Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx The Quiet Man

I agree with Gary - this works so much better as a voice other than John's.
The preview we heard at Fulham was perfect, (read by - I think - 'scanshift??, who worked with Fisher on the londonunderlondon project - and worked so much better than John's own reading of the Grey Suit. I think its an accent thing. The Quiet Man belongs to London, he inhabits London, and a 'BBC London' accent works for better than a gentle Lancastrian one.

I also think that the delivery of this reader is spot on. He employs a resigned, almost tired tone with sufficient detachment to make it sound really authentic.

It also opens John's work up to others and allows for a different interpretation, which gives it more life and longevity.

I notice that the reading that accompanies this film is about a fifth of the whole 'The Quiet Man' piece (c500 words). This works out that enough film just for this chapter would last about 25 minutes - and there are, what? - six or seven 'published' extracts from the book over the years in different places?

Its going to be quite a project

I'm curious as to why Missing Person should have been uploaded. Perhaps it was one of the pieces used in the original londonunderlondon recording?

Listen out for it at Leeds

Thats a kind of 50/50 reason for me, as i thought it also lacked the passion and knowledge thats often behind Johns voice when he (be it rarely) narrates hes work.

Regarding the Quiet Man show this coming Friday... I understand that John's due 'on-stage' at 21:00 - and that the 'show' is set to finish an hour later at 10:00. However, there's likely to be a Q & A session after that for about 20 minutes / half-an-hour.

Rob

Regarding the five minutes excerpt of The Quiet Man now on view, I’m not grabbed by what I’ve seen so far, and I actually prefer watching that other clip of John playing piano along with the piece, but putting this impression aside, if the show had actually been happening next month in December instead of now then I’d like to have seen it, I’ll be in Manchester then so I would have nipped over to Leeds by train, but maybe next time…

A lot of multimedia storytelling and art installation work can be quite a flat experience for the viewer, well for this viewer at least, and it’s not often that these kinds of pieces are strong enough to stand up as films alone. A film consisting only of a narrative voice spoken over constructed visuals, or as is more usually the case, found or located shots, is not something that generally excites me, it makes me feel like I’m being spoken to about the film rather than getting to experience it firsthand. It’s really the inherent nature of all of this type of filmmaking, it’s a huge constraint and I appreciate that John must work his project within it.

I don’t know if it’s just the narrator’s voice or also the choice of some of the words or descriptions that John has used in his writing, but one man’s ‘spot on’ can be another man’s ‘drop off’, and put this together with the tired and bland clips of tea-making, London buses, and people walking, it makes for something slightly antiquated about it all. But hey, yes maybe that’s intentional, as Birdsong said, the BBC voiceover guy sounds bored, but listening to him speaking just leaves me feeling detached from his world.

The Cathedral Oceans multimedia (I would imagine, never having been to any performance) works due to its site-specific design, and in having the advantage of solely using rich visuals with an evocative musical score to convey the impression of a message, and these very tangible element’s can allow you to feel that you are dreaming a story. Having a voice-over in a film is often just like the harsh reality of daylight annoyingly interrupting your day-dream imagination, and that presence of a voice or its particular language have got to have the texture of music to my ears and mind in order to sweep me up into its flow, I don’t get that with this five minute beginning, if this is the opening chapter then for me it’s sadly a bit of a let-down.

Couldn’t find any information about Londonunderlondon online, but references to The Unlife of Gardens, Hauntology, and Haunting Nostalgia, are great terms that appear to unite the work of various artists, and I suspect that Mr Fishers interest in the aspects of John’s work that have these facets is probably what has lead to John inviting him to narrate The Quiet Man.

http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/modern_ruins/

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/?p=827


Hey, did I just notice a surrealist inspiration for The Pleasures Of Electricity cover lurking down below

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

I don't think Mark Fisher actually narrated The Quiet Man himself.

Don’t know if I’ve confused what you posted, or what I posted but I didn’t mean to imply that I think that Mark Fisher is the actual character of the Quiet Man in the story, or refers to himself as such, I’m just picking up on the conjecture that he is the person behind the voiceover in the five minute excerpt online, (as previously posted by Radiobeach). It would at least give me an explanation as to why John choose that particular voice, a choice which clearly doesn’t gel together for me in the work.
I don’t want to sound too critical, I’ve only been here five minutes and already I’m complaining again, first its IMW, now its TQM

I can really appreciate the problems of suitability, finance, etc, in getting the correct acting voice in ‘filmmaking’ of this kind. Unlike making music, multimedia is something I have had some past experience of, and it is very frustrating trying to get the equivalence of the range of intellectual and emotional impact that you can get with actors in a movie, or rather a story with human motion in it, when your budget or project limits you to presenting instead that script as a series of flat images with a spoken story over it. For obvious reasons there is very much of this in colleges, and working artist shows all over the country, and unfortunately a lot of these ‘talking pictures’ can be very boring, well it is for me

Hopefully John will answer some of these questions during the 20 minute Q&A, about why this route of presenting his writing, why that voice, would he have hoped for a larger or more versatile canvas to explore it instead, and I’d love to hear what he thinks about his place in ‘Hauntology”

I see. Beg your pardon - I think I must have misunderstood.

I spoke about this project with Mark at Fulham when it was first performed, and he explained that The Quiet Man extract started life as part of the londonunderlondon project - which is about an hour long and contains several similar pieces of music/readings etc

It is a collaborative project that he worked on with a colleague who operates as 'scanshifts' and it is his voice actually reading The Quiet Man.

Hopefully, this clears up whatever confusion may be going on.
My apologies

No apology necessary Birdsong. ‘LondonunderLondon’ sounds like Interesting stuff, as an ex-Londoner myself I feel that it's a theme that could be applied to other cities in England and Scotland that I’ve lived in. The little I’ve found online about this is as usual a bit academically written, but hearing about artists like The Fall and Burial being cited takes me back to that whole wider gothic music vision, where its not all just Black and Manson. There’s a whole world of living with dystopia in our towns and cities through the self creation of an imaginary or romanticised inner vision, which is shaped and celebrated in much of the music I’m sure a lot of us on the forum enjoy.

Walking casually around Glasgow last Sunday, and not just going from A to B but just for a change being able to look up or look around, I walked on a less travelled route for me from Kelvingrove to the town centre, and I started taking in the older architecture. Catching sight of plants growing high up on the rooftops of buildings from a previous age, or noticing the doorway to a church I'd never seen before, or a seemingly anachronistic setting I didn’t realise was just around the corner. There is so much of the Ghost always living alongside the recently new in towns and cities. One day this 'new' that we strive for will be haunting the future’s new present, eventually becoming largely unappreciated or unnoticed in itself, and only due to practicalities will it be necessarily accepted as an almost but not quite redundant presence.

This is when you suddenly remember the obvious, like just why are you drawn to particular things in Johns work, the promises of technology, the romanticised organic or fractured existences, and those similar ideas you also seek to find in other artists music, films, and books. Of course it goes without saying that you know that your choices here often go very well together, but its more important that they all connect in some deeper way with the big unconscious themes that inspire you, those archetypes just lurking under the surface in us all but every so often raising their heads to remind you that they are always with you.

Any news on a venue for drinkies before the 'gig'
Cheers

I think people are all arriving at different times so its difficult.

I'm staying at the Radison SAS Hotel not far from the gig.Its got free Internet access so if anyone wants to meet up then please email me .I should be there from 4pm.

Brian