Listener as Operator
Howard Slater
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
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Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
Simple maths and stringent scored instructions move precise frequencies and clicks to create a dense, fluctuating environment of standing waves and physical sound.
Experience a sense of being in the world, in a specific space and time. Including Jeanne Liotta’s recordings of the ionosphere and Walter Ruttmann’s radical 35mm precursor to musique concrète.
A voice that can vault from an elegantly whispered insinuation to asphyxiated and murderous barks or squalls in a heartbeat.
Location: Around and about the old public library in Easterhouse; disinvested in and left to rot by the council but which was shamelessly, hastily and superficially cleaned by them in expectation of our event.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.