Philadelphia Contemporary
Everything
was falling apart by the time I settled down to listen to Muffled Drums, Susan
Philipsz’ new four-part digital sound installation, available to stream on the
Philadelphia Contemporary website. No, not the big wide world outside that’s
fallen prey to the mass destructive powers of the Covid-19 pandemic and the
enforced global lockdown that followed. Nor the pains of confinement that go
hand in disposable plastic glove with the enforced isolation that goes with it.
I’m
talking about the actual everyday material wear and tear of domestic fixtures
and fittings that were starting to take the strain from me being indoors too
much. Where normally we’d have time apart as I took advantage of having the
freedom of the city, now, other than my state-sanctioned daily constitutional,
the furniture and I are pretty much cooped up 24/7, and we’re all feeling the
strain.
It was the
wind that did it, the weekend just past when it swooped in from the west or
wherever to make its mark. I could hear it through the walls when I was in bed,
whistling and rattling through the kitchen window, whooshing in a draft as it
went. Eventually, something in the lock gave way, and the window flung itself
open enough so the breeze rushed in before I slammed it shut once more. It
happened again. The lock didn’t catch. And again, so I slammed it harder,
pressed on the double glazing, but it clicked open again. I put a great big tin
pot in front of it, hoping its weight might block it, but the wind forced its
way through again, so the window ended up knocking the pan into the sink with a
crash.
It was
maddening, thinking I’d got it slammed tight, only for it to click open again
and bash against the taps as the wind howled in. I tried keeping the kitchen
door shut, but you could hear it creaking as the hinges stretched and strained.
The wooden door frame tugged for dear life in the opposite direction, its own
glass panes shaking with the effort. As the window was forced open, so too was
the door, which flung its way out of its frame and into the living room. No
longer in control of gravity, it eventually swung lose as its top hinge gave
way, bending limply out of shape as it dislodged itself from the door.
With a
window gaping and a door hanging, just to add insult to injury, the wooden tray
I eat my dinner off fell apart in an elaborate unfolding that left it in two matching
pieces of what now resembled a slot-together Ikea kit. This threatened to
collapse into my lap each time I used it, taking the scalding contents of my
plate with it as it smashed onto the floor. What a mess. In every dream home a
heartache and all that, but the poltergeists must be bored stiff.
These
things are sent to try us, alas, mercifully in light of day. As its title
suggests, however, Muffled Drums casts up the spirit of things that go bump in
the night. Or maybe I just think that because I originally misread it as
Muffled Dreams.
Philipsz’s
original commission was set to be a site-specific piece occupying the nooks and
crannies of Hamilton Mansion, the 16-room manor built in the 18th
century by William Hamilton, the grandson of Scottish émigré lawyer, Andrew
Hamilton. The house sits in the grounds of The Woodlands, the 54-acre West
Philly estate that is part pleasure garden, part cemetery.
Christening
her proposed new creation The Unquiet Grave, after the 15th century ballad
collected by American folklorist Francis James Child, Philipsz took her cue as
well from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. Written and
published in 1843, while Poe was resident in Philadelphia. Poe’s first-person yarn
is penned in the voice of a murderer, who disposes of their victim’s cut-up
body under the floorboards. The killer is subsequently driven to distraction by
the noises they believe to be the still pounding heart of their victim, sealing
their own fate as they confess all.
The reference
in the title to Child’s found song adds another layer, telling its own story of
a man mourning the death of his true love, who berates him for allowing his
sorrow to keep her spirit from peaceful rest. He begs her for a final kiss,
only to be told that it would kill him. He persists, willing to join her in
death, but she tells him that if they were both dead, that their hearts would
decay, and that he should make the most of life while he has it.
