NOTES… on Drawing Songs

Having two blogs isn’t working this time…

It’s working much better over on my website where it’s all in one place. Just because I’ve previously had a “project blog” in addition to the main blog (Threads) doesn’t mean I always have to…

So what will happen is I’m going to retire NOTES and paste the last two posts from here over to Threads and take it from there… the whole point is that the disparate elements of my practice merge, so it makes no sense to try to separate it again. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but sometimes you have to see it happen before you realise, sometimes you’re too close to it…

So goodbye NOTES and hello to a fully integrated practice, in a fully integrated blog!

It’s a weird thing really, the landing of an Arts Council Grant. It’s not as if I haven’t been working in the studio for the last year, and if I hadn’t got it, I would of course have carried on working.
The work has been physically running along one (visual) track, while the imaginary funded (music) work runs along far behind in my head. I would have got round to it eventually, with saving up for music studio and producer time, but it would have been piecemeal. Therefore it would always be lagging behind, and would not be having a real effect on the visual work, as I hoped and wanted. I believed (and still do) that what would be important in developing the work would be working on the sound work AT THE SAME TIME as the visual work.

Since hearing the good news, I have contacted everyone involved and arranged to “start”… and it really does feel like a start.
I’ve organised myself, my work space, my files… I’ve made lists and notes. I’ve sent huge music files through WeTransfer to Michael Clarke for review. A starting point. We have had a zoom meeting to discuss what that starting point is.

I learned through my previous funded project that it is a really good idea to have someone to document the project as it goes along. So I also have a carefully planned socially distanced meeting arranged with Laura Rhodes the project photographer. A starting point then… where am I now with the visual in one place and the sound in another? Have it captured as it is now, so that at the end of the project, about a year from now, I have something to assess progress against. We are quick to forget how things were…

………

A chance conversation about sound artist Bill Laybourne has led me to a conversation with him, and some collaboration on his project. We have very different skills and sensibilities, but have found touch-points in our work that are really interesting and inspiring. He has lent me a small contact microphone so that I can listen to my drawings, on paper and in wire, while I work on them, and while they hang. A week in, and already I’m seeing how working on both aspects simultaneously can make a difference to how I go about things. I can see me getting new equipment and mic’ing up everything I work on…

So now the money has landed in my account I can start in earnest.

It is worth noting that in the same week the money arrives, Birmingham goes into local lockdown measures, and 3/5 of the band, the recording studio and my producer are in Birmingham. I am just over the border, with one remaining band member a couple of miles away.

So my first task is to figure out how the plan can change in the short term (hopefully) to accommodate this. So my diary is filling, but with zoom meetings rather than real ones. We are creative people, I am sure we can figure it out. But the annoying thing is online meetings are not real time. Collaborative music making just doesn’t work. So it will consist of talk, and the transferring of files, but not true interaction.

However… I am careful not to be downhearted. I am grateful. I still have access to these wonderful people. And the real difference is in my own head. Previously I have held my sound ideas in a bubble… unable to do anything with them until after the fact of making, while saving up. So what happens is a bolting-on of sound after. What I am already feeling is that shift of thinking. The fact that I can record things, manipulate them, send them to Michael* for him to work with, and discuss with him the possibilities, and feed them back into the work I’m drawing/making almost immediately is fantastic.

My photographer Laura** is also in Birmingham. Originally we planned to do a starting point studio visit to document things that would get picked up and followed. Maybe we can do this while the weather is nice, in the local park, or my garden… but not just yet… I shall take not such great photos, and we can record a sort of Q&A together, and also with my fellow artist and project co-curator Sarah Goudie… but I think a little creative and clear thinking will be required to make this read coherently at the end.

It is interesting that any documentation of projects all over the place at the moment, are also documents of pandemic response, not just the work. I think we have to not just come to terms with this, but embrace what the restrictions make us do instead, that perhaps we would never have thought of. And to make us appreciate the luxury of sitting in a small room with another person, a microphone and a musical instrument.

*(Michael Clarke: musician, songwriter, producer, engineer, all round multi-talented good person)
**(Laura Rhodes: Photographs and videos, artist, interviewer, all round multi-talented good person)