Anthony Moore: Monkey's Birthday

Navel-Gazers #77 is an interview with Anthony Moore who is going to talk to us about Monkey’s Birthday. This LP, the latest archival curiosity on Paradigm Discs, is the soundtrack to a 6-hour film which was directed by someone named David Larcher between 1973 and 1975. Its liner notes recount an international sound recording journey which itself couldn’t sound more cinematic, with Mr Moore - on some sort of wayward sabbatical between musical endeavours with Slapp Happy and Henry Cow - caravanning around Southeastern Europe recording anything and everything on location, from a battery-powered studio in the back of a lorry. But these aren’t just location recordings, and that’s part of what caught my ear. The record is a sound collage, rich with compositional artistry in the form of edits, cuts, layers, loops, and the like which convinces me that maybe this work is not so radically distant and alien as it may first appear, from the avant-pop for which the artist is better known. Anthony Moore is a forthcoming artist who has spoken at length elsewhere about his music, but this archival release - along with its predecessor Mare’s Tail (1969) - seem to constitute some sort of critical missing piece in the discography and ultimately, biography. We’re on the phone for this one, I’m listening carefully!

AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! …how do you do?

Anthony Moore: How do you do, there? Where are you located?

AC: Stoke Newington.

Anthony Moore: Oh! Such a hip part of the world.

AC: …hasn’t made me any hipper.

Anthony Moore: How long have you been there for?

AC: Gosh, I think 7 or 8 years. …and you?

Anthony Moore: We’re on the coast, in Hastings.

AC: Hip as well! There and Brighton, where I just was.

Anthony Moore: Yes, a lot of musicians along the coast.

AC: You know I was thinking leading up to our call, I believe this is the 77th of these interviews I’ve done, and of all of them yours is probably the music I’ve actually listened to the most.

Anthony Moore: It also, if I’m not mistaken, corresponds precisely to the years of my life.

AC: How about that! You’re 77?

Anthony Moore: Yeah. I imagine that’s a pretty meaningless coincidence.

AC: If we were a little more superstitious, that might have been quite important to us.

Anthony Moore: Haha. Yes.

AC: So yeah with your music… maybe there’s something for every mood. The thing is that it’s so eclectic: there’s the solo albums, the Slapp Happy stuff, the early experimental work.

Anthony Moore: Right, well if someone could give me a unifying theory of old “Moore”, I’d be quite happy because living inside it is a bit of a maelstrom really. And there are days when I think I’m not hitting the mark in any of them… as you say, there are so many different directions I’ve pursued and in a way, continue to pursue.

The discussion about where does the songwriter fit with the avant-garde experimentalist, or whatever you want to call it, is endlessly complicated.

With the minimalist stuff - if you don’t mind me rattling a bit already here - the minimalist stuff of Cloudland Ballroom and Secrets Of The Blue Bag, there is actually quite an easy parallel you can draw with the modular structure of song - pop songs and the way they’re put together.

But with the tape work and the more abstract noise pieces and field recordings, it all gets a bit difficult to pull into one whole. I tend to end up thinking I’m neither one thing nor the other, rather than both.

There was a Kevin Ayres lyric: “sometimes life’s a fiddle, you fall down the hole in the middle”. …he was a great lyricist of course. I worked with him and I knew him pretty well.

AC: Wow. …and a great lyric there yes.

So I normally start these discussions by asking about the artist’s general background, but in your case I’d really like instead to refer our readers to a comprehensive 4-part interview you recently did with Jason Gross at Perfect Sound Forever.

Anthony Moore: Yes, that happened over a four year period or so. We took it decade by decade. There’s a lot in there.

AC: Yes. Now, ‘Monkey’s Birthday’ has only just been released, isn’t covered in that interview and is attributed to quite a broad time period from 1973 to 1975.

So my first question for you is when did this project fall on the timeline exactly?

