrow, winding little country roads and imaginative signage, Polruan isn't exactly easy to get to, or get back from, even when you live only just five miles away like I do. So this is a bit of an adventure. Polruan is a beautiful place, but off-season like so much of Cornwall's seaside, it's a dead zone of empty holiday lets. This old village hall though, seems like a place with a past, rather than somewhere that is closed when the tourists aren't here. It's a place in which people have lived and grown up and done their amateur dramatics and their jam making and bought their raffle tickets. It's not some purpose-built facility with the very latest equipment designed to open up opportunities for cultural collaboration, interdisciplinary connections and community partnerships, if you know what I mean.

So here it is night by night:

 

WEDNESDAY

The interval music is Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks. The bar is stocked up with an exotic selection of Belgian beers, Czech lager, cider, local microbrewery, a selection of teas, single malt whisky and some kind of flapjacks. And the theme tonight is three blokes, each with a table-top full of an assortment of electrical and other junk. To the uninitiated this might look like a car boot sale, except they're all wired up to a very nice looking PA. Rob Curgenven introduces the performers in turn and each performance is about half an hour to an hour. It seems about right.

Dennis Wiehahn opens the proceedings with the sound of a London railway station, a sonic postcard. Sitting behind a table top full of audio equipment, he introduces and explains each short pre-recorded piece. This includes the street sounds of St Austell; a piece featuring the voice of Maggi Hambling during the making of her Oscar Wilde sculpture and other textured sound collages.

After a warning for epilepsy sufferers, it's time for Matt Davis. Matt is standing behind another table, this one's covered with electrical appliances. But these are appliances like an insect electrocutor and flickering domestic light bulbs. The sound he produces seems to be coming from miked up electromagnetic fields - spluttering interference patterns creating flavours of mains hum and earth loops. No beats, no tunes, not music as we know it, and not very loud. Manufacturer's warnings ignored - warrantees void. Sometimes he pokes the appliances with a pointy stick. Sometimes there is a faint bouquet of Motörhead and perhaps a hint of 90's digital hardcore (or is it just me having flashbacks...?).

By heck, this is good.

Ludomir Franczak and Marcin Dymiter couldn't make it from Poland so they've sent a video instead, 'Waiting for Emma' is a projection of street scenes in Eastern Europe with a minimal droning soundtrack. It's all a bit monochrome, and nothing much happens. Hmm, forget what I wrote about “the real world”, this would probably work better in a purpose built cinema with HD screen.

Behind another table now, high up on the stage, is Lee Patterson, very smartly dressed, a table with some sort of chemistry set as well as the usual kind of sound equipment. He starts his set by dropping Andrews Liver Salts into a couple of glasses of water. The amplified liquid fizzes and the fizzes turn into some sort of atmospherics and there's other sorts of crackles and heaven only knows what he's up to…He twangs small springs that sound huge and deep, then there's strange burning smells and the crackling of small fires – then it looks like he's set his mixing desk on fire – but he can't have because he's sitting there very calmly.
It’s a poignant and subtle multi-sensory theatre.
 

THURSDAY

 

Alex Wendt
Photo by Iris Garrelfs

 

Alex Wendt tells a fairy tale about little animals, and gently places a rainstick, a group of small digital playback gadgets and little speakers on a pair of white canvasses on the floor. They click and make electrical insect whirrings and seem to be communicating to each other in some sort of insect language. None of this is amplified.

Iris Garrelfs does this arresting thing with her own voice, making strange non-verbal utterances like monkey noises. She loops the vocalizations – it looks like she's using some MacBook app - and builds up layers of sound on sound. Somehow this emerges as something enormously trancelike and relaxing.

Robert Curgenven sits behind a laptop playing a piece based on the sounds of a pipe organ. This is highly abstracted, decomposed so that all you are hearing is the wheezy breathing of the organ pumps and wind box, turning the unique timbre of the instrument into something akin to weather conditions, overtones, undertones, creaks and rustlings. Engaging and magical passages, sometimes loud and some that would be silent - if it wasn't for some drunk in the audience giving us a commentary.

