Readers of the previous blog may wonder where the phrase ‘relative simultaneity’ suddenly came from. I used it in some musings I wrote for an interesting project, called Vision Forum, led by Per Hüttner a while ago. Reading them again, I though it might be useful to throw them in here too. This time no pics, just words…

I love music. I listen to it while pottering in the kitchen, while working at my computer, or while sitting on the bus with my iPod. What’s more, I also go to live gigs on a regular basis. Whether a band is great at live performances is not so much the point of my train of thought here. My concern is this: enjoying a live performance seems to sit in our perception on a fairly equal footing with listening to music captured on vinyl or a CD. While the latter are in essence forms of mediation of something that once happened in real time, we understand the live and the mediated as different manifestations of one and the same creative process. With music we seem to be able to wholeheartedly embrace the experience of the real and the mediated as natural extensions of each other. The record or CD and the live event can sit happily side-by-side, and there doesn’t seem to be much of an issue of hierarchy, or it being less, or a coming after of the mediated versus the real.

The same can hardly ever be said about art, and the exhibitions in which it is often displayed, and their different forms of mediation: they rarely go beyond the obligatory catalogue. Some contain great reflections by gifted writers and theoreticians and attempt to contribute to critical discourse about the work and the concepts behind it. Others focus on particular groupings and formats of presentation of the work, and are more concerned with the curatorial concept underpinning the project they accompany. Others simply give an impression via brief descriptions and some images. What most of them have in common though, is a sense of ‘coming after’, and an impression of them being less than the real thing. Invariably they seem to function as mementos, as tokens by which to remember what once was.

Picking up my train of thought in relation to live and mediated music, I wonder: could publications take in a similar position of relative equality, a position of sitting alongside the real thing? Is it possible for publications to elevate themselves, so they no longer function as just a translation or mediation of artistic practices into another medium or language that can be read or looked at at another moment in time? Is it possible for them to have a currency of simultaneity, like the record has to the live performance? Is it possible for them to somehow take on a shape and form that is no longer subservient to, but that simply is the real deal?

Of course some artist’s books go some way in relation to the issue of status and time when it comes to artists and their work. At best they are the real deal, the real and the mediated coinciding in time and place. But even if they do so, they often have a tendency of operating in their own ‘ghetto’. More because of a general perception rather than reality, they seem to – still! – hover in the corner of crafts and the hand-made. Despite the liberating impact of conceptual artists’ practices in the 1960s and 1970s, there’s still a lot of headway to be made.

And what about curatorial practice in publications? How many attempts have there been since for instance Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox Book (1968) and July-August (1970)? What publications can claim to have successfully captured curatorial practice, beyond simply talking about it? With the plethora of books about curating in all its different manifestations and with all its various specificities, it’s maybe time to ask whether publications can be sites for curatorial practice in their own right, and, if so, to start using them as such.
GvN

I came across Jem Finer as an artist, not as a musician, which is how many others no doubt first became acquainted with his work. For those whose memory is not immediately jogged by the mention of his name: Jem is one of the founding members of the band The Pogues. He is the one responsible for the dulcet banjo tones, among other things, on the band’s records, and at live performances. He is not only a gifted musician, but also an interesting artist, who, maybe because he’s not primarily trained as one, sometimes comes to his projects from completely different angles and with different questions than other artists might.

The project I want to talk about was first realised in 1999, going live in London at mid-day on the 31^st of December 1999, at exactly the same moment as midnight struck in Sydney, Australia. Since then it has been running along quietly: not only here in London, where you can visit it in a lighthouse along the Thames, far beyond the city’s East End, but also at four other sites in different places around he world, including the new library in Alexandria, Egypt.

Running simultaneously at various listening posts (the first one was in Australia, hence the mid-day London start), the work is basically generated by six individual soundtracks that interfere with each other, which in turn generates a new soundtrack. The source for all is a single 20-minute-long track. Running through this source at six different speeds, the six separate tracks interfere in such a way that the sound we eventually hear will never be the same over a period of exactly a thousand years. The title of the project is as simple as it is apt: Longplayer. Now, rather than explaining the background behind the project (for that you can go to the website), I want to focus on how the work exists in various ways, one alongside the other. So, here goes.

