A combined live audio visual improvisation with contributions and vinyl selection from this years guest Scorpio, Jack Smylie Wild.
I really enjoyed working on this experimental project with Jake. For me, it was a chance to leave my usual writing practice to one side, and focus on enjoying the collaborative process, dipping into areas I’m interested in, but don’t give much time to.
I found a lot of old footage I’d taken, and Jake was happy to play around with it. I also made some new bits of film especially for A Circle in Twelve Parts, transforming myself into a kind of Green Man in the woods, with river clay and leaf litter. For the live recording on the night, I revisited some characters I used to draw when I was a teenager, for a comic I made called ‘Creatures of the Moonshine’ – which explores ideas around the multifaceted nature of self, and the seeming contradictions and juxtapositions therein.
This work felt more like the start of something than an end-product, and I’m looking forward to getting back into Jake’s lab to conduct further multi-media experiments, perhaps with some spoken word and rap, in the future.
Revisiting some old tech including the Sony FD Mavica! what a camera!
A popular digital stills camera about 20 years ago, I remember there were 2 available in West Wales School of Art where I was studying at the time, so popular we had to book it at least a week ahead! One of the first digital cameras to save to removable media, it used a floppy disc and could hold around 10 photos a disc!… amazing! It also boasts the ability to record short low resolution videos and has an A/V out!
Experimenting with the analog output – after not pressing anything for a while the camera went into a lovely demo cycle…
After rearranging the studio, I can now reach the turntables and synths at the same time! This is really quite exciting, these are the second or third time I’ve played the two together seen by Sony A1E and GoPro4 cameras through a Skytronic A/V switcher.
A live audio visual improvisation with images, video and vinyl selection from this years guest Taurus, Maura Hazelden:
An aural & visual dance duet, a reminder of birthdays past, I so enjoyed the immersion in apple blossom.
It was great to feel a bit creative and to be creative in collaboration. I had thought I might use some of my work in terms of images but somehow it became a personal journey of images from birthdays & my life, some friends…photos of me (I’m not always fond of having my photo taken except in my work!), of a place close to my heart now gone, food and bluebell wood walks for my birthday, and … apple blossom.
How have I never made a link between Lily the Pink and my series of works with pink lilies?
I would like to apologise for both of us not realising that soundcloud advertising would slip in, and my lack of speed in silencing it! I might be a Quaker but I don’t endorse Franklin Graham…this is not a love song…
Thank you Jake for the invitation and a creative afternoon with plenty of joy! I am inspired to relook at some of my language/sound work and do some re-creation.
This year’s circle in 12 parts features guest artists chosen by zodiac sign, my guest for Aquarius is Maria Hayes.
Double Aquarius 14:02:22
We are birthday twins so we created this piece on our birthdays.
Working with Jake is always exciting and invigorating. Our creative conversations happen through initial talking, but mostly through the doing. We each work in our own ways but there is a connection, synchronicity and overlap in how we do what we do.
In making choices for this performance from Jake’s significant record collection and my overloaded image library I decided to be spontaneous. I listened to internal prompts and allowed those to guide me. On reflection I notice that many of the choices are things that have significance in how I have been formed, informed, shaped and made at different stages of my life. There are also sounds and images of my current obsessions. In addition there is the purr of my younger cat. All are soul connections.
This month we both lost our friend and collaborator Sianed Jones. Sianed features in my choices too. How could she not? She appears as butterfly. Psyche – soul – transformation. A butterfly can have the gentlest and most transient of presences yet affect complex systems in dramatic ways. And this can be true of us all.
And birds. Being an air sign birds are of significance to us both. I have worked for many years with the tension between freedom and security. Between trying to establish roots while desiring to fly. Between being of the earth and being other. Perhaps it’s something of the condition of being an artist and freelance working. Never quite belonging, but observing. Taking flight with our imaginations then nest building for the next project. It is so wonderful to find another member of your tribe, or flock, to fly with. Thank you Jake.
This year’s circle in 12 parts features guest artists chosen by zodiac sign, my guest for Taurus is Rhowan Alleyne:
“The playlist started by looking up people who I share my birthday with. I remembered Grace Jones already but I had forgotten about Malcolm X. I was somewhat alarmed by Pol Pot.
Then I saw Ho Chi Minh. So this is where the idea of doing something ‘revolutionary’ arose. I looked up the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s film, Malcolm X, which is where several of the vinyl choices came from. I’ve always loved The Planets suite since I played in a youth orchestra many years ago so I was really happy that Jake has that as one of his ‘base’ records. Venus transports me every time to a place of calm and beauty.
Being a swimmer, naturally I’m interested in the mermaid side of my planetary ruler. There’s an oceanic turn happening in some parts of the humanities. A paradigm shift towards a more watery understanding of the world that has huge value for the ecological and environmental movements. And our well-being.
My affinity with the ‘blue humanities’ comes from embodied immersion in the seas around the coast of west Wales. It tunes me in to the seasons and heightens environmental consciousness.
