CD
1
ABC in sound (2:35)
7
consonants in space (3:26)
Polar
Polaris (8:51)
Tillid
(1:34)
Autor
(1:00) mp3
Outsider
(2:15)
Borges
(soundtrack) (10:15)
Capital
(0:58)
Elastic
collision (0:37)
Experience
(2:10)
Circulation
(9:51)
French
Persian cats (1:23)
Ona
(0:50)
RRR
(2:31)
Pre-eminence
(7:49)
Hocus
pocus (2:19)
Gesichter/Visages
(excerpt) (3:49)
Musica
(1:48) mp3
Percussion=voice
(3:54)
Improvisation
(1:16)
total time 2hrs 17:47
|
|
CD 2
Unknown
title (2:14) mp3
Cherokee
(1:28)
Lichtgeschwindigkeit
(6:00)
Circulation
(extended element) (5:51)
Friction (1:27)
Movimiento
(4:32)
Hymn
to lesbians (0:56)
Sino
(1:17)
Traffic
(10:31)
Tillid
(1:12)
Tops
(0:53)
Trykfejl
(0:16)
Seascape
(7:58)
Underground
(2:57)
Relativity
(8:13)
Untitled
studio experiment (1:32)
Polaris
supermix (6:33)
Gebet
(0:46)
End
of concert (1:13) |
Britains
best known sound poet is Bob Cobbing, but its hard to come
up with a list of other sound poets working in Britain in the 60s
and 70s. Its equally difficult to think of any female
sound poets working anywhere. Lily Greenham was Danish, but spent
her childhood in Vienna. After several relocations across Europe
she settled in London in 1972 with her British husband (musician
and poet Peter Greenham), where she lived until her death in 2001.
Nearly all of her own writings and compositions date from after
her arrival in London, but prior to this she had
been involved in two major European art movements. In the late 50s
she had been an active member of the early Wienner Gruppe, performing
in their wild experimental theatre works and reciting the new poetry
of young artists like Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer and A.C. Hartmann,
but before the Wienner Gruppe had established itself as the important
art movement it was to become, she had moved on and changed her
working practice.
In 1964 she was back in Paris for a second time, but this time she
was working as a visual artist creating optical art pieces. She
was soon directly involved in group shows with the Groupe
de Recherche dArt Visuel. For the second time she was
at the centre of an emerging art movement that was exploring new
ground, but predictably enough she moved on. Once in London she
began to record her own text based compositions that used a mixture
of sound poetry techniques, electronics and multi-tracking. The
term lingual music that she coined for her compositions
refers to her technique of using tape loops of text to create complex
and dense musical structures. Her most well known composition in
this style is Relativity, which was made in 1974 in
collaboration with the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC. She also
worked with quite a few musicians, both via the early LMC network
in London, but also on the international scene. A list of musicians
she worked with includes John Tchicai, Wolfgang Dauner, Bob Downes,
Barry Guy, Hugh Davies, Max Eastley and Peter Cusack. This 2CD set
compiles a wide variety of her own work, including live solo performances,
film soundtracks, as well as many tape pieces. There are also
examples of her performing works by Cobbing, Rühm and other
sound poets, as well as recordings of her work with Bob Downes Open
Music. The recordings date from between 1968 and 1984.
REVIEWS
Boomkat
Lily Greenham was a performer and early pioneer of 'concrete poetry',
yep I know how weird that sounds, but all will become clear. She
used her voice in ways that genuinely hadn't been explored before,
cutting, splicing, pitching and effecting it, making tones and chopping
out syllables until words were barely even audible as words anymore,
and occasionally punctuated these sounds with electronics or concrete
recordings to create experimental compositions like nothing else
at the time. I suppose the best point of reference at the moment
would be Maja Ratkje who has a similar desire to explore the experimental
potential of her own voice, but what Greenham manages is particularly
stunning. Falling somewhere in-between Dadaist poetry and the early
electronic explorations of Daphne Oram or Delia Derbyshire, what
sets Greenham apart from the others is her desire to include the
voice. Take 'Polar Polaris' for example, a menacing, hissing eight-minute
piece of glorious electronic noise, based on two filtered words,
or 'Experience', a peculiar two-minute play on words with synthesizer
from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Paddy Kingsland. This double
disc set is a veritable treasure-trove of oddities and while not
as accessible as the Daphne Oram compilation, should hold plenty
for the more experimentally minded amongst you. Excellent stuff,
and highly recommended.
