Article Issue 13

ARTICLE Issue 13 Article and Sensoria April 2010

SYNESTHESIA Sense Light Organs Sniffer Dogs Psychics

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Article Magazine – Issue 13: The Synesthesia Issue This issue of Article magazine has been created in collaboration with Sensoria Film and Music Festival. They provided ideas inspiration, contacts, and tireless patience as we bored them with details of print specifications and content ratios. Before we explain anything about the issue, we have to thank Jo and Nigel for all they gave at a time when they were obviously very busy.

Thanks.

When it comes to gaining an idea of what synesthesia is, descriptive language is perhaps the first clue. We purposefully confuse descriptive words in search of their most evocative combinations. Words like sweet, dark, sour, tasty, bright, painful, are all descriptive adjectives used primarily to describe sensations felt by specific senses. Yet such words are easily transferred to descriptions of other senses. You know what I mean when I say “dark music’” or “sweet rhythms” despite the fact that the words ‘dark’ and ‘sweet’ are normally used to describe other senses. For a privileged few, this evocative confusion of senses goes far beyond language, and into into an actual world of perception. Synesthesia is a condition in which a persons’ senses are involuntarily ‘united’ in a way the general population does not normally experience.

These unions are incredibly varied in their scope, unique to the individuals who experience them.

ARTICLE

ARTICLE Issue 13 April/May 2010 Article and Sensoria Article is a guide to the space that you are in. Connecting urbanism, pop culture, fashion, music and criticism Article is driven by the desire to demonstrate that the normal and everyday is in fact fascinating and absorbing.

This issue has been created to coincide with Sheffield’s Sensoria Festival of Film and Music. www.sensoria.org.uk www.articlemagazine.co.uk

Taking these forced connections as a theme, this issue of Article has set out to explore the condition of Synesthesia. But not without taking precautions. One defining facet of synesthesia is its uniqueness to the individual. A famous example of two inconsistent synesthetes was the disagreement between composers Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov about which note was the colour yellow. It does no’t take a genius to figure out that recreating a true synesthetic is nearly impossible. Although, history has shown it has not been for lack of trying.

So rather than try an foster genuine synesthetic experiences in our readers, we decided to go a different route and create our own synthetic synesthetic connections. All of the features in this issue are about mixing an confusing senses in one way or another.

Beyond the feature section we have also reviewed five films showing at this year’s Sensoria festival, and interviewed a few of the performers and one film director. In addition to this you should find some further interviews and a guide to what’s happening in Sheffield’s art world these coming months.

Article.

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ARTICLE

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Light and Music Tom Banham

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Wax Cylinder Recordings Alasdair Hiscock

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Extra Sensory Perception Kate Lloyd

23 Article’s Guide to Life

Sensoria Film Picks The Life Worth Living – Art Previews from Around the City

34 A Taste of Castle Market Michel Hunter

40 Police Dogs and the Smell of Justice Tom Bobbin

42 Sensory Deprivation Ivan Rabodzeenko Interviews

Studio B4 Bank Street Arts 32-40 Bank Street Sheffield S1 2DS

46 British Sea Power

Produced and Designed by Ben Dunmore and Alasdair Hiscock

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More Design and Production Ivan Rabodzeenko

50 52 56 60 4

www.articlemagazine.co.uk contact@impursuit.com

Kathryn Hall Rachel Koolen Tom Bobbin We Call it Skweee Ben Dunmore Shaun Bloodworth James Woodcock Music For Real Airports Alasdair Hiscock Tom J. Newell Ben Dunmore

Special Thanks to: Jo and Nigel and everyone vibing Sensoria Festival. The Site Gallery Team, James Dodd, Club Pony, Bernie, James O’Hara, Chris Smith, Rupert Wood, Max Wadsworth, Greg and Becky at Kuji, Tom J. Newell, Shaun Bloodworth.

ARTICLE

Contributors Article Magazine was started in the spring of 2008 by a bunch of students who wanted an outlet for their creative urges. Un-attracted to the thought of jumping straight into internships at large companies in London or wherever else, the idea was simple, get experience of making by doing it, learn on the way. With the first issues paid for by gigs in small bars around Sheffield, the magazine has grown into a nearly monthly publication paid for entirely by willing advertisers who are cool enough to get it. Article is made by people who like it, are bored, want to do something. Here are some of their profiles.

Tom Banham is resident DJ at Sheffield’s Club Alasdair Hiscock doesn’t Pony. He is also a talented wear a helmet on his bike, writer who’s skills we but is otherwise pretty are trying to foster. http:// tame. He should probably www.myspace.com/ be credited as Art Director. upandatomdjs Ben Dunmore likes coffee and hot sauce, he wrote all the bits that don’t get credited and bossed people about to greater or lesser effect.

Ollie Stone is a freelance illustrator from dahn sarf.

He did the pictures for the cover and the light organ piece. Check out more of his illustration at www. olliestone.co.uk Kate Lloyd is a student at the University of Sheffield and a fashion blogger.

She writes for us too. And when she isn’t too busy writing philosophy essays, helps out around the office.

Kate wrote about some psychics http://wearniceclothes. blogspot.com/ 6

James Woodcock is an architecture student and DJ with a penchant for boat shoes. He interviewed Shaun Bloodworth. Check him at jamesmontrave. tumblr.com/

Thomas Heginbotham will, one day, move to the big city, and get a job in advertising. But for now, he works for a parking company and does the odd Kate Pearson will soon bit of illustration. He drew finish her photography the dog mask. degree at Sheffield Hallam http:// and swiftly move to Paris. thebitsinbetweenblog.

She took the photos in blogspot.com/ the Castle Market feature. http://www.flickr.com/ Michael Hunter is a soonphotos/topupthetea/ to-be graduate preparing for the dole queue back Ivan Robadzeenko in his smog-filled homed studies architecture at the town in the North East of University of Sheffield. He England. He bought some listens to awful bass music stuff in Castle Market. and trance, but brings a michaelpaulhunter@ Russian style of optimism googlemail.com to the Article office.

Thativansart.blogspot.com Ashleigh Barron studies Design and Art Direction Tom Bobbin likes his at the Manchester School bicycle and is about to start of Art. As far as we can an MA at the University of remember, hers is the first Sheffield about some crazy layout by anyone trained existential philosophy. He to lay things out. She did interviewed Rachel Koolen the psychics artwork. and talked to the police ashleighbarron.blogspot. about their dogs. com/

LIGHTS AND MUSIC

What do you see when you listen to music?

Maybe colours or shapes. But could you ever know what someone else saw; whether this relationship was universal?

Even though both the Ancient Greeks and Renaissance Europeans were fascinated by the relationship between sound and colour, it was not until 1812 that any serious neurological research was undertaken into the condition.

Once published, Gustav Fechger’s study sparked a scientific interest in the condition that lasted until the 1920s, when interest in the condition dwindled, and it was barely so much as considered a topic for research until the 1980s.

While partly due to the benign nature of the condition (indeed most people ‘afflicted’ with the condition see it as positive, not something to be suffered), 20th Century scientists were actively moving away from the individualistic

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focus that characterised examinations of earlier years. In contrast, Synaesthesia has shown itself to be a highly subjective phenomenon, varying widely between individuals; there are believed to be over 70 different types of synaesthete who, while they all share the characteristic of having separate responses triggered by abnormal stimuli, are entirely different in the nature, variety and severity of their condition. While the most well known are coloured numbers, or seeing music, there are also people who see dates aligned in physical space, or imagine the three-dimensional topography of sentences.

“Rather than producing sound, each key when depressed would open a curtain, revealing the corresponding coloured pane, and bathing the room in a symphony of colour. At least in theory.�

Oddly, many synaesthetes who share the same kind of synaethesia seem to have very similar experiences of their condition. Among people who see musical pitch, tone or timbre as colour, deep sounds tend to occupy the lower end of the spectrum, and bright, harsh sounds such as trumpet blasts are often significantly lighter in tone. The synaesthete composer Alexander Scriabin discovered his own condition when both he and Rimsky-Korsakov experienced an entire piece in D major as overwhelmingly yellow.

Although the synaesthetic response was unknown at the time, it is exactly this apparent relationship between the musical scale and the visible light spectrum that grabbed the attention of 16th Century mathematicians. Following his experiments with prisms and white light, Newton wrote of a colour spectrum, detailing what he saw as a mathematical relationship between tone in both colour and sound. Goethe too became fascinated with these principles, describing them extensively in Theory of Colours. Prior to this, Louis-Bertrand Castel explained his own findings in his proposal for an Ocular Harpsichord.

Castel, a Jesuit monk, was the first man to attempt to build a functioning Colour Organ, a machine that would play light according to this perceived relationship between colour and sound. Consisting of a double length keyboard to which was attached a gigantic cabinet, filled with candles shining through coloured panes of glass, the organ was played as you would a piano. Rather than producing sound, each key when depressed would open a curtain, 11

“All social characteristics are seen as somehow contributing to our ‘fitness’, whether it be the physical characteristics we find attractive, the foods we eat, or the way we communicate. How can you explain art in these evolutionary terms?” revealing the corresponding coloured pane, and bathing the room in a symphony of colour. At least in theory. In reality, a gigantic wooden box filled with fire and flapping gossamer was deemed far too great a fire hazard to be demonstrated in any public theatre, and so Castel’s idea was soon forgotten. Not that this would have bothered him excessively.

Why, after all, should he lower himself to a ‘bricklayer in order to create examples of architecture’.

From our post-structuralist vantage point, it is easy to ridicule these ideas. We all know that there is nothing intrinsic about art, be it music, painting, literature, or any of the other varied and wonderful things people do in the name of culture. We enjoy certain artistic modes because we are socially conditioned to, the mechanisms of power distracting us, letting us believe we have creative individuality, when in fact we are shackled by society (or something along those lines. Foucauldian neo-Anarchism is all a little depressing).

Despite all this pseudo-intellectual doom and gloom, somehow the science bods of this world refuse to let it get them down.

Evolutionary biology has, in all its reformatting of the way we seen the world, brought with it a social desire to explain everything in terms of Darwinian theory. The rise of evolutionary science over the last 150 years has fundamentally changed the way we see the world, not only scientifically, but also socially and philosophically. There has been a trend over the last half a century to attempt to explain almost all human characteristics in terms of Darwinian theory and, although this is receding somewhat, society’s need to explain everything in evolutionary terms remains worryingly prevalent. All social characteristics are seen as somehow contributing to our ‘fitness’, whether it be the physical characteristics we find attractive, the foods we eat, or the way we communicate. Which brings us back to art, and its function in our society. How can you 12

explain art in these evolutionary terms?

It is difficult to see an evolutionary imperative in art, be it visual, audio or anything else. However, research into the way the brain reacts to music seems to indicate that there is a degree of universality in our biological responses to it. Stefan Evers and Jorn Dannert, researchers at the universities of Munster and Dortmund respectively, monitored skin temperature, heart rate and breathing rates while an individual was played different pieces of classical music, ranging from Strauss’ waltzes to modernist nonsense from the likes of Stravinsky. The results were as expected; slow music in a minor key had a calming effect, major keys excited, and fast discord produced a feeling of fear.

