This is worth noting even though it’s nearly over, a short presentation of sound recordings by Chris Watson at the alt.gallery, Newcastle. Watson was a founder member of one of my favourite groups of the post-punk era, Cabaret Voltaire. He left CV in 1981 and shortly thereafter formed The Hafler Trio, an experimental audio outfit with whom I conducted some correspondence for a couple of years. I still have a letter somewhere signed by the group authorising me to act (creatively) on their behalf, a licence I’m sorry to say I never took advantage of beyond sneaking the name of their enigmatic mentor, Robert Spridgeon, into the Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. Watson today is an internationally renowned wildlife sound recordist, responsible for a number of stunning CDs on the Touch label, as well as much work for television documentaries. The alt.gallery exhibition runs to August 6, 2008.

Oceanus Pacificus brings the sounds of the largest ocean, encompassing almost a third of our planet, into one of the UK’s smallest galleries. This unique four channel sound installation is created from nighttime underwater recordings of the Pacific Ocean.

Recorded at the depth of three metres, reflecting the exact physical dimensions of the gallery space, the installation presents underwater voices, rhythms and movements rarely heard by the human ear. The ebb and flow of the Humboldt Current creates a seductive and harmonic rhythm as cold water wells up from the depths, drawing up the sounds of life.

The recordings were made on location around the Galapagos Islands 1000km off the coast of Ecuador, using a pair of Dolphin Ear Pro Hydrophones onto a NAGRA ARES-PII digital audio recorder. The four hydrophones were fixed on a square wooden rig and suspended three metres below the surface at night to capture the voices and rhythms of this hostile environment.

Chris Watson is a sound recordist specialising in natural history with a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. He is interested in the quality, depth and diversity of sounds produced by water, from single drops to streams, ice sheets, glaciers, waterfalls and oceans. He has described the sounds of water as “the music of another medium”.

He is one of the most prolific and versatile figures working in sound today. In 1971 he was a founder member of the influential Sheffield-based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire and in 1981 was a member of The Hafler Trio. His sound recording career began in 1981 when he joined Tyne Tees Television. Since then he has worked with David Attenborough on BBC TV productions such as The Life of Birds and The Blue Planet.  In 1998 he won a BAFTA for Best Factual Recording for The Life of Birds.

He has produced various sound installations, including Whispering in the Leaves commissioned by AV Festival 08 and Forma. From 19 July – 2 November he will be presenting the sound installation Cima Verde as part of Manifesta 7 in Italy.

The 7” record Oceanus Pacificus was released by Touch in 2007 as part of the Touch Sevens series of 7” vinyl only releases. For further information please visit www.touchmusic.org.uk/touchsevens.

www.chriswatson.net

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Max Eastley’s musical sculptures
• The Avant Garde Project

Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Moebius, Roedelius.

Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little else for the past week or two.

Mark Pilkington has very conveniently saved me the trouble of summing up the wandering history of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius in their various incarnations with his introductory piece, Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster & Harmonia. Unlike many of their Krautrock contemporaries, Moebius and Roedelius have remained very active, Roedelius particularly has an extensive solo discography. I’ve never been very taken with their work since the early Eighties, however. I have an inordinate fondness for the analogue keyboards which contribute to their early sound; as the Eighties progressed they took to using digital keyboards and their music lost much of its previous charm as a result.

The Cluster discography is very long and confused, encompassing Kluster (pre-Cluster line-up with Conrad Schnitzler), Cluster, Harmonia (Cluster with Michael Rother from Neu!), Cluster with Brian Eno, then Moebius and Roedelius’s numerous solo works and collaborations with other artists. As a result, a guide such as this is useful for the curious. So here we go with another blog list…

Cluster—Cluster 71 (1971)
A timeless racket. Three long noisy slabs of synth distortion that make the first two noisy Kraftwerk albums seem positively melodic. This could easily be passed off as an unreleased Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire album.

Cluster—Cluster II (1972)
The second album continues the granular challenge but lets some light and music into the mix.

Harmonia—Deluxe (1975)
I prefer the second Harmonia album to the first, and prefer both to Cluster’s third opus, Zuckerzeit, recorded around the same time as this. Michael Rother’s involvement in Harmonia pushes the sound very close to Neu! in places, especially the more melodic strains of Neu! 75.

