Pascal Wyse interviews Brian Duffy of the Modified Toy Orchestra in the Guardian giving some insight into why he does what he does.
Duffy started modifying toys nearly 10 years ago while hunting for unusual sounds to sample. But nagging away were some heavier concerns. “What is music for? What meaning does music carry? What’s the role of the ego in it?” he says. “I realised most of the popular culture around me, particularly music, seemed to be obsessed with personal narrative, self-expression, self-catharsis, and social commentary. Surely there must be more to it; there must be more to be discussed than these songs that start with the word ‘I’. I never dreamed when I started modifying the toys that the answer I was looking for would be in them.”
Inspired by experimental composer John Cage’s book For the Birds, and by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Duffy dug deeper, attracted by Fuller’s ideas of refining objects to a level of perfection, and of “finding the surplus value inside the seemingly redundant” – which is quite a philosophical way of looking at a Speak & Spell machine. But Duffy goes on: “There is only one amount of stuff in the universe, which just exchanges itself between matter and energy. Along the way, it rearranges itself into us. I started to wonder why – why does it rearrange itself into us?”
More…
Warm Circuit page with YouTube videos.
MySpace page.
The Orchestra play the Barfly on May 24th and the Supersonic Festival on July 14th.
Photo by myself from Supersonic 06. Hat tip to Russ L.
The Surface Unsigned Festival is a rather massive live music competition running in Birmingham over the next few months.
The first heat starts on Monday with a series of 29 gigs at the Actress and Bishop running until the end of April. Each will have around six bands playing, making roughly 170 bands in this region. Two winners will be selected by the audience along with another two selected by the bands themselves.
These winners will then go through a second heat, a semi-final, and then a regional final where 12 bands play. The top four then go onto the national final “performing in front of a panel of Music Industry legends and A&R representatives” to win a top prize of £1,000.
Full details are here. The semi-final gigs take place at the Medicine Bar, the regional final at the Barfly with the national final occurring at an “Open Air Festival” in the Custard Factory lake.
The first round gigs are listed here. I guess the challenge is for anyone to go to all 29. It would certainly give a decent snapshot of the live music scene in the region. Hmm…
Stef Lewandowski of local creative agency 3form is atending the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin TX and is blogging what he sees.
A regular selection of photos from the Birmingham Flickr community.
by tanyalupton
by hartlandmartin
by Paul Regan
by ikkio_too
All copyright as applies.
To suggest photos for inclusion in this feature add them to this thread or leave a link in the comments.
Test Bed is an art exhibition based around Five Ways.
Test Bed involves eight artists making new work specific to people and place. The location and community of Five Ways Shopping Centre, Birmingham, will inform the creation of the work. Harry Palmer, George Saxon, Darryl Georgiou, Pauline Bailey, Julie M ONeill, Sandra Hall, Nelson Douglas and Mark Storor – are to make new work in response to the community they will be based in.
Test Bed will showcase challenging and diverse new work by artists with national and international reputations for socially engaging and edgy work of the highest quality. The work will result from collaborations with the community who live and work in the location, finding a voice for their issues and concerns and reflecting those concerns back and outward to the wider world.
The Five Ways community, depending on your viewpoint, is either a gateway to the glittering lights of the ever-changing cityscape and 24-hour hedonistic delights provided by Broad Street, or a lasting reminder of the concrete collar that has strangled the centre of Birmingham since the 1960s. One thing is certain. It is a paradox. One of the most socially and economically deprived wards in Birmingham, Five Ways also provides office and apartment space for the new affluent section of Birmingham society that likes to work and party hard and spends a lot of money doing both.
The eight artists are informed by communities, sites and locations, but they are not ‘community artists’. Instead of working for a gallery environment and audience they will showcase and exhibit Test Bed where it was made and in front of those communities.
The event launches on Thursday 19th April 2007 and continues until Saturday 28th April at the Curio City Shop, 11 Auchinleck Square, Five Ways, Birmingham, B15 1EW.
There’s also a blog by Lee Grifffiths, organizer of the show, which documents the project. See this post for a longer introduction to the project along with more details about the artists.
