Jennifer Walshe: Compos(it)er
by Stephen Graham
She's lauded by critics and toasted by other musicians. But what lies behind composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe's Protean aspects? Stephen Graham explores.
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, as it happens. Because artists have been using aliases and alter egos to displace the observed biographical self and to create new contexts for creativity since art as a public spectacle began. Aliases or alter egos – from P.D.Q. Bach to George Eliot to Peter Warlock to Ziggy Stardust to Bob Dylan to Diamanda Galas to Turf Boon, not to mention the Beatles, Grúpat and every other collective musical alias; the list is endless – empower. They also emplace and embody. Through aliases, the bounded body becomes enunciated as a site of transformation, a host for multiple, parallel identities.
Theorists of identity (such as Judith Butler) have long argued for the constructed and performative nature of personal identity. This is such that, privilege and opportunity notwithstanding, we might all live multiple lives within one lifetime. Even our given names; our quilting name, our host name, is a kind of alias, an assumed, contingent identification that can be altered, rejected, embraced, and much more. (Jennifer Walshe, the subject of this article, has even said that ‘Jennifer Walshe is a persona as much as Flor Hartigan or Violetta Mahon’, two of her aliases, ‘are personae’.) You’re born naked and the rest is drag; you start in fact but soon become fiction; all that remains is to live out this ‘truth’.
So, aliases and alter egos are both powerful and pervasive tools. Aliases denote and delineate subjective variety. They create multiple reception histories even as they drive artists themselves into whole new repertoires of artistic languages, just like the child who, living as herself, cannot cartwheel, but, living as the school mascot, bounds about playing fields loosed from but returned to her/self. Fiction, as we can see, is more effective than we think. Aliases are both powerful and pervasive tools. Artists are better at living this than the rest of us, bound as we are by tedious practical constraints. Artists have learnt to enunciate themselves multiply.
Though perhaps best known to the listening public as the presenter of Lyric FM’s new music show Nova, Bernard Clarke has recently been coming to the fore as a radio artist, having to his name an expanding portfolio of startling, various works. In this interview Colony spoke to Bernard about his piece the he and the she of it.
BERNARD CLARKE (b. 1967) is an award-winning radio broadcaster with RTÉ lyric fm, Ireland. His new music programme, Nova, has won five consecutive PPI Radio Awards (National Irish Radio Awards) and one New York Festival’s award; he’s also won prizes for documentaries on Patrick Kavanagh, Glenn Gould, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix. Clarke has also been shortlisted for the Prix Italia (Cagliari, 2008), the Prix Europa (Berlin, 2011), the Prix Phonurgia Nova (Paris, 2012); and the Black & White International Audio Festival (Porto, 2013). Though he has extensive radio experience, his work in radio art is still fairly new, with his radio art pieces being broadcast in Ireland, Germany, France, Austria, Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Spain, USA and Australia.
MUSIC
Since its inception a couple of years ago the London-based DISCREPANT label has been presenting us with the best in strange sounds. From King Gong’s haunting audio-collages derived from field recordings made in Southeast Asia, to the psychedelic modular synth workouts of Cédric Stevens, and a series, Ethnic Discrepancies, exploring folk traditions from around the world, Discrepant has consistently sought out and brought to a wider public high quality music from beyond the pale.
We’re excited, then, dear reader, to have in this issue an exclusive mix by Discrepant honcho Gonzo. Taking off from the theme of fakes and counterfeits, Gonzo’s mix wanders the byways of the audio imagination, with sounds ranging from Orson Welles’s hoax War of the Worlds broadcast to the phony ‘Thatchergate’ tapes concocted by anarchist punk group Crass, to Burroughs, to Molnbär av John, to Hype Williams
TRACKLISTING
Orson Wells - War of the Worlds
Cornet Audio - NN (V12)
Tortoise - Djed
Moon Landing Communications
Rashad Becker - Themes II
Dominik Eulberg - Uhu-Dh
Hype Williams - Untitled
Thatchergate Broadcast - 27.01.84
Gonjasufi - Suzieq (Dem Hunger Bowel remix)
Lustmord - GrigoriGonzo - Dies Irae (A side extract)
William Burroughs - Are You Talking To Me
Cannibal Holocaust Trailer
Unknown artist - Un Pigeon Nomme Adrien
Throbbing Gristle - Hamburguer Lady
John Duncan - Nasca Transmissions
Nixon & Kissinger Phone talks
Cédric Stevens - Disguised Telescoped on their way to Planet Bottle
Robert Mitchum - Love/Hate Speech
Phillip Glass - Metamorphosis
Omar Souleyman - Atabat
Dolat-Shahi Dariush - Otashgah 1986
Molnbär av John - Kaikki Loppunu
DISCREPANT: inconsistent; conflicting; at variance [from Latin discrepāns, from discrepāre to differ in sound, from dis-1 + crepāre to be noisy]. London based record label and more. Our aim is to deconstruct, distort and re-assemble the lore of (un)popular music.
