Tuesday, April 25, 2006

variousing

Is not corny, I reckon; as I know what you mean. I grew up in a town - a hell of a place, literally! So, urban is all I really know - despite hundreds of walks up mountains! I like some pastoral, rural, music - but I, like you, thrive on the raw energy of impulses like punk's urbanism. I like discord, aggressive playing, confrontational attitudes etc. - so long as they are backed up with intelligence and ideas, with sound politics, and are ultimately constructive. I like the Modernist project, is one way of looking at it. I like its preoccupations with difference, making strange, with moving forward, iconoclasm. Punk was and is part of that; maybe the last part, before the fizzle and collapse into Postmodernism. Certainly, I would want murmurists to reflect and include that. The film I've made so far definitely does; and the electronic nature of our sound, though varied, indicates our wish to connect with such themes. A recent contact of mine has been a guy doing contemporary pschogeography - basically, wandering around, in his case London, in an artful, Situationist-style vie to rewrite the map. Films like Robinson in Space, London, Sans Soleil, and London Orbital, and books like Heart of Darkness and The Postcard, do something of the same. I like this material; I like its attitude. I have it in mind when I'm creating what I do. McLaren's early work - a film about Oxford Street - played with such notions. Savage posits this as a key precursor to Punk. I agree. Against the backdrop of Prog's pastoralism, Punk emerged like Pop Art did against the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism; announcing, in its own way, 'this is tomorrow' - nihilistically, as 'no future in England's dreaming', and being concerned with so-called real-life, urbanism, as opposed to the rarefied fantasising of pastoral Prog. In essence, I like and respect both attitudes, as having something to say; in essence, I like both, in tandem, as a kind of ProgPunk / PunkProg. That, for me, is the good stuff: Godspeed being a good example. If you can set up the Chewbacca gig - excellent! Again, thanks for your commitment to murmurists. Like you, I don't intend to spread myself thin. I'd rather invest my efforts and time into what I really want to do. I think we have something worth building upon, and I'm a hard-worker by nature, and will put the hours into murmurists - creatively, and in order to network our material. Best wishes, Anthony