Side 1 I.C.E. 23/9/1980
An amplified 5-string violin solo from a concert at I.C.E. (Institute of Contemporary Events) owned and run by the mercurial nightlife entrepreneur Ian Hartley. The distortion caused by the modulation of close tones and intensified by the amplification was an interest of mine at the time (also putting rhythm in the bow). The classical world hated everything about it, but Rock n Roll types found no problem with the torture as long as it was loud (their only issue was speed - at one club, a member cried out from the audience ‘It’s too fucking fast!’)
I draw the listener to this this extract from an article I wrote about Rik Rue and alternative music in Sydney around 1980 for Real Time Magazine (the rest of the article has quite a lot to say about music in that time):
"I’m trying to think of one event where Rik and I were involved that would encapsulate the urban culture of the early 1980s in Sydney. Louis Burdett is/was one of the most naturally talented of musicians anywhere, but often captured by circumstance. On one occasion, he ended up in hospital after somebody hit him in the head with a crowbar. He was hospitalised with mercury poisoning on another occasion after putting his arm through a television set installation as part of his solo performance at ICE. So no surprise that we were also witness to the notorious concert when he was attacked by a group of outraged women while running around his drum kit naked with a functioning firework displayed in, and being emitted from, his posterior. Later in the concert, one enthusiastic male member of the audience grabbed Louis’ penis as a dancer was being asphyxiated from the smoke in an overhead net (having dropped the knife with which to cut himself free from the net and jump into the hopefully surprised audience at a peak point in the performance — the peak came and went and only weak cries of ‘help, help’ from above alerted us to the near-death experience attached to the ceiling). Somehow it isn’t like this is in Sydney anymore!"
Side 2 Sydney Studio 10/11/1980.
This track features the 19-String Violin on a vertical frame. It was amplified in stereo and this is probably the best example I have of the set-up live in concert. The improvisation was recorded direct to cassette which unfortunately ran out before the end of the concert - an occupational hazard back then. I wish I had the original master tape instead of this analogue copy.
The acoustics of The Sydney Studio were expansive - too good to last and the building was bought by a tea heiress who wished to dabble in art, then sold to a developer who created apartments for Sydney’s wealthy.
An instrument, and indeed some music, arrives on this planet, exists for a couple of years, and then disappears into the ether - never to be heard again. Such was the short history of the 19-String Violin. Some commented that it did not sound like anything they had ever heard, others suggested that it must be art because it certainly wasn’t music, and others commented to the effect of ‘that poor violin!’
This violin hack launched me into experimenting with the very structure of violins. Up until that point, all my investigations had avoided messing with my main 4-string instrument. I’d been told through my youth that the violin was perfect, arrived from heaven accompanied by angels blowing trumpets, and that was how it was, how the music sounded, how that music was perfection, and that was what I’d be playing for the rest of my working life. The idea didn’t appeal, so at 15 years old I started to play other kinds of music on other instruments (double bass, guitar, piano - no problem), but there was little I could do with the violin expect read classical music notation. Then I discovered cheap Chinese violins and nothing could stop a new pathological activity from taking over my life (see relative violins).
The 19-string violin was stolen from a car just after a recording session with English violinist Phil Wachsmann in London. Said instrument had just been loaded into a car along with my regular violin, and I ran quickly back to say ‘bye’ and ‘thanks’ - turned around and in the space of 90 seconds both violins had been stolen. I try to picture the guy’s face running down the street with what he might have thought was an antique of some kind. On discovering it was just junk, I’m guessing he probably chucked it into the Thames and sold the legit violin for a fiver in the local pub. English percussionist Roger Turner searched the markets but nothing ever turned up. Thus began a parallel narrative in which to date some seven of my homemades have been stolen… but there is not space here to develop that theme.
The 19-string violin instrument was supported by a metal frame and some four contact microphones, phaser, ring modulator, compressor, and two volume pedals feeding a stereo image.
Fringe Benefit Records was set up in 1977 by Jon Rose as a tape library of Australian improvised music. By the time of the
final release in 1985, more than 50 cassettes and more than a dozen LPs had been released. This site now exists to digitise and bring those releases to a new audience, beginning with the compilation double CD released on Entropy Stereo Recordings in Michigan in 1998......more
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