While this in itself may seem neither surprising nor particularly interesting, in confirming an almost universal physical reaction to music that bypasses personal taste this research points towards the idea that human response to music is somehow hardwired into our genetic makeup.

The language aspect of music is up to interpretation, as there is significant evidence to suggest that musical ability is located away from the language centre of the brain. Musicians and composers who have suffered strokes or brain trauma that has severely affected their communication have in certain instances been found to have maintained their ability to play and understand music, and the opposite is equally as true. Studies into the mental activity of musicians and non-musicians show that innate responses to music happen in the right hemisphere, whereas language is focused on the left, in trained musicians there is sustained activity in both hemispheres.

Even more interestingly, it has been shown that when playing their instruments trained musicians will demonstrate significant activity in the ‘mind’s eye’, the section of the brain that conjures up imaginary images; the brain creates its own symbols in order to decipher pitch and tone. While this may differ from a synaesthetic response in the fact that, while involuntary, it is a learned process,

it shares the same response as many synaesthetes describe; the response of multiple senses to a single stimulus.

On a more artistic level, research into the way music reacts with emotions has shown that what most people believed to be a learned response may in fact be far more intrinsic than first thought. A woman in Montreal underwent brain surgery which severely damaged blood vessels supplying her brain. While she was still able to converse normally, she was bizarrely unable to sing, hum, or recognise any melodies, or even detect changes in pitch. However, when pitches and tempos of pieces were manipulated between major and minor keys, she still could still feel the standard emotional response shared by the rest of the world.

So we retire back to our post modernist vantage point and survey all this.

That we share sensual responses, that ‘social synaesthesia’ might exist, raises interesting questions. Not least that art could again be explained in evolutionary terms, under a question of ‘fitness.’ Who will win?

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wax on In a quiet Sheffield suburb, behind the curtains of a semi detached house lies a factory, the world’s only current producer of wax cylinder recordings. Once the future of music, they are now a very obsolete format. Today, they are made in Sheffield by Duncan Miller, to orders from around the world.

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Amazingly brightly packaged, about the size of a tin of food, they play on phonograph players, turning against a needle, which interprets the grooves on its surface as sound. This is amplified only by a horn - increase the size, increase the noise.

The cylinders are produced entirely here, from the material itself to the impression of grooves, in a replication of a process that has seen the development of popular music, distribution, copyright and celebrity emerge from it.

Emerging as a popular format in the late 19th century, played on an Edison phonograph, the wax cylinder was a means of recording and distributing performances of music. Recordings would be made by placing a conical horn near to a source of sound.

The air pressure would force a needle to make marks on the surface, and a recording was made. Playing it back is an exact reversal of this process, requiring no electric amplification at all. At this stage there was no master recording of any sort, and multiple copies would be made by arranging multiple recording devices around the performer. Any sound mixing would be done spatially - by moving nearer or further from the phonograph to change the volume.

The first mass produced duplicates from this process actually arose from an early from of music piracy.

A consumer had created a device which traced the grooves from one cylinder to a blank, making an accurate copy. This predated any copyright law, and so was not illegal, and is something that we can still observe today in the legal challenges over the distribution of new formats - the territory defines its enclosure.

Many changes were brought as a result, not least for

performers themselves. Once paid per performance, and required by the constraints of technology to perform repeatedly so long as recordings were required, they now only needed to sing once. Consequently, and in some cases quite Gallic-ly, this fast change was the cause of some distaste and industrial action.

As the mass production of recordings took off in the early 20th century, an accompanying shift in the consumption and perception of music developed.

Branding became an important part of the musical experience, with the labelling of music incredibly effective in selling a certain brand. Duncan still engages with this today, having borrowed a Sheffield symbol, the god Vulcan, to adorn his decorative packaging for the cylinders produced here.

Perhaps most significantly, the cylinder recording also marks a shift of popular music into the everyday. Music could appear at any point, with performances replayed.

Duncan mentions the image of farmworkers in the Midwest, sitting down after work to listen to records, the same as hearing it in New York or anywhere else.

We listen to a number of records, each lasting a few minutes. They are surprisingly good quality, with apparently a better range of frequencies that flat vinyl.

Why wax cylinder now? Who buys them? There is no main market, apparently. The internet has allowed a new type of customer, where intense specialisation can flourish. If you’re going to be obsolete, why not be as obsolete as possible, seems to be the logic, and it appears to be working. Vulcan Records has continuous orders from collectors, enthusiasts and even artists, who want to explore this unique sound object. www.vulcanrecords.com 17

Adventures in Extra Sensory Perception Extra-sensory perception, or ESP to those in the know, tends to be referred to as “the sixth sense” within popular culture.

Masters of ESP don’t have to depend on measly physical senses; they use the power of the paranormal to gain knowledge about events, objects and people from every corner of time and space. (They’ll know if you don’t invite them to that major house party you’re planning.)

Extra-sensory perception is a skill that has intrigued people for centuries. It was a part of early spiritual cultures, like the Native Americans and the Celts and its still loitering around now. Some of the brightest minds have been enthralled by extra-sensory perception. Be it the witches’ prophesies in Macbeth, Scrooge’s personal encounters with the paranormal or Professor Trelawny’s grim predictions of Harry Potter’s future, ESP continues to fascinate.

Most of us choose to ignore the ideas of mediums, psychics and ghost hunters; remaining uninformed about the culture of their community. It seems fair enough. We live in a society that is driven by empirical evidence and scientific theory and it’s hard to imagine ever discovering the necessary physical proof needed to confirm nonphysical activity’s existence scientifically.

It’s easy to believe that there is no such thing as spirits or extra-sensory perception when the closest we’ve come to an extra sensory experience is Jedward doing Ghostbusters on X Factor.

There is, however, a thriving community of individuals claiming to have ESP in every town and city, including Sheffield. Although many members may appear to be slightly delirious or fraudulent, there are others who aren’t trying to make a quick buck. Article spoke to two of the most prominent and convincing voices in the Sheffield scene to try and deliver ourselves from ignorance.

Most Haunted eat your non-physical heart out.

Steve Mugglestone and Brenda Diskin are both mediums from Sheffield. Brenda is a medium and ghost hunter. She has helped with police murder investigations and hunted for ghosts at Radio Hallam and

Middlewood hospital, places she describes as the most haunted in Sheffield

spent a lot of time sitting meditating under a tree.

Brenda’s first experience of the paranormal was in her teens. She was at an old country house on holiday with her mother and picked up on something. Since then she has spent her life as a medium studying the paranormal, starting ghost investigation team Sheffield Paranormal in 2002. She has demonstrated her skills on Kilroy, BBC Radio Four and in Take a Break magazine.

Even as a sceptic, it’s hard to avoid becoming excessively self conscious whilst speaking to him, worried that he’s aware of personal secrets and past traumas.

She sees her approach as a rational one, looking at every possible reason behind a mysterious occurrence before blaming it on the paranormal. Her investigations work in the opposite way to those of science: gathering empirical evidence and then supporting it with intuition and information gathered in trance, rather than having an intuition and finding supporting evidence via experimental investigation.

Steve describes himself as a psychic medium. He is an individual who can tell the future using intuition as well as communicating with the spirit realm. He has apparently predicted deaths, seen people who live in parallel dimensions and been correctly informed by a spirit of an ashamed friend’s double KFC binge.

I’m on the phone with Steve for forty minutes. It’s almost nine at night and he’s been on a walk up a hill whilst chatting. The wind whistling in the background adds an eerie edge to the phone call that is further enhanced when his signal goes and the conversation crackles to an end.

Steve started sensing the messages of the paranormal about 20 years ago when he found himself predicting his friend’s future activities.

“I’d predict little things like that my a friend had eaten two KFCs. I wouldn’t tell them, but they would happen. I wasn’t sure how I was doing it.” He says. “I thought I was going mad.”

It was only when he started talking to other mediums that Steve considered the possibility that he was, in fact, developing ESP. He has spent the past 20 years developing his ability. He says that he has

“You’ve not lost many people,” he says and he’s right, “I can’t hear many spirits trying to speak to you.” Torn between asking him what else he knows and freaking out, it feels like he’s invading personal space.

I avoid having a minor panic attack and instead ask him how he would define a spirit.

He tells me that he thinks that spirits are the consciousness, soul and character of the dead, separated from the body and trapped on Earth.

I’m left a little puzzled and doubtful after Steve’s vague description and can’t seem to get a more in depth answer from him.

Brenda offers a more plausible portrayal.

She says that everything in the world is made up of energy. Our body is just a sleeve, when we die and our body decays, our energy goes out into the universe. When she communicates with spirits she is tapping into this energy.

She says: “Many people, including mediums, are under the illusion ghosts are earth bound spirits” that have met a tragic end.” But she believes that they are just “trapped energy.”

“When I carry out my paranormal investigations, I use an electromagnetic field meter because the paranormal acts as a magnet for energy and will draw on electrical charge as a source when it manifests itself. If we get a reading there then there could be activity.”

“I check to see if there are fluctuations of temperature – sudden drops or rises. It’s usually assumed that it gets cold when there are ghosts around but that is not always the case. People tend to feel colder in the presence of the paranormal because of the 19

ghost drawing energy from your body.”

A combination of spiritual ideas and those of science, her ideas seem grounded.

It seems like accuracy is key for Brenda.

As well has working towards being able to reliably identify the paranormal using her psyche she also uses works is meticulous in selecting ghost hunting equipment.

She tells me that she only uses cameras with flat lenses to photograph haunted areas, as others are prone to producing “orbs” (little circles on the photographs) that could be mistaken for ghosts.

She also talks about avoiding a getting “graveyard breath” in photographs when investigating outdoors in the cold as it could be mistaken for paranormal mist.

“When experiencing the paranormal, most people may see an unexplained mist or feel a breeze or a strange sensation called “cobwebbing” which feels like you are walking through cobwebs. Even my sceptical husband has felt it.”

It seems that there is no way to stop ourselves bumping into the paranormal.

Both Steve and Brenda sometimes struggle to control their extra senses; unable to put the spirits and their messages on stand by.

Steve says that, although most of the time he can filter what he listens to, when he is sleeping or when a spirit desperately wants their message heard it is impossible to stop them.

“It can be tiring.” He says. “But I feel a responsibility to help people and spirits.

Now that I have the skill there is no turning back. There was one time, on Halloween, when I was trying to do a séance with an audience and I kept getting distracted by this big group of white spirits storming the building. I couldn’t stop myself from seeing them. ” “I have a spirit guide who talks to me.

Sometimes, when I’m in trance I find myself writing automatically, often in the language of scripture. I see video shows scrolling through my brain.”

He tells me that he senses the paranormal in different ways. He can see, hear, feel, even smell and taste ghosts. He says that he can see spirits about 95 per-cent as clearly as he sees real live human beings, and that he often smells the perfume of client’s lost relatives.

On a different level, he tells me that he can sometimes feel the deaths of spirits and disturbingly sometimes the deaths of friends

“Steve can see, hear, before they have happened; the movement of their blood leading to a heart attack or the taste of blood in his mouth signalling murder.

“A client once came to me saying that they had a relative missing in Australia. I couldn’t see the spirit of their relative but I knew their name, address, phone number and could taste their blood in my mouth.”

What first seemed like a fun and trivial conversation with a man walking up a hill has taken a chilling, uncomfortable turn.