When you go to the listening post in London, you don’t actually see much. Once having arrived at Trinity Buoy Wharf, you go up the narrow steps of a defunct lighthouse and you end up in the large attic of the building it is attached to. There you see a simple wooden garden shed. Through its window you see an old Mac, with on its screen the representation of time passing at various speeds through six sound tracks. You can go further up, into the actual lantern of the lighthouse, where the sound generated by the interference of the six separate tracks, is broadcast via a set of speakers. There’s some chairs, so you can sit down and listen to the work, whiling away your time, quietly, removed from the hustle and bustle of the city, overlooking the Thames, the Dome and Canary Wharf a little bit further back.

Those who are not able to visit the work physically by going to a listening post, can listen to it in the privacy of your their home, via the live audio stream on the website: www.longplayer.org. They don’t have to travel to barely used DLR stations, or spend money on a cab from tube stops they would otherwise never visit, or spend hours on a bus that meanders East from what for most people is already deep down East London.

Several years after Longplayer launched, the organisation that originally commissioned the project, Artangel, published a book that captures the development of the project in depth through texts, as well as a mind-map, notebook facsimiles etc. The package comes with, how could it have been anything else, an LP. Of course the LP only gives you a total of 40 minutes of listening pleasure, with two fragments on either side, carefully selected from the nearly three years the project had been running by the time the LP was pressed. But you can listen to it nonetheless, in the comfort of your lounge without having to sit in front of your computer. That is, of course, if you still own a record player.

However, our means of access don’t stop there, although the latest incarnation was probably a one-off, certainly not something that will be repeated soon. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in September, you could go and see the work being performed live. ‘Live?’ you may ask. Something that now runs through a computer and is intended to last for a thousand years, surely cannot be translated back to mere instruments and physical performance? The funny thing with Longplayer is that that it is exactly what happened. Being able to somehow play the soundtrack of Longplayer live had always been part of Jem’s thinking around the project, right from the moment he started thinking about it, around 1994 or so. Bearing that in mind, fifteen years later, it was about time…

Of course Jem didn’t execute this incarnation single-handedly. It required an extraordinary array of fellow artists and musicians to collaborate. In small teams they played the Tibetan singing bowls, using stopwatches to make sure they’d follow the ‘score’ in minute detail. A series of wooden concentric circles, h with markings that helped the musicians track time, the bowls were placed here and there individually, here and there in clusters. They were the same bowls Jem used to generate the original soundtrack that is the source of Longplayer as a sound piece. The live performance took place over a total of 1000 minutes in the vast circular space of the Roundhouse, in North London, where during the day the sunlight added its own spark to the installation and its players.

It made for a wonderful sight, and sound. The audience could wander in and out, so some people made themselves comfortable on the floor and stayed for ages. Other simply nipped in and out quickly. Some kept pacing – quietly – up and down, as if they were part of another, extra circle around the structure that generated Longplayer here live, without computers, without synched time devices, just through pure and simple handwork.

So there you are, Longplayer is available to us at all times and in a variety of different formats and contexts: via our computer and the project’s website; by physically visiting a listening post, be it London or any of the others; via a book and an LP; and, to top it, we now had a chance to experience it live. Of course these various means of listening all make for different kinds of experiences, but each one of them is generated by what is indisputably the same work.
GvN

-aps

Alexis you have the floor.

(speaking in unidentifiable European accent)

Heeeello, I thought I would youtube dj some of my new favourite bands for you as it’s summer and you should be outside in zee sun, listening to zee tunes, not inside reading zee silly blogie things.

So we begin with zee Crocodiles and their live version of I want to kill

Next I give you zee band Wavves and their song No Hope Kids

Now we have zee the Maccabees and their song Love You Better.  So cute these boys, Alexis wants to pinch your indie cheeks…

Zee Wedding Present and Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft

This song continaully comes up on zee iPod on zee random

Minus the Bear When We Escape

So I suggest you watch zees videos, whilst I go find some hapless rich European dude and we can hit up St. Tropez and party with Puffy Bear Combs or whatever his name is.  It’s been lovely my darlings, big smooches, Alexis is out.