Anthony Moore: Yeah, this is going to be challenging for me! I have difficulty remembering myself. You know, I noticed that it’s spread between those years and I never challenged it. I probably should, but I simply can’t remember when the film was released.

David being David - Larcher, that is the filmmaker - saw film as a kind of living, performative medium really. He would screen different parts of the film, he would possibly do alternative edits, he’d invite people to sing and dance in the middle of it, or whatever. So when the final version of it was released - the film and therefore the sound - I don’t know, but the trip it’s based on was in 1973.

Given that I was in a lorry with a generator doing a lot of the sound on the road during the filming, I imagine that I was done and dusted with it by ’74. I don’t really know why those extra years are there, unless it was that long that it took David to put the thing together.

Now, I remember working with him in the piano factory in Camden. We had a Steenbeck, we had an editing table, we had the sound on 16mm sprocketed tape which meant that we could synchronise it up with the 16mm film, and we were therefore locking in bits of sound to bits of picture. And I think that was not 2 or 3 years after we came back from the trip, I think we went straight to it.

What should exist somewhere is a date for the screening at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill Gate. That would be a definitive end date, because I don’t suppose I went back to work on it after it was screened. The famous anecdote is that it was screened at 6 o’clock in the morning, and lasted for half the day.

Most of the material was done on the road. We had a little Honda generator, and an old second-hand truck that I’d bought in Munich.

AC: Right, so you apparently went around places like Hungary, Romania and Turkey making location recordings from this mobile studio in the back of a truck. This is fascinating… tell us what you remember about these places and the things you recorded there.

Anthony Moore: I think the recording really starts in Hungary. I had a smaller vehicle - a Bedford van - for the first couple of weeks of the project. As I recall during that time no recording was being done. Although for the lorry, I believe I actually went back from Romania, back through Hungary to Munich to buy it, then drove south, over the Alps, down the coast to the border of Albania and across into Thessaloniki to pick up the rest of the guys again.

But the central field recording of the movie, and of the album actually, is “Plains Of Hungary”. It’s a recording of some pond life in the middle of the night. We pulled off a long straight road late at night and… circled the wagons, if you like. Plains Of Hungary, Chris Cutler picked up decades ago and released a version of it on Recommended Records, so Clive Graham of Paradigm recently spoke to him about reusing it on ‘Monkey’s Birthday’.

There was an extraordinary coincidence. What was amazing was that in this very flat landscape, you had the impression of being able to hear for hundreds of miles. Obviously that’s an illusion, but “distant trains” - to quote… is that a Steve Reich piece? - or dogs barking in farmyards in the night, miles and miles away, contrasted with this extreme close-up of the frogs and insects in the pond where the mics were set up.

So here you have a real depth of recording something right in your face, and a lot of other stuff way over the horizon.

Then by pure coincidence, no traffic had been on that road most of the day and the evening that we’d been driving along it, but five minutes or so after I’d set the mics up a motorbike makes an appearance coming from one side of the stereo, and a lorry from the other. The two vehicles cross right in the middle of the recording, which was kind of shocking.

It provided me with a wave of noise, with which I could introduce those atonal loops of Dagmar vocalising, I think she’s simply singing “aah” - whether she actually sang in quarter-tones or semi-tones, or maybe I just slowed down the loops a bit, I can’t remember but you have this shimmering vocal chorus that emerges out of the noise of the engines as they cross in the middle of the recording. That fades away and the whole thing comes to an end.

We had big loudspeakers, and we did playbacks. I was recording more or less anything and everything that was going on around.

I remember at one point we drove from Thessaloniki, through Alexandroupolis along the Mediterranean coast into Istanbul, into Göreme where there were those extraordinary cores of volcanoes containing early Christian churches. I was doing recordings: Turkish guys playing the saz, singing, bits of shortwave radio.

There’s a piece which didn’t make it onto the album, which was recorded in one of those caves, which I remember as a harrowing, Reich-ian scream-fest. I’m glad it didn’t make it, because it really is pretty horrible. Not as a piece necessarily, but sonically. I wondered if you managed to extend a scream for long enough, whether it would just become a musical event. But it doesn’t, it’s still blood-curdling! All the way to the bitter end.

