Blow Up: Exploding Sound and Noise (London to Brighton 1959-1969)

24th June—25th July '10

featuring material from AMM, Better Books, Bob Cobbing, DIAS, Coleridge Goode, Joe Harriott, James Joyce, Jeff Keen, John Latham, Annea Lockwood, Gustav Metzger, John Stevens, Val Wilmer and more.


PRESS RELEASE

Flat Time House hosts an exhibition of artworks, archive, movies and sound curated by Tony Herrington (Editor-in-Chief & Publisher, The Wire) and David Toop (musician, curator, long-time collaborator of John Latham).

For a period in the 1960s there was a great creative synergy in the UK between the visual arts, experimental film, free jazz, psychedelic rock, and the energetic poetry scene that formed the UK's so-called Underground. BLOW UP will present a visual and aural map of those connections through art works, recordings, archival film and documents, contemporary accounts, posters and album art.

The artist John Latham, who lived at Flat Time House until his death in 2006, was a central protagonist in this explosion of cross-talk and the mythologies surrounding his film Speak (1962) were a catalyst for exhibition. Speak is a powerfully strobing, paper-disc animation and, although it precedes the psychedelics of the high sixties by half a decade, its physical effect on the viewer is typical of the whole mind/body experiences of the early light-show gigs of Soft Machine or Pink Floyd and the environmental happenings of the late 60s organised by artists including Cobbing, Keen, Latham and Jeff Nuttall.

In fact, Speak illuminated some of the seminal events of the UK's new counter culture: it served as the Floyd's light show at early gigs at the UFO club and the Roundhouse; it was screened at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, the bookshop where Bob Cobbing hatched plans with Allen Ginsberg and Alex Trocchi for the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, and founded the London Filmmakers Coop with Keen and others in 1966. But it is the film's soundtrack that really connects the dots between London's art scene and contemporaries in free jazz and psychedelic rock: remarkably Latham rejected as 'too musical' scores recorded for him first by the Joe Harriott Quintet and then the Pink Floyd, before adding his own circular-saw soundtrack, pointing towards the simultaneously emerging noise aesthetic.

This exhibition begins to write a history of these connections, artistic, personal, or just in the air, and Speak's story is just one of the many told in BLOW UP.

Flat Time House will publish a poster edition with an essay by David Toop.

***Don't miss the special event at Cafe Oto***

BLOW UP: THE LEGACY OF BOMB CULTURE

Cafe Oto, 8 July, 8pm, £4, www.cafeoto.co.uk

The Wire Salon presents 'Blow Up: The Legacy Of Bomb Culture'. The series continues in July with an event that examines the collision of auto-destructive art, proto-psychedelia, free jazz, noise and sound poetry that occurred at the fringes of the UK's swinging 60s counterculture. Author/musician David Toop, curator Mathieu Copeland, and Syd Barrett biographer Rob Chapman, author of A Very Irregular Head, will lead a discussion on the practices and philosophies that linked such quintessential underground figures as artists John Latham and Gustav Metzger, free jazz pioneer Joe Harriott, Pink Floyd, improvisors John Stevens and AMM, composer Annea Lockwood, and sound/text poet Bob Cobbing. The panel will also debate how their work continues to impact on today's radical artists and musicians. Plus, screenings of the original 16mm prints of films by 60s experimental film maker Jeff Keen, including the legendary Marvo Movie; and Edwin Pouncey spinning Othersounds of the 60s.

The Wire Salon is a monthly series of salon events, hosted by The Wire magazine, and dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The evenings, which take place on the first Thursday of each month, will consist of readings, discussions, panel debates, film screenings, DJ sets and even the occasional live performance.