An Exhibition of recent ambient paintings based on early 1970's 'Prog' and 'Cosmische' rock.
The Exhibition will also feature specially selected 'Prog' ceramics by emerging ceramicist Sharon Richards.
'Live' Neo Prog Sound by Neil Pedder.
The Paintings:
These small paintings made between 2008-2011 can be viewed as ‘ambient’ works that in their execution rely on a certain sonic atmosphere in the studio. This soundscape is derived from my habit of blasting out all sorts of well-known, obscure, and down right obscene ‘Prog-Rock’ during periods of decompression after completing sessions on my other more regular large scale paintings.
While these smaller paintings do not derive an imagery or have a direct relationship to the visual landscape often alluded to, or inhabited by ‘Prog’ (as revealed on album cover art and posters of the early 1970’s) they might be seen to occupy a certain ambient zone that benefits from the sonic experience of ‘Prog’ at it’s most experimental, atonal, schizoid or ethereal. In these terms the paintings should be viewed as subliminal passages; a testing out, and a progressive shift that reflects the freedom of the artists studio environment at its most playful.
For example, the result in the form of these small paintings, may be a fusion not unlike what one might experience upon synthesising the improvisatory electronics of some of Prog or Krautrock’s ‘cosmische musik’; what Erik Davis defines as “not just an object but a quality of conciousness”.1
The Sound:
My own sonic landscape for these works, which were executed at my studio in Grangetown, Cardiff, veers and wobbles wildly all over the place. For me this landscape is fore-grounded by the early experiments in electronics by Louis & Bebe Barron with their incredible soundtrack to the film ‘The Forbidden Planet’, hearing Joe Meek’s ‘Telstar’ in 1962 when I was four, the theme from Dr Who by Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, ‘Fireball XL5’, Barbarella, the proto-prog United States of America’s eponymous album (1967) and ‘Electronic Storm’ by White Noise (1968). The classic ‘prog’ period for me seems to begin around 69/70 thru to about 1975. This was also the beginning of my own rites of passage and teenage experimentation with music, lifestyle, intellectual, artistic, and cultural aspiration.
“Like all good rock-n-roll, progressive rock was a reaction to what came before it; one that took pop music over the top, one that was consciously highbrow, and one that relished in the enormity of it all. Yet progressive rock was neither unilaterally one way or the another; it was as diverse and multi-faceted as its constituents, and at its peak, as fresh and original as anything that came before.” 2
While making these small collateral paintings in the studio, depending on mood and circumstance, I would crack on with a mix of what they used to call Progressive Blues/Rock. Maybe a bit of The Groundhogs, and the Edgar Broughton Band for instance just to get the body going. A painting session might thereafter develop with astonishing leaps and bounds through the often bonkers post-pastoral-blues-jazzy-watsat workouts of Jethro Tull, Focus, and Caravan, to the pomp prog of Yes and early Genesis, the ‘space rock’ of Pink Floyd and Hawkwind, the fractured and orthopaedic shunting of Henry Cow, the lo-fo no- wave of Tractor, the proto metal brain bashing of King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator, and Magma; eventually ending up it’s own back passage with the used car salesmen of the genre E.L.P., and so on; on through the prog portal to the obscure nether regions of Christian Prog as in Water Into Wine Band, or Northern Irish Prog: Fruupp anyone? This and more back-slapped with lashings of Krautrock: the cosmische Tangerine Dream,
prog-ambient innovators Cluster, Harmonia, Popol Vuh; the psych-skull-tubbing improvisations of Amon Düül ll, Guru Guru, Faust, Embryo; the proto-techno Kraftwerk and the motorik of the mighty Neu!
“Kosmische musik, in my mind, seems to be a crucial strand of the progressive psychedelic music that appeared in Germany in the early 1970’s: an alternatively meditative and ferocious dissolution of boundaries that invoked, through sound or function or packaging, the unearthly otherworlds that link outer and inner space.”3
The Execution: how the paintings were done and what they are
Each painting is on average 50x60cm with some larger at 100cm x100cm . These small paintings are different from my usual signature work which can be from 2metres x 3metres and upwards. All works are oil paint on linen. They are executed in a style that may be described as gestural abstraction, and/or ambiguous abstraction.
The Venue
When I think about St David’s Hall I think of a connection to another time and space. Some of these same bands that have backgrounded my activity in the studio played reformation gigs here (The Groundhogs, Focus, Jethro Tull), there have also been all manner of Pink Floyd tribute bands and even a band called Prognosis (geddit?). In many ways St. David’s Hall is the perfect venue for an old-timers’ Prog Rock concert. Cardiff’s premier concert hall was completed in the autumn of 1982, however, its architecture looks as it’s from another time. More like early seventies brutalist mashed-up with eighties interior design unchic chic. It achieves without trying too hard an ambience of aspirational 1970’s Blue Stratos Denim resurrected in big time beardy-weirdy Prog heaven.
Progressive rock (also referred to as prog rock or prog) is a subgenre of rock music4 that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility.”5John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of the 1960s as much as take its rightful place beside the modern classical music of Stravinsky and Bartók." 6 Progressive rock bands pushed "rock's technical and compositional boundaries" by going beyond the standard rock or popular verse-chorus-based song structures. The Oxford Companion to Music states that progressive rock bands "...explored extended musical structures which involved intricate instrumental patterns and textures and often esoteric subject matter."7 Additionally, the arrangements often incorporated elements drawn from classical, jazz, and world music. Instrumentals were common, while songs with lyrics were sometimes conceptual, abstract, or based in fantasy. Progressive rock bands sometimes used "concept albums that made unified statements, usually telling an epic story or tackling a grand overarching theme."8 Progressive rock developed from late 1960s psychedelic rock, as part of a wide-ranging tendency in rock music of this era to draw inspiration from ever more diverse influences. The term was initially applied to the music of bands such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, reaching its peak of popularity in the mid 1970s.
1Davis, Erik, Kosmische, in Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and It’s Legacy, pg.32, Black Dog 2009
2Snider, Charles, The Strawberry Brick Guide To Progressive Rock, Strawberry Bricks, Chicago 2007
3ibid
4Listening to the future: the time of progressive rock, 1968-1978, pp. 71-75
5Prog Rock-All Rock, AllMusic. 2007. Retrieved 2007-12-04.
6Informaworld.com, Covach, John. "Echolyn and American Progressive Rock." Contemporary Music Review 18.4 (1999):Web.
7 Popular music. Oxford Companion to Music. Accessed online on March 29, 2010.
8ibid
4-8 retrieved 26 June 2011 13.53 GMT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_rock,
For more information contact Ruth Cayford 029 20878706
rcayford@cardiff.gov.uk