Harmonia—Harmonia 76: Tracks & Traces (1976)
Albums of studio outtakes are usually for die-hard fans only but this one is surprisingly good with an outstanding long atmospheric piece, Sometimes In Autumn. Brian Eno was hanging out with Cluster by this point and he contributes a vocal on Luneberg Heath.

Cluster—Sowiesoso (1976)
The most melodic and relaxed of all the Cluster albums and the one which birthed a host of inferior copyists on the Sky label.

Cluster & Eno (1977)
Recorded at around the same time as By This River on Eno’s Before And After Science. Holger Czukay from Can is a guest on the Eno albums.

Eno, Moebius & Roedelius—After The Heat (1978)
Of the two Cluster & Eno albums this is probably the best and ends with three Eno songs which turned out to be his last vocal works until Nerve Net in 1992. Note that the CD reissue has a different (and in my view, inferior) track ordering to the vinyl original.

Cluster—Grosses Wasser (1979)
Produced by ex-Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann and recorded at his studio which gave the Cluster guys the opportunity to use his superior synth equipment. As a result a couple of the tracks here are very similar to Baumann’s solo work.

Moebius & Plank—Rastakraut Pasta (1980)
This album and its follow-up should be added to the list of works which influenced Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The opening track News, features sampled radio voices (as per later Eno & Byrne) mixed with a plodding rhythm that includes a recurrent synth note that’s the spit of similar sounds used on My Life.

Moebius & Plank—Material (1981)
Genius producer Conny Plank brought out the best in many of the artists he worked with and these two collaborations with Moebius are a great example of that. He had a similar effect with Roedelius on an early solo album, Durch die Wüste, moving Roedelius out of his ambient keyboards comfort zone. The tone on Material is more strident and uptempo than Rastakraut Pasta, especially on Tollkühn which is like some mad techno synth run ten years too early.

Cluster and co. on YouTube
• Cluster 71
• Harmonia—Deluxe (Immer Wieder)
• Cluster—Sowiesoso
• Cluster & Eno—Für Luise
• Brian Eno—By This River

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Avant Garde Project
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

A follow-up to last year’s list. Seeing as Joy Division are very much in the news at the moment with the release of Control and the re-issue of the albums, I thought a post-punk theme would be appropriate. The period which immediately followed punk in the late Seventies saw a lot of doom being imported into what was then still a proper alternative to the mainstream of popular music. This trend quickly ossified into the distinct and far less adventurous genres of goth and post Throbbing Gristle/Cabaret Voltaire industrial but between 1978 and 1982 everything was in a state of fascinating flux.

Hamburger Lady (1978) by Throbbing Gristle.
TG’s heart-warming ode to a burns victim.

6am (1979) by Thomas Leer & Robert Rental.
Leer and Rental’s The Bridge album was originally one of the few none-Throbbing Gristle releases on TG’s Industrial label, one half songs, the other moody electronic instrumentals. 6am perfectly conjures a picture of empty streets at dawn and sounds like a precursor of Ennio Morricone’s score for The Thing.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead (1979) by Bauhaus.
The first Bauhaus single and the only song of theirs I liked. Put to great use at the beginning of the otherwise pretty risible The Hunger.

Day Of The Lords (1979) by Joy Division.
If anything shows that Ian Curtis was a Romantic in the 19th century sense, it’s this grandiose wallow in the atrocities of history. “Where will it end?”

James Whale (1980) by Tuxedomoon.
Church bells toll and a lonely violin shrieks for the director of the Universal Frankenstein films.

Halloween (1981) by Siouxsie & the Banshees.
With a title like that, how could it not be included here?

Goo Goo Muck (1981) by The Cramps.
Always superior collagists of rockabilly weirdness and early garage riffs, The Cramps started out in the horror camp (“camp” being a big part of their act) with the Gravest Hits EP. Goo Goo Muck was a cover of a great single by (I kid not) Ronnie Cook & the Gaylads. “When the sun goes down and the moon comes up / I turn into a teenage goo goo muck.”

Raising The Count (1981) by Cabaret Voltaire.
An obscure moment of resurrection originally on the Rough Trade C81 cassette compilation from the NME.

Gregouka (1982) by 23 Skidoo.
Gregorian monks meet Moroccan pipes and drums with the result sounding like a voodoo ceremony taking place in cathedral catacombs.