Given that
lockdown has prevented any physical engagement with art on display beyond our
collective front door, this is sound advice. With Philipsz prevented from
haunting the four walls of Hamilton Mansion with The Unquiet Grave in the
flesh, the project was brought back to life as Muffled Drums. This interactive
installation allows the listener to create their own haunted house experience
in the comfort of their own front room, bedroom and kitchen, broken locks
notwithstanding.
Muffled
Drums is made up of three separate drum-based recordings of Philipsz tapping
out a simple but foreboding thump-thump heartbeat pattern on different types of
percussion instrument. These are indicated by the white-on-black line drawings
on the installation’s suitably gothic-looking webpage.
A fourth
recording finds Philipsz singing The Unquiet Grave a cappella. Participants are
invited to play each channel separately or together as they see fit from
different devices spread out from room to room. To add to the mood, Philipsz recommends
incorporating pots, pans, vases and what in a musical context would be called
found instruments, adding reverberations and other domestic clatter into the
mix.
One might
think here of the accusatory maxim brought into play by song-writer Jesse Stone
on his opus, Shake, Rattle and Roll, which was originally recorded by Big Joe
Turner in 1954, but made more famous by Bill Haley & His Comets the same
year. The song’s decree in what reads as a domestic argument to ‘Get out from
that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans’ could easily be a pre-cursor to
the fatal events in The Unquiet Grave and The Tell-Tale Heart.
More
playfully, the wordless choreography of Morecambe and Wise’s iconic 1976
breakfast sketch, as toasters pop and eggs are whipped to the bump and grind of
David Rose’s 1950s instrumental, The Stripper, suggests another set of everyday
routines between long-term co-dependents who sometimes drive each other mad.
Composer
Matthew Herbert’s 1998 album, Around the House, mixed dance beats with sounds
generated by kitchen utensils. He followed this in 2001 with Bodily Functions,
which featured sounds made from human hair, skin and internal organs. Then
there are the pots and pans that under lockdown accompany the sub Steve
Reichian Thursday night mass applause for key workers that acts as catharsis
for those taking part as much as a show of solidarity with those it’s intended
to honour.
Muffled
Drums is more primal in construction than any of that. The potentially infinite
series of remixes that are in the listener’s hands as much as ears make for an often-eerie
experience. Just eight minutes of one of the drum recordings by itself –
patiently, insistently, steadily relentless – is enough to keep you awake at
night. Add another from your laptop on the other side of the room, and then
another playing on your iPhone from inside a pan in your kitchen, and its suggested
portents of doom are even more affecting.
The
drumbeats niggle at you from all sides, dropping in and out on the off-beats if
you time it right. As the beats double and treble up, they seem to be sounding
the clarion call of a little army of restless spirits battering away at the
walls they’re bricked up in. Or perhaps it comes from the foundations they’ve
been buried in before having an entire house built on top of them.
Try
listening to it on headphones. With the light off. Then add Philipsz’s voice
singing The Unquiet Grave as those spirits are tunnelling away. Overlay it with
the same voice emanating from the ether, so it creates a round, with each line
overlapping the other before one by one falling silent. By the end, only a
solitary voice resonates darkly around the creaking, wind-whistling room. And
then, stillness, if not total silence.
Philipsz
has been making spectral aural interventions for more than two decades now,
ever since the Glasgow-born artist’s recordings of herself singing songs by
Nirvana, the Velvet Underground and others in Filter (1998) seeped into
bus-stops and supermarkets.
Philipsz’
use of outdoor environments saw her 2010 Glasgow International Festival of
Visual commission, Lowlands, feature recordings of three different versions of
16th century Scottish lament, Lowlands. The song tells the story of
a drowned woman who returns as a ghost to mourn the fact that she will never be
with her lover again.
The three
versions of Lowlands played beneath a trio of bridges on the River Clyde in
Glasgow, and subsequently won Philipsz the Turner Prize. Since then, Philipsz’
voice – untutored, melancholy and full of fragile grace – has carried through
indoor and outdoor spaces across the globe.