Rhubarb Farm, the online retail wing of Rhubarb Rhubarb, are joining the New Art Birmingham event with a series of For Sale signs distributed around Hockley and Eastside.
Fine art photographers go out onto the streets for a month in Birmingham, from 14 March, in a unique exhibition which is made in the form of ‘For Sale’ boards. Up to 16 boards will be shown by tenants or building owners in Eastside or Hockley, who have chosen an image from the project web site and will have the fine art photograph on show outside their properties. All images can be bought via the internet and delivered direct to buyers.
The project aims to profile regional, European and American photographers, play on the issues of markets – and create new propositions for showcasing and selling work in a city with no showcasing venues for use by its emerging artists.
A plaque on the wall of the building, below the image, will give information about the artists, the photograph and where it can be bought. Tours of the boards will be organised for Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 March.
The press release also contains this great quote from Rhonda Wilson, Creative Director of Rhubarb-Rhubarb:
“Obviously some people will be enraged that art of this standard is outside in the street but as there is nowhere else in the city to put them, which we can afford to hire, this seems a rather brilliant opportunity to show them off. The NAB art fair in Curzon Street Station was full, so we took to the streets.â€
Roadshow West Midlands: Ecosystem is an interesting looking event run by the Networking Artists Network to be held at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday 24 March from 12.30 – 6pm. Topics under discussion include:
- How do artists relate to the art market?
- Why is there no significant commercial system in Birmingham or the West Midlands?
- Are regional networks over-reliant on the current art funding structures?
- What are the alternatives to the commercial gallery system?
The speakers are:
- Ruth Claxton – Birmingham-based artist. She has shown widely in the UK and is represented by Arquebuse in Geneva. She is also a member of artist-led group Self Service, whose current project is Pub Conversations
- Tom Godfrey – artist and co-curator of Moot, a Nottingham-based artist-led gallery.
- Susan McNally – Art Consultant and Project Manager and Co-Producer of New Art Birmingham.
- Matt Roberts – Founder of Matt Roberts Arts, a not-for-profit artist-led organisation that creates opportunities for early career artists in new locations and new contexts, and to link up networks in London with potential partners across Britain.
- Ian Vines – Exhibition and Programme Coordinator at the Potteries Museum in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent.
The cost is £15 and places are limited so you’ll need to submit a CV. The deadline for applications is March 10th. More details here.
Creative Birmingham, not to be confused with this blog, is a new site masterminded by Stef Lewandowski of 3form that’s now ready for public consumption.
The basic concept is to act as a one page snapshot of all the activity going on in Birmingham’s creative community, combining feeds from sites like this one, events listings, photos by local photographers and spotlighting major items of interest. The beauty of it is it’s pretty much self-maintaining as it just draws in information that’s already out there, and the more information that’s made available through RSS feeds the better it will get.
Stef’s very keen to get feedback and suggestions on how it can be developed. Email him at stef@3form.net.
The Drum in Aston is having an open day tomorrow from 1.30 – 9.30pm aimed at local creatives who might be interested in working with them.
The Drum is Birmingham’s leading African, Asian and Caribbean arts centre. Over the past 10 years, we have built a reputation for nurturing local talent within the creative industries by engaging and raising the quality of the arts. Continuing in this vain, we’ve decided to launch the spring season by hosting an Open Day.
The Open Day is a great opportunity for you to come along and find out more about our programme and facilities. The programming team will be available to meet local artists, musicians, and other creative and cultural organisations. So come network and pitch your ideas and to find out how to showcase your work at The Drum.
In addition, this exciting event provides a sneak preview of what we have coming up during the spring season. You’ll have an opportunity to see extracts of performances from local and emerging artists, national touring companies, plus there will be regular guided tours of all creative spaces. And, finally, to round off the evening, there’s a brain teasing cultural quiz, music and much more.
For more information call 0121 333 2444
The Birmingham Post reports that the Creative Industries are Booming in the West Midlands with 60,000 people working in the sector, expected to increase by 7% over the next year. All good. Except D’log wonders where exactly they’re getting their figures from. It’s a fair point. Where do you draw the line on what counts as “creative”? And how do you count all the self-employed and part-time people?
(And if there really are 60,000 creatives, does that mean I have to blog about them all? Cripes!)