The Litanies Of Satan (1982) by Diamanda Galás.
The formidable Ms Galás was part of last year’s list and her first album is just as hair-raising as her later works. The second part is the marvellously titled Wild Women With Steak-knives (The Homicidal Love Song For Solo Scream).

Happy Halloween!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box

I spent much of the summer of 1983 playing games on a very primitive ZX Spectrum computer while listening to the first couple of Street Sounds Electro compilations. Those mix albums were among the best releases that year and remain highly sought after, seeing as they’ve never been reissued on CD.

The musical reputation of the compilations has overshadowed the sleeve design which was very distinctive for the time and undoubtedly a factor in their success. The vertical ELECTRO type was inspired by Neville Brody’s design for The Face which had turned the magazine’s title through ninety degrees the year before. Also very Brodyish was the use of photocopier-processed graphics and narrow typography although it should be pointed out that Brody hand-drew nearly all his headlines which left his imitators searching through type catalogues for approximations. The sleeve designs are credited to “Red Ranch for Carver’s” about whom I can find no information whatever. Things came full-circle when The Face ran a feature on the electro scene in 1984 giving Brody the opportunity to do a cover with his own variant on the sleeve layouts.

Essential Electro 9-album box, HBOX 1 (1984).

One of the big attractions of these albums for me was the new directions they were opening up for electronic music. Outside the mainstream pop world electronica in the early Eighties meant either the polite fare of Tangerine Dream or the dreary sludge of minor industrial acts such as Portion Control. Cabaret Voltaire were still vital for a while and their thundering Crackdown single (with sleeve design by Neville Brody) was remixed for its 12-inch incarnation by electro producer John Robie. But nothing matched the excitement of a bunch of NYC kids lifting Kraftwerk riffs and playing in a very unselfconscious manner with new and relatively cheap equipment, especially the Roland TR-808 drum machine which provides the backbone for many of these recordings.

Crucial Electro, ELCST 999 (1984).

A1 Tyrone Brunson—The Smurf
A2 Warp 9—Light Years Away
A3 Warp 9—Nunk (New Wave Funk)
A4 Man Parrish—Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)
A5 Herbie Hancock—Rockit
B1 Twilight 22—Electric Kingdom
B2 Cybotron—Clear
B3 Hashim—Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
B4 Captain Rock—Return Of Captain Rock
B5 Time Zone—Wild Style

Although this came later in the series it’s probably the best single collection. Lots of classic tracks with John “Jellybean” Benitez’s Warp 9, Man Parrish, 43 year-old Herbie Hancock (assisted by Bill Laswell and DST) showing he could still rock with the kids, Cybotron aka Juan Atkins riffing on Kraftwerk, Hashim’s great Al-Naafiysh (one of my all-time favourites) and Afrika Bambaataa’s Time Zone. Crucial indeed.

Electro 1, ELCST 01 (1983).

A1 The Packman—I’m The Packman (Eat Everything I Can)
A2 Newcleus—Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)
A3 West Street Mob—Break Dancin’—Electric Boogie
A4 C-Bank—Get Wet
B1 K-9 Corp—Dog Talk
B2 G. Force—Feel The Force
B3 Project Future—Ray-Gun-Omics
B4 Captain Rock—Return Of Captain Rock

“As seen on TV”, Electro 1 was dominated by breaks and raps and which means it sounds more conventionally hip hop than some of its neighbours. The Newcleus track was a real gem, however, a very infectious chipmunk-voiced rap whose Wikki-Wikki subtitle refers to the sound of record scratching, still a big deal in 1983.

Electro 2, ELCST 02 (1983).

A1 The B-Boys—Two, Three, Break
A2 The B-Boys—Cuttin’ Herbie
A3 Xena—On The Upside
A4 Hashim—Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
B1 Rammellzee Vs K-Rob—Beat Bop
B2 Two Sisters—B-Boys Beware (Club Mix)
B3 Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel—White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)

Along with Crucial Electro, the other high point of the series. This starts out in a very minimal manner with two tracks of simple break stuff (Cuttin’ Herbie is a scratch mix of Rockit) then explodes into colour with Xena’s anthem and Hashim’s Al-Naafiysh. Beat Bop is a slow Message-style rap which undergoes another explosion as Two Sisters burst into a tremendous girl-power rap. Al-Naafiysh remains for me the definitive TR-808 track but B-Boys Beware gives it a run for its money.