Thanks for that Alexis von Spauldhoff.  She’s a card, a card with fairly groovy musical tastes.  While G is gone I am going to throw up a bunch of different things, some writing, some youtube etc., perhaps more guest writers.  Keeping it fun for the kids in the summer.

aps

It often starts with the tossing and the turning, searching for the cool spot on the pillow.  Most people find it and fall back asleep. Me, I never find the cool spot.

I am sitting here, looking out over New York City as the sun rises and lazily tries to break through the low-hanging haze that seems to be a permanent fixture on the skyline. When I leave my cocoon of air conditioning and sound-proofed windows, not only will I be immersed in the city but also in the haze and the humidity.

So, why start like this, why bring us into it? you ask. It’s simple: it’s about work and ways of being and thinking. I know this is a shared blog and in general the policy is that I don’t really write on my own work things in the specific, but I feel that this is a worthwhile endeavour, so here we go:

WHAT DRIVES YOU TO MAKE THE WORK?

I am asking this, because this morning I woke up wrecked with anxiety, an anxiety that makes me want to hide from everything: my work, the PhD, and life in general. It’s not as if it’s too much, or as if there’s something that I can’t manage, but it’s like the haze outside my window: it envelopes you like a blanket, and right now it feels too heavy for me to move myself.

As I am about to embark on another installation I think about this state of mind and who I am, and which aspects of it are present within my work. It’s not like I have come to some sort of light-bulb-like conclusion: ‘Oh anxiety, that’s what it should be about’. It simply seeps in.

So what and why and how is this in any way relevant to this blog and the working relationship I have with G? The reason is that it’s about the base for everything I do: in some way every work I have made has in some aspect tried to address this issue. I suppose it comes down to the question of ‘what kind of experience am I trying to create?’

It’s such a vital and important question, and in a way I haven’t answered it or even asked it directly. My father came over to Glasgow after the second installation in my PhD research was completed, and we did a brain-storming session, I have never worked with my father like that before on a project.  For the most part my parents don’t participate in that way. But working with someone outside of my contextual framework was amazing. I had to have answers and I had to know, as he was asking questions out of curiosity, not malice. It made me realise how little I did know about what it is that I want. To some degree working within the structure of practice-led research creates some kind of tunnel vision. I was going full steam ahead on the work, with in some way letting my instinct and gut feeling take over when it came to the nature of the experience. But I never directly addressed what that experience was to be or what I wanted it to be. A bit cart before the horse. Now I have the chance to rectify that process, can I change that with the third installation?

So back to the nature of experience: what is it that I want? The best way of doing this is to look at work that I have seen lately, and to give you a peak at the thinking inside my head.

When G and I were in Basel there weren’t any immersive installations per se, but there was a lot of work that was immersive in some way. Lots of glossy black plexi, in which you’re reflected, but not forever like in a mirror, but in a rather flat 2D way. I have never enjoyed seeing myself in artwork, because it breaks the fantasy: I am real but the artwork is producing this thing beyond myself and then bam, there I am. In some way that inclusion of the self is vitally important.  It’s jarring in the sense that for the most part we have an idea of how we look, but sometimes our reflection is not the same as the internal image we have created of ourselves. That’s where the black plexi and the mirrors come in.

I had been deliberating for months, or rather the past year, that Room 3 would involve a pool. I had seen it done in Basel several years ago, and besides the sheer coolness of it, being in a pool was something so ineffable within the context of it being a work of art. The work came alive when it was engaged with by the viewers, and it contained an ultimate sense of immersion.  But as I have neither the funds nor the physical space to create the work that I want to create, the questions is how do you substitute that and what do you do to keep moving?

In glimpsing all of this black Perspex in Basel and seeing some mirrored pieces, it became apparent that I wouldn’t need water to generate the effect that I am after. I can create an environment about immersion without having people actually physically immersive people within the work.

Within the last two installations, the work has had a high aesthetic sensibility while I am also cultivating and actively generating a sense of dread or doom. There is something about the work that makes people uncomfortable. I like that, and I want that as that is my way of allowing people in, to give them a sense of certain things that I feel at particular moments, if only for a short time. I am not just immersing people into this aesthetic visual world, but I am using the music that I create to integrate the visual and the aural, to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.

