The Julie Ruin

Men make art, Men make music. For women to make art and music is in itself (sadly still true) a political statement. For women to make killer rock and roll with a Smash The State, Smash The Patriarchy power that The Julie Ruin brings to the stage is a revelation, a revaluation, and a revolution.

On the third day of visiting the 2014 MONA FOMA I was lamenting to myself the lack of political engagement of the artists. Sure there were many cool things to see, and hear, and taste, and there were many cool folk to mingle with and to chat. But in terms of anything that faced the urgencies of our time, there was very little.

And I wandered about the auditoriums and court yards and thought of Nietzsche:

This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Where was this music? Where was this reflection?

Art is enough singer Kathleen Hanna told the crowd, mix art with activism, with community building she further suggested to the audience. She discussed the need for unity, the need to get over that that false leftie sort of idea that we should be pure, and we should constantly cut down those who; for example, still drink milk in their fair trade tea, as opposed to the purity of soy milk. This is all crap and what is needed at this time is unity.

The band spoke warmly and honestly to the audience, and they were able to engage the usually passive Hobart crowd. Anyone that missed this show, missed a lesson in music and a lesson in politics and most vitally the missed a lesson in how music and politics can be fused as we dance round the grave about Kapital.

On a side note I thought it was of interest that the keyboard player was a bloke, was this a happy coincidence or a statement on the fact that many times there are bands in which the keyboard player is the only woman.

During the final song of the set the crowd was able to witness all the actual nature of class and gender relations in our “ freedom.” Two young women, rock and rollers and full of passion and energy, and desirous of change hurdled the barrier, into that special space between audience and performer, that space reserved for the elite few photographers and their bully boy escorts. Of course the big burly he-men bouncers pounced and man handled the women back into the seething mass, where they obviously belong.

One could see exactly what The Julie Ruin were saying. Any divergence, any deviation of the rules can not be allowed, can not be tolerated. There can be no dancing, save in the nominated places. Much like the horrid free speech areas which are popping up all over the Western World, which do no more than silence dissent.

HIVE

Hermes: Can you see the crowd dear Kharon?
Kharon: I see a rolling tumult, a life full of confusion, and their cities like hives - each one has a stinger to sting their neighbour.
Kharon 15.1ff ~ Lucian of Samosata

New York based experimental composer Tyondai Braxton played two performances at MONA FOMA on Friday night; I only say the first show. He led a party of five called HIVE in a brave new world of composition and looping experimentation.

Five space age, futuristic tables lined up in a row. Each with a matrix of holes cut into them. Slow clouds of aerosol rose, twisting and helixing, up to ceiling. The murmuring forest sounds of the expectant crowd rises and falls, punctuated by staccato beats of laughter and coughs, and tinny mobile phone tunes. Outside the sun fell and entered the river stream, while lights came on one by one in the houses, on the hill, across the river. And darkness spread over the ways of the world.

The performers climbed onto their tables and settled in, like cosmonauts in the capsule of a Soyuz rocket. And there was a pause and a hush as the band members organised themselves, arranging scores, making themselves comfortable, fiddling with electronic bits and bobs. Apple laptops glowed waking from sleep mode.

And then a beat and a rhythm, which quickly rushed into focus and tore around the room like a cloud of locusts devouring the villagers grain supply.

An assortment of noises ply upon ply. Clicks and clacks and beats and bumps. Sitting and basking in the extreme-summer heat, the cicada rests on the spear point of Athena and sings loudly, while we gather in parks and bars and cafes and clubs and schools and law courts and sing endlessly. Kalahari computer tenderhearted Khoisan sounds vie with simple stick on wood sound in the noisy emporium.

Indeed I am mesmerised by the flashing drum stick cutting the dense smoking air. And the bass drum sound surged like a crashing wave on the sea side shore, and the bass vibrations made the hairs on my dance, and made my insides move and squish.

No lyrics, no singing, bar some half heard sounds which may or may not have been speech. Wide varying smoke and light constant changing and intersecting, a sixth member of the group. No interaction with the audience. Just the five perched like the singing cicadas on the spear point never smiling, always grim focused. Only the layered texture of sounds. And I turned over in my mind, thinking to myself about the various ways and roads of freedom. Some can find freedom in precision, other in improvisation. And as abrupt as that the show was over.

The Enchantress of Numbers

The Enchantress of Numbers
Princess of Parallelograms

with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Hello is
begin
   Put_Line ("Hello WORLD!");
end Hello;

The ancient Greek smithy god Hephaestus built tripods that would aid him in this work. With the Ada Project Conrad Shawcross takes this one step further, in that he has made a tripod which aids in generating inspiration. Conrad Shawcross and Ken Farmer designed and built a five metre high robot arm that when programmed will trace intricate mathematical designs and three dimensional shapes. The large metal arm can stretch out, and never tiring, never forgetting repeating the dance shape over and over ad infinitum.

The name of this project comes from the Ada Lovelace the Victorian pioneer of the general purpose computer. Extending the idea of the Jacquard card Ada and her colleague Charles Babbage designed an 'analytical engine' that could solve equations. An early type of computer. Ada Lovelace went on to write the first computer program. This program calculated Bernoulli numbers. She was able however to see that with the ability to write and store programs on cards the engine could perform a great many tasks, saying “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

The Ada Project has given us a machine which weaves inspiration. A hypnotic machine that moves and sways through three dimensional space producing a specific pattern. A bright light is attached to the robot arm. This allows the movements to be captured on film, showing the completed shape. This moving light casts strange ebbing and flowing shadows as the robot dances.