Electro 3, ELCST 03 (1984).

A1 Divine Sounds—Dollar Bill
A2 Imperial Brothers—We Come To Rock
A3 Newcleus—Jam On It
B1 Boogie Boys—Zodiac
B2 Pumpkin—King Of The Beat
B3 Davy DMX—One For The Treble (Fresh)
B4 Fresh 3—MC’s Fresh

This for me was the last good collection (although side two was rather weak) including the welcome return of Newcleus. The series continued up to #10 in 1985 but #4 lacked the magic of the earlier editions and the expediency of limited resources moved my attention elsewhere. Much of electro’s original momentum was lost by the mid-Eighties as the rap quotient gradually went mainstream and artists outside the scene such as New Order began co-opting the producers. Some artists stayed with the underground, however, Juan Atkins in particular moving electro forward into Detroit Techno. It’s (very) arguable that much of the music you’ve been hearing over the past twenty years can be traced back to these few singles. And if you want some equally spurious contemporary relevance, Xeni Jardin insists that Newcleus’s “wikki-wikki” refrain is the Wikipedia theme tune.

Nearly everything here has been reissued on compilation CDs although those collections lack the juxtaposition you get from the Street Sounds mixes. Try to hear the original vinyl if you can.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper
• Oh Yeah by Charles Mingus
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

Chrome: Firebomb single (1982).

I seem to have spent the past twenty-five years introducing people to Chrome. The world remains stubbornly resistant to their splendour, so here we go again…

Chrome were a San Francisco rock band born in the mid-Seventies, primary members Damon Edge and Helios Creed, ostensibly part of the punk thing but their sound is most aptly characterised by shorthand descriptions such as “Cabaret Voltaire meets Amon Düül II”. A newspaper ad for their Blood On The Moon album bore the legend “New Perfumed Metal”, and Perfumed Metal (the name of a track from Blood On The Moon) is how I tend to think of their blend of chugging riffs, synth squall, distorted vocals and tape collage. Those diverse and contradictory characteristics—perfume, metal—were embodied in the name of their record label, Siren, which finds in a single word reference to erotic mythology and industrial noise. Chrome are/were a difficult band to categorise and describe, so I’m fortunate that Julian Cope has risen to the challenge already with this great potted history and a look at their finest musical moments. Cope’s site also features a lengthy appraisal by another reviewer of their unhinged masterpiece, Half Machine Lip Moves.

Chrome’s covers were almost all the work of Damon Edge, usually collages with titles hand-scrawled in Edge’s angular script. The Firebomb single above (also the cover art of the 3rd From The Sun album) became the band’s defining image, a lion-head door-knocker transformed into some bug-eyed alien organism by the simple addition of a pair of oversize eyes. Their second album was titled Alien Soundtracks so this is entirely appropriate. As Julian Cope puts it in his usual inimitable style:

So the vibe created is definitely very Sci-Fi, but no gleaming clean surfaces from Beyond The Year 2000 here. It’s a bit like in the original “Alien” movie (also from 1979 coincidentally), where the technology is “advanced” but the space ships are dank & dirty and all the equipment keeps breaking down. Science will not only bring forth smiling nuclear families with robot maids flying around in hover cars, but also ever-more-crowded metropolitan slums and squalor and new designer chemicals to help stave off (or feed?) dread and paranoia. To borrow a term coined nearly a decade later, Chrome’s is a “CYBER-PUNK” vision of the future.

The vision didn’t last for long but then most bands have a golden period of four or five years which is then dissipated in personnel splits or changes in musical direction. Chrome’s golden period ran from 1978 to 1982; longer than most and definitely worthy of your attention.

