Múm - Museum of Garden History 29/08/07

So I was one of the lucky 125 who won the opportunity (through the Múm mailing list) to purchase tickets for this very special gig at the Museum of Garden History. The Museum itself is quite weird – dedicated to displays of garden shovels and hoes through the ages – being formerly the church of St Mary-at Lambeth. Sound was good but lacked a little clarity; sightlines were ok-ish (the stage was quite small).

But you don’t want to know about that. You want to know about the new Múm.

Regular readers (oh if only) will have followed the saga of Múm’s loss of figurehead and vocalist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (see http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2006/11/gig-review-kitchen-motors.html). In theory Múm are now left with the two “boys”, the perhaps somewhat anonymous (and underrated) founder members Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, but they have always had a squad of friends and musicians for tours and recording, and they have dipped into the pool of remarkable Icelandic talent, particularly the aforereviewed Kitchen Motors Collective, to refresh themselves. So here they were 7 strong. Regulars drummer and token Finlander, Samuli Kosminen on drums, and Ólöf Arnalds on strings and vocals were supplemented by the glorious Sigurlaug Gísladóttir (who goes by the name of Mr Silla but I can tell you she aint no fella!) and the sublimely talented Hildur Ingveldardóttir Gudnadóttir (here on vocals, but her brilliant solo cello album under the name of Lost in Hildurness has been gathering rave reviews) and Eiríkur Orri Olafsson on trumpet and keyboards.



The gig was a one-off to launch their new single “They Made Frogs Smoke 'til They Exploded” out this week and the new album “Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy” out 24th September.

And it was, of course, fantastic. It was pretty much a run through of the whole of the new album plus a couple of oldies and a very odd and wonderfully shambolic honky tonk meets gospel cover (so right, and yet so wrong, in a church, oi!)

They sounded, well, like only Múm sound. There were some differences, post–Kristín. The boys seemed, well somehow friendlier, more relaxed, warmer. The sound was brighter, a bit meatier in the beats, less waves crashing on Lighthouse rocks and more wooden shack with roaring fire and toasted marshmallows and beer and Brenivin (Iceland’s own home brew style fire-water, not known as the Black Death for nothing). Less string, more woodwind. Generally the vocals were sung by the three girls and the boys all together. As they didn’t really do old songs we wait to see how they will deal with trademark Kristín tunes like “Green Grass of Tunnel”.




To be honest, after the Kitchen Motors gig I wasn’t too worried about Múm. I knew the new members were talented, and I always suspected there was more to those two boys than met the eye. I wonder if they are in some ways liberated after Kristín. We will miss her brooding fragile intensity and sonic touches, but there is no doubt that Múm are as wonderful as ever. They tour properly later in the year and I can’t wait for December, when they play the Scala.

Road Trip V - Belsay Hall, Northumberland - 30/07

Belsay Hall is an English Heritage site near Morpeth in the heart of Northumberland. The Hall itself is Greek revival style villa built in the early 19th Century. Now empty, it is given over every year to assorted artists to do with as they will. When I heard that the ghostly cellars had been given over to a sound installation by Anthony (of the Johnsons) and the great New York contemporary classical / electronica composer William Basinski and when I saw the pictures of what Geraldine Pilgrim had done in the bedrooms, I knew I had to go!




I was so impressed, especially by the way that themes ran across the work of the various artists. Generally the artists traced the history of the Middleton family who lived at Belsay for seven centuries, and the work fell into two categories. Some examined the socio-political aspects, such as the life of scullery maids: I found this work a little too worthy. The other, more successful, approach was to turn the site into a phantasmagoria; haunted by the Middletons and their imagined lives.

Ghosts abound. You hear them in Anthony’s haunting spooky tones emanating from the cellars and drifting around the house. In Pilgrim’s rooms, ghost birds flutter behind open wardrobes, a spectre brushes her hair in the mirror, a single eye blinks in the wardrobe. It was like site specific promenade theatre (ok Faust!) all over again, except here the actors had departed into the shadows. What you are left with are traces, ghosts of ghosts.



In a room by Sandy Powell, a single spot light illuminates a key hole – you peep through it and watch Lady Middleton slowly undress – at the end she walks towards you, bends down, and winks. Who is the watcher here? The walls have eyes, as well as ears. In Mike Figgis’ room, wallpaper is torn to reveal a face staring back at you; a reflection of the picture in the related room by Boudicca next door.

In Francesca Steele’s room, you sit and watch the wallpaper morph. Part of the wall is a projection, perfectly matching the real botanical style paper, until it starts to move, and grow or shrink or tear; other images burn through, of plants and macro-biology.

