Kinver Pond: Moonrise Over Legends Gym

Navel-Gazers #57 is an interview with Mike Holland a.k.a. Kinver Pond who is going to talk to us about “Moonrise Over Legends Gym”. I’m a sucker for titles, and this one is instantly ringing in my ear-for-the-absurd: what a grand, magisterial turn of phrase to describe something so banal. So it is in the sound-world of Kinver Pond, where the artist can be heard mumbling inexplicable snippets of text amidst an elaborate medley of field recordings which - one suspects - were taken close to home. Its text-rich visual world too, glimpsed in collage-art inserts which accompany the physical Chocolate Monk release, seems cut from the same cloth. Mike entered my orbit courtesy of Navel-Gazers alumnus Paul Margree, and their backgrounds strike me as similar in having arrived at this kind of activity from a sort of non-music, maybe more literary perspective, which seems to bring something quite fresh and different to the table. Mike is also local, and I’m pleased to say this is the third consecutive Navel-Gazers interview occurring live here in London. They’ve all been outdoor locations too - today we’re at Abney Park, at this bit in the corner which is sort of like a stage, sat on a pair of logs which seem as though they were placed here for the sheer benefit of our discussion. Why thank you, let’s partake!

AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! First of all what is Kinver Pond? I think you told me once the name comes from somewhere but an internet search seems to mainly return references to your music. And who… are you?

Mike Holland: The name “Kinver Pond” is taken from a novel by M. John Harrison called “The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again”. It’s set in Kinver, a town in the Midlands. There’s a scene in someone’s house at night, with a domestic garden fish pond, where the character sees something… bizarre, going on.

AC: I see… and Kinver’s a real place?

Mike Holland: Yes. But the book’s entirely fictional, a sci-fi horror. So, that scene is sort of obscurely weird. The character’s looking through this frosted window, and you’re not entirely sure the nature of what’s going on, is it an ecstatic bit of weirdness, an alien visitation? And I like that as a mood. I also thought Kinver Pond could just be someone’s name as well, almost like a Thomas Pynchon character.

AC: So the pond is a fictional element, or is that someplace you could visit in Kinver?

Mike Holland: I think it’s fictional, just a garden pond at a house.

It’s a great book. The world goes a bit strange, and the character’s job goes off the rails, and then there are these goings-on. The thing is he’s not entirely interested in the weirdness that’s going on - it’s all filtered through his lack of interest or awareness. You as the reader want to go out and get a look at what’s going on at the pond, but we get only a sideways glance at it.

Me, I’m not a musician, don’t have a musical job, never been in any bands or anything. I started doing this purely because of Paul Margree (Ivy Nostrum) who I’m in Wellness Regime with. I’ve always loved noise, improvised music, anything on the fringes, but when Paul first said we should do something, I thought he was joking. Then at some point with Wellness Regime I just thought, what I bring to that - my half of that - why don’t I expand on it and do something solo?

AC: ‘Moonrise Over Legends Gym’ is your latest release as Kinver Pond. Where did it come from? Let’s talk about what came first - was it source sounds, titles, arrangements? Was it the idea to do an album, some other preliminary idea? And how did it develop?

Mike Holland: It came from just wanting to do an album. The first album-shaped thing I did was a collection of odds-and-ends, things I’d experimented with over a couple of years, called Nothing But Worn-Out Joy. And that’s a line from a film called “Old Joy”.

AC: Not “Oldboy”.

Mike Holland: Haha, no a completely different film. It’s almost like the anti-”Oldboy”. It’s about these two guys who haven’t seen each other for years, who just go off to the woods on a hike, to go and find a spa. And that’s it. It’s got no hammer fights in corridors or anything.

So anyway now I wanted to make something more intentional. There were a couple of things I had just floating around that are on this one, but the rest was all made at the same time, intentionally to be together, with a single set of ideas. So then the source sounds came. My method was just to walk around with a Tascam sound recorder, recording all sorts of stuff: traffic noises, snatches of conversations as people walked past, creaky doors, my children running around, rain on things, anything.

I like the idea of just recording and then when you listen back, panning for gold. Sometimes there’ll be a funny little combination of accidental things on there and you grab those.

AC: Yeah and chuck the rest.

Mike Holland: You bin the rest, right. The rest is wind noise, or cars beeping or whatever. But occasionally you’ll get a bus going by, plus a beepy door, plus someone saying something, all at once… and there’s something so satisfying about it. I was describing this to someone else and they were saying how frustrating it must be, listening back to all that, and I just find it fun. Listening back, meditatively - it trains me to listen more when I go out, even when I haven’t got anything to record with.

And then, well I love collage and DaDa, and the idea of crashing things together to “crack the universe”, make a new thing which isn’t inherent in either thing. From there it’s just a process of playing. So I’m taking a little packet of sounds within the larger group that I’ve got, putting it into the sampler, juggling it around, making loops, having a jam and editing it down.

