CABARET VOLTAIRE JOHNNY YESNO SCREENING 11TH NOVEMBER

I'll be introducing a screening of Johnny Yes No at The Horse Hospital this Friday night from 7.30, details here. The event is to mark the release of a Mute DVD/CD box set containing both the original and new versions of the film and soundtrack plus extensive sleeve notes.

There's a timeless quality to CV material and I still find the scratchy, grimy bleakness of the early works strangely uplifting, even if so much has changed over three decades. After all, back then Britain was in the midst of a recession and was governed by an authoritarian clique of free market fundamentalists...

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4th Annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021 recording

Thanks to all who watched the event on Friday, we all enjoyed it and were really pleased with the response, we were only sorry not to have more time for questions and discussion. Ludmilla Andrews did a great job of executing the film at great speed in lockdown conditions. My commentary for the film was written in haste over the New Year and recorded in the following week. It's a snapshot of the transition from 2020 to 2021 through the prism of Test Dept's work and Fisher's response to it.

A Tale of Two Future Glasgows

Despite its undoubted cultural vitality, Glasgow has often had a grim reputation, especially south of the English border. Yet the very bleakness, exacerbated by epic mismanagement, aggressive deindustrialization and sectarianism has also made it a site of constant and sometimes tragically over-ambitious attempts at utopian regeneration. This can be seen in the now highly poignant film Glasgow 1980 , which was already being quietly forgotten and surpassed by harsh reality even before the city had reached the year the film is supposed to depict. It poignantly promised a gleaming, post-industrial future in which "muscle gives way to automation." Yet in between the completion of the film and 1980, the oil shock and economic slowdown shattered the dreams of its makers and backers. Relatively little of the utopian plans (which to some already seemed dystopian) was ever built and many of the hopes of the "white heat of technology" era came to nothing. Other buildings...

J.M. Bowers - Edison's Residue

J.M. Bowers is a well respected sound/noise producer who gave a very memorable performance at the Noise=Noise event at The Foundry last autumn. I have just discovered this intriguing free release for download. The source is a heavily rendered recording of Edison's famous 'Mary had little lamb' test recording. The result is a very tactile audio landscape, full of rich and uncanny detail. Recommended.

Plural Machine

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