Off The Page

Link: Sound and Music

Date: Friday 11 - Sunday 13 February 2011

Venue: The Playhouse, Whitstable

Produced by: Sound and Music and The Wire

In February 2011, Sound and Music and The Wire present Off the Page, the UK’s first ever literary festival devoted to music criticism. Taking place at the Playhouse Theatre, Whitstable, on the South coast, this weekend-long event will feature a host of internationally-renowned critics, authors, musicians and artists discussing the current state of underground and experimental music in a programme of talks, presentations, panel discussions and workshops.

Schedule:

Friday 11 February, 7pm – 10.30pm
Doors open at 7pm
Presentation: Robert Wyatt on his favourite music
Short films hosted by BFI and introduced by Jonny Trunk: Tristram Cary on film

Saturday 12 February, 10am – 10.30pm
Talk: Ken Hollings on the post-Cageian universe
Talk: Rob Young and Matthew Herbert on the impact of musique concrète on contemporary sonic culture
Talk: Steve Beresford and John Kieffer in conversation
Talk: Kodwo Eshun on his favourite music writing
Talk: Dave Tompkins on the history of the vocoder, from its use in the Second World War to its role in the era of Auto Tune
Talk: Teal Triggs on Fanzines
Presentation: Christian Marclay
Short films hosted by Lux: Cage On Cable

Sunday 13 February: 11am – 5pm
Writing tips from The Wire (limited capacity)
Panel discussion: Salome Voegelin, David Toop, Daniela Cascella on the philosophy of listening
In conversation: Green Gartside with Mark Fisher discussing politics and cultural theory in pop culture and music
Performance lecture: Claudia Molitor, Jennifer Walshe, Sarah Nicholls on music notation

ADVANCE TICKETS ONLY

Tickets are available from Ticketweb:

Early bird weekend pass: £25 + bkg fee
Weekend pass: £30 + bkg fee
Friday pass: £12.50 + bkg fee
Saturday pass: £15 + bkg fee
Sunday pass: £12.50 + bkg fee

Book now

Please note: the Playhouse Theatre Whitstable has restricted wheelchair access

Durutti Column - Another Setting

From: The Wire
Date: 13/12/07
By: Stefan Schneider

Durutti Column – Another Setting (Factory 1983)
Design by Jackie Williams (drawing/stencil), Mark Farrow (Graphic design)


Inside the sleeve of this album is a cardboard sheet with rectangular stencilled shapes. It’s printed on one side only, with all the album credits in the middle of the design, written in a small Grotesque typeface, and with four drawings that were supposedly made with crayons and watercolours.

It must have been one of the very few Factory record sleeves not done by Peter Saville: it credits Jackie Williams for the drawings and stencil, and Mark Farrow as the designer.

When you pull the sheet out of the sleeve, it looks naked, fragile and unprotected, and to a degree almost disappointing. It offers nothing much to read or to look at that would make such a luxurious supplement appear reasonable. Was it merely a gimmick? What about the missing elements? Are the most crucial parts the missing ones? The shapes of the cut-outs don’t reflect any kind of special craftsmanship. Its simplicity matches the pastel drawings on the front sleeve, which look like coloured reflections on water. The label of the record shows a black and white photograph of Vini Reilly swimming in a pool.

The sleeve and especially the stencil sheet left me quite uncertain about how to regard it and what to do with it. Since the stencil did not seem to be of any practical value, I started to look at it like something you find on the street, which you can’t really figure out what it is, or figure out if it’s worth taking home to give it a closer look.

Maybe like something that needs to be looked at without any additional information, something which gives you the feeling that you must forget all your previous knowledge about forms of art/design/music, and look at it
from a zero starting point.

I bought Another Setting around the time it came out, when I was already very familiar with the music of Vini Reilly. I felt very close to it. The fact that Durutti Column was never a full group and dealt with an incomplete line-up (no bass player, no keyboardist) gave the music a feeling of being unprotected and vulnerable. A music and a voice that left things openended in order to give space to the listener to fill it with his or her own wishes, hopes or physical activity. Or to accept it as it is in its bare radical softness.