So back to what it is that I want, what kind of experience I am after. What is the purpose of Room 3? Simply put, I want Room 3 to be the integrated accumulation of all that I have been working towards. This is my chance to really show not only my aesthetic sensibility, but to also highlight what that sense of aesthetics means to the work as a whole. I want the experience to incorporate aspects of calm but ultimately to have people leave feeling unsettled. I want the hair on the back of your neck to stand up and for you to feel a mental itch. If the work were to be realised right now, I would say that the purpose of the work is to drown you in my anxieties and to allow someone else to feel them, to truly know the level and depth of someone else’s fears. And I want it to look good.
For the moment I feel pretty I have said everything there is to say. The sun has broken through the haze, so it’s time for me to frolic.

aps

(images to follow)

Returned from Venice, and having rested my weary legs after having traipsed up and down, and down and up the narrow streets and the city’s vast amount of little bridges many times during the three days that constitute the official opening of the Venice Biennale, one of the highlights for me this time was the Icelandic pavilion.

Although the pavilion houses two distinct works, or rather facets of the artist’s – Ragnar Kjartansson – practice, I want to focus on the video installation, and leave the durational piece, which is supposed to last for six months, for what it is. My main curiosity about this second work – for which the artist will paint a daily picture of a male model wearing nothing but swimming trunks, set against the backdrop of the iconic views of the Grand Canal lined with palazzos on either side – is whether some level of boredom won’t set in at some stage, provoking either painter or model (or both) to insert the intended daily act with ever-increasing subversions. (For those who are interested in this particular work, you can find a stylised impression here). How it will pan out, only time will tell.

But, back to the video installation. It’s a work that made me slow down, smile, leave the room, but return back to it immediately, return again later, smile again, and each time leave in even better spirits. So what happens and why did it have this effect on me? It being a video installation, there’s obviously something on a visual level that compelled me to come back more than once, and that made me linger for a while on each occasion. But there’s also the aural element, that’s maybe just as compelling.

In essence the idea is super simple, and maybe it’s this seeming simplicity that makes it so beguiling. Here’s what you encounter when you walk into a relatively small rectangular space: it’s dark and you find yourself surrounded by six medium-sized projections, all of the same format. Each projection shows a snow-covered landscape, which, because of the copious amount of trees, you immediate understand to be somewhere else but Iceland. On five screens there’s one, and sometimes two figures in the foreground, mountains and blue skies and sometimes threatening clouds behind them, while sometimes they’re surrounded by trees, or an odd tree in the foreground functions as a traditional coulisse. On one screen the angle of the frame is much wider, with a lone figure and a grand piano positioned in front of an impressive mountain range, in the distance across an immaculate white snowy plane, and a small figure walking in an even further distance. The figure(s) on each screen are clad against the cold, wearing fur hats, and warm winter coats. That’s what you see.

Now, on to what you hear. Despite the wintry circumstances, all figures (or rather, the same figure and his companion) manage to play an instrument. And within five seconds you get it, you understand what’s happening. All the instruments – including a banjo, a drum set, a grand piano, a guitar, a base – play the same tune, and the series of one-, or sometimes two-man pieces, actually form a whole band together, despite being dislocated in space and real time, somehow playing in perfect sync in the work’s time. The music that they generate is of a slow, laid-back, folksy nature, in keeping with the landscape and the musicians’ attire.

There’s a clear romantic streak to it all, both on a visual and an aural level. A streak that’s inherent to the artist’s practice in general, so the press release tells me, but the nice things is that it’s not over-egged. Otherwise the artist would surely not have opted for the bright pink guitar, visible on one of the screens, or would have gone through great length to disguise the here and there clearly visible wires, mike stands and bulky amplifiers, which place it all very much into a twenty-first-century now.

So, what’s so incredibly likeable about this work? Partly I think it is the sheer simplicity of it. Don’t get me wrong though: obviously there’s an impressive level of technical accomplishment at work, with the six screens covering various instruments and images and sound somehow all adding up to a bigger whole. But it’s the adding up to the bigger whole of an in essence simple idea that seems to do the trick. That, and what seems like a refreshing lightness of touch: again not because the artist did not go through great lengths to actually produce the piece, filming in the Canadian Rocky Mountains in winter with no doubt at least a crew of several camera and sound people, as well as the artist’s companion. But it’s the compelling combination of serious undertones, a high level of production values, combined with a laid-back attitude and the simplicity that does produce something that is – like magic – much more than the sum of its parts.