• Official website
• Damon Edge | Helios Creed
• Chrome on YouTube: Meet You In The Subway (1979) | New Age (1980)

Select discography:
Alien Soundtracks (1978)
Half Machine Lip Moves (1979)
Subterranean Modern (1979) (compilation album with other artists)
Read Only Memory (1979) 12″ EP
Red Exposure (1980)
Blood on the Moon (1981)
3rd from the Sun (1982)
No Humans Allowed (1982)
The Chronicles I (1982)
The Chronicles II (1982)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• Maximum heaviosity

Metabolist were Malcolm Lane (guitar, synth, vocals), Simon Millward (bass, vocals, synth) and Mark Rowlatt (drums, percussion), with Jacqueline Bailey designing the covers in a Suprematist style that would no doubt have pleased Kazimir Malevich. All Metabolist covers feature variations on the same line of Helvetica plus a coloured (or black) square. As to the music, here’s my good friend Gav (who carefully digitised his Metabolist collection for me) on an old forum posting:

Initially very underrated and now just unknown, Metabolist were reviewed in the UK music press (NME & Sounds specifically) alongside The Pop Group, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle & This Heat as part of a brief vanguard of new UK experimental music, and for a little while it looked like fractured noise and Europe-inspired riffing might become an important part of the independent (as opposed to indie) mainstream…but alas…

According to “Eurock” magazine in 1980:

“gladiators of independent music, Metabolist have existed in one form or another for 3 or 4 years, the present group consisting of Malcolm Lane, Anton Loach, Simon Millward and Mark Rowlatt. The group is run along co-operative lines to include Jacqueline Bailey who handles publicity promotion, etc. The five of us have all reached the decision to work outside of the large companies in the music business and have therefore formed our own company – Drömm Records. So far we have released 1 EP, 15 minutes of music incl. “Drömm”, “Slaves” and “Eulam’s Beat”, plus a cassette tape of first take rehearsal material called “Goatmanaut”, also containing 3 tracks “Zordan Returns”, “Chained” and “Thru the Black Hole”. The groups first album “Hansten Klork is released in January 1980, closely followed by a single, “I Can’t Identify”. All these recordings have been made at the group’s studio with members of the group being responsible for recording, mixing and editing. We feel that this is the only way, apart from having unlimited cash, that Metabolist can have control over their musical output at every stage. All artwork and sleeve design are also handled within the group. Thanks to the growth of alternative distribution networks in recent years our records can now become available worldwide, so we consider independence to be both viable and desirable. Musically the group has been through many changes, Metabolist refuse to be dictated to by fashion, or by establishing a Metabolist “sound” and sticking to it for ever after. You can therefore find that you love the album, but hate the EP and so on. You will have to trust us as we do not intend to have 10 versions of a hit sound on our LP’s.”

Metabolist only released one full-length vinyl LP, 2 cassettes, a 7″ EP and a single, and their entire oeuvre, including peripheral compilation contributions, would fit onto a nice double CD comp, but none of it has ever been re-released – DURTRO were rumoured to be interested at one time, but as all original members were either untraceable or uninterested, it remains up to original fans (like myself – for the record I bought all their releases directly from the band) to champion their cause – and a worthy cause it is: imagine a lo-fi garageband Magma rehearsing & recording in a gents’ toilet, minus the chorale but compensating with the intensity of ‘Metal Box’ PiL or ‘Monster Movie’ Can, grunted vocals in a kind of proto-Kobaïan neo-dialect (’Chained’, ‘King Quack’), or short bursts of bleeping and burping feedback and electronics like a lost ‘Faust Tapes’ outtake (’Racing Poodles’, ‘Zordan Returns’)…and at a time when ‘Krautrock’ was just the first track on ‘Faust IV’ and ‘Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh’ was a quid in any and every secondhand record shop, Metabolist were citing Der Kosmische Music and Magma as major influences, not a good starting point for a suspicious post-punk record-buying public…I’ve always loved this band because they did it their way, they rocked hard, and they then just disappeared, leaving a small but perfectly-formed Ur-Cosmic body of work that will be rediscovered at some point…surely…

Surely, but not yet. My summation of the Metabolist sound would be something like “Magma’s Christian Vander jamming with This Heat”, but seeing them as a poor man’s This Heat is rather unfair since they have their own distinct personality beyond the few areas of sound and production (This Heat also had their own studio) that overlap with Brixton’s finest. In place of This Heat’s standard-issue Socialist concerns, Metabolist are often fiercer and weirder, deliberately plugging themselves into a post-Magma “Zeuhl” axis as they growl many of their songs in an invented (?) tongue. Little wonder, then, that they remain beyond the pale. Other bands from the period such as Wire, The Gang of Four—even The Fire Engines!—have been resurrected, reissued and even reformed, with younger groups declaring them as influences. We’re currently lacking any enterprising Drömm-heads prepared to take this formidable sound as the starting point for something new. If they’re out there, they’ll need to be hardy souls with little expectation of reward; Franz Ferdinand wouldn’t have graced the charts shouting incoherently into an echo chamber while heavy bass rumbles and drums pound and ricochet in the background.

