After my convalescence from pneumonia (details) and immediately before our holiday in Scotland (not many details), M spent a weekend with me in Sheffield. That coincided with a two-day performance by Transient v Resident, a duo featuring Martin Archer, whose stuff I knew well — and who recently dropped by here — and Chris Bywater, who I hadn't heard of before. That would have been 19th and 20th July 1997.
I persuaded M that we should drop by. The performance was at the Mappin Gallery. You can get away with music in art galleries that would be a very hard sell in concert spaces, for one simple reason: the audience is invited to wander at will; they can choose to stay for 25 minutes or 25 seconds. Call yourself a sound installation and people will tolerate almost anything, with nothing more vituperative than a resigned tut-tut.
I remember no more of the performance than that we were there. Perhaps we only stayed 25 seconds before going to get an ice-cream in the park or look at the stuffed bears in the museum. But the following year I picked up this memento, a limited-edition two-CDR set compiled from recordings of those two days, the following year at a Martin Archer gig.
As described on the Transient v Resident profile page, "movement between sections [in this performance] occurs slowly and organically often with minimal playing input". Not sure if that is code for "we arrive with a bundle of pre-recorded sequences on disk/tape and decide how to shuffle them when we get there". Either way, the result is yet another manifestation of Archer's shapeshifting musical persona. And yet again, he (along with Bywater, whose contribution I can't judge, having never heard him outside TvR) pulls off a very convincing album. I didn't listen to it all the way through in one sitting; I dipped in for 20 minutes at a time, as though wandering in and out of a gallery. To begin with it felt like a version of Irrlicht or Conal with updated kit. But, over time, the similarities and references multiplied. If you don't like one bit (and I found the glitchy distortion a bit overdone at the end of Disc 1), wait five minutes and everything will have metamorphosed, without you quite noticing how or when. This led me to look back over previous posts and find that I also enjoyed TvR's subsequent album, which I'd love to listen to again, if time permits.
Part of the knack of building a (commercial) musical career is developing a memorable gimmick and then repeating it ad nauseam until the audience catches on. Archer's output seems to take exactly the opposite approach: the more of his work I listen to, the harder it becomes to pin down what martinarchermusic sounds like. Only by the happy accident of living in Sheffield for 16 years during a period when the improv scene was the most interesting part of the city's musical life did I get to accumulate so much of this music. And only now, seven years after I left am I starting to appreciate it fully.
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