horsemouth is (local) history

DOPO porto based five piece experimental ambient folk outfit. good stuff. seemingly active 2004-2009, last posting a retrospective compilation in 2019. 

mário lopes wrote the sleevenotes, he opens browser window after browser window looking for their history. 

'in the middle of the process that purpose faded from my thinking and the sound took over the operations. this sound: I found myself in the center of an orchestra born before my ears unexpectedly. the acoustic and electric guitars, the harmonics, the tambourines, the ferrinhos, the rattles, the melodies, the layers of noise processed by pedals that the DOPO manipulated so that the voices were different and the guitars and keyboards stopped being exactly keyboards and guitars...' 

it's horsemouth AM. a slow starting day. horsemouth is (local) history the fall of the house of fitzgerald has been added to tower hamlets local history archive. one day aliens will land. survey the ruins. look at all the hard drives and find horsemouth and enza playing dress up. 

horsemouth is reading james sallis's time's hammers. there's a jerry cornelius story. the west collapses, london burns, there are corpse barges everywhere on the river, jerry and michael moorcock sit out on the balcony in a modernist riverside des res and watch it all come down. 

the current torypocalypse is not a bit like this. there is cronyism and corruption. strangely people are not e-baying their way through the crisis like horsemouth assumed, online sales are not up (much) but physical sales are very down. we are in penitential lent. the economy is most excellently tanked (and we haven't even had brexit yet). 

horsemouth has sent a message to sean (long time no see - get in touch dude). yesterday 

horsemouth was getting over tired. at 2.55 he was cursing the air black and blue, slamming doors, drawers, threatening kettles and demanding vengeance. at 5pm he was done. he had a beer and was laughing at a compilation video of people getting seriously hurt doing dangerous stunts.

astral traveling versus the commute

 this is one of the 4 tracks recorded in LA on this day in  1970 by pharoah sanders. it is the famous one because it has lonnie liston smith on electric piano (apparently it was just sitting in a corner of the studio) the remaining two tracks on the album were recorded in NY and are much more straight ahead  faux african pieces. one of the four is a great cecil mcbee bass solo. 

horsemouth has just worked (travelled to and travelled back) and he works there tomorrow (bollocks). hopefully this is horsemouth moving sharply towards the exit to the year. some coughing and sneezing on the train (hopefully horsemouth won't get sick and die - this would piss him off). he's up early - so he'll save it now (the night of the 24th) so he can just pop it up first thing. 

he was just watching a great a.l. 'bert' lloyd interviews doc watson film. bot just doc watson singing am I born to die? but also him doing a version of salty dog (one that horsemouth knows from mississippi john hurt).

we are climbing up the hill of winter (and we must climb down the other side too)

recorded this day in 1971

in his dream horsemouth was up the pub with marike. they were being adults and giving an advice and guidance session to a youngster. (HINT. don't take any advice from horsemouth, he really does know  nothing). horsemouth was bragging about lots of historical events, the (in)famous people he knew etc. er. back in the day etc.  

anyway. he's up now. 

last night a zoom meeting on the state of the co-operative (horsemouth almost forgot about it). he worked in the morning. he attends a meeting this morning and then travels and works this afternoon. 

last night a documentary on the disproportionate deaths of BAME people (and BAME health workers in particular) during the pandemic. it is of course racism rather than race that leads to poverty and poor public health, it is the disproportionate presence of BAME people in lower patient-facing roles in the health service, they are poorer so they take more shifts, that leads to increased exposure (and thus increased death). 

but now everybody gets a risk assessment (woopie!) so everything is of course better. 

horsemouth is of the opinion that if white people were dying disproportionately then a motley crew of strangely BAME employees would soon be rounded up and shipped off towards the guns (but then he digresses). 

perhaps he is wrong. maybe the ruling class don't even give that much of a shit. we have had the great government fuck up in the provision of PPE now we move on through the great government fuck up in test, track and trace towards the great government fuck up in getting people vaccinated. 

this will of course be followed by a few hard rounds of austerity (e.g. no pay rises to match inflation in the public sector real-terms wage cuts) leading to increased poor public health just in time for the next novel virus. and of course there's the double tap of brexit.

horsemouth is glad to be out of it. except he's not out of it. he's leading a strange ubikstyle existence where he ghosts up once in a while and gets on a train to go to work. the rest of the time he is working from home on technology he does not understand. 

horsemouth worries about falling ill this late in the game (we are climbing up the hill of winter and we must climb down the other side too). at the weekend he babysat (too many people). this afternoon he gets on a train (too many people) and tomorrow too. and that will be his appetite for risk done. 

and then it's just next week (really).

requiem for w.c.fields (who died from acute alcoholism)

'the script was written after the performance by chance methods for possible repeats' - rose lee goldberg writing on cage's variations V in performance art.

this morning horsemouth dreamed about the co-op having a radio station. a girl from the english language class many years ago came up but wouldn't speak to him (it was then that he woke up, reasoning that there was no point in staying asleep to be ignored)

yesterday horsemouth was out babysitting (at the park of the mini-me). (people if this is what we call staying at home  and being on lockdown then we are fucked). meanwhile work are posting horsemouth off to sunny kingston twice this week (wtaf work?).

horsemouth listened to two classic rock bands he doesn't normally listen to - he listened to  uriah heep's demons and wizards (most excellent) and doctor doctor a track by UFO (this one he had as a kid on k-tel's axe attack compilation). uriah heep were widely mocked as a poor man's deep purple,  both are heavily in debt to vanilla fudge and that big organ sound but the balance of forces was different in each band and so were the results. uriah heep were lead from the keyboards by a singer-songwriter (er. who was also a good slide guitarist and also played acoustic guitars detuned to c) plus everybody in the band could sing (in the style of sweet or queen). late on he watched an albums ranked show about them - he's as far as the live album. 

he also watched werner herzog's bells from the deep (as part of his werner herzog series) - russian babies are baptised with drama and full immersion, once each time for the father, the son and the holy ghost, people crawl out along the thin ice to try and hear the bells of the lost city of kitezh (sunk beneath the waves to escape the mongol hordes).  

horsemouth has just worked and is now grumpy. tomorrow the anniversary of the recording of black unity by pharoah sanders, wednesday the recording of thembi  and astral travelling  at the record plant in LA,

today is the anniversary of the death of judee sill. (right now horsemouth is particularly taken with linda perhacs in particular this demo for chimacum rain). 