“I’ve seen and felt the deaths of people close to me and been unable to contact them before their death 30 hours later.”

From the way that he describes ESP, it seems less an extra sense and more an extension of the senses that all humans have. Just as some dogs can hear high pitched sounds that we can’t and bees can see some colours that we can’t, those individuals with ESP can sense a greater range of wave frequencies than us.

“Mediums and psychics have the same five senses as everyone else, they’ve just broken down the barriers between them and nature, so each of their senses is stronger and clearer.”

“Everyone has the natural ability to be a medium, but it takes years to peel back the layers of conditioning and become reconnected with nature. Of course some people are more gifted than others, but all have the potential to develop with training.

After practise you can tell the difference between your imagination and your spirit guide.”

It seems reasonable; haven’t we all had moments of déjà vu or extreme coincidence? Chance moments where you and your best friend have picked up the phone to call each other at the same time or when your grandma has said that she has a feeling in her bones that something is going to go wrong and it does.

Steve says that many of the occurrences that we think of as flukes are actually down to our untrained ESP. “There is no such thing as coincidence.” He says.

Brenda agrees that everyone can develop their extra senses by training to the point where you can recognise the difference between your imagination and the spirit world:

feel, even smell and taste ghosts. He says that he can see spirits about 95 per-cent as clearly as he sees real live human beings, and that he often smells the perfume of client’s lost relatives.

“Anyone even sceptics can sense spirits, we all have a psychic ability, but it takes practise to develop it. People’s first obstacle is their fear of the unknown.”

“In order to nurture our psychic ability we must work on developing the senses by meditation. I started developing my extra sensory ability by trying to sense with my mind’s eye; imagining colours, foods and music and experiencing smell, sight, sound, touch and taste as though it were real life.”

“It was only after my senses had become heightened and I could sense everything a lot clearer that I was able to distinguish between the senses of the world around me and of other worldly beings and classed myself as psychic. When I’m tuned in I can hear a mouse squeak at 100 yards!”

You may, by now, be thinking that some of these ideas are a little far fetched and definitely hard to accept, but maybe their ideas shouldn’t be totally written off. The niggling feeling of self consciousness that I felt whilst interviewing them suggests that there is a part of me that is not totally sure that what they are saying is unrealistic.

That being the case; be careful in 2012.

Steve kept mentioning how more and more people would get psychic powers in the next two years. I have to be honest, for most of the interview I thought he was talking about the Olympics, but it turns out to be one of many years that alternative calendars have predicted will play host to the end of the world, this time using the Mayan. Based on this, Steve has predicted tsunamis in California and San Francisco on December 21st.

It seems like we’ll have to wait and see how accurate his senses are then.

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THE ARTICLE GUIDE TO LIFE

SENSORIA Reviews of choice films from the festival

LIFE WORTH LIVING Art previews from around the city

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Brooklyn Queens Expressway At Sensoria, 25 April 2010

Commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the BQE is a 45 minute journey up New York City’s Brooklyn Queens Express way. The BQE is a six lane road that covers the thirteen miles connecting the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Despised for its terrible design, arrogant layout, dangerous bends and horrible traffic jams, among other things, the BQE is infamous at best.

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Steven’s film presents a triptych of moving images across the screen. Shots are taken on 8mm film from the inside of cars, and sides of roads. Like an arty Flickr

photo set of someone’s visit to NYC, the images range from skyscrapers, painted shop signs, cars, parks, bridges, underpasses, the Empire state building. The shots linger, creating the sensation you are actually there, looking at these things. Nothing is polished.

Nothing moves. You are left alone to wander in the images.

This is not the romanticized New York of Jay-Z and Alisha Keys, or the mafia underworld of the Corleones, or the gangland of a young 50 Cent, the Jewish ghetto of George Gershwin, the Sesame Street of Elmo and Big Bird, or the NYC of a Pabst Blue Ribbon drinking hipster, although it may be

closer to the latter. Instead, it is all of these versions of New York and everyone else, normal peoples’ too.

The film uncovers peoples’ love of talking about where they live. Watching this film would perhaps be quite different for someone actually from New York. On one level it is a film of common experience, an outpouring of frustration at a poorly conceived stretch of tarmac. But for those of us who don’t use the BQE to drive to work everyday and suffer from its flaws, the BQE is an insight into someone else’s world. Lacking the narrative of documentary and fictional

metroscopic At Sensoria, 25 April 2010

Metroscopic is an enigmatic eight minute short, attempting to reframe one man’s daily commute. By taking clips of film from the dull journey on the London Underground and Southern commuter trains and reflecting them so screen is filled with four versions of the same footage, technically called a quadroscopic reflection, director Paul Winderage has made the commute purposefully disorienting. Coupled with a dark, spoken word and drum and bass soundtrack, the result is an angry, angsty and frightening trip on London’s Underground.

pieces, means the viewer is allowed to find their own place on the Brooklyn Queens Express Way, to get lost in it, fascinated by it, frustrated with it, bored with it, delighted with it. It is this unfiltered style which offers a privileged, unadulterated look into a city.

If you like Sufjan Stevens, have ever thought of moving to the Big Apple, or even intend to watch this film at a later date via streaming it onto your computer, I highly recommend you see this in the cinema when there is a chance. The visual delivery is stunning and deserving of the biggest screen it can be afforded. Standalone, Stevens’ orchestral soundtrack is a piece of brilliance, evoking the jams, the curves and the speeds of the express way themselves. Coupled with smooth music video-esque sensibilities in the film’s editing: the BQE a joy to watch. Enhanced by a cheeky hand rolled cigarette round the back of the cinema, this’ll be one of the best things you’ve watched in some time.

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PRELUDE TO SLEEP At Sensoria, 24 April 2010

Sitting in a garden by several beehives is a dignified yet friendly looking elderly Frenchmen. He is slumped in a plastic chair, smoking a cigarette, and has enormous headphones over his ears plugged into an even more enormous reel to reel tape player onto which he has just recorded the noises of the bees. Meet Jean-Jacques Perrey.

To those that know him, Perrey is a legend. Since the fifties he has pioneered and shared his love of synthetic instruments.

Starting with the synthesizer’s ancestor the Ondioline, and then becoming one of the first to use a Moog Synthesizer, and an early user of tape and recorded samples, Perrey has been both an innovator and ambassador for electronic 26

music.

This delightful documentary follows the ramblings of a polite elderly Frenchman recounting some of his experiences. Other guest talking heads include those who have worked with him and those who have been touched and influence such as Michel Gondry and the two chaps from Air. The documentary itself is wonderful in style. Avoiding the temptation to rely on masses of historical television clips, it prefers to just ask the man himself, and thus avoids any sort of premature eulogy of Perrey that might have been so tempting at his age of eighty one. The overall feeling of the film is thus one of sitting and having a chat with an elderly man who has an impressive story to tell.

keep on running At Sensoria, 25 April 2010

Fifty years ago, a young and adventurous Chris Blackwell did what so many have dreamed of he set up his own record label in his home country of Jamaica at the age of twenty one. After a few less than successful jazz singles, Chris moved operations across the Atlantic to London, where he sold singles to the burgeoning Jamaican community. It was from this base that Island Records evolved to become one of the most important and influential labels in British music history, putting out records from Bob Marley to U2, Grace Jones to King Crimson. Through interviews with the artists, producers, A&R men, and Chris himself, Keep on Running tells the story of Chris Blackwell and his record label Island Records.

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THE DELIAN MODE At Sensoria, 24 April 2010

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With programmes like Garage Band, Ableton, and Reason readily available, the capacity to make electronic music easily exists for anyone with a computer and musical pretensions. Perhaps it is then redundant to point out that in the pre-MacBook world, making electronic music was a bit harder. But even the nineties had sequencers and drum machines.

And at least the eighties and seventies had synthesizers, even though at the start they were the size of a beach chalet. However, as far back as the early sixties, some people were making what could easily be called electronic music, without the aid of any of these things.

Deep in the bowels of the BBC Maida Vale studios was the now legendary Radiophonic Workshop, where musician and composer Delia Derbyshire worked. Sixties techniques for making electronic music utilised the modulation of magnetic tape recordings. For every note, you started with a recorded sound. This was then modified by slowing, speeding up,

reversing, etc. When the sound was sufficient it was physically cut out of the tape and spliced onto a series of previously created notes and sounds. In this laborious way loops of notes were created, to be played alongside loops of other noises at the same time on separate machines. This painstaking work was used to create the soundtracks and sound effects to radio plays, TV shows, local news, and most famously, the theme to Doctor Who.

At the time BBC politics was such that workers of the radiophonic workshop were not greatly acknowledged for their work and innovation. However, in recent years figures such as Delia Derbyshire have emerged as some of the most important innovators in the history of electronic music. This twenty-five minute documentary looks at the life of Delia Derbyshire and her work as a pioneer and genius, and also reveals she may well have been the first person to ever produce a techno track, as far back as 1969!

THE LIFE WORTH LIVING April / May 2010

SOL LeWITT site gallery

In a partnership between Site Gallery and the Research Group for Artists Publications, an exhibition of the books of American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt will be stopping in Sheffield in May. This is the only UK exhibition of the works, which were produced between 1967 and 2002, and are a key part of LeWitt’s complete working process. Alongside the books will be a wall drawing, executed daily according to LeWitt’s instructions, and a series of specially developed musical performances in the gallery.

FAUNAGRAPHIC the old sweet shop

Faunagraphic is a Sheffield based graffiti artist, designer and illustrator, whose work draws on images of nature, wildlife and well, flora and fauna. Much of her graffiti work in particular, takes on the appearance of beautiful organic mater reclaiming the decaying buildings and walls on which she paints. The title of her new show, Res Nulius, however, takes her outdoor work indoors. Utilising the Latin term for things that are not, are no longer, or never were, private property, this new show will explore the idea of finding ownership in lost and abandoned things which are no one’s property.

The collection of new canvases, spray and ink works are to be found in the Old Sweet Shop in Nether Edge.

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TRAMLINES across sheffield july 2010

It’s confirmed, it’s happening! Playing on the success of last year’s citywide music festival, this year’s Tramlines will be even bigger, not mention, even better. Keep an eye out for details.

COW CULTURE bloc space april

A one night exhibition at Bloc Space about the contemporary European milk situation in which many farmers are struggling to sell their product, and how much is wasted. The exhibition’s intention is to raise awareness of the difficulties European Dairy farmers currently face. We are informed that the exhibition will consist of a life size free standing cow made out of hessian and a video projection of a man milking it. With live music provided by Unicorn Desert Strap, a new Sheffield band who make some excellent noise, this looks to be an excellent evening!

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dead ends book and exhbition

A collaboration between Theo Simpson, Tom Common and Ben Mclaughlin, Dead Ends looks at the state of unemployment in Sheffield with reference to the national issue. Document thing problem of the new service economy, the project investigates not only the nature of the jobs but also traces of personality and character evident in the unique way in which the slips have been discarded by their beholders.