Podcast
by Discrepant Records
Matthew Mendez explores Austrian composer Peter Ablinger's practice of musical phono-realism, in which the piano becomes a replicant human voice.
MATTHEW MENDEZ is an independent scholar specialising in the study of the aesthetics of contemporary music. He earned a Bachelors degree in music at Harvard and Master's degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He is active as a composer, having studied with Julian Anderson and Brian Ferneyhough. http://soundproofedblog.blogspot.co.uk/
Jennifer Walshe pays heed to these possibilities. Her work as composer and as a musician is both intensely intermedial and intensely interpersonal. It shifts between registers as a matter of course, operating as a meta-hyperlink portalling between ideas, sounds, and selves. (This hyperlinked creativity echoes many artists working today, from composers such as Bernhard Lang to pop artists such as Jai Paul to artists such as Heather Phillipson to film makers such as Neveldine and Taylor.) Various artistic and cultural traditions, from post-Cageian experimental music to philosophical theory to theatrical actions, are all important to Walshe. Various institutional and non-institutional media, too, from the marionette opera of Walshe’s condensed gossipy psychodrama XXX LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!!, to the staged and conceptual chamber music of pieces such as The Procedure for Smoothing Air, to the telepathic improvisations (go read about or experience one of those!) of her ongoing collaboration with Tomomi Adachi. That is not even mentioning other interesting projects, such as the THMOTES cycle of perishable Snapchat smartphone text/image scores, or indeed Walshe’s large-scale multimedia opera – including footage shot within video games, street dancers, voiceover, conventional and unconventional singing styles, and more – Die Taktik, which played at Stuttgart Opera in 2012.
Walshe, as can be seen from this overview, has taken the liberating reins of postmodernism and run with them. She finds herself/ves in an unnamed present which is the result of but not identical with postmodern plurality. It’s not, I’d say, really identical with anything besides itself, even as it links to various reference points and cultural contexts, from experimental music to mongrel underground music to conceptual art to whatever. I’ll come back to this question of cultural positioning.
The intermediality just discussed is complemented by the other key focal point of Walshe’s aesthetics; the explicit character play that situates (host name) Walshe at an interesting conjuncture between art forms such as music, theatre, and performance art, as well as between and across her various selves. There is no one art here, just as there is no one person. Walshe is at the head of an imagined collective, Grúpat, with a wide and active roster of artists. Under the banner of the Home Office-like Milker Corp. (I recommend a visit to its hauntological, uncannily-visioned site), Grúpat includes members such as The Parks Service, Ukeoirn O'Connor, Bulletin M, Flor Hartigan, Violetta Mahon, The Dowager Marchylove, Caoimhín Breathnach, Turf Boon, Detleva Verens, O'Brien Industries, and Freya Birren.
All of these figures have been written into their own histories. They perform around the world, are reviewed and written about independently (even if by Walshe herself), and have subtly different artistic personalities; Breathnach’s imagined Dadaist works can be seen to contrast with the Parks Service’s Lovecraftian fiction and Turf Boon’s sculptural sound works, for example. And there’s much more besides that. Walshe is like Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrols, a living rhizome cutting across personae each with their own superpower (though what their weakness are I don’t know). And all of this does funny things to (art’s) reality. As the wise eldritch Priest (sic alias) has pointed out, in enacting and letting her collective run, Walshe ‘produces her own kind of hyper(fictional) music that amplifies and harnesses the immanence of the hyperreal’. Nothing is real and nothing is unreal in Walshe’s world: everything is possible.
Does all this hyper-play of hyper-selves get in the way of artistic cohesion and focus? Is it all a dance too far? I’m not sure the former question can be answered; if indeed it should even be asked. It would be hard to separate Walshe’s art from the intermediality and interpersonality that is so central to it. (Artistic ‘cohesion’ is also not an unproblematic critical concept in itself.) I would confess to the odd feeling of dilettantism in response to some of Walshe’s work, particularly her vocal performances, which can sometimes feel a touch hackneyed in their jittery fast-forwards through vocalisations familiar from decades of sound poetry and Berberianisms. However, with the right partner and in the right setting – alongside regular partner Tony Conrad as Ma La Pert at the 2013 London Contemporary Music Festival, for instance, where Walshe gave a dynamic, variable, often playful performance – Walshe’s vocals can be tremendous.
