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Trout Steel


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EXHIBITION: Friday 2nd - Saturday 24th November, Wed - Sat, 12 - 6pm (Closed Saturday 17th November)

OPENING: Thursday 1st November 2018, 6pm

PERFORMANCE: Sophie Lee & Isabel Mallet, Sunday 11th November 2018, 4pm


A slow rain sizzles on the river
like a pan
full of frying flowers, and with each drop of rain
the ocean begins again.

-Richard Brautigan, extract from The Return of The Rivers

Artists:

Josephine Baker, Sam Bakewell, Mary Barnes, Sam Cotterell, Alex Crocker, Gina Fischli, Tom Humpherys, Ed Hill, Neal Jones, Sophie Lee, Isabel Mallet, Charlotte Murdoch, Matthew Peers


Trout Steel is the third studio album recorded by Mike Cooper and released by Dawn the ‘progressive’ outlet of Pye records which is now defunct.

The album was first released in 1970.

Track 4.
Ive got mine, the longest track on the record, 11 mins 23 seconds. An imaginary soundtrack for a film not made.Its origins coming from a concise base of folk and blues tradition, a psychedelic undertow begins to flow, microtonal improvisation and free jazz erupt over the repeated sufi inspired cyclical lyrics:

Im ready to go Im ready to go

Time calcifies and flattens becoming stretched, layered and expanded.

Speleogenesis, refers to the process of the formation of caves. Caves are hollows formed in the rock strata. Some caves, caverns, give rise to speleothems, more commonly known as cave formations; stalagmites, stalactites, flow stone, cave crystals, etc.

A friend recently talked about artists creating arenas/architectures, both haptic and conceptual, in order for certain traits and behaviours to develop, often in a non linguistic or linear way. Chinatown by Migos came up.

China Town, China Town, China Town, China Town

Hip Hop could be said to be going through a renaissance, the medium reviving itself. Trap and Drill reduce lyrics down into simple cryptic memes, flows change, 808s and cinematic use of orchestral, keyboard and synth sounds provide the scaffold. This abstraction/reduction roughens and breaks linguistic registers, syntax is razed into a memetic kaleidoscope of aspiration, youth, drugs, violence, poverty, race, gender and the effort to work within, outside, above, below and around these ‘structures’

In an increasingly turbulent socio, economic and political world, the exhibition brings together a mixed group of artists working through a variety of media; who create ‘spaces’; that cut through notions of linear history, perceived hierarchies and ideologies and allow the room for new behaviour/thoughts to develop and grow.

And like the rain, they fill the ocean again.