by Zuzana Sun Aug 20, 2006 8:13 am
Pop: Earth, air, water and Finer
The Sunday Times
August 20, 2006
Full URL
The former Pogues man Jem Finer is unleashing the music of the elements. Stewart Lee is intrigued
The musician and artist Jem Finer arrives in the car park of King’s Wood, near the village of Challock, Kent, on a wet Sunday afternoon in early summer. Deep inside the forest, on the side of a hill, is a 23ft-deep concrete shaft, constructed at Finer’s behest after he won a commission from the Performing Rights Society (PRS) for a piece called Score for a Hole in the Ground. It is raining heavily. Finer locks the boot of his estate car and puts on a cagoule. “Have you got waterproofs?” he asks. “It’s about an hour’s walk.”
I was lucky enough to be invited onto the judging panel last year for the inaugural PRS Foundation New Music Award. Finer, a former member of the folk-punk band the Pogues, was already familiar from his Longplayer project, a 1,000- year piece of music that rearranges itself, via computer software, in Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, Docklands. His new proposal included a crudely sketched drawing of water dripping down a shaft, hitting pivoted, resonating bowls and sending notes up into the ether through a giant brass horn. One proposed site was a remote, disused Staffordshire mine shaft, and there was something attractive about the idea of an abandoned industrial space being adapted in this way. Though he provided little scientific supporting evidence, Finer had thoughtfully sketched tiny notes emerging from the horn, so we knew the design would work.
We set off through the woods, already soaked. But why are we in Kent? “Well, I liked the idea of the mine shaft with a big brass horn coming out of it, like a sort of colliery band, and I found some amazing holes,” Finer says. “I looked down an 80ft well in Staffordshire, and the feeling of negative space was incredible, but when I leant over and shouted into it, the sound was sucked into the old bricks, like acoustic sponges. I panicked at that point and thought it wasn’t going to work.” Finer, who now has the air of a geography teacher who has lost his way on a school trip, gets his bearings before heading deeper into the wood. “Next, I looked down a 250ft lead mine. At the bottom, you could see water rippling, but again it was the same non- acoustic phenomenon. In the end, the decision was made for me. I would have to construct the sound hole myself.”
For Finer, the sudden change of direction wasn’t insurmountable. “One of the things I love is when you make plans for something, and when you’re in the process of carrying them out, unexpected things occur and the whole thing starts to develop a life of its own.” Finer’s team began to construct a shaft in King’s Wood, which already houses some site-specific sculptures commissioned by the Stour Valley Arts organisation. Finding your way through the forest to the sound hole is half the fun: the journey creates a mounting sense of excitement. As we crest a hill, the rain subsides momentarily and we see a steel plate lying amid the bluebells in a little clearing overlooking a valley. A sign reads: “Warning. Deep Excavations.” Deer shadow us in the woods.
We bend down to drag the metal cover off the shaft. “It’s very heavy. Pull it from one corner.” As the sheet scrapes the hole’s rim, the silo resonates reassuringly. “Hello, hello,” one of our little party shouts, as echoes of her voice bounce back. Stones and pebbles are dropped into the exposed corner of the hole, and thunder as they land.
As Finer watched the last of the concrete collars being lowered into the shaft, a tremor made him lose his balance; he remembers swaying uneasily at the edge of the 23ft drop. Though shaken by the experience, he is self-aware enough to find the idea of the conceptual artist falling fatally into his own hole darkly comic. “The first new thing,” he explains, “was having to make sure the hole didn’t get too full of water, so you get into real Stone Age plumbing stuff. But what have changed most are ideas about what the instrumentation would be. In the original proposal, it was going to be Tibetan singing bowls with water dripping into them, but I just got hold of a book called La Musique de l’eau, by an instrument-maker called Jacques Dudon, and there are some brilliant things in that.”
Beautiful though the site of the sculp- ture is, I miss the connotations of the original proposal. I liked the idea of reappropriating an industrial space. I liked the devotional aspect of the water striking the Buddhist bowls, reminded of Larkin’s line, “If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water.” But, following Finer’s law of unexpected consequence, the site seems to be constructing its own narrative, with its own unseen implications.
We walk up the hill a little. “It’s slippery round here — be careful,” Finer says. “Let’s see how much water is in the pond. Good. That’s a relief. It’s nearly up to the top of the pipe.” We’re looking at a low, clay-lined depression from which a feeder pipe supplies the hole. In Finer’s original proposal, rain was the source of the sound hole’s water. But, as the record summer temperatures have shown, we can no longer rely on rain. So, the team has constructed a dew pond, an artificial reservoir traditionally favoured by farmers of chalky landscapes such as those in which the wood is situated. On the way out of King’s Wood, we see a gen-uine ancient dew pond and the remains of prehistoric flint mines. Score for a Hole in the Ground suddenly begins to seem at home, part of a continuing process.
Nonetheless, it’s a long journey from the Pogues, isn’t it? “Not really,” Finer says. “In the Pogues, we took a timeless tradition, Irish folk music, and, hopefully, reinvigorated it, but it didn’t sound dated. After four years of programming Longplayer, I found myself consumed by digital technology, and I wanted to get back to a more physical involvement with play- ing music, to be involved with physical materials and the earth. I’m continually curious about music and sound and modes of composition.”
Last month, the giant steel horn was brought from a Nottingham foundry and installed in the hole. On September 24, Score for a Hole in the Ground will open to the public. Now, it’s time to trek back through the wet woods. “I feel very excited indeed,” Finer says. “This is actually happening. And it’s actually working. It’s not just leaking away into the ground.”