The Tell-Tale
Heart has been adapted for stage, screen and radio numerous times. Former
Velvet Underground vocalist Lou Reed, a Poe aficionado, went as far as
recording his own take on The Tell-Tale Heart on his 2003 homage to Poe, The
Raven. On stage, Edinburgh-born playwright Anthony Neilson took advantage of
the story’s pronoun-free narrator to update it in an all-female version for the
National Theatre of Great Britain in 2018.
The Unquiet
Grave has similarly been heard in many forms. This has seen the song astral
travel its way through arrangements by Ralph Vaughan Williams, to covers by
Joan Baez, Barbara Dickson and Kate Rusby. There have been several goth takes
on the song, while Kris Drever applied his own composition to it on Scots
neo-folk trio Lau’s 2007 album, Lightweights and Gentlemen.
Muffled
Drums is not an adaptation of either Poe’s story or Child’s found ballad. In
its primal, potentially multi-tracked call and response, Philipsz’s
installation is the stuff of Happenings and kinetic sculptures triggered into
life by invisible trip switches. Together and apart, the four pieces creates
the essence and atmosphere of an indoor environment even as they beckon from
beyond the grave.
In the
current climate, the everyday rhythms of life – cooking, cleaning, working,
playing – are chores and routines that have metamorphosed into something else.
Things to make and do are stretched to breaking point by the claustrophobic intensity
of the absorbed monotony of life under lockdown. And yes, the devil will make
work for idle hands.
Despite
this, Poe’s story itself conjures up a full Sensurround experience. Sound,
especially, is everywhere in its few ornate pages, dripped into being by the
furious scratchings of its author’s quill. As
the un-named narrator outlines his deeds, ‘Above all was the sense of hearing acute’
he writes. Later, he talks of how ‘The nesting of a drum stimulates a soldier
into courage,’ and of ‘a sound as a watch makes when enveloped with cotton.’
This is the language of a million sound-effects
slammed into carefully timed being by hunched-up Foley artists or, more likely
these days, by digitally enhanced sound designers. Both are as experimentally
inclined as the latter-day noise artists with their contact microphones.
These in turn resemble the sonic playpen
manipulated by the electronic composer brought to life by John Hurt in Jerzy
Skolimowsky’s 1978 big-screen adaptation of Robert Graves’ short story, The
Shout. In Graves’ work, a man seemingly empowered with the forces of indigenous
aboriginal shamanism claims to be able to produce a shout so powerful it can
kill.
Similarly, the blacked-out box of tricks used so
effectively in stage productions of The Woman in Black is the same as those
used in any American horror story set in isolated mansions surrounded by
graveyards and invariably inspired by Poe.
It was the
late Martin Hannett, who talked of creating an invisible room with sound. It
was around 1980, and the maverick sonic sculptor and producer of Joy Division let
loose his pearls of wisdom while indulging his TV presenter record label boss
Tony Wilson, who was interviewing Hannett as he worked in the studio for an
idiot’s guide style light feature for teatime TV. As Hannett mapped out his
room at the mixing desk based on the sounds he could hear in his head, the drum
sounds remained at its centre.
Hannett
was in part echoing another producer, Phil Spector, and his idea of a wall of
sound.
Where
Hannett created space, Spector threw everything including several kitchen sinks
into works that became epic enough to make the heart pound. Both men were
regarded as crazed geniuses, whose madness occasionally threatened to take them
over the edge.
One of the
best things about Muffled Drums is that, in Philipsz’s imaginary room, you can
rearrange the furniture to your heart’s desire, DIY in every sense.
My kitchen
window’s fixed now. It no longer rattles at night, and the wind can’t whistle
in. The door is still hanging. It’s not considered an essential repair under
lockdown, but there’s a stillness to it anyway. The pots and pans have been put
away as well. A place for everything, and everything in its place. And in
Muffled Drums, the song from under the floorboards goes on, heart beating up
love till the last.
ends
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