Yesterday I went to a wonderful event at Tate Britain devoted to the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. There were three short films and then a conversation between Louisa Buck and the two remaining members, Anne Bean and Richard Wilson. It was probably one of the best artist talks I've ever been to - they were so engaging, articulate and inspiring. Paul Burwell died in 2007 but his thoughts were captured in one of the films, framed by retrospective questions from Bean. His Guardian obituary described the time when, 'memorably for those who were there, Burwell engaged the leader of the famous Kodo Drummers in a drum battle that traversed the entire harbour area of Sado Island, Japan.' Bean reminisced about this experience, recalling how it had ended with the Japanese drummer bowing in respect.
I have mentioned the Bow Gamelan Ensemble before on this blog, as the highlight of a 2013 exhibition about the Thames. 'Most enjoyable of all, there is footage of The Bow Gamelan Ensemble from 1985, performing 51º 29'.9"North - 0º11' East, Rainham Barges, bashing out music from makeshift instruments at the river's edge as the tide rises and night falls.' You can read more about this performance on the Ensemble's website:
Regrettably I never saw them perform and the old footage of them staging events on derelict land by the river is increasingly hard to relate to what you experience in the modern city. They talked about how cheap it was to live in Butler's Wharf when they first met in the seventies. It sounds like a magical time, with Anne Bean's studio the venue for art world parties that included key figures from the punk movement. From the perspective of this blog, I'm interested in the way they worked at scale and transformed whole cityscapes - Simon Reynolds called them 'the missing link between Test Dept’s metal-bashing clangour and the Land Art of figures like Robert Smithson'. One of their most striking ideas was a concert for cranes, making use of the fact that Docklands was a permanent building site, with instruments picked up and moved around in three dimensions. Their use of pyrotechnics would not be possible now, although apparently they did get away with breaking the rules recently. Back in 1993 Burwell and Bean staged a spectacular event at Bankside power station (an image can be seen in my photo above). The woman who organised it was in the audience last night and she said they were only allowed to do it if they insured the building, but nobody knew what it was worth. So she got a quote from a local insurance company and it set them back £375. A few years later Bankside had become Tate Modern.'they were filmed for over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed capturing the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and the ways one could harness this power to shift and shape sound. As the huge resonant chambers of the barges filled up, they deepened the sounds of the metal reinforcing bars sticking out as they were played with sticks and beaters. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan’s own array of foghorns, sirens and hooters.'
