Lots of Work:
- A project by the band Black Country, New Road that has mainly been treated as a music album, though that is just one part of a strikingly dense series of works in different media, including the original live performances (which use 3 different set designs and sets of costumes), a series of related printed books/theatre programmes, and a concert film that was released for free online.
Lots of Song:
- This density also marks the suite of songs that rest at the bottom of this collection of works, which combine all sorts of musical styles into complex structures, as well as featuring words that shoot off in all sorts of directions.
= Pictures of Making Things (Together):
- In this way each work and each song explore different themes and ideas, but when all of these parts are joined together, they produce a picture of making, which is a picture of a way of making, which is a picture of joy in a way of making, and all of these pictures helpfully encourage making things. Or, a picture of people making things together, a picture of joy in that process, that in turn might encourage others to make things together.
A Picture of Making (A Picture of the Possible):
The way of making demonstrated here is double; a democratic organisation of works, in which different parts of the structure (the songs or set designs or books) can do as they please while also working towards a (an unknown?) common goal; and a collaborative process which does the same (a group of musicians with multiple composers and concerns, who sometimes switch roles). The concert becomes a central train station where a network of intersecting stories can meet and be performed.
1. The Violin Maker's Workshop
Turning into a door at random, a bell rings, revealing a place as quiet as the ceramic bowl on the ledge, a little chapel to a different time and structure of time. Shade is illuminated by tall white columns cast by small windows, casting light on a spiral staircase, brown paintings, engravings of masked clowns, Pulcinellas and Harlequins. Each worn plaster wall is pockmarked and scratched with telephone numbers and notes. Each workshop contains a little cosmos of dust in sunlight, falling in the slow time of a long window.
Hanging up are horse tails and bows in different stages of finish, some notched, some turned, some set with pearl. There are unfinished violins too, on wide, plain worktables set with heavy, faded blue clamps. A cabinet holding many glass-fronted drawers holds unknown treasures, little glass phials and jars squat and filled with colourful powders.
The violin maker lumbers slowly and carefully, speaking slowly and carefully in a Colorado accent. He explains his idea of making things, which is to understand a problem. His problem is to make something sound. You can use the old designs, but you won't have three hundred year old wood clear of all moisture.
I put my hand out the window of the car. How would you make a poem turned finely as the wood in the violin-maker's workshop, turned to the problem of a fine sound?
- The picture of making in LIVE AT BUSH HALL is introduced straight away in the first minute or so of the film, a fast-cutting montage dense with images and sounds: voices introduce the three books, there are images of the stage being built, and there are fragments of video taken with small cameras that appear to have been shot by members of the band as well as concert attendees. There are also images of a camera taking pictures of people in the crowd, followed by the actual photographs integrated into the montage.
- This cacophony leads straight into the beginning of the concert film-proper and the performance of the first song "Up Song" (which begins with more pictures of production, of clapper boards clacking). The lyrics of this song straightforwardly celebrate the act of making things together, while the arrangement builds spaces in which each instrument is given a moment in the spotlight. This song is performed in the first set design, which looks like an American high school prom or reunion.
SOMETHING WILD (1986)
While the concert film setting might suggest a lineage with STOP MAKING SENSE (1984), a more useful comparison might be with Jonathan Demme's subsequent film SOMETHING WILD. The disjointed feeling of the USA high school stage in LIVE AT BUSH HALL brought back the memory of the school reunion sequence in small town Pennsylvania where The Feelies play the function band.
Both films also feature a publication, in the case of SOMETHING WILD a yearbook, while LIVE AT BUSH HALL has something of the crazy carefree energy of Jeff Daniels' freaky dancing.
Or, a playful attitude to identity which delights in costumes and disguises, the different costumes in the concert film, or the scene at the second-hand shop.
