interview pieces by Holly Pester is licensed under a Creative Commons License

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No one wants to see a bashed berry yogurt in the morning. On occasion it’s forgivable to tone two neutrals together. Soap and sack, rough water holidays. This fest is an ideal time to try some new samples – plucked skin is hot but to be daring is to risk a sterile ruby. Minus a shade or two for a proper century carpet, and now you’re really staining! A good fantasy fetcher is ¾ pig ink, a must-have for this corner space.
Feather the brick wash. You won’t regret putting blush before you’re 40. Make space, make time, the cherries are groaning. The crack of a new month is the perfect excuse for some fresh acid thinking. Why not update your alcoves with something musty. Your home is a mood-farm and worth every lick. If the dappled long coats get you down, sprinkle some fizz and relive the era of the mantle-piece. Something for sitting and driving: it should always make you roomy, a bit like a garden.

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People of the watermelon, listen to the new sound coming from the angry red planet. Peach-wash or milk crust? This is contemporary California style. The new motors have a wonderful aroma and a mildness that agrees with your red-eye. Liner. So do yourselves a flavour and complete the decking in meat planks. Do it for your family, or just for the sheer fat of it. Life is certainly pleasurable now. It’s made of pure foam – Don’t ever forget that. Fact.

In the olden days a wife was a spread of bacteria. She knew the smack of pink wafer biscuit. Spray, spray, spray away the crinkles. Lip is the stick smart women should wear – says Andy McDowell, the glut agent. Today the trend in telephones is certainly to colour – in both home and the office. So why not update your talking shades? You’re a smoker, so American. Not a baby washer after all.
This bathroom is synonymous with the gracious living of Beverly Hills. It’s mulberry blush, it’s sandalwood and it won’t harm your pets. Want to know Paris’s secret to beauty in the morning? Cry a little. And there’s no need to plug it in, or even shake. To keep your decor in trend, you must follow the Johnson Plan. Step one is a Barbarella diet with two-tone salmon trays. Step two to three becomes available on Boxing Day. The most recent devotee has inched herself into 3 flesh sizes her previous. It could be you, so why not update your talking shades?

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Feeling low? Blow away the brown air with a new internal wall. You’ve seen them in the showrooms; they leak real-life hormones. Halleluiah Jimmy. Now award yourself a twin-pack and really begin the neo year. It really really really will make your mornings bigger. It’s what every contempo doll is looking for. What is? This is! And you thought the bag-hogs had the last sample stitch. We all care about your lounge, Ronda. Believe it.
R-O-T spells luxury rug.

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Monroes welcomes Baglics, the most recent member of the Vanity family. They insist on surfaces being bright and clear. Keeping up bright and across clear, ensuring a bright and clear sphere that’s bright and clear. The portals are bright and clear. The bays are bright and clear. They’ve customized bright to enhance clear, really bringing out the shine in the furnishings. The focus is on bringing out the bright, it’s clear. The design shanks are aren’t just clear, they’re brighter than clear, they’re bright and clear. And the rest. Bag-a-lics say, Come Alive! You’re in the coochie purse generation. That’s bright; that’s clearer than clear. Pimp your basement room ready for some grade A action. Hang up the stuff! Match faux fur with jaundice stones. And always make sure there’s plenty of peach on the blankets.

Programme notes:

At the conception of this project Kaye and Pester created a system of exchange and translation, developing shared concerns for chance operations, periphery speech sounds and the thrill of live performance. By trading sound, text and image material, they allowed the piece to workshop itself out of their (re)interpretation and (mis)translation. Kaye and Pester have engendered not only a musical score, but a hypertextual network of graphic notation, sound poetics and a prolific collaborative partnership.

The piece works as a triptych, with each instant both setting Pester’s text and also conceptually representing each visual poem. The piece is also interspersed with rhythmic interludes.

Baritone – Alex Garziglia

Percussion 1 – Catherine Ring

Percussion 2 – Louise Morgan

To begin our collaboration Josh and I exchanged compilation CDs with recordings that we felt represented or at least indicated the direction of our practices/interests. My CD for Josh was a mix of sound poetry excerpts from Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing, some experimental vocal tracks by heavy metal musician Mike Patton, a few songs from Bjork’s ‘Medulla’ album and some Mongolian throat singing. (And some pretty incredible Michael Jackson acapella!) Things that I like, listen to, make me think about the voice and the concept of singing.

Josh passed on to me an alien world of contemporary opera, some of his own piano pieces and pieces for many voices, plus a welcome reminder of The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’. What did they tell me about Josh? That he likes inter-sections of voice and percussion; rhythmic, polyphonic vocal sounds.

After this we talked over our listening experiences and went to see as many exhibition, event and performances as we could, trying to build or uncover a common language. It became clear that neither of us were interested in the conventional poet-composer partnership, i.e. having me compose a text, hand it over to Josh and then have him set it to music. We wanted a collaboration that involved a continuous workshop and thought laboratory, that pushed both our practices forward, and gave away our personal artistic temperaments.

More than this, we wanted the piece to perform the exciting collision of text and music that was occurring in our dialogue.

