Deathcleaning. Where is thy Sting album?

 

So, Carl Flint emails me saying here was a guy selling old fanzines on his stall on Chesterfield Flea Market...(see photo). Mostly British but a few international ones as well. I didn't buy any, he says. as I'm trying to cut back on those sort of purchases in the interest of death-cleaning

He's fine by the way, and so am I..

I only heard that Death Cleaning is a thing quite recently. Might have been from Carl. It's a Swedish thing, a rational and civilised preparation for the inevitable that takes the onus off family and probably makes you feel a bit more in charge of things. It'd also be a good way to ensure that anything embarrassing gets deffed before you do, like that Sting Live lp with the blobby painting on the cover  or the tubes of panic -purchase Pile Cream. 

(We've all been there. It's nothing to be ashamed of.) (Pile Cream, not Sting.) 

It's in the air.  I've  had quite a few  discussions regarding souvenirs etc, about what you keep and what you don't and why. A few people had made a conscious decision to dump drawers full of stuff, but I don't think anyone referred to Death Cleaning though, they just let the  conversation trail off....

Turns out there's a tv show about it too...

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/06/the-gentle-art-of-swedish-death-cleaning-a-rare-tv-show-that-will-change-your-life-for-the-better

I have been doing it myself. The drawing portfolio regularly gets the treatment, drawings get screwed up and dumped, leaving clouds of charcoal dust hanging. The reasoning is that someone, one day, will have to go through this stuff. And not through familial obligation either.  Its going to either be someone who volunteers, or a Professional.  I'm trying to get a head start on it, getting rid of the rubbish, anything I don't rate. I suppose it would be easier on the poor sod who gets the job if I got rid of the good stuff, so there was only obvious rubbish there. I'm not really sure how he's supposed to know the difference.

Anyway obviously I desperately want these fanzines, but I'm not going to be around Chesterfield on any thursday coming up. Luckily my friend Androo Wobble is, and is good enough to wander down and grab me a selected bundle. Androo has excellent judgement on these matters so it'll be a good selection, and something to mystify whoever has to one day drag out whatever is under my bed.  Many thanks youth.

Walking Headless

A busy few days. Alex's figures are taking on some extra layers of clothing and a bit of what todays young people, (or their parents) call Attitude.  Heads next, and then a coat of matt white for printing.  We've been talking to a firm who can print these, so a small edition will be coming your way. 

Meanwhile, Jim is working on mouth shapes so that his animated figure can sing...
 ...and we have a further Flypaper ready, another one looking at the Prittstick Jungle of fanzine publication and illustration, as a companion piece to the RED zine ish, with former NME illustrator Carl Flint. 

 

 

Here's to you, Messers Robinson.

The AOIRE / John Hall show at Full Of Noises will be rescheduled as soon as we can, and in the meantime John is writing this in the third person to let you that he has not been idle , and has taken delivery today of these items, which will form part of the presentation.

Loaned by Robinson's Brewery of Stockport, these original 1980s ashtrays will be used to light the room, in ways, and for reasons, that will become apparent.

John would like to thank Gillian Hannan of Robinson's Customer Services, and Joanne Clayton-Brown of the Hope and Anchor, Ulverston. Gillian tells us that she used to drink at the Grain and Grape, when she was about 16. As John is sure did many of the people that will read this and hopefully see the show.

Alex Blackmore. Pop Tribes. Work In Progress, and The Dressing Up Box.

 Alex Blackmore is working on a series of figures representing historic youth culture tribes.  Drawing on photos and his own recollections, he's producing these sculptures for scanning and 3D printing as an edition.

Alex tells us that the "Grey green stuff is Milliput & the green stuff is called greenstuff" and that "It sets a bit like chewing gum thats been chewed & stuck under a table." Which seems appropriate.

Each new pop tribe is first feared, then mocked and then commodified by the industry it seeks to undermine and by the culture it seeks to transcend. 

In the mid 60s, Coach parties toured the Haight Asbury and viewed the Hippies and street people from behind plexiglass, as Exotics in an updating of the 19thC World Tour, condensed and relocated within US borders. Meanwhile the more affluent hippies were doing something comparable in Nepal or Afghanistan, although they did at least get off the bus and talk to people. The ones who stayed home would carry mirrors with which to return the gawps of those coach parties. In early 80s London, several postcard series appeared showing kids in mohawks and studs in front of the Commons or Guardsmen, flipping the bird; "Greetings from London." They were the new Pearly Kings. "Consider yourself part of the furniture"

As representations of these tribes become more frequent they are reduced to basic signifiers. By now, Hippy is a necklace and a pair of round specs, Punk is a circled A, Mod – or the movie spin-off revival versh -a Spitfire decal on a parka. The complexities of Rave are reduced to a Smiley, or just the use of the word "Rave."

Each is launched intact, loaded with private language and behaviour codes, but an often unclear demarcation; Early Ted was rooted in a post war appropriation of Edwardian Brit finery, but owed a share of its swagger to a pre-rock'n'roll America, through cinema depictions of riverboat gambler chic and the exaggerations of Zoot . Punk pillaged Fetishware and Rocker styles in a fusion of transgressive folk devilry. The more photogenic end of Brit Hippy and the Underground indicates a Pre-Raph tendency.  Lace and velvet brushes against capes and Victorian militaria in search of Arcadia. Guinevere in Wonderland. Those round specs - Granny Glasses - hinted at the required hinterland of  wisdom and unworldliness, preferable to the harder edge provided by the contemporary Harry Palmer Hornrim.*  Only the Modernists of the late 50s - tech-heads, ears wide open, in a constant and exhausting state of self-appraisal and re-invention - can be said to be entirely of their own time.

Once the tribe is in orbit, there is a jettisoning of much of what got it up there in the first place. Its wit is diluted and coarsened; spokespeople (men, usually) are promoted and invited to the top tables. Edge doesn't stand a chance. It vanishes by design, through excessive handling, through the very processes that aid each new cult's ascendency to its tabloid demon high-waterline. 

 That unclear demarcation is now a given; we cheerfully loot the dressing up box, mixing and matching, punk rockers with flowers in our hair. 

In a time when images float freely, and yet have greater weight and influence than actual experience, we read each other by means of references, allusions, and allusions to references. 

 And now of course, nothing goes away. What's in the dressing up box is also in the Retro shops, online and on what remains of the High Street. Retro is now itself an attitude of mind, rather than a step on the way to one.

You are what you adopt.

The contents of the Dressing Up box still reward attention; clues to lineage can be found, bits of arcane cultural salvage can be bolted together and cranked into life, and ridden to more explicit connections which are harder to commodify, and harder to appropriate. 

 The problem lies in who is doing the digging and what they do with what they find. The Underground, the Punks and the more idealistic of the Ravers were trying to build something. The best of them made their move outside the mainstream. They pulled up alongside it, and boarded. And if they didn't actually take the wheel, they had a positive influence on the direction of travel. 

 If history, in a  post-truth world, can be reduced to images, floating unanchored in uncharted waters, then it can be appropriated and enlisted to any end, by people who really, really want to take the wheel. 

* I know, because I have a pair of each.

MERCH. Aoire / FON, Barrow Date To Be Rescheduled.

 

You'll have seen that we are rescheduling the FON gig. When we return This tape will be on sale .  It features 4 compositions from hours of Shaun's deep-mining and manipulation of the local demo tapes, gig recordings, rehearsal tapes etc that also provide the source material for the performance.

It comes within another limited edition layer of packaging, not shown here.

There'll also be a special edition of your super soaraway Flypaper, which will serve as Official Programme, at no additional charge.

 

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

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/