Don't Say Nowt

Jumble Hole Clough's creator, Colin Robinson, describes it as 'music influenced by the landscape, industrial remains and experiences around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. Forgotten things half-hidden beneath the undergrowth.' Robinson has now created forty-three albums under the Jumble Hole Clough name, the latest three being a trilogy based on written-down dreams ('the minor transient documents of everyday life', as he describes them). Over the previous forty, Robinson had moved gradually away from his self-imposed local brief. This trilogy, however, brings the world around Hebden Bridge back into focus: the calls of the curlews the crows and the sound of the church bells rising up from the valley (everyday experiences for anyone living around Hebden Bridge) mingle with more exotic, surreal dream-images. For example, someone – in one of the catchiest songs in the trilogy – has mysteriously filled the back of his car with riot-shields. I can't explain why I like that song as much as I do any more than I suspect Colin Robinson can explain why he dreamt it.

The first album of the trilogy, with its ambiguous double-negative title, Don't Say Nowt (and other dreams), contains conventional songs. Correction: conventional JHC songs, which is not quite the same thing. Conventional in JHC terms means short, sonically diverse and full of tongue-in-cheek surrealism. These are the dreams you were dreaming the moment you woke up: brief, vivid narratives with a logic of their own, which seemed perfectly reasonable while you were dreaming them.

The second album, You're Our Prisoner Now (and other dreams) is less conventional. All the tracks were 'based initially on aleatoric methods: generative, serial, Euclidean, tape loops and other such systems'. JHC produced its first album using generative music (...and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you?) almost exactly a year ago. One of the interesting things about that album – and this – is that even when relinquishing control of the music to algorithms, it still manages to sound like JHC.

The third album, The Sunken Chapel (and other dreams) goes even further in this direction. Listening to it for the first time, I immediately found myself thinking of it as a series of sound-tracks to dreams, like an album of the music for a film which only one person – in this case the dreamer, Colin Robinson – has ever seen.

If you've never heard the music of JHC before but enjoy listening to these albums as much as I do, you have a treat in store: you've still got the forty other albums in the JHC back catalogue to listen to.

Cosey and Delia

Cosey Fanni Tutti's latest album – a solo album – is based on the soundtrack she created for the film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. The film, directed by Caroline Catz (best known for her role as the headteacher in the TV series Doc Martin), is about the life and work of the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s. CFT gives a fascinating account of how she created it in the book, Re-Sisters. Having spent time talking to people who knew Delia, she then visited the John Rylands Library in Manchester to listen to digital recordings of the 'legendary tapes' themselves, which are held there (tantalizingly, they're not freely available because of copyright complications). I get the impression that the tapes are a kind of 'sound diary' of Delia's working life. CFT managed to assemble a collection of old, analogue equipment, which allowed her to explore Delia's way of working:

I'd made copious notes on how I'd go about composing and finding the right sounds that would reflect Delia's style while staying true to myself and to Delia's ethos of obtaining previously unheard sounds. Re-Sisters, p.119

She also had access to Delia's VCS3 synthesizer 'patch sheets' (diagrams showing the positions of the controls and the ways different parts of the machine were interconnected to produce a particular sound). As she said, recreating one of Delia's 'patches' was unlikely to produce the same sound but was at least an interesting starting point. (Elsewhere in Re-Sisters, she talks about Keats' idea of 'negative capability' and the importance to artists of just letting things happen). One should stress that the end result is very much the work of CFT and definitely not a recreation of Delia's music. I suppose one could describe it as a dialogue with Delia's ghost.

I've been a long-time fan of Throbbing Gristle but, until now, I'd not taken the time to get to know the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti outside of the band. It's a voyage of discovery for me, it's still in progress, and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

In addition to her music and performance art, CFT has written two books: an autobiography, Art Sex Music (2018) and, most recently, Re-Sisters: The Lives and Recordings of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe and Cosey Fanni Tutti (2022). 

Moten/Lopez/Cleaver

Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver have been working together for some years as a duo making innovative improvised music. Both are established figures in the New York Jazz scene. On this album they've come together with American poet Fred Moten. It was recorded during the pandemic, in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion.

