Life as Art

France, 2006, the seemingly infinite weekend. But is this experience of rural France any more than just a merry-go-round of swimming in the pool, reading De Botton, eating great food (and fresh baguette of course) and drinking unfeasibly cheap wine?

Well, just maybe it is. Maybe.

Art has begun to happen. In fact, art is starting to weave itself into the lives of the 6 of us here (Sam said a fond farewell yesterday, leaving Sayriol, Julie, Jules, Abe, Dave and I). Our activities drift almost subconsciously from sitting, talking and drinking wine, to recording cello tracks, arranging 5-part vocal harmonies and, in the case of last night, making a piece of music into a whole evening. Let me explain,

Following dinner, we decided to make some music collectively. Two stereo microphones were set up in the barn and we musicians drifted towards a particular instrument (the barn is litttered with the equipment and tools of music in the same way that bedrooms are littered with old underwear) that took our fancy. Making music in this way requires faith and a suspension of disbelief. It inevitably starts sounding weak and laboured as we struggle with hackneyed musical ideas.

But given enough time (this particular recording lasted for an hour and twenty minutes) things develop and grow, and without knowing it, and certainly without anyone's control, you find yourself stamping out a rhythm on the dinner table or mournfully bending a guitar string in and out of tune. Our improvisation included a cello, a piano, some congas, a guitar, several beer bottles (now broken!), assorted wine glasses and mugs, a very long and noisy roll of brown paper, the heavy metal parts of a socket set and three matches, struck directly into the microphone.

As 'art-house' and 60's as this sounds, it certainly fely real enough, the mixture of wine, beer and moroccan hash stirring my mind variously into tribal frenzies and apocalyptic funeral dirges that I never anticipated.

So, real or put-on, music or noise, art or nonsense, it was an experience that left me breathless. Listening to the track afterwards was like discovering that someone had been recording while I was dreaming: "Oh yeah, this bit was weird" or "This doesn't sound familiar. Where was I at this point? Which of these crazy sounds are mine?". All very strange.

Oh, and there's the possibility of a song in the more traditional sense of mine will be posted on the beatabet website at some point. I'll blog it up when it happens.

That's all for now. We're off into a small French town tonight to watch the World Cup final. It'll be my first experience of anything actually French!

Love Rob