nicol

album titled 'inside birds outside', a person on all fours is pushing and gathering seeds with their face

album titled 'outside birds inside', a small pile of sorted seeds, the number 5, circled in charcoal

I've uploaded two new albums to bandcamp. Recordings of performance art and noise, exchanging roles of lead voice and atmosphere/environment.
nicolnicolnicol.bandcamp.com
(I like them!)

It's astonishing. There's a section (many sections) of Bedouin Hornbook which writes the internal sense of improvising in music better than anything I've read. Nobody does music in language like Mackey!

Last summer I was working on the top floor of a cultural centre in London. Heard horns and drums from the street below, and familiar/beloved melody drifting up. Orchestra of children and teenagers marching through the street playing this piece.
As beautiful as it gets, and so needed.

Louise is an endlessly generous and loved member of music and sound (and right-in-between) community, and could use some support.

Stunned at how bad as both music and performance this was. Constant mugging to the audience. People pretend-meditating on stage while he pounded out the melody as fast as he could. Cheap macho tasteless shit, made from a piece I love.

The lighting and the big mirror looked alright.

This coward is speed running Vexations

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nicol (nicol)

Six new albums of miniatures from 2024 at nicolnicolnicol.bandcamp.com

I think was trying to find out my tics and preoccupations, either towards purging or deepening. Sharing things (outside of performance) felt quite unpleasant for a while and this is a try at doing that again.

For those interested, I'm hearing Wednesday 26th, 11am outside parliament!

@dis-ppl-protest.bsky.social will have more.

I love the sounds of bodies in performance, the way the space shapes and is shaped by activity, and everybody in attendance tacitly (or not) contributing to the presence of the moment.
Often close to silent, but luminous.

The Live Art Listener in the Retrospective Present - Contemporary Theatre Review In this evocative article with accompanying audio piece, Nicol Parkinson explores the use of sound recording as a documentary technology for live art.

I wrote about listening back to the sounds made by performance art, for Contemporary Theatre Review.

www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2024/the-liv...

There’s still time for Willie Nelson to record a cover of Black And Brown Blues.

Eugene Chadbourne / We Keep The KKK In Line YouTube video by Observations of Deviance

Eugene Chadbourne / We Keep The KKK In Line (1988)

youtu.be/KgteLmiI7ew?...

Hopefully not

All of the most significant, joyous and impactful experiences I’ve had hearing music in person has been accompanied by a moment of reflex concern: ‘DO they actually know what they’re doing?’

Black Eyed Susan, by Maher Shalal Hash Baz from the album Live At Forestlimit 2017

Ecstatic shortcut.

addendumrecs.bandcamp.com/track/black-...

a copy of Straight Up, Without Wings, Joe McPhee's memoir, balancing on a stack of CDs.

I can't recommend Joe McPhee's new memoir (via Corbett vs Dempsey) highly enough. A deeply beautiful man with a unique place in sound and music.

Steve Beresford in Primary Sources magazine, summer 1979.

(minimal pressure melody: 24/11/24)