ReR
catalogue
Another important slice
of history from the redoubtable Paradigm records: Lily Greenham,
composer, performer, concrete poet and optical-kinetic painter,
born in 1924 and highly active in both the visual and electronic
arts from the early '60s onward; peripatetic and multilingual, she
lived in Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris, Madrid and Lisbon before finally
settling in London in the early '70s, where she produced prize-winning
electronic pieces; collaborated extensively with the radiophonic
workshop, toured alone, performed with Hugh Davies, Bob Downes,
Barry Guy, Peter Cusack, Max Eastley, John Tchicai and others, and
helped shape an era. These are important contributions to the
history of concrete poetry - both as it comes, and where the voice
is radically processed, layered and made sound. English is seasoned
with Danish, German, French and Spanish and, while the voice is
source, sound is always the centre and Greenham consistently works
her materials at a high level of imagination and technique. Also
captured here are rare recordings of the ubiquitous but unheralded
Bob Downes Open Music Trio, and collaborations with Hugh Davies
and the legendary Paddy Kingsland. Collected mostly from unreleased
tapes, this collection is a melange of home studio, radio and performance
recordings which, taken together, memorialise a mature and consequent
performer working at a highly productive historical moment: it's
like a luminous notebook. Accompanied by excellent notes from Michael
Parsons, two texts by Greenham herself, archive photographs and
some of Greenham's visual work. A much needed restoration to the
record of a significant talent. Excellent.
The SOUND PROJECTOR 16th issue
Double CD set of this astonishing multi-lingual, multi-talented, multi-thinking Danish vocalist who lived in the UK and Europe and was wife to Peter Greenham. She did concrete poetry, improvised vocalese, her own form of electro-acoustic performance, and many other sonic things that are pretty much beyond categorisation. She was also a visual artist and explored her own inner worlds through painting and drawing, then later with op-art and kinetic sculptures. And what inner worlds she inhabited! Im still reeling from the steely intellect and force of creative thinking to be found here. To accomplish all this she must have lived three lives, been born with two brains, and spoken with 16 different mouths.
Over two discs which mostly survey the mid-1970s, we hear live performances, electro-acoustic compositions made in the studio, soundtracks for experimental films, poems, and radiophonic works; some involve collaborations with such greats as Bob Cobbing (UK ultra-maverick sound poet titan), Paddy Kingsland (Radiophonic Workshop whizz), and amazingly the Bob Downes trio (UK avant-jazz band which made some inroads into the progressive rock sphere). Even this doesn't cover anything like the full extent of Greenham's achievements. As a performer she also associated with German underground electronic rock genius Wolfgang Dauner, free jazz US giant John Tchicai, and UK powerhouses such as Hugh Davies, Max Eastley, Peter Cusack.
Just start digging into the sound-art here and you'll find straightaway that Greenham is a maestro of language and its constituent parts, the spoken word, the syllable. Poly-lingual, she uses European languages as freely as Matisse used colour, and mixes them up to suit her chosen meanings. She loves puns; words which we take for granted have the meaning flayed out of them by her relentless tongue, and additional layers of meaning are also superimposed by lingual methods. 'Tillid', 'Autor', and 'Outsider' are just three of many shortish cuts extracted from a 1973 work Tune in to Reality, for which Paddy Kingsland did the electronic half. Here she freely ranges across many European tongues and explores the 'rhythmic accentuations' or associations inherent in the syllables. She yaps 'em out like they were hot wasps from her mouth. 'Outsider' is truly a statement of steadfast personal belief where the artiste refuses compromise, refuses to have her ideas adulterated by mixture, and dares us to follow her as she spins strange puns and weaves wild associations around that word. 'Experience' (Kingsland again) is likewise intended as a 'semantic play in several dimensions'. Once again her scepticism of 'shared reality' is detectable in her cynical tone, and the constant questioning of the meaning of one word. Our common assumptions are challenged, and fall. Lazy thinkers, beware!
Another subtle and sophisticated thing she does is re-colonise significant areas of human endeavour outside of art, and make them entirely into her own territory, again though knowledge of many languages, improvisation, and use of tape loops to subvert reality. Take 'Polar Polaris', which starts with loops of two words and includes found broadcast materials; rich with scientific content, it is a very dense impressionistic sketch of geo-physical properties with hidden coded messages leaking out between the cracks she is making. Scientific terminologies are transformed into something totally artistic and personal, their rigid certainties rendered ambiguous. 'Pre-Eminence' similarly undermines conventional scholarship, scrambling a boring academic lecture by cleverly disrupting it with loops, which reduce words to guttural gibbers.