I used to quite like recording things like film dialogue, but on this album I wanted more sounds that I personally encountered. There’s a little bit of film dialogue in there, but it’s mostly either reversed or heavily obscured. There’s Bob Hoskins on there very briefly for example.

AC: Ah, I’ll have to see if I can find that.

Mike Holland: It could be a competition for your readers.

There’s also some no-technique noisy guitar, and there are some creaky doors - those are a nod to the Nurse With Wound album “Salt Marie Celeste”. I love the really overt gothic camp of that creaky door on “Salt Marie Celeste”, the cartoonishness of it which also doesn’t detract from the general spookiness.

So it’s all then just mangled through the sampler. See, once I’ve decided on the things I’m going to do and the order, they’re mostly just one-take jams and I chop out the best bit.

So it’s not composed in any way other than a broad sketch.

AC: Wow, that was not obvious to me.

So we discussed the literary origin of “Kinver Pond”. At No Computers, you recited a lot of text during your set. And ‘Moonrise Over Legends Gym’ - itself something of a mouthful - features lots of talking, and titles such as “Brush my hair for me, Julian. You know I’ve never liked thunder”. …is there a literary bent to your music?

Mike Holland: Definitely. I’m a big reader. At No Computers, it was taking the found-sound thing to found books. Books I found on walls, pamphlets from community book boxes.. there was a fairly horrible “how to socialise and make friends” self-help guide, which pivots partway through to how to leverage your newfound friends for your personal business. Another was from the more offensive end of the “think-yourself-better” kind of self-help guides… another was a 1990’s guide to the houses of Devon and Dorset… another, a really crumbly report on UFOs that someone had left out on my street.

So then it’s just treating those materials as prose poetry, flagging up interesting passages and reading them out to an audience with no context whatsoever. It’s the same as you do if you combine different sounds or images, let someone else connect the dots and find meaning.

“Brush my hair for me…” etc. is a line from “Hotel Du Lac” by Anita Brookner. That’s the thing, you remove that line of dialogue and it’s just mysterious.

AC: Yeah I notice your track titles often look funny together as a list, almost like a little poem.

Mike Holland: Yes. All of the titles existed long before I had tracks for them. I collect the words like I do the sounds. Another one of the titles - “The Butcher’s Dreadful End” - is from a book called “Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead” by Barbara Comyns, about a suicide epidemic in a small English village, where a butcher chops his own head off.

“Agitated In The Epilogue Room” is a scene from “Lanark” by Alasdair Gray, where a character becomes very agitated in the epilogue of the book. It’s one of these self-referential postmodern bits where the author appears in the epilogue and has a conversation with the character.

AC: So a few of the titles are literary references.

Mike Holland: Yeah I think they all are actually.

Because… “You want a clock, Here’s a clock!” and the final track “Please overlook this crappy letter”, both titles are both from the letters of Philip Guston.

AC: “You want a clock, Here’s a clock!” is my favourite track here. I suspected that the person speaking is you but it’s hard to tell with all the pitch shifting, and I’m not sure until around 3 minutes in. What are you saying, and what are the other sounds?

Mike Holland: That’s one of the found poems I started making. It’s from all different sources. There’s parts from adverts, graffiti, literary sources… say where we are now (Abney Cemetery) there might be an interesting graveyard inscription and I write that down. I went through a phase of whenever I saw a date tattooed on someone, I’d take down the date. And then I made this fake diary where I’d only use the dates off peoples’ arms.

One of the lines I overheard in a pub. The guy behind me looked over at where all the cutlery was, and said: “Look at all the fucking vinegar they have here”.

AC: This is new to me. You hear something out in the world, take it down - then later, you say it.

Mike Holland: Yeah quoting things that aren’t out of books. It just goes with the ethos of the project, lifting these things that you come across by chance, from wherever.

There were two pieces of music I had in mind when I was working on that track. One was Graham Lambkin’s Poem For Voice And Tape, where you have the two layers - you’ve got the dripping tap, and then that very slowed down poetry reading. I love the simpleness of that and how bizarre it is.

The other piece was Crys Cole and Frances Plagne’s Two Words. Most of the sound is just a contact mic rubbed on a piece of paper - I think - which sounds like the sea going in and out. And then you have a spoken word bit at the end over this two-note synth thing.

AC: Do I hear a cat purring or just something resembling one?

Mike Holland: Well just to revolt your readers, that sound is a fart! It’s a single fart, slowed down, dragged out a bit, played up and down, backwards, etc.

AC: Ha! Brilliant.

Mike Holland: I should say that Kinver Pond isn’t a highbrow project.

AC: Plenty of toilet humour.

Mike Holland: Yes. And in improvised and experimental music, some of my best experiences have been watching something which made me laugh.

AC: Agree.

I’m tempted for one of my questions to be “Why is it a secret that John Cassavetes is dead?”, but I suppose… that’s a rhetorical question?