In a film by the Quay Brothers, projected inside a coffin, the traces of the ghosts have all but vanished, just a creaking door or a footstep is left. Traces of ghosts of ghosts.

In works by United Visual Artists and Golan Levin (the latter in the 14th Century castle) it is the viewer who is made into ghost, the gaze turned back again on the visitor. In the former, wispy images of oneself are projected onto a screen; in the latter you are turned into a skeletal hieroglyphic, pacing around the room and waving your arms to find yourself amongst the other ghosts.

Between the Hall and the Castle lie wonderful gardens, formal at first, then you drop into the cool air of a former quarry where huge ferns and weird plants dominate, like something out of Jurassic Park.

Another wonderful, enchanted and enchanting place.

Road Trip IV - Northumberland - 29/07

Northumberland

Who knew? Certainly not me. Mile after mile of the most beautiful, unspoilt scenery.

Rolling hills, massive skies, wonderful huge fluffy clouds, meadows and vales and forests, sunsets to live for.




Then there’s the coast, designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with a 35 mile road running along side. Dune grass and castles, a perfect sea, seabirds everywhere. Our first stop was Craster famed for its kippers, although the town’s famed smokehouse restaurant was closed on a Sunday, so I settled for the burger van by the tourist information booth. Kippers from a van? Ah but they were so good – marinaded in spices, then cooked in tinfoil on the hotplate, and served in a bun. Delicious! They were holding an artists open house event in Craster that day – one artist had a piece (not for sale) about the perils of a road trip – talk about synchronicity.


After buying some prints, we stopped again after Seahouses to explore the dunes, then made our way to Bamburgh Castle.




What a Castle – huge, perched on the side of the sea, impeccably restored.





Everything seemed to conspire to give us picture postcard views - a games of cricket on the green in front of the castle; a kite flying over the dunes. If you are lucky, I'll show you the full set of photos some day.

We stopped at some great pubs. The Gun Inn near Bellingham sported amazing views for miles around and friendly locals. Great fish was had at the Cross Keys in Thropton. I just wanted to record that in case, sorry make that for when, I go back.

Road Trip III - The Angel of the North - 28/07

No road trip from Yorkshire to Northumberland would be complete without a stop off at the Angel of the North, although in a funny kind of way TAOTN is at its most angelic whilst driving along the M1 – it crops up on the left, disappears, then appears on the right, then its on the left again, now straight in front of you.

At the site itself, what strikes you is the sheer size of the thing, and the engineering – deep grooves run along the outside, an external skeleton.




It seems to me that Gormley shares a lot of attributes with Goldsworthy – both are treated with suspicion by the art establishment, I suspect because of their popularity – they make public art and they make work that the public wants to see. And they demonstrate a scale and ambition lacking in many of the “art scene” artists.

TAOTN is the most popular piece of art in Britain. The Geordies of course love it; as we were to discover, they are very proud and passionate about and in this part of the world, and they have a piece of work worthy of their pride.

Road Trip IIA - Goldsworthy pictures

Wood Room (courtsey YSP site)

Stone Room (courtesy Daily Telegraph)

Clay Room (courtesy Daily Telegraph)

Leaf Stalk Room (courtesy Daily Telegraph)

Road Trip II - Andy Goldsworthy at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The YSP is dedicating its 4 galleries and various outdoor locations to a major exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy. The London-centric art scene are rather snotty about Goldsworthy – I think they consider him twee, a country bumpkin, and worse of all, he is very,very popular, and with real people, not ICA clones with silly facial hair. I believe that his books are the bestselling art books in the market. The establishment snottiness is odd given that a lot of his work is conceptual, rather than aesthetic, and he predated the YBAs love of materials like piss, shit and blood and subjects like death and decay.

Very Damian Hirst you might think, save that Goldsworthy’s canvass is nature, particularly rural and agricultural, where such material is everyday and you cannot afford to be squeamish about it. Much of his work is temporary, designed to decay or vanish, melting snowballs, corroding damns, etc, leaving you with just the ghost, the photograph of the work in action, which make up those oh so popular books. He describes his art in terms of “actions” or “interventions”.

Some of this work leaves me cold – I saw one of his melting snowballs in a gallery a few years ago – a pile of watery mud, but at it’s best, which it is here, his work is breathtaking. The underground gallery at the YSP hosts a series of rooms each more astonishing than the last.

