ABOVE AND BEYOND From Volume 5 Number 2 (in print) For prepared guitar player, Keith Rowe, travelling around the world with AMM, no matter what time and space, radio is the inconstant, unpredictable constant. (Improvised from notes into a tape recorder by Keith Rowe. Transcribed and edited by Phil England). Why I use the radio: Found Object Unpredictable content Fixed to a time and a place Part of a global culture and at the same time a local culture. Part of the process of shifting the object from the utilitarian to the aesthetic. Allows vulgar materials to be incorporated into the performance Difficult to determine whether it elevates, degenerates or celebrates the sources of the materials Additional multiplicity Creativity at the point of juxtaposition Integration of another media Helps to produce a layered sensation Produces a form of counterpoint Independent Perpetual variation

Modular Reproduces certain aspects of daily life Synthetic Challenges the notion of authority that came from technique Adds to the polyphony of timbre Has its own unique texture A question of reality and a question of art: the artistic fact Engages in imitation Replaces the exterior contribution of the composer in some aspects. Environment and noise Provides melody for the guitar Lack of uniqueness in its contribution Helps with the act of music making, of organising in front of you Changes the perceptions of the performance. Within the AMM I've used both tape and radio. I realised subsequently that I tended to use the tape recorder during times of upheaval in the group. The biggest upheaval is when we started - the period between '64 & '65 - when I would copy onto tape The Beach Boys' Barbara-Ann or Lightning Strikes maybe 20, 30 or 40 times. You can make differences in volume, timbre, etc in subsequent recordings to make discrete differences in playback. I would play the tape at enormous volume, filling the whole performance area. For us it was an attempt to occupy the total space, almost like Coltrane's notion of sheets of sound. This was the first period of tape use. The second period was the period of political upheaval, '71-'73, when I was using political sound bites. I guess Mao Tse Tung was the master of the sound bite. I became much more interested in the political content of the tape for the sake of political correctness: trying to be very strict about the output from the

performance. I probably would have preferred to use the radio, for example having Radio Tirana inject itself into the performance with that kind of content, but obviously the opportunity of having Radio Tirana coincide with the time of the performance was impossible. I would also record things like Yellow River Concerto or Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The third period of using the tape recorder was immediately after Cardew's death in December '81. For example, I performed with Phil Minton and Roger Turner at the Arnolfini Gallery where I contributed a short solo in tribute to Cardew who had died a week or so before. I used a taped version of Barber's Adagio with some pages of Cardew's Treatise. Probably the single most important facet of why I used the radio came from the fact that I was from a fine art background. As an art student the found object was something that I thought extremely appealing. Using the world around you directly, rather than trying to imitate it or reproduce it, made sense. For me it poses the question of exactly where the prepared guitar starts. I think it probably starts in the early 1500s with Da Vinci. He'd observed that an artist could stimulate his imagination by trying to find recognisable shapes in the stains of old walls. Then in the 1700s Alexander Cousins suggested producing such chance effects on purpose and developed the ink blot landscape which influenced John Constable in the early 1800s. Constable's English landscape painting is based on observable facts - "employing the pure apprehension of the natural effect," as he puts it. But unlike his predecessors he was concerned with the intangible qualities of conditions of sky and light and atmosphere rather than the concrete details of the scene. Perhaps the most powerful found object was Marcel Duchamp's urinal signed "R Mutt" (in the Armoury Show, New York 1913). "Whatever the artist chooses to be art is art." In the final analysis you cannot rely on the radio in terms of its content. That, however, is its strength. It continues to throw up the unexpected whether you welcome it or not. It can range from atmospheric static through to highly defined classical music or political commentary. For the most part it broadcasts messages and culture that, in the heat of the performance, one does not comprehend. One has the option of dealing with the timbre, the volume, the pitch, the EQ, the duration or whatever; and as quite often with speech you don't understand the content, you build a possible response or not around the broadcast. Radio is forever fixing times and places. It can be fixing it with a football result or with a unique moment in the broadcast.* They're unrepeatable; or if they are repeatable, the content is continually changing around them.

