cribbed via whileyouwereout

A ramble. Which is how it all started.

A walk through the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Adam Hoyle coding me a sound engine for a client, having a studio in the garden, these elements all conjoined in my creating Radio Arcadia a couple of years back…

An audio tape of birdsong from the Wiltshire garden of Digital One’s chairman has been used as the test transmission for various digital radio stations since it’s recording in the spring of 1992.

When it was last taken off air three years ago, the broadcaster was surprised to find it had dedicated listeners voicing complaint.

Radio Arcadia is my gift to all office and cubicle workers. Play gently. Escape.

www.flatearth.co.uk/arcadia

For those of you without speakers it boils down to me tweaking Adam’s audio engine to generate an endless stream of British bird song.

Skip to the summer, news reaches Adam and I that radio birdsong has finally been taken off the air (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8076381.stm), Adam asks if I would mind if he, in return, tweaked the code back, and ported it to the iPhone.

Which he does, asks me for a logo, and sends it into Apple for approval. Apple vet every application for inclusion in the iTunes store. We get a reply.

Subject: BirdSongFM 1.0: Application Submission Feedback

Dear Mr.Hoyle,

We’ve reviewed your application BirdSongFM and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

So it appears that if it hasn’t got a slider it’s no good. Dear Mr Mondrian, perhaps if the viewer were given a felt tip…

I particularly like Apple’s next line in the reply, “If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend …” Thanks Apple, I’m sure my mother will be very proud of me too.

So it seems that the iPhone is a closed platform. Adam is muttering about adding a tweet intensity control, but I for one think it may have ended for the best since I really hate the icon I drew, and publish it here to chastise myself for so fucking cute. Should have stuck to my guns too and called it Radio Arcadia.

Oh, and I learnt through the power of Google that Iggy sings “radio burning up above” and not radio birdland, although I kind of prefer my misheard version.

London, October 2009

Sometimes you can reel off a load of shots only to find it’s the initial test image that has it all…

I feel I’ve come to the party too late. And what a fantastic party it would have been. Until June there has been an exhibition of Carlo Mollino’s work here in London. And I found at about him last weekend.

Chatting at the lab about lo-fi erotica with fellow rock Holgist Brian from www.letthemeatcoal.com, waiting for our clip tests to develop, he asks if I like the work of Mr Mollino. Ignorance. Google to the rescue.

Carlo Mollino is a well renowned furniture designer and architect, noted for his lavish interiors with attention to handcrafted detail, as well as respected photographer. But beyond that he lived a life with an sybaritic exuberance that reads like a Scott Fitzgerald playboy.

Here’s a quick round-up of his endevours aside from the above: winning the 24-hour race at La Mans is a car of his own design; writing a book on his own techniques for downhill skiing; aviator and engineer of airplane parts; publishing a thesis on photography, using extensive retouching techniques to match the photographic reality to his mind’s fantasy. He wrote…

Everything is allowed, imagination is always saved

He had built an elaborate room to die in and hence be carried on into the afterlife, other sources suggest he was an occultist, drug user and sex addict but these have only ‘internet substantiation’ so far. But the icing on the tiered cake for me is, when the executors of his will started clearing his house they uncovered hundreds of erotic polaroids and photographs shot over twenty years.

The polaroids must have given him a freedom to pursue this private pastime as the imagery gets bolder. He hired local Turin prostitutes to pose in meticulously posed scenarios, using new models for each shot. Their beauty and pathos I think emerge from the fact that although this were clandestine and risque, he was not capturing them as pornography to masturbate over, nor as trophy photos of conquests; they were shot intended as erotic art if just for his personal audience of one. The non-professional models bring a voluptuousness and honesty that only heightens his aspirations.

Carlo Mollino, quite a card.

Further reading:
www.postmedia.net/06/mollino.htm
www.designboom.com/world/mollino/photos/index.html
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_2_42/ai_109023355/
ambushstudio.blogspot.com/2009/06/carlo-mollino.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Mollino
www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/6374/carlo-mollino-interiors-at-sebastian-and-barquet-london.html
www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/fashion/04iht-design4.html
www.colectiva.tv/wordpress/lang/en-us/las-polaroids-de-carlo-mollinocarlo-mollinos-polaroids/

All polaroids shot by Carlo Mollino

Blasted by your booby traps
I felt the blow in both knee-caps
Your eyes did shine
Your lips were fine
And the device in you pants was out of sight

All you give me is barbed wire love
All caught up in barbed wire love
Tangled up in barbed wire love
Throw my leg over barbed wire love
Barbed wire love snags my jeans

Fantastic.