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Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
[b]Pop: Earth, air, water and Finer[/b]
[i]The Sunday Times
August 20, 2006[/i]
[url=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2315213,00.html]Full URL[/url]
[i]The former Pogues man Jem Finer is unleashing the music of the elements. Stewart Lee is intrigued [/i]
The musician and artist Jem Finer arrives in the car park of King’s Wood, near the village of Challock, Kent, on a wet Sunday afternoon in early summer. Deep inside the forest, on the side of a hill, is a 23ft-deep concrete shaft, constructed at Finer’s behest after he won a commission from the Performing Rights Society (PRS) for a piece called Score for a Hole in the Ground. It is raining heavily. Finer locks the boot of his estate car and puts on a cagoule. “Have you got waterproofs?” he asks. “It’s about an hour’s walk.”
I was lucky enough to be invited onto the judging panel last year for the inaugural PRS Foundation New Music Award. Finer, a former member of the folk-punk band the Pogues, was already familiar from his Longplayer project, a 1,000- year piece of music that rearranges itself, via computer software, in Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, Docklands. His new proposal included a crudely sketched drawing of water dripping down a shaft, hitting pivoted, resonating bowls and sending notes up into the ether through a giant brass horn. One proposed site was a remote, disused Staffordshire mine shaft, and there was something attractive about the idea of an abandoned industrial space being adapted in this way. Though he provided little scientific supporting evidence, Finer had thoughtfully sketched tiny notes emerging from the horn, so we knew the design would work.
We set off through the woods, already soaked. But why are we in Kent? “Well, I liked the idea of the mine shaft with a big brass horn coming out of it, like a sort of colliery band, and I found some amazing holes,” Finer says. “I looked down an 80ft well in Staffordshire, and the feeling of negative space was incredible, but when I leant over and shouted into it, the sound was sucked into the old bricks, like acoustic sponges. I panicked at that point and thought it wasn’t going to work.” Finer, who now has the air of a geography teacher who has lost his way on a school trip, gets his bearings before heading deeper into the wood. “Next, I looked down a 250ft lead mine. At the bottom, you could see water rippling, but again it was the same non- acoustic phenomenon. In the end, the decision was made for me. I would have to construct the sound hole myself.”
For Finer, the sudden change of direction wasn’t insurmountable. “One of the things I love is when you make plans for something, and when you’re in the process of carrying them out, unexpected things occur and the whole thing starts to develop a life of its own.” Finer’s team began to construct a shaft in King’s Wood, which already houses some site-specific sculptures commissioned by the Stour Valley Arts organisation. Finding your way through the forest to the sound hole is half the fun: the journey creates a mounting sense of excitement. As we crest a hill, the rain subsides momentarily and we see a steel plate lying amid the bluebells in a little clearing overlooking a valley. A sign reads: “Warning. Deep Excavations.” Deer shadow us in the woods.
We bend down to drag the metal cover off the shaft. “It’s very heavy. Pull it from one corner.” As the sheet scrapes the hole’s rim, the silo resonates reassuringly. “Hello, hello,” one of our little party shouts, as echoes of her voice bounce back. Stones and pebbles are dropped into the exposed corner of the hole, and thunder as they land.
As Finer watched the last of the concrete collars being lowered into the shaft, a tremor made him lose his balance; he remembers swaying uneasily at the edge of the 23ft drop. Though shaken by the experience, he is self-aware enough to find the idea of the conceptual artist falling fatally into his own hole darkly comic. “The first new thing,” he explains, “was having to make sure the hole didn’t get too full of water, so you get into real Stone Age plumbing stuff. But what have changed most are ideas about what the instrumentation would be. In the original proposal, it was going to be Tibetan singing bowls with water dripping into them, but I just got hold of a book called La Musique de l’eau, by an instrument-maker called Jacques Dudon, and there are some brilliant things in that.”
Beautiful though the site of the sculp- ture is, I miss the connotations of the original proposal. I liked the idea of reappropriating an industrial space. I liked the devotional aspect of the water striking the Buddhist bowls, reminded of Larkin’s line, “If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water.” But, following Finer’s law of unexpected consequence, the site seems to be constructing its own narrative, with its own unseen implications.
We walk up the hill a little. “It’s slippery round here — be careful,” Finer says. “Let’s see how much water is in the pond. Good. That’s a relief. It’s nearly up to the top of the pipe.” We’re looking at a low, clay-lined depression from which a feeder pipe supplies the hole. In Finer’s original proposal, rain was the source of the sound hole’s water. But, as the record summer temperatures have shown, we can no longer rely on rain. So, the team has constructed a dew pond, an artificial reservoir traditionally favoured by farmers of chalky landscapes such as those in which the wood is situated. On the way out of King’s Wood, we see a gen-uine ancient dew pond and the remains of prehistoric flint mines. Score for a Hole in the Ground suddenly begins to seem at home, part of a continuing process.
Nonetheless, it’s a long journey from the Pogues, isn’t it? “Not really,” Finer says. “In the Pogues, we took a timeless tradition, Irish folk music, and, hopefully, reinvigorated it, but it didn’t sound dated. After four years of programming Longplayer, I found myself consumed by digital technology, and I wanted to get back to a more physical involvement with play- ing music, to be involved with physical materials and the earth. I’m continually curious about music and sound and modes of composition.”
Last month, the giant steel horn was brought from a Nottingham foundry and installed in the hole. On September 24, Score for a Hole in the Ground will open to the public. Now, it’s time to trek back through the wet woods. “I feel very excited indeed,” Finer says. “This is actually happening. And it’s actually working. It’s not just leaking away into the ground.”
-------------------------------------
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
