Cottage Industry. Animation with Jim Alexander.

 More images from Jim's animation sessions at the Sir John Barrow cottage.  Our set is the attic, with Jim's camera halfway up the steps. Historian Iain McNicol is downstairs, showing people around and introducing them to the collection, and we get plenty of interested visitors...this weeks were from Blackpool, Preston, and Mexico. The piece is coming along nicely, we have found two little cassette machine keyfobs that serve our purpose nicely, and the music track that goes with the animation is just about ready, with new words being written and recorded downstairs while Jim does his thing using story boards, the song words, and ideas as they spring to mind. Many thanks to Dan Elsworth and Greenlane Archaeology.

 

REVERB: Aoire/John Hall at FON Aug 9

Tickets here....https://www.fonfestival.org/event/concert-aoire/

Programme note sneak preview.....

REVERB/ Aoire/ John Hall

Following the Play Summat We Know book, and the Play One Of Your Own exhibition, the REVERB project now looks at the ways in which the material extensions of music and pop culture affect us.

Musician Shaun Blezard, sculptor Alex Blackmore and Animator James Alexander will work with Lead Artist / writer John Hall to look at the enduring and ephemeral delivery systems of pop; at tape and records, at souvenirs, merch and personal memorabilia; at shops and venues and their place in the communal memory of the scenes they served and helped create, and in the animation and revivification of town centres and buildings.

And, we are working with the responses of local people to the exhibition in mind.

We begin with a work-in-progress combination of text and music from Aoire and John Hall.

Aoire is local musician and sound artist Shaun Blezard. He has been a part of the Barrow music community since the mid 80s, starting as bass player with The Peach Thieves and The Clementines. Inspired by mid 90s ambient dance he started making electronic music. This has his been his main interest for the last 25 years, incorporating field recordings and free improvisation into his music. He became the first Cumbrian composer to be featured in the British Music Collection and is returning to the stage after a break of a few years. He has played with musicians from Pere Ubu, The Slits and Mike Flowers Pops and many of the leading free improvisers in the UK.

John Hall is REVERB's lead artist and Project Manager. He was a founder Director of Full Of Noises and worked with Shaun in the laptop improv band Good Noise Bad Noise. Johns live work has taken him to Glastonbury Festival, the San Paulo Biennale and a Biker bar in Nashville . He produces books, records and audio for broadcast, and  the pop culture 'zine Flypaper.

Aoire is working on a commissioned cassette album for REVERB due out towards the end of this year. The music is made from elements of recordings of local independent bands from the 80s and 90s, mostly taken from old cassettes, many of which have been in various lofts in Barrow for decades. The music comes clad in tape hiss, wow, flutter and muck, degraded by copying, each play delivering less information and more evidence of the frailty of the vessel. Aoire deep-mines these accretions for stems and samples, and subjects them to a granular, forensic examination. What emerges is like a hazy memory of youth glimpsed from a middle aged perspective, it floats in a suspension of blue pub air and valve amp hum, pinpricked by shards of clarity.

My work here includes a number of shortish recordings I've called Familiar Music. Familiar as in reminiscent of something previously heard or felt, and Familiar as agent, companion, accomplice. Hopefully providing some ritual ambience, Familiar Music comprises , so far, 6 pieces of music, field recording and recovered audio that began as attempts at a recreation of an accidental folk music of television themes, advert jingles, idents, the aural wallpaper that was in the background of our lives and didn't quite leave us. Conjured, enlisted, then locked within form...tape, vinyl, digital system, that stuff has agency. It can be be used to inspire states of awareness and recall, to accompany unselfconscious rituals and exchanges, to wake cultural sleeper cells, to summon the trace from the walls.

The Song was assembled from a failed Fetch , from fragments delivered by inadequate file recovery software. Many people came to the POOYO show and remembered lost friends from their scene; this is me remembering one of mine.

REVERB is an Artspace project.

https://www.artspacecumbria.com/

 

REVERB on CANDO FM with Deborah Henry,

CANDO FM is Barrow's Community Radio Station, broadcasting out of the Mall.  You can listen on 106.3fm and and 107.3fm  Ulverston.  Deborah Henry presents a great music show called All Things Festival on Wednesdays and Fridays from 6 till 7 and last week she let me and Shaun Blezard aka Aoire in to talk about Reverb, our work in progress and to play some examples of what you might hear at our Full Of Noises Show on August 9 in Barrow.  Here's the recording. Any heavy breathing is me having charged up Duke Street in time to arrive late.  

