Butoh

Many years ago, when I was still trying to pick up and appropriate formal theatrical disciplines I took part in a Butoh workshop. The experience left me physically and mentally exhausted, but I don't recall any profound emotional impact. Beyond the confines of the immediate physical activity of participating in the slow, slow, shockingly precise activity I have no impression of being galvanised - which is always what you are aiming for in any such activity.

Yet years after the experience I find myself continually, increasingly, haunted by my introduction to Butoh. The formal discipline is highly attractive, as is the glacial progression of the movement and the very clear psychological journey undertaken by the performers.

This clip of Ikeda Carlotta reminds me as much of the physical payment excised by the engagement with the protocol as it does the ineffable mystery underpinning the discipline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opaS-W7b6GI

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Happy Birthday, Leonard Cohen

I have often shamelessly appropriated the technique of dictating a list of potently symbolic objects and stirring them up like a recipe into something more resonant than the component parts - most recently with the growing Fortress Longing reading list (more on that in a later post) and the reference in the Introduction to Fortress Longing podcast of the contents of the flight table, and the Andalucian hotel floor.

I first stole the technique from Leonard Cohen when I was a boy. It appeared in a two part piece called The Pure List and the Commentary in Flowers for Hitler. (The whole volume can now be read on Scribd, though I am not at all sure of the legal standing of this.)

This is point 6 from the commentary. Happy Birthday, Mr. Cohen!

"Albert Hotel sixth floor seven thirty p.m. On the scratched table I set out in a row a copper bust of Stalin, a plaster of paris bust of Beethoven, a china jug shaped like Winston Churchill's head, a reproduction of a fragment of the True Cross, a small idol, a photograph of a drawing of the Indian chief Pontiac, hair, an applicator used for artificial insemination. I undressed and waited for power."

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An Introduction to Fortress Longing

Episode 7 of Thomas Bey William Bailey's recommended "Belsona Academy" podcast features a 30 minute Human Greed special.

"Join us on this weeks Belsona Academy for a journey into Human Greed's Heart of Darkenss (and into other much more nuanced and indescribable states of being as well) Courtesy of Michael Begg we have an HG exclusive to this show entitled "Introduction to Fortress Longing: the interior campaign for the safe and complete return of the Sleeping Egyptian to the desert." Building upon a psycho-ambient repertoire that has earned HG comparisons to Arvo Part Henryk Gorecki and other purveyors of lush emotionality this new piece is Begg's first recorded narrative in 10 odd years. In it he deals with an illuminating moment of confrontation of death, and the singular after effects"

Belsona Strategic Site

Direct link to iTunes Belsona Academy podcast

Click here to view the new Fortress Longing blog

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Autumn Blood (constructions)

The Lumberton Trading Company compilation, Autumn Blood (Constructions) will be released later this month. A very limited number of copies will be for sale through Omnempathy.

TRACK LISTING

Lawrence English – Inside From Above
Peter Christopherson –
All Possible Numbers
Birds Build Nests Underground – St. Wave
Steven Severin – Sleepercell
Volga – Raining
Theme – Nothing Here
Andrew Liles – It’s Been So Long Now I’m Fucked If I Know
Zenial/Banabila – Factories from the Sky
Formication – Sows Air and the Dream of the Heart Star
Sion Orgon – Reverse Engineer
Human Greed (with Brenda LeeDVD) – Moonsuite IV: Dalkeith’s Next Top Model
Colin Potter – Never Underestimate the Power of Nothing

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cocoon line up in full

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UK Shows for Human Greed

Human Greed will be performing at the Cocoon Counter Culture Festival in Edinburgh on September 12th...

http://www.itsycollective.org/#/cocoon-info/4534334004

Human Greed will be performing at the Ship of Fools event in London on November 15th...

http://www.kaparte.info/

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Black Hill - Foxy Digitalis Review

Another nice review of Black Hill - this one on Foxy Digitalis

"From the start, the enveloping mood of this album pulls you down into its depths and doesn't let go until the final note"

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Paraphilia: "When Greed is Good"

Paraphilia Magazine's third issue has just been released. In there can be found some of the textual material informing and underlying Moonsuite. Including the section on "Dalkeith's Next Top Model" which - co-incidentally - is the section of Moonsuite narrated by LeeDVD on Human Greed's contribution to the forthcoming Lumberton Trading Co compilation "Autumn Blood (Constructions)"

Also, within this issue can be found "When Greed is Good" which is a continuation of the dialogue/interview between Canadian writer and film maker Kate MacDonald and myself that grew out of the original interview material for the Adverse Effect interview "Fine Arts of Language and Sound"

The magazine is free to download in PDF format and can be found here: http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com

Choice quote? "I feel as much sorrow for a generation who have been given no room for their own minds to grow as I feel deep, profound seething hatred and loathing for Simon Cowell"

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Weeping Girls

I usually balk at the idea of public art spaces. So, it came as a dramatic and very welcome shock to wander out into a West Lothian woodland and suddenly come into contact with these wonderful casts by Laura Ford.

Five of these figures stand in relative isolation in a corner of the woods. In contrast to the efforts made by other artists to patronizingly suggest means by which our contact with the space and with nature might be better tuned, Laura Ford unashamedly sensed the uneasy melancholy of this corner of the *deep, dark woods* and boldly dropped a narrative right into the mulch.

Transpires that Laura was at Chelsea School of Art the year before I turned up there, which gives me all the more reason to enthuse.

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Broken Sleep, Broken Radios

I had the most curious dream. Then I awoke and thought I should share it. Then I let the day slide. Now that I come here the memory of what was already hazy has become as tenuous as childhood.

But I dreamed that I stopped my life moving forward, and, at the same time - for they seemed like two separate events - I stopped time from turning.

What resulted was absolute silence, absolute peace. And I dreamed that I would visit everyone in their sleep and begin a study as to where the need for music came from. I would begin by examining the radio alarms at the side of each bed, and move slowly towards attics and basements where discarded stereos gathered dust and made homes for spiders.

An empirical approach led - by some circuitous route - to be able to generate a graph with stems featuring labels such as; survival and The illusion of shared experience and measure of disposable income as validation

Then there is only a sense of the coming rain, gathering darkly across a distant field, far away, in the green morning of childhood. The ungraspable feeling that there was a choice to be made between a life in art and a long walk out to Kaimes Quarry. When I awoke - and even now - I still cannot understand this choice that seemingly had to be made. They seem so inextricably linked. But you would need to know the long walk to Kaimes Quarry to appreciate why. You would need to know a certain summer and the scent of single rose oil to know how

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