Combining poetry with jazz goes back a long way. The idea, however, while retaining curiosity value, has never become mainstream. The Beats and, later, the Black Arts Movement tried to develop it. Some of the results have become iconic. This album, which has been compared to the work of Amiri Bakara with the New York Art Quartet, may well be up there with the best.

The problem – according to detractors – is that one is never sure what to concentrate on, the music or the poetry. This is a mistake, I think. As TS Eliot said, 'genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.' One can think of the poet in this context as just another musician, only a musician playing with words. If one is paying the right kind of attention to the poetry, there is no need to be preoccupied with trying to understand it. The words work like notes, the phrases like musical phrases. Just listen and you'll find out what you need to know. This doesn't mean the meaning of the words will be lost on you: Moten is poet who writes powerfully about the politics of being black in the USA, of how – referencing the death of George Floyd – “somebody black and poor can't breathe”. The title of the first poem/track on the album tells you what it's standing up against: “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me”.

Moten's poetry is ideal for this kind of project. Its phrases live for themselves, like the latest thought of an improvising musician. Derek Bailey once said of improvisation words to the effect that improvised music was like music without memory. This quality of living in the moment, shared by Moten's poetry – on one level – and musical improvisation, is what I think makes this album work so well.

I don't think it'll be forgotten in a hurry. I don't buy much vinyl but I'm tempted to buy it for that reason - and because, if I do, I can sit it next to my Iskra 1903 double LP (1972), which it reminds me of, possibly because that, too, hit me between the eyes when I first heard it. Bailey, Rutherford and Guy released that album of improvised music fifty years ago, in a different country, in a different context. Hopefully people will still be listening to Moten/López/Cleaver fifty years from now, too.

.​..and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you?

I always keep a look out for any new releases by Jumble Hole Clough. If you don't know it, it's the brainchild of Colin Robinson of Big Block 454, which describes itself as 'making exploratory, highly individual music that encompasses rock, funk, electronica, folk music, Dadaist collage and much more besides.' Jumble Hole Clough seems to have grown out of this. It started out, as Robinson puts it, 'to produce music influenced by the landscape, industrial remains and experiences around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire'. I would respectfully suggest that although JHC retains some of the eldritch oddity that I associate with that neck of the woods (it was once my stamping ground, too), it has, over the 39 albums now produced under the name, gone beyond it.

Of the 38 albums produced prior to this one it's hard to single out a favourite but mine is probably Answers on a Postcard. They're all more than worth a listen.

.​..and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you? is something of a departure – but less of one than might appear at first glance. It's a collection of generative music, an approach which has certainly not openly figured in JHC's music so far. As Robinson explains, 'you set up a system and some rules... A variety of probability and aleatoric functions are used, such as Turing Machines and nested Bernoulli gates. The probability process means that the music gradually changes over time.' Reading this, it was hard not to think of the work of Brian Eno. However, I was reminded of something someone once said of John Cage, that however much he used processes and aleatoric techniques to put distance between himself and his music, it still, somehow, managed to sound like John Cage. For all the processes, this album still manages to sound like Jumble Hole Clough - but in new and unexpected ways. The quirky, eldritch quality still shines through.

Jumble Hole Clough -as Cage once said of Satie- is indispensable.

All at Once

Seventeen years ago I took part in an Arts Council project that culminated in a local art exhibition. I'd created a series of short pieces of electronic music which I paired with digitally created pictures. These were based on photographs I'd been taking of my own shadow, which I'd taken outside in the area around where we live. Looking back, it's very like things I've been doing recently, being confined to our local neighbourhood as we have been for the last year.

The other day I came across a track I'd created in the years after the project. It clearly belonged to it but since the moment had passed, I'd left it unfinished. Yesterday I finished it off and uploaded it to YouTube. For the visual element, I added the images from the original project.

The title of the track refers to a Kenneth Patchen picture-poem, All at Once Is What Eternity Is. 

I then added it to the Bandcamp album, SHADES, created of music from the original project.