Claams

Jim Colquhoun and Jamie McNeill have been walking out into denuded landscapes and talking shite for over twenty years now. Usually a camera is turned on accidentally in someones pocket and their cod-psychogeographical  drivel is captured through sheer incompetence. The fractured, purposeless and ill-considered invective is frankly embarrassing and putting some kind of awful didgeridoo-a-like pan pipes over the top was/is a risible idea which nevertheless has a certain rough charm! They share a passion for landscapes that others might consider marginal at best and have a predilection for a certain kind of open-ended poetics carried out in situ using whatever broken bits of language or technology come to hand. Join them as they mutter over mushrooms, talk to the animals, fondle the stones, take luncheon amidst a bog, howl in a tunnel, lose themselves then find themselves again and take stock of the changing nature of landscape in places that quite literally repel your average rambler. So, a collage of inane chatter, warped soundscapes, weather, squelchy field recordings and Moor ore.

THE INLAND CASTAWAYS (2021)

Cru Servers - Bogged Embrace (ISLE013)

Cru Servers - Sacramental Lettuce (ISLE013)

ATOM presents: 
BLACK POWDER
 Delineating the Blasted Peninsula. 
On the trail of Alfred Nobel. 
A work of docufiction.

BLACK POWDER

ATOM presents:
THREEPWOOD. 
The Redacted Stones.
A docufiction in eight fragments.

THREEPWOOD

ATOM presents:
THE BURIED CATHEDRAL.
A dauner along the spiral vortex.
A short work of docufiction. 



the pagan gods are not so long dead

THE BURIED CATHEDRAL

Produced as part of a co-commissioning residency exchange with Radiophrenia, Glasgow and WORM, Rotterdam. Recorded at Worm Sound Studios and a bungalow in Wielewaal, June 2023. 

Colquhoun & McNeill found themselves locked in an airless cellar in Rotterdam for what seemed like an eternity. Surrounded by a bewildering array of vintage synths that neither artist had any idea how to switch on never mind play and as their incessant bickering lurched ever closer to the daily fistfight Colquhoun babbled gibberish into a broken cassette recorder whilst McNeill attempted to electrolyse his frontal lobe and not for the last time. 

The trick seemed to be to record everything all the time as every five hours or so a dying synthesiser would vomit a few seconds of barely salvageable audio, its circuits fried by a decrepit power cable or the overzealous application of some Space Echo. From these fragments they were able to construct a gnostic grammar from which to mimic the machines they consistently tried to destroy. Colquhoun had become particularly skilled in apeing the high end screech of a badly patched ARP 2600. 

A guitar lead coils itself slowly into a gordian knot like a snake that can’t quite stomach eating its own head, the calcified circuit board reroutes itself as self-immolating electro-pictograms and in the over-defined flicker and glare of the studio lighting Colquhoun mistakes a toaster for a vintage mic spending yet another wasted afternoon whispering enochian incantations into the heating element.

Benjamin Furly's Library

A live-to-air performance commissioned as part of Radiophrenia, a week-long radio art station broadcasting from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts in April 2015.
www.radiophrenia.scot
‘The Balderwick Codex’ by Jim Colquhoun and Jamie McNeill – “A New Statistical Account of the Parish of Balderwick and Environs. Including: a Sucking Bog, an Importunate Erection, a Dead Dad, Fish Slaughter, Two Pricks and a Man, a Worthy Man, in Happy Mood, Conversing with a Fly.”

Jim Colquhoun & Jamie McNeil - The Balderwick Codex (excerpt)

Two hours of 'what the fuck was that?!' from our man in Berlin via Cambridge and his musical kindred spirit. Together they are No Frills and they run a series of parties at About:Blank where they offer an experience not too dissimilar to what we at 12th Isle strive to embody. To some it may be an infuriating cacophony, to others it is a joyous and life affirming exploration into the outer realms of sonic possibility (an exploration often combined with large quantities of alcohol). The mix they have prepared for our forecast series moves swiftly through avant-garde noise, traditional folk song, downtempo dub abuse and neck-snapping breakbeat excursions in a fashion which we can't help but admire.

Forecast 014: No Frills

°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸NeW yEaR PaRtY HiGh NrG°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,

J. P. McNEILL
1/2 Cru Server
GLASGOW,
STRATHCLYDE


Claams

ESTAITIS

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