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#Post#: 422--------------------------------------------------
FINGERPRINCE (Project of the Week for 15th of May)
By: moleshow Date: May 15, 2017, 11:06 am
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i feel like this album is an album for hotter, sunnier days.
and the days are hot and sunny.
#Post#: 423--------------------------------------------------
Re: FINGERPRINCE (Project of the Week for 15th of May)
By: moleshow Date: May 26, 2017, 12:05 am
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(i forgot to mention that this one is extended because i need
some time to think on what to do for upcoming PotWs.)
#Post#: 424--------------------------------------------------
Re: FINGERPRINCE (Project of the Week for 15th of May)
By: CheerfulHypocrite Date: May 28, 2017, 11:29 am
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[quote="The Residents"]
Man, represented as a primitive humanoid, is consumed by his
self-created environment only to be replaced by a new creature,
still primitive, still faulty, but destined to rule the world
just as poorly.[/quote]
It was 1979. January. Sid Vicious (aka John Beverly, aka John
Simon Ritchie 1957-1979) had not long, allegedly, murdered Nancy
Spungen (1958-1978) and was not long for this world; and,
Britain was in the throes of the Winter of Discontent. On
January the 10th, the S_n headline is 'Crisis? What Crisis?'. A
headline which was part of a campaign against Prime Minister
James Callaghan (Baron Callaghan of Cardiff 1912-2005). By May,
the Labour Government would be replaced by the proto-Fascist
Government of Margaret Thatcher (Baroness Thatcher 1925-2013).
In the United States of America, on January the 25th, the first
robot killing of a human - Robert Williams (1953-1979), in Flat
Rock Michigan - was recorded while the Star Club in Hamburg
reopened.
In 2006, about thirty years after the release of Fingerprince
and twenty years after Sid and Nancy: Love Kills I was sitting
in The Egg Cafe in Newington, Liverpool. Alex Cox (1954-) had
arrived for tea, coffee or even just privacy. There was an Art
exhibition on - because that is what Cafe's do: food and art.
One of the pieces was conceptual. Written on the wall in black
marker pen were conceptual art slogans by "Lisa Jane Galloway".
In a fit of why not, a conspiracy - not involving Cox - was
hatched to steal the concepts. With some white emulsion paint, a
camera and the assistance of an employee of The Egg the deed was
complete. The Words were photographed, the walls were painted
and ransom notes were issued.
[center]
HTML http://www.theguideliverpool.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/EGG-BOLD-STREET-THE-GUIDE-LIVERPOOL.jpg[/center]
[center]Outside The Egg[/center]
The theme tune to the adventure was Six Things To A Cycle.
played on a portable record player that seemed to use a steel
arrowhead as a needle. The thirty year old copy of Fingerprince
was destroyed. But this was a worthwhile trade to achieve the
world's first Conceptual Art Theft.
[center]
HTML http://www.sheriffhill.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/IMG_0442.jpg[/center]
Back in 1979, things were hotting up. Liverpool in the 1980s
would become the front line of a class war. A working class city
stood up to a manifestly unfair and provocative Conservative
Government and fought for its survival. Naturally, the
Government Won. But anybody who was part or party to the events
was indelibly altered. Nobody becoming a Master Conceptual Art
Thief could have a personal history that would fail to include
1979 Liverpool or 1987 Liverpool or 1981 Liverpool or all three.
The Truth was that the City had summoned forth demons.
[quote="Godsong"]
God never really did like man
anyway
At least not after they started
walking around on their hind legs
And talking on the
telephone
[/quote]
[center]
HTML http://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1019/556902797_df36c0f224_z.jpg[/center]
[center]Outside The Piggeries[/center]
These demons were listening to all sorts of things and doing all
sorts of things. It was an era of transition from the violent
thuggishness of Punk - which ended on the death of friends from
heroin. Death is always the way to end an era. The Piggeries
were a group of Blocks Of Flats: Haigh Heights, Canterbury
Heights and Crosbie Heights. Built in 1965 and almost derelict
by 1972, they were the home to people that the City Council
considered to be a criminal underclass. Council employees
entirely blamed the tenants for the conditions in the Piggeries.
Talking to someone who had worked in the local Repairs Office,
on Shaw Street, it became clear that that was never going to be
the whole story. Shaw Street Offices were the area focus for
repairs and decoration of council owned properties. Naturally,
works were prioritised as they came in. Requests for Piggeries
repairs were put in a specific box. At the end of the day the
specific box was emptied into the bin. If you happened to be
female, 23, living in a squat in the Piggeries and get raped,
heroin is a superb method to end it all. It allows the coroner
to record a verdict of "death by misadventure". Which is
entirely reasonable as hypothermia while a white out induced by
heroin is marvellously misadventurous.