In prehistoric times sea levels were lower and the larger wild mammals were not yet extinct. Swimming at Whitesands I took my GoPro into the sea and recalled the horn of the wild bull that was found on the beach after a storm one winter. The poem about it is kind of a layering of time and experience. But it’s also about Venus, about knowledge that comes from the sea and about the only thing that’s worth doing when all else is lost, and that is to love the world and love each other unreservedly.
Sea monsters I don’t see as villains anymore but as the ultimate disrupters of human hypocrisies and vanities.”
Rhowan’s vinyl record selection: China Crisis – Performing Seals; Tracy Chapman – Talkin’ bout a revolution; Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues; Ariel Ramirez – La Peregrinacion; Lionel Hampton – Flying Home; Herb Alpert – Surfin Senorita; Velvet Underground – Venus in Furs; Public Enemy – Revolutionary Generation; Grace Jones – Pull up to the Bumper; KLF – Justified and Ancient; Panic Allstars – Change is gonna come; Holst – Venus.
Venutian Revolution
Tracklist:
Born in the Foam
Vibrant Earth
Sinking and Extinction
Revolutionary Bodies
Big Pink Bells
Selkies aren’t the Enemy
Born in the Foam
How do the ocean born love? As though we’re the last ones left alive on Earth
or like aurochs swimming through flooded forests whose lush understories swish and sway in the undercurrents
or like navigators who chart course by memory of shearwaters flocking and shoals of silvery herrings that fly across the darkest night skies
without fear of the depths or turning tides
Vibrant Earth
At the beach, on the shore, in the sea
is where I am most in touch
with the Earth’s
sensory vibrancy.
In spray hanging in the air
above waves peaking on an offshore wind,
sunlight splits and rainbows flash fleetingly,
just inches away.
Time is layered
in the sediments that rise slowly above sea level,
and in the sand that is building around the marram grass.
One night a storm surge will slice through it all
and in the morning we’ll marvel at the cliff falls,
the strata, the root systems tangled and dangling.
The river in spate loosens a dinghy from its tether,
pushing it to the black rocks
where the sand sucks it down
but its red and blue stern juts out,
just like one of the jagged stones.
A tree trunk that’s drifted down the estuary
is dragged from the tideline and burnt
on the edge of the dune,
its smoke seeping into the clothes
of dancers bopping to simple minds on a bluetooth speaker
whilst waiting for a comet’s tail to fan itself
like a swan’s wing across the northern sky
Each thing it’s own thing
in time and space,
its own momentum, trajectory and tangled relationships with others, and us.
Each day,
shifting winds, tides, sunset and sunrise,
cliff falls, rainfall and currents
re-sculpt the Earth and how we know it.
Sinking and Extinction
Are sea levels rising or earth levels falling?
Either way, we better learn to swim.
The skills we need for the future
work with the ebbs and flows,
ripples, eddies,
swipes of tail flukes,
racing fins, rips, drifts and seal snorts
of a more watery world.
Of letting go of solid ground.
Of humility and fearlessness.
Of sinking into, or out of, extinction.
Revolutionary Bodies
Walking, swimming and other things that put us back in touch with our bodies, are the times when we’re in touch with our becomings. Swimming, which combines streamlining with intentional instability and surrender of total control to the forces in the waters, disrupts our usual ways of moving and thinking. Body surfing forces adaptations to our bodies and minds through gentle and crashing action. Getting slammed and scraped, sucked out and slapped in the face, pumped and dumped are all part of the battle and the fun, if you own it. A swimmer’s language is slippery, becomes fluid and mutable. Swimming re-wilds us. We submerge and we subvert. We submerge to emerge. We’re divers and freedom fighters. Sea swimming is a radical practice in flow, with the uncertainty and heartbreak of a broken world.
Big Pink Bells
You can’t think about swimming without thinking about
bodies
and the sensory experience
of touching, hosting, interacting and empathising
with other bodies.
As water sculpts the earth,
so it reshapes swimmers’ bodies;
re-enchanting us to the beauty of change,
to the thrill of connecting
and blurring our boundaries with
cold currents,
thumping shorebreak,
gritty impacts,
urchins, dorsal fins,
winds, driftwood,
sand eels, jellyfish,
rope zombies, dead crabs,
the sun, the salt.
I’m a swarm of big pink bells,
a mussell on the perch,
spider crabs spawning,
an octopus observing that it’s being observed,
a razor clam,
a forest of sandmasons fanning their tiny branches,
a lugworm cast forming,
a walrus balancing a starfish on its nose
A pebble bored by an angel wing.
My skin is as mottled as a seal pelt
as scarred as a bottle nosed dolphin’s
Crushed oyster shells, leaf mould, silt and algae cling to my wrinkles
is a swimsuit an intertidal zone?
Selkies Aren’t the Enemy
leviathan, atargatis, scylla the cracen medusa cthulu godzilla ursula jaws the meg
sea foam hissing and shining, dissolving and reforming with every wave
Other records in the mix: Roger Christian – Discover yourself through Astrology; John Dankworth – The Zodiac Variations; Cosmos – Your Stars for 1968; Norrie Paramour Orchestra – The Zodiac Suite; Cannonball Adderley presents – Soul Zodiac; Cosmic Sounds – The Zodiac; Madame Francesca – Your spoken Horoscope – Taurus
The found of music 