Little Songs of the Mutilated, the music collective behind the show, hopes to bring strange and genre-bending avant-garde sounds to a wider audience with a show that’s both challenging and fun.
Emerging from the French surrealist scene, Exquisite Corpse is a game in which artists collaborate to write a sentence or draw a picture, none of them aware of what the full work looks like until all have contributed. The resulting pieces can be absurd or sinister, amusing or simply confusing. Justin Ashworth, curator of the Exquisite Corpse show, is perhaps the first to successfully apply the game to music, using online file-sharing.
“You never really get the full context of what the piece you’re working on is,” explains Ashworth. “The end result is sometimes beautifully consistent, and sometimes it’s a mega genre collage, with people chopping and changing really quickly.”
Ashworth’s live version of musical Exquisite Corpse works only with electronic musicians – headphones allow the performers to hear select pieces of the work in progress while remaining unaware of its full structure.
Little Songs of the Mutilated brings together performers from all walks – from jazz trumpeter Gemma Horbury to keyboardist Adam Rudegeair of funk group Lake Minnetonka – and compels them to collaborate. The collective’s raison d’être, says Ashworth, is to unite the noisecore artists, avant-garde jazz composers and other experimental musicians, usually isolated in their own musical subcultures, under one tent.
“It’s about bringing together a whole bunch of people who are unique artists in their own right, but with a similar passion for trying things and putting them together in ways that are challenging or unexpected,” says Ashworth “The keywords around it would be: community, play, experimentation.”
Processing at the Exquisite Corpse show will be done by Mat Blackwell, also known as A Demon Sheen, the artist behind the collective’s surrealist album cover art.
The collective will also be premiering what they call “speed dating”: a performance that has an ensemble strive to improvise music on-the-fly while also swapping out members, one by one. For Ashworth, this type of improvisational game is more engaging than the most polished and technically accurate performance of a scripted piece.
After two Exquisite Corpse-style musical games, the show will close with a performance of Cobra, an improvisational musical work created by Downtown music pioneer John Zorn. Since Zorn has never published a comprehensive explanation of the rules for playing Cobra, Ashworth had to sift through hours of YouTube performances of the piece to reconstruct a usable set of rules.
Produced without Zorn’s oversight, this will be a “renegade” performance of Cobra, Ashworth explains:
“It’s our Cobra, not his,” he says. “We’re not trying to recreate a ‘Downtown New York in the ‘80s’ sound. We’re trying to express the local community’s personality and make our version of Cobra. The rules are the same, but the personalities and the playing style are completely different.”
Ashworth began the Little Songs of the Mutilated collective as an antidote to the stiflingly academic atmosphere of his honours year. Now, he hopes that Exquisite Corpse will show Melbourne that experimental music can be as fun and entertaining as standard rock and pop.
“Music and sound art can be so serious and, at times, academic,” says Ashworth. “But it can be really hilarious watching musicians replace other musicians in a band, and there’s definitely a sense of engagement that I think anyone can be entertained by. You get to see the raw fuck-ups happen, when people have to adapt … The playfulness of it makes it quite a spectacle to watch.”
