The Dumpcast #2

ROOT

Improvised spoken word and percussion. 18 June 2016, Middlesex University, London.

The scraping that can be heard at the beginning is a the head of a rusted pick-axe that I attached to my ankle with string, so I had to drag it behind me as I moved. The stage was bare, except for a dais on which there was a tight spotlight. Sitting on the dais was a stool on which was a mural crown made out of brown paper. At the end of the piece, I picked up the crown and raised it above my head, then the lights went down. For a large part of the performance I was behind the audience, who were seated looking towards the stage.

DARK FIBRE NETWORK DRIFT 27 OCTOBER 2019

POO-TEE-WEET AT THE ASC GALLERY

Homage to K Vonnegut. So it goes.

Poo tee weet by Robin Bale, Electric Spectra, Domain of Sensible Knowledge, ASC Gallery 1/6/17. from Nicola Woodham on Vimeo.

NEW PROJECT....

The Patterers

Further details to be announced in the next week or two.

BIKE CEMETERY VALEDICTION

A valedictory iteration of some of the - now sadly occluded - inscriptions on the Bike Cemetery wall. This video was taken at the Bike Cemetery on a Sunday in May 2017.
WOLF VANISH from robin bale on Vimeo.

TWAT GRAFFITI

Documentation of my performance at the launch of the Performance Art Faction box set by ]performance s p a c e[ last summer.

AQUA TOPHANA

My performance from last December at the Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan. In case you are wondering, aqua tophana was a poison believed to work so insensibly slowly that it was indistinguishable from old age. It was also meant to be so virulent that a single drop could poison the entire sea. It actually does have some historical basis, in that there was a famous manufacturer of that  poison, Giulia Tofana - so it is in fact a brand name.  I've always enjoyed the idea that we have all been poisoned by it - which is why we don't live forever.

The stick that you can see me holding is an improvised bass - it had machine heads strung with fishing line, an empty can for a resonating chamber and a contact mic for amplification. It was rather microphonic, so you can hear my voice coming through it into the effects pedal it was attached to as well. Unfortunately, it didn't survive the night but mark II will make its appearance sometime soon I hope.

POD ACADEMY

The Bike Cemetery in Winter 2012

 My podcast, Return to the Bike Cemetery, is now available on www.podacademy.org
 there's some other very good stuff on there too, including a talk from a historian of smell, an ethnomusicological discussion of the music of the BayAka people, and a discussion of  manifestations of economic thought in cultural products. It's a very pleasingly heterogenous collection.

My piece is the first in a projected series of three programmes that will take different levels of interpretation (or degrees of generality) and angles towards the Bike Cemetery. They will all be equally preoccupied with sound, though; how it can evoke a space, or series of them, how it can internally dislocate a space (especially when broadcast to somewhere else), and its temporality - that is, its passing, which is of course the precondition of its stubborn or uncanny return (say, in the use of delay).

A rough outline might go: Bike Cemetery - empty space (as in Claude Lefort's image) - sovereignty of subject (bourgeois liberal democratic) - sovereignty (as in Karl Schmitt's version of decision) - exception and example, and the spatial relationship that both categories necessitate - Bike Cemetery - waste ground - "waste" in terms of time - metaphors of "natural" growth/accumulation - the responsibilized subject - "unnatural" growth/stasis - the welfare state and its characterisation by the likes of Charles Murray - "addiction" as trope, to benefits or (for the state) to debt - addiction as perpetual return (to same place) therefore antithesis of neoliberal models of growth or statehood - the stuttering, repetitive inscriptions at the Bike Cemetery.

I realise that the outline just given might seem confused, fragmentary and a bit dry, but I am going to do my best to make it a coherent trip through some contemporary obsessions. I think that the audio essay form can do this well. 

HERE IS THE EP - HEAR

NEW SOUNDS

A piece made for the listening seminar at Goldsmiths on the evening of Tuesday 14 January 2014. It is composed of field and studio recordings, plus some programmed samples. It takes the form of the invocation I have frequently used to begin - to demarcate a space - in my performances, and then goes on a small tour of the underworld.

RECLUSE NETWORKING - 26 0CTOBER 2013

This was the performance at the Recluse Networking event. Very good day all round. Here I used an ebow to create a feedback drone on the guitar, which is just going into my crappy practice amp. The other instruments are a thunder tube (the thing with the spring on it) jew's harp and kazoo. What I was saying was directly inspired by the discussions that were going on at the event concerning "value" - what value is and how we arrive at the idea of value.