Thirty years a go Stiff Little Fingers released ‘Inflammable Material’, featuring their incendiary paean to teenage lust ‘Barbed Wire Love’: a raw marriage of punk and doo-wop.

Both musical movements share another legacy, that of prolific reproduction. Punk with it’s do-it-yourself aesthetic and a fan base centred around live gigs with direct contact to the groups, spawned for a short while a huge number of record releases. Anyone who saved enough money from their Saturday job could put out a record. And with Geoff Travis deciding to form Rough Trade to wrest control of distribution away from the majors anyone had a chance too.

But independent record production has an unsung birth, in the vocal harmony groups of the 40s and 50s, a genre which became popularised as Doo-Wop. Across America in black neighbourhoods groups of friends would gather and vocal harmonise together. With no musical instruments and need for overdubs or mixing levels these groups found it simple to to pitch up at a recording studio, complete their song in a single take, and purchase a pressing of perhaps a hundred records. It is estimate that over it’s 25 year span Doo-Wop gave birth to 30,000 songs. Shaaa-bop!

The 70s saw a revival in vocal harmonies (Manhattan Transfer anyone?) and Stiff Little Fingers ripped the pastiche apart from the inside and hurled it into present. Their blue print lay dormant for thirty years till Glasvegas picked up the mantle.

Punk was largely posturing and the main players sang of revolution but it was SLF coming up from the streets of belfast who gave anger of revolt it’s true voice. Buy the album from www.slf.com and listen to the righteous paint-blistering anger of Suspect Device. And then there is their finest moment…

People occasionally cover a Bob Marley song, and usually with a ‘why bother’ result. To equal Saint Bob is something, but to better him…? SLF take Rita Marley’s ‘Johnny Was’ and transpose the senseless shooting of the protagonist from the electoral violence of Jamaica’s Kingston to the occupation and civil war in Northern Ireland. Shedding along the way any pretense of authenticity of reggae and playing it out it a white heat of guitar noise. Still, when Jake Burns rasps “a single shot shot rings out in the Belfast night” the hairs on my neck stand on end, thirty years on.

Is it that good? Buy the album and see for yourself.

“Handbag”
London, October 2009

‘Vaudeville Ruin’
Fire eater. Burlesque performer. Hula Queen.
London, October 2009

The internet is both a blessing and a curse. But you knew that. Whilst allowing the easy publication of ideas and work that would never reach us in the mainstream media it offers one major drawback: it’s a little too easy to get lost in it’s flows and eddies when you should be working.

Lomoporno is a new venture from www.flashglamtrash.com, one of the destinations I stop off out to see what’s new in the world. A world where diamonds in the gutter come wrapped in suspiciously stained flyers from Studio 54 perhaps. Not always not safe for work.

Not sure they would want to be called nice people, so I shall just say those people at Lomoporno published a selection of my photographs. And now I discover it’s going off line because The Lomographic Society object to the site’s name. How often do you type ‘porno’ by accident instead of ‘graphy’? I understand protecting a brand but I find it a touch ironic given rule 10 at www.lomography.com/about/the-ten-golden-rules.

No hard feelings, and you might like to know The Photographers Gallery sells Holgas at £25, same price as eBay.

I will not be dancing as part of Geraldine Pilgrim’s “Handbag” this Monday evening at Battersea Arts Centre. Do come along and not shake a leg. It’s rather uplifting and joyous.

In an empty ballroom a caretaker sweeps away the remnants of a previous event. A woman enters the space and puts down her handbag. A beat begins, a mirror ball turns and the sound of a classic dance track fills the air…

A witty and wistful performance that, in a few delirious moments, succinctly makes the point that no woman needs a man when she has got her handbag in tow. Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

Tickets and information at www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/event.php?id=619