In his latest documentary film piece, Pilgrimage From Scattered Points, Luke Fowler outlines the history of The Scratch Orchestra, composer Cornelius Cardew’s free-thinking grouping of musicians, non-musicians and other interested parties.

Using archive footage - much of it culled from Hanne Boenisch’s 1971 television film Journey To The North Pole - alongside interviews, rostrum shots of ephemera and Super-8 vignettes, Pilgrimage From Scattered Points is at once a coherent narrative essay on the Orchestra’s history, and a fluid portrait in film of Cardew and his confreres. Divided into seven sections, the film runs from the group’s formation in 1969 to it’s rancorous split in the mid-1970s, by which time tensions between two factions, fostered by divisive debates on the function of art - a Maoist tendency who argued for making music to serve the people and a ‘bourgeoisie idealist’ camp devoted to formal experiment - had risen to boiling point. Along the way, we learn that the Scratch Orchestra - defined in their ‘Draft Manifesto’ as ‘a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performances, edification)’ - improvised from visual scores, including in one case a dog-eared copy of the Radio Times, and took a revolutionary approach to music making in more ways than one.

This clear narrative, undermined though it is by free-wheeling editing and narration by unidentified members of the Orchestra or other commentators, sets Pilgrimage… apart from Fowler’s past work. His previous films, What You See Is Where You’re At, on maverick psychologist R.D. Laing, and The Way out, a biography of Xentos Jones, lead singer of pseudo-punks the Homosexuals, were both hewn from archive footage and recordings, but both were closer to impressionistic, sometimes bewildering, near psychedelic portraits of their subjects than documentaries from which a clear picture could be gleaned. Indeed, at least one reviewer took Xentos Jones to be a fictional character, cypher, or mythic stand-in for every underground obscurity with a cult following.

And yet, this latest film can be seen as key to Fowler’s practice to date. While a little closer to documentary in the conventional sense, it covers similar ground to the earlier works, with an emphasis on the eccentric (a tag that fits Laing, Jones and the key players in The Scratch Orchestra, but does none of them justice) on utopian idealism, on collaboration, and on improvisation. These last three tenets could almost serve as Fowler’s own manifesto. Shaddaz, Fowler’s record label, fanzine and DVD imprint was set up to foster collaboration between visual artists and musicians. In his group Rude Pravo, named after the official newspaper of the Czech communist party, Fowler improvises with tape loops and unconventional instrumentation, an aspect of his musical practice he takes further when performing with fellow improvisor John Fail.

The show accompanying the debut screenings of Pilgrimage… is, too, an odd admixture of curation, appropriation and collaboration. In it, photographs of The Scratch Orchestra taken by Alec Hill were digitally reprinted by Fowler, with the two sharing credit, and a silkscreen print of Keith Rowe’s ‘Village Concert’ poster was on show, matched by the only ‘original’ Fowler, another poster collaging scores, texts and newspaper clippings relating to the Orchestra. Two specially commissioned animations, one by Alasdair Willis, another by Rude Pravo member Lucile Desamory, were displayed on monitors in the gallery, as well as being folded into Fowler’s film, emphasising the fact that film-making is, inevitably, a collaborative process.

Pilgrimage From Scattered Points can, then, be seen not just as a continuation of Fowler’s practice, its subject matter following his established interests, but a reflection of that practice. Fowler’s anti-auteurship is twinned with, or, perhaps, a more successful expression of, Cardew’s experiment in orchestrated democracy, and the non-musician members of The Scratch Orchestra match Fowler’s status as, if not a non-artist, an artist of a different stripe, combining roles - film-maker, musician, publisher, enabler and collaborator - more often found outside the gallery than in.

This review was first published in Map in May, 2006.

It may be a quirk of history, or down to the man himself, but Prince Buster, who deserves to be a household name, risks becoming a footnote in the pop music cannon. He didn’t die young, like Bob Marley, so missed his chance to become a sanitised saint. Nor, like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, did he have the knack for crafting a potent mythology, guaranteeing crackpot cult hero status. But Prince Buster’s place in the firmament of Jamaican music stars is alongside those two, even, perhaps, above them.

