hail the vandals

horsemouth (thanks to john clarkson) went to see richard skelton play - he bowed a bouzouki laid flat which made a pleasant feedback-y kind of noise at important moments and a string quartet produced a range of textures (sometimes reducing the volume to (near) silence). horsemouth knows too little about music to tell you what was going on structurally but at the level of texture and dynamics it was very pleasing. he makes a wide range of things (recordings, pamphlets, poems, books, and no doubt physical appearances as well as all authors of books, and not just recorders of music, are required to do these days http://richardskelton.wordpress.com/)

the peformance space was st. luke's - a church at old street with a giant hawksmoorean monolith instead of a tower (horsemouth has a memory of max climbing in a window when it was still derelict and wandering about a bit), the performance didn't start until 7.45 so john and horsemouth adjourned to the cafe downstairs sited in what had formerly been the crypt full of dead victorian citizens (displaced in the name of art rather than invited to join proceedings). just like the archeologists at the exhumations in the crypt of christchurch spitalfields the rumanian/ albanian/ polish workers doing the exhumations at st. luke's (largely chosen because of their up-to-date vaccinations against a wide range of victorian pestilences) were shocked at how recent the bodies were and in what a 'good' condition they were in. some of the archeologists at christchurch had required counselling to deal with the feeling that they were tampering with the bodies of the dead - whether the east european workers at st. luke's were offered counselling is not recorded.

there were fears that the coffins might contain still active anthrax spores and that upon release those spores would drift over the silicon roundabout wiping out a whole generation of startups, spreading over shoreditch and brick lane (hipsters bohemians dying in the street), then seeming to gather its forces before rolling downhill into the financial district. (this was not to be).