Mat Pogo sits on the steps to the stage, unamplified, his body twitches and spasms, he gurgles as if struggling to make speech. Over the course of several minutes of unamplified physical theatre he produces an incredible vocal performance, fitful human beatboxing crossed with jazz scat and dada performance poetry. Sometimes he moves his mouth to a voice processor, many times he misses and carries on eventually a line or two of pure joyous song emerges - then that's all, folks.


FRIDAYThere's a higher proportion of women in the audience tonight and more women in the show, too. And everyone's a lot better behaved than last night. It all kicks off with JD Zazie , armed with turntables and CD player, she boldly seeks out all the ways you are not supposed to play records and CDs. The surface noise of vinyl wibbling with off-centre wobbles, amplified CD motors fast forwarding and skipping. Elements once intended to reproduce hi-fi sound create something dirty, organic and lovely.

And now the red stage curtains open to reveal an icy white cube stage set where Kathleen M stands half naked. She moves slowly to minimal drone soundtrack, in a slow dance of a some tortured, abject spirit, face is blotted out with smeared makeup, vulnerable and with a great sadness.

The next piece is a Supergroup - many of the performers who have been performing solo now take turns to perform in improvised duets. The recombination of sonic elements in this more social music works very smoothly. Sitting in the audience I get lost in music and it becomes timeless and it's hard to figure out what is going on. It's fab though.

And then the chairs are pulled back and stacked up, and Polruan Village Hall becomes Company Fuck’s dancehall.…OMG! 

Company Fuck
Photo by Iris Garrelfs

Company Fuck is a mad Aussie in nerd spectacles wearing a crotch-hugging two tone purple leotard. Yelling DJ clichés into a wireless karaoke mike he remotely triggers Euro-disco trash punctuated by sudden explosions of HIGH VOLUME HARSH NOISE. This lunatic crawls round the floor, climbs over things, pushes and shoves and humps members of the audience, regardless of gender. “Shut up!” he hollers in the faces of a couple of women who happen to be enjoying a private conversation, “..this is my art, I've been working on this piece for years!”.
Apparently there were complaints from the neighbours.

SATURDAY
Dominic Allen has set up his crazy analogue sound system: loads of flashing LEDs and dials and elements of fairground organ and banging drums, untidy components salvaged from skips. A handmade 10-step analogue sequencer drives electro mechanical components, gutted re-purposed reed instruments, and backwards-engineered fragments from crashed UFOs. 

Dom Allen's machines -detail
Photo by Nigel Ayers

As the sun goes down, Dominic does an incredible live performance with this living scrapheap. This is supposed to be the hyper-efficient world of digital information, but the scrapheap seems to be winning.

 So, tonight I'm performing as Nigel Ayers. Look, we're talking about the Grandfather of Industrial Noise, the one out of the Nocturnal Emissions here. I've a new hand-painted film to screen and some new sounds, based on my own digestive system. I perform a Space Cornish magic rite which sends me off into a pisky-led state of consciousness, I safely make re-entry back to Earth, Cornwall, Polruan then all recordings of a lifetime flash past. A brief section of vintage harsh noise and then earthworms dance to self-actualisation grooves. I finish with an amplified cat purr. The set is brilliant, as per usual, I enjoyed that.

Nigel Ayers makes the sign of the fire goddess
Photo by Iris Garrelfs

Apparently I'm a tough act to follow. But this isn't a competition. There's no Simon Cowell here. As I chill out with the nice beer that Kat has kindly put aside for me, Jorg Maria Zeger plays a wickedly energising multi-harmonic guitar feedback drone through a large collection of guitar effects. The drone becomes extended and hypnotic and after a while he hands the guitar round the audience.

Nicholas Bullen screens a DVD made up of vintage and recent super 8 holiday home movie footage, old fashioned cars, shots of stone circles, Gaudi's architecture all mixed up together and subtly colorized with a live contemplative soundtrack. A nice dreamlike sequence bit of personal and family history blended with a minimal soundtrack.

So there you have it, a great week of modern sonic fun with a beautifully clear sound system. Nothing corporate, no sponsors, nothing academic, nothing too desperate to please. The audience was fab, attentive, friendly and well behaved most of the time. Rob Curgenven was a great curator, host, and bouncer. Some good Belgian beers and herbal teas and flapjacks.

