An ISIS Arts ‘Year of The Artist’ residency, in
collaboration with The Northern Region Film and Television
Archive (NRFTA) - Demixed by Chris Dooks. View this
clip to see the video side of the project
and see also "Art Projects" page for a review of this
project.
An excerpt from the
sleevenotes of the CD:
Three Tons of Onions : Three charismatic
French onion sellers rent a house in Wallsend and stuff it
with onions. They spend days tying the onions together and
then they sell them to Tynesiders! Fantastic! The best
thing about this clip is the way these guys have hybrid
accents — a kind of Gallic/Geordie hybrid. Listen to the
way they say “turn” in this piece.
Things Like That : Schoolchildren are
given a kind of ‘funky’ science lesson where they learn
about gravity. The hilarious thing is, that when asked what
they have learned, most of the children reply, “about
gravity an' that”, or, "things like that".
What I have done is edit all the “things like
that”(s) together from the different kids’ responses,
under a scientific sounding digital score. The aesthetics
of the responses are amazingly similar, a kind of nervous
response to the question as if they didn’t really
understand the lesson.
No Men (They've Been Banned) : A city club
promoter, who looks and sounds a bit like Jackie Stewart,
gives an interview with a female reporter (a rare thing
then) and the whole thing has a whiff of Peter
Stringfellows about it. It’s a slightly bizarre piece,
which today would have major, same–sex overtones, as it’s a
lunchtime women only disco. Women working in the city
centre can, ‘get a drink and a bite to eat’, ‘watch fashion
displays’ and the like. It really is a very odd clip. I pay
homage to it in this dance track. No men? They’ve been
banned!!
05/09/58 : A strange choice of direction
for such a tragic story here, but it’s fascinating and
brilliant. Stand aside Taggart, Morse, Kojak (insert your
TV detective hero here), because the presenter, in this
case, Luke Casey (For whom I am waiting to call and tell me
to stop insulting his 70s TV work), beats them all. It’s a
great progressive performance, a slice of
dramatic–cum–factual local television. Basically, Casey
talks of a terrible murder in a carpet shop. The camera
followed him meditatively down Newport Road in
Middlesbrough to the premises where on 5th September 1958,
the young worker in the shop was brutally stabbed,
apparently without rational motive. The killer was never
found and the shop is to be knocked down to make way for a
new development. Casey, the master orator, reveals other
brutal Cleveland murders, but there is no Crimewatch ‘don’t
have nightmares’ here, just a bleak list of local victims.
In this piece I have buried the sound under layers of
distortion and scratchy composition as if the dramatic
transmission is still floating around Newport Road like some
restless ghost.
Lazarus Static : I am a big fan of the
Finnish electronic music duo Pan Sonic, formerly
Panasonic, before an injunction put an end
to that. They use pure sine wave sound, and very cold
minimal austere electronic noise in their compositions. I
have made a piece as a kind of nod to them but instead of
using pure sine waves and tones, I have used scraps of
damaged audio found on the beginnings and endings of
various clips in the archive. I like the idea that
generally speaking, absolutely no one would voluntarily
select such material from an archive unless they were nuts,
like me. I have played God with these runt–of–the–litter
clips and resurrected them into a shape. This clip works
best on headphones. Technical note: watch the tweeters in
your speakers! My then flat–mate hated me playing this sort
of stuff on his stereo.
Little Angels : I transcribed Tyneside
nursery rhymes word for word to the Macintosh Simpletext
application, which can phonetically read the typed text.
There’s nothing new with an artist using this application,
but it’s bizarrely wonderful to hear words like Cullercoats
read by a soft, American, female robot. The piece surrounds
the good work of teacher Mrs Rachel Smith who began to do
something one day. She listened to everyday nursery rhymes,
and found that the seemingly innocent rhymes were full of
birth, death and pain. They were kind of legacies of
illness and dark folk tales through the ages. There’s one
piece: “There is a lady on the mountain. Who she is I do
not know. All she wants is gold and silver.” Then there’s
the “Now we are getting married, now we are getting older,
now we are digging our graves, now we are dead and
buried.”, rhyme of the little Dutch boy and girl.
Silver Buckles : I have given the classic
Tyne folk song Bobby Shaftoe a slow–motion remix, coupled
with a scholarly voice–over from a teacher. Earlier, I was
talking about trying to avoid things obviously associated
with the North East but I felt that I still wanted some of
the culture in the project. So I am happy this is here.
Thank you to: Clymene Christoforou, Clive and Lindsay and
all at ISIS arts, Chris Galloway, Lisa Bond and Leo
Enticknap at the NRFTA, Paul Wells, Carol Cooke and Suzanne
Heywood at Teesside University, Repeat Perfomance
Multimedia, Andrew Conway, The Big M team, Digital Fringe,
Throssel Hole, John Peel, Heather Powell, Kenneth Simpson
and all the collaborators, both alive and dead on this CD.
All tracks (c) copyright controlled BBC / NRFTA / CHRIS
DOOKS 2001