Thanks to Gav for permission to re-use his words. And for the music, of course…

The recordings:
Dromm (7″) (Drömm Records, 1979).
Goatmanaut (cassette) (Drömm Records, 1979).
Hansten Klork (LP) (Drömm Records, 1980).
Identify (7″) (Drömm Records, 1980).
Split (7″) (Bain Total, 1981).
Stagmanaut! (cassette) (Cassette King, 1981).
Tracks appear on:
Compilation Internationale No.1 (LP) Le Grand Prique, Chained (Scopa Invisible, 1980).
Miniatures (LP) Racing Poodles (Pipe, 1980).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Maximum Heaviosity
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• This Heat

The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody.

William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. A recent posting on the Grey Lodge is a torrent of The Final Academy Documents, the shoddily-produced DVD made from the low-grade video recordings that captured the event (originally an Ikon Video production from Factory). The DVD is so badly presented by Cherry Red that no one should feel guilty about downloading this.

I’ve always been grateful that a record was made of this event, however poor, since I was in the audience that evening, very conscious of the fact that this was my one and only opportunity to see Burroughs in the flesh. His appearance was the magical part of a scaled-down version of the larger two-day Final Academy that had taken place earlier that week in London. The rest of the event was either strange or underwhelming, not helped by the chilly and elitist atmosphere of Manchester’s newest and most famous club. In the days before “Madchester” and the rave scene (the period that gets excised from the city’s cultural history), the Haçienda was a cold, grey concrete barn with terrible acoustics and a members-only policy that required the flourishing of a Peter Saville-designed card at the door. The place was usually half-empty and the clientèle tended to be students living nearby.

Burroughs’ presence that evening at least managed to fill out the space, even if a large portion of the audience didn’t seem to know why they were there or what the whole thing was about. Some of the films made by Burroughs’ collaborator Antony Balch (Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups) were shown on the club’s big projection screens then John Giorno took to the stage to give a spirited and funny presentation of his performance poetry. I hadn’t heard of Giorno before, or his Giorno Poetry Systems, which had been putting readings by Burroughs and others on record, but he was very entertaining.

Burroughs followed, reading from The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. It later became apparent that this was part of an ongoing scheme by his manager, James Grauerholz, to get the aged writer in front of audiences and earning some much-needed money. Whatever money he made was well-earned since few writers can deliver their work in public with as much style and wit, as the numerous recordings of his later readings testify. I’m not sure now what I expected from his reading but I remember being surprised at the degree of humour involved. What might seem cold and dead on the page came to life dripping with satiric vitriol under the stress of that snarling delivery. After this, the screening of a lengthy video by Psychic TV was something of an anti-climax, even if the blood and other fluids on display did provoke one audience member to exclaim “Why are you watching this?!” before storming out.

The Final Academy was the first event I attended at the Haçienda and certainly one of the best, equalled only by an incredibly ferocious performance from Einstürzende Neubauten a few months later. This featured broken glass flying into the audience and the band drilling into the concrete wall of the venue with a pneumatic drill (part of their stage equipment at the time) which they then left hanging from the wall. I don’t think the Haçienda management were pleased by that. I caught the Burroughs event just as I was preparing to move to the city myself and it made Manchester immediately seem like a vital and worthwhile place to be; how things change…. It’s curious now the way this pointed towards my future work here; also in the audience that evening were future friends and colleagues Michael Butterworth and Martin Flitcroft of Savoy Books. Mike’s sister was part of the Ikon Video team who were filming the event and Savoy are credited on the Final Academy video release. William Burroughs is one of the dark angels presiding over the entire Savoy project; Mike and Dave Britton recounted in an interview with Sarajane Inkster their memories of meeting him in New York City.

William Burroughs in the Rue Git-le-Coeur, circa 1960.

