BIFOCALS / RITUAL EXCHANGES

Ulverston's gentleman anarchist Martin Gilbert was a student in the USA during the late 60's and early 70's. During this time he did a bit of what you might expect and a bit of what you might not. To supplement his studies Martin sold the alternative press on the streets of  Atlanta and San Franscisco. Haight-Ashbury.  Short, sweet, illustrated  and in no way the whole story, Flypaper 4 looks at the times through the papers, flyers and community newsletters  he brought back with him, excerpts from a chat with Martin and from email exchanges with Stephanie Coffin, co-founder of The Great Speckled Bird.  Available here..along with gratifyingly small numbers of issues 1, 2 and 3 . https://www.johnhallartist.com/product-page/flypaper-4

  Despite lockdown, HORNGARTH has been seen at Furness Tradition Festival, Whitby at Home and is currently on offer to members of the Folklore Society via a link on their blog.   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o3Wxv-eB3ivi4b5KM3sKNrkZ2HSP_Wlx/view?usp=sharing An audio piece " The Tide Will Turn' will offer another angle on the service hacking down and weaving interviews, field recording , archive material and cassette recordings made by participants to evoke the mixture of superstition, social obligation and inconvenience that has followed the Whitby Horngarth Service from its roots in rituals of rogation to the present day, through 900 years of recorded observance. It includes the voices of hear several generations of the family that delivered the service on pein of losing their land, the current Court Leet Bailiff of Fyling, various explainers and commentators, and of the service itself.

In 1971 logos were usually the preserve of  the prog bands.  Angular, heraldic or biomorphic, they spoke to male fixations of sex, power,  superiority and complexity.  Using graphic styles inherited from the 60's  underground and then diluted to be at least readable, they lent themselves to careful analysis and faithful reproduction. Rendered halfway accurately,  they could signal across a crowded comprehensive school playing field  from the back of an army store rucksack. In the world of pop,  logos were rare. The Jackson Five's wasn't always used even by their record company, but the fans picked up on it and drew it into their own vocabulary of intimacy and  emotional investment in the groups joyuous, consoling music. You saw it on smaller, personal items; Pencil Cases, Diaries and School Jotters where it jostled with coded messages and names of friends picked out in a soft-block lettering. This was appropriated from the bubblefonts...

https://vimeo.com/40776116 Spaces between us Keep getting deeper   ("Spaces" / One Direction) Negative space , in  art , is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or  relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image .   ( Wikipedia, but you knew that) "Why so negative?"   ( attrib  President Trump, endlessly) What will we make after Covid 19?  The response of the Government will be picked over and  condemned or excused; it'll  be dramatized I imagine, maybe like  David Hare's Stuff Happens which reconstructed the making of a bogus case - of - convenience that led to the Iraq war. Surely the Health Service  and Care Sector will be celebrated in song.   Pop's response to political events is usually to personalize, to...

These playground chants and the choreography of  clapping and skipping that goes with them are from Walney, off the coast of Barrow. No-one composes them as such. They seem to wait in the playground to be discovered, dusted down and tried on for size.  Obsolete features are removed, others survive and others are added. Populated now by UFOs rather than (as I recall)  Elsie Tanner, their rhythms, calls and responses and fizzy backchat deal with pecking orders, identity and territory.   https://soundcloud.com/bifocals-2013/walney-childrens-games The Opie's " Lore And Language Of Schoolchildren" is probably still the set text on this.. They came up here in rhe 50's and found this nursery rhyme in Ulverston.. Wrangel a wrangel a Pig-a-machine, All his mighty men: Fly,cock, goose or hen.   Poet Kate Davis -who lives within earshot of the school playground when the wind drops  reports  "..a pparently the reader  would hold onto a lock of...

2 r ainy nights, roughly a month apart, at opposite edges of the country; one in Whitby , one in Ulverston. Crowds have gathered despite the rain; in Ulverston they are here to see the Oss and associated effigies  , hear the Harmonica and the Human organs pipe band, and the ostler's bewildered proclamation.. In Whitby a couple of hundred are mustered to march. I was there; it may go down the harbour side I thought, above the Penny Hedge, providing a juxtaposition of dancing illuminated willow and drowned, unseen hazel staves.  By 6 It didnt look promising; I watched the wind pull on the bin-bag surface  of the harbour water from the dining room of the Jolly Sailors, (Sam Smiths. No mobiles, no screens, no swearing please) ate and went back to the digs to get a coat , returning just in time to miss the parade as it crossed the bridge.  And then back up Grape Lane it came,  a fleet of tissue and withy lifeboats cresting the shoulders of the kids tha...

Their limited pal ette and the equally limited permutations thereof may characterise the Human Organs sound, but it isn't sacrosanct. Reeds, chanters, bellows and lungs are welcome to thread their melodies in and out of the soft pulses of the pipes. This winter will again see musician Mike Willoughby join them for Oss Night in Ulverston, with a new piece composed for the occasion to go along with the traditional Stretton Oss Song, and accompany the cries and pronouncements of the Ostler. https://vimeo.com/371443632 Here 2 members of the band meet Mike on Gill Banks to explore the possibilities. Mike's Lydian modalities have felt out the shape of the space offered by the pipes, and a phrase is emerging, on which to hang a cats cradle of a tune, to which the Oss can dance.