PUBLIC SPACES

14 July 2006

Standing on a patch of mown grass on the edge of a small rundown playground. There is some dog shit inches from my left foot and I have just realised my right foot is standing on a patch of dried puke. A posse of teenagers is playing football in a caged basketball court. There is also a small park café with a few tables and chairs. The café is closed but a bunch of mothers are sitting at one of the tables and their toddlers and brats are messing about. The air is hot and sticky, a thunderstorm threatens. Surrounding this public space are blocks of flats, pre-Corbusier flats. Windows are wide open, washing is hanging out of some of them, people out of others.

I’m in district 20 of Vienna where most of the ‘guest workers’ live. I was going to call it the immigrant quarter but that seems too loaded with pretentious, romanticised, patronising crap. ‘Hey, we’re hanging out in the immigrant quarter.’ Somewhere else in this city The Rolling Stones are sound-checking for their concert in the national stadium this evening. I wonder if they will play ‘Paint It Black’? Mick Jagger is the sort of person who would – so his lyrics suggest anyway – like you to think he hangs out in the immigrant quarter.

It’s late Friday afternoon. The working week is done and I’m digging the vibe. Then the music starts and whatever vibe I thought I was digging instantly evaporates. The lads stop playing football, the toddlers and brats cover their ears and run to their mums, the folk hanging out of the windows want to know where the racket is coming from and my nostrils suddenly pick up the scent of the dried puke on the grass under my right foot.

The reason I am in Vienna is because I have been invited over by Robert Jelinek. He is an Austrian-cum-Czech artist and founder of the State Of Sabotage (SoS). I may write more about SoS later if I can in some way squeeze it into the rather loose remit of this book. Robert Jelinek is curating a series of events for the community radio station Orange 94FM. I only have a vague idea of what these events are about.

A woman from Orange told me they were doing the project with a number of other non-commercial radio stations across Europe, including Resonance FM in London. Robert told me it was something to do with artists being commissioned to use radio in a very non-radio sort of way. Robert Jelinek thinks The17 – a music thing that cannot be broadcast by any radio station, even this Orange one, but can be discussed on air – fits the project perfectly. Tomorrow evening I am doing An Introduction To The17 and performance of the score, AGE in one of the station’s studios. Listeners to Orange were invited to take part. The first 17 people to apply got tickets. Afterwards I will be talking about the performance and The17 in general on air.

The scent of the puke is invading my nostrils even more and for some reason I am unwilling to move from where I am standing, Robert Jelinek’s other invited artists are performing this evening. The artists are Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer. I understand they are a couple. In her work she often uses ice. He is also a musician. When working together they make records out of ice.  This is how I understand it is done. They start by recording some music, grow a metal stamper from acetate. So far this is the traditional way of making a record. I won’t go into all the technical process of how this is done it would take pages. If the traditional process were to be followed the metal stamper would be taken to a record-pressing plant and used to press records out of hot vinyl. Then you could buy the records and play them at home until you got bored with it or it wore out. But with Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer that doesn’t happen. They take the metal stamper and put it in a circular tin box the same size as the disc, fill it with water and then put it in the deep freeze. At any time after the water has been frozen it can be taken out of the tin, very carefully of course and this perfect record can be played on a record player. It being ice, it starts to melt immediately and has a playing life of no more than ten minutes before its grooves have melted away.

Now I know this idea of records made out of ice serves no practical purpose. It’s definitely not the format that the global music industry is looking for to entice the buying public away from free downloads but I love it.  It ticks so many of the boxes that I enjoy ticking at the moment. For a start it is impermanent. It is of the moment. There is nothing left but water that you can either drink or, more symbolically, wash your hands with. Or, with the water shortage, you could use the water again to make another record.

A few weeks ago when Robert Jelinek was telling me about Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer and their ice records (eisplatten) I thought he was suggesting they make a record of The17 performance and that this recording is played the next evening to those who had taken part. This sounded like a very good idea to me, very much in keeping with what I like to think The17 are about. But it seems with my hectic and somewhat out of control lifestyle communication had broken down between us. He had not had confirmation from me that I was up for having The17’s performance being committed to ice. Thus Robert followed a different path.

Some years ago I was sent in the post what looked like a CD of the album Chill Out that Jimmy Cauty and I had recorded as The KLF in late 1988. The cover of the original record was a photo of some sheep in an English field. In our heads the cover was, among other things, a nod of respect to the cover of Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd. The cover of Atom Heart Mother featured a cow in an English field. I won’t bother trying to describe the music on Chill Out, it seemed to become a blueprint for a whole genre of music that might have been best left uninvented. It also took on iconic status and benchmark qualities. It took us an afternoon to record in Jimmy’s front room. It may be the piece of music that we did together that I am most proud of.

