Barry Guy – Murdo Eason – From Hill to Sea

Cut Grass Radio Show, Music and Landscape

We were recently asked to select a few tracks and talk about them for Cut Grass, the music show on totallyradio, hosted by Grasscut.

For anyone not familiar, Grasscut are the landscape-focused, musical duo of composer/producer/vocalist/musician Andrew Phillips and manager/musician Marcus O’Dair. As Grasscut, they have released two albums on Ninja Tune, with their third album Everyone Was a Bird – ‘an album born of footfall’ – recently released on Lo Recordings. Sleeve notes are by none other than Robert Macfarlane.

Grasscut have performed across Europe and worked with musicians including Robert Wyatt, John Surman and the Kronos Quartet. Marcus has also written a highly acclaimed, authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, Different Every Time, published in 2014.

The tracks we selected for the show were by: John Cage, Wire, Vashti Bunyan, Black Box Recorder, Barry Guy and Laura Cannell. There is a host of other great music featured and also extracts of readings by the poet Charles Olson.

You can listen to the radio programme here

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We also wrote a piece for the Grasscut blog, loosely based around several themes connecting music and landscape:

In a Landscape

Secular Pilgrimage

Specific Places

Sound in Spaces

Arterial Connectivity

Apocalyptic Landscapes

The piece outlines in more detail the reasons for our track selections and pulls in a whole range of other music including: Patti Smith, Sandy Denny, Áine O’Dwyer, Brötzmann & Bennink, La Monte Young and Corrupted. You can read the piece here and/or read a couple of extracts below.

In a Landscape

Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.

John Cage

In a Landscape, a composition by John Cage is, arguably, one of the more ‘tuneful’ of his works. Written for solo piano or harp, it throws a nod towards Satie and borders on Impressionism. The title as an existential statement could hardly be bettered. Not walking through a landscape, but the conscious realisation of (being) in a landscape. It is also worth noting that Cage’s (in)famous silent piece 4’33” was first performed in a landscape. The Maverick Concert Hall is an open-air theatre, on the outskirts of Woodstock, New York, which was built in 1916 to present ‘Music in the Woods’. Kyle Gann notes that there about as many seats outside of the hall, as in, and that oak, maple hemlock and shagbark-hickory trees intrude gently upon the listening space. On the evening of Friday, 29th August 1952, the pianist David Tudor opened and closed the piano list as instructed by the score. The merits or otherwise of the ‘silent piece’, 4’33”, have and will continue to be debated, but if nothing else, our view is that it is an invitation to really listen and become aware of your surroundings. Cage himself notes that the sounds he heard during the performance included the wind stirring, raindrops patterning the roof and the noise of people as they walked out …

Kay Larson says: “before anything else, (4’33”) is an experience.” It is a proposition that says, in notational shorthand: stop for a moment and look around you and listen; stop and look; stop and listen. “Something” and “Nothing” can never be divided.

Perhaps a useful thought for any landscape wanderer to ponder …

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Secular Pilgrimage

We have always been attracted to the idea of the motivated journey, or secular pilgrimage such as Werner Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris recounted in Of Walking in Ice. The other dimension is the juxtaposition of an idea or image of a place, constructed before arriving, and the lived reality of actually experiencing it. In early 1970s New York, a young Patti Smith, obsessed with the poet Arthur Rimbaud, hatched a plan to travel to Harar in Ethiopia to find Rimbaud’s (imagined) lost valise:

I would return with the contents of the mysterious case, preserved in Abyssinian dust, and present it to the world.

Attempts to raise funding for the trip from “publishers, patrons and literary foundations” were met with bemused nods and Smith concluded that “the imagined secret papers of Rimbaud were not a fashionable cause.” However, Smith did manage to scrape up enough funds to head to Charleville in France, the place where the poet was born and buried. Smith recounts her experiences in a short text Charleville:

“I carried my raincoat and ventured into the Charleville night. It was quite dark and I walked the wide and empty quai Rimbaud. I felt a little afraid but then suddenly in the distance I saw a tiny light, a small neon sign — Rimbaud Bar. I stopped and took a breath, unable to believe my good fortune. I advanced slowly afraid it would disappear like a mirage in a desert…”

A bar where she would feed the jukebox with a: “crazy mix of Charles Aznavour, Hank Williams and Cat Stevens”.

This short book is a combination of the idealised image of a place, carried by Smith and the reality of her lived experiences such as finding the Rimbaud museum closed and bringing some blue glass beads from Harar to Rimbaud’s grave. “I felt that, since he was unable to return to Harar, I should bring a bit of Harar to him.”