Released as a 400 copy book in mid April, Dead Ends will provide material for an exhibition taking place in May, details TBA. 31

Tom J Newell the forum

He may have abandoned Sheff-vegas for the big smoke, but Sheffield’s favourite illustrator is back in town with an exhibition of fairly meaningless doodles, which look quite nice. This is as close as you can get to a onestop-pop up-Tom J Newell-shop. Two as yet unseen screen-prints and an limited edition t-shirt will be revealed, alongside one off canvases and some familiar screen prints. Expect lots of sharp two and three colour images, skulls and illustrations with a sense of humour.

FUTURE EVERYTHING manchester may 2010

Future everything is Manchester’s annual citywide festival for Art and Music. This year’s music events feature the likes of Grum, Roska, the Hacker, and L-Vis 1990 to name a few. The themes for artwork and exhibitions range from data visualisation to adaptive cities, where cities are understood as fluid and alive, not static. And for those that are truly hardcore about this culture malarky, there are some quality looking conferences attached too. If you ever needed an excuse for a day / weekend out to Manchester, this is a good one. Check out their program at futureeverything.org 32

IN CAMERA bank street arts

A series of photography and video exhibitions at Bank Street Arts. The exhibition features thematically driven slideshows located around the gallery, showing street photography, portraiture, landscapes and documentary work by over 100 photographers from the world over.

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a taste of castle market

Five chicken fillets. Four packets of Rizla. Three grapefruits. Two discount Mars Easter eggs. And an onion bigger than a baseball.

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I’d like to see Ainlsey Harriott rustle something up in 20 minutes using the contents of my shopping bag.

I spent six quid in half an hour at Castle Market, which is remarkable given you’re only ever 15 seconds away from being accosted by a butcher.

They wait for you like those bastards with

clipboards in the city centre, poised for a glimpse of eye contact before pouncing with their meaty sales pitches. Which, on balance, tend to be much more appealing than donating 2 quid a month to an

orphan half way round the world.

Five fillets for three quid. I wouldn’t see those prices down Tesco. I couldn’t say fairer than that. Could I?

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You can’t blame their desperate attempts to shift the stuff. There’s enough meat in Castle Market to beat each leafleting Sheffield parliamentary candidate senseless – and even then have some left over for tea. With my bargain fillets I served up an onion. Not the most diverse – or, indeed, appetising – dish, granted. But devastatingly filling. The onions in Castle Market were big enough to make my testicles shrink on the spot.

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I would’ve had some veg from ‘H.V. & R. Stokes’ as well. But sadly for Stokesy, all the dawdling human traffic streams straight past his stall to an anonymous bloke flogging sweets, models of household animals and, decisively, four packs of Rizla for a pound.

Next to an offer like that, Mr Stokes’s threegrapefruits-for-a-quid deal doesn’t seem such a steal.

I don’t even smoke. But I know a bargain when I see one. Like the Easter eggs I juggled home at 80 pence a pop.

First-time visitors to South Yorkshire might flock unwittingly to the Peak District or Chatsworth House.

But if only they were aware such delights were lying a mere 10-minute walk away from Sheffield station.

Keep your unspoilt scenic routes and idyllic 16thcentury heritage. If there’s no packed-out chippy selling battered sausage and chips at 10.30 in the morning, I’m barely interested.

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And if there’s nowhere selling Fanta Orange from glass bottles to rekindle memories of shit, earlynoughties family holidays in Rhodes, I couldn’t care less.

Simple pleasures under one roof, with Primark and Wilko superstores lurking just a T-bone’s throw away for good measure. The dream ticket, right there.

Castle Market is South Yorkshire’s unveiled side.

A place where reputable butchers whistle Sidney Samson tunes to make re-stocking more fun. A place where newsagents feel it necessary to declare ‘WE NOW SELL MILK’ in subtle, fluorescent orange.

A simpler place. Where coffee is served in a mug with stains in the bottom. And without a spoon to stir it yourself.

More importantly, though, it’s a place where suffocating your battered brunch in salt and vinegar is far from frowned upon. No; instead, it’s encouraged. And I’ll raise a stained glass bottle of Orange Fanta to that.

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The Smell of Justice When law enforcement agencies began to stumble upon the full potential of ‘Detector Dogs’ in the 1960s, it was like finding judicial gold. Sure, police can have their hunches about what a criminal looks like, but if after a while you find that your suspects are disproportionality populated by ethnic minorities things start to look a bit suspicious. Guesswork may work for Columbo, but the police of the real world needed a new method.

It’s a peculiar idea attaching a scent to justice. While it is the objects themselves that are illegal, their presence betrayed by their aroma, the use of detection dogs has given the scents themselves something akin to their own legal status, albeit a grey and murky one. Anyone detected with a positive indication by a K9 enforcer is liable to an on-the-spot search, whether guilty of possession or not; even if nothing is found they are likely to be reprimanded for having ‘most likely’ had drugs on their person in the days previous. Plainly, the carrying of a scent marks one out as a potential law breaker and carries with it the law’s intervention.

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It is another strange aspect of the scent of justice that has led to their significant success, however. While us mere mortals know what the dogs are looking for, fully aware of the consequences of what we do, the dogs know not; and yet it is their ability, not ours, that tears away the facade of innocence. It is the unconscious, indiscriminate nature of dog detection that has transformed the way law enforcers

around the world have addressed issues such as arms and narcotic possession, trace tracking and forensics. While the visual appearance of guilt can be manipulated and hidden, and therefore subject to human error, the scent of guilt transcends the level of human thought; a permanent indication of our crime.

But rarely does a miracle cure come without its own cost. That the use of detection dogs has removed some of the inadequacies of human judgment in the fight against crime has not ensured the eradication of any error at all. In August of last year, the drugs awareness body Release began legal proceedings against the British Transport Police, claiming that the use of dogs to detect drugs constitutes a fundamental human rights breach. Australian research has shown that 74% of searches carried out on the back of a positive indication by a sniffer dog yield no results; the consequence, according to Release, is that

“In the case of drug dogs, they are refreshed throughout the year upon each type of drug; this includes introducing them to new scents as we keep up to date with any new substances and variations.”

3/4 of suspects are left with their privacy rights and freedom of movement infringed upon. The case is expected to go to the high court later this year, and victory for Release would mean the permanent cessation of drug detector dogs in public.

For that we can only wait and see, but the importance of the issue is such that it raises its own fundamental questions about the nature of law enforcement in general.

While tracing the scents of illegality might bypass our own deficiencies and prejudices, perhaps it is the very participation of human thought itself that ensures the law is never too far removed from justice.

Article spoke to Harry Morton, manager of the Police Dog Training School for South Yorkshire police, about the training, success and legality of detector dogs.

Hi Harry. So firstly tell us about your role as manager of the PDTS. Well, that involves ensuring that all the training is undertaken, recorded and monitored for all of the dogs within South Yorkshire police. At the moment there are 43 general patrol dogs and 26 specialist dogs; of these we have 16 are reactive drugs dogs, a classic detection drug dog, some explosive detection dogs, currency detection dogs, victim recovery dogs and blood recovery dogs.

Sounds like a lot! In terms of the specialist dogs what is the training method you use?

Generally they will take a 6-8 week course during which they are conditioned to whatever they are being trained to look for, after which they are assessed independently by an officer from another force according to a national criteria. They then spend 16 days per year on a revision course where they are constantly assessed and refreshed regarding the particular scent they are trained to pick up. In the case of drug dogs, they are refreshed throughout the year upon each type of drug; this includes introducing them to new scents as we keep up to date with any new substances and variations. It is all reward based, literally a case of ‘find the scent, get a reward.’ Obviously, the dogs can’t be given the substances as they are poisonous and the handlers are given first aid courses in case the dogs come into contact with any narcotics.

How important and successful do you see the role of detection dogs in the South Yorkshire police force?

In the majority of cases, they are very successful. Dogs are extremely honest, and if they smell a scent they will always indicate it. The nose is an extremely accurate instrument, and as yet no scientific instrument is available that can detect the miniscule traces that a police dog can. I thought that was a fallacy until recently, but

actually spoke to a notable scientist who confirmed that fact.

What are your views on the Release case, and in regards to the legal disputes about the accuracy of the dogs?

What the dogs are checking is actually the air around a person as they move. As such, I wouldn’t think that a dog checking the air around a person is a violation of their personal rights. Regarding the precision of the dogs, we have had instances where a dog’s accuracy in indicating somebody has been proven, despite an absence of drugs on their person, when they have then said ‘yes I was with my friend who has been handling a drug’.

So it may be the case that the suspect has been in some contact with drugs at some preceding point?

It could be, because in the main the accuracy level is very very good.. As part of the licensing criteria we also look at the amount of false indications, because obviously we do have to be extremely mindful that we don’t violate people’s rights. But a police dog’s accuracy can be measured on its annual licensing and its accreditation; from the moment it starts to the moment it finishes a police dog’s work is recorded.

The work is not only the dog indicating; it should be working in conjunction with a team of police looking for people who may be taking steps to avoid coming in contact with the dogs. Each bit of that allows for suspicion, which then goes into police powers.

What do you think would be the cost of Release winning the case?

That’s a very difficult one for me to answer in my role. My viewpoint would be that, providing no civil rights or human rights are being violated, then they are an extremely valuable tool and extremely effective in drug detection.

Thanks!

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S E N S O RY DEPRIVATION, MIND CONTROL

AND SELF IMPROVEMENT

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What happens in a situation when you do not feel connected to the environment you are in? When you cannot even feel your body being there. There are no stimuli. All you’ve got is your own brain to keep you company. First there is a sense of calm.

After a few hours you start to hear and see things that are not there. At first just flashes of light, then simple geometric patterns and random noise. After a few more hours you get more meaningful hallucinations as complex visual scenes and human voices. This is the point when fear and verbal anxiety starts. You try to scream, but you can hardly hear your own voice. Panic! Your mind is playing tricks on you and there is nothing you can do about it. And that is only after 10 hours of sensory deprivation. After a few days with no environmental stimulation the psyche is completely shot to bits. A scene from a horror film.

Every day our sensory organs are bombarded with vast quantities of information. We see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us. Senses help us survive as well as keep us from boredom by giving our mind some different or new information to analyse and process.

After loading just one sensory organ with a continuous stream of stimuli the brain

will triggers other senses and we can be entertained for hours: alternating patterns of symbols in a book or a magazine, changing pictures from a TV screen, different sound levels and frequencies from the radio.

By having previous sensory encounters with objects described and shown, we can make psychological connections with them without physically being there. We can taste what the characters are eating, smell the scents and even put colours to the landscapes. Combined stimulation of two or more organs gives us a feeling of different reality. Like in the cinema when the room is dark, most of our visual field is taken up by the picture and the sound is coming from all directions - we can feel ourselves to be part of what is happening on the screen.

Even in places people consider noneventful and boring such as waiting rooms, empty enclosed spaces and classrooms, there is still enough stimulation for every one of our organs. In the absolute darkness you can hear noises and can touch objects around you, in classrooms you can look out of the window. With rapid developments in mobile technology and invention of Twitter, the most boring of places has the potential to become a subject of a new life update. Hell, even in prison cells there are windows, mice, political brochures and

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other prison mates to stimulate every one of your senses!

Our brain depends on the sensory organs to gather all the information it needs to function. So what if that information suddenly becomes less and less or decreases to almost nil? Imagine perfect boredom. What would the brain do without anything to keep it going? Will it keep on working with the data supplied a minute or an hour ago to create the sense of reality which is not there? Will it eventually just shut down with nothing new to do?

