A one off event at the Victorian Arts Centre. 8pm, Wednesday
14th November, 2007
image ..TONY MAHONY
the Lurid yellow Mist ...featuring
Dave Graney and Clare Moore. Plutonic Lab. (hip hop instrumental breaks) Joe McKee (guitarist/singer from Snowman). Penny Ikinger.
Visuals by Jaimie and Asapasia Leonarder from Sydney maverick arts and
film compound, the Mu-Meson Archive.
Lights,film, sound, black box, audience free to roam
around the performers. (who are fixed).
the bewdy of
speed
music and art from the real
world,pal. From the future. Well, beyond NOW.
An hour of music by artists from the farthest flung atolls of the drifting,
broken up islands that once made up the mythic and monolithic land mass
of pop. Dave Graney and Clare Moore...featuring the Lurid Yellow Mist,
Joe McKee from Snowman, Penny Ikinger with her dazzling
21st century electric guitar and voice and Obese recording artists Plutonic
Lab. Some could say rock, prog,punk,post punk and also hip hop. Go
ahead and say it too. Its all true. A visual mix by Jamie Leonarder and
Asper from Sydney independent film and fringe culture compound, the
Mu-Meson archives.
“Nice and disturbing” was the description given to me by a “deep
thorat” from the bowels of the Arts Centre. Having grown up in a
timber town in regional australia I was born into a nice and disturbing
world, This was my turf! The Bewdy of Speed is a celebration of creation. Not Recreation.
Creation. Musicians are at the vanguard of the rubbish
dump of eternity and I am giving them this brief and shining stage to
transcend the deafening chat of the audience to talk to our most modern
and futuristic selves.
As for the “art” bit, all the performers will be arranged as
if exhibits in a gallery and the audience can move around as in in a joint
like that.
We live in a paintng. We are ground into the synthetic screen and light
is beamed down upon us by advertising companies, so as other people can
see us. We live in the future. There was once a gang of elitist
pranksters and cads who called themselves the Futurists. they longed to
live where we live, in the future. They talked of “the beauty
of speed”. Ihave taken this phrase as the title for this hour
long experience we are going to produce at the BlackBox which is within
the Arts Centre building. Like I say , we live in the future so we should
get onto it.
The Futurists might have turned out to keep some dodgy company but they
were big on risks and diving into situations. Hurrah!
But we live in a painting. Its so slow. The government approved historians
dispute that anything has ever happened at all. Where is the proof? This
country was triumph! As an economic machine, it functions as best as can
be arranged, given the local peculiarities. “The Bewdy of Speed”
is an exhibition of peculiarities. Male and female, vocal and instrumental.
And visual. All in a black box that the audience is free to walk around
in as if they were , indeed in a gallery exhibition.
The musical element is provided by artists from Melbourne and also one
from Perth. They are all outsiders. The thing is that we are all outsiders
here in this joint. The musicians are outside what is identified as the
music industry. The industry is a painting. Commercial radio is a painting.
They erase whoever might upset their audiences view of each themselves.
(Michael Jackson, where are you?) . There is the antiquated idea of youth
radio, that is a painting too. The young, pure , provincial hands are
guided by soothing older voices from the large city. Its still an old
painting and you can still see the Bea-l--s foolish , grinning faces through
the thin paint that is spayed constantly onto the canvas. They do not
exist on the night that the Bewdy of Speed is taken on. Forget
them, Appolinaire called for “great forgetters”., he wanted
“the Christopher Columbus of forgetting!”. We are here to forget
entire continents (bye bye Gallipoli) as we put the foot to the floor
and get some kicks, just for the thrill of it. Someone else can come and
clean up the mess. Screw pragmatism, thats for squares.
The Futurists had a Futurist idea for food and tried to fight the Fascist
promulgation of bread and pasta as the national Italian dish. They longed
for “an edible art” . At a dinner they mixed liquids
such as pork juice and rum , chicken “permeated with the taste
of steel balls”, a sausage simmered in very strong coffee. All
in a room covered in aluminium from top to bottom, including aluminium
napkins.
The Futurists had some painters who only worked up in balloons or planes.
With the “Bewdy of speed’ we want to give the audience
the same sensation of bringing them into the “flight” of creation.
. “Perspective had placed at the centre of the universe an unmoving
man , frozen by his own vision.....revitalized by perspective accelarations,
anamorphoses, viws from above, warped, altered, reduced spaces that materialized
the...modern, unfamiliar vision...Modern man found out that gaining height
did not clarify the visible, but multiplied it instead....”
“the Bewdy of speed”....