Composers were invited to live with and immerse themselves in the choreography of the robot arm. Composing a piece of music for a binary dance. The result was the world premier of four short scores to compliment and interpret the jerky grace of the robot.

From a slow sinuous glacial arc to the soaring purity of the soprano voice, each piece was an attempt to interpret the splines made. Each response as unique as the robot actions are controlled.

Beatrice Dillion & Rupert Clervaux built up a percussive tachycardia crescendo combining recursive (F(n) = F(n − 1) + F(n − 2)) recordings of the re-imagined welding robot working with drum with piano with harpsichord.

Holly Herndan found a different, more alien sounding palette, making a science fiction sound which tumbled a jumble of falling down sort of rhythm beat and half heard phrases carried by the wind.

Tamara & Mylo combined voice and machine to explore the incurable cancer laudanum hallucinations of the last years of Ada Lovelace's short, unhappy, exhilarating, visionary life. Hallucinating the ecstasy of number.

Mira Calix explored the tension arising from the machine being able to do only what it is told and no more, and our dreamy desire to make a machine that can surprise, or enjoy strawberries & cream. This poem was sung by soprano Teresa Duddy.

The machine whirs and comes to life the arm swings up, the great noontide, and the arms swings down singing an end of the day song. The machines moves casting steel shadows on the walls. The clouds chase the sun across the beach.

Sun Ra

A large chunk of the country sweltered in a merciless heat wave, fruit bats and possums falling dead from trees. The RAN fired across the bow of a boat carrying desperate refugees. In was in this background that I went to see the Sun Ra Arkestra on the first night of the 2014 MONA FOMA festival.

Beautiful warm high summer evening I went down to an old wharf reclaimed warehouse on reclaimed from the sea Hunter Street. Having seen Sun Ra once many years ago -- sometime last century -- and knowing what to expect, I was still blown away by the joy, by the sonic oscillation, by the wild fire jazz bebop rave burning free across interplanetary space. The juxtaposed rhythms, chaos of vibrating space.

And as I was driving home, I was struck by the beauty of the moon reflecting off the waves. The Sun endlessly explodes and flames, radiating heat and light and all manner of energy. After seven minutes or so these expanding wave vibrations bounce off and make the moon glow. And the light then falls the surging endless wave upon wave of the lagoon. The light strikes sensitive cells in my eyes and is then relayed, in a effort to make sense, to my brain.

And so with Sun Ra Arkestra. This cold, empty, outer space depth of an idea struck me as a way to make sense of the band. Sun Ra used to speak of being transported to the planet Saturn. This transportation is the unifying idea for the band. Sum Ra created, and the Arkestra continues this science fiction mythos as a theme for their performances. This is seen in the Eygptian flavored space age customs, in lyrics which sing of other worlds and dimensions, of interplanetary harmony. And when they play the music rolls and swirls and bounces around and at times is reinforced to make bigger and stronger waves, while at other times the sound is undercutting and making stationary waves. Sound rises from the vibrations and mingles to bring forth new sounds that have never been played. These future echoes come to life and fall away.

Horns sounded, drums and piano and guitar and bass and an assortment of voices filled the hall. The audience swayed and danced and clapped along. The band encouraged the audience to become part of the band, part of sound, part of the cosmic harmony. The band played the Hobart Blues and I closed my eyes and swayed and dreamt down, dirty, ballsy Chicago brothel blues. Strippers glistening in the light half covered by feather boas, pasties blinking reflected diamonte crystals. In my reverie it was appropriate for the Arkestra to play “When You Wish Upon a Star,” as music, like dreams, builds our desires from the void, melting them away in an instant. And I thought that if Finnegans Wake is the book of the night, the book of dreams, then Sun Ra Arkestra is the song of the night, a vast endless soundtrack to dreaming.

Mimesis

---

Driving the heat wave afternoon
Shimmering highway false lake
The pitiless sun fades the paddocks
Cows stand in the Iron Creek,
Like grandparents at the beach.

Distorting angles and images
Upside down
And it is up to
The viewer
Observer
Car driver
To make sense...

Paraklausithyron

---

Callimachus: Epigram 64
A lament at the door ( paraklausithyron ).

---

So may you sleep, Konopion.
You force me to
Keep watch all night
On this chilly porch
Outside your door.

So may you sleep, most stubborn one,
And your lover you put to rest.
You do not come close to pity,
Not even in a dream.

The neighbours take pity on me.
But you, not even in a dream.

Soon your hair will grow grey
And you will recall
All of this.

Sou’easter

---

Three days windy rain.
Three days rainy wind.
Leaf twig stripping.
Wave crest spindrift.
Foam gathers dirty the strand
Battered of wind and rain days.
Crashing sea spray and salt
Thin covers cars and houses.

Rain and wind
Rattling windows
Tin night roof drumming
Dreaming. I am disturbed.
Roused sleep, broken branches,
Troubling dreams.
My child
My ten year old son dead.
On the street. His face bruised,
So much so I can not tell
Him, save by his feet.

It seems. So real.
My heart races.
My gut heaves
I feel ill.
Retching reaching
Stumbling stairs.
I can not sleep.
I listen his
Ten year old
Reassuring rhythmic
Sleep breathing.

Chamomile tea
To sleep settle.
I close my eyes
That image
Again and again.
I see.
Again the image.

A book. Maybe.
Read to nod.
Dozing off. Sleep.
Diverting mind
Void restless
Away false powers.
The dark cloudy night
Howls moonless.
Swaying dancing
Trees lash the roof.
Cracking creaking
Sounds of stress.
Leaves and branches
Scatter the garden.
Gather the garden.