Take a

O S SEN

What happens if you block all the sense organs? In the 50s stories started to appear that the Soviets and Chinese had utilised so called “Sensory Deprivation” methods to brainwash prisoners. Korea used social and sensory isolation on American GI’s to force them into making statements against the USA. In reaction to this, extensive research was carried out at universities across North America to see if there was any truth in the matter and at the same time gain greater

!

H T A B

Disclaimer: Prolonged exposure to the device may cose neurosis, shaking hands, nausea and death

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understanding of the way the brain functions without outside stimulation.

Students who wanted to get paid for doing nothing were the test subjects.

At the time no one really knew what was happening in those dark basements behind the Iron Curtain, so substitute experiments based on second-hand information were conducted. At McGill University in Canada students sat for days in a lit soundproof cubicle wearing light-diffusing googles and cardboard cuffs. E. L. Beckman put his subjects into 33.5°C water to neck level for periods up to 24 hours until they started to experience breathing problems and J. Lilly and J. T. Shurley submerged experiment subjects completely into a tank of warm circulating water wearing blacked out mask and breathing apparatus.

Many different methods have been adopted to first partially dampen senses and at later times to cancel them out as far as possible to find out just what happens when the brain does not have any sensory input. But how to remove all environmental stimulation without operations or drugs? The earliest experiments started with the

subjects lying in a bed with no light or outside sounds. This later developed into confining the subjects to the cubicle with soft sound-proof walls, white noise playing through headphones to remove the sound of the subject’s heart and body movements, gloves and cardboard cuffs on the hands to limit tactile perception. More advanced experiments submerged the subjects into a warm water tank with ear and eye masks to remove sight, hearing, touch and pressure perception. Water immersion simulates weightlessness and removes the sense of presence of subject’s own body. Although the tests originally were scientific in their queries, their applications now are altogether more sinister.

We have advanced from the classic medieval torture chamber; dark dirty underground dungeons, dimly lit with smoky torches, iron machines crushing bones, huge mechanisms pulling joints apart, blood spattering in all directions, screams travelling from room to room.

Clenched teeth, pain spreading through every cell of the body. This graphically scary torture, designed to force a change of mind through the overload of particular senses - pain. But you cannot really show up to Geneva convention trials with halfmutilated prisoners any more and claim

they fell down the stairs.

listen to the things which you thought were not true or interesting beforehand.

Your opinions change much more quickly than in normal conditions. Suddenly those terrible things that you thought were wrong are now suddenly not so bad! And when the sound stops, there is nothing else but to think about things you have just heard, really analyse their context. Psychological re-programming is working.

Modern torture has changed, it is a clinical white sterile reality. Forget dark rooms, loud screaming, physical contact and lack of sleep. It’s now soft white beds, diffused light, head masks and headphones. Lie down and relax... The key to an individual is not through negative physical stimuli, but through psychological re-tuning.

With modern technological advances, all the elements and machinery which in the 60s took up a space of the whole room can now be done in a normal bath tub. A sensory deprivation chamber available for all the family. It can be as useful household item as a television or a sun bed. Boost your self confidence, learn important material for the next meeting with the clients, stop kids from misbehaving.

Learning has never been more fun!

“What if information suddenly becomes less and less or decreases to almost nil? Imagine perfect boredom.”

Let us not dwell on these horrors. Like nuclear energy, Sensory Deprivation can also be a useful tool for learning, and not just Communist propaganda. With nothing to do you are very willing to listen to the most boring information. Even to the same information over and over again ( subjects in one experiment listened to the same tape 53 times! ) As there is nothing else to disturb you from thoroughly taking in the information, you learn and remember things phenomenally quickly. You even

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BRITISH SEA POWER “It’s nice to set some time aside to perform a film soundtrack and immerse yourself in the music and the film. It’s also nice to be able to sit down for a bit, after all the injuries we get.”

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Since the early 2000s, Brighton based British Sea Power have released a string of three critically acclaimed albums, as well as having become renowned for live performances encompassing anything from shrubbery-ridden stage sets to dancing bears and injury-inflicting stage dives. Last year they set aside time to record a new soundtrack to accompany the 1934 film Man of Aran. The band will perform this alongside screenings of the film at the closing night celebrations of this year’s Sensoria, a fitting end to a festival all about the fusion of film and music.

Directed by renowned documentary maker Robert J. Flaherty, Man of Aran depicts family life on the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland through a combination of documentary and dramatisation. Though Flaherty at times diverges into romanticised recreations of pre-twentieth century methods of subsistence (most notably a spearhanded shark hunting mission to restock the liver oil that was once essential to lighting the lamps of Aran), the film retains throughout an accurate depiction of the islands’ hostile conditions. Life on this barren landscape is a daily battle with the elements, as the islanders struggle to work in harmony with the raging sea, which they rely on to survive but which at the same time ever threatens destruction.

The band has breathed new life into this film, composing a soundtrack to compliment the stark, emotionally evocative black and white images of nature at its most powerful yet destructively beautiful.

How did you become involved in recording the new soundtrack for Man of Aran?

We got given a video cassette of Man of Aran by a BSP/film fan a few years ago when we were playing in Northern Ireland.

We watched it on the tour bus and fell asleep, but it stayed in our subconscious.

The Edinburgh Film Festival asked us to write and perform a new soundtrack to a film two years ago and we agreed, not knowing what we’d do. We had a few other films in mind – King Kong, Winged Migration, The Karma Sutra – but Man of Aran barely has any dialogue, and the images are poetic and stand up for themselves. This allowed a lot more scope for writing music, and allowed the music to be the voice of the film.

Following the Mercury nominated success of Do You Like Rock Music? in 2008, did it feel like a risky move to embark on this experimental project rather than pursue a more mainstream route?

Not really. We had written the film score already and we’d just started renting a farmhouse, and bought loads of equipment in preparation for our forthcoming album proper. Man of Aran was a good test run to see if we could record ourselves and work in the new self sufficient environment.

It’s nice to set some time aside to perform a film soundtrack and immerse yourself in the music and the film. It’s also nice to be able to sit down for a bit, after all the injuries we get.

You’ve screened Man of Aran in a few places since last summer, how has it been received? Have you bridged the gap between fans of the film and those of your music?

Yes, we’ve had fans of the film and fans of the band come and enjoy it. Some people aren’t sure whether to clap after each song or just clap at the end. We’ve had standing ovations every time, which has been great.

We performed it at the Perth International

Arts Festival in Australia. The audience was very mixed and we had a small portion of the Blue Rinse Brigade come; Irish ex-pats. One oldie had a Primal Scream T-shirt on, and one ran out yelling “it’s not what I thought it was going to be!”

Your interest in nature and British heritage is lyrically evident on previous albums and is reflected live, where it has become customary to see foliage and taxidermy on stage; is your work with this film an extension of this?

It seemed an appropriate film for us. We’ve always looked outwards from Britain though.

Some people think we are Brit-centric, but we are very inclusive. We have done a split single and foreign exchange with Czech band “The Ecstasy of St Theresa,” written a song about Polish plumbers, and use the French and German language. This film is based on the Irish Aran Isles, who also use the Euro now.

With your contribution, the film combines the contexts of the pre-modern way of life depicted on screen with a post-rock atmospheric soundtrack. Was your intention to appropriate the film, or to rejuvenate it adhering to Flaherty’s vision?

The original soundtrack had very jaunty swing/jazz music which made it look like the islanders had a wonderful rosy existence. I’m sure they had a lovely time, but island life can be harsh, especially in winter when the storms are up and the island gets a bashing.

The film is expressionistic and shot beautifully, and I think we complemented that with an expressionistic soundtrack.

I think we’ve altered, or heightened, the meaning and the emotional content sometimes. Artistic licence.

How far does the music rely on its integration with the images that inspired it?

Did you always intend it to be appreciated as a standalone album as well as a combined concept?

We considered the soundtrack part of the film, but thought it would be fair to offer a CD with the DVD. We wrote some of the music whilst watching the film and making it up as we went. We had some existing music that had not made previous records that fits the atmosphere of the film, so we resurrected them. With all of the music, we made sure the music fitted the mood of the images. Sometimes the music alters the original intent, but that makes the film more abstract and unusual.

Like the part where they are chopping rocks; we made that especially grim. We like Sergei Eisenstein and David Lynch, where things not making sense, or odd clashes in image and music, work well. It’s best in Man of Aran when modern music and the old way of life work clash, and merge into a dreamlike vision.

You’ve been known to play in unconventional venues, performing on the Scilly Isles, down a Cornish slate mine, and on a ferry across the Mersey; is there a chance you’ll brave the conditions for a performance on the Aran Islands?

We considered doing it around the time of release. I have a feeling one day we will play on the Aran Islands. These things tend to happen to us.

What can we expect from British Sea Power in the future? Is this interrelation between film and music something you’d like to explore further?

We are enjoying playing Man of Aran, and are really happy with the recorded soundtrack, so maybe we will do more. At the moment we have just finished our new album, so we are getting ready for that.

We’ll be standing up and facing the front again soon.

BSP’s live accompaniment to screenings of Man of Aran will take place at Showroom Cinema, Sheffield, on Thursday 29th April at 19:00 and 21:00

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RACHEL KOOLEN In a highly conceptual work, Rachel Koolen’s Admin Goes Pomo looks at the notions and problems of the role of administration and bureaucracy in society through a group of four installations. Her pieces at this year’s Art Sheffield: Life A User’s Manual specifically tackle the large theme of how structure and space inform behaviour and society, through the examination of particular instances and moments. The installation is broken down into four pieces, each attempting to create a different system, to examine particular areas of this large subject. We caught up with her for an interview as she was setting up the installation.

Tell us about your exhibition at Yorkshire Art Space.

‘Admin Goes Pomo’ is the title of the overall work installed in the reception area of the studio complex. It consists of four arrangements or ‘systems’. First, when you enter the space, next to the curvy, pebbled path is a plinth with perspex vitrine case.

In it is displayed a collage-like model from paper. Blue, A4, glossy paper maps out the surface. A path similar to the one in the actual space transverses the model. There are some wavy, centrical lines scratched in it. Other small fragments consist of a piece of white plastic tape and some pieces of leftover printed paper stuck to cellophane tape. Some of these scraps have the same printed texture as the thumb sized model box, which is pasted in a similar loose way on the blue paper. A photographic print of a red brick wall is mapped onto the side planes of the model box’s surface, the front plane is taken by a photographic image of a garage door. The model in this context opens up a cosmic world with infinite possibilities or the model itself is an example of the idea of infinity or origin. It poses questions of place and position, 48

questions of where we are at, for example through the strange presence of a garage in that universe.

The second ‘system’ consists of an A4 ink-jet print supported by a customised table with a cream, skin-coloured perspex tabletop, together with an audio piece. In the audio piece I make an over-precise semiotic analysis of that image, which depicts a meeting between a social worker and client, in the form of a revisited conversation or a thinking out loud.

My frequent hesitation in the rather dry formulation and slippages of the tongue both allows the listener to share my doubt in what I’m doing and locates a humour or critique of the self-reflexive mode that this audio work uses.