Radio has the ability to bring a global culture into the performance. Two things are thrown up here. It's often struck me how frequently one hears American voices wherever you are in the world, whatever frequencies. It's obviously making some kind of political statement about cultural domination and suppression. And the same old pop tunes are thrown up time and time again wherever you are - but in a flash of a second you then find the local weather forecast. I find it intriguing to have those two things almost simultaneously existing wherever you're doing a performance. Local issues are often discussed which have a relevance to the audience and which you're not a part of in a strange way. Quite often the audience will respond to what is being said on the radio. It's only later by actually asking someone what was going on that you find out what was happening. Using the radio in performance shifts its context from the utilitarian to the aesthetic. That's also true for the preparations used with the guitar. Knives for example have been used in music for at least a thousand years, particularly with plainchant and monochords. I like the idea of taking the knife that you eat with and putting it into the guitar strings and activating it. It's turned into an aesthetic object at that point. The radio is a utilitarian object and broadcasts everyday materials which suddenly become aesthetic: I find this highly attractive. It's something which is found in pop art and synthetic Cubism, with Braque taking a cigarette packet and gluing it to the painting, for example. In using the radio one is incorporating vulgar materials. It's difficult to tell whether its inclusion in the music elevates it or denigrates it. In a sense I guess it's a celebration of the source of the materials. For me, classic memories of that would be an AMM performance where we would almost reach a suspended feeling in the music. It's not particularly quiet but there's a hum of a generator or something. It's just hanging in the air. I put the radio on and you hear Bert Kampfert or the Johnny Douglas Big Band in a very muffled way floating across the music. There's an extraordinary feeling. It touches on that area that Donald Judd the painter writes about. He was discussing Pollock's paintings saying that they involve neither the immediate emotions of traditional art, nor the way these are generalised; that they are about immediate sensations; and that the development of Pollock's art is one of tension between emotions and sensation. And clearly putting Bert Kampfert on top of this static AMM sound is a sensation. It's not generated by an emotional feeling, but there is almost an emotional response from hearing the things put together. Radio is a part of the tug of war between what you know and what you don't know. I like the idea of multiplicity too. The radio is able to bring multiplicity in a way that one cannot expect into a performance. I think the point of all this is that the creativity comes at the point of juxtaposition. It has been said that a

painting of Cezanne or a musical composition often or not is the proof of creativity at some other point. So when Haydn sat at a table and wrote the String Quartets, the creativity is there happening within him. With Cezanne, as he is looking at the landscape, something chemical is happening in his brain: the painting is the proof of that creativity. But with Robert Rauschenberg in Monogram, 1950s, where he places a huge tractor tyre around the stomach of a free-standing Angora goat, the creativity is at the point of juxtaposition. In the AMM performance when the static is hanging in the sky, at the point where the radio comes on, there's the same notion of putting the tyre around the goat. I find the juxtaposition of those two things extremely compelling. Perhaps with sampling and plunderphonics, musicians are moving towards the plastic arts in that we're recognising that the art of juxtaposition is a very important art: in the final analysis maybe the only art. The radio also integrates another media into performance. I've used different things: fire alarms, television, old tv and radio broadcasts, tape, a huge variety of bowed materials, big metal jugs and cups, a lot of plastic boxes, rulers, electric motors, fans, miniature chain saws. Radio is part of integrating found objects in the performance. Within the AMM it adds to the layered or 'laminal' sensation which Eddie Prevost has written about. One could view radio as a form of counterpoint. But a counterpoint that is continually shifting round like one of those arcade games where you have a bat and a ball flying around the screen and you are forever trying to track it. Obviously one has the notion of just letting it get on with whatever it does. Radio's content is independent and has its own way of shifting. Sometimes you settle down into something which you feel is working very well and then the radio will change radically. There's a radio station in France, FIP, which would play Rameau one moment and then some gross French chanson the next. Perpetual variation is one of the central features of the radio. The other facet of radio is its modular quality. It's part of the natural set up of the guitar to be modular in terms of its effects: whammy pedals, zoom boxes, distortion units, etc. And one is forever picking these components. Radio is a part of this modular structure. The idea of reproducing certain aspects of daily life and bringing those into the performance is interesting. The performance is like a fantastic landscape of which one has some memories. There are times in performance when I'm reminded of earlier periods in my life. One example would be when I lived in Leicester in the mid 70s and worked in a printing factory in a desperate attempt

