A cover version of ‘Avalanche‘ by Leonard Cohen. The song was arranged initially using Garageband on the iPad, and then ported to the desktop version to create the final arrangement, add the vocals and effects.

I’m fascinated by the ‘presets’ in musical software as a starting point for arrangement, I have been since my first electronic instrument. All the note patterns were initially produced from the preset picking and playing of the software – my robotic band of soulless automatons, relentlessly shifting from chord to chord at my command, never dropping a note. I like to force them to change instruments, and subject them to destructive audio processing, but they don’s seem to mind.

The song is notoriously difficult to play on the guitar, and the original is a piece of virtuosity which would be impossible to better. Instead I’ve taken the song to it’s menacing roots, the story of a detested lover at the end of a dying relationship.

Well I stepped into an avalanche,
it covered up my soul;
when I am not this hunchback that you see,
I sleep beneath the golden hill.
You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn, learn to serve me well.

You strike my side by accident
as you go down for your gold.
The cripple here that you clothe and feed
is neither starved nor cold;
he does not ask for your company,
not at the centre, the centre of the world.

When I am on a pedestal,
you did not raise me there.
Your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare.
I myself am the pedestal
for this ugly hump at which you stare.

You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn what makes me kind;
the crumbs of love that you offer me,
they’re the crumbs I’ve left behind.
Your pain is no credential here,
it’s just the shadow, shadow of my wound.

I have begun to long for you,
I who have no greed;
I have begun to ask for you,
I who have no need.
You say you’ve gone away from me,
but I can feel you when you breathe.

Do not dress in those rags for me,
I know you are not poor;
you don’t love me quite so fiercely now
when you know that you are not sure,
it is your turn, beloved,
it is your flesh that I wear.

12-5, each Saturday & Sunday in May, 2011

The Old Market, Hove. UK
http://theoldmarket.com/

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you can also:

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07790 650 959

The Consciousness Engine by Sam Hewitt and Shardcore is a series of visual and digital art installations distributed throughout the hidden spaces of The Old Market in Hove. It is a three dimensional map of an emergent consciousness making discoveries about its own nature, not as a child learning for the first time, but as an adult looking beyond assumptions of what is possible. At the core lies a constantly evolving computer generated mind.

The audience can explore this piece on their own terms and there are several opportunities to interact with and, for a time, become part of the exploration that the Engine is making into the nature of consciousness.

The Consciousness Engine will be the fifth collaborative project between the artists Shardcore and Sam Hewitt, all of which have explored the search for truth: spiritual, scientific, collective and individual.

blueberry hill by shardcore

UPDATE

Sacha Wheeler has created a wonderful video for the song:

“If this were a dictatorship it’d be a heck of a lot easier.
Just so long as I’m the dictator…”

Choose Tory, choose Liberal, choose Labour!
Choose you own fuckin’ jailor!
Democracy… you’re havin’ a laugh, innit?
They’re only in it to win it.
Can’t take another failure to acknowledge
What everybody already knows:
That’s the way it goes.
Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes….

Government by consent they tell me,
Well I don’t give mine.
Government by the mediocre pack, the grey,
the dead-from-the-neck-up party hacks.
Public schoolboys kissing arse.
Democracy, I wouldn’t wipe your arse with it.

Democracy…. Mediocracy…. A lawyer’s trick.
Every four years they choose their moment and offer you a little bite.
Then you get sentenced to Democracy of the Westminster kind.
No, not government by the tabloids or self-obsessed tv, Democracy!

Devoid of the honesty to admit that public opinion is the shit,
the lies they print between the tits and panty shots
and the lying banners of the red-rag tops. Democracy!

The first to go is freedom of speech.
I’m told I can’t complain or criticise
because I have defamed the memory of those who died.
Apparently granddad did his bit for this so-called Democrashit.

Yeah, right!

All those drafted Johnnies who didn’t go Over The Top
were consequently lined up and shot by their own side.
That’s how much your country loved your Dad,
I’ll not kiss your fucking flag!
Democracy, I wouldn’t wipe your arse with it.

And always you’re told to keep a hold of nurse
for fear of finding something worse.

Democracy, the so-called least-worse option.
An adman’s nightmare, can you imagine the pitch?
“The least-worse margarine”, man that’s a bitch!

Is that really the best we can ever get?
Accept what they call the best we’ve got?

And never try to better it except, of course,
through the gradualism of lying manifestos.
Small wonder that my cynicism grows
until I long for the day when nobody shows up for this sham anymore.

Choose Tory, choose Liberal, choose Labour!
Choose you own fuckin’ jailor!
Democracy… you’re havin’ a laugh, innit?
They’re only in it to win it.

So tick a box, or phone a friend, vote by mail
and indulge in the smug pretence that somehow it just might arrive.

Democracy, I wouldn’t wipe your arse with it.

There is an imbalance of opportunity inherent in cash, the rich have access to more of the world than the poor. Many people are obsessed with money, the ‘creation’ and acquisition of wealth in-and-of itself. This is, of course, an illusion – the actual value of money is a flexible agreement within a society mediated by the shifting tides of the economy. When that agreement of trust is compromised the ramifications can be substantial. Witness the recent crash in world markets, leaving this country, and many more, with unimaginably large debts, created in our name to prop up ‘the banking system’.

I started a campaign of subtly defacing currency about two years ago. Using a custom ink-stamp and UV ink, I have been tagging all the money that passes through my hands. To date, that’s now well into the thousands of pounds. The stamp itself is invisible, until illuminated under a blacklight – commonly used in this country to check for counterfeit notes.

This work is really about how we use these pieces of paper as markers of our passage through time. We spend to live, and live to spend. Each note we hand over gets us a little closer to death…

Here is the latest, House Husband.

UPDATE YouTube objected to me using Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’, and muted my video. The version you see above now features a shardcore original also called Burning Bush [click to download mp3]

I made several Bushfingers between 2005 and 2006, and of course the infamous ‘paint your own bushfinger’ video.