Music & Dance at Kelvingrove Art Gallery

Some musical/dance images from Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which I visited this weekend:

'Melody' by Kellock Brown (1894)

'Music' designed by David Gauld, made by Hugh McCulloch & Co., Glasgown (c.1891)



Angel musician, detail from 'The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin' by Harry Clarke (1923) - a stained glass window originally designed for a convent in Dowanhill, Glasgow

as above

The Dance of Spring by E.A. Hornel (1864-1933)

 

Shimmy on Down

A new low in corporate clubbing at the Shimmy club in Glasgow, where women have complained about a two way mirror looking in to the women's toilets which groups of men can pay to view from an adjoining function room:

'Allegations that a nightclub in Glasgow has secretly fitted a two-way mirror to allow male guests to spy on the women's toilets "as a bit of fun" are being investigated by police and council licensing officers.Glasgow city council said it had received complaints that the Shimmy nightclub had installed a spy mirror – without warning female guests – between the toilets and a function room that was allegedly rented to private parties for £800.

A customer at the club called Amy told the Guardian she was warned about the two-way mirror by another customer when she visited Shimmy's recently to celebrate her birthday. Distressed, she left the toilet, and noticed that people in the club's main room could glimpse inside the toilets. The main view into the women's toilets was from private booths that were immediately adjacent to the mirror, she said. "It was booked out by all boys and they were up against the mirror and making gestures up against the mirror."

Amy complained directly to G1 Group, owner of the recently relaunched club in central Glasgow, saying it was "absolutely outrageous" that women customers were having their privacy invaded, allowing men to "leer disgustingly" at them. "Nowhere is it made clear that this is the case, so when visiting the bathroom for the first time, there are women bending over the sink, pouting into the mirror to redo their lipstick, adjusting themselves personally whilst unknowingly being watched by people on the other side," she said."What is even more vulgar is that the toilets face on to a private booth that can be booked out to specifically leer into the girls' bathrooms whilst the girls are unaware that they are being watched." (Guardian, 21 May 2013)

The G1 Group PLC 'founded by Managing Director, Stefan King' claims to be 'the most dynamic and forward thinking bar, restaurant, hotel, cinema and nightclub group in Scotland... currently operating 40+ venues across Scotland'. Not just The Shimmy  but G1 as a whole is facing a fierce backlash from women in Scotland. Existence is Futile on tumblr says: 'I urge you all to avoid/boycott ‘The Shimmy Club’ in Royal Exchange, Glasgow as they have a non-advertised two way mirror in the female toilets. This type of sexist exploitation of women has no place in Glasgow, let alone no place in 2013. The sexual objectification of the female club goers is utterly disgusting... Not only clubs/pubs and restaurants they also own The Grosvenor Cinema. I had a look to see exactly how many venues they own in Scotland and I was very surprised. Definitely making a note of them and boycotting every single one'.

1980s Glasgow Haircuts

Somebody else can write the cultural history of how the punk look was gradually domesticated in mainstream hairdressing during the 1980s - for now I will just say 'great hair'! These examples all from Alan and Linda Stewart's Rainbow Room (and Rainbow Room Education) in Glasgow.

From Hairdressers Journal: '1986 Blonde Cropped

'Its Band Aid for your Easter Bonnet', Anne Simpson, Glasgow Herald, 23 April 1984)

From Hairdressers Journal: '1984 Punk Quiff'

Lowlands: music at the Turner Prize

The Turner Prize 2010 exhibition is now open at Tate Britain, with at least three of the four short-listed artists having strong musical connections.

Painter Dexter Dalwood was once the bassist in first wave Bristol punk band The Cortinas. I have a copy of their 1977 single Fascist Dictator/Television Families which I will have to get out if he wins.

The Otolith Group is a partnership between Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The latter is well known for his music writing, notably the seminal afro-futurist thoughtist classic, More Brilliant than the Sun. The former sings on some of their film soundtracks.

I don't know whether Angela de la Cruz has a secret past as a member of an anarcho-punk band or zine editor, so can't comment on any musical connections with her work.

But the final room in the exhibition is a musical work by Susan Philipsz. She was shortlisted on the basis of her piece Lowlands which involved recordings of her singing a Scottish folk song being played under three bridges across the River Clyde in Glasgow. Transposing this into the much smaller scale of a single room in a gallery is quite a challenge, but actually adds something to it.