On the most outstanding wall, in the sense that it is characteristic of the architectural style, I have attached an approximately 3 meter long curvy line, fabricated from wood, hemp and paint. A kind of ‘muralesque’. The ‘back’ and the ‘front’ side of the sculpture are treated in the same way, they are in fact each other’s doubles with only a transection indicating the imaginary mirroring line between the two parts. Besides this doubling, it’s also broken down into three sections, suggesting a modular or functional system.

It is suspended in an upward, progressive position, starting at eye level inclining to raised hand level, pointing towards the corner of the reception area, where the juxtaposing wall is taken up by a window.

The hemp textile is painted over by several layers of glossy, mint green paint that with the raking daylight creates an effect of waxiness.

Finally, I implemented a specific lighting situation, using green coloured gels, filtering the light above and around the reception desk. This, with the idea that it would create a mint-greenish, saturated light, adds a theatrical element to the institutional space. Somehow referring to the ink-jet print and spoken text in the audio piece as well, where I describe “a greenish light that assembles both objects and gestures” and further on “it sort of puts a momentary hold on.. (ah, this is what I also call congealing) ..it puts a hold on a sign’s potential to evaporate meaning. Like the state of quick-silver in room temperature.”

So, it both diffuses and flattens, but also creates this ability to move, to move out of something, maybe liquid into another state.

“When an institution achieves transparency, things most of the time become unreadable. Does that mean that our relation to it is solely based on the belief that information is available in some form?”

Your work is concerned with administration and bureaucratic environments. How did your interest in this area arise?

that our relation to it is solely based on the belief that information is available in some form?

Because there have been some tremendous re-organizations both on the part of the policy making and consequently manifestation as well. These changes have a very direct impact on my artistic practice.

I chose to work with it indirectly, working with the operation of the implementation, which is basically the function of the administration and bureaucracy. My interest in administrative structures lies in that it is part of a superfluous middle-ground or its appearance as a figure of the anonymous.

This anonymity or generality is at once a powerful tool to act on the recognisable meeting points between my personal practice and public social histories, but also creates a resistance by reason of its proximity.

In my work I have adopted several forms of delivery through display or speech particular to this sort of spaces, that collapse in their function of offering information. I rather use them as a means to create the conditions for leakage to occur: An original incident seeps into its documentation or the technocratic space of a history is simultaneously open and obstructive.

Much of your art involves an inherent tension between the apparent transparency and openness of certain environments, and the attempted constraints and limitations put in place by such an environments’ aims.

How does your work on the administration services relate to this?

I’m asking myself whether transparency as an institutional goal can also be an artistic goal and what kind of political implications this might have. When an institution achieves transparency, things most of the time become unreadable. Does that mean

I hope that my audio work’s reflection on the ink-jet print will be perceived as an attempt to get closer to the image, even though I obviously fail in this and achieve quite the opposite; it doesn’t make anything anymore transparent. Only by turning away from the immediate sight of the work it is possible to approach the level of abstraction that I attend in my speech. This is an example of the way I play out the ambivalent relation between opening up and exclusion.

How do you see the artist’s role, and the artistic procedure, as reflective of this control and constraint?

I strive to make tangible the often difficult relation between a thought or artistic process and the substantiality of the existing norms and standards in the work. I bring about this tension through the idea of self-imposed restraints that summons both unknown

outside forces and real, practical constraints.

As for example with the model: How it in a seemingly random fashion, brings things together. It hovers between the gesture -contained in the moment extractiondeciding that -this is it- raising a question of limitation.

In examining administration space through the context of societal attitudes, are you more concerned with architecture, as the physical embodiment of the objectives that guide its production, or the human interactions and confrontations within such spaces?

Both. Being in such spaces, everything is designed to create/guide a certain behaviour or subjectivity. The identifying models that are presented to us prevent us, or at least me, from considering what is being proposed here. My aim is to offer a possibility to look at things differently.

Your work is structured across various platforms; photography, video and sculpture.

Was it always a conscious decision to explore different artistic directions?

The material forms or platforms that I use are inseparably intertwined with my thought processes. It is through the mimicry and appropriation of formats that I can actually learn a language, create an active form or reinvent my attitude in relation to the production of new physical spaces.

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“The entire Skweee movement I don’t think could be born anywhere other than in Sweden or Finland, because it assumes the space and climate in its sonority”

In 2008 Iacopo Patierno started following around a group of nerdy Scandinavian musicians, with a camera in tow. The movement he was documenting; Skweee, a squelching, slowed down dance music style with an entirely self-deprecating sense of humour. The result of his journey is the fly on the wall documentary “We Call it Skwee.” Filled with hilarious fillets of

nordic cod-philosophy, Patierno succeeds in drawing out the charming and idiosyncratic personalities of several of Skweee’s leading lights. Culminating in a showcase set at the Sonar music festival, the film follows the musicians and producers around their hangouts, basements, and hometowns revealing a dance music culture delightfully unlike what you might expect.

WE CALL IT SKWEEE 50

How would you describe Skweee music to someone who had never heard it?

Take an old Volvo car, give it to a nerdish mechanic in love with low budget Sci-Fi movies, and ask him to fix according to his own wishes. Then take the Volvo back, ride for 40 km on a frozen lake singing the last song you remember from your undiscovered childhood, record your voice, traumatize your neighbours late at night whispering Dante’s Inferno. Record the reaction with a crappy mic. Take your sound recordings, mash them up, take again the Volvo and play the cassette while the engine is 5000 running. Now take a bit, make it brainy funky. Play the previous records and up synched it with the bit.....ok now you’re close.

Do you like it?

I’m seriously in love A lot of the Skweee ethos seems to be about using older technologies. Most of the instruments are analogue synths, and the tracks are mainly released on 7 inch vinyl. Do you think this is a large part of the music’s appeal, or is there something more?

Releasing on 7 inch makes the whole Skweee collection a nice piece of rounded chocolate biscuit, not everybody can hold it before it melts. This is enough underground nowadays, even if releasing on 7inch is much older then any digital device, we’re in a kind of dysphasia today where having 7inch puts the producer in the corner of the experimentalist...strange enough. Do we have to talk about the fetishist pleasure of having a vinyl on your shelves? Starting from a really really small crowd of people producing and listening to Skweee music, and having a limited amount of pieces to spread around (like not more then 300) being an owner of a early Flogsta Dansehall’s 7 inch was tagging you as being part of a small music circuit. It’s not the 7inch that provides the appeal to the music, the appeal is given by the music itself, no good music, fake appeal, this is good music with strong appeal because its good music; but having a 7inch release helps give an appeal to the movement it self.

The story goes that you were helping out as assistant on Erik Gandini’s Videocracy when you came across this Sweden’s Skweee music scene. What made you want to start filming?

David (aka Joxaren) invited me to my

first Skweee night. We were working in the same production company but on different projects, he probably saw this lonely Italian guy trying to drink some Swedish coffee and he felt a bit of pity so he asked me if I wanted to join a club that night where he was about to play. I just arrived in the club and I saw David completely surrounded with machines and little lights, knobs, electric cables and other strange things. When he started to play I felt that this electronic music had something weird and the small crowd of people around me had a very lovely vibe.

It was a great night! Moreover David asked me if I’d like the idea to film and follow 8 Scandinavian dudes to Barcelona, performing a gig in Sonar festival....How could I answer negatively!? So it goes with me making some experimental filming in the first Skweee marathon in Stockholm 1 May 2008, instead of minding my business and just record the concert I also made the mistake of making some interviews with the guys.... oops the voice spread and now there’s a rumour I’m making a documentary about Skweee... oops the rumour was already turning into my system but now it’s out in the world...so it was.

What was the reaction of the musicians when you said “I wanna make a film about you guys”?

It was great also because actually they just found me and my camera chasing them, they didn’t really have time to realise what I was doing. The camera and I became immediately part of the crew and I think you can have this feeling watching the movie.

You’ve said that “We Call it Skweee is a foreigner’s view on a culture from that in many ways mirrors what I understand as typically Scandinavian.” What do you mean by this? How integral was your outside perspective to making the film?

I’d been hanging out for several weeks with some guys that were driving me into the black hole of the Jaloviina and the Finnish humour, I had to take Romantica boat (aka ‘the fucking boat’) to cross the Baltic sea over Finland from Stockholm and back.

One day in Barcelona I’d been the referee for an epic fight between Randy Barracuda and a cheese seller in the market. The way those guys were related to each other and to me, with this warm north European attitude mixed with the sincere smile of who is happy just having a drink and a bit of sun... this is for me really Scandinavian. Moreover

the entire Skweee movement I don’t think could be born anywhere other than in Sweden or Finland, because it assumes the space and climate in its sonority; I got really inspired by walking in the Helsinki’s suburbs and after going back to Eero Johannes’s place and listening to his music or trying to walk into Daniel Savio’s room without being bitten by some vinyl monster.

I’ve been touched a lot by all this.

My outside vision was simply the one of a guy that meet a new interesting music genre, he discovers that behind the music there are fantastic people and he keeps on filming and hanging out with them. We didn’t know each other before and I’m not from Scandinavia...I guess I was an outsider The film follows the journey of several Skweee musicians as they go to perform a showcase at Sonar Festival. After following the musicians for so long, did you feel as though you were part of the gang?

Yes definitely I felt like part of the gang from the first day I met them, they made me feel part of it. What I really liked was this feeling of a group of great friends making a reunion playing music instead of going fishing or playing poker. I made new friends.

Since the release of the film, how has the Skweee scene grown?

This is an interesting question that I don’t know how to answer....I know it’s growing little by little I hear there are producer popping up in Europe and U.S. and the interest for the movement is circulating on the mouth of the other music producers as well.....but I don’t really have numbers...

Do you think the film helped spread the Skweee movement?

I’m sure it did, I don’t know how much Skweee is more popular thanks’ to the film, but it has definitely helped. Aren’t we talking about Skweee through the film now?

Since making the film have you tried your hand a making a few of your own Skweee tracks?

No. I’d love to have the time to start exploring my music maker side but at the moment I wouldn’t know where to start.

Making Skweee is not a starting point anyway, a bad Skweee track is impossible to listen, it sound too crappy. But I’m positive for the future and I’m planning to release my first 7inch in 2032, stay tuned!

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SHAUN BLOODWORTH “You’ve got to listen to stuff that sounds like you want things to look in the end.”

Shaun Bloodworth is a Sheffield-based photographer whose images have become icons for dubstep and bass music. A freelancer for nearly 20 years, he has photographed the lot: Chernobyl, fancy food, fridge graveyards. But starting in 2005, Bloodworth began turning his camera on emerging Dubstep stars like Skream, Daedalus, Mary Anne Hobbs and Flying Lotus. His photos have since gone on to create the slick muted look of the Tempa Music label, Rinse FM and multiple album covers. Most recently Bloodworth began a project entitled N.S.E.W. It documents the underground electronic scenes in Los Angeles, Glasgow, London and New York.

He is also currently working on compiling a film about Sheffield nightlife to form the visuals for Mary Anne Hobbs’ stage at Sonar Festival this summer.

to expect. This was quite early on, 2005 sometime. I think Skream was on, Youngsta was on, N-Type and Kode 9 I think. It was unbelievable.

often just for pleasure.

Pretty much straight away the photography for the Skream! album came up. He was very difficult to track down and we decided to do it in Leeds, at a night called Subdub.

