Vinyl From the Wombles to The Final Countdown and from Be Bop to Tibetan Buddhist chants, Bill's record collection is a pretty damn diverse even perverse and for Vinyl he plays some of it and talks about the tracks. He doesn't just talk about the music he also talks about what the records mean to him, for a record collection is more than just music, it is a depository of memories: the collector's and the society's. For Vinyl, Bill plays some of the wildly diverse singles and LPs he has picked up over many years on the move and recalls, revises and retells what they might be records of. Artist’s Statement “The impetus for Vinyl comes from two things. The first is being a lifelong collector of records. I have a large and wildly diverse collection that has been built up in many countries applying very personal criteria such as, ‘difficult listening’, ‘functional recordings’ or ‘cultural hyper-specificity’. That is a way of saying that there is some seriously unusual and at times unlistenable stuff in there and that I don’t necessarily collect the music that I like. The second impetus comes from a chance event one day when I found myself in a bar with a modern digital jukebox. This jukebox was encyclopaedic in scope and had the top 10 singles of every week of the UK charts dating back to early 60s. Out of curiosity I looked up my birthday and to both my horror and amusement saw the song ‘Granddad’ by Clive Dunn, a very sentimental children’s song, so bad it is funny, was number one.” “Putting these two things together I am going to revisit my record collection, supplementing it with some purchases necessary for this project and look at the period from when I was born to the present day through a vinyl frame of reference. The recordings will not necessarily date from the year they represent so for example my idea of 1981 might be represented by a 1973 recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. Time in this work will flow in loops binding together pasts, presents and futures through the connecting tissue of words, actions and sounds. The piece will weave personal, cultural and political observations together so that autobiographical material is in the service of something larger yet due to the desperately idiosyncratic nature of the records it should retain a very personal and homemade feel.” Bill began working on Vinyl in November 2011 with a two-week residency at Lanternhouse in Ulverston (UK) and showed a short extract of this new work at Practice, an evening of works in progress curated by ICIA. He kept a BLOG that features audio recordings and images of the residency. Vinyl is currently being developed in different formats, as a solo show and as a collective event based around records and memory, that will become a longer work in the Autumn of 2012. A taste of the records used can be seen HERE

Vinyl

From the Wombles to The Final Countdown and from Be Bop to Tibetan Buddhist chants, Bill's record collection is a pretty damn diverse even perverse and for Vinyl he plays some of it and talks about the tracks. He doesn't just talk about the music he also talks about what the records mean to him, for a record collection is more than just music, it is a depository of memories: the collector's and the society's. For Vinyl, Bill plays some of the wildly diverse singles and LPs he has picked up over many years on the move and recalls, revises and retells what they might be records of.

Artist’s Statement

“The impetus for Vinyl comes from two things. The first is being a lifelong collector of records. I have a large and wildly diverse collection that has been built up in many countries applying very personal criteria such as, ‘difficult listening’, ‘functional recordings’ or ‘cultural hyper-specificity’. That is a way of saying that there is some seriously unusual and at times unlistenable stuff in there and that I don’t necessarily collect the music that I like. The second impetus comes from a chance event one day when I found myself in a bar with a modern digital jukebox. This jukebox was encyclopaedic in scope and had the top 10 singles of every week of the UK charts dating back to early 60s. Out of curiosity I looked up my birthday and to both my horror and amusement saw the song ‘Granddad’ by Clive Dunn, a very sentimental children’s song, so bad it is funny, was number one.”

“Putting these two things together I am going to revisit my record collection, supplementing it with some purchases necessary for this project and look at the period from when I was born to the present day through a vinyl frame of reference. The recordings will not necessarily date from the year they represent so for example my idea of 1981 might be represented by a 1973 recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. Time in this work will flow in loops binding together pasts, presents and futures through the connecting tissue of words, actions and sounds. The piece will weave personal, cultural and political observations together so that autobiographical material is in the service of something larger yet due to the desperately idiosyncratic nature of the records it should retain a very personal and homemade feel.”

Bill began working on Vinyl in November 2011 with a two-week residency at Lanternhouse in Ulverston (UK) and showed a short extract of this new work at Practice, an evening of works in progress curated by ICIA. He kept a BLOG that features audio recordings and images of the residency. Vinyl is currently being developed in different formats, as a solo show and as a collective event based around records and memory, that will become a longer work in the Autumn of 2012. A taste of the records used can be seen HERE