The programme booklets and posters for the Final Academy were designed by Neville Brody. It would have been nice to see the DVD release use Brody’s designs but that’s obviously expecting too much of the incompetents at Cherry Red. Among the many photographs inside Brody’s booklet are some showing Burroughs in the Rue Git-le-Coeur, Paris, from the period when he was living in the famous Beat Hotel with Brion Gysin and others. I managed to track down the hotel on my last trip to the city. The street seems to have retained much of its earlier character but the hotel itself has received a bland makeover that says “international” and “expensive”. One can’t help but wonder where the Beats would migrate to today in the search for cheap accommodation; it certainly wouldn’t be Paris or London or, for that matter, Manchester. Prague? Somewhere in Brazil maybe?

The street as it is today, with the former Beat Hotel on the left.

The Final Academy was a defining moment in what, for want of a better term, is now seen as the Industrial Culture scene, Burroughs having been adopted as godfather by most of the prime movers in that movement-that-wasn’t-quite-a-movement. Psychic TV grew out of Throbbing Gristle, of course, and one of the last releases on TG’s Industrial Records label was Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, a collection of Burroughs’ early tape experiments. 23 Skidoo sampled (in the days before sampling…) a snatch of those recordings for The Gospel Comes to New Guinea, a single produced by Cabaret Voltaire, and both these bands played at the London Final Academy event. At the time this meeting of literary and avant garde musical culture didn’t seem so surprising but 24 years on it seems increasingly unique and unrepeatable. Despite Burroughs’ considerable influence, the events in London and Manchester weren’t the inspirational moment that the organisers and participants might have wished as the 1980s turned out to be a decade of pop trivia and much political and cultural conservatism. Burroughs continued to produce good work (his musical collaborations, Seven Souls with Material and the Dead City Radio readings were high points) but Brion Gysin died in 1986 and many of the musical performers gradually ran out of steam or lost their way as the decade progressed. The “final” part of The Final Academy was more of a terminal declaration than anyone realised at the time.

Brainwashed has some reviews and interviews concerning The Final Academy here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

(left) “Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)” by Raoul Hausmann.

‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 16, 2006

NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art’s only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.

“Total pandemonium” was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. “Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.”

I’m sure you had to be there.

The Dada show, opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is pretty much an official survey (an oxymoron), and, this being MoMA, nearly all 450 or so objects in it look elegant, which they were certainly never intended to look. Interpret that as you will. The buttoned-down museum, which in many ways seems to have lost its bearings, returns to its roots.

The exhibition arrives after stops in Paris (where, papered with hundreds of documents and arranged like a chessboard of small rooms, it was by all accounts superbly eccentric) and in Washington, where it was pared down and didactic.

Splitting the difference, MoMA’s curator, Anne Umland, has added Dada touches like two separate entrances. (You choose.) She knows the Dadaists were actually closet aesthetes. After Marcel Duchamp waltzed into a plumbing equipment manufacturer on lower Fifth Avenue, acquired a porcelain urinal, signed it “R. Mutt” and submitted the now notorious “Fountain” to an art show, he claimed to be horrified when people found his readymade beautiful.

Art by declaration had replaced art by discrimination. A urinal, a snow shovel, a hat rack and a bicycle wheel fastened to a stool were art because he said so, and who was to say they weren’t? Except that, by the same token, if someone decided the urinal or snow shovel looked aesthetically pleasing, who was he to deny it?

Such became the world of modern art, and either you are the sort of skeptic who thinks that art went to hell in a handbasket, or you see that Dada opened art up to the everyday and we are its beneficiaries. That hat rack looks awfully stylish now, and so does the mobile fashioned out of clothes hangers by Man Ray, never mind if it’s still a little hard to love the silvered plumbing trap that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Livingston Schamberg titled “God.” (I wonder if they noticed that the curlicue of the trap spells each of those letters in lowercase?)

In any event, it’s good to be reacquainted with a generation that had no market to speak of and for whom society’s corruption and exhaustion seemed a golden opportunity to make themselves useful. Politicians were responsible for mass murder, advertisers were conmen, the press self-censoring.

So Dadaists figured it was time to throw away the rules, and you can tell they had a ball doing so. Out with jingoism and the clichés of romanticism and Expressionism, whose self-centeredness they particularly despised, and in with a new spirit of internationalism, collaboration, serendipity and transparency. (Duchamp’s cracked glass was the operative symbol.) Dada stood for freedom. Art may be useless but it is also indispensable.