That really opened my eyes – it was such an exciting night but there was a real menace about the place, very different to what I’d come across in London. It was friendly, but you felt like you could get turned over at any time. Having a load of photography kit in a dark warehouse where a couple of students had just got quite badly beaten up didn’t help. So that’s how I got into it really. At that time there was no real scene in Sheffield.

Yes, that’s right. Twenty years!

I think that’s recording. So. How did you get here?

So just going back a bit, how did you end up in Sheffield in the first place?

The first stuff I did was for Tempa, sometime in 2005, with Stuart. He asked me to come to Transition, a vinyl cutting shop in Brixton and take some photographs as a favour – it was just another job really.

It turned out that he’d engineered it so that on that night it was FWD> at Plastic People, and so I ended up going along as I was staying over anyway, with no idea what

I’m from Sheffield – I went away to college and lived in London for a few years afterwards but moved back up when my wife was pregnant. After that I commuted to London for six years – as a photographer you had to do pretty much everything to survive in Sheffield at the time, there was no room to specialise. Now I’ll only travel to London maybe twice a month, and it’s

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You’ve always worked freelance, is that right?

I thought I’d better ask some vaguely technical stuff. You’ve got a very recognisable style, especially with portraits – in fact there’s a Daedalus track called ‘A Bloodworth’ isn’t there?

[Laughs] Yeah, that’s right.

How did you arrive at that, Is that something that you’ve consciously developed?

When I first started out everything I did was black and white because I liked a particular photographer when I was at college, so a lot of the work I got early on was like that – lit black and white shots, often portraits. Then, to get to the next rung up the ladder you’d work in colour. I know everything’s colour now but you had choices then in how you worked. Often you were being printed in quite bad magazines so sometimes you’d have to really whack the saturation up, as it’d never come out as it looked as a print or a transparency. Everything was super-saturated. As I got older I started to

worry less about what others thought - you become much more of an individual and follow your own route. I got into watching a lot of foreign films and was really into the melancholic feeling you got from the more muted, desaturated colours. So that slowly came into my work, and I think it suits the subject matter with this stuff.

I like the way that DJs are completely different to bands – whilst a band will often be about promoting the personality of the singer, with DJs – particularly the good ones, the more underground ones – it’s much more pure. These people are very much about promoting the music rather than themselves. They tend to be music heads who’d happily just spend days in record shops, and it’s about putting that across.

It’s quite obvious in your current work that it’s very hi-res and digital. When did you move over that way? Were you an early adopter?

to listen to stuff that sounds like you want I’ve read somewhere that you tend not to look to other photographers for inspiration? things to look in the end.

That’s not strictly true. I’d rather dip into things than go to a specific website or show.

I might look at the Guardian’s 20 pictures from that morning or something and find a certain part of a shot interesting. Other areas are far more important.

There are ways that you can look at paintings. Paintings from different periods are often lit in a certain way to symbolise certain things. There are a lot of German turn-of-the-century paintings where the light comes down from the top right-hand corner, these shafts of light. For a while I shot like that. You develop these oddities that you carry around with you.

Do you get inspired by things that aren’t visual?

Yeah, music, definitely. Certainly the more experimental stuff. It sounds daft but it forces you to think about it in a non-musical Absolutely, yeah. I’ve got friends who still way – you are creating a mood. I quite shoot on film and I can’t for the life of me like that, and I think that can really affect understand why. Especially in Sheffield, it’d take you four days to get your negatives the way you might then go out and take a back and the quality’s rubbish. I like to be in photograph. If you listen to something that’s control and working in digital gives me that. quite dark and experimental before a shoot, you’re fired up to go and be experimental.

You’ve only got yourself to blame!

It’s the same when I’m editing – you’ve got

I take it you mean experimental in an electronic sense?

Yeah. It doesn’t have to be – the worst thing you can do is get hung up on listening to a certain type of thing – but it does tend to be that way.

So, the here and now. What are you up to at the moment? What are you excited about?

It doesn’t really bother me at the end of the day what you do, whether it’s corporate or a personal project. You still have to do it the best of your ability, whatever it is. I think that’s a trick that a lot of people miss – they do part of their career really badly to try and get what they really want. You’ve got to try and put effort in to everything, even if it’s a bit uninteresting.

I guess you’re testament to the value of doing things off your own back as well as big commercial work. Take the NSEW project for example, you and Stuart started that off your own backs before Bleep decided to pick it up, right?

Yeah. I think photographers are quite used to working for themselves, working for 53

not a lot, documenting. It’s something that you’re brought up with, we’re educated like that. If you find something interesting you go out and record it. That’s something you only get working for yourself – you’d never get that in a design studio. It’s sometimes difficult to strike a balance.

Music and images, the physical product at least, are become increasingly separated these days. I wonder if that’s had anything to do with the fact that nobody wants to pay for music any more. The NSEW project was quite novel in that the music and artwork came as a whole...

Funnily enough we haven’t had too many enquiries – EMI haven’t exactly been banging down our door – but we have had some interest from a few people. You don’t make much money from that, it’s a case of covering your costs really. It’s a labour of love at the moment. But I do think there’ll be more projects like that in the future, certainly for me anyway.

You’ve been involved in the scene for nearly five years now. Obviously things have changed – the sound has changed, your work has changed – things have progressed.

Where do you see yourself in a year?

self-funded stuff; go back to America. A lot of the producers I originally photographed have become friends, and there’s a whole new generation of producers coming through who’ll be big in a year’s time. Take Gaslamp Killer – he’s gone from being pretty much unknown about 18 months ago to playing 200 shows a year all over the world. Good luck to him.

Absolutely.

The film stuff – who knows. The budgets are definitely getting bigger.

I wonder if there’ll be a convergence with the more commercial stuff – if this ‘hobby’ ends up with you working in a similar environment as on jobs for clients like Sony and BA. It’s interesting that you’re still involved at both ends of it. You’re obviously concerned with giving exposure to artists at grassroots, but at the same time you’re documenting at the big-budget end of things.

You have to, I think. You have to keep a bit of credibility as well. I hate all that ‘picking scalps’ – photographing an artist because they’ve been picked up by a label or whatever. At the end of the day it’s a document. Who knows, I might end up documenting something completely different.

You only have to be out for a few weeks and you lose touch, people think you’ve disappeared. Every six months you have to put something out otherwise your name falls A lot of your earlier work on Restaurant magazine involved portraying dishes to an out of the loop. I’d like to continue doing Images copyright Shaun Bloodworth

audience that couldn’t taste them. I guess that’s kind of the same with the work you’re doing now – you’re photographing ‘music’ for an audience that can’t hear it.

That’s something I find really bizarre about it. People have engaged so much with something that has nothing to do with sound, on the face of it. Why should a musician be interested in a visual image of themselves? It comes down to this melting pot of senses. Going back to the food thing – at the very high end it becomes less about the food itself and more about the experience. I’ve had some meals where the food isn’t that great but the evening has been unbelievable as a sensory overload, whereas the best food you’ve ever had might just be egg and chips or a bowl or soup.

One last thing. To some people you’re known as a bit of a pork fan.

Mmm. Have you got a particular favourite recipe you could recommend?

Let’s have a think… When I was at Restaurant magazine this restaurant opened around the corner from their offices called Bodeans [adopts a tone of reverence], I think it’s a big chain now. They used to do this thing called ‘pulled pork’ - they pull it apart to tenderise it. Really great. Cheap meat, you can’t go wrong. Failing that, Castle Market do a good line in pigs’ heads.

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MUSIC FOR REAL AIRPORTS Music For Real Airports is a live audio visual collaboration between two Sheffield based artists - Black Dog provides the audio, with Human performing visuals. The piece will be premiered as part of Sensoria festival in the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield on Saturday 24 April.

Both artists have a background in the combination of audio and video. The Black Dog’s members, having produced music for over 25 years, taking them to regular performances worldwide, also work as graphic designers. Human is a design studio led by Nick Bax, whose clients include the American producer and DJ Dubfire, leading Savile Row tailors and MTV. He was previously a director of The Designers Republic, designing a number of high profile projects including Pulp’s album covers and working with record labels such as Warp.

Music For Real Airports takes its title from Brian Eno’s work Music For Airports, and is conceived as a response to this. Where Eno’s work has an ambient, elegiac quality that intended to calm the space of an airport, the reality of these spaces is much different.

Music for Real Airports was created from many hours of field recordings from Airports around the world, as The Black Dog travelled between performances.

We talked to Martin and Rich from The Black Dog, and Nick Bax at Human’s office, before adjourning to the Fat Cat for pies.

How do you know each other / get involved in this project?

Human: We’ve

known each other since the early/mid nineties

One of the features of Sheffield is that you’ve got small pockets of people who are artists, designers, musicians, but they’re all doing they’re own thing and never seem to collaborate. I think it’s a really weird aspect of Sheffield. If you go to London, you’ve got the Croydon dubstep and UK funky thing happening, and you’d never get that in Sheffield. And I’ve got no idea why that is. It’s happened since the early days of electronic music in Sheffield; Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Clock DVA all had members that moved around, but they never really collaborated.

Black Dog:

very idealistic, and coming from a punk background I just didn’t think that worked.

We’ve been sat for the last three years just working on bits and pieces, and we eventually started talking with Nick about it as a multimedia project. Before we’d finished anything, we pitched it to Sensoria, and they said yes, which I think surprised both parties.

It wasn’t until we had that commitment from Sensoria that we actually had to nail it down. We’d been getting strange looks in airports for recording, on buses, on planes just trying to capture everything.

For us, we’ve been going nearly three Was that conceived with the visual parts in years and we’ve worked with musicians in mind?

Belgium, Dubfire and their Sci+Tec label doing live performances with them and also music video things.

Human: You respect the talents of each party, but we’ve talked enough that we have an idea of what would be appropriate and Black Dog: The time was right as well. We suitable. A lot of it is talking about other were in a position where we had some free things that we’ve been to, and where it’s time. In the history of The Black Dog, it’s succeeded and failed. Other events we’ve the first time that we’ve ever launched been to, things we’ve seen, right down to anything in Sheffield. Which for someone the fact that we actually want to perform it. who’s been a musician here since 1976 takes some doing. I don’t know if Sheffield That was a big part of it. supports artists at an early enough stage, they have to go off somewhere else to get Black Dog: I don’t think it happened on one credibility. day. We spent a lot of time talking at our monthly pie meeting. Nick came over to So how did this project develop through our studio to listen to music, and we came time? over here, so it was a slow progress really.

The catalyst to finish it and to get on with it was Sensoria. That was totally unusual to Black Dog: It’s got quite a long time frame. us. We thought we’d be launching in Berlin The idea stems from me hearing Brian or something, because with this you could Eno’s Music for Airports in 1979. On write two sentences about it and someone paper, like a lot of Brian’s stuff, it sounded would book you. fantastic, really great. And then upon hearing it, I was really disappointed. Even at an early age, I thought that doesn’t represent Can you each try and give us a description of what it will be like to watch? anything. It’s pitched as a utopia, and it’s Human:

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Human: We’ve

produced a little teaser to try and answer that. The nearest thing that I can think of is an art installation. Last year I went to the Venice Biennale, and in the British Pavilion they had Steve McQueen showing just one film. You just sat and watched it for about 25 minutes in total pitch blackness. That’s the nearest thing that people will have experienced before. It’s not a gig, and it’s not going to the cinema there’ll be no one in there with popcorn.

