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piano
502
 ghost dance -michael giles, jamie muir, david cunningham |
music composed and performed by:
michael giles: kit drums, assorted percussion, mouth horns, mouth reeds, bow, voice, keyboard
jamie muir: assorted percussion, hand drums, bow, thumb piano, mouthpiece, conch
david cunningham: loops, treatments, guitar, occasional percussion
'ghost dance', a film by ken mcmullen
'ghost dance' DVD
the collaboration -david cunningham
an interview with jamie muir
michael giles information
david cunningham -discography
track listing:
1 Ghost Dance 5.41
2 Scratching the Curve 1.35
3 Spillers Village 7.27
4 Cascade 3.52
5 Screenwash 2.51
6 Mouthwork 2.45
7 Snake Dance 2.05
8 The Moving Cymbal 2.51
9 Metalwork 1.29
10 Slow Motion 1.46
11 Cargo 2.52
12 Pascale 2.01
13 Blue Dance 6.01
14 Ghost Dance reprise 4.55
15 The Trial 6.34
we don't
deconstruct food, we eat it chew it up, swallow and digest it and we've
been doing so all our lives. the attempt by philosophers of the
80s to
repackage or 'reinvent' everyday knowledge as high philosophy seemed to
have more to do with the internal politics and economics of the
academic world, the need for philosophers to appease the new gods and
regain the initiative in order to justify their budgets at a time of
massive cost cutting in the education system - pumping money rather
than
iron, getting rid of the flab and becoming a lean mean success
machine or so ran (amok) the thinking of that decade, than with any
noticeable
insight into the human condition.
- and then there is of course ambitiousness and self
promotion. like
that other indispensable accessory of the new elite citizen, the
american express card, you can't go anywhere without it - or so it
would
appear.
but whichever it is, making sense of the world, like eating, is clearly
something we all do quite naturally and though the meeting of the
modern post-industrial city with exotic ethnic cultures can be
disruptive, there are benefits which are becoming more and more clear.
in 1983 as we began to work as a trio, ken mcmullen commissioned us to
provide the music for his film 'ghost dance'. the film was made
in a
very improvisational way, exploring the collision between ethnic
cultures and western cities - the rich inner mythologies of the one and
the alienation of the other - and the philosophies that were beginning
to explore this odd melée and what it reveals about us.
we approached the music in the same way, but more instinctively than
intellectually, as is the nature of music. we produced bits and
pieces
of improvised music mostly using very simple non-tec instruments, hand
drums, kazoo, thumb piano, bells, voice, found things, very simply
constructed things and so on, which was then molested with technology
till it was thoroughly macerated into some other hybrid shape. we
would then take this as the basic material and try to make sense of it
and develop it within the context of the film.
Giles,
Muir, Cunningham 1996
The
recording contains analogue tape distortion, noise and hiss which,
besides
being unavoidable, at times form an integral part of the music.
Thanks
to: Ken McMullen, Robert
Hargreaves, Mark Lucas, Jane Thorburn, Rob Ayling
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© piano 1996