The piece is me ranting about the so-called ethical turn, as has been my wont lately; Carl Schmitt warned that liberal governance ultimately devolves into a form of managerialism on the one hand, and morality on the other. This tendency has been made utterly clear at our present moment of neoliberal governance. Opposition to the prevalent economic (read managerial or technocratic) rationality presenting itself as punitive (and pointless) austerity (in fact, it is a vast expropriation of public resources) is far too often framed as the exercise of some form of personal morality. This version of capitalism is wrong because it is immoral and unfair etc. everyone should pay their taxes/contribute and so on, it is unfair to demonise the unemployed as scroungers because they really want to work.

Postcard/poster Robin Bale 2009

But what if you don't want to work or contribute but still demand change and your own bit of the collective on exactly those negative grounds?

Our current regime seems to like to denigrate citizenship in favour of a (particular and approved) individual subjectivity - a clear example is the emphasis on the moral culpability of the unemployed, and even the disabled, for their plight and the necessity of privatised initiatives to inculcate the correct virtues. Where citizenship was a legal status that did not depend on the content of the individual, status is now accorded by the possession of the right personal characteristics. When  Cameron talks of the "faceless, distant, bureaucrats of the welfare state"  that is what they are critiquing; a state that accords rights impartially. However, a great deal of the opposition to the depradations of the current government is framed in almost the same terms. The word fairness gets bandied about quite a lot on both sides. What the fuck is fairness, anyway? It's not the same as equality (of both opportunity and outcome) I'm sure. People have the right to material equality, not because they are good, or that they recycle, or work hard and pay their taxes, or that they aspire, and not because they are striving to make a better world either. People have the right to it just because they do.

Note that there was a stage being used in this video, this is a subject (the stage, and all it implies) that I will return to, as I think that it has some bearing on what I discussed here above.

SAINT JAMES' INFIRMARY

Shortened version of this track - a rough mix, too, which will be sorted. The full extravaganza (featuring the Bike Cemetery Brass) will be posted in the fullness of time.

The song itself will be familiar to most. I have adapted some of the words, which are the result in any case of many interpolations and accretions over the song's long history.

I realise that the vocal in the spoken section is unclear (which will be fixed shortly with some judicious compression) so here's what I am saying:

Can't miss it, mate -Just a step up the road, through the freshly privatised out-patients' clinic without walls, the result of a recent merger with the debtors' prison. Cemetery gates on the left, 24 hour offy on the right, and all the  bright new shining glass, playschool clad, buy to let cash-farms gleaming like an advert for  the transparency and self presence of the well-lived life. It's just there - yeah, next to those hoardings displaying gym-zombies with bodies like well sculpted CVs and posters exhorting responsible citizens to do something wild and life-affirming -   go shopping. There's pictures of them gurning like giro day. It's a small door.

 There's a buzzer.

If they ask, say I sent you

Obviously, the best ever version - for both its sound and the morbid-hallucinatory visuals, is this one. Sorry about the ad at the beginning.

POWERPLAY AT THE ART CAFE, TOYNBEE HALL

 

Coming up in two weeks. I will be presenting an illustrated performative lecture on participation in performance with the working title "The Neighbour is an Other you can't kill" at this event about participation, organised by these. It should be good. Tickets available here.

I may very well be posting some sort of teaser/trailer up here soon

MOVING FOREST CODA - JULY 2012

We Owe the Future Nothing: Moving Forest Coda 2012 from robin bale on Vimeo.

THIS HURTS ME MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU

Documentation of the performance at Anatum's Abode last Saturday. The text (with added interjections from me)is taken from Osborne's unpleasant (when is he not) and disingenuous Spending Review speech on 25 June 2013 (full text here).
This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You from robin bale on Vimeo.

FIRST TRACK ON BANDCAMP

My first track on bandcamp. It's by no means perfect, in terms of recording or execution (improvised in my front room) I've cleaned up the recording a bit, though not enough. There may be a remix in the pipeline, I've got a lot of fragments of similar ideas that may or may not fit - we'll see.

CLOSE PROTECTION - PERFORMANCE WITH NICOLA WOODHAM

Performance with Nicola Woodham at "Bunker Mentality", a show in a  WWII bunker in Dalston. Niki created and manipulated live video loops from the "Benefit Busters" series. I did my usual, with the addition of guitar, and a miked-up shaman stick.  
Close Protection: performance documentation from Nicola Woodham on Vimeo.

TONIGHT ON ABJECT BLOC SHOW, RESONANCE FM

I will be doing a live set on resonance fm tonight on the Abject Bloc show, between 10:30 and 11:30 pm. Link to stream here. It will be the first public manifestation of the Ghosts and Weather material.

REHEARSAL AT COLONUS - KAUNAS, LITHUANIA