Forthcoming & Fragments

31 March 2009

That Night Follows Day is finally heading for performance in London – two gigs at Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the lovely Spill Festival, next Tuesday and Wednesday 6 and 7 April at 7.45pm.

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Two weeks later (from Tuesday 21- Saturday 25 April) the new piece from Forced Entertainment Void Story premieres at Soho Theatre, again as part of Spill Festival. Use Void Story tag to find various images and writing fragments related to the project here in the notebook.

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My videos So Small and Erasure feature in the show Roll it to me at Collective, 22-28 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1NY nearby Waverley railway station.The show runs 14.03.09-09.05.09 and also features work from Pil and Galia Kollectiv and TeamPingPong.

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I was there in the blitz and it’s come to me, relatively recently, that my love for abstract sounds [came from] the air-raid sirens: that’s a sound you hear and you don’t know the source of as a young child… then the sound of the “all clear” – that was electronic music. I mentioned the Catholic bit: I was taken to benediction as a child and it was all in Latin -plain song hymns in an abstract language. After the worst blitz I was shifted to Preston, where my parents came from. It’s only today that I’ve realised that the sound of clogs on cobbles must have been such a big influence on me – that percussive sound of all the mill workers going to work at six o’clock in the morning.

Been following various links about Delia Derbyshire who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the ’60s producing electronic music and sound effects for TV shows (Dr Who theme, for example).  Here’s a short interview from which the quote above is taken. Maths and music at Cambridge. Quite some more digging to do too – want to have a proper look around this site for another BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer Daphne Oram.

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“Mr. Beck presents himself as a revivalist in a troubled land. He preaches against politicians, hosts regular segments titled “Constitution Under Attack” and “Economic Apocalypse,” and occasionally breaks into tears.”

This New York Times article about Glenn Beck, Fox News’ highly theatrical and increasingly popular news anchor had me searching out clips of Peter Finch in the movie Network (1976) which I haven’t seen in ages.
Quoted in the NYT piece conservative writer David Frum says Beck’s success “is a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

Scary.

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