It begins with Stacked Oak - a perfect mound of chopped trees, beautifully, naturally curved. In the Stone Room are eleven stone domes, like an ancient village in miniature, or a futuristic settlement on the moon, or some weird agricultural practice us townies can only guess at. The top of each dome supports a wafer thin hole, the effect to make the deep dark black of the hole seem more like a felt covering.

The Clay Room is just that; the walls caked in thick mud which has cracked as it dried. The mud undulates and warps away from the wall. Rather like a Rothko, the more you look, the more you notice, luring you into a trance like state – different shades, patterning and rhythms in the cracks, your eyes start to dance.

The first thing you notice on entering the Wood Room is the deep almost astringent smell. 760 logs of coppiced chestnut curl around in a self-supporting dome, like the lair of a Tolkeinesque warlord.

The final room is simply beyond any man made artefact I have ever seen. In the Leaf Stalk Room , Goldsworthy has made a 12 metre wide “curtain” from leaf stalks held together only with blackthorns. I say curtain but it is only a filigree lattice, so fragile, and yet giving the effect of solidity. So still, yet containing within so much energy. So peaceful, yet the effort of it not falling induces anxiety, a kind of horizontal vertigo. At the centre of the curtain is a void, a hole, anti-matter, absence made whole. The piece took him two hours everyday for three months, and there was a full scale collapse midway through.


Sadly we weren't allowed to take photos, so here's a shot of the outside of the gallery, with some Goldsworthy arches - if i find any photos of these rooms I will post later.






The other galleries on this part of the site showed pictures of previous works – I was especially taken by a set of four photographs of a curved damn, each photo taken with a higher water level, so that in the third just the top of the damn walls peeks over, and in the fourth it has gone, but its line is shadowed in the different patterns the water makes either side of it.

Outside, a series called Hanging Trees featured three walled enclosures into which trees have been incorporated.




We never got to the far gallery, which hosted paintings made by sheep (with Goldsworthy’s help) and other stuff with blood and dung, nor to a couple of the more difficult to reach outdoor pieces. But the exhibition runs until January, so that’s not to say that I wont!

Road Trip I - Yorkshire Sculpture Park – 27/28 July

What an enchanted, magical and mellow place this is. The park covers a huge area (500 acres) of fields, agricultural land, meadows, woodland, streams and rivers, as well as four separate gallery spaces and a plush modern visitor’s centre.

Outdoors, selections from the Park’s collection are dotted all around.


Because the sculptures are often changed, there isn’t a guide as such, just some suggested walks, and many of the sculptures don’t have anything to tell you who they are by. This could be annoying, but somehow isn’t, as it allows you to wander freely and make your own discoveries and judgements. So some magnificent humanoid forms sit in the middle of a field of sheep, whilst a row of clucking birds lead us to a wonderful Henry Moore figure...

As we get lost in the forest, nothing seemed to make sense any more. Some of the artists play with the question of what sculpture is, incorporating elements of the rural surroundings. We stumble on an arch of arranged twigs – considered work, or a children’s project? A treehouse rests on a large tree into which a poem has been carved; from a distance it looks random, like graffiti or vandalism, only close up does it reveal itself. That sheep pen over there – is it for the sheep or is it an installation? – it looks like it is a working pen save for a sign pointing to the public entrance. In an old deer shelter James Turrell has made one of his skyspaces – a square hole in the ceiling – you sit and look at a square of sky – the drama of cloud sun and sky focussed and quickened by being framed.

Cibelle – Luminaire – 26th July

I can’t think of a more appropriate siren to sing me away on my road trip than the honey- toned Cibelle (pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘lov-er-ly’). I’ve previously posted her own (non) definition of her music without boundaries: “Even better, is to sculpt out of a big mass of collected particles of sound, sweat, glue, lick, purple, silver, air, wood, wind, anything thats been stuck together by living life and all these and other things accumulating inside of me just like breathing and the only things remaining being the ones that match me at that moment, then letting them out, all merged inside me by osmosis, letting it all come out, all that, is that mass, that will be sculpted until it gives me goose bumps and butterflies. then i know it's ready”.

On stage this amounts to an assortment of electronic gadgets and children’s toys and percussive instruments, backed up by fiery drummer and guitarist, and brought together by Cibelle’s angelic voice – she sounds like hot maple syrup dripping over cold ice cream melting over hot home-made waffles. Mmmm.

This was part of a new night called dsh blp which featured djs from my old pals Tunng, and excellent support from SonVer (chamber rock meets shoegazer electronica) and Robert Logan (bedroom moog-freakery) – it was kind of like the Arctic Circle used to be only better, and I will definitely check out any future events they hold.

But the night belonged to Cibelle.