What seems to add to this heady mix is the tentative nature with which the music starts, plays, peters out, and then starts again, giving the impression that it’s not perfection in the musical performance that the artist strives for. As a result it gives you, the viewer, the feeling that it doesn’t matter when in the sequence of events you walk in or leave, or how long you stay for. There doesn’t seem to be that – often implied – desire for you to experience a piece from beginning to end.

Because of the seeming casualness with which the music is played, and with which the protagonists seem to behave on screen – one of them occasionally walking into the frame or out without any clear reason, or leaning against a tree if at that moment in time his musical input is not required – the simple fact that you’ve walked into the space, looked around, and leave smiling (as most people do), seems to be enough. Used as we are to clear chronologies and (implied) narratives when it comes to video work, and the often felt pressure on our desired attention for its duration, this is quite liberating: it makes me feel relaxed and at ease. And funnily enough that’s exactly why I keep wanting to go back and stay. Just to hang out, in that room, with the six screens, the music and their bunch of casual players.

Maybe there’s something in the title that refers (possibly unwittingly) to this moment of feeling liberated, and the end to the oft-felt pressure of being a dutiful viewer. Maybe I’m getting carried away here and am I simply projecting my own experience onto it all.  Entitled The End, the work not only seems to indicate a wonderful clarity of vision, but also a trust that it all, indeed, adds up, in the end.

Some images below. The music can actually be heard as part of the YouTube clip that relates to the durational piece I referred to earlier.

For those wanting more about Venice: go read the abundance of reviews.
But, if you want to see more of actual work, you can find some other pictures, many of them actually moving, as many other Venice Biennale 2009 participations got the hang of it this year too, either via YouTube, or on dedicated Venice pavilion sites.

Here goes: Steve McQueen in the British pavilion, and for conversations with Martin Boyce (Scotland), John Cale (Wales) and Susan MacWilliam (Northern Ireland) go to the British Council website; Fiona Tan in the Dutch pavilion; Liam Gillick in the German pavilion; (About) Francis Upritchard in the New Zealand pavilion; Pae White in the Arsenale. And just for the fun and some good old-fashioned spectacle of it, Michelangelo Pistoletto in the Arsenale. The Danish & Nordic pavilion is not captured in moving image – as in essence the experience, curated by Elmgreen & Dragset, had to be experienced in real time – but is available in stills.

GvN

For whatever reasons, I have been rather maudlin and drawn lately. What once seemed to have a silver lining, now appears grey and miserable; it’s almost as if my personal outlook is covered in crap weather, without a break in the cloud cover.

This sense of being maudlin and melancholic got me thinking a bit. What is it that I am actually doing as an artist? The focus of this blog is to explore and try and better comprehend experiences, in whatever shape or form they may come in: gigs, art, sex, food, drugs, whatever. However I tend not to write from my own first person perspective as an artist, because I have another blog for doing that and I’m still establishing who I am on this blog versus the other one. But what I want to look at doesn’t necessarily fit there, at this moment in time, so bear with me, although this might not make sense in parts, but hopefully it will pull itself together at some stage.

Being melancholic and maudlin are feelings, or ways of feeling, that have always interested me. When I was a kid and the time came to colouring, the other kids gravitated towards the brightly coloured crayons and pencils, but not this kid. Give me some Rothko-like blacks and blues and fuck the yellow: to me yellow wasn’t even going to come close to expressing the ways that I was feeling. It didn’t call out to me and say ‘look at the depth and range of how to feel utterly shite’. (Perhaps it’s wise to insert a note here. Blacks and greys are not always depressive colours but it’s safe to say they work very well for the depressed).

I guess what I am trying to tackle is what happens when you step back from yourself in times of emotional mire or crisis and think ‘what here is usable for the work, and what here is simply going to hurt like a bastard and break my heart?’

Currently I find myself engulfed in a considerable amount of emotional strife, which seemingly gets larger by the day. At some moments I do actually step outside of myself and think ‘well, it already sucks, but what can I use, what can I reclaim back to be mine and be good?’