Mike Holland: Well yes on the topic of Kinver Pond not being particularly highbrow, that quote is from a Judge Dredd comic from the 1990s. There’s an episode around Judge Dredd and these other stormtroopers or whatever they were, megacity cops kicking down this guy’s door and he’s got a load of banned literature under his floorboards. I think it’s set after a nuclear war, Judge Dredd and the cops are keeping control over the metropolis. And all this stuff from before the war has been banned, but nobody knows why. And that’s his question as he’s being carted off: “Why is it a secret that John Cassavetes is dead?”.

And Judge Dredd doesn’t know, he says it doesn’t matter. So this guy is being carted off for ten years in prison because he’s kept an obituary from a very old copy of “the times”.

AC: In these interviews I sometimes like to dissect a small passage where there seems to be a lot going on. There’s a sequence from around 6:50 to 7:50 of ‘Agitated in the epilogue room’ which is incredibly disorienting and busy… I wonder if you could just tell us what we’re hearing there?

Mike Holland: Yeah, there are quite a few sounds there. There’s a fight at a bus stop, a very loud creaking floorboard, a creaking door, chains clanking on the Clissold Park gate, a bit of analogue radio crackle, some wind, and Philip Guston saying “and one by one they leave”. And… I think that’s it.

So it’s those sounds played in different densities and different ways, and they all get smashed together, and it’s then it’s all one take, like we were talking about.

AC: Who is Philip Guston by the way?

Mike Holland: He’s a painter, one of my favourite painters. His stuff’s really chaotic. He paints lots of individual objects, which I like and try to emulate with sounds. Some of his paintings are just, say… a shoe, a frying pan, someone vomiting, a gravestone, a window pane… they’re very cartoonish, with these distinct objects.

I give him the final word at the end. He’s talking there about a conversation he had with John Cage about the painting process. He says that when you start working, everyone is in your studio: the past, your friends, your enemies, the art world, and your own ideas… they’re all there, but as you continue painting, they all start leaving one by one, and you’re left completely alone. And then if you’re lucky, even you leave! ...it’s a very John Cage-ean thing too, everyone leaves and you’re left with this thing which is divorced from any kind of input.

The title “You want a clock, Here’s a clock!” comes from some of Guston’s correspondence where he’s talking about being frustrated with one of his art students. They’ve got a painting and they’re trying to do a clock, having loads of problems, and he just comes along and paints a circle with two little sticks. I think about that, because I don’t think of myself as having very much skill in this stuff. If I get stuck on a track I just leave it and move on, I don’t obsess too much.

AC: Tell us about the other aspects of this album: the collage art cover image, the release on Chocolate Monk, and also the wacky blurb by veteran Navel-Gazer, Paul Margree.

Mike Holland: That image, people have said that it’s revolting and horrific, which surprised me. The body, you see, is from a medical robot which I suppose is pretty eerie, then there’s a skier on top and a flower blooming out of the neck. The title is just literally I was walking home one day on Ridley Road and I saw the moon rise over Legends Gym. Sort of a literary thing again, to take this mundane phenomenon and make it a bit gothic and romantic. I didn’t sit there for hours watching the moon rise, but to kind of give the listener the impression that I might have done.

Yeah I pitched it to Chocolate Monk and Dylan kindly put it out. Then there’s the blurb from legendary music journalist and sound artist Paul Margree. Dylan asked Paul to do that. I think he knew our connection. As to the sense Paul’s making there, that would really be a question for Paul. It’s kind of a hyperbolic sales pitch, in the style of a Lester Bangs rock n roll journalist, but perhaps even more gonzo.

AC: Yeah there’s a real swagger.

Mike Holland: Yes swagger is the word. …which also, in no way fits the atmosphere of the music I’ve done! It’s a standalone piece of art, that blurb.

AC: What are you up to next? Any new projects in progress or on the horizon? Any final thoughts for our readers? Kinver Pond wisdom?

Mike Holland: Well next, some gigs with Wellness Regime in London, and one in Brighton. Maybe some solo ones as well. I’ve only done one solo gig which was a piece I’d done for Hard Return and I wanted to see if I could do it live. It came from a sample of Ian MacEwan saying the word “bees”, over and over again, it was a good test of audience tolerance.

AC: Right, I was there for that!

Mike Holland: I’m also developing an artistic philosophy which I think I’m going to call “incompetronics”. It’s going to basically be a fig leaf over my inability to use any musical tools properly, which I’ll work up as a fake school of thought.

AC: You’re the first artist to say that what you’re working on next is a new school of thought.

Mike Holland: It’s a grand philosophy for people that don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve just had so much fun finding out that I can do what I do. Even if you’re only using five of the buttons on some hundred-button thing…

AC: Yeah or like, just the top string on the guitar…

Mike Holland: Exactly. You just do it.

I’ve no greater vision or wisdom to impart other than rolling as many peoples’ art around in your head as possible, and then seeing what comes out in your own stuff.

AC: That will do it! Thanks for talking to me.

Mike Holland: Thanks very much!

Mike can be found on Bandcamp.