Music

This is a short extract from Walt Shaw and Graham Foster's 62 minute sound and video work Rubble, commissioned for the Osnabruck Biennial exhibition and shown in the Kunsthalle Dominikankirche the Summer of 2006. Walt and Graham perform music / live performance gigs as Mahood and have used this work as the basis for a number of shows in the UK and Germany.

Geoff Bright, Walt Shaw and Gillian Whiteley operate with a set of practices and activities which play with the idea of alchemy and consciously parodying notions of authenticity and artifice – schmalchemy. The punning title – Alchemy/Schmalchemy delineates a disruptive oscillatory space of mischief in which the live performance operates. The group uses scientific apparatus and they adorn spaces with a range of objects and materials – bottles, coloured liquids, microscopes, pipes, mirrors, projections, from antique projection apparatus, pendulums etc. Acoustic musical instruments are combined with ramshackle low-tech sound-producing equipment: this might include an ancient harmonium (pedal-driven), an old mechanical gramophone alongside low-tech electronics. Soundworks produced have an emphasis on intensity, through highly focused and energised intention, which can build to quite 'electrical' levels and then in an instant dissipate, to be built up again in repeated cycles.