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THE CONCEPT ALBUM AS CURATORIAL ‘MEDIUM’: COLIN RILEY'S IN PLACE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2021
Abstract
Colin Riley's collaborative and curated project In Place (2015–18) – with its exploration of memory, place, language and identity – becomes a stimulus for considering the intertwining relationship between the song cycle and the album form. Featuring seven commissioned poets alongside found texts, In Place simultaneously assembles fragments of contemporary Britain and its broken tongues whilst reflecting on the current possibilities for binding these through song. Riley and his collaborators construct a sense of place in the movements between idiom, psychogeography, field recordings, samples, instrumental voices, speech and song, rather than from any fixed location, reference, identity or origin. I argue that this adapts and learns from the history of the album as a form of double binding, both of a finite set of materials and, crucially, of a community or interpersonal relations. With its development in the modern era through the poetry collection, song cycle, and recording, the album provides a model for living, collective remembrance, contrasting with the archival paradigm of preserving cultural authority. Its transformation and persistence are pursued with the emergence of the concept album through to music streaming, offering an historical framework in which In Place can be appreciated as a contribution to the contemporary ‘return to memory’.
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References
1 Gareth Williams, ‘Classics Unwrapped’, BBC Radio Scotland, 13 January 2019.
2 Kate Molleson, ‘Colin Riley: Shenanigans –CD review’, The Guardian, 9 November 2017. www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/09/colin-riley-shenanigans-cd-review.
3 In addition to the album, In Place has been a touring project and, more specifically, a conceptual platform incorporating a dedicated website, four broadcasts on Resonance FM, and an extensive series of blog posts and other writing. See https://inplaceproject.co.uk, accessed 1 October 2020.
4 This fuels the current discourse on contemporaneity explored predominantly across the gallery arts – see, for example, Assis, Paulo de and Schwab, Michael, eds, Futures of the Contemporary: Contemporaneity, Untimeliness, and Artistic Research (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The problem of historicity for modernism has been widely explored, notably for example in Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961)Google Scholar, Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, (1979), transl. Tribe, Keith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, Ricœur's, Paul last work, Memory, History, Forgetting, transl. Blamey, Kathleen and Pellauer, David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, transl. Brown, Saskia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
5 Drott, Eric, ‘Why the Next Song Matters: Streaming, Recommendation, Scarcity’, Twentieth-Century Music 15/3 (2018), pp. 325–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Resonance FM broadcast, 22 June 2016, on https://inplaceproject.co.uk/blog/ accessed 28 September 2020.
7 ‘Weather Words’, in Colin Riley, In Place, Squeaky Kate Music, 2018, Audio CD booklet; excerpted from Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Penguin, 2015).
9 John Mowitt, Sounds: The Ambient Humanities (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
10 In addition to Pappenheim, the band comprises Kate Halsall (piano, keyboard, harmonium), Nic Pendlebury (viola), Ruth Goller (bass guitar, double bass, uke bass), and Stephen Hiscock (percussion).
11 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).
12 Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, transl. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), p. 33.
13 Milan Kundera, Slowness, transl. Linda Asher (London: Faber, 1996), pp. 34–5.
14 The decades around the beginning of the twentieth century were conspicuous for their concern with time. Indeed, Schoenberg's steps off the edge of tonality were taken with the conspicuous aid of variations on the song cycle, from the Gurrelieder to Erwartung, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Pierrot Lunaire and the Four Orchestral Songs. See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
15 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, transl. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989), pp. 7–24. Nora's argument attempts to engage the problem of the expanding gap between ‘history’ and ‘memory’, developed at a time (the 1980s) when the passion for heritage, commemoration and returns to the archive was becoming a distinct phenomenon.
16 Phyllis Culham, ‘Archives and Alternatives in Republican Rome’, Classical Philology 84/2 (1984), pp. 100–115.
17 Albums appear first as relatively inexpensive ways to preserve formulas for legal codes concerning property rights, wills and other forms of authorised contract between lay publics, only later taken up as a medium for recording and sharing privately treasured materials. Warren C Brown, ‘The gesta municipalia and the public validation of documents in Frankish Europe’, in Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Warren C Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Adam J Kosto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 95–124. We can observe, in passing, that this transferral of memory from the public to private domain is consistent with the retreat described by Hannah Arendt from the political sphere of ‘action’ among a plurality of equals – and the concomitant requirement for promissory and contractual mechanisms to ameliorate the necessarily unpredictable quality of public acts – to the ‘contemplative life’ as the proper sphere of human action i.e. beyond the necessities of everyday living.