I’m growing to like the Number 10 petition site. The petitions might not achieve anything in themselves but they do serve to stimulate debate on issues that have slipped off the media’s agenda. A recent one that’s relevant to this blog is to recognise that music and dance should not be restricted by burdensome licensing regulations (39,882 and counting) which was brought to my attention by Radio To Go podcaster Robin Valk. This is not new legislation. If I’m remembering rightly it came into force early last year and is part of the Licensing Act 2003, specifically this bit about venues requiring a license for any form of live music or dancing. Previously pubs could have one person with a guitar playing without a license but now they need to pay for one.
It caused a bit of a fuss when it came into force but it soon died down, as these things do. Now it’s settled in there are concerns about the effect it’s having on music in this country. A nice summary comes from musician Steve Tromans‘ site.
The Government have recently passed laws in the UK to try and suppress live music. Pubs which could previously offer work to solo musicians or duos now have to pay for a special licence and can only have 12 of these per year. Even school Xmas concerts need to be licensed. The unlicensed provision of even one musician is a potential criminal offence (although some places are exempt, including places of public religious worship, royal palaces and moving vehicles). Max penalty: £20,000 fine and six months in prison (for the proprietor and the musicians). The rationale is to prevent noise, crime and disorder, to ensure public safety, and the protection of children from harm. But broadcast entertainment, including sport and music, is exempt – no matter where, and no matter how powerfully amplified. For the first time, private performances raising money for charity will need a licence. School performances open to friends and family will need a licence – they count as public performances.
One thing that hadn’t occurred to me before is that recorded music and television is exempt – you can have a TV showing a band playing in a pub but you can’t have a live band. This seems a little odd until you realise this is a piece of public order legislation designed to stop “anti-social behaviour”. People tend to get a little excited at gigs. All that dancing gets them going in a way staring at the tube doesn’t. I’ll let you formulate your own conspiracy theory about this.
With my reasonable hat on I think this is a piece of legislation that was well intentioned, clearing up a grey area or what constituted a “band” and putting all performance on a level playing field, but the long term implications for DIY-style performance and creative expression are rather worrying.
Further reading:
Dominic Cronin started the petition and has a portal of links about the issue including his reasons for doing it.
The last time there was a petition about this issue the government responded thus.
Libby Purvis wrote about it in the Times last month.
The current petition.
I’m not sure whether this is news per se but the dates for this year’s Capsule’s Supersonic Festival have been set for 13-14th July. Stick it in your diary now.
Misty’s Big Adventure are playing a small series of gigs where they’re doing double sets, performing as many songs as possible in an hour and a half including ones from the forthcoming new album Funny Times. The Birmingham gig on March 27th at the Glee Club has support from Poppy and the Jezebels, a group consisting of four girls between 14 and 16 years old.
I’d vaguely heard of them a year ago from a friend but didn’t realise they were doing so well. After a few gigs in Birmingham they’ve been playing London of late, hanging out with real pop stars and the like. If there’s a buzz about them it’s not just the novelty schoolgirl thing – they’re actually rather good and original with a range of influences you’d imagine to be beyond their years.
I’ve long been concerned about the dearth of women on the West Midlands’ live music scene. They do exist – Kate Finch and KateGoes spring to mind – but it’s all generally very bloke-centric so the emergence of Poppy and the Jezebels can only be a good thing.
It’s also worth noting that Gareth of Misty’s appears to be using his position to pluck out interesting local bands to play with them. KateGoes have only been in existence for a little over a year but touring with Misty’s has turned them into a right proper outfit, so it’s worth using Gareth as another filter on the sprawling local music scene.
Photo by Steve Gerrard taken from their MySpace page.
You might have noticed I added a calendar to the site recently. This holds all the events and festivals I come across as I’m blogging. It’s by no means comprehensive and I’m not including music gigs as that’s just too much work, but you might find it useful.
It’s run on Google’s new calendar program which has lots of interesting tricks for collaborating and sharing. I’ll be investigating these over time but for now you can add the CiB calendar to you own calendar using this address. It will work in Apple’s iCal and Microsoft Outlook amongst others. Give it a try.