There have been times when I have even indulged in the idea that at some point in our later years jimmy and I could cash in on our legacy by going out and performing the complete form of Chill Out live, or as live as these things can be. In the same way that Brian Wilson goes out and performs the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’. It would not be a KLF reformation thing, just as Brian Wilson is not reforming The Beach Boys to play Pet Sounds. It would be billed as Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond perform The KLF’s Chill Out. Now you have to understand this will never happen, but there are times when I think about it and all the practicalities of us putting it on.

So this CD came through the post some five or six years ago that looked like Chill Out. It wasn’t. The sheep had been Photoshopped out and replaced by wolves. A play on the wolf in sheep’s clothing I guess (or is it sheep in wolves’ clothing).

The music on the CD was nothing like the spacey comedown music that we had made back in late 1988. It was unlistenable noise music. Each track by a different act. I liked it. I liked the cover. Having one CD cover based on our original did not quite put Chill Out in the same league as Sergeant Pepper. The sleeve to Sergeant Peppers has been parodied, homaged and ripped off almost every year by someone ever since it came out in 1967.

This album with the wolves on the cover had been put together by Robert Jelinek in Vienna. He had not been a KLF fan nor was music particularly part of his own practice as an artist, it was just one of the numerous things he had done along the way. Sending it to me had established a line of sporadic communication between us and I have become a keen follower and soon to be citizen of State Of Sabotage.

Remember how I was telling you a few hundred words ago about music starting and kids running to their mothers, holding their hands over their ears? Well I’m picking up from where I left of there. This music that is hardly music is being pumped out of a pair of speakers that are stood either side of the open doors to Radio Orange. Just in case you are worried, and I was, Radio Orange is not sponsored by Orange the mobile phone people. What is being played is the Eisplatten/ice record made especially by Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer for the occasion. What you hear first is the eardrum spiking crackles and crunches. It’s as if the stylus on the record player that is following the groove on the Eisplatten is like one of those ice breaker ships crunching their way through the pack ice. And, to stretch this analogy even further, the bits of dark water that are revealed in the wake of the ship is the actual music that I am now hearing beneath all the crackles and crunches. This music, and it takes me some time to realise this is Chill Out by The KLF.

Whatever artistic qualities Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer’s work may possess are not being appreciated by the local residents. Rock ‘n’ roll may not be noise pollution to almost quote AC/DC, but this certainly is. I feel somehow responsible for their Friday evening’s good vibe being so rudely shattered in the name of contemporary art. Radio Orange is a community radio station. I don’t think this community here are appreciating it that much right now.

I stay rooted to the spot. Dog turd still to the left of my left foot, puke under my right. Then I feel guilt from another quarter. Most of the 30 or so people that had been hanging about with cans of free beer in hand who are here as guests of Radio Orange have gone back through the open doors into the radio station to where Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer are spinning their Eisplatten, I guess, to fully appreciate what they are doing.

Hearing a KLF record always makes me feel acutely embarrassed. Not that I think they were all bad but they just do. Now I am thinking that they will be thinking that I am being very rude by not going in and physically demonstrating my appreciation of what they are doing by nodding my head or tapping my toe to the music. Not that Chill Out contains any beats to tap your toe or nod your head to.

So the spot still has my feet rooted to it while my mind does all sorts of whizzing about. And now an idea has entered my head. The best one that’s arrived all day.

I’m wearing a turquoise blue T-shirt with some orange writing on the front and the back. On the front it says MyDeath.net and on the back Prepare To Die. MyDeath.net is a website that I set up some years ago. I won’t go into all the details about why I set up the site or what it’s all about. You can visit it if you want to know. All you need know is that it is a site that encourages you to think of your funeral as the last and possibly most creative act of your life and where you can plan exactly how you want it done. I started it ’cause a friend of mine had died of cancer in his 40s and he had a crap funeral. It did not reflect him or his life in any way. People deserve better funerals.

The thing is, even though the site has been up since 2000, I’ve never got around to thinking about my own funeral. But now there is this idea in my head.

I want Claudia Marzendorfer and Nik Hummer to make an Eisplatten of a performance of AGE and as my coffin goes through the curtains to whatever lies at the other side, this Eisplatten can be played. The melted water from the disc is to be collected and kept in a jam jar to be poured later into the Penkiln Burn from the rock where some of my children know I want my ashes scattered.

Thoughts of my funeral are now being broken by the sounds of people clapping. The Chill Out Eisplatten has come to an end. The normal sounds of a summer evening return to fill the air. Children take their hands off their ears, teenagers return to playing football and I pull up the roots from a spot beneath my feet and move away from the stench of the stale sick.