The festival was an entirely an artist run initiative and as such was staged entirely without conventional arts funding. Sales of the 2CD festival compilation provided a large percentage of the costs of the festival (artists’ transport, accommodation and food). Get it here: http://www.recordedfields.net

Get it here: http://www.recordedfields.net

Written for www.artcornwall.org  

 

The New Landscape - private view

17 January - 14 March 2008
Royal Cornwall Museum, River street, Truro
www.royalcornwallmuseum.org

Ecnad Larolf

Ecnad Larolf

Nigel Ayers
Ecnad Larolf (2009)

Ecnad Larolf is a multimedia work constructed around a three minute recording of Helston Town Band playing the Floral Dance, which has been digitally time-stretched so that it is more than an hour long. Emanating from artificial-looking grassy knolls , the resulting sound follows a beat that seems closer to the earth breathing, or the cycles of plants, than a traditional processional dance beat.



Installed in Royal Cornwall Museum
17 January - 14 March 2008
Royal Cornwall Museum, River street, Truro
www.royalcornwallmuseum.org

Bodmin Moor Zodiac spotted in Atlanta, Georgia

There it is, the Bodmin Moor Zodiac, on the wall in the background. In the foreground is Brian Hitselberger, Constancy at
Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies at Eyedrum gallery
Nov 20th, 2008
Atlanta Georgia, USA. There are 20 artists involved and the catalogue is sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation. The photo is from
http://burnaway.org/2008/11/crop-circles-cosmograms-psychogeographies-at-eyedrum/

Luther Blissett and others..

Greencube Exhibition at Newlyn

Soul Zodiac

Greencube Exhibition at Newlyn

Nigel Ayers displays a set of digitally enhanced images from the Bodmin Moor Zodiac at the Newlyn Art Gallery.

Psycho/geography exhibition this week

This is what the exhibition looked like this afternoon - photo by Lesley.

Psycho/geography exhibition this week

psycho/geography
Wednesday 23 - Sunday 27 January, Upper Gallery

psycho/geography is a changing exhibition of work curated by four
artists, Rupert White, Nigel Ayers, Daryl Waller and Paul Chaney
using the collective name GreenCube.
The artists are all interested in exposing the deep psychological
and political content inherent in the landscape and our experience of place. Though connecting with environmental issues, their work goes
beyond the simple moral imperatives implied by the green agenda,
and instead explores related areas of fantasy, desire and imagination.
The result cannot be predicted in advance, but, through working
together the artists hope to discover shared aspects of rural living
that are new, radical and challenging.

Newlyn Art Gallery New Road Newlyn Cornwall TR18 5PZ
Open Wednesday - Saturday: 10am - 5pm,
Sunday: 11am - 4pm (Monday & Tuesday closed)
Admission Free
+44 (0)1736 363715

mail@newlynartgallery.co.uk
www.newlynartgallery.co.uk

Greencube Exhibition at Newlyn

GreenCube
psycho/geography
Wednesday 23 - Sunday 27 January, Upper Gallery

psycho/geography is a changing exhibition of work curated by four
artists, Rupert White, Nigel Ayers, Daryl Waller and Paul Chaney
using the collective name GreenCube.
The artists are all interested in exposing the deep psychological
and political content inherent in the landscape and our experience of
place. Though connecting with environmental issues, their work goes
beyond the simple moral imperatives implied by the green agenda,
and instead explores related areas of fantasy, desire and imagination.
The result cannot be predicted in advance, but, through working
together the artists hope to discover shared aspects of rural living
that are new, radical and challenging.

Newlyn Art Gallery New Road Newlyn Cornwall TR18 5PZ
Open Wednesday - Saturday: 10am - 5pm,
Sunday: 11am - 4pm (Monday & Tuesday closed)
Admission Free
+44 (0)1736 363715
mail@newlynartgallery.co.uk
www.newlynartgallery.co.uk

Web site updates

At last I'm properly archiving my visual art pieces for the www.nigelayers.com web site. A lot of this hasn't been seen online before. I've got loads to sort through....
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

The Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame