British singular, pioneer free improvisers – pianist John Tilbury and guitarist Keith Rowe have performed together within the legendary improvising ensemble AMM (with Cornelius Cardew) and in numerous other contexts over the years. In January 2017 Tilbury and Rowe recorded with Norwegian experimental video artist and electronics player Kjell Bjørgeengen (who produced Rowe and Tilbury’s 4-CD box set, enough still not to know, Sofa Music, 2015) the album Sissel (Sofa Music, 2018) at RIMI/IMIR Scenehuset in Stavanger. Bjørgeengen suggested French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin’s «The gathering of the ashes of Phocion by his widow» (1648) as a possible focal point for that recording, interpreted in British art historian T. J. Clark’s book The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2008). Flicker, Scratch and Ivory offers the version of Sissel performed at London’s Cafe OTO in March 2018.
Poussin’s painting shows the figure of Phocion’s widow on her hands and knees surreptitiously gathering the ashes of the executed Phocion, who had become a victim of political maneuvering. Phocion has been denied a proper burial, his body burned on open ground, and by necessity, his widow must collect his remains secretively. The painting also shows local people going about their daily tasks and two large trees, bearing witness to the comings and goings of human life. The muteness of the observing trees became the main reference for Bjørgeengen, Rowe and Tilbury. Rowe connects this muteness to another painting of Poussin, «Landscape with a Calm» (1650-51), where a curly-haired shepherd is gazing out over a lake at the same spot as the widow. But there is something strange here, the sky is full of turbulent stormy clouds, but the reflection on the lake is completely calm. «Maybe it’s here where the disruptive turbulent shocking distressing news of the death of a dear friend who we loved locates its muteness», Rowe concludes.
Bjørgeengen, who often works with flicker videos that are sound given video sync, thus becoming video and revealing the self-identity of the two, plays here on synth created by Dave Jones from the Experimental Television Center in New York that feeds signals from an oscillator into video sync signals and suggests «a direct identity between sound and image». The intriguing, minimalist 48-minute piece offers quiet and austere Feldman-esque piano passages that are gently disturbed by textures of soft electronic noises. It ends with complete silence and leaves the listener with a Beckett-ian reflection on muteness during our turbulent times.
A Thought for Two documents a previous collaboration between Rowe and Bjørgeengen. The 42-minute piece was recorded at the Experimental Intermedia in New York in December 2010 and is dedicated to the late composer Phil Niblock (1923-2024) who ran the Experimental Intermedia organization. Rowe and Bjørgeengen, with the help of Dave Jones from the Experimental Television Center, designed a special device, Flood Coil – a cardboard circuit board with a video input – that would feed the video for the concert to cathode-ray tube monitor so Rowe could pick up the debris of the magnetic field surrounding the tube and use it as an input for his music. The outcome is an enigmatic drone ornamented by alien rustles that add a stimulating sense of tension.
Eyal Hareuveni
Keith Rowe (guitar, electronics, drawing), John Tilbury (piano), Kjell Bjørgeengen (video, Dave Jones (synthesizer)
