Skip to main content

Gair Dunlop - Europe Endless: a performance for handbells

As Britain leaves Europe for now at least on the back of the Brexit referendum, the artistic response has been one of muted mourning and quiet defiance. Both notions are embodied in Europe Endless: A performance for handbells, a video work by Gair Dunlop and Lucy Smith, which films a performance of Smith’s handbell arrangement of the opening track of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album, Trans-Europe Express.

Played by a cross-generational team of ten volunteers from various European nations, Smith’s arrangement takes Ralf Hutter’s romantic electronic meditation on Europe and transforms it into a piece of participatory art in which communication and co-operation are crucial to its execution.

Where Hutter’s lyrics speak of ‘Parks, hotels and palaces, ‘Promenades and avenues’ and ‘Elegance and decadence’ as observed through a fast-moving train window, Dunlop and Smith use the grounds of the ruined Balmerino Abbey in Fife as a backdrop for a wordless and elegiac rendition of an already ennui-laden song.

“Bell ringing is all about performance and communication within a landscape,” says Dunlop, “marking a human settlement through sound and the rhythm of the church, culture and seasonal year.”

Dunlop and Smith’s performance of Endless Europe took place in March 2019, when Britain had originally been mooted to leave Europe. With a sound edit by Zoe Irvine, this original ‘green world’ version sits alongside a studio rendition. A third performance took place in the foyer of DJCAD on October 31st 2019, a date which again had been originally scheduled as ‘Brexit Day’. Now that day has finally arrived, in a spirit of free movement and global access, Endless Europe can be viewed for free online. 

Green world mix (Balmerino Abbey) - https://vimeo.com/323424620

Studio mix - https://vimeo.com/326761619

The List, January 31st 2020

ends






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more