When left to herself to work in a simple home studio with a tape recorder, watch out. Listen to 'Circulation', a French version of 'Traffic' which also appears on CD 2. Loops and varispeeded voices, astounding and uncanny dynamics make this one a remarkable electroacoustic composition. It uses voice and 'three alien sounds'. Greenham's clarity of thought is well demonstrated on this piece, which unleashes all manner of wild ideas, through very precise (but relentless) arrangement of simple elements. The piece gets recycled again as 'Percussion=Voice', using the text to trigger a synthi tone.
So she can concoct studio works. Can she do it live? Hear the extracts from a live solo unaccompanied performance she made in Paris 1976. 'Hocus Pocus', 'Improvisation', 'Underground' just her and a microphone, extemporising meaning from words and phrases, then lapsing freely into scat-speech, song, moaning, language-changing - often all these and more in the space a single breath. Quicksilver brain, challenging ideas. Or listen to how she can perform live against a prepared tape on 'RRR', a stellar example of bizarre mouth work melded with a sickened version of a Terry Riley-esque backdrop.
I've barely scratched the surface of this immensely rich collection; dozens more treasures await the lucky listener. After all how can you summarise a life as diverse as hers? What I really relish is Greenham's tough-mindedness, her refusal to be categorised and co-opted by the narrow-minded male-dominated art and music worlds in which she floated freely like an outsider, owing homage to no-one and refusing doctrinaire creeds. Her 1995 statement which is printed in this booklet is one of the most moving I have read by any artist. It shows clearly what a perpetual struggle the creative mind faces, and what the price of artistic freedom actually is: 'Categories don't fit my character, nor my soul. I am a stranger in a strange land.'
Given that Greenham has no collectible 'discography' to speak of (before this release, her entire documented output in sound amounted to a mere handful of LPs and cassettes, many of them compilations on which she contributes a track or two), this collection has to be reckoned as another triumph for Paradigm in terms of exposing some true buried treasure from a lost world of avant genius, from a vanished time when people actually had ideas and wild energies, instead of networking skills and a MySpace website. The incomparable Hugh Davies has once again been instrumental in making this happen. (Ed Pinsent)
The
WIRE (March 2007 - in collaboration with Daphne Oram review)
Lily Greenham lived a
very different story. Born in Vienna, she studied painting in Paris.
returning to Vienna for further study, she encountered experimental
writers such as Gerhard Rühm, and her performance of a text
piece by Rühm and Konrad Bayer is the earliest unreleased tape
included in this collection. A permanent move to London came in
1972 and, though insistent on her independence from all classification,
she was a familiar, dynamic, wryly humourous and often humanising
figure on the poetry scene, then centred at the Poetry Society in
Earl's Court. king of that court was Bob Cobbing, and the first
of these Cds opens with her reading his ABC In Sound, the
date 1968, the listeners apparently teenage and highly amused by
the whole thing. Perhaps the setting was a school. Her commitment
to audience feedback and abilities as a natural communicator are
evident, though the discomfiting aspect of sound poetry - robust,
historically logical yet still faintly ridiculous - anticipates
its declining prospects within the performing arts.
Bob
Cobbing described her as a performer, not a poet. The distinction
seems contrary to his own rejection of art categories and is not
born out by the material collected for this release. Her interest
in process art, or 'programmed art' as she described it in 1995,
is consistently pursued through experiments with visual geometric
patterns, magic figures, grids and what she described as 'lingual
music'. In collaborations with Paddy Kingsland and flautist/saxophonist
Bob Downes and his Open Music group she accumulated dense patterns
of sound derived from speech: narrated texts, multilingual phrases,
single words (a keyword, she called this) or sounds extracted from
elements of speech. Repetition, either electronically generated
or vocally performed in real time, gives the best of these pieces
a hypnotic quality, a slow build to overloaded density during which
meaning erodes yet lingers as traces in language fog.
Assessing the work on these two double CDs with any objectivity
is difficult. Painstakingly curated and nicely presented, they burst
with ideas, energy, venture into territory only barely explored
before, moments of absolute clarity and inspiration. Obscurity clouds
the issue just as much as tape deterioration or incomplete documentation,
and though an understanding of 20th century audio culture is partial
without access to work by innovative, important if marginal figures
such as Oram and Greenham, a feeling persists: these are sonic remnants
of frustrated ambitions, lives which drifted out of earshot and
now return in a compressed, somehow indecipherable form. David
Toop |