Trout House Replica & So the Red Rose / Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre/ 11 Nov 23 - 17 Feb 24.
Trout House Replica & So the Red Rose / Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre/ 11 Nov 23 - 17 Feb 24.
Trout House Replica recreates the 'red room' in the Los Angeles home where Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band composed their landmark 1969 album Trout Mask Replica. So the Red Rose features a houseboat-inspired structure referencing Vanda Chan’s fictional marooned boat “Arcadia.” By juxtaposing these factual and fictional spaces tied to countercultural music and art, the exhibition aimed to spur dialogue on how creative forms transport audiences and catalyse affirmative societal visions.
The late 1960s was notable for a congruence of ideas concerning freedom and ecology. A moment where literature, music, and art met and fused with environmental welfare and consciousness-raising. Ideas of freedom were embraced by artists, writers and musicians which embodied a turn away from the mainstream. Innovation in artistic form and content would be prized for being prefigurative of hope for political alternatives. The release of the album ‘Trout Mask Replica’ can and has been, understood as being situated within this social, cultural and ecological turn.*
In 1968, the Magic Band moved into a split-level wooden house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. They remained in isolation in the house for over 8 months and during this time, in a room they painted bright red, wrote and rehearsed 20 plus songs, which would be released as the album Trout Mask Replica. Recorded over 50 years ago, the album remains an influential musical and cultural artefact and its clanking, un-ingratiating, un-integrated music continues to resonate with emerging music and other art forms.*
‘Trout Mask Replica’ has exerted a clear influence on experimental rock music from the Residents, to Japanese noise bands the Boredoms, to Chicago rock band U.S. Maple, and San Diego indie band Trumans Water. Many visual artists and poets are fans. Musicians from Tom Waits, P.J Harvey and Tricky, to Ghost Poet, Deerhoof and Cosey Fanni Tutti have acknowledged its influence. Millennial psychedelicists like Olivia Tremor Control display familiarity with the music’s unorthodox poly-tonality and rhythmic-tics.
As big capital moved in on music, morphing small recording companies into conservative corporations, technological advances in FM broadcast in the late 60s, cross-fertilizing with progressive ideals created bandwidth space for the airing of local/non-commercial radio and combined to create the space, time and audience for free-form radio. As a result, consciousness-raising discussions, progressive politics and experimental music found a home in spaces overlooked by the mainstream.
Tyman and Webster’s interest in ‘Trout Mask Replica’, is not to nostalgically rehabilitate a simulation of 60s psych, or to repeat the classic ‘work of genius narrative,’ that often obscures. It is an act of un-forgetting, an attempt to find a way to explore the lost potentials of counter-cultures and to explore if and how a coalition of music and arts can play a central role in culture in the present moment and enable the construction of new narratives - to speak to and of a different world/s where alternatives are still possible.
*Beefheart’s ‘turn’ however, was not fueled by a romantic, cliched thinking of nature, as a thing with a sense of unity and well-being. For Beefheart, nature was a thing of disturbance and antagonism, and he revelled in the fact that there was no normal, no safe and pleasant natural world – it was deviant, oppressive, and flawed and much like the Magic Bands music troubled all categories.
** The record is a constant of the top 100 albums of all time lists and was entered into the US Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2010. Every year, the Library of Congress picks 25 recordings of cultural, historical, or aesthetic importance.
***At the time of his death in 2017, Fisher was planning a new book ‘ Acid Communism’, which would have attempted to reclaim elements of the 1960s counterculture in the interest of imagining new political possibilities for the Left.
In July 1985, the maverick environmentalist and part-time DJ Vanda Chan set off in Arcadia,* her home-made houseboat, to sail the short distance from Pulawat towards Pulpap Atolls (Micronesia). A storm however caused her to change course and the houseboat hit rocks close to an uninhabited island. Chan believed she would be found quickly, but her solitude would last over 8 months before she was rescued. Chan managed to salvage a few personal artefacts including an old atlas (by the radical geographer Élisée Reclus) **, a cassette player, a broken ship radio, and most importantly, a box of recordings of radio broadcasts which had accompanied her on previous expeditions.
The radio was irreparable, but she managed to fix the onboard solar panel system to power the cassette player. To pass time, and what would become a regular daily routine, Chan would browse through the Reclus atlas whilst playing the tapes. In complete solitude, she became engrossed in listening to and making playlists of the recordings and this became a catalyst for undertaking imaginary travel, where her only option was to look towards her own imagination. Like the imprisoned figure in Xavier De Maistre’s , A Journey Around My Room (1829), she found that she could travel across continents without leaving her confines. The tapes were no longer simply a collection of songs but virtually prompted her to move from place to place.
Amongst Chan’s box of recordings, one tape in particular, copied by a friend onto a C90 cassette and labelled ‘The Magic Band’, became of particular importance. The friend had given her the tape as she departed on her voyage from Pulawat.
The Magic Band tape’s handmade cover was damaged by seawater, making it difficult to discern song titles, but her friends typed notes, included some background about the tape, revealing that the music and its making, were surrounded by myths and fiction, but it was accepted that the all the songs had been written and rehearsed by the Magic Band whilst living in isolation, almost imprisoned in a small wood cabin. The band had lived and rehearsed in the larger room of the cabin, (which was painted entirely red), for over eight months. Chan was unsettled by these details, of enforced isolation, but as an avid listener of music, more so than ever in her isolation, she recognized in its eclectic juxtaposition and hybridisation of sound and word, a sense of striving for a kind of freedom and began to see the music, like that on her own improvised handmade mix-tapes, as a way to travel and dream.
Notes:
*In 1985, three members of the band ‘Duran Duran’ formed a side project called Arcadia and released the album So The Red Rose. Needless to say, the radical potential of the album name and the significance of the Red Rose as a symbol of socialism were left unexplored. The album went platinum.
** Reclus advocated nature conservation and bio-regionalism. His ideas are seen by many as anticipating modern social ecology
Contributors to the project included: Agathe de Bailliencourt, Alain Chamois (Paul Rooney), Alan Dunn, Alice Maude-Roxby & Tansy Spinks, AMM-AllStars (Iris Watson, M. L. Hufkie, Out To Lunch, Dave Black, Graham Davis, Peter Baxter, Guy Evans, Eleanor Crook, Paul Shearsmith), Andreas Mitterer, Andy Abbott, Anna van de Star, a.P.A.t.T., aRzu saglam, Brighid Lowe, Bryan Biggs, Daan Gielis,David Mabb, Elisabeth Ajtay, Florian Tuercke, Floris Vanhoof, Frederick Vergaert (Intoarumorists: Rachel Daniels, Lena Derwael, Mathias Engelen, Milan Gillard, Kimi Vanheuckelom, Daan Vandezande),