pirate radio + rave exhibition

Sweet Harmony: Radio, Rave & Waltham Forest, 1989-1994

open now, running until 25 May 2022

free

exhibition rationale:

Sweet Harmony: Radio, Rave & Waltham Forest, 1989-1994 began as a research project by Rendezvous Projects in 2019. Originally funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund, the most recent part of the project is being funded by Waltham Forest Council.

The project looks at a significant five-year period in the UK dance music history and the contribution that young people living and working in the London Borough of Waltham Forest at the time made to it. Previously undocumented, Rendezvous Projects are now bringing these stories to life, celebrating them and preserving them for future generations.

1989 – 1994 was a distinct period in music history; at the end of the acid house music scene, garage, hardcore, jungle and drum and bass all emerged in quick succession. Through their research, Rendezvous Projects have established that Waltham Forest played an important role in the development and dissemination of these musical genres, influencing a generation of musicians and young people. The social history captured demonstrates the interdependencies and relationships between location, post-war architecture and diverse communities, and how they all contributed to a potent and creative period of time.

The exhibition includes oral histories, photographs, video, audio, flyers and ephemera, as well as rare hand-painted banners designed by local company Bannerama and original printed magazine Ravescene. Over 30 oral histories have been recorded with people who made significant contributions to this scene and the borough’s cultural heritage, and so far include Chelsea-Louise Berlin, Cool Hand Flex, Linden C, Andy Clockwork, Dlux, DJ Rap, Vicki Edwards, Stephen Hebditch, Ronnie Herel, Gordon Mac, MC Navigator, Jessie Grace Mellor, Roger the Doctor, Slipmatt, Tim Strudwick, Uncle 22 and Warlock.

Before this project there was very little record of the Waltham Forest’s contribution to UK dance music, either online or in print. As with many working-class (and mainly black) histories, the story had largely been told by those with greater privilege. Rendezvous Projects look to redress this balance, celebrating, highlighting and recording the hard work, creative entrepreneurship and talent of the people involved, and putting the protagonists’ own voices at the heart of the story.

more about the project 

Sweet Harmony: Radio, Rave & Waltham Forest, 1989-1994 is a project which documents and celebrates the history of pirate radio and rave in the borough during the period 1989-1994.

The first phase of the project started in April 2019 and was funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund. A new phase 'Retuning the Airwaves' was funded by Waltham Forest Council in 2020-21 and included workshops with young people in the borough. This phase will culminate in an exhibition at Vestry House Museum in November 2021, and a series of audio pieces made available at locations relevant to the project.

In the lead up to the exhibition, a music event is being held at new venue Patchworks on Church Road E10, featuring some of the DJs who were interviewed for the project.

Oral history interviews conducted in 2019 include: Bizzy B, Roy Balfourth, Chelsea-Louise Berlin, Linden C, Andy Clockwork, Merry Collins, Dlux, DJ Louise, DJ Rap, Nicky Dungeons, Vicki Edwards, Adrian Hall, Joel Harrison, Kier Hawkins, Stephen Hebditch, Claire Henderson, Ronnie Herel, Marlon Guildford, Gordon Mac, MC Navigator, Jessie Grace Mellor, Chris Pilling, Roger the Doctor, Slipmatt, Steve B, Adam S, Ian S, Mike Stone, Tim Strudwick and Warlock. These can be listened to in full by appointment at Waltham Forest Archives and Local Studies Library at Vestry House Museum.

Limited edition publication

As a result of this first phase of the project, we've produced a limited edition booklet and map showing the location of former radio stations and including oral history extracts to tell their history.

The booklet is 24 pages, A5, printed in one colour, and saddle stitched with a folded full colour B2 size map as jacket.

P.R.E.M. versus the C-word

Dale Cornish, not content with inventing the genre of "thug ambient", has coined another nifty name. In a recent tweet he announced: 

"Yesterday, in an interview for A Thing, I invented the term Press Release Experimental Music, whereby the promo blurb is 374 times more interesting than the bland music it's hyping up. "recorded in a cave in Belarus using rare AKG microphones" = sounds bloody boring though m8888"

Now, I know what you're thinking. 

You're thinking, "Dale, mate - it's been named. It's called Conceptronica."

And I admit, that was the first thing that popped into my head. 

But upon consideration, I decided they're not the same thing. 

They overlap, but Press Release Experimental Music is a purely pejorative term.

Whereas Conceptronica is actually value-neutral (no, honestly it is -  many assume it's a brickbat,  others a big-up, but it's neither). 

Under the umbrella of Conceptronica, you would indeed find a swathe of stuff where the press release was way better than the actual music.

But you would also find a swathe of stuff where the press release and the music were just as good as each other and mutually enhancing. 

And you would find yet another swathe of stuff where the press release was turgid and pretentious such that the music would be much better off without that framing - and in that sense is 347 times better than said press release.

And - we're not done yet - there is another subcategory (and in truth this probably was something the C-word had in its sights, as a target) and that is the swathe of stuff where the press release (interesting in its own right) and the music (also interesting, "stands up by itself") are both fine and dandy, but there doesn't seem to be any actual relationship between the themes, critiques etc asserted in the framing bumf and the actual sonic events that comprise the work. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Apropos of this, recently I came across a bit of Mark Fisher writing that prefigures the conceptualization of conceptronica, although not actually being about music, per se. 

"What's interesting - and this has a direct bearing on some of the disputes about abstraction and the [hardcore continuum]to which I will return in a post that's been germinating ever since the UEL event - is the way in which Burial's music conducted affects and images so powerfully, so lucidly, without the mediation of the (facialised, biographical) individual or its self-understandings. (How different is Burial's abstract art - so painterly, so precise in the images it produced - to so much of what appears in galleries, with its overthought, overconscious, nulanguage meta-rationales, while 'the work' induces no ideas, no affects, at all.)"

K-punk here is slagging off art-art, not art-tekno -  visual art, gallery art. 

I am curious what Mark would have thought of the Conceptronica phenomenon - he seemed both amenable to That Kind of Thing (e.g. wrote about Ultra-Red I seem to recall, Mille Plateaux agit-proptronica) but on the other would have been reflexively suspicious of the self-curatorial turn in modern music I'd have thought (given his swipes at e.g. S. Youth etc). 

Recently also realized that the seed of conceptronica, which I've used on and off as a term since 2006,  can be traced right back to Energy Flash and the chapter called "Fuck Dance, Let's Art", in whose opening section the idea of the museum as space of non-vibe is aspersed: 

By the end of 1995, a new zone of music-making had emerged out of the ruins of ‘electronic listening music’: a sort of post-rave omni-genre wherein techno’s purity was ‘contaminated’ by an influx of ideas from jungle, trip hop, all over. Not particularly danceable, yet too restlessly rhythmic and texturally startling to be ambient chill-out, this music might be dubbed art-tekno, since the only appropriate listener response is a sort of fascinated contemplation. Imagine a museum dedicated not to the past but the future, where you marvel at the bizarre audio-sculptures, let your ears wander through the sound-installations, and boggle at the noise contraptions as they go about their pointless, captivating tasks.

One of the earliest events dedicated to this new omni-genre, the Electronic Lounge, was actually situated in the bar at an art gallery, London’s ICA....

But here it's cast as art-for-art's sake experimentation, music without social energy behind it or a social function... whereas conceptronica is very much purposed with a polemical or even didactic point, is in some cases an activist attempt to reconnect experimental music and Society.