AC: It was worth checking!

Anthony Moore: The interesting thing perhaps is that the field recordings were transformed into compositions. Using tape machines as musical instruments is something I began exploring in 1969 during the making of ‘Mare’s Tail’, David Larcher's previous film. We had a small budget for the making of Mare's Tail, but it was enough to pick up old tape machines that were on their last legs, and start doing machine-to-machine dubbing and just exploring all the things you could do with tape - tape being that medium which was so close to celluloid. The things I would do with the sound, not least cutting and splicing and looping, superimposition, playing it backwards, and changing the playback speed etc, David would be doing with the film.

I always said the great freedom for me, with all the experimental soundtracks that I did, was that I could just never have seen the movie, really. It’s the correspondence of the technical handling of the media of magnetic tape and celluloid that really joins the things together in a lovely way.

So the field recordings - ‘Plains Of Hungary’ as well - they’re manipulated. Obviously there weren’t 24 Dagmars singing an atonal chorus in the landscape, that was manipulation. I was doing a lot of splicing and looping - in other words, making pieces, in the lorry as well and those pieces you hear popping up in the soundtrack.

AC: One thing I always enjoy about your work is connecting the dots between seemingly disparate projects. I noted some examples here. At the start of Part 2 there's that disjointed talking - apparently Dagmar and Peter from Slapp Happy - which I think I’m hearing resurface on a track called Girl It’s Your Time from Flying Doesn’t Help in 1979. Or am I? Do you know the passage I’m talking about?

Anthony Moore: Yes, I know the passage. This is another piece which is also called variously, “I Look For Her Everywhere”. That’s three voices - it’s Peter Blegvad, Dagmar, and someone named Alan Powers. They’re reading strange hexagrams from “The Book Of Changes”, and I chopped up the voices, replaced vowels and consonants with bits of silence. It becomes a kind of cyclical, rhythmical thing.

So that’s the piece you’re referring to. An excerpt of that I threw onto the 1978 recording of ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’.

AC: I see. They are… akin, or something?

Anthony Moore: Well, interesting because no, they were completely different projects. One was out on the road doing stuff for a movie, and the other was locked in a hermetically sealed recording studio with no windows, making a rock and roll album. They couldn’t have been more different, in a way!

AC: Aha! Ok. That one’s my imagination I guess.

…there’s another thing like this: from around 10 minutes into Part 1, I’m fairly sure I’m hearing… Faust’s “Giggy Smile”, on a warbled guitar?

Anthony Moore: Well, interesting. The 1976 album Out, for Virgin - which ironically never came ‘out’, or at least it’s never come out until recently on Drag City - has a song on it called River The Follower, or ‘The River’. That song arose from a strummy guitar riff that I used to play with Peter Blegvad when he was still at school in about 1967 or 68. He and I had become friends, I was a year or two older and I had started my studies in how to become a 60’s art school dropout - which I’m proud to say, I made that grade.

I became very friendly with Peter who was just finishing his A-levels at school. We had a wonderful time together, talking poetry and him introducing me to a lot of Americana which I loved a lot. We played guitars together. We were even in a school band together called, “Your Hair Is Like a Swimmer’s Nightmare”.

AC: !

Anthony Moore: We were fascinated by the long-form stuff of early Soft Machine, playing for 40 minutes without stopping, just the same riff over and over again. “We did it again, we did it again”.

I came out with this riff, which is buried somewhere in “Mare’s Tail’, and then it ended up being Just A Conversation on a Slapp Happy record, and then again in ‘River The Follower’ on ‘Out’.

Now, what you’re referring to in ‘Monkey’s Birthday’ as a Faust piece, that is possible, because at some point - and you should speak to Jean-Hervé Peron about this - David did indeed go to Wümme when Slapp Happy were recording with Faust. So on that occasion would some Faust material have crept into the ‘Monkey’s Birthday’ soundtrack? Maybe, but I actually can’t remember.

