Bites

Video Data Bank
Birth of an artform

Tony Conrad’s Cycles Of 3s And 7s (1967)

Gary Hill’s Soundings (1979)

Charlemagne Palestine’s Island Song (1976)“Gotta get outta here… gotta get outta here…
gotta get outta here,” clangs composer and cantor
Charlemagne Palestine’s incessant chant, as hezooms around an island on a motorcycle, a video
camera strapped to his body filming the potholedroad beneath his wheels. The resulting piece,
Island Song (1976), builds into an intense personal
psychodrama, portraying man and machine united
against the world, as his maniacal incantation
harmonises with the motor’s vibration. “Times seven
divided by eight, times seven divided by eight,
times seven divided by eight,” chants a different
voice while carrying out the commands on a simple
calculator. The voice is Tony Conrad’s, and thepiece, Cycles Of 3s And 7s, also dates from 1976.
The numbers count out harmonic intervals – here
represented through their frequency ratios. The
Pythagoras-obsessed minimalist is in full flow, boiling
down the mathematical essence of music to a simple,
repetitive act of punching a calculator.

Both these works are included on the formidable
eight DVD box set Surveying The First Decade: Video
Art And Alternative Media in The US 1968–1980,
originally released on VHS in 1995 by Video Data
Bank, a Chicago based institution set up in 1974
to distribute, preserve and archive the burgeoning
field of video art. Divided into two volumes, the set
comprises 68 historic video works collected onto
eight themed discs such as Explorations Of Presence,
Performance And Audience, Gendered Confrontations,and Investigations Of The Phenomenal World.
When the Sony Portapak, the first portable video
recorder, became commercially available in 1967,
musicians and artists embraced the format as an
exciting new medium allowing them to foregroundidea and process rather than solid objects. Someworks convey a childlike enthusiasm for thetechnology itself. Gary Hill’s 1979 Soundings, forexample, explores the phenomenology of sound byfilming the artist’s hands nailing, stroking, burying,burning and drowning a speaker cone – whose tautcovering he dubs ‘skin’ – while his monotonous voice
repeats phrases through the same speaker: “Burythe sound imaging the skin space underground...
Drive the image of a spike with a spike through theimaging sounds... Watering the sound, imaging theskin space.” The voice distorts as he subjects thespeaker cone to the actions described, transforming
this compelling work into an oddly mesmerising pieceof concrete poetry.
Surveying The First Decade is invaluable foranyone interested in milestones in American video
art. The only drawback? The $1500 price tag, whichevidentally targets the set at institutions rather
than the general public. Thankfully, clips can beviewed at Video Data Bank’s website.  SurveyingThe First Decade: Video Art And Alternative Media in
The US 1968–1980 is available from Video Data Bank,
vdb.org
Anne Hilde Neset

