From the Guardian, 26th August 2010:
Next Thursday, I am going to be playing a theremin under London Bridge for 24 hours. I will be starting and ending at midnight, in a slowly developing collaboration with the thousands of pedestrians who cross the bridge. I'll be situated on the walkway beneath the arches, feeding the output of the theremin into a series of loop and effect pedals to create continuous, complex washes of sound that will be audible on the walkway around me. Pedestrians crossing the bridge above will unwittingly affect this output: as they pass by, they will cut a hidden beam on the bridge that will momentarily mute the music I'm making, a little blip of silence imprinted by each passing pedestrian throughout the 24 hours. (...article continues below film) |
It's a very simple idea, really – all music is made up of notes and rests. For Hymn to London Bridge, I'm providing the notes, the pedestrians the rests. Up on the bridge, they won't be able to hear their effect on the music, nor will I be able to see them pass – this is a duet by the unseeing and the unhearing. But every time it happens, there will be this little exciting moment, a passing of energy from me to them and back again. The piece will slowly change character as it is affected by the flow of pedestrian traffic. In the small hours, it'll be made up of almost continuous sound, with only the occasional poignant interruption as some unseen person crosses from the deserted streets of the City of London; but as London Bridge's remarkable pedestrian rush hour builds, the music will get more percussive and insistent, until it may even be silenced altogether as tens of thousands of people surge past on their way to work.
That's the theory, anyway, though how it will unfold on the day is anyone's guess. I have an idea what my element of it will sound like, but there are so many variables that almost anything could happen. Despite months of preparation, it's entirely possible that the project may not deliver anything I expect it to; that edge of chaos is one of the things I find most exciting. I like that once I've set things up, I'm not really going to be in control of where it goes. I'll try and shape my aspect of it, but I can't even be sure how that's going to work as the hours tick by and tiredness kicks in.
I also find myself increasingly intimidated by the prospect of having only a theremin to make music with for this event. It's a notoriously difficult instrument to play, and its gentle ululations are starting to lose their appeal after months of intensive practice. I chose the theremin because the initial spark for the project was to create a piece for two contactless instruments, a theremin and a Soundbeam, the British-made electronic instrument that sends out pulses of sonar waves and is used predominantly in music therapy. As much as I now wish I could swap my theremin for a more conventional instrument, I like the purity of a piece being made without the physical touch of a human hand, so the theremin stays.
People who only know me as part of Lemon Jelly look a bit surprised when I tell them what I'm going to be doing at London Bridge, but it feels like a very natural development of the more experimental music I've been making over the last few years. When my musical partner Fred Deakin and I decided to take a break from the group in 2005, I had no specific idea of what I wanted to do next. An improvised guitar jam session with my friend Charles Casey showed that the ghastly 12-bar blues I played in my teens had been well and truly expunged, replaced by a long-overdue outlet for the dissonant chords, twisting textures and looping drones of Boulez, Scott Walker, Sunn 0))) that had become the backbone of my personal listening over the last 20 years.
And so Blacksand was born. We play effects pedals more than guitars, and a specially made portable power-pack connected to a ship's battery means we can take our improvised soundscapes to the most outlandish places. The launch for our debut album Barn was down a mine in Wiltshire; we have played on a Cold War submarine and on Hampstead Heath to herald in the dawn; we even broke into a disused government testing facility and played there. For these performances, it always took hours of heavy lifting with a dwindling supply of friends to get everything in place, and not everything went to plan – people broke bones or got bitten by leeches; equipment failed; we'd set up for hours and only play for a few minutes because security would spot us and we'd have to leg it. But when it all falls into place, nothing beats the experience of improvising music in an unusual space, a place with an atmosphere, an inherent otherness.
My appreciation of these spaces has definitely been inspired by my increasing obsession with both wreck-diving and urban exploration, which have influenced my creative perspective more than anything else. Nothing can quite compare to the tranquil, tragic beauty of an abandoned Victorian psychiatric hospital, a burned-out convent, a torpedoed passenger liner. In these ghostly spaces, I feel the force of the people who once lived and worked there. A wreck is a powerful place.
London Bridge isn't a wreck – it's a clean, bright, modern bridge. The area where I'll set up isn't a space with a faded, beautiful past, it's a sterile concrete walkway. But I think this location will show its true colours when the pedestrians start doing their thing. This space isn't about the atmosphere of the departed, it's about the living passing overhead. That's why I felt the project should take place over 24 hours – to get a true picture of the life of the bridge. I'm intrigued by the idea of eavesdropping on one complete cycle, and then slipping off exactly where I started.
As the piece draws to a conclusion, I hope it will have conveyed a fundamental feeling for the ebb and flow of human traffic. It's apt that this is taking place next to the river – the Thames is very tidal here, and the strength of the tide as it comes and goes twice a day is mirrored by the remarkable surge of commuters in the two rush hours, building and fading away. I hope to get a sense of just quite how powerful and unstoppable that movement is. I'm also hoping there will be a sense of the individual within it all – at the quieter times of day, that will be very obvious, but I'm not sure how apparent it will be during the vast influxes. The mass of people may obliterate any sense of the individuals inside it; we'll just have to wait and see.
