Thing of the Day
THE
SLATE PIPE BANJO DRAGGERS
December 19th 2010
THE
SLATE PIPE BANJO DRAGGERS: Prime Bolus Music
– (Eaten By Squirrels) Apparently this sixteen minute one track CD is an edited and mastered
version of an improvised live set that the interestingly named Slate
Pipe Banjo Draggers have been performing around London this year. A
sixteen-minute, ever building piece of clever musical
construction.
“i live and work in london
i am a sound artist and audio visual technician
i make sound and video pieces which explore various methods of sound creation and employment
i make music using the name the slate pipe banjo draggers both alone and through collaboration
i make paintings using paint and mixed media”
So reads Andy Rowe’s (lower-case only, no capitalisation here) website
– just typed in Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers and up came Mr Rowe’s page,
seems to be his project..
Hard to work out how much of this
improvision is ‘live’. How many of the spoken words are
recorded,
who’s doing what, how many of them are there on the stage rather than
in a soundbite, what's field noise, recorded state – are those voices
live on stage? They sound like field recordings to us – not that it
matters here: this is well painted sound, this is good…
“The sixteen minute piece is called Prime Bolus Music
and comprises principally of found sounds and field recordings made in
London and Sri Lanka during 2010, these sounds have then been mixed
with conventional and software instruments” reads the accompanying
press release.
Prime Bolus is an impressive piece of work, a slowly evolving, regenerating piece – tribal electronics, evolving drones woven with spoken word, with announcements, train stations, pulsing drive, ritual organicness, slowly spinning machines, peaking ultra motions… Kind of dark in places, mysterious noises out there on the edges of the piece - layers, repetitive cycles overlapping, interlapping, interloping, layers to peel back, the more you journey with it, the more you hear, the more you discover.
Peeling mechanical onions for your ears, voice patterns, animal sounds, the sound of silence. Audio weaving – tactile, warm, inviting. Eavesdropping on the 149 to Edmonton Green, my friend said let’s go to a gay club… Scanner.. throbbing of the engine, voices from the deep, motorway city… I can hear the air the air that they breathe through their mouths… blood pumping warmth, tunes wrapped around tunes, drones meeting words, machine organicness getting closer, she gets a bit closer, she sees the room sideways again… she sees his hands in front of her… the beauty of machines, the safety of repetitive mechanicalism, of many voices, bites of conversations, announcements overheard…
This is excellent actually, locks you into those
rhythms, feeds you different bits each time, one great big complete
whole of a piece that works so well as one big sound painting, one
piece of joined up thinking. "Are you recording me? Are you going to
put that on the internet? Stop recording me!" Stick it on repeat, learn
the bus route, wait for the kick in that comes about five and a quarter
minutes along the journey and just go with the piece and enjoy it on so
many levels.. The real art of listening, resonance indeed. – soundart
with an excellent tune, a warm tune, an ever evolving ever building
tune, a warm texture, a narrative you just don’t tire of, a real piece
of thought-out crafted delight. We get a lot of this kind of thing sent
in here, most of it comes nowhere near holding our interest and taking
it with us like this fine piece does, you can’t help but pay attention…
Out
on Italy’s Eaten By Squirrels label as a numbered limited edtion of
just forty hard copies, I’m sure it must be available to
download as well. Further investigation via
www.slatepipe.co.uk
www.eatenbysquirrels.org
