Articles

Newsletter 1.9

September, 1996

Editorial

Hello, and welcome to the penultimate Newsletter of the year and back on track after the last hiccup. Kevin Eden has provided us with excerpts for the third interview in our series of people who have worked with Wire. We are please what is, in fact, only the second interview that Paul Kendall has conducted. Newsletter ten was to have included an interview with John Bonnar but, due to his current touring commitments with Dead Can Dance, this will now appear in a later edition. In its place we have pulled out of the WMO archives extracts from a fascinating satellite radio interview that Wire gave in November 1979 with Radio 2JJ, Sydney, shortly after their Jeanette Cochrane appearances.

pre>He

WMO is pleased to announce the release of Edvard Graham Lewis' pre>He (WMO 6CD). All material was recorded in 1983, with the majority of the tracks being instrumental. Only He Said Argh has been released before by Touch on the Meridians Two cassette.

We reported in Newsletter eight that Graham's next He Said album would be called Omala. Graham has corrected us by saying that Omala is in fact the name that his two fellow collaborators, Andeas Karperyd and Mathias Tegner, go under. So the correct title of the album is He Said Omala as they are still bearing away at recording, there is still no release schedule. Graham, along with CM Von Hauswolff and Jean-Louis Huhta, DJ-ed a 36 hour event in Stockholm starting at 6:00 p.m. on 31st August and ending at 4:00 am on 1st September. Held at the Sarga Fabriken (Colour Factory) this non-stop event, entitled Love-All feature 30 acts of widely differing natures. Whilst most of the performances were from Swedish musicians, DJ's, and artists, Panasonic and Ssimon Hartley (ex-lLFO) were also included. The success of this first event, with 1200 people attending on opening night has prompted the organizers to make plans for a second Love-All in 1997 with a more international scope.

Bruce Gilbert

Ash International release Instant Shed Vol. 2 (Ash 2.8) at the end of September. This double one-sided 7" single comes packaged in a gatefold freezer bag with one disc being clear vinyl and the other black.

Work on his spoken word album The Haring (WMO 5CD) is now in full swing and we hope to have it released buy the end of November. The initial limited boxed edition of 1000 copies will be available only by mail order from WMO, These (UK) and Soleilmoon (US) and not in the shops. Watch this space for more details.

Bruce has just completed work on a new CD for the Atlanta label Table of Elements. Entitled Ordre it is to be released in early next year.

Wire

We've had a lot of inquiries and received a bit of stick from some of you about the late news of Wire's final appearance back in May.

Unfortunately, as we said, this was a private function and we were sworn to secrecy over the date and venue until it had passed. Many of you have asked about getting copies of the video of Drill that MTV Europe broadcast a few weeks later., Whist we too would love to see both the audio and video generally available, the rights to both of these belong to Mute. Can we suggest that any further letters be addressed to Paul Smith c/o Mute Records 429 Harrow Road, London W10 4RE?

Unless you've been in an alternate universe recently, one could not help notice that the 100th Olympic Games recently took place in Atlanta GA. One of the Olympic sponsors, Budweiser, decided to use Elastica's Connection for their advert. In the meantime, Elastica are putting the final touches to a new album on which one track uses the Lowdown riff. Wire are suitably amused.

Swim

Immersion have provided an audio installation, entitled Identity, as part of The Event Horizon at The Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin, from 11th September to 11th October. The opening night will also see Immersion DJing at a Swim night. The back of this Newsletter contains their blurb from the catalog of the event.

Autumn releases from Swim are a new Pablo's Eye 12" (VWM11) which contains 3 remixes from Ronnie & Clyde, Pablo's Eye and Incarnate.

Also due is a various artists double CD, Water Ccommunication, but at the price of a single CD. This will contain one old and one new track by all the Swim artists: Pablo's Eye, Lobe, G Man, Immersion, Malka Spigel, Colin Newman, Oracle, Yoshi Maeda and Ronnie & Clyde.

Malka Spigel's proposed CD single and the Colin Newman CD will follow in 1997, along with a new label set up by Swim for g man. The label, called g, will release a vinyl LP by DJ Falovie.

More details when we have them!

Reissues

Many of you are still inquiring about the long overdue CD reissues of the P'o and Michael O'Shea albums. We can now confirm that These Records have relinquished their option to release them and WMO will be making the P'o CD (WMO 11CD) their first release for 1997, with Michael O'Shea (WMO 12 CD) planned later.

As already confirmed, the P'o CD will contain two extra tracks; Only One I and Zinc Lasso (Noose), along with the full version of I Will. There will also be four further alternate mixes of tracks already on the album. We will keep you informed of the exact dates when they happen.

Immersion—identity

Immersion's contribution to The Event Horizon is an installation which consists of several CD players asynchronously looping sound and music created by Immersion through divergently placed sets of speakers creating a sound field in which people, items and events move in time and space. The work is intended to have no visual counterpoint save for the rest of the work in the exhibition. It also has no subject. It is a debatable point whether any art other than narrative can have a subject but music especially in its most abstract form can not by definition have one.

Immersion does not attempt to project an identity through this work but rather seeks to embrace the event in the only way it knows how; by Immersion...

What is the identity of Immersion?

Knowing the identity of an artist cannot really be a substitution for partaking in that artist's work. Although in all art forms this information has more or less become the only arbiter of taste and more importantly value. Galleries, cinemas, record halls, concert halls and bookshops all for the most part trade in names.

That notwithstanding Immersion is not a nom de plume, the artists involved (Malka Spigel and Colin Newman) are not only a working partnership involved primarily in music but also a married couple who in addition run a small record company (Swim). It is perhaps a strange commentary on our society that this most common of physical pairings is considered atypical from the point of an artistic (or even business) standpoint.

The terms sound and music are used in reference to this work. The term sound alone avoids some of the limitations which the term music May conjure up in the mind of the potential listener, but has the less desirable connotation of applying also to something with random timbre also referred to as noise.

Immersion have chosen two colour images to accompany this text. These images have been chosen on their own merit and have no particular connection with the auditory exhibit or with this text. The orientation of the photographs and to some extent their subject matter finds some connection with the term landscape.

Narrative is absent from this work.