Born in 1938, Cecil Bustamente Campbell took an unusual route into the Jamaican music business he would come to dominate. His career began not behind the mixing desk or in front of the microphone, but in the boxing ring. Hired by Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd to provide security for his Down Beat soundsystem, he earned his nickname, the Prince, with his fists. Buster was not, however, a mere muscleman, and in 1959 set himself up as a rival to his mentor, opening a shop, Busters Record Shack, and launching a soundsystem, calling it Voice of the People, an early hint at the conscious, Afro-centric lyrics that were to become one of many trademarks.

His next step, a move into the studio, was to change Jamaican music forever. Little Honey, by the Buster Group was among the first release to capitalise on the waning enthusiasm for pure American R&B on the island as rock ‘n’ roll. By fusing the R&B shuffle with island musics like mento and buru, Buster launched the syncopated style, with a lurching after-beat, that came to define ska, and, later, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall.

He had a hit on his hands with Little Honey, but his next release, the Folkes Brothers’ ‘Oh Carolina’, pushed further, called in Count Ossie and his troupe of Rastafarian nyabingi drummers to provide rhythmic backing, marking the birth of a uniquely Jamaican pop music.

In 1962, Buster took to the microphone himself and revealed that his midas touch at the mixing desk was matched not only by a fine voice, but a knack for stirring up controversy. Launching broadsides at rival island producers like Duke Reid and Leslie Kong, Buster stirred up such passion between rival soundsystems that the Jamaican authorities forced a public reconciliation to quell the violence that spilled off the vinyl and onto the streets.

Buster was not just about making trouble, though. His output was so prolific in the 1960s that he had to launch a slew of imprints to keep up with the steady stream of releases, and their names provide something of a clue to his themes. Wildbells, Islam, Soulville Center and the original Voice of the People imprint all point to his eccentric adoption of Marcus Garvey-inspired Afrocentrism, bound up with hardline Christian fundamentalism, itself oddly matched with philosophy culled from the Black Muslim movement in the US, all tied together with Buster’s self-proclaimed status as spokesman for working-class Jamaican youth.

The Ten Commandments seemingly presented a wildly misogynistic worldview, but it was quickly followed by answer songs from women DJs, produced by Buster himself. The stunning Judge Dread series flipped Buster’s previous hardman reputation on its head - an answer Derrick Morgan’s Tougher Than Tough, in which a magistrate leniently releases a gang of murderous Yardies, the titular Judge Dread gave the fictional miscreants serious jailtime. A complex political soap opera in song followed, as singers and DJs across Jamaica rushed to respond, prompting a national debate on violent crime and the judicial system.

At the same time, Buster was crafting the hits - Madness, One Step Beyond, Al Capone - that marked his unique contribution to British music. The seminal Blue Beat imprint, founded to bring his music to the UK, released a staggering 600 singles through the 1960s, which were not only popular with the Caribbean immigrant community, but Mods, and, later, Skinheads too. In the mid-60s he toured the UK to rapturous reception, pushing Al Capone into the Top 20, the first Jamaican-produced song to do so, and appearing on Ready, Steady, Go in 1963 in regal African garb. These UK successes eventually sparked ska’s second wave in the 1980s, centred around the Two Tone label - founded by The Specials’ Jerry Dammers, who is set to support Prince Buster at TripTych - and typefied by Madness, a group named after a Buster production who scored their first hit covering his One Step Beyond.

Prince Buster’s final, typically controversial, reinvention came in 1968, when he turned to ‘rude reggae’, releasing the likes of Wreck A Pum Pum, Rough Rider, and the ever popular Whine And Grind, all featuring ‘slack’ lyrics that set the template for dancehall’s preoccupation with matters sexual. Then, as reggae replaced rocksteady, Buster found his star on the wane. Uncomfortable in the genre he had inspired with his earlier Afro-centrism, and unable to convincingly adopt Rastafarianism having converted to Islam in 1961, in 1973 Prince Buster retired as an artist, preferring to rely his past glories. Releasing numerous Greatest Hits packages, complete with eloquently ranting liner notes decrying what he saw as the sorry state of contemporary music, he concentrated on his business interests - the Record Shack remains open to this day, and throughout his musical career he made canny investments in jukebox and fruit machine businesses. Eventually relocating to Miami, Buster remained silent through the Two Tone explosion, making sporadic live appearances in the late 1980s, embarking on a tour of Japan with the Skatalites at the dawn of the 1990s, and returning to the studio to cut a fresh version of Whine And Grind in 1998, marking a belated return to the UK charts.