AC: It does seem to be with your music uniquely, that I find myself playing these games. …these connections, which seem to cut across completely different projects of yours.

Anthony Moore: I could tell you that was a deliberate historical narrative strategy. But it’s probably more to do with running out of ideas, and desperately plagiarising myself in order to fill a gap!

AC: You have described meeting David Larcher as a seismic moment. Tell us about this person and the role he played in your life.

Anthony Moore: Yes well that’s going back, possibly into late ’68 or early ’69. I’d gone to do painting in Newcastle and dropped out after one term. I was playing more music in the evenings in the pubs and places in Newcastle, than really concentrating on the painting. I lost the touch really of what I was painting about, and ended up dropping out. …still in the 60s, I’m proud to say.

Through a series of connections which I really cannot for the life of me remember, I ended up driving with a Scottish priest in his car from Edinburgh to Glasgow, up to Oban, and then taking a ferry across to Mull, across Mull and over to that last little island, Iona, in a rowing boat.

On this island is a monastery, and in this monastery - I kind of flirted with monastic existence on a few occasions - it was a missionary order and I got put up there. At this wonderful old monastic building with the chapel and the church, there were only the three of us there. All the monks were dispersed either through China or Africa or somewhere because it was a missionary order.

I was there to be the kind of dogsbody of the monastery, the maintenance man who was responsible for keeping the slates on the roofs intact and so on, and in return for that I got my own cell and I got fed. So I was living this strange life on this tiny Hebridean island.

The encounter was pure Hollywood really. There was a pounding late at night on the door. I opened it and there was this howling gale and this wild-looking guy with long hair and a beard and a cape, and a big leather bag over his shoulder full of Hasselblads and Pentax cameras and stuff, and it was David.

He’d been wandering around taking photographs of standing stones on Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, he was basically a photographer and he found himself on Iona seeking shelter late at night. …the novelty of the place had started to wear a bit thin for me, so it was a very welcome idea that I would have someone to talk to, and we shared some ideas in common about life and poetry and madness. .

He stayed about a week, and we spoke a lot. I was trying to make musical instruments in the workshop in my spare time, rather clumsily. We spent a couple of nights trying to make flutes and whistles and things. I had a stringed instrument that I made which was almost like a monochord, or a multiple-chord, with no frets and stretched strings which could be bowed and so on.

He recognised that I was into music and sound so when he got back down to London months later, he got in touch with me somehow and he said: I’ve just been given a couple of grants to make this film, and I’ve got this big empty house that’s been lent to me by the guy who put up the money - come down, do the soundtrack.

I left Iona and went to London and hung out in this crazy house. There was all sorts of madness going on in that house. I remember The Living Theater from New York suddenly rocked up on one occasion, and they were all throwing themselves up and down the stairs.

That’s where - thanks to David - I first encountered the possibilities of tape machines as instruments, with which to make compositions. It was seminal insofar as he set me off on a methodology for experimental music making, and an introduction into maybe the last days of the avant-garde, which was already in its death throes after Paris ’68 I suppose.

There were film screenings where we were meeting European filmmakers, and then me becoming a kind of “nomad with Revoxes”, as I was described once, wandering about Europe doing experimental soundtracks using techniques I’d developed working with David. There were people doing it obviously way before me, but for myself it was a new world and it was David who opened the door on that.

AC: The journey you just described from Edinburgh, to Oban, to Mull, to Iona… those are the first places I ever visited in the UK years ago. The first journey I took here. It’s so striking that you’ve just told this story.

Anthony Moore: That’s weird!

AC: Yes. And well I was with a friend and actually we didn’t make it to Iona, because we just missed the ferry. I remember watching the little ferry go across to Iona and it was the last one of the day.

And - that friend, I spoke to him the other day for a very long time, for the first time in a long time.