As with many old folk songs, there are several versions of Lowland's Away in circulation. Philipsz has recorded three different versions of the song which play simultaneously from a triangle of speakers in the gallery. The effect is slightly disorienting as the three voices are singing in chorus but not always the same lyrics. Presumably in the original piece it was not possible to hear the three voices together in the same way, or to mix between them by shifting your attention or location in relation to the speakers.

The acoustics of the gallery are of course different from outdoors with the sound waves from the three speakers creating a sonic space that does feel almost tangible, as when for instance a long sustained note carves the air.

It's undeniably lovely, but I guess there will be the predictable 'is it art?' response. It is true that in some ways it is not so different from the unaccompanied warblings of an accomplished folk singer - her style is similar to the recording of the song by Anne Briggs. But there is no doubt that she has created a specific experience quite distinct from what is commonly heard and felt in a folk club or a concert setting.

The song itself is a mournful lament for a lost lover, drowned and returned as a ghost. When I am in the Tate galleries I often think of its own ghosts, of the prisoners who suffered there when the Millbank Penitentiary stood on the site and the patients in the hospital next door replaced by the later Tate extension. Hearing this song there put me in mind of an inmate in exile from the Scotland of lowlands, highlands and islands, wistfully singing to themselves in their cell 'My love is drowned in the misty lowlands...'

Here's another three versions of the song, you could even create your own version of the Turner piece by playing them all at the same time!:

Anne Briggs:



Kate McGarrigle and Rufus Wainwright:



The Corries:

Of Cattle and Music

How much do the origins of music owe to cattle? I was prompted to think about this when reading 'The Storr: unfolding landscape' (edited by Angus Farquhar) a book documenting an ambitious 2005 public art project staged on the Storr mountain on the Isle of Skye by nva (a group with their origins in Test Department).

The event seems to have involved a nightwalk around the mountain with various light and sound happenings - seemingly including the sounds of ancient horns. Hence the book includes an essay by ancient musical instrument expert John Purser, Paths of our Ancestors, which discusses their significance:

'there were much older instruments belonging to the peoples who herded cattle in Ireland and Scotland - the beautiful curved bronze horns from the Bronze Age itself, of which many still survive. The orginals - some still playable - are derived in form from the horns of cattle and can reproduce the sounds of cattle among other things. They date from three millennia ago and, with their accompanying rattles shaped like a bull's scrotum, they carry with them a fertile memory of a great herding culture...

Besides being able to imitate the sounds of cattle, bronze horns can also convey a sense of fear or of magic - sounds which relate to the mythology of the cattle, in to which much that is magical is woven. That deeper sound world which is shared by all living things, in which the sounds of warning, or enticement and allure, have some strange commonality beyond analysis, will carry to you the sounds of our ancestors, human and animal, from deep in their throats. Listen in silence and you too may, in imagination, follow those paths where human and animal, reality and myth, meet without embarrassment in natural companionship'.

The notions of the horn section remains at the heart of soul and jazz, even if the instruments no longer resemble their animal ancestors. But the name itself is a reminder that some of the earliest musical instruments were made from cattle (from actual horns, and in the case of drums from the skin of cattle), partly in imitation of the sounds of these creatures. Later bagpipes too were made from animal skin, as well as the belly of some stringed instruments.

I was reminded of some of the primeval power of music last week, and indeed of Test Department, when I came across this lot in Glasgow's Buchanan Street. Clanadonia are self-styled 'Tribal Pipes and Drums band', and they do make a fearsome sound.

More Silent Raves

Earlier this month, police staged an operation to prevent a silent rave at Glasgow's central station. Elsewhere people did manage to put on similar events - 100 people danced at Chorlton Green (Manchester), apparently to celebrate somebody's birthday. In Milton Keynes, up to 400 people partied in the main shopping centre (see below):



Not so silent in Milton Keynes was a party in a Church Hall. The 18 year old organiser received a police caution for fraud after booking the hall for a family '50th birthday party' and then inviting hundreds of people via Facebook who apparently left the 'area strewn with broken glass, cans, beer bottles and glow sticks'.

Banning Christmas

Still a few days to go of the Twelve Days of Christmas festivities. In the 16th century though, protestant churches in Scotland sometimes tried to ban mid-winter celebrations - even Christmas carols - as pagan and papist:

'at St Andrews, in 1573... the kirk session, the local unit of church govern­ment, punished a number of people for 'observing of superstitious days and specially of Yuil-day.' The following year it made a particular example of a baker, for filling his house with lights and guests on New Year's Day and shouting 'Yuil! Yuil! Yuil!' In that year, too, the kirk session at Aberdeen tried fourteen women for 'playing, dancing and singing of filthy carols on Yule Day at even'...

