The Disquiet Junto assignment is to "Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves."
The so-called Horseshoe crab came to mind after I wondered what my son would pick.
He described these as a poster child for not evolving.
As I considered how that might sound, I remembered a sketch of a riff that had been sitting on my desktop for a few months.
So I opened the Live document, shifted the loops around a little to sit with the video from Archive.org and then put that exported version through Motion's comic effect.
A riff that didn't want to evolve as a soundtrack to a Horseshoe crab.
This week I gave a Studio Co!Lab Artist in the House talk on what I've learned using the Cut-Up Technique.
To begin I encouraged everyone to print a copy of Picasso's poem about noon, since he's known to have stated that artists steal and it feels right to honour this contemporary of Cut-ups.
My Cut-up experiences have been realised in lyrics, sampling and also a book that invites destruction.
I also mentioned the poetry reading that I gave at a book launch which performed a live remix.
We began cutting Picasso's poem into individual words while I explained how the imagery reminded me of the Riverina and introduced David Bowie's use of the technique.
The singer acknowledged his debt to Brion Gysin and echoed some of the magical attributes he promoted with a process pioneered earlier in the 20th Century by Tristan Tzara.
My recollection is Cut-ups were a significant development in the split between Surrealism and Dada, when Tzara created a "manifesto" using newspaper clippings.
At the time the Surrealists were writing manifestoes and took offence at this brute process for generating words.
However, the cut-ups have been seen to share in common the influence of Freud's ideas of dream analysis as a way of identifying cues from the unconscious.
Cut-up documents interrogate the text in a haphazard manner that reveals as much about the dynamics and relationships of the reader, while allowing anyone to be an author.
In this way it shows a Dadaist antiestablishment attitude that can be seen as an attack on authorial intention.
Some might view the process as reassembling a document and the process can be viewed through a variety of philosophical positions, such as the magic and art roles.
When you begin creating a cut-up text there are decisions about the process that determine roles for chance or probability.
You might choose to draw a word from a hat, or you might assemble them from a visible pool of possible words.
While the process of preparing the pieces and then pasting them together has a meditative quality that suits gallery spaces that are open for more of a performance art aesthetic, the simplicity of the idea is ripe for technology.
The idea of cutting seems simple and it's worth remembering that many ideas about editing have developed since Tzara.
When you cut up a text the words are never entirely anonymous, even if the document become a palette for beige language.
Each discrete piece becomes a springboard for a chain of connotations, which is a process that has been called "unlimited semiosis" in semiotic theory.
These become potent symbols and through the popularisation by Gysin the cut-up practice came to be infused with ideas of magic that were researched by Genesis P-Orridge.
Burroughs undertook audio and film-based cut-ups that extended the ideas he identified in literary practice.
I explained an audio-based curse that P-Orridge detailed and how sampling harnesses a similar energy when it takes a small example from a larger whole.
Working with the landscape as a document to sample you find inspiration in selecting small symbolic examples to trigger memories of entire ecosystems.
This is a rerecording of the track ‘Hopped’ that I recorded last week.
That piece was the second of three takes, so I went back and exported the third take to share.
In this version I take a different path to the F# chord progression from the song about being a tumbleweed and arrive sooner at the delay setting you can hear with it.