If we can create a really intense, enjoyable experience that reminds people of how they’re actually being treated and what they are being subjected to, and paying for, then I’ll be happy.

Black Dog:

So what do you think that experience is?

You’ve mentioned a ‘fear’ as the feeling of airports in other descriptions of this piece.

Black Dog: The

music does have a dark undercurrent, but I don’t think there’s a question of fear, I think it’s about the security and who it’s actually for. As an experience of paying £2000 to go somewhere, being treated like that, if you were going to a restaurant or a hotel, would be unacceptable. But we accept things at face value because we’ve been told that we should fear people getting on planes with bombs and various other things that they want to carry out. I honestly don’t believe it’s that big an issue, so it’s like - who’s all this for? I see airports as a microcosm of the two extremes - something that’s really joyful, and can be a great experience, or the absolute worst experience that you’ve ever subjected yourself to. I think that’s interesting - the utopia/dystopia, and what we’ve tried to do with the graphics and music is like a fulcrum. We want to blend what Eno did with his utopia, with the kind of things that we have gone through. Quite a bit of the music was written in airports because we spend so much time in them touring.

Are there any specific airports that are apparent in the music?

Black Dog: A lot

of the background recordings you can hear tend to be a really good mix.

East Midlands is quite good - you can just go upstairs and have a pint, then there’s the complete terror of Leeds Bradford, where there’s a nine hour delay, and getting on a plane and being told you could be there for another two hours. But it’s about amalgamating that into one 40 minute experience. I’ve played this to a lot of people that don’t like electronic and ambient

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music, but because of the field recordings that are in it, they recognise the journey and the emotions in it. That, for me, is more rewarding than a good review - that people recognise something in it.

Human: There’s

a big part of it, with both the music and the visuals that’s quite hard to place. It’s surprised us, that there’s quite an emotional core to it that’s come through.

And we’re looking forward to seeing it on that scale, because it will amplify it all.

Between the music and the visuals, there’s a whole array of emotions that seem to come through. I think that most people going there will take their own experiences with them and they will recognise it. It will prompt certain feelings in them that perhaps they hadn’t thought of before. Once you pick up your case and leave the airport you forget about it and it will provoke those feelings. There’s also a lot in there about the joy of flight that comes across.

Black Dog: The

idea was to make something that documented the whole experience. Our experience is quite different to people who go on holiday, as we sometimes take two or three flights in a week. You see a lot more, the more time you spend there. We can spot somebody who’s going to be difficult on a flight at a mile.

There was a guy in Barcelona who looked as rough as anything, but he had brand new clothes on, and he just had a fag on the plane. He then got arrested on the way off, spat in a policeman’s face, hit him in the head and everyone on the bus was shouting ‘taser him!’

movement you might get from a conveyer belt, or being orchestrated in line, or the feeling you get when you look out of a window and see things moving beneath you.

How much improvisation is there within the performance?

Black Dog: There’ll be three computers linked together in the performance on which anyone can play anything. We’ve agreed on a sequence, although the length of the pieces could effectively be infinite. Dan from Human, who’s doing the visual mixing will be standing at the side, as if he’s the fourth member.

It is all live. We have certain sequences, some are six minutes, others are just twenty seconds. But how the 45 minutes is manifested is undecided.

Some parts are done with certain musical movements in mind, but other parts might drop in and out.

Human:

I think you’ve got to leave space for happy accidents, which is something that we’d do live as well.

Black Dog:

That’s a bit of an Eno thing to do isn’t it?

No, I don’t think Brian Eno owns synchronicity or chance. He’s probably had a good go at it though.

Black Dog:

Human: The performances that we’ve done to date have been with DJs, and last year we went to Miami to the Winter Music Conference, to do an event with Dubfire, and we didn’t have a clue what he was going to play. I know he doesn’t play We’ve seen security as well where they’ve chamber music, but we didn’t know where all got their heads down, looking like they the breakdowns were going to be. So we are going to check everything, but once kind of have a kit of parts that we take with we’d gone through you culled see that they us, that we perform live with for anything were actually all playing counterstrike on all up to 3 hours. This is kind of like that, but four screens. we know the music.

To come back to the visuals, and talking about people having their own experiences and emotions that they bring to this, how did you develop the images in them, as I think I expected it to be more ‘techy’ or computer generated, rather than with quite strong illustrative parts?

Black Dog: I think that as we take the performance to other cities, it will constantly evolve as well. I’d love to do one where it was visuals on all four walls.

Human: We

Black Dog:

thought about the different experiences and how you go about depicting that. We didn’t want it to be too abstract.

There are parts of the music that evoked certain things in us and so we expressed that visually, trying to amplify things that come to us from the music. We talked about the

What are the plans for taking this beyond Sensoria?

Unfortunately, we announced this all a bit to late to get this on the festival circuit, but the plan is to review this and then take it to London and Barcelona and see how that evolves. The art world and the environments we are going for work on a very different time scale, and are a totally

alien group of people to us, so we’re hoping that we can take it to different places. We’d actually like to evolve this over a couple of years and then take it back to Sheffield, to see what’s happened over that time. I think the launch show could be really interesting, and the end show could show the journey of the work. Ultimately, as you practice more, at you get exposed to it, it evolves into something.

It’s interesting to me because Sheffield electronic groups through history have all used visuals, even if it was just slides. It’s something that we’ve always done, to add another aspect to what we’re doing. Some groups had a digital clock that counted down, others had four or five slides. Or they had large perspex sheets in front of their synths so that people couldn’t throw beer at them.

How did the music form out of the samples as you were travelling?

Black Dog: We’ve

got iPhones and recorders, and because airports repeat things quite a lot, as soon as you hear something they come out. Or, we’d just be sat with it on all the time. You get these little snippets, like a little girl who just starts singing a nursery rhyme.

Listening to the CD, I sort of got the feeling that it’s recorded from a person’s perspective, as they are travelling.

I don’t know if that was intentional, a few people have said that now. We certainly didn’t intend it to be a literal recording. I obviously just can’t deal with other peoples’ interpretations, I’m so intolerant! I think the only literal bit is the beginning and the end, where you have arrival and departure.

Black Dog:

I think with the visuals that they aren’t in sequence, so it jumbles it up even more. If there’s any chronology, we’ve messed with it. It’s more about feeling.

Within the music there’s peaks and troughs, and it’s the same with the visuals. They don’t actually happen at the same time necessarily, you can have some quite relaxed music with intense visuals. It’s not like it builds up to one big crescendo, there’s a lot of different parts that are quite rabid. I think there are some parts of it where people are going to want to get out of the room. There are some quite heavy going parts in it, where it will be very loud, very intense and slightly unpleasant. And then some parts that are just beautiful.

Human:

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TOM J NEWELL

“Skulls are probably one of the most awesome things that a human could ever hope to draw because everybody’s got one and they’ve just got a general bad-ass rep”

exhibited alongside some new screen prints that Archipelago Works have knocked up for me.

We’ll start with some basics. What influences your drawing style?

I think I’m probably influenced by stuff that I don’t really like just as much as stuff that I’m really into. I’m always aware of what I don’t want my work to look like as I’m doing it, but what I do probably want it to look like is something half as good as something done by Charles Burns, Robert Crumb, Mike Giant or Barry McGee.

If you’ve been anywhere near Division Street in the past year you will likely have noticed the distinctive two and three colour works of Tom J Newell, one of Sheffield’s most recent cultural exports. In perhaps a natural progression, Newell has since moved down South and his work has been picked up and employed by a number hip companies, from Moshi Moshi and Toast Records to Dazed and Confused Magazine.

Not forgetting his roots, and probably because this is where his largest fan base is, Tom is back in Sheffield for an ambient food and skull based exhibition in the Forum bar.

You’ve got an exhibition coming up. What are we gonna see in it?

Plenty of culinary inspired, decorative nick-nacks featuring skulls with eyeballs and hand-drawn dedications to J Dilla and Mama Cass. I’ve been drawing and painting onto loads of plates and mirrors that’ll be 60

You studied as a conceptual artist at Sheffield Hallam. However, your work now looks like its origins are more from the doodle you might have gotten into trouble for in high school. What motivated the change from doing presumably abstract work to straight up pen on paper illustration?

During the transitional period when I was trying to adapt what I’d been doing at uni into something that I could make a bit of a living from, I began to stray away from conceptual art and started to concentrate on the more illustrative stuff that I’d been doing to make gig posters for my band.

Making it as a ‘real’ artist on that whole contemporary scene is such hard work and I’ve got a lot of respect for friends of mine who’re still working in that way. I suppose I just fell back into working in a way that I was always the most comfortable with, and without the Psalter Lane (R.I.P) equipment stores, I only really had access to a pen and paper anyway!

If the start date of your blog is anything to go by, you’ve only been marketing yourself

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as an illustrator for a short period of time. But you also have been remarkably successful, illustrating for bands, record labels, dazed and confused magazine etc.

What do you think it is about your style that people find so likeable?

I dunno really.. Maybe some people pick up on the cultural references that I try and drop into the work when I can. Other people might admire the detail involved in some of the stuff. There’s a certain ‘craft element’ that I hope shines through. I hate to cut corners and if something of mine looks like it took a long time to do then it almost certainly did.. in fact it probably took longer.

Talking of magazines and record companies, do you think illustrated images have become more popular recently, as opposed to clean computer graphics or other styles?

I think the popularity of a certain style will always come in waves, but some people are always gonna stay true to traditional methods, just as other people will prefer a clean-cut computer job, and whoever’s left will be completely indifferent and apathetic to the whole thing.

You’ve impressively developed a very distinctive drawing style, and also managed to avoid drawing the same things over and over. What are the challenges you face drawing in the same style? How do you do it and keep it fresh?

The things that are commonly passed off 62

as clichés in illustration are usually just recognizable elements of a visual language that have been over used or misplaced.

Skulls are probably one of the most awesome things that a human could ever hope to draw because everybody’s got one and they’ve just got a general ‘bad-ass rep’. To try and maintain a certain style and freshness I’ll revisit a trusted subject, but each time tweak or subvert it in a slightly different way.

Recently you moved from Sheffield to London town. Has this influenced your work in any ways?

I suppose it has, although I basically still spend most of my time sat on my own drawing… it’s just in a different room in a different city. There is definitely a vibrancy that you get a sense of and can often benefit from down here though. I work part-time in an art shop in Shoreditch so I’ve had chance to pass my stuff around some cool people there.

I’ve developed a greater fondness for Sheffield since I moved too. The old place has attained a fuzzy, golden glow in my mind, and I always love every minute of it when I pop back up to see my family and friends.

ARTY PARTY ARTICLE SECOND BIRTHDAY BASH photos by Andy Brown

Last month we celebrated printing twelve issues of Article with packed out little party at the Site Gallery. The crowd of cool kids soaked up the cheap booze and we all got a little rosie in the cheeks and danced to the tunes provided

by DJs Montrave and Afroturf.

Cheers to all who turned out for the shin dig. We can’t wait till the next one!

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bungalows and bears food music art bungalows and bears