Or, a shared democratic attitude to music. In SOMETHING WILD the soundtrack, and the characters in the film, are in the moment of the mixtape and the beginning of individual curation of music as well as the growing availability of international music. The narrative of the film becomes a space to be interrupted by musical performances by Sister Carol or a Bach recital on the harpsichord (delight in cutting together styles). Whereas the musical performance in LIVE AT BUSH HALL becomes a space for different narratives.
Or, a playfulness which sometimes boils over into surprisingly violent imagery, as in the song "Turbines/Pigs", or the scary third act of SOMETHING WILD.
- The second song "The Boy" builds a frame for a story about woodland animals in which an injured robin attempts to fix its broken wings, encountering different characters on the way. There's room for small details, like flowers seen from below when the robin fails to leave the ground. The story is split into 3 chapters, and each of these chapters is announced by the singer.
These announced headings are another sort of picture of making. The story is the kind you would expect to find written down, maybe in a small book with pictures - if not, in any case, this kind of story makes pictures in your head, using only words like the names of animals, a way to go into a different world, an illusion. Here the story is performed aloud with the written-down features intact. You can see the story being written and performed - but this doesn't seem to lessen the pictures the story creates in your head (of the animals!).
Illusion Without Illusion (A Picture Making (A Picture of the Possible)):
- Even more than in SOMETHING WILD there is a flurry of activity and a flux of identities and characters. This comes from the stage designs, which are visibly stage designs, and the costumes, which are visibly costumes. They register as costumes rather than as illusions of another identity, like masks, they register as the process of making identities rather than something permanent (a liberating feeling).
Maybe LIVE AT BUSH HALL is doing something positive in that this doesn't degenerate into a random play of signs or into nothingness. There is still a story, the story of the robin, without a trickery or an overwhelming of the viewer - a more co-operative experience? The story is something transparent overlaid on the visible process that creates it - it becomes pliant rather than demanding control of its own interpretation. This open quality allows others to see how a story functions, they might agree or disagree or use this knowledge to create their own. Maybe the effect of this is something is made possible - a different world can be created that is accessible and possible.
Picture of making: a framework that remains visible (performers and instruments on a stage) whilst also displaying different places making might lead into - dreams, stories, abstractions, or ideas for a different way of life. A space of fiction can be reflected back into real space as ideas, routes, gestures, transparent and subject to change. An escape from reality into reality.
DUELLE (1976) also known as TWHYLIGHT
Similarly, the story and dialogue of the film are collaged together out of fragments from other films, including musicals and detective films, as well as folk tales and mythology. The resulting narrative, which features supernatural characters interacting with everyday Parisians, is mysterious and open to interpretation. The performances of the actors are similarly experimental and again produce an effect where you can see performance itself taking place, you can see it being worked out in real time, as the actors attempt to produce a new form of performance that becomes extremely dance-like.
2. Two Cities
First City:
In the city in a dream there is a busy square. At the centre a collapsing fountain sits on the old cobblestones. Water still runs into the reservation of the fountain, but the statues are missing hands or noses. The square is busy with people, some sitting and listening to the sound of the clear water running through the red stones of the fountain. Around the square there are dilapidated hotels with slumping facades, faded bars leaking yellow lamp-light, and two grand archways leading into other squares. A railway crosses the southern archway, shaking dust from the masonry, and the steam from the train rises into a night sky marked with millions of stars.
Second City (The Swimming Pool City):
In another city people swim through the sound and light of a long street on a summer evening, the wash of sound from swaying branches and passing cars, the poses of men sitting outside cafes, the white light of a petrol station. Softly, amongst all this noise, they say
Chorus of the Swimmers:
"We have gone away. Where we are and how we came here, we have forgotten. Everything is imaginary, is a series of pictures."
- The song "Across the Pond Friend" is performed in a countryside setting of cut-out rolling hills and wind turbines, with farmyard costumes and hats from Van Gogh paintings. The words of the song seem to be a description of a transatlantic trip wherein the narrator meets a helpful accomplice (it sounds a little bit like the plot of SOMETHING WILD (SOMETHING WILD's picture of the possible is how quickly the two characters escape Manhattan into the hugeness of the USA. The rest of the world, a place worth visiting, is just a tunnel away)).