to earn some money. The factory had 20 or 30 printing machines which made an incredible clatter. But above all of that there was the radio: incessant music which you could sometimes just perceive and which at other times would be very clear. You could never hear what people were talking about. Earlier still, after I left art school, I took a job as a dockside labourer and worked on aircraft carriers. We'd be deep inside the fuel tanks cleaning them out or painting them and there'd be someone with a radio or tape machine or singing at some distance. You could hear it through the metal structure. Quite often the radio is the link to those aspects of daily life in the performances. Radio is a synthetic object. In the plastic arts, sythetic materials were most readily incorporated by the synthetic Cubists. Up to that point Cubism had been dealing with simultaneous vision, the fusion of various views and uniting the subject with its surroundings. The synthetic Cubists however, would use fragments of paper or stencilled letters and were concerned with the relationship between the customary modes of perception and the artistic fact as presented by the artist. The syntheticness of the radio allows it in a sense to be hermetic. It allows relationships with the past, with older compositions for example. It allows frozen interpretations of a piece of music to enter the performance. It's intriguing to have that in what is otherwise a live, real-time improvisation. Radio adds to the polyphony of timbre. It has its unique texture unlike anything other in the ensemble. Yet paradoxically, radio is also able to engage in imitation. First, there is the idea of its speaker - all my music comes from this vibrating piece of cardboard - the fact that the radio with its own little speaker cone is able to imitate a symphony orchestra or the human voice is an astounding idea. Secondly, I recall a AMM performance when John Tilbury, on the other side of the stage from me, was playing something very beautiful on the piano, I placed the radio ear piece in my ear and searched around FM for some piano music rather like the music he was playing. I was lucky and found something very, very similar and provided an oblique reference to that via the radio. John then changed what he was playing in imitation of what the radio was broadcasting. This brings me to the idea that radio replaces the exterior contribution of the composer. There are times in performance where I have put the ear piece into my ear and I've listened to a play or a dialogue and I have accompanied this with some music. Or I would use the radio to feed me instructions. I remember once listening to a cooking programme where someone was explaining a recipe and I did a sonic version of the recipe without the audience being able to hear the instructions. At times it is possible for the audience to hear both.

I'm also quite attracted to the idea of radio as environment. Radio - particularly on shortwave - is subject to variations due to time of day, dust in the atmosphere, where the sun is, sunspots, all that kind of stuff. Radio also establishes political environments with comments about everyday issues of elections or whatever. In the very early days of AMM I used shortwave or medium wave exclusively. Shortwave tends to be a fairly unclear signal, lacking definition, and is easier to integrate into the overall sound. With shortwave one is drawn into listening into the essence or the spirit of the broadcast. There is also a higher frequency of foreign, political broadcasting. An example of that has just been released as part of the AMM Laminal set, some German counting from shortwave from a 1982 performance at Goldsmiths College. It had an incredibly menacing, frightening and chilling feel to it. I remembered it for years and subsequently found out that those kinds of techniques of reading numbers was a way for the East German Communist Party to communicate with its agents in the West. Medium wave is a much firmer sound image, though it shares the same general timbres as shortwave. FM is sometimes too clear. For me it has the same relationship that CDs have to vinyl. But because of its clarity it's possible to take very small snatches from a radio play - just single words - and keep visiting the broadcast during the performance so you get a stripped down version of the play. One of radio's unique properties, which I think John Cage touched on, is that the source originates outside the performance space. That's pretty much a unique facet. Then there's the radio as provider of melody. AMM contributed to John Cage's 70th celebrations at the Almeida where we did a version of Cardew's Treatise for him for which I used the radio. I remember him coming up afterwards and having a fairly lengthy discussion about the use of the radio in works like this. It was his view that turning the radio on it was a legitimate way to play a melody on an instrument. A fairly central part of why I like to use radio in performance is that it challenges the notions of technique. One of the aspects of Pollock's life that troubled him was, 'Can you tell that I can draw from a drip painting?'. (I think you can actually). But for the artist to have the respect and consideration of the viewer, the public often demands that you know your instrument, or that you can paint. For the early AMM, not working in the traditional modes of music making, it was much more difficult for the audience to assess what was happening. They had to rely on their own judgements of whether the AMM had

significance for them. In the classical world the performer buys franchises for the performance: rather like buying a McDonalds or a Wendy Burger franchise the musician buys Beethoven for 20 minutes or Haydn for 10 minutes. The audience is able to relax because the process has been sifted through time. Only the good, powerful, great works exist and the audience knows that as long as it's a reasonable performance, everything is OK. If you're not working with the same harmonic language of central keys, themes, developments, motifs, cadence, rhythmic character, dynamics, exposition, recapitulation, codas, sonata form... then it's much more difficult for the audience. Furthermore, if you destabilise the instruments to such an extent that there are no conceivable notions of technique going on, I think that's pretty challenging. Clearly the radio is a part of that challenge. I turn the radio on - where's the musical skill? I'm attracted to the idea of being very transparent about what one is doing and with radio it's very clear that I'm there organising in front of you. * A very important function for the radio within the AMM is for John and Eddie to find out how their football teams (QPR and West Ham respectively) fared on Saturday afternoons.