Holding the stencil in my hand was probably the point when I started to doubt that I was as close to the music of Durutti Column as I thought I was. It gave me the feeling that I might not understand very much of what the guy was doing when he created such unfamiliar shapes. I had to examine my relationship towards it, which made me feel unprotected. In 1983, Another Setting was one of the very few records (besides maybe Felt’s Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty) that made me want to create my own sounds. All I did around that time was some very simple field recordings, which I made with a borrowed tape recorder. Of all of these recordings, what I loved most was an electric hum of a long distance line that I heard on a field outside Düsseldorf: a constant drone that was floating somewhere in the humid air. This was my perfect version of the Durutti Column feeling. I lost the recording of that hum and, instead of going back to the site to record it, I started to reconstruct it with a guitar and a delay pedal.

To lose your fear of showing yourself unprotected and vulnerable is of fundamental importance to me for any kind of art production. The moment when I finish a new record, I’m almost always disappointed with the outcome, and I have to deal with this disappointment before the record release. I almost feel like a fool because I come to realise that I wanted to do it that way – but I did not want it to sound like this. A sensation I also found much later in the installation Show Your Wound by Joseph Beuys. The sleeve of Another Setting was an early encounter with all this for me.

Stefan Schneider is a member of To Rococo Rot and Mapstation.

AC Marias - DROP/SO

From: The Wire
Date: 13/11/03
By: Jon Wozencroft

AC Marias – DROP/SO (Dome Records,1981)
Designed by Angela Conway & Bruce Gilbert

For top conceptual cover designs, Terry Jones’s film canister for PiL’s Metal Box takes some beating. Then again, it’s a headache to source and manufacture packaging materials beyond the pressing plants’ stock items, and a headache to get them in the shops. For its simplicity and directness, I love this early release on Bruce Gilbert’s and Graham Lewis’s Dome Records — the first single by AC Marias. It was the only copy they had at the record shop I bought it from — it looked a bit battered to say the least — but I stumped up the cash and thought no more about it. The eureka moment came many months later when I realised that this scrunched-up cover was in fact a designed and beautifully printed scrunched-up cover. By that point, I suspected that the scratches and pops on the recording were not a defect in the manufacturing — the vinyl looked fine.

It’s a good feeling to feel dumb and highly impressed at one and the same time. You don’t get that much, these days. So let’s hear it for this long-lost gem. Angela Conway would later record “Just Talk” for Mute Records — it’s another one well worth tracking down. “Drop/So” is not the sort of item I’ve ever seen in a secondhand shop, but if you did ever come across it, it would be great to see how it stands up to the Basic Channel test — real-time dust and scratches merging with the printed dust and scratches.

Jon Wozencroft is co-founder and resident designer of the Touch label

Wooden "music"

Following on from the last post, I thought I'd gather together some examples of music formats or hardware replicated in other, supposedly unplayable materials. The following are all wood interpretations with the first being the cover for The Wire's Undercurrents book which was designed by Non-Format (whose record covers I previously referenced).

Images two and three document the 2008 work of artist Elisa Strinna as featured on Inti Gueurrero. In a fashion, these do actually play.

"A series of thin slices of wood are cut from different types of tree trunks, which are later sanded down to a certain thickness as to resemble LP vinyls. When played, the trunk’s rings, which mark the life cycles of the tree, are translated into sound. The abstract sound produced is an utterance of the cultural translation of nature’s History"

Image four is a heat transfer on wood that's sold via, U.S. interiors site, Bughouse and number five is the artwork for µ-Ziq's 1995 album, In Pine Effect. The final three pictures feature the various formats for Money Mark's Brand New By Tomorrow from 2007 although the wooden items themselves were created in 2003 by Todd St. John and Gary Benzel of Hunter Gatherer.

Inner Sleeve

As I'm pillaging The Wire's content, I might as well reference the excellent section known as Inner Sleeve. This is an ever growing archive featuring an individual (musician, visual artist, designer, label owner, writer, etc) choosing and discussing his or her favourite piece of music related design. An online selection is to be found here.

The above is an especially nice example featuring a Finnish techno release by Ø : a.k.a. Mika Vainio who later went on to commission some beautiful packaging solutions when working as part of, experimental trio, Pan(a)sonic.