Distance Without Snobbery (Illusion Without Illusion (A Picture of Making (A Picture of the Possible))):
The music of this song is rooted in pop (whatever that is), but is at a distance from pop music. It lacks the sheen of production that pop music has, because it is a recording of a live performance by a group of musicians playing together (rather than overdubbing), mainly using traditional, acoustic instruments (violin and piano (not to imply this is something better or worse)) - yet the music itself has the quality of pop, and not the pop of 50 years ago. This distance is audible, but is different from other kinds of distancing. The intention here does not seem to be to call attention to the way popular music functions in a critical way, or to condescendingly attempt to "free the spectator", nor to attempt to use the form to transmit a message thought to be in contrast with that form.
There is none of the snobbery that these approaches can fall victim to. The distance that is not snobbery is a love of something and an encouragement for everyone else, a revealing of the working parts of a form like popular music which draws attention to their reproducibility - by anyone. Rather than a calling to attention of the negative aspects of a mass form of culture (if anything can still really be called that), the distance here reveals the positive and subversive possibilities of these forms. This idea aligns with the decision to stream the film for free online.
There are some parallels with the Tropicália artists working Brazil in the 1960s, who delighted in finding all kinds of great ideas in musical forms that were not only radically different, but often militantly opposed to one another. They used televised song contests to disseminate their work, later even producing their own television series DIVINHO, MARAVILHOSO (1968), which featured beautiful costumes and sets designed in collaboration with contemporary artists.
3. Night-Time Park
The long avenues of the night-time park are scattered with international pilgrims, dancing slowly or speaking quietly under the dark leaves, watching scenes framed by the trunks of the night-time trees.
- shhh -
A dog looks back at a matchbox containing a blue bay. As the printed picture of the red bridge grows, the dog imagines itself swimming, head bobbing up and down as it paddles through the dotty, printed blue bay waters. The dog shrinks as the frame tracks outwards, a small dog in the bay of the city.
In the night-time bandstand the group of musicians play their soft music. One turns the hand of a painted wooden box, producing a long, humming sound with woolly edges. Another carefully presses the pearl keys of an accordion, the soft clicks of the keys are a rhythm that accompanies the long, slow melodies of the night-time accordion.
- shhh -
The violin-maker stops and looks into the distance, through the light that falls slowly in a golden ramp through the glass of the workshop. Crossing the red bridge, the little car putters slowly through woodland to small, rocky towns, to the wide expanses of the desert. One of the pilgrims opens a door and steps into the warm evening of the desert that joins all things together. The sky has turned a deep blue, and so has the flat sand of the desert that stretches endlessly to the horizon.
A slow crowd sit in the night-time meadow at the centre of the park. Night-time breezes wash through the dim trees, fanning out waves of sound. The crowd lie on the cool grass, dizzied by the landscape spilled across the night sky. The biggest map, the biggest Euston Road. The view is endless, in the endlessness people can decide what they want to see.
- shhh -
Endless managers throw their hands up in sheer exasperation, clutch at the cheap carpets, throw telephones at cheerfully unresponsive walls. The workers are going on strike and nothing can stop them now, the machines are quiet and every wheel is completely still.
I sit down on the bench in the night-time park. I have been here before. The expanding leaves are full of sound that runs through my hands that move as the leaves do, new leaves in the new season, new hands.
Shhh...
- Other pictures of making: an interlude showing the sets being built and painted; "I Won't Always Love You", which also functions as a lesson on how to set a text to music; "Laughing Song" which recites the titles of all the other songs in the suite; "Dancers" which produces a staged performance within the staged performance, an imaginary choreography; a finale which presents the first song in a completely different arrangement.
A Picture of the Possible:
A text that describes another world, but does not exceed this world in its material means - it exceeds this world in imagining the possibilities presented by those means.
