Category Archives: Wavelength

Wavelength – Obscure English Lettriste and some Artists

Pepys’ Diary by Benny Hill (1961). Flight by Dryden Goodwin (2006) and Catriona Shaw sings Baldessari sings LeWitt re-edit Like a Virgin by Loao Onofre from the LP The Half-Shut Door (2011 SE8 Gallery) followed by Tony Conrad and Alexandria Gelencser ‘live in Austin, Texas 1999’ on Beta-Lactam Ring Records.

Wavelength – Poemes et Musique Lettristes

Records by Maurice LeMaitre reissued in 1971. 2 EPs and a single. The first EP was originally issued in 1958 in an edition of 100 copies, the second was issued in 1966 as “Maurice LeMaitre presente Le Lettrisme”. Accompanying the 1971 reissue is a single which is completely silent entitled “Le Crochet” with the instruction to the listener to engrave the vinyl.

Wavelength – Bob Parks and The Recreationals

Bob Parks and The Recreationals live at Raven Row Gallery, Artillery Lane, London. As part of the exhibition curated by Ed Baxter at Raven Row: Gone with the Wind; Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti and broadcasts from the gallery by Resonance 104.4fm, Wavelength became Ravelength for the duration of the show. This week’s guest was Bob Parks and his band playing live followed by an interview with Bob whose diverse career moves include Leicester Art College, The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), The Gong Show, extra in New York New York by Scorsese, Auctioneer’s assistant and much more. Since 1991 Bob has worked as a Host at the South Bank and the 6 piece band The Recreationals also work as Hosts at the same venue.

Wavelength – Ravelength from Raven Row

Dieter Roth: Die R adio Sonate, The R adio Sonata. The original LP was published in 1978 by Lebeer-Hossmann, Brussels and Hamburg and edition Hansjorg Mayer in a signed edition of 300. In 1995 Diter Roth produced a signed and numbered CD edition of 100 which vanished in mysterious circumstances. For this he rewrote two texts added a few words and fitted them to the CD format.

Wavelength – Nicky Hamlyn and Conor Kelly

Filmmaker and author of Film Art Phenomena Nicky Hamlyn and artist Conor Kelly talk about the disjunction between sound and image, displaced sound and their collaboration at Wilton’s Music Hall. Recorded at Raven Row for Gone with the Wind.

Wavelength – The MMs Bar Recordings

Artist Sandra Cross in conversation with Jonny Trunk about the MMs Bar Recordings: Making weekly rail trips between London and Leicester, Cross taped hundreds of buffet announcements, editing them into this 30-minute piece. Focusing on the small, usually unvarying list of fare generates a maddeningly mundane musicality. Seven minutes in, the unprecedented unavailability of hot drinks seems catastrophic. Different announcements, with vastly different emphasis and emotional resonances, can sound indefatigably enthusiastic about the Quavers/water combos, or audibly defeated. Marking the announcements as individual tracks might have offered infinite random variations, but it is fitting that we endure this album as the artist intended. (Stewart Lee review; Sunday Times Culture Section 17.07.11).

Wavelength – Ravelength from Raven Row

Nicolas de Oliveira talks about Artists’ Soundtracks, Unit 7, the Museum of Installation and the SE8 Gallery

Wavelength – Jack Bruce

One of the greatest bass players of all time Jack Bruce is one of the first wave of British blues musicians. His career reads like a who’s who of British blues and includes Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, Graham Bond Organisation, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and Cream. 1: Two Heartedly, To the Other Side, from Vertical’s Currency (1984). 2: The First Time I met the Blues, from Graham Bond Organisation recorded at the Railway Hotel, West Hampstead in 1964. 3: Folk Song, from BBC Live in Concert 1977. 4: Velasquez, from Desire Develops an Edge (Kip Hanrahan 1983). 5: We’re going wrong, also from Live at the BBC. 6: All Us Working Class Boys, also from Desire Develops an Edge.

Wavelength – Audio-films (for radio).

1. “Weekend” by Walter Ruttmann was a pioneering sound work commissioned in 1928 by Berlin Radio Hour. In a collage of words, music fragments and sounds, on 13th June 1930 the avant-garde film-maker Walter Ruttmann presented a radically innovative radio piece: an aural impression of a Berlin weekend urban landscape. In Ruttmann’s own words “Weekend is a study in sound-montage. In Weekend sound was an end itself.” Before making Weekend, Ruttmann had produced the experimental documentary Berlin-Symphony of a Great City as well as a number of short, experimental abstract animated films. Ruttmann sought possibilities for producing an audio-film for radio. “Everything audible in the world becomes material,” he wrote in a manifesto in 1929, anticipating Schaeffer, Varese and Cage. For Weekend sounds were recorded on optical sound film using the so-called Tri-Ergon process. The broadcast was never repeated and the original was lost until rediscovered in New York in 1978. In 2000 a CD was issued called Weekend Remix including ‘to rococo rot’ Berlin 98 version and that is the track played. 2. This track is an excerpt of Journey number 1 by the little known artist Jack Ellitt, born in England, but brought up in Sydney Australia. The vinyl record it comes from was pressed in 1954 but it is believed that the original dates from the 1930s when Ellitt was working with Len Lye on an unfinished film that evoked space travel. Apparently Ellitt’s music came before the film concept and acted as inspiration for the project. Released in 2007 on the CD Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music 1930-1973. 3. “L’Anticoncept” by the Lettrist poet Gil J. Wolman, being five excerpts from the film which was shown for the first time on 11 February 1952 at the ‘Avant-Garde 52’ cinema club. It consisted of blank illumination projected onto a weather balloon, accompanied by a staccato spoken soundtrack. The film was banned by the French censors on 2 April 1952. When the Lettrists visited the Cannes Film Festival the following month, they were forced to restrict the audience to journalists only. The text of the soundtrack was published in the sole issue of the Lettrist journal Ion in 1952. Ion also included the text of Guy Debord’s film Howls for Sade, which was dedicated to Wolman and featured his voice in its own soundtrack. 4. “Theme for an Imaginary Western” a song written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown originally appearing on Bruce’s Songs for a Tailor album in 1969. The song is sometimes referred to as “Theme from an Imaginary Western.” and has been performed by many artists, including Jack Bruce, Mountain, Leslie West, Colosseum, Greenslade and DC3. Mountain bassist and vocalist Felix Pappalardi had helped produce Bruce’s album and brought the song to guitarist/vocalist Leslie West’s attention for their album Climbing! and Mountain performed the song at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. This is the version by Mountain.