PSIDuring my second year in Art School, a schoolmate of mine asked me to participate in one performance piece along with other schoolmates for her assessment. The final piece would be a video piece consisting of the footage of that performance. The concept was to theatrically depict an official gallery sponsors’ dinner in a fashion of parody and attack. Us would be the dining lot, set around a large table on which the food was roughly put (no plates, no cutlery), “dressed properly” (wrapped in silly garment, wearing absurd masks upside down, etc) and the director and camera operator, would be the gallery’s security guard wearing the appropriate uniform as well (her real job at the time in London’s National Gallery). The lights were off so that in the filming process only what she would decide to shed light on by a torch would be clear. Performance kicks off and the dining creatures start messing around with the food, spreading it on the table, reluctantly associating with it; in the beginning. The play goes on and we have already started to expand our movements and fields of action from the table to ourselves and to each other. It is now time for more expression as we’re in the ritual and spontaneously no speech but squeaky cries come out, primitive orgasmic shouts and roars as the scenery becomes more and more vulgar. Keeping it up like this and approaching the peak, one of us is laid on the table in the food massacre, being pleased by our tortures. Catharsis has to put us to sleep now and we open the door. We altogether run outside wearing the masks and costumes, covered in canned pasta and other consumerists’ disgusting inventions, to all of the University’s facilities still shouting like mad people, finally stopping in the bathrooms to end the whole thing.
Long story for a start but worth mentioning in correspondence to The Peeesseye’s Commuting Between The Surface and the Underworld and its improvisational development. Raw and offensive, a knit work of squeaky movements and lo-fi acoustic guitarisms with ritualistic cannibalism vocals swaying among peaks and pits of muddy smog, this Peeesseye album has a somehow suppressed intensity and harmful narrative devices. From the performance art perspective – should we accept the art-music distinction but you Academics asked for it, you got it – this work overcomes all obstacles on the way of succeeding in the completion of the –anti. In listening, you can tell where is who in the recording space. Although not very sure if that works positively or negatively in the final verdict of the album’s quality, it surely puts you in the loop of thinking about it. As the entire album’s manner of recording appears to be, one has to make up his/her mind on what sort of weird course of action is being documented here or what is making that sound. In Stay Positive, Asshole, things seem to shape up a bit from pure abstraction to drone rock and articulated musical dominance. The question though quickly emerges: Is noise improvisation a matter of loudness and silence rather than middle audio situations? Without even a second of hold-on for an answer, Commuting Between The Surface and the Underworld, is surely the soundtrack of Jaime Fennelly’s, Chris Forsyth’s and Fritz Welch’s intentions of man-instrument idioms.
:: Peeesseye: Commuting Between The Surface And The Underworld - Evolving Ear.
