[the gathering…the chewing] + Walt Shaw
Geoff Bright - Roland Aerophone, Gillian Whiteley – digital keyboard
Walt Shaw – percussion, mainly on home-made instruments

This piece was produced under lockdown conditions, hence the digital instrumentation. On invitation, our long-time collaborator, Walt Shaw, recorded three short pieces of live improvised percussion. We responded by improvising live to Walt’s pieces and later created the video with source material from the rarely used basement at Eagle Works, a former steel foundry in Sheffield, UK where we have our studio. The piece develops our ongoing preoccupation with articulating what we are calling a ‘politicized practice’. The title is taken from Volume 1 of Ernst Bloch’s monumental rumination on utopia and the imagination, The Principle of Hope (originally published in Germany in 1959). We were inspired by the following from the section ‘Daily into the Blue’.

Later we reach out more confidently. Wish ourselves where things are named more
clearly…the homely den must never venture too far into the dream. It must remain a
place the lizard has not yet violated, the butterfly not yet threatened. From here
what we like doing best is playing and collecting window-views, deep and brief
glimpses into otherness…behind which the wished-for distance lies.

Geoff Bright & Gillian Whiteley [the gathering…the chewing]
March 2021

See www.bricolagekitchen.com for more on [the gathering…the chewing]. Also, and presciently, in 2009, AC Institute hosted the first manifestation of bricolagekitchen’s Pan-demonium project, consisting of a multimedia exhibition and accompanying publication exploring the notion of ‘pan-demons’, ‘pan-demics’ and all things ‘pan’ in the light of the global political, ecological and economic situation and viral forces of ‘contagion’ at the time.