Of course Smith’s pilgrimage experience seeps into much of her subsequent writing. The power of place imagined, experienced and carried within:

I gotta move from my mind to the area

(go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud)

‘Land’ from Horses.

The full blog piece can be read here:

All of the Cut Grass radio shows can be listened to here:

References:

Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence, John Cage’s 4’33” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).

Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).

Patti Smith, Charleville (Paris/Arles: FondationCartier pour l’art contemprain/Actes Sud, 2008).

The Woods and the Words

The stories are still told

of a time before the water.

When the earth lay heaped,

black and smouldering.

It is said that they tunnelled

g r o u n d

for black diamonds

to burn for warmth.

A structure survived

the darkest of

the dark days –

although, now, no one

is quite sure

what it was used for

Now.

now to simply be

amongst our co-dwellers

in this healing place.

If you remain still

for long enough

they become curious

and congregate,

silently swaying

with the wind.

A few season-cycles ago

the visitors started to return.

We listen for their arrival

always the calling first.

despite

bluebell

all that happened

stitchwort

the woods and the words

wild hyacinth

at least

oak

some of the words

hazel

and some of the woods

dog mercury

survive

And the thin

bleached light

of a pale sun

continues to shine

on the white tree

of Harran Hill Wood.

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♦ ♦

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This little field trip, possibly sent from another point in time (?), was inspired by frequent visits to a favorite place in Central Fife: Lochore Meadows or The Meedies as it is known locally.

The Meedies opened as a Country Park in 1976 following one of the largest and most ambitious industrial landscape renovation projects in Europe. This included the reclamation of 600ha of heavily contaminated land comprising six redundant coal mine sites, colliery buildings, mineral railways, refuse tipping, areas of subsidence and the towering pit bings (most of them burning) which rose to 60m over the surrounding countryside and settlements.

The Meedies is now a major centre for outdoor and environmental education with Loch Ore the largest area of standing water in Fife. It is an important habitat for wildfowl with significant numbers both over-wintering and breeding. Otters, bats, water voles and even ospreys have been recorded within the park boundary. The acid grasslands of Clune Craig are botanically rich and also bear traces of hut-circles and enclosures from a Bronze age settlement.

The ‘structure’ in the photographs above is the reinforced concrete headframe of the ‘Big Mary’ No. 2 pit shaft, sunk in 1923. It is one of only two such surviving structures in Fife and a monument to the Kingdom’s mining heritage. (The other is The Frances in Dysart). You can gain some impression of how the area looked when mining was in operation from this photograph:

The pit head is in the distance and the smouldering pit bings in the foreground. This photograph is from the fabulous web resource on the Fife Pits by Michael Martin which can be accessed here.

The original Loch Ore was drained in the 1790s when the landowner, Captain Parks, attempted to reclaim the land for cattle grazing. The project was a commercial failure and the land formerly occupied by the loch remained boggy. Parks was declared bankrupt in 1798. The loch gradually returned in the mid 20th century, when coal mining flourished and the mineral railway serving the pithead became an embankment surrounded by water. The return of the loch was mainly due to subsidence caused by mining, and the ‘new’ loch now occupies a different footprint to the original. The loch is now stabilised but its depth still fluctuates. The islands in the loch are the remains of the former railway embankment.

To the north west lies Harran Hill Wood which sits on a rocky ledge between Loch Ore and Benarty Hill. Botanical studies indicate a strong possibility that this site may have been wooded since shortly after the last Ice Age c. 10,000 years ago.

Whilst writing this, I’m listening to a composed piece called After The Rain by Barry Guy, perhaps better known as a free improviser. I don’t think I had ever read the sleeve notes before but was intrigued to learn that it was partly inspired by the Max Ernst painting Europe After the Rain. As Guy says in the sleeve notes:

“The canvas portrays four large masses of tortuous baroque-like remains as if left after some unfathomable catastrophe…these images invite the viewer to speculate on the nature of the events. Here in Europe After the Rain could be the apotheosis of anxiety and destruction or the emergence of new life from the ruins. I am drawn to the latter…”

Now Playing: Barry Guy and City of London Sinfonia – After the Rain

Reference:

Fife Council Lochore Meadows Country Park Development Plan, November 2008.

Michael Martin, Fife Pits and Memorial Book, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/mmartin/fifepits/

Miles K Oglethorpe, (2006), Scottish Collieries: An Inventory of the Scottish Coal Industry in the Nationalised Era (Edinburgh, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland).

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