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.

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

CONTACT MIC DANCE

Contact mic put through Korg Monotron Delay. Field recordings.

This will hopefully be developed as a dance piece - the dancer, (possibly me) will have the mic attached to the side of their shoe. The score will be generated by the sound of their movements, and future movements predicated on the delay; so a feedback loop, basically. The Korg has the huge advantage, quite apart from the delay unit being great (its got a filter too), it is tiny and very light. This means that it can be worn and the delay time, feedback etc manipulated by the dancer live.

FUCK! ...IT'S A SPHINX!

Myself and the Bike Cemetery Big Band from the other year, performing the Sphinx Song. Bad news, those Sphinxes.

WE ALL OWE NOTHING - NOT EVEN TO OURSELVES

SOUTHWARK...SEARCHING FOR THE WORKHOUSE

A night drift around Southwark, digging for lost bones and shoes on the beach, paying respects to the unconsecrated dead, piecing together the syntax of lost streets

Thunder tube feedback machine and synthesiser

Kkkaaa

New vocal piece here:
An homage to the speech patterns of the place I grew up in. Glottals like hawking up phlegm or a kick in the balls, vowels like swinging on a rusty gate and consonants like ravens.

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.

MOVING FOREST CODA - JULY 2012

We Owe the Future Nothing: Moving Forest Coda 2012 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.

ABJECT BLOC - WOLF VANISH

So just did the Abject Bloc show. Think that it went well. It did from my perspective anyway - layers of (fake, digital) tape delay and relatively well mixed drums. Ended up on London Bridge, drinking some cans from the offy and looking at the lights  of the city (olympic logos aplenty) smearing across the currents whilst the local constabulary hassled (black) drivers who were crossing the water there. Documentation of show - strikes me just now, the parallel of presenting one's documentation - will be here by tomorrow or something.

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.

ABJECT BLOC RADIO SESSION 7/02/12

REHEARSAL AT COLONUS - KAUNAS, LITHUANIA