Fucking hell, I know, it seems cold and calculating, but I have two more installations to make, eight records to do and a ton of unanswered questions are looming. If the pain can feed and motivate that work in some ways, then why not use it?

So why all the bitching? What the hell is my problem?, you may ask. It’s not a problem per se but rather a quandary. The work I make is experiential – touching largely upon the idea of memory and a sense of looking backwards to look forwards –and it’s in this sense of memory that I find the melancholic and the maudlin to be useful. It’s the tinge, the hint of these emotions that seems to resonate most strongly within others. Since all of my own personal feelings are amplified to what seems like 200 per cent, if I won’t be adding the ingredients right, instead of a pinch, it will be a bucket load.

I mean I am not setting out to make work about whinging: that is the thing, that’s private. So much of this is private and applicable to me, but what’s useful is the transference of a set of emotions in order to create an experience for others.

At the end of the day the only thing I have to go on when I make work, is myself. I have stopped lying to myself when I say it’s all about me doing the artistic thing alone in my studio. Yes I make this work because it gets me out of bed and it’s who I am, but I also make work because I want to interact with people. I want to speak to them about certain things in a way that I can’t put in words.

As humans we all have emotions and it’s through these emotions that I try and bring people in. But the strangest thing about these emotions is the way in which we understand them. I choose to work with the idea of the maudlin and the melancholic: I know what the resulting emotions mean to me, how I feel within them and how they make me feel. That’s all I know. Because if both G and I say we’re sad, who’s to say that our sense of sadness is the same, and how can we even start to identify similarities? Sure, you can measure brain-waves and look at results of physical tests, but at the end of the day you’re left with words, and they’re words that fail us. I mean they have limitations. Saying the word ‘sad’ only provides the other person with his or her own personal understanding of it. How the hell do you climb inside and get a true comparison of your sadness versus mine?

Hmm, maybe I won’t be able to tie this together, but let me give it a go.

Making work is about trying to find the common ground between my ideas and the personal emotional stuff that generates it and my viewers who will use their own personal knowledge and frame of reference to understand what it is that I am doing. Right, that part is simple and a bit of a given. What’s harder is when you want to scratch beyond the surface and the idea that it has the potential to be a given. Everyone at some stage is sad, so they will get sadness. But it’s not just about getting sadness – it’s about understanding it, gathering it up and picking through the nuances. How do you do that?

-APS

APS

if you care enough to check me out at my other various web haunts, you’ll be up to speed on where my head’s at.  I try and keep this blog of Alex Spaulding/PhD stuff, but there is something that’s worth talking about here and not there

Some background info:

Within the scope of my PhD I am creating three room installations, the first being modeled on the bedroom I had as a child at my parent’s house. Due to various situations beyond my control, finishing this work
is taking forever. Meaning that I have conceptually been sleeping and breathing this work for longer than I have ever had to do in the past. What strikes me the most about this is how boring one’s idea can be
over a long period of time: not your normal long period of a couple months, rather a couple years, but also how in denial I’ve been about the true nature of this work.

The impetus behind this work was to recreate the space where I had my first ineffable experience, hiding from the world, listening to music and bathing in the waning winter daylight. Yes, that all happened, and it
was fundamentally one of the most important experiences in my life. But what also happened was I used to retreat to my room, to that space, and listen to music because I was a miserable child. (This is where blog
writing gets tricky, how to tell the tale without telling you too much).

I have plenty of distance from the kid I was, and parts of that kid still live inside of me: I still listen to music with the same wonderment and I still look for the winter dusk to hide lines and corners and turn what I see into a living Uta Barth photograph, but all of this looking and thinking, and reconsidering also makes me realise in some way that that was fundamentally one of the worst times in my life. Yet, here I am mining it for my own work, and essentially rewriting history by making it more than the sum of its parts.

The most challenging aspect that has come up for me is this unconscious way that I was going about re-writing my history, and denying that there had been anything even remotely negative about the memories or that particular time in general. More succinctly: can I take such a situation and make it ineffable for others, and do I even want to?