18 The important distinction I want to make here is with the notion of religion that arrives with Cicero as re-ligio: literally ‘tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman and hence always legendary effort to lay the foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity. To be religious meant to be tied to the past’ (my emphasis). Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 121. Secreted in the historical passage of the album is the performance of a binding of individuals to each other, as distinct from a collective identity bound by the pre-established authority of an historical archive.
19 John Daverio, ‘The Song Cycle: Journeys Through a Romantic Landscape’, in German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rufus Hallmark (New York: Routledge, 2009). Gareth Shute, Concept Albums (Milton Keynes: Investigations Publishing, 2013).
20 The proposition comes from the ancient grammarian Varro; see John T Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 74.
21 Drott, ‘Why the Next Song Matters’, pp. 332–3.
22 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’, (1934), transl. Thomas Y. Levin, October 55 (1990), pp. 56–61.
23 Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
24 It's no surprise this coincided with The Who's conceptual turn with The Who Sell Out, similarly satirizing their own commodification. The emergence of rock criticism, notably in the pioneering writings of Richard Melzer, Richard Goldstein, Robert Christgau and Ellen Willis, was riven with this tension. See Devon Powers, Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), and Les Roka, ‘A Day in the Life of American Music Criticism: The “Sgt. Pepper” Debate of 1967–69’, Journalism History 30/1 (2004), pp. 20–30.
25 Gary Burns, ‘Beatles News: Product Line Extensions and the Rock Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, ed. Kenneth Womack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Allan F. Moore, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
26 The lines between Pop Art and Art Pop were shading on several levels. Art Schools encouraged bohemian self-expression, providing a home brew of radical ideas, free time and permissive daring that sparked a shift from the art studio to the recording studio. John Lennon was not the only Art School-of-rock graduate. Keith Richards, The Animals, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and many others tuned in to visual art before dropping out to form bands. At the same time, Pop Artists pioneered a ‘jukebox modernism’ by using hit parades as exhibition soundtracks, both as an affront to the respectability of ‘museum taste’ and as a means to attract younger and less elite viewers. Mike Roberts, How Art Made Pop and Pop Became Art (London: Tate, 2018); Melissa L. Mednicov, Pop Art and Popular Music: Jukebox Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2018).
27 Crow, Thomas, The Long March of Pop: Art Music and Design 1930–1995 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. Gallery recognition of album artwork also arrived promptly, as with Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf's 1975 exhibition Sehen um zu Hören – see Laura Maes, ‘Sounding Out Sound Art: A Study of the Definition, Origin, Context, and Techniques of Sound Art’ (PhD diss., Universiteit Gent, 2013).
28 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, October 12 and 13 (1980).
29 Oswald first presented the concept of plunderphonics at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference, Toronto, in 1985. His first release using the term came in a four-track EP from 1988, though the more comprehensive double-CD/book plunderphonics, fony 069/96, 2001, lists tracks dating from 1969 – all very short, as brief as five seconds – and his first substantial ‘song’ track, ‘power’, from 1975. Stone's ‘Sukothai’ was his first piece to self-consciously use existing recordings as the basis for new work – see Carl Stone, Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties, Unseen Worlds, UW015LP, 2016. The celebrated ‘Pictures’ exhibition that brought attention to artists using appropriation strategies was held at New York's Artists Space, 24 September–29 October 1977.
30 LaBelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2008)Google Scholar.
31 Eisenberg's ‘Finale quasi una fantasia’, updating his classic text, is remarkably prescient here. ‘By imperceptible degrees, a music emerges: the music the listener most deeply desires. Desires, moreover, at the very moment he hears it; for it constantly shifts and evolves to fit his moods, his activities, his metamorphic self’. The Recording Angel, p. 238. See also Drott, ‘Why the Next Song Matters’, and Morris, Jeremy Wade and Powers, Devon, ‘Control, Curation and Musical Experience in Streaming Music Services’, Creative Industries Journal 8/2 (2015), pp. 106–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber, 2011)Google Scholar.
33 Hamilton, Security. The attribution is, once again, from Varro.