Now, Prince Buster seems happy to enjoy his role as elder statesman, not quite forgotten in his native Jamaica, but embraced by generations of Jamaican music fans in the UK, whether drawn to his music through reggae, Two Tone or the third wave of ska led by US punks. Still a force to be reckoned with on stage in his late 60s, this latest revival is not a swansong, but, perhaps, Prince Buster’s chance to reclaim his deserved place at the top of the Jamaican music tree.

This preview was first published in The Sunday Herald in March, 2005.

When most artists claim to be one of a kind, mould-breakers or unique entities in the history of music, it’s hard not to suppress a snigger. When Diamanda Galas says, albeit laughing, that she belongs to ‘the isolated tradition of me’ it is impossible to disagree.

Pick any facet of her lengthy career, and it’s hard to find points of comparison. She has an unearthly voice, that can comfortably stretch across four octaves, effortlessly switching from an operatic diva-screech to a low blues growl. Her lyrical concerns are not your average pop fodder, either: Galas’ most famous work is Plague Mass, a constantly developing, confrontational meditation on the impact of the AIDS virus that claimed the life of her brother, the playwright Philip Dimitri Galas. Her latest work, to be performed at the CCA this week, is Defixiones, Will and Testament, a piece dealing with Armenian genocide and Middle Eastern politics.

‘I’m like the one person in the crowd who says, “Everybody is saying this one fucking thing, but what about this thing that needs to be said?”’ Galas says, explaining the genesis of her music, ‘I have a choice: I can go home and not say anything, and go home safely, or I can say it and have everybody call me a fucking asshole. Well, I’ll pick the second one, because that allows me to go to sleep at night, where if I picked the first one, that would kill me, it would just kill me.’

Galas is, then, unafraid to tackle issues many would seek to sweep under the carpet, but she is not to be confused with a campaigner or protest singer, a fact which becomes clear the more inaccessible she makes her music, drawing on obscure texts in numerous languages and incorporating elements of everything from contemporary classical to traditional Middle Eastern music via blues standards. ‘I’m not a fucking propagandist,’ she says, ‘If someone used something I’ve said on a poster I’d probably be the first to faint. In disgust. When I was first working on Plague Mass, people were saying, “Hey, you’re singing this in like ten different languages, maybe you should do it all in English,” and I was like, ‘Oh right, only people who speak English are getting this virus, how could I have not realised this?’ No! The most important thing is that I know what the fuck I’m singing about, I’m not going to make it more simple so that you and Joe Blow over there can figure it out.’

As with the work on AIDS, Galas’ current work on Armenia is rooted in the personal as well as the political, tying together musical influences with the Galas family history. ‘Well, here I am, an Anatolian Greek - a middle eastern Greek - and I’m an American, which is a bloody weird combination,’ she explains, ‘It already says that I’m a Greek in the middle east, which means living under the influence of the Turks as a slave to Islam, and that has a lot to do with Defixiones. Then you have the American side, which is, well… the finest music here that I know is from the south, whether it’s white country blues, or black country blues, it’s really powerful music. I think that when you’re coming out of a culture like that, that was dominated for many, many years, you see the death of your culture through disinterest and powerful interests from outside. That’s what the work is about in a way, the betrayal of these countries by the large powers.’

Defixiones, then, is nothing if not timely and, since few musicians are willing or able to tackle such topics at all, let alone with the breathtaking power that characterises Galas’ live work, her performances at the CCA are unmissable.

This interview was first published in The List in September, 2002.

You can read the full interview conducted for this piece here.

Sunday nights have always been that little bit special. Any club that runs on the Sabbath attracts the dedicated hedonist, and, without the commercial constraints of the weekend proper, the DJ is freed from the shackles of genre. Optimo (Esapacio) residents Jonnie Wilkes and Twitch take full advantage of their Sunday slot, twisting together a mess of music that takes in anything from The Slits to electro classics via undiscovered proto-disco gems.

For Twitch, Optimo is a necessity, the antidote to the mainstream glut of cash-cow clubbing by numbers. ‘We started the club out of boredom, cynicism and despair with the club scene,’ he says, ‘and out of a hatred of belonging to any scene to begin with.’