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cadences of ECM Records. Although The Blue Moment
will inevitably end up racked on the jazz shelves ofyour local book emporium, at times Williams’s WG
Sebald-like drift diverges so far from its nominal
subject that you can find yourself in the middle ofPicasso’s Blue Period, or hearing about the medicinalpractices of medieval lapidarists. He also spares timefor neglected jazz backbenchers such as GeorgeRussell, Don Ellis, André Hodeir and David Mack, who
fused modality with serialist and classical complexity.
Williams has a strong claim on such a bird’seye view. As deputy editor of Melody Maker at thebeginning of the 1970s, he was an early British
champion of the The Velvet Underground; he alsopresented the earliest episodes of the BBC’s live
music TV show, The Old Grey Whistle Test. He started
contributing pop and jazz reviews to The Times when‘quality’ newspapers still looked down their noses atthe stuff. Following an interlude as an A&R man for
Island Records in the mid-70s, he edited Time Outand during the 1980s held key editorial positionsat The Sunday Times and Independent On Sunday.
In 1992 he wound down his music journalism – “Fora long time I haven’t wanted to write about badmusic, or even good music of a kind that doesn’tinterest me” – and became Chief Sports Writer for
The Guardian. “For some reason I’m quite happy
writing about a bad football match,” he explains,
adding, “The similarity between the music I’minterested in and sport as a whole is spontaneity andunpredictability.”
As the author points out, Kind Of Blue is the one
jazz album even non-jazz fans tend to own. “That’s
the really staggering thing about Kind Of Blue – and,I’m convinced, the single quality that has given itsuch a remarkable life. Some things, a very few, arelike that – the more you listen to or read or watch
or look at them, the more they reveal.”  The Blue
Moment is published this month by Faber & Faber“We want to support the artists we play sothat they can continue to make great art,
even the ones who send hand-painted
cassettes with no name or contact info,”says Jason Sigel of the Free Music
Archive at freemusicarchive.org. “ButSoundExchange [the US royalties collectionagency] don’t even try to track down thevast majority of the artists we play, so our‘royalties’ just get pocketed by theorganisation… I personally expect more outof the internet.” With revenue streams fastdrying up, the response of many music
publishing bodies in the US, the UK andbeyond has been to slap a charge on any
kind of music usage they can keep tabs on.
Radio stations and webcasters now pay toplay each track; fees are levied for ‘publicbroadcast’ in shops and even offices. As
Sigel points out, smaller artists are often
left behind in this commercial shake-up, andare out of the loop for royalties in any case.
The Free Music Archive is in part a
response to this climate. For broadcasters,
it’s a free-to-use archive of innovative
material; for artists and listeners, it’s adiscerning outlet for music run by quality
curators. There’s no money involved – themusic on the FMA is royalty-free, licensed
directly from the musicians. The archive isstill a little rough around the edges, butnevertheless has around 10,000 tracks freefor streaming, download and usage byartists from Deerhoof to Dengue Fever, plus
live sets at WFMU and All Tomorrow’s
Parties, and unclassifiable audio ephemera
such as the Conet Project broadcasts ofnumbers stations. “We have public domain
recordings from pop stars of the early
1900s like Billy Murray,” Sigel enthuses.
“And an extremely well-curated batch ofearly international recordings courtesy of
Excavated Shellac, which might otherwise
go unheard.”
Curators run the gamut of broadcasters
and webcasters, and come from as far afield
as Israel and Moscow. Notable among themis New Jersey based, listener-supported‘freeform’ radio station WFMU, whose DJs
include The Wire contributors Dave Mandl
and Kurt Gottschalk. “The curated approach
has always been a part of what we do hereat WFMU,” Sigel explains. “We’ve extended
this to the Free Music Archive. Thereremains this looming possibility that
unreasonable royalty rates will once again
put webcasters in jeopardy.” It’s not justpirates that thrive on the uncertainties ofinternet copyright – publishers, after all,can use these grey areas to throw theirweight around. “If that day ever came,”
concludes Sigel, “the Free Music Archive
would be an even more important resource.”

Rob Young

Derek Walmsley

Kind of significant: Miles Davis

Herb Snitzer (Davis)

Richard Williams
Tangled up in blue
“No colour has so saturated music over the last
hundred years, while permitting so many shadings”,
runs the central premise of Richard Williams’s book
The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue And
The Remaking Of Modern Music. Returning to the1959 album that signalled Miles’s move into modality
cannot have been easy. As well as the trumpeter’s
own salty autobiography, there are strong lives by Ian
Carr and John Szwed – not to mention Williams’s own
The Man In The Green Shirt – plus two recent forensic
studies of this long-lasting album. “I started thinking
about this book more than ten years ago,” says
Williams, “and began actually writing it in 2002. But
then came the books by Ashley Kahn [Kind Of Blue]and Eric Nisenson [The Making Of Kind Of Blue] – both
excellent in their different ways – and I set my project
aside. A couple of years ago, however, I realised thatneither had written the book I meant to write all along,one which began with a study of Kind Of Blue but thendeveloped into an exploration of its broader impact
on contemporary music, something I felt very strongly
about. So I re-examined the few thousand words ofthe original work and started again.”
The result is a book in which Kind Of Blue isportrayed as the root-ball of a vast, tangled
system of musical tendrils stretching forwards
and backwards through history, its fronds curling
around various musics united by varying degrees
of introspection, conceptual innovation and an
instinctive sense of ‘blueness’. Beginning with amemoir of how, as a youthful pop fan doing the Twist
in 1963, Kind Of Blue’s doleful indigo moods provided
the author’s first musical epiphany, Williams charts
a personal map through the sound environmentsof the past 50 years, from cool school jazz to John
Coltrane’s Ascension; existentialist literature to
the artworks of Yves Klein; Terry Riley and La MonteYoung to The Velvet Underground; Soft Machine andJon Hassell to The Necks and Supersilent; Rudy van
Gelder’s spacey production values to the crystalline

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