From 1583 the Glasgow kirk sessions ordered that those who kept Yule were to be excommunicated and also punished by the secular magistrates. A few years later bakers at Perth were questioned for making 'Yule Bread', and in 1588 the Haddington presbytery forbade the singing of carols at this time. In 1593 the minister of Errol equated this pastime with fornication and in 1599 the local elite of Elgin prepared for the season by forbidding 'profane pastime ... viz. footballing through the town, snowballing, singing of carols or other profane songs, guising, piping, violing and dancing.' In that decade also a piper from Dunblane was forced to promise not to play upon Christmas Day or any other old festival, having been hired to do so by Yuletide revellers in villages along the Allan Water.


The same sorts of record (which are all that we have) also make clear the large amount of opposition which these measures encountered. The ruling at Glasgow had to be repeated four times up to 1604, a sure sign of resistance to it. At Aberdeen in 1606, thirty years after the campaign of repression began, the kirk session had to condemn anew 'the superstitious time of Yule or New Year's Day' and direct that henceforth the citizens should not 'presume to mask or disguise themselves in any sort, the men in women's clothes, nor the women in men's clothes, nor otherways, be dancing with bells, other on the streets of this burgh or in private house'. The Elgin session ruling of 1599 had been the third, and most detailed, of its kind within five years. Every one of those before had been defied by revellers disguised by blackened faces, masks, handkerchiefs, or fancy dress; traditional festival costume now assuming a practical advantage. So was this order, by at least two young women going abroad attired as men. At Yule in 1603 a man rode through the town with a cloth over his head, while another was accused of 'singing and hagmonayis' at New Year. Two years later a set of Aberdonians got into trouble by going through the streets 'masked and dancing with bells'.

Source: Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: a History of the Ritual Year in England (1996)

Glasgow Arches Under Threat

Famous Glasgow nightclub The Arches is at risk of losing its license (though its website declares that it is currently still open for business as usual):

'One of Scotland's leading arts venues has been ordered to close for six weeks after police discovered dozens of men engaged in indecent acts within a concealed area. Strathclyde Police uncovered the incident after receiving several complaints over a number of months that "acts of public indecency" were taking place at a monthly club run at the Arches in Glasgow. During an arranged visit to the Burly night in March this year two uniformed officers found up to 30 men "in various states of undress" and engaging in sexual activity in a corner area covered by black mesh. Despite the presence of two uniformed officers several of those taking part continued with the activity before disappearing into the crowd. One man was arrested and reported to the procurator-fiscal.

After a formal police complaint was made to the City of Glasgow Licensing Board, the Arches was told yesterday to shut its doors for six weeks after it was accepted the management was "not fit and proper" to hold the entertainment licence. The venue is to lodge an immediate appeal and will continue to trade prior to the case being taken to the sheriff court, where management hope the board's decision will be overturned. Failing that, the venue will have to comply with the sanction, shutting the entire Arches operation and then paying the local authority's legal costs. It has already axed the Burly event, which attracted older gay men from all over Scotland.

(Glasgow Herald, 30 August 2008)

The Arches is surely the best known club in Scotland: 'With a capacity of up to 3000, the cavernous Grade A listed Victorian archways provide the perfect setting for a phenomenal production set-up, with a Funktion 1 PA system and award-winning visuals supporting some of the biggest nights in Europe over the last 15 years. Which is probably why a selection of top DJ’s recently voted it amongst the top ten clubs in the world in DJ magazine. Alongside the five giants; Death Disco, Pressure, Colours, Freefall and Inside Out, where the world’s biggest DJs regularly play; Pete Tong, Sasha, Laurent Garnier, David Holmes, Judge Jules, Erol Alkan, Green Velvet and Carl Cox to name but a few, the Arches is also known for its smaller, more independent and specialist club nights, such as newcomers Art of Parties and massive weekly student night Octopussy, which houses a jacuzzi, swimming pool, bouncy castle and wedding chapel' (source: Arches website).

Machine Music in an Age of Sweat

The following is an extract from 'Machine Music in an Age of Sweat' an article by Fishtoe published in the Glasgow-based libertarian magazine Here & Now, no.16/17, 1996. In a way it is typical of some of the breathless writing from that time, when in the excitement of new intensities of noise and sweat the North West Passage seemed to have been found that would bypass all previous political and cultural efforts via the dancefloor. Also here is the dawning of the realization that maybe the moment was passing, or maybe the moment is always already passing... just as it is always already becoming for the next unjaded person coming along.

