Rhythm
The performance of “Satellites” as song begins with rhythms set with everyday objects: sticks, jingles, paint brushes. I am surprised by the intensity of the rhythm-makers. Their eyes turn down or up, they create a world of beats which even after the guitar and voices begin, continue with an intense independence that belie their supposedly subordinate place in the event of song. Percussion, says John Cage, is the admission of “noise” from the world beyond the enclosed space of music, not a release from that world or protection from it; the prolonged attention to rhythm brings that world back into music. When the rough sleeper begins and ends the song with his finger snaps, he brings the body itself as an instrument into the space of words and melody. Cage says that “the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences . . . [and] receptive to the to the spiritual aspect of life.” With raised or lowered eyes, the rhythm-makers enter and create a trance that incorporates rather than transcends the noise of that world of chaos and mayhem. In a recording of “Gold Cog” you can hear scraps of the room itself. Simultaneous with the rhythms comes the chant, low and repeating, from another, an earlier place—an evocation of the medieval, a flavour of the archaic.
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It is the final project by arthur+martha CIC.
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