Flesh Guitar

PERFORMANCE NOTES

Bob Arnold reviews a Jenny Slade gig to cherish

The Psychology Club takes place on alternate Thursdays in a disused missile silo in Kent. Audiences are small but discerning. Improvisation is the name of the game; improvisation along with subversion, aural mayhem and cheap guitar thrills.

Last Thursday Tom Scorn and Jenny Slade premiered a new untitled piece, a work for computer, voice and guitar. There was talk that the pair had fallen out in the past over artistic differences, but on this occasion the hatchet seemed to be well and truly buried.

Scorn has always been as much into language as music, and on this occasion he vocalized while Jenny played her flesh guitar. In front of Scorn was a small computer programmed to create an endless stream of words and phrases, maybe even whole sentences, but using only the letters ABCDEF and G — the letters that correspond to the notes of western music. Sharps and flats were out. Scorn was to shout out this computer-generated language and Jenny would play their musical equivalents.

Jenny was free to choose where on the neck of the guitar and in which octave to play the notes. She was also free to decide whether notes were to be plucked, hammered on, pulled off, or played as harmonics. She could also determine the length of the notes, the time signature if appropriate, the degree of attack or sustain, the tone of the guitar, the effects used.

Simple words were obviously easy enough to translate into music notes, words like ‘dad’ and ‘bed’. But some of the longer configurations would clearly be trickier, not only remembering and playing the notes, but also trying instantly to give the notes an intonation, a meaning that corresponded to the content of the language. Fortunately Jenny has always liked a challenge.

The audience settled, the lights went down and Tom Scorn tapped his computer. He peered at the tiny screen for a moment and then started. It was simple enough at first, just shouting out a few apparently random words. ‘Egad,’ he shouted. ‘Gee! Ace! Fab!’

Jenny played the corresponding notes. Then it got a little tougher.

Perhaps remembering his art school background Scorn was heard to shout, ‘Dada! Dada! Dada! Dada!’

Jenny played right along, and then it was as though Scorn were ordering food.

‘Egg!’ he shouted. ‘Egg! Cabbage! Egg!’

‘A misty incomprehension settled over the audience, so Scorn addressed them directly. ‘Deaf?’ he enquired of several members of the front row. ‘Deaf? Deaf?’ and of the last person, ‘Dead?’

And then he and the computer were off on a continuous, if only intermittently coherent, narrative.

‘A café. A faded facade. Ed, a cad, cadged a fag. Ada, a deb, faced a bad decade. Bea, a babe, gagged. Abe bagged a cab.’

And then Scorn, or at least the computer, loosened up no end, and the language became, not gibberish exactly, and not meaningless either, but Scorn found himself calling a long stream of unconnected words.

‘Abba!’ he shouted. ‘Baa baa. Abed. Abba. Baggage. Fad baggage! A gaff? A badge? AC/DC. Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!’

Jenny was clearly doing her best to keep up with Scorn and yet not overtake him. It must have been all too tempting just to let her fingers do the walking and find that she had fallen into cliche, that she was playing some old blues riff.

And then something went terribly wrong with Scorn’s computer. The cybernetic needle got stuck and for the next fifteen minutes or so all it came up with was ‘gabba gabba gabba gabba gabba gabba’. The audience became restless. Ever the situationist, Scorn went with the flow and kept shouting the repeated word. Jenny, changing her guitar tone to something raw and fuzzed, had little choice but to follow where he led.

The audience reacted powerfully. Some said it was a superb piece of minimalism. Some said it was like being at a really bad Ramones gig. Others said there was no difference between these two propositions. Who knows how long the piece might have gone on if an audience member, a frail teenager in a gingham dress and flying helmet, fearing for her ears and/ or her sanity, hadn’t leapt on stage and unplugged Scorn’s computer?

Scorn was outraged and shouted many words that contained letters other than A to G, and stormed from the stage in a queeny fit. Jenny took off her guitar, cocked the tremolo arm, and left it to howl against the speaker, where the feedback note produced was a microtone pitched superbly between G and G#. It was a transcendent moment, one that is unlikely to be repeated in the near future.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 6 Issue 2