Anthony Moore: That is very very spooky. Extremely spooky. I can’t wait to tell Martine about that.

Well, so you’ve done that journey and that was the journey I made in the middle of winter before spending a few months on the island.

AC: What was the name of that town there… Tobermory?

Anthony Moore: Tobermory yes. Or Tobermory is the port on Mull, it’s where you would land from Oban. Then you have to go all the way across Mull, I don’t think there was even a township where the ferry set off for Iona, it was just a couple of houses and an old bloke with a rowing boat.

AC: ‘Monkey’s Birthday’ and ‘Mare’s Tail’ are archival releases on the Paradigm Discs label. I tried and failed to find ‘Monkey’s Birthday’ itself - the film - to watch in advance of this interview. Do you think we’ll ever have any opportunity to see these films, on either the big screen or the small screen?

Anthony Moore: I’ve been carrying boxes of tapes around with me all my life - I don’t know where anything is and I don’t know what I’ve dumped because it was just too heavy to carry.

But the odd thing is that David and I were both appointed professorships in an art academy in Cologne, in the same year, the inverse of the year in which we met, not ’69 but in ’96. He was a professor for experimental video and I - after a due process of interviews and such - was asked to create the sound department for the academy.

By that time, we weren’t the same people that we had been 30 years earlier. David was still as wild as ever - fascinating, endearing, maddening, unpredictable - and I had probably… calmed down a bit. We taught in different ways, our seminars didn’t overlap really, but of course we saw each other quite often, usually at horribly boring administrative meetings.

Fragments of his work, and his later work too, were in archives there. He must have brought ‘Monkey’s Birthday’ with him to the academy. He probably had it digitised earlier, maybe in the 80’s when you started to digitise tele-cine stuff. He would probably then have re-edited bits, he would have done screenings with different versions and so on, so I don’t even know if there is a definitive final version of ‘Monkey’s Birthday’.

The person you probably could get more precise information from would be Clive Graham. He’s a rigorous researcher, this chap, and he doesn’t handle these projects lightly. He tries to find people with the source materials, and the family and all the rest of it.

What also comes to mind: in Karlsruhe, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien which is still running and has been around since the early 90s, they have an enormous archive of film and media art, and it’s very likely that they may have a copy. Or the BFI, or the London Film Makers’ Co-Op …whether copies are any good quality-wise, I don’t know. Whether they’re complete versions, whether they’re later edits, I don’t know.

It’s kind of an organic tangle, which would probably have pleased David a lot. Sadly, we lost him a couple of years ago.

Somebody called me the other day and asked me if I would want to do a live performance to a screening of the film at Cafe Oto, which they’re trying to organise.

AC: For the whole 6-hour film?

Anthony Moore: No. I doubt it very much, it would be excerpts. It would be a typical Cafe Oto thing, sort of 8:30 to 10:30.

Also, I said I would only do it if I could do the sound without looking at the image.

AC: Ha! Fair enough.

Anthony Moore: Well you know, exquisite corpse, where you write a line and fold the paper over and give it to the next person. They write something and that gets folded over and so on. It’s kind of blind overdubbing if you like, or deaf overdubbing.

I really like that. It’s opening up the possibility for lucky accidents, which because there is no author of them, they are really the most magical and enjoyable moments for me anyway. It’s along the lines of Cage, aleatoric chance operations.

AC: So you’d insist on that.

Anthony Moore: I would have my back to the screen for sure.

AC: What else are you up to nowadays? Do you have any current or future projects that you’d like to mention while you’re here?

Anthony Moore: Yeah. I left academia in about 2015, and was living in France until 3 or 4 years ago.

I did some work with some Cologne musicians who were in a collective called the Therapeutic Listening Group, or Therapeutische Hörgruppe. They are wonderful wonderful people who basically work in the realm of electronics and self-built instruments and improvisation. We did an album called The Present is Missing in 2015, and another called The April Sessions, and I did a concert in Cologne a couple of years after that, ironically called Live In Cologne.