'my heart has outgrown, like magic, the clamour of painful things...'

horsemouth has transferred his reading affections from performance art (increasingly a book of lists) to the eve of fluxus - billie moves into george maciunas's commune slightly unaware that he is titular head of international art organisation fluxus. they become lovers. there is a fluxwedding (25th february 1978) where they swap the clothes of bride and groom - hollis melton documents it in an accordeon photobook black and white. three months later maciunas dies of cancer.

when maciunas dies (he's a much older man) she is unceremoniously ejected from the movement and the house (horsemouth had forgotten this).she moves penniless to lisbon to write poetry. it is 1979  she struggles with the language (and teaches english (badly) and gets fired), she 'pounds' away at the heavy old school electric typewriter she brought with her, writing a journal. she reads hannah arendt,  she likes patti smith and punk over ginsberg, the beats and the hippies.

'she's a poet' remark her few portuguese friends. she thinks that learning portuguese will rewire her brain.

at first she stays only two years. hollis and the lawyers sort out maciunas's will and billie gets some money. she moves back to the states to go to university and study portuguese. in 1988 she moves back able to speak and read properly, she translates symbolist poet florbela espanca'a desert in flower.

'my heart has outgrown, like magic, the clamour of painful things...'

it's a necessary corrective to the account of fluxus in performance art - the lists of fluxus members and expulsions (beuys, henry flynt, yoko ono).  

a friend is stuck doing some copyediting to survive. there is a question about the wisdom of georg lukacs. horsemouth cannot find his favourite lukacs quote (something hippie-ish about the days when your ways are strewn with stars etc.) but he takes the point that wisdom is ahistorical, a bit mythical.  

there's little doubt that lukacs sees marxism from within the cauldron of its philosophical making (not just hegel but also kierkegaard, fichte) but also of the early debates within it rosa luxemburg etc. he has that overview, and then he does not die he survives to tread carefully despite having authored the hegelo-marxist 'western' heresy. it's tempting to take him for a wise old man. 

lichtheim has little patience with the tap dancing lukacs had to do to stay alive - accusing him of writing as if he'd had a lobotomy. (darn it, it's in lichtheim's bluffer's guide to lukacs but it's not in horsemouth's reduced size book shelves with the other bluffer's guides). 

last night horsemouth was early to bed. today some walking around. maybe some babysitting. 

then back to the grind. a double booked wednesday that horsemouth will have to find a way around. possibly a bit to much face to face and there and back again  for his taste. 

horsemouth (selfportrait) launch of the UFO completed

werner herzog likes walking. he walks the borders of germany. as a kid he wants to be a ski-jumper but he gives it up when a friend nearly dies, he becomes a film maker instead.  he walks from munich to paris to interview lotte eisner and re-establish a link with the fritz lang generation of filmmakers. later he remakes nosferatu (a great klaus kinsky, delft, isabel adjani, popul vuh version). 

horsemouth has launched the UFO. really this was just a fake event so that he could email round all his friends. horsemouth was late to the start of it because he was watching the country music  documentary. horsemouth posted some additional material - Catastro/fille's demo kandinsky animation, martin of confyde's song (with enza's spoken word). 

people seemed to like it, 'Fab - mad and beautiful' was his favourite review (thanks lise), there was a 'loved it!' from christophe (thanks dude).  

224 views so far (only some of which, as horsemouth is fond of remarking, will be him). 

it looks a greyish morning. last night horsemouth managed to read a little more of performance art. we are with the americans at black mountain college. he will try and read some more this morning. 

if you've seen it already please share it on to your friends

phew. horsemouth has made it to the end of the week. he does this with one hand while with the other he is conducting an evening in celebration of the release of the fall of the house of fitzgerald. 

this is already (18:30 up to 207 views (and not all of them are horsemouth).

if you've seen it already please share it on to your friends. 

today (while traveling) horsemouth read. he read rosie lee goldberg's  performance art in the thames and hudson world of art series. there have been 3 editions of it so far (that horsemouth knows of from the days when he used to frequent second hand book shops and bargain racks). 

you can get the pdf here.

this starts with alfred jarry's ubu roi and moves on through the use made of it by the futurists, dada, the constructivists and the bauhaus. kandinsky's trajectory was from the constructivists to the bauhaus but all of them used performance to refresh their artistic juices and get the ideas flowing again. though of course, as the text notes early on, da vinci, caravaggio, bernini, people famous to us as painters, had all used performance and put on renaissance spectaculars. there is a prehistory of performance to be written.

horsemouth is up to p114 and the performance of RuR- Russom's Universal Robots in berlin in 1922. he's still got all the new stuff to come.

from the film side of it horsemouth would probably cite kenneth anger, sun ra, paradjanov, pasolini, jonas mekas. anything with nice static shots. (it's a paradox that what really works though are the shots where himself and enza are in motion. 

it was, horsemouth has to admit, great fun to do. horsemouth's version of darktown strutter's ball even getting compared to the great bonzo dog doo-dah band. he feels a bit bad about not being able to extend out teh party some more.