The show is organized by cities, different artists having come to the same notion of Dada around the same time in different places. Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Arp and his wife, Sophie Taeuber, settled in neutral Zurich. Ball, seeing corpses on the battlefield, had contemplated suicide. Marcel Janco said that he could still hear the bombardments in faraway Verdun while he slept.

Out of this came antiwar happenings and lyrical abstractions. Arp and Taeuber, separately and together, made collages, jig-sawed reliefs, chalices and bowls in earthen colors, and marionettes with faces like Oceanic masks for retelling an 18th-century play, “The King Stag,” as an allegory of psychoanalysis. “Kill me, kill me. I have not analyzed myself and can’t stand it anymore!” was the king’s minister’s big line.

In Cologne, Max Ernst, who fought in an artillery brigade, turned to montages of human biplanes and other nightmare creatures, while Johannes Baargeld delved into gender-bending, a Dada obsession, escaping into the uncanny from a catastrophe that in Berlin provoked Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and Georg Grosz to produce the most overtly political art. They devised nonsense texts, photomontages of dismembered and reconfigured bodies and of the Kaiser as a war machine excreting Dada artists, and mannequins with prostheses.

Höch and Hausmann dreamed of a populist revolution. Their works were sublime: anti-art advertisements, slapstick assemblages of ingenious designs, exploiting the implicit veracity of photographs. Cut apart, like the war wounded, the photographs reconfigured truth and proposed a new form of mass media. They teemed with half-mechanical men, de Chirico’s tailor dummies transformed into Hausmann’s “Spirit of Our Age,” a sculpture made out of a hairdresser’s wig-making dummy to which are attached a crocodile wallet, a ruler, a collapsible cup and a tape measure, as if in lieu of a brain: the essence of nullity.

In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters was transposing trolley stubs and other bits of junk into constructions whose compression was a metaphor of urban life, and he was conceiving his own castle of Dada, his “Merzbau.”

As for Duchamp, who had left his first readymade behind in Paris, with Man Ray and Francis Picabia in New York he made mischief entailing photographs and machine parts and cross-dressing and girls. Consumer culture was an obvious target. A show at Francis Naumann’s gallery on the Upper East Side spotlights the female artists who were also in town, whom the Modern leaves out, like Katherine Dreier and Florine Stettheimer. Between the two exhibitions, it’s obvious how early and crazy New York was with Dada.

After the war everybody gravitated to Paris, which turned out to be Dada’s Waterloo, a hothouse salon scene of bloviating nihilists who loved to fight. The show, like the movement, nearly peters out at this point on the Seine.

“It is the loss of community,” writes Leah Dickerman, the Washington curator, in the show’s catalog, “that haunts Dada.” She meant the loss of the prewar communities in Europe. The Dadaists themselves basically split up by the mid-20’s, succeeded by Surrealism, whose lunacy was strictly regimented by its leaders. Hitched to Surrealism in history books, Dada has suffered by association, a fate this landmark show rectifies.

It is curious to see how some artists hold up in it. Schwitters, minus the Merzbau, looks marginal; Picabia and Ernst, deft but often galling in their fastidiousness; Grosz, separated from his late work, like a major player. His watercolor-collage of a whore and suitor, a fat tart and a tin man with hollow eyes fed numbers by a pair of disembodied hands, is the classic Weimar image.

“Kindhearted malice” was Hausmann’s phrase. Cynical and traumatized, the Dadaists were tireless young optimists at heart. Despairing of the war and the effects of technology, they nevertheless discovered a world full of wonders in machines and the modern cityscape. In Viking Eggeling’s film, “Symphonie Diagonale,” abstract blips dance across the screen, aspiring to the ecstasies of music. In René Clair’s and Picabia’s “Entr’acte,” two men prance around a cannon, a ballerina turns into a bearded man and a funeral procession becomes a chase scene.

In Hans Richter’s “Ghosts Before Breakfast,” eight gloriously loopy minutes of bowler hats flying through the sky like a flock of birds, fire hoses winding and unwinding themselves, and men wearing fake beards and disappearing behind lampposts, the rudimentary tricks of film are used to replace real-world anarchy with a new, exhilarating madness.

The next German regime didn’t miss the point. The Nazis deemed Richter’s film degenerate, and Hindemith’s soundtrack for it is lost.

Dada, it turned out, was never really as impotent as it feared. It still isn’t.

“Dada” opens Sunday and continues through Sept. 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-9400.