New booklet: Mind Games

Here is the new book. 56 pages featuring faces and figures. Full colour. £12 plus p&p. Posts worldwide. Very limited print run. Please contact me at rtomens@gmail.com if interested.

Vispo: Self-censorship

RTomens, 2024

 

Album of the Week: Rian Treanor with Rotherham Sight & Sound - Action Potential

Using software synths designed by Rian Treanor and Mark Fell, visually impaired pensioners Anne Goss (75), Kathleen Allott (74) and Mick Gladwin (65) aka Rotherham Sight & Sound, have made what for them is truly liberating music. They've been practising for a while and now Action Potential is out on Treanor's label, Electronic Music Club. They even played Cafe Oto (see clip below), but don't hold that against them for this is no hipster project. 

Worthiness (in the best sense) aside, what they've created is a joyous selection of seven tracks, comparable to Autechre, if they were really 'free' - ha-ha. An atmosphere of play pervades, like the best Improv,  minus the studious 'intellectual' attitude. Hold has a 'Ragga' feel and consistent rhythms frequently come into play, but elsewhere they cut loose, as on When It Ends and the following 30 Seconds, the latter sounding like the best early electronic 'space music'. The way the last track, 1 Dial, drops off into a percussive black hole is fantastic. 

Buy it here

'Freedom to do what we want'...

Collage: Disinterested?

RTomens, 20119

 

Print/Vispo: You Were Never Really There

RTomens, 2024

 

Vispo: Amount To Something / Jorge Luis Borges, G.K.Chesterton and falling out with 'friends' /Three types of Rain (Dark, Text & real)

RTomens, 2024

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I've given up trying to be smarter than I already am. Perhaps, once upon a time, long ago, I tried. I may have tried in my twenties, for the very first time. What did that entail? Reading 'smart' books. Or were they just books by smart people? Smart people can't write terrible books, but they can write ones you find boring...incomprehensible, annoying etc.

It's not as if we fall into comprehensive categories, is it? That brain surgeon is hopeless at DIY and that rocket scientist can barely dress properly. Can we therefore call them smart? Really? Is there a total person, adept at practical and intellectual tasks?

You may watch lumps of flesh pounding the pavements as I often do outside a cafe and think 'Brainless idiot!' But you're being cruel. Supposing they were as brainless as they appear; it isn't their fault. They were dealt a hand at birth? Environment? Parents? Socio-economic situation? And even if it is their fault because they never once tried to learn anything except the basics such as walking and eating, it was their choice.

A few weeks ago I thought I'd challenge myself by reading Jorge Luis Borges. The Labyrinths collection had been sitting on my shelf for years but I didn't just start reading that, oh no, I bought The Complete Fictions. I was quite serious. It's chronological so, to begin with, A Universal History of Iniquity (1935). I read all the stories. Then Fictions (1945) and the 'story', Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius...dammit! I was defeated...I fell at the first real hurdle, closing the book with a sigh and, you might imagine, if I was a cartoon character, steam hissing from my ears. Pah! I've not given up on Borges and will return to him as soon as I've got over this...event.

So I turned to another recent purchase, bought because of Borges, who was a fan of G.K.Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Again, I bought the complete collection in one volume and read the first, The Blue Cross, which I enjoyed. How could you not enjoy such a refreshing approach to the crime story and a masterful display of writing? Then halfway through the second story, The Secret Garden, it dawned on me that I had lost the plot. Or to try and be more precise, lost track of the characters involved. Oh please...

Am I really so stupid?

I blame the internet. As part of the bridging generation, from no-internet life to internet life, I move from addiction to resistance. A common scenario, I'm sure. I check in online frequently, but rarely stay long. Long enough though, it seems, to become another victim of concentration deficit. Bah! 

Unfortunately, the internet being my gallery without walls, I must tune in regularly. If not for my art, perhaps I would visit less often. Then again, as a virtual hermit, socially, I might have to go online to talk to 'friends'. I've heard people describe books as their 'friends' and thought, 'How sad that is', yet I'm in no better position, perhaps even worse since my ability to engage with even those 'friends' seems to be rapidly diminishing! 

*

Yesterday as I waited for the bus...'it was cold and it rained and I felt like an actor' so I looked into a puddle and took a photo. 