And most other things I’ve experienced from her have been transcendent. Walshe’s King’s Place performance of the bizarrely Irish (in its cultural specificities and its mythopoetic Irish Dadaism) and vividly culturally anchored All The Many Peopls was bewilderingly pleasing. Including references to and material from sites such as 4Chan and Amazon, recordings of interstellar sonic phenomena, and soldiers blowing things up on YouTube, All The Many Peopls broached the kind of vividly dreamt imaginative traditions put forward by DDAA and Ghédalia Tazartès, not to mention more kitschy examples such as Martin Denny and Lex Baxter, or, indeed, Henri Rousseau. It also keyed into the same kind of digital and pop cultural collage spirit mentioned earlier, the ‘hyperlinked creativity’ which sees artists from many different fields trying to deal with all of this confusing consumerist contemporary culture in some kind of artistic way, though ‘artistic’ here refers less to the traditional figure of the discrete and elevated artist than it used to. No, dilettantism is a risk all great artists must take, and if Walshe’s work occasionally slips into that sort of space, it is only through the sheer mulitiplicity and mystification it risks.
I didn’t conduct an interview with Walshe for this piece. (My conversations with Turf Boon, on the other hand, are not fit for public consumption.) I would have asked her questions to do with veracity, biography, and discreteness. Perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t get to do that interview. Better I was left in the soup, stitching together my own version of Walshe’s composite realities. (In fairness, I have interviewed Walshe in the past. She gives good interview. It suits my interests in aliases and fakery here, though, for our planned interview for this piece to have fallen apart.)
In any case, I’m interested in what all of this has to say to wider questions not only about fakery/authenticity but also about our wider cultural moment, to which I alluded above. It’s rather confusing, though, to read the us into the ‘I’ or the particular ‘us’ of Walshe. As it is with anyone; microhistories, where the particular speaks for the universal, always feel a little shoehorned to me. I do know, at least, that by tracking Walshe(s) we’re also tracking something else. This history phases into another one. We left postmodernism at some point in the 1990s and we’re somewhere else now. Some suggest the post-postmodern. Some the hypermodern. Others have tried to describe how contemporaries like Walshe should be seen as metamodernists, negotiating between aspects of modernism and aspects of postmodernism as they see fit. (Others wouldn’t worry about such labels, but let’s not worry about them.) All of those descriptions are adequate to Walshe, but they also fail her in important ways too. Such profligate art as hers needs profligate theory.
So here goes. The interpersonalism of Walshe, along with her intermediality, operates hyperstitionally. In the CCRU’s language, ‘fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions – consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behavioural responses’. Walshe performs this condition. Her work converges dreams, fiction, sorcery, and theatre. Compare her to a postmodernist such as John Zorn and it’s like comparing Crank or Spring Breakers or Southland Tales to Pulp Fiction. (Charlie Kaufman is probably something of a bridging point here.) Community to Scrubs. Walshe, like Southland Tales and the rest, might merely have intensified tendencies already out there in culture. But in doing so she revealed new realities within those tendencies, new valences and new affiliations that suggest paradigmatic change of some kind, though beyond pointing to this general shift I don’t know how far we can take all this. History hasn’t settled on our times as yet:
As Priest acknowledged, the fact that all of Walshe’s composite vitality emerges from one earthen source might be seen to undermine its radical potential, to tie the flowering dream collective to one meat-body. But I don’t see why this needs to be the case. Operating in and/or alongside the art music tradition means that Walshe can’t help but be seen as singular artistic figure in charge of her work, but her de-flowering of singularity and her intense, Crazy Jane compositing set her apart from past tradition in important ways. In some ways she is as much as ‘composer’ as Marina Abramovic is a fine artist. These categories speak to the past; or at least to different parts of our present. Walshe, on the other hand, is a seed amongst many of new traditions defined by new allegiances and new links across digital culture. But find this all out for yourself. There is a wide enough repertoire things on YouTube to get you acquainted. Apartment House’s knotty and exciting rendering of NUDE GIRLS is available on DVD from Mere. Look out for her live shows. Do all this and more, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what happens to postmodernity when it spazzes out supernova-style, its recursive chains and self-references going so far into themselves as to produce new realities, new phasings, new composites, both of the past and beyond it – unsettled and various as a self.
STEPHEN GRAHAM studied at University College Dublin (BMus) and King’s College London (MMus) before heading to Goldsmiths College in 2008 to pursue PhD research, completing the PhD in September 2012. Stephen's thesis drew together his interest in popular and art musics in its examination of a range of ‘underground’ musical genres and practices. Stephen is currently turning his thesis into a book. In addition to this, Stephen is also collaborating on the writing of a multi-generic history of the music of the twentieth century. These research interests are complemented by a number of articles on subjects such as form in Justin Timberlake, queer (musical) identity in televised drag performance, and recent trends in contemporary composition.