What this brought me to was a realisation that - in my 70s - the best thing I could possibly do is to start doing something I’d never done before, as a kind of self-preservation strategy to keep from closing up shop and calling it a day.

Actually my passion for recording and tape - which after working with David manifested itself in projects like the recordings of Slapp Happy, the solo albums, and producing and working with other rock musicians - was a life pretty much of crawling around underneath mixing desks, wearing necklaces of cables in windowless rooms. Recording was all I really did. What I seldom did was to perform.

I identified performance as something I should challenge myself with. So especially in the last five years, I’ve been accepting more or less all and any gigs which anybody’s foolish enough to offer me. Some of them have been recorded, such as the latest project on Drag City called On Beacon Hill, that’s actually a live album pretty much. …and the aforementioned electronics improvisations.

A couple of years ago, I decided to create a sort of label/archive called Half-Cat, because Peter Blegvad had done these fantastic drawings of two half-cats and I wanted to honour his work and our friendship. There are to this day six albums of Half-Cat projects. They’re all on the website, if you click on the scratch marks on the top left of the landing page of Half-Cat, there’s a recordings list.

In that you can see all the projects that I’ve done since leaving Germany in 2015 up to last week more or less, when I formed a trio called OBTRAM3 with bass player Olie Brice and trombonist and electronic musician - electronicist, lets’s say - Tullis Rennie.

The three of us have been improvising and performing and we’ve made a couple of records, including Hastings/London which is a very nice album where John Butcher joined us along with a German trombonist called Matthias Muche who is an outstanding musician, well worth checking out. He has his own project called Bonecrusher, where a dozen trombonists sit around and blow their heads off.

So I’m performing which is challenging, and to make it even more challenging I’m improvising, which is something I’ve never done. To step on stage without knowing what I’m actually going to do is the ultimate nerve-wracking challenge.

Eventually, like all these things, you kind of learn the dark arts of it. It’s become something I really really treasure and enjoy, and through which I read all sorts of strange metaphysics about superluminal communication - the sort of quantum timing of musicians playing together. All sorts of wonderful magical strange ideas that I fill my head with, when I’m not actually playing.

AC: A nice way to think about improvisation!

Did I see you’re doing something at The Horse Hospital?

Anthony Moore: I am.

AC: What is it you’ll do?

Anthony Moore: I don’t know!

AC: Haha, well that’s just what we’ve been talking about I guess.

Anthony Moore: Yes! Well, it’s a benefit for Resonance FM. There are four acts. I’ll do a bit of storytelling. Contrary to the rules of improvisation, I will hold my hand up and confess that there may be a bit of playback involved, which always is problematic for me but… it solves problems somehow. Filling spaces with atmospheres and storytelling. And some songs - just, why not?

I probably will mine my own lyrics because I can’t actually find it in myself to write new lyrics. I don’t know why not. Maybe I should apply the exquisite corpse method.

AC: That sounds like a good gig. If I can make it, I’ll come say hi.

Anthony Moore: Please do, Andrew.

AC: And I’m pleased to hear you are planning some storytelling. Going by this discussion, you are quite the storyteller indeed.

Thanks for talking to me.

Anthony Moore: Thank you.

Anthony can be found at https://halfcatmusic.com/.

Images

0) 'Monkey's Birthday' album cover on Paradigm Discs.

1) (Unknown).

2) Still from "Monkey's Birthday" courtesy of Clive Graham.

3) Still from "Monkey's Birthday" courtesy of Clive Graham.

4) Still from "Monkey's Birthday" courtesy of Clive Graham.

5) Photo by David Larcher.

6) With David Larcher, Elizabeth Goodman and Tinnan (photo by David Larcher).

7) Sketch by Peter Blegvad from 'Monkey's Birthday' album sleeve.

8) Photo by David Larcher.

9) Still from "Monkey's Birthday" courtesy of Clive Graham.

10) Still from "Monkey's Birthday".

11) Photo by AC at Horse Hospital.