I've been listening to other types of rain, Black Rain and (appropriately, considering my 'art' and struggles with reading), Rain Text. Black Rain are a new discovery for me but they began in 1992. I can't say what, if anything, marks them out from all the other Dark/Techno/Ambient artists, but they have something that I find...engaging...satisfying. Perhaps it's that balance between the genres that they put together so well. That or the fact that, recently, with the onset of Autumn, their music suits the mood I frequently find myself in. 

Rain Text are Giuseppe Ielasi & Giovanni Civitenga. III is their first album, just released on SAGOME. Don't rush to judgment should you decide to give it a casual liste and skip through - no, give it time - that's it - relax with a cup of tea, light a pipe, put your feet up, clamp on or insert the headphones...and you'll find a lot more going on than may first appear. How can I put it? The compositions may not be packed with complexities or heavyweight sonics, so it seems, yet there's much to be said for the way the pair juggle sounds, jiggle sounds, even, from percussive patterns to concrete pavement gritty ambience; perfect soundtracks for moody weather...even, to borrow the film title, a seance on a wet afternoon.

Collage: Taking Notes / Morricone Art Ensemble mix up

RTomens, 2024

I hope you're all taking notes...is probably what a teacher once said in class...and I didn't...because school was a house of horrors to me, filled with terrifying subjects, such as Maths (double Maths was an excuse/motivation to leave the school grounds by the rear exit, walk into town and browse in the local record shop...yes, that's how I got where I am today!). 

Another horror: the chance of being thumped by a bully. I was the original 7 stone weakling Charles Atlas body-building ads were aimed at. I should have taken the course, except that, had I built myself a body like his perhaps I would have got into more fights and, inevitably, lost some because, like gunslingers in the Old West, there's always someone faster/stronger/meaner. 

Have you ever confused Ennio Morricone with the Art Ensemble of Chicago? Come on, admit it, you have. No, you've never been listening to one of Ennio's spaghetti soundtracks and thought it was the AEC, of course. You might, however, have been listening to the AEC, on shuffle, which later served up Ennio's Dialogo from Dimensioni Sonore 7 and thought 'It's the Art Ensemble again'...as I did ten minutes ago. Here's the track...

I don't want to say it again because I've told a lot of people but in case you're one who doesn't know. Ennio Morricone made some astounding 'avant-garde' music for 70s Italian horror films (sorry if I'm being patronising towards you). Also, the track above is from recording made for RCA in 1972. An epic release split with Bruno Nicolai. Both created fantastic sounds fusing Jazz with electronic mood pieces and orchestral modernism yada-yada. Treat yourself for Christmas, why don't you. Take note!

Vispo for sale

 

Visual Image, RTomens, 2024

Visual Image: Typed text on printed background. Size: 14.2 x 20.8cm

 https://www.paypal.com/instantcommerce/checkout/WUJCMUXPH4RFC 

Vispo: Everyone Is Dumb

 

RTomens, 2024

Source of the title, found on a pavement around Regent's Park. I wish I'd also left out the 'e':

Top Ten Novels / Collage: Vernacular / Andrew Rudin

 

RTomens, 20-

Whilst speaking to someone recently the subject of slimming down our book collections came up and I asked her for her Top Ten. Then I gave her mine. This is it:

The Outsider - Camus

Nova Express - Burroughs

Don Quixote - Cervantes

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

Our Man In Havana - Graham Greene

Nineteen-Eighty-Four - you-know-who

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

On The Road - Kerouac

The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald

Double Indemnity - James M. Cain

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RTomens, 2024

I've not blogged for a while, mostly been typing but - .....

recently I decided to return to collage (see above) and...

since it involves architecture perhaps, subconsciously, this was dictated by the forthcoming work on our flat due to be started on Monday - the dread - I hate workman invading my space and this will be a four-day interruption of my usual existence which may not be fun-filled or action-packed but it is my routine and that involves making art, the disruption of which would normally involve homicide but cannot until the work is done, after which I shall be too relieved to want to kill them...

*

A recent post by Simon Reynolds alerted me to the existence of  Andrew Rudin, for which I'm extremely grateful. As Simon says: 'love to listen to this stuff but I'm not sure I really understand it beyond "that's a bunch of cool weird noises in a pattern" ', which is a brave (?) admission but one I can relate too and, if truth be told, so can most of us humble fans of avant-garde electronic music. Yes, there will, in many cases, be an intellectual/musical explanation of the complex arrangements and technical expertise and I even have some in books on the genre but there's no way I'm going to try and decipher what's written. Meanwhile, you might enjoy these 'weird noises' and as a bonus, visuals by Rudin himself...