I'll be streaming the audio live on my website so you can listen to it and communicate with me at Twitter.com/nickfranglen as it develops. Afterwards, I'll upload it in its entirety. While I know no one is ever going to listen to the whole recording (I doubt I ever will!), anyone who walked across London Bridge that day will be able to hear what was going on when they passed the sensor, and maybe even the little blip of silence that was their unique contribution. I hope they'll feel a sense of ownership of the piece, and a different connection with London Bridge and the other people who cross it each day.
That's the theory, anyway, though how it will unfold on the day is anyone's guess. I have an idea what my element of it will sound like, but there are so many variables that almost anything could happen. Despite months of preparation, it's entirely possible that the project may not deliver anything I expect it to; that edge of chaos is one of the things I find most exciting. I like that once I've set things up, I'm not really going to be in control of where it goes. I'll try and shape my aspect of it, but I can't even be sure how that's going to work as the hours tick by and tiredness kicks in.
I also find myself increasingly intimidated by the prospect of having only a theremin to make music with for this event. It's a notoriously difficult instrument to play, and its gentle ululations are starting to lose their appeal after months of intensive practice. I chose the theremin because the initial spark for the project was to create a piece for two contactless instruments, a theremin and a Soundbeam, the British-made electronic instrument that sends out pulses of sonar waves and is used predominantly in music therapy. As much as I now wish I could swap my theremin for a more conventional instrument, I like the purity of a piece being made without the physical touch of a human hand, so the theremin stays.
People who only know me as part of Lemon Jelly look a bit surprised when I tell them what I'm going to be doing at London Bridge, but it feels like a very natural development of the more experimental music I've been making over the last few years. When my musical partner Fred Deakin and I decided to take a break from the group in 2005, I had no specific idea of what I wanted to do next. An improvised guitar jam session with my friend Charles Casey showed that the ghastly 12-bar blues I played in my teens had been well and truly expunged, replaced by a long-overdue outlet for the dissonant chords, twisting textures and looping drones of Boulez, Scott Walker, Sunn 0))) that had become the backbone of my personal listening over the last 20 years.
And so Blacksand was born. We play effects pedals more than guitars, and a specially made portable power-pack connected to a ship's battery means we can take our improvised soundscapes to the most outlandish places. The launch for our debut album Barn was down a mine in Wiltshire; we have played on a Cold War submarine and on Hampstead Heath to herald in the dawn; we even broke into a disused government testing facility and played there. For these performances, it always took hours of heavy lifting with a dwindling supply of friends to get everything in place, and not everything went to plan – people broke bones or got bitten by leeches; equipment failed; we'd set up for hours and only play for a few minutes because security would spot us and we'd have to leg it. But when it all falls into place, nothing beats the experience of improvising music in an unusual space, a place with an atmosphere, an inherent otherness.
My appreciation of these spaces has definitely been inspired by my increasing obsession with both wreck-diving and urban exploration, which have influenced my creative perspective more than anything else. Nothing can quite compare to the tranquil, tragic beauty of an abandoned Victorian psychiatric hospital, a burned-out convent, a torpedoed passenger liner. In these ghostly spaces, I feel the force of the people who once lived and worked there. A wreck is a powerful place.
London Bridge isn't a wreck – it's a clean, bright, modern bridge. The area where I'll set up isn't a space with a faded, beautiful past, it's a sterile concrete walkway. But I think this location will show its true colours when the pedestrians start doing their thing. This space isn't about the atmosphere of the departed, it's about the living passing overhead. That's why I felt the project should take place over 24 hours – to get a true picture of the life of the bridge. I'm intrigued by the idea of eavesdropping on one complete cycle, and then slipping off exactly where I started.
As the piece draws to a conclusion, I hope it will have conveyed a fundamental feeling for the ebb and flow of human traffic. It's apt that this is taking place next to the river – the Thames is very tidal here, and the strength of the tide as it comes and goes twice a day is mirrored by the remarkable surge of commuters in the two rush hours, building and fading away. I hope to get a sense of just quite how powerful and unstoppable that movement is. I'm also hoping there will be a sense of the individual within it all – at the quieter times of day, that will be very obvious, but I'm not sure how apparent it will be during the vast influxes. The mass of people may obliterate any sense of the individuals inside it; we'll just have to wait and see.
I'll be streaming the audio live on my website so you can listen to it and communicate with me at Twitter.com/nickfranglen as it develops. Afterwards, I'll upload it in its entirety. While I know no one is ever going to listen to the whole recording (I doubt I ever will!), anyone who walked across London Bridge that day will be able to hear what was going on when they passed the sensor, and maybe even the little blip of silence that was their unique contribution. I hope they'll feel a sense of ownership of the piece, and a different connection with London Bridge and the other people who cross it each day.