Dan Scott

A small piece:

Noise ’45 is a response to the short and often chaotic career of Destroy All Monsters, currently presented as a combined documentary/installation/manifesto at the Space Gallery in Hackney. DAM described themselves as anti-rock, and were one of the first bands to realize pure noise as a base component of rocknroll.

Noise ’45 is made of the noise elements of 45 1960s rocknroll groups, the era just before DAM.  The elements are parts of the song where arranged sound ends and noise begins; Keith Moon’s scatalogical drumfill on a Who record, Jimi Hendrix’s feedback grind at the end of Manic Depression or the Rolling Stones crashing through 4 bars to the finish.   Groups like DAM took the music down to the atomic level of pure sound,  yet music still retains an essence of rocknroll music; through pure energy and exuberance.

The artists used in the piece are The Stooges, Velvet Underground and Nico, The Godz, The Fugs, Jeff Beck Group, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Gene Vincent, The Silver Apples, The Doors, The Lovin Spoonful. Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Ohio Express, Gun, The Amboy Dukes, The Sonics, Funkadelic, MC5, The Electric Prunes, John Coltrane, Link Wray, Blue Cheer, Vanilla Fudge, Hawkwind, The Red Krayola, The Pink Floyd, The Who, Led Zepellin, Jefferson Airplane, The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, The Yardbirds, The Byrds, The Troggs, James Brown, Duane Eddy, The Beatles, Mitch Ryder.

For the past month I´ve been in Sigulfjordur, Iceland at the artist residency there called Herhusid.  It was a busy, exhilarating and productive month.  We met some great people and had fun.  Our project is here:

http://www.trishscott.org/herringquest

I wrote this in early 2007.  I hope to turn it into a sound piece but for now I may as well share it.

The Primrose Hill Lighthouse

“I kept a scrapbook about the lighthouse because, well, it was probably the most interesting thing that ever happened to me.  Not that it happened to me directly you’ll understand.  It’s just it captured my imagination.  Put it in a little cell for six months.  I had never kept scrapbooks before the lighthouse appeared and I’ve never done since.  Not that nothing interesting has happened since, lots has; funerals, marriages and the like, it’s just this one thing exhausted it for me.  I don’t think I’ll make a scrapbook again.
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The soft touch of nylon on wood, the sweet dulce voice; the idiomatic dulcet tone.  We are sat in the tiny El Colmado at the beginning of a concert by an Argentinian tango-singer, Cecilia Ledesma.

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What does a city sound like? Noisy. “Noise is a health issue,” says the Catalan Association against Acoustic Contamination. Our cities make us deaf. For others it’s the constant tinnitus-buzz that shows a city is alive. A UK project called Your Favourite London Sounds interviewed 6000 Londoners and created a database of the noises people loved, from a Tube announcement to a boiling kettle. People are obviously listening. So, we switched off our iPod to hear what Barcelona has to offer.
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Looking uphill at night in Barcelona, you see the floodlit church of Tibadabo. A metaphor-to-scale of its beholden city, from a distance aglow, an enigmatic firmament and, up close, a theme park full of malnourished clowns gathered around an unkempt concrete monument to the spirit. exudes the over-exposed “wish you were” aura of a 1960’s Spanish Tourist Board ad, its shallowness revealing all. But go a little further over the crest of the hill and you reach the sprawling Collserola park, a leisure zone of curious depth.
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