We started by making a small collection of vocal noise. I recorded some ‘para-speech’ noises (erming, ahring, coughing, spluttering, laughing etc.) and Josh produced some piano bits and some of his own throat singing. Josh set this using some sound editing software and passed it back to me. I took this newly constructed sound piece and visually translated it into a sequence of typewriter poems. I passed these back to Josh who translated these as graphic notation, unpicking the flat plane of paper and creating a dimensionality that I found very exciting.

And this was how the process continued, passing back and forth sound, to image to composition.

Eventually I narrowed down the sources for my noise-making to YouTube footage of Barack Obama interviews, extracting those wonderful, distinctively pitched, vocal controllers he makes when pausing between words. I collected these, mimicked them and recorded them. I then juxtaposed this recording with impressions of talking pet birds (also sourced from YouTube). These sounds were arranged into the sound piece ‘bird interview’ which informed the body of much of the final piece:

Download audio file (bird-interview.mp3)

This suited our mutual creative interests in interviews, periphery speech expenditure and procedure-led art-making. It was also inevitable given my current fixation with the phenomenal sound of Obama’s voice.

While much of the material was still in fragments; typewriter poems, sound texts and annotated scores, we met with our singer, Alex and began testing some of the vocal sequences Josh had devised. During one of these rehearsal sessions I transcribed some conversations between Josh and Alex, discussing the technicalities of singing the score. These transcriptions were worked into another poem that was spliced into the interventional sections before each miniature.

I was continually excited by the way Josh interpreted the material we had workshopped out between us. One of the typewriter poems I gave him had solid squares of letters, which Josh – through the indetermination of  graphic notation – devised into a game for percussionists. This is ‘played’ in the final miniature where Louise and Catherine race to get to a certain note in the grid. Because of this each performance, although structurally identical, has an inbuilt facilitator for different versions. Both Josh and I place a great deal of value on the alchemic moment of live performance and were eager to make sure that there was something deliberate that ensured each time would be different.

The female percussionists work together regularly as a duo and had a wonderful energy between them. Josh’s vision for Alex’s vocals to be constantly struggling to break through the drumming was almost too successful. They embraced the vocal interjections Josh had written for them with a thrilling vivacity. Overall the performic dynamic between the trio for the final performance made it something of a visual and sonic spectacle.

“I always felt the need to bring a new objectivity to” ladders.

Who’s speaking? Every interview is a junkyard of voices; you believe, I insist, we all think. Allow me to explain. I am the partial interviewer, veiled in script. I am the interviewee that spoke and the one that was written later in my absence. We are all various understandings of the Work, and the work’s value. But which one of us is interested in forklift trucks?

What do you want to say about interviews? That we’re too in love with them? That they fill in narratives of how and why art works? How and why does your art work. I can’t tell you now that you’ve asked me. How do you understand it? If you enjoy it you must understand it. There’s no need to say ‘What about your lines? What about your materials? “Being intelligible is not what it seems.” What’s interesting about this interview is the rhetorical skill, it’s so dependent on an unambiguous persona. Only he could answer a question like that. Somebody said something impulsive at a point in time, somebody wrote something rational and that moment is now a monument. Ask her about her plan. The question is always the answer is always a statement about your current project. That’s not a question. But do you agree or disagree. With what? With whether the question or answer is the making of criticism.

It’s probably more like an exercise in understanding a journalist. The golden egg is a recording of someone’s meltdown. The best way to achieve this is to cause someone to have a meltdown. Tell us about the moment of your public failure and if you can’t please be silent. You mustn’t insult me by understanding me. My way of being critical is my way of showing you that I care. I care enough to ask what you think about how logos have changed? And how did the move to go all white come about? It was my brief. People must be so bored of decision making. Explain your strategies for escaping phallocentricism? Silence. I had my first exhibition in Warsaw, with photographs of my actions. Untitled (November 1976) was in it, as was Untitled (18 November 1976) and other things I had done.

Is an apologia even necessary, and what’s the difference between what you decided and what you can’t decide? Decision making. I am interested in the initial impulse that led to your ‘actions’, what did you do before this? I was doing drawings in a notepad then I did collage. What have you heard others say about your work? What they say is true. How did you end up in Poland? It was for my second exhibition. Could you explain the train journey in detail, including the coffee and the sandwich and the book you read. Maybe that’s when I had the idea. What have you heard others say about your work? What they say is wrong.

It’s a shame this interview is too circumscribed for you to say anything surprising. Was that your intention? If you enjoy it you understand it. Everyone talks about what a wonderful structure Number 32 has. (What I mean is) if they only knew how arbitrary that decision was. Now the biographers are calling and I can’t remember what is true and what isn’t. Why are you using forklift trucks? I’m fascinated by them. You are not fascinated by them. I can’t talk about intention, everything I do is a surprise.

(This article can be found in next month’s Vacuum magazine)

projection text

He nodded and she bus
like this is a film
And she knew she’s seen in
The bus
The film
The seen in the bus with extras
She’s in the scene
He nodded.
In ninety minutes the book closes
steps off the bus she knew
the nine mile scene with extras in leggings
Shot. Dead the scene beginning again with filters
With she
He nodded nodded du-duh du-duh

she allowed to move
in time with the extras in filters
Dénouement on legs and walking away