This ideology is more than a pose, encompassing an anti-DJ stance that has sampler Lady Miss Roland given equal billing with the human residents, leading to an emphasis on semi-live re-edits and technical tinkering. ‘The crowd at Optimo is a crazy mix of people,’ Wilkes explains, ‘so making a track that uses say, a Dead Kennedys’ guitar part, strange drum programming, and a big disco bassline means you’ve old punks, electro freaks and disco dancers all going off.’

That ‘crazy mix’ is something of an understatement, but Optimo’s success is down to a community spirit most clubs only aspire to, with a thriving internet message board and a not-so-secret society of badge-wearing regulars splaying the club across the week. ‘That is the essence of Optimo,’ Twitch confirms, ‘and the day that falls away we will shut up shop. The fact that this community exists beyond the night is probably more important than the physical space itself. Without going into some cod-sociological thesis, community is often missing from our world and the human soul needs it.’

On the night The Face pays a visit, Optimo is typically atypical. Twitch is off spreading the message in New York, and stand-in Guy De Board brings a retro-techno edge to the proceedings. The crowd, weaned on expecting the unexpected, cram the dancefloor regardless.

Optimo (Espacio) is a club that cocks a snook at conventional clubbing and defines itself through defying definition, so can it be summed up in three words? ‘Yes,’ says Twitch, ‘Passion, passion and passion.’

This review was first published in The Face in August, 2001.

Robin Rimbaud, better known as Scanner, is a difficult man to pin down. For some, he’s a key practitioner in what current artspeak calls time-based art, others know him as a sound designer for the theatre. Avid readers of the tabloids and fans of avant-garde music alike will remember the controversy surrounding his series of albums containing cut-up collages culled from endless eavesdropping on mobile ‘phone conversations.

‘I never really know what I should call myself,’ Rimbaud admits, ‘so I just use the phrase a newspaper last called me. I’ve been dubbed all these terrible titles over the years, things like ‘minimalist anti-hero.’ In Belgium a magazine just came out with the headline ‘Scanner - the man who sucks off the whole of London.’ I’m sure they were referring to the fact that I Hoover up all these unusual sounds, but they conjured up a rather strange image.’ Whatever you call the cross-media polymath, his projects all contain a common thread: this is the output of an artist who seems to be overwhelmed with enthusiasm when it comes to sound in all it’s forms and equally concerned with a need to uncover new means of presenting his obsession.

‘I’m not somebody who set out and said, ‘I must become an artist,’ Rimbaud explains, ‘I’m somebody who began using sound in the work I’ve done from the earliest age, but somehow, and I can’t explain why, it’s drifted and expanded into all these different areas. When I was about fourteen, I used to have a reel-to-reel tape recorder and used it to make big loops of tape around my room of sounds from outside, or recorded the sound of defrosting our fridge at home, which didn’t go down too well with my mother, but, you know, a boy has to experiment!’

‘There’s always been these odd moments, just because I had a tape recorder, I used to record sounds, the way people now have video cameras and use them to record inane situations . Sometimes technology enables you to do something, and you just start playing without really knowing why. I think that’s important, most of the projects I’ve done have had serious intent, but there’s meant to be a playful element in there somewhere.’ As the antithesis of the usual po-faced sonic experimenter, Rimbaud’s latest project is nothing if not playful. He has released a long-player, Wave of Light by Wave of Light, using a new nom de guerre, Scannerfunk.

As the new pseudonym suggests, this is a record that is a far cry from the investigations of sonic textures that characterised earlier music works. Referencing disco, house and techno, the disc is, well, funky. Not to mention danceable and, just about, mainstream. It is also, once you dip below the surface, in the tradition of Rimbaud’s aural investigations. ‘I wanted to make one record as a singular statement,’ he says, ‘a rhythmic record, for home-listening in a sense and with a central groove. I realise that any beat is a very seductive tool and, you can draw people into listening the most eclectic and unusual sounds just by adhering to a simple beat. I’ve used things like software that changes photographs into noises, so one of the rhythm tracks is made up entirely of photos of Lenny Kravitz! The record is filled with these rather playful uses of sound, but you don’t necessarily have to find them, because the surface level is bright shiny electronic music. It’s meant to be fun.’

It is impossible to predict what Robin Rimbaud will do next, but there’s one thing for certain, it won’t be the same as what he’s done before: ‘I do seem,’ he says, ‘to be getting more eccentric.’

Scannerfunk’s Wave of Light by Wave of Light is out now on Sulphur Records.