Techno is re-routed machinery. It is not metaphoric. It does not show us what could be achieved in the real world. It is a practical example of the seizure of the means of production, in this case weapons technology and found sounds; and the transformation of intended purposes through a technique of melting juxtaposi­tions. The reality produced by techno machines is radically different and the vistas of possibility opened up are far wider than that envisioned by those who advocate the seizure of state power, or workers' control. The shaping of mass behaviour through the generation of aural ambiences is of greater significance for free desiring production than anything dreamed of through imposed political directives.

Techno is hardness. It forbids the seepage of humanity into its impervious structure. It is pure grounding, without mediated spirits disguising its nature. It is without representation, there are no mirrors. Movement must always be away from it. It is an architecture, shaping the possible movements and consciousness of those who skate its grooves. Techno is a surface.

However a certain slackness has appeared at the centre of the techno project, a contentment that reduces it to less than shopping mall muzak (a form that at least fulfils its own function, causing distraction from itself and attracting attention to its visual perception). For music to be negative it was usually enough to rely on loudness and speed, flooding received behaviour with tempo­rary excitations which would override the reality principle. Any other formula must be considered affirmative in its relation to social production, only extremity is true. The Future Sound of London are most prominent in the unreserved positivity felt by techno-groups towards the technology used. This is compounded by a seepage of good vibes generally into ambient; New Age affirmations of spirituality strain upwards towards the light, severing all awareness of anal capital, such anti-materialisms are the essence of cringeful vulgarity.

That dance culture which is entirely celebratory in structure should reconstitute negativity is an unforeseen perversity that certainly has nothing to do with intent, or the political opinions of the people participating. In fact the dawning political conscious­ness of techno may be taken to be its formal capitulation into affirmative culture; in adopting political discourse it finds itself subject to the forces that generate it.


Amongst the harsh landscapes of junglist drums and bass, the wistful post-war drone of synths, the fragments of sound after the humans have left. Machined ambience, always melancholic, feels the absence of swarming human proliferation over its structures and can only connect to the dancing as those who are entirely alien to each other can, in a kind of mutual excited colonisation. Like all art ­forms it intuitively recognises its connection to a post-apocalypse; formalism is a process of exclusion and refinement - it denies the excess of the real world through clear lines, holding it back behind temporary artificial limits. The faculties of perception are tuned to engage more fully with the world as it floods back in and engulfs.

Language, the human presence does not belong in techno, only snatched, disembodied phrases which remind us that we are always in crowds, that our reality is always socially generated. Voices may swirl up from the depths of machine drums but they say nothing, their randomness is their effect. It is a music that does not participate in ideologies or representations but is a generating ground, literally a background. Human action occurs entirely in the foreground, across the surfaces which stretch out, against a backdrop of noise which determines movement in the simplest of base and superstructure models. Dancers connect into the archi­tectural ambience of pure function in an unmediated reality. This is an economy of sweat; what was once a demeaning sign labour, the mark of a limit to the possession of the means of production and thus the time to enjoy the products of that labour, is now a free currency spent in a relation of pleasure. So many signs are dissolved in the reversal, supersession and forgetting of mediated object/subject relations that it's possible to observe a fleeting body which in shorting sign-systems becomes a thing itself.

The weakness of techno lies in the adoption of a formulaic criteria for the reproduction of this intensity, attempting to hold on to it, and not continue to alter its boundaries. Extremity lapses into this year's melody. The wholesale embrace of technology, of spurious New Age spiritualisms, marks the loss of the thing for itself, and the return of producing for the ear. Its the re­penetration of the human in terms of quality, a rigid formulation of easily digested cliches, and the collapse back into the arena of art. What does not occur is the rigorous dispersal of the discoveries of techno, of the relations of aural ambient architecture and unmediated behaviour, into everyday life.

May Day Dancing in the Streets

A fairly low key May Day in London yesterday. At Canary Wharf (big business centre) about 100 people danced to a samba band, having previously entered the area disguised in office suits (an event initiated by Space Hijackers). They ended up partying on the Thames beach. In South London, there was dancing round a maypole in Kennington Park to the sounds of Soca, Gogol Bordello (a CD not the band) and a man with a mandolin. A banner read 'Workers of the World Relax'. Elsewhere in the UK there was a street party with sound system in Glasgow.

Globally, things were heavier in some parts of the world. In Los Angeles, police used tear gas to disperse a crowd partying in MacArthur Park at the end of a May Day migrants' rights rally.