- Venue
- The Cavendish Arms
- Location
- London
It’s a Wednesday night in Stockwell. In a local pub, some friends are celebrating a birthday and disco classics are playing through the stereo.
In the back room, something altogether different is happening. I arrive once most the acts have been and gone. The event is described as a digital holocaust where “everything as microchip has malfunctioned”[1].
Three women come on to the curtain-draped stage, wearing skin-tight, skin-coloured clothing with red LED’s compelling us to focus on their breasts; hand made paper cones on their heads. Their faces are masked, flattened. The only thing that distinguishes these performers is their shoes – one wears red, one green, one blue. They stand behind a desk with a selection of objects. At first, Polly Fibre appear like a crudely feminised Kraftwerk, who are, incidentally, playing down the road.
Each performer, like automata, pick up large fabric scissors which have been mic’d up. Occasionally, the sound begins to take on a musical structure but constantly breaks down and reformulates itself. Like all the performers on the night, Polly Fibre appear ritualistic, almost cold, as if the microchips that were destroyed not only contained digital information but human emotions.
Through a series of considered cuts and scratches on a piece of material, a 12 inch circular disc is cut, then hammered, before being placed into square sleeves and flicked into the audience. Their throwaway products appears like a record, yet the sounds on the record will only appear to have been recorded to the person who was watching at The Prophetic Sound, not the person that may try to listen back later.
AAS appear on stage after a short break to perform Samekhmem. In contrast to Polly Fibre’s automata, five performers wear a small amount of facepaint and an item of fur over their clothes. Both acts appear to be from the same period of time, but have responded to their situation in different ways.
Through a relentless drone, the drum beat, an egg timer that takes centre stage and one of the performers who creates a sound like waves crashing within a post-human world, everything is structured. The sound resonating off the walls of the room appears louder than that coming out of the speakers.
The sound both completely disappears and is the only thing that matters during the short time that it takes place. Similarly, through its use of direct visual and aural measures, I become both aware of the time yet manage to lose myself within it.
Both Polly Fibre and AAS resonate within a primeval-post-lingual world[2]. That is, a world that has had and made sense of language, but lost it and returned to a time when language didn’t matter.
The final act was perhaps the most peculiar. BUGHOUSE offered anybody who wanted to the chance to join in a collective drone. The programme described it ‘as a kind of primordial-soup in which patterns can be discovered collectively, and new forms of communication can potentially evolve, or failing that, at least the absence of the possibility of communicating can perhaps be expressed.’
What it meant that the friends celebrating the birthday next door had joined in this collective drone and the event ended with them singing ‘Happy Birthday’ is beyond me.
[1] http://agencyofnoise.wordpress.com
[2] Too much?