[center]
HTML https://asenseofplaceblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/piggeries-3.jpg[/center]
[center]Further Outside The Piggeries[/center]
The demons were primitive humanoids in a self created
environment. The tubular bells of You Yesyesyes Again with the
pause at the end before a sneeze - which may, or may not, have
been imagined - were the favourite bit, - along with the howler
monkey introduction of Six Things To A Cycle - of Kathy. She was
strange, provocative, older, kissed women and enjoyed herself.
Six Things To A Cycle might well have been her favourite piece
of music - but you could never tell. She listened to an endless
series of pawned records ranging from Tangerine Dream to
Hawkwind to Sex Pistols and Blondie with oddities like the
Residents in between. It took over two weeks for me to discover
she was dead. Nobody went into the Piggeries - she would always
meet people outside the blocks.
Six Things To A Cycle was always good for clapping along to.
Forget the idea that music has to have melody or orchestration,
clapping was the future. Clapping and chanting. It was about
1999 that I heard Kecak - Balinese Monkey Chants. But that is
what we were doing to Six Things To A Cycle in 1979. Chanting.
In 1988 I watched Akira and was assured it had chanting in.
Which is not something I believed. The Chanting to Six Things To
A Cycle was different. Improvised. Private. Personal. Something
that makes Goodbye Sober Day by Mister Bungle seem that tiniest
bit like Top Of The Pops. Six Things To A Cycle was the source
of endless improvisations. Not only in noise making but in being
an audience.
Detatched from the original three sided work, Fingerprince was
an imperfect creature in a self ceated environment -
foreshadowing Eskimo and hinting at the complexity of the world
rather than showing it in the manner of The Gingerbread Man or
Bad Day On The Midway. Much like other works that preceded the
machine mediated creations that, almost, begins with Eskimo,
Fingerprince is a manually assembled collage in the tradition of
the Situationist International. A work that is simultaneously
psychogeographical - or, by analogy, psychoanthropological - and
incomplete. The absence of the Babyfingers section never really
impinged on any kind of understanding of the whole work.
The music you think of as being the favourite of someone who has
died has a strange, potent, sentimentality. Memory begins right
now and stretches backwards into time, in reverse, and so you
spend more time storytelling than recalling. It might well be
that the memories and the implications of the memories have
simply melded into a narrative that sprang, incomplete and
imperfect, from the experience of the music. Fingerprince was
spattered with sounds that may or may not have been what they
are recalled as being.
[quote="March De La Winni"]
La la
La-la la-la
La la
La-la la-la
[/quote]
That seemed like a perfectly accurate quote of the lyrics for a
track that turned out to be instrumental. While
[Quote="Godsong"]
One of His favorite things
Was man's believing in Him, and then not believing in Him
Believing in Him, Not believing in Him
[/quote]
which echoes
[Quote="Tourniquet Of Roses"]
And all that's left is something else
There is no more to say
Is no more to say now... Is no more to say...
[/quote]
Was, for some years, thought to be on Third Reich And Roll.
Which makes little sense as it is perfectly reasonable stab at
the kind of unifying lietmotiv that runs through Fingerprince.
When the "restored" version on compact disc came into existence
it highlighted how unreliable for fact the Residents really are.
Back in 2006, the Words were stolen from the walls and an
ultimatum issued to the Artist. Lisa Jane Galloway, it turned
out, was not a single artist but collaborators using a nom de
plume. The irony escaped me. Which is one of the main fobiles of
memory: it is a form of irony that Kathy (1956-1979) would have
railed and screamed at.
Fingerprince has always been something I have listened to in
sections, even thought it is supposed to be a complete work. It
epitomises the house construction elements of the Theory Of
Phonetic Organisation and sits in the caesura between the tape
mangling era and the bit mangling era. Which was also between
the end of the Victorian Era and modern Britain. Primarily, Six
Things To A Cycle sounds like someone bashing home made
instruments. Which appealed to the punk DIY ethos. The same
ethos that would see thousands of British people take up a
nomadic lifestyle in the 1980s. Ultimately giving rise to the
Festival Culture of the twenty first century. Six Things To A
Cycle was, undoubtably, more than merely the sum of parts. More
than merely musical building bricks even as each section built
around a minimalist theme worthy of John Cage (1912-1992) or
Steve Reich (1936-) into something that is always worth clapping
along to.
In 1979 being Gay was not really an option. For men it was
explicitly illegal and Lesbians did not exist - because,
according to Queen Victoria (1819-1901) "Women did not do that
sort of thing". Queen Victoria, it appears, banged like a barn
door and took cannabis and morphine for period pains but thought
same sex relationships would either frighten the horses or did
not exist. The Vibrator was invented either by Romain Vigouroux
(1831-1911) - using it at the Salpêtrière hospital, Paris 1878 -
or Joseph Mortimer Granville (1833–1900) who documented how
bringing women to paroxysm cured them of hysteria or sexual
inversion. This was not a cure for being a lesbian in 1979. Even
in 2017, r_pe is not actually a cure for being a Lesbian, nor
heroin.
Nor is memory a substitute for real people.
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