Deborah has already been a big part of Reverb, she lent the Hash n Thrash Stick for the exhibition, and pointed me at Bill Clark who gave the exhibition airtime earlier in the year, many thanks to Bill for that.  There are other points of intersection here too: Deborah founded a men's mental health charity in Barrow, while Shaun is Safer Communities Co-ordinator for Every Life Matters  and has been a trustee for MIND in Furness. They talk of people from the music scenes they shared who aren't around any more, and of the process of dealing with their absence. The conversation here touches on the  ability of recordings to capture  a precious voice or the atmosphere of a time, to evoke and invoke the essence of a moment, and on the fragility both of cassette tape and our own memories as we age.  Radio Conversations like this help to publicise the work, obviously, but the best ones also give you a bit of space to relax, and to think and talk about what the work is about, to laugh at the daftness of something, to reflect on your reasons for doing it, and maybe sharpen an idea in real time. This is work in progress after all; it was nice to sit and talk about the process with someone who gets it and shares the history that informs so much of Shaun's work. 

Listen here..https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PC53S7kmIv65-PcP7Y9rUSuAPKnuNeCd/view?usp=sharing

Thanks Debs, and Cando.  More about Cando and its excellent work within this community here....https://candofm.co.uk/about/

 

Let's Dance...with Year Three at Sacred Heart in Barrow.

 I got in touch with Sacred Heart around Christmas,  and since then I've got to know Ms Willis'  Year three class quite well, since as well as the sessions we've done for Reverb, I worked with them and two other groups from the school on Artgene's recent Sea Like A Mirror project with the RNLI. 

They really are a great and very diverse bunch of young people, skillful, communicative,  interesting and very funny.  In 20 years time they'll have their own memories of growing up in the town and their own ideas of how we should be doing things. I think we'll be in good hands.

We began our project by talking about dancing, and then doing a bit. The children were asked to freeze mid-dance, to notice a few of the positions their friends were in, and make a series of drawings that would form the basis of a four-step animation. They then made a bendy figure from two pipe-cleaners  fixed it to a base and, in groups, posed it for two cameras using their drawings a reference.

I then cleaned up the backgrounds in the stills, ran the frames together, and then reversed them, so each figure went through 8 stages of movement, with two camera angles to choose from. 

                      

And then we speeded it up.  

Next, in order to do something messy, we clad the figures in clay and let them dry.  The results are a a collection of chunky clay figures, and we make little plynths  with the plan to make statues of dancers...

However, it was suggested that the best statues, and ones that an audience would connect with the video, might be made from the pipecleaners...so we made some more, and decorated the statue plynths to look like the one in Ramsden square in Barrow...

I know from my work here, from the chats I've had while making it and from my own nights out that dancing has always been a big thing in Barrow.  People love it, and put their hearts and souls into doing it, to live bands, to DJs, to their own music collections...and they do it all over town.  It's a form of creative expression, and it can be wonderful to watch...

So maybe we need to commemorate the dancers of Barrow with some statues of them in action. 

Here are a few examples of the children's work, and our video....and we'll have more to show you as REVERB progresses.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18aDzgUJoahDIvk0tqshFRrN1h_8GFl4t/view?usp=sharing

So thank you Year Three, Ms Willis and your support staff, it's been a real pleasure to meet you and work with you..

Claymation Under A Groove.

If you remember the animated sequence in Still Waters you'll  recognise James Alexander's style here. 

We have a recorded song, lost, salvaged in bits by inadequate retrieval software, crudely reassembled and made to roam the earth. It deals with loss and celebration, the agency of recorded voices and the constant presence of the Then in the Now. Something like that. Hopefully it'll make you laugh too. Either way, we are putting it into the clammy chops of Jim's figure here,  and recording it at the Sir John Barrow Cottage on Dragley Beck in Ulverston. 

We are at the storyboarding stage, using the words and stresses in the song as cues for movement, and rather than using sketches we using still images. The light in the cottage is ideal, and its a great place to visit. Historian Iain McNicol will be down there, fridays and sundays, and he'll clue you in and show you around the place and the collection of items relating to Sir John Barrow. 

Watch for the blog and the facebook stuff and we'll let you know when we are down there next. You can come and watch and hear us give whatever our current explanation is for what we are doing.  Many thanks to Dan Elsworth at https://www.greenlanearchaeology.co.uk/  for making the space available to us.,

                            

Tales from Toytown

This is Carl Flint, illustrator - for NME, Toytown Times, Marxism Today and Punch amongst others. I had a smashing afternoon with him in Sheffield on saturday talking about zines and posters and their relationship with the scenes that produce them with a view to a bit of collaborative work for Flypaper that will mirror the RED zine issue that was part of the Barrow Reverb exhibition. 

Carl is the latest in a increasing number of people I forgot to photograph, so luckily I have this shot of him with a mirror from the Fusion in Chesterfield.