Relay Eight (Sunday 11th June 2000)

Sunday 11th June 2000 Mini-Millennium Dome - Secret Location - Knut's Refreshment Table - 2:13 Club Relay takes place annually, during the Stoke Newington Midsummer Street Festival. There are 3 or 4 performance spaces about 5 minutes walk from each other. Each space has a fixed number of musicians and every time a new one arrives another must leave. The event runs from 2:13 pm till 5:13 pm. RELAY 8 - Sunday 11th June 2000 Two months before the event all participants made a self-portrait. Jonathan Bohman started growing his moustache. On Monday the children in Year 6 at William Patten School began constructing a Mini-Millennium Dome. Under the guiding hand of Darcy Turner they took hundreds of newspapers and rolled them up tightly, making sticks which were then tied together to form the structure. On Tuesday we discovered that Burkhard Beins' flight from Berlin was landing at 2 pm - so we decided to start at 3:12 to give him time to get across London and join us. At 8 am on Sunday half a dozen children, parents and other helpers met at William Patten School. They carried the Dome down Church Street, while all the stalls and stages were setting up for the Festival. It was erected on a triangle of grass in front of Clissold Park, given walls of brown paper and sprayed with fire-retardant. Various people stood guard until 2:30, when the first musicians arrived. At 2:45 two Fire Officers appeared. They claimed the Dome was not fire-proof, and set fire to it to bring their point home. Hazard tape was put over the entrance and the musicians set up in front of it. The 2:13 Club was the 'concert', with a stage area and chairs for the audience. The starting group at each location had an already existing identity or aesthetic. The intention was that an established group sound would gradually be undermined or developed through interventions from successive musicians. In the club this was the duo of John Butcher on Saxophone and Phil Durrant on Electronic Manipulation. But Phil Durrant had a dreadful journey to the event, and was besieged by technical problems for most of the first hour - so that in fact the situation became more and more cohesive as time went on. After ten minutes Phil Minton joined John Butcher, and from then on gradually changing duos played with Phil Durrant. The Dome had the Pure Sidney Project (Bisset / Kallin / Talya Davies) as its opening trio. But by the time the Fire Officers had done their bit, and drums, tables and whatnot had been moved around the grass a few times, other players were lining up to interrupt - so the trio never really got going. The Dome was intended as a public location - with people coming across it by chance - curiously poking their heads in. Without the boundary of paper walls the distinction between performers and public, between intentional music-making and random ambient noise, became profoundly blurred. The space was eventually abandoned to a group of drumming children. The Secret Location was a living room - private, domestic, silent, with no audience allowed. (Well, there was the kingpin of the London impro audience, Tim Fletcher and his DAT machine.) Here the musicians could be as serious or as silly as they liked - and they were. It was here that the opening trio of Mark Wastell / Rhodri Davies / Angharad Davies managed to play as it intended - with focus and deliberation. Here also that Jonathan Bohman finished shaving off his patiently cultivated moustache. Knut's Refreshment Table was set up in the entrance lobby of the 2:13 Club. A solo was played, treated by Knut, and rewarded with a drink, fruit or muesli bar. This was meant to be the place to re-define oneself without reference to others - to refresh oneself, musically as well as physically. In fact they were duos with Knut, and the table was a meeting place for the wandering musicians to take a break and chat. The cd: All silences on this cd were made at the time of recording. The material is presented either chronologically or using a musician as a link. Thanks to: All children from Year 6 at William Patten School; Richard Boon and family; Eike Adams; Alan Wilkinson and Ellis; Christopher Evans; Clive Graham. John Bisset, January 2001. Available from www.2-13.co.uk.