the sourcerer: City Soirée at Haas Collective

Saturday, June 25, 2011

City Soirée at Haas Collective

Last night we sat in a row on a velvet settee, beer in hand, while three musicians took it in turn to play for us. And I realized: there is no place I'd rather be. During the interval we spoke about different musical instruments and their limitations. For example - the piano - how far can you push it's abilities?

This is something I have learnt from watching Righard Kapp play his guitar: he can make it sound like almost anything. He throws his whole body into it, he plays it until his fingers bleed. It's wonderful to see how he uses every bit of that instrument. I'm not a musician, so I don't know what other guitarists do with the end of each string, but Righard leaves them standing haywire, and when he shakes them they become a delicate rattlesnake snare.

The show started with a classical guitar performance by Nina Fourie-Gouws. Her hands are startling - the movement of them so contained, but hummingbird-fast.

Mark Fransman played next. His alto-saxophone is a mesmerizing instrument. Dully gleaming, foxed, mysterious keys and buttons. I learnt that it can also be pushed to sound like a thousand other things. I heard a slowly beating metronome and I heard his voice rushing through the wind.

It was extraordinary.

1 comment:

Chris said...: wow Lil.; June 26, 2011 at 9:11 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.