The first half of this question is important, the second references my exhaustion in fighting to make this project come to life, but it’s that fight that the question comes from. Before ignorance was bliss, I wasn’t aware of how painful the past was, and in my mind every aspect of the work was ineffable. But now that I sense perhaps not all aspects were so great, why bother covering that up? There is no rule that says I must engage in full disclosure with my viewers and the real tale is mine to tell,so why do I feel as if I am betraying the child whose room that was, and to whom the experiences belong?

There are no neat answers, and I don’t have witty replies or retorts within which to wrap this up, and in some way this is the worst form of navel gazing and chin stroking. As this blog explores the idea of
commonality within music and art, and perhaps the real struggle I am having is what sort of balance needs to be achieved within this room project to reach a humanised commonality, a place where the real is
accessible so that the ineffable can just exist.

-APS

It’s one of those random things that came into my head today while I was walking around doing errands, because anyone with an iPod is making a soundtrack to the next 5 minutes, forget about the film or their own life. We are creating and remaking our filmic soundtrack everyday, so what then lends any weight to the song I listen to today versus those I would immortalise with an idealised filmic version of my own life? For example, at the moment I am listening to The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret by Queens of the Stone Age, so if this particular moment, me writing this were immortalised on film, would the same song be playing?

The most obvious distinction is that the film version of your life has the potential to be seen by other people, who for a concentrated amount of time will feign interest in you, but when I am walking down the street –unless I am looking for trouble – the only people engaging with me and my iPod, are, well me and my iPod.

If that’s the only distinction, what then is the music in the soundtrack to the film version of my life supposed to symbolise? As a music geek, the idea of a film soundtrack is more appealing than the idea of the film itself. I mean do I choose things as they happened – like when I had my first kiss to Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine – and therefore should fact colour fiction, dressed as fact? Or, is the distinction between actual reality and an actualised reality something that is even still pertinent? My first kiss to Only Shallow is the soundtrack to reality, but would the filmic version need something else, would someone else’s interpretation of my reality entail them to choose something daft like Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It song

So if you were scoring your own biopic, how much is about sticking to the real? Choosing songs because they were what was actually playing when those experiences went down might make for potentially disjointed, although appealing listening, and it would better establish an idea of context. But the context of why that song was playing then only makes sense to me, because I was actually there. There is of course the ability to completely rewrite history with a few casual song changes: what was once happy can now be sad, what was once simply sad could now be catastrophic. Songs are the cheapest form of manipulation, thus adding emotional content where there might be none and enhancing whatever was/is there.

It’s kind of obvious I haven’t come to any real conclusion on this matter, I have merely asked a lot of questions. But to go back to my original question: what would the soundtrack to the film version of my life be?

In a very particular order, although I am not sure what scenes they would correspond to. other than the opening and closing credits, the list includes:

Opening Credits: Mark Farina – Dream Machine

David Bowie – Absolute Beginners
The Rolling Stones – Brown Sugar
Pil – Bad Baby
The Sex Pistols – No Feelings
Carly Simon – You’re So Vain
Film School – He’s a Deep Deep Lake
Windsor for the Derby – Nightingale
PJ Harvey – Victory
Arab Strap – Coming Down
Archers of Loaf – Worst Defence
Alexandra P. Spaulding – untitled
Beastie Boys – What Comes Around
Black Flag – My Rules
The Buzzcocks – Just Lust
Minor Threat – I Don’t Wanna Hear It
Fugazi – Public Witness Program
My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow
Bright Eyes – Take It Easy (Love Nothing)
Nirvana – You Know Your Right
Greg Dulli – Cigarettes
Fugazi – Margin Walker
Radiohead – Black Star
Sonic Youth – Teenage Riot
Radiohead – My Iron Lung
Groove Armada – Superstylin’
Hot Chip – Over and Over
Wu Tang Clan – Protect Ya Neck
The Streets – Has it Come to This
Heartless Bastards – New Resolution
Herbaliser – When I Shine
LCD Soundsystem – Someone Great
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – There She Goes My Beautiful World
Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #1
Beck – Lost Cause
The Breeders – Do You Love Me Now?
Radiohead – Let Down
Built to Spill – Goin’ Against Your Mind
New Order – Temptation
Katio – Color of Feels
The Field – From Here We Go Sublime
The Clash – London Calling

…. more to come

Closing Credits: Scott Walker – The Escape

APS

*I reserve the right to continually amend this list.