WHO#13 – Blood Music – GPS Poetics
CD/DL – limited edition of 200 copies
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1: There Is No Centre And There Never Was
2: I Like To Enjoy Myself
3: What About The Punk Thing
4: Play From Your Fucking Heart
5: Glitz Mercury
6: Zero Hours
7: Banjul Taiko
8: Voice Voice Voice
9: Ipomoea Violacea
10: The Table The Table The Table
“Hit record and mixed tracks from 2017-2018. Turns out I made an album, by mistake. old school BM guitar-&-drum machine, a Linn-Drum & a Fred Moten sample, Serge drone, FM synth kicks & a YMO interview & a robot, ‘shut up and listen to him play’, 808 acid funk, 280bpm Gescom memories, a taiko ramen break rounded & a just intonation poem - abc, the whole alphabet: performance from within fugitive study. I like to enjoy myself.” – Simon Pomery, London, 28 December 2018.
Blood Music is Simon Pomery: London-based, Irish-born producer, musician and maker of the “infinity-poem”. The name Blood Music is one English translation of the Japanese word “Kodo”: “mind-before-thought”, “children of the drum”, “music heard in the womb”, or rather, “blood music”. He has two 12”s on Diagonal Records – “Blood Music EP” (2013), and “Chicks/Badgering” (2015) – digis on dingn\dents and self-released works.
“GPS Poetics” is influenced by Pomery’s research into poetics and ethics: Fred Moten’s writings on poetry and improvisation from “In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition”, Joan Retallack on Gertrude Stein, John Cage and aleatoric composition in “The Poethical Wager”, and Édouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation”. The notion of “the centre” is exploded in favour of fugitive research into the relational. The result here is a live mix of cross-genre blood musics, given to that most freely proliferating, streamable, downloadable, capitalist communication of consumer taste: the DJ mixtape. Pomery’s use of text and voice in Blood Music continues his investigation of text-sound compositions of the 60s and 70s. His “infinity poems”, which are algorithmically produced for print as well as for his a/v show “SPEED READING WITH BLOOD MUSIC”, provide the visual art and language for his relational poetics.
Blood Music has played Berlin Atonal (Germany), Elevate (Austria) Les Urbaines (Switzerland), Ochiai Soup (Tokyo), Club Stomp (Osaka), La Cheetah (Scotland), UH Fest (Hungary), Les Atelier Claus (Belgium), Incubate (Holland), a water tank in Lewisham and at Cafe Oto in London, where Pomery curates PRAXIS (2016-now), a series of events devoted to text-sound compositions.
“I might use GPS Poetics to help navigate a world: I use the indefinite article for ‘world’ here, since every relation to the immediate entity of experience that we name ‘the world’, through sensual or digital experience, is different and relational; infinitely plural rather than singular. Via GPS Poetics one can critique indifferent gazes in the age of the Anthropocene, latent voices that argue ‘There are only surfaces’ through the mouth of their screens: ‘we are the Great Data Collector. Our violence is off the screen we speak through.’ I would suggest that context cannot be separated from global positioning systems.”
Reviews
Electronic Sound (UK):
The work of Irish sonic auteur Simone Pomery, Blood Music’s “GPS Poetics” operates on the frontier territories of improvisational text art and aggressive techno-informed electronics. It stitches together out-of-context vocal samples, wild synth sequences and beats that seem to accelerate of their own free will. Tracks like the opener “There Is No Centre And There Never Was” and the randomised, rapid switches of “Glitz Mercury” are urgent and persuasive, making for an unpredictable and vividly-executed album. [Mat Smith]
Norman Records (UK):
GPS Poetics is a banger. A brutal and often alienating work, it combines the natural and the synthesized into one seamless mix. The beats are chewier than a warm Curly-Wurly and provide an iron-hard bedrock for skittering, whirling synth textures, deep, aggressive bass and even some post-punk guitars on opening song ‘There Is No Centre and There Never Was’. This LP is one continuous live mix done by Simon Pomeroy, and is divided up into ten ‘songs’. For such a concise album, GPS Poetics is also a portrayal of excess. It’s the sound of instruments and textures being pushed that bit too far, beats played a little too fast. Mirroring the Édouard Glissant work, ‘Poetics of Relation’, that Blood Music was reportedly influenced by, this album too is a way of showing a world in transformation. It’s the sound of the human and the inhuman: Shellac guitars combined with Autechre-influenced beats, dry vocal samples repeated over and over to the point of digital incoherence.
According to the Tapeworm (Blood Music’s label) website, this album was ‘influenced by Pomery’s research into poetics and ethics’ such as works by Gertude Stein and the ‘Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition’, but don’t let this rather stuffy description put you off; these influences are always worn lightly and seem designed to inform the listeners’ appreciation of the music, rather than having affected the music itself. It’s an album that discusses weighty topics like consumerism and alienation, just take song titles like ‘What about the punk thing’, indicating a growing and deliberate distance from the lessons of the past, or ‘Zero Hours’, a reference to the UK’s current employment problems.
I love the progression of this album. The first song ‘There Is No Centre And There Never Was’ is very much an order of service for this album, outlining how the album gets gradually less and less coherent, losing any signposts or structure. Of course this is no seamless progression, but on the whole the album breaks down into lots of different, opposed musical themes and ideas. It’s a cauldron of wild and varying influences, taking in techno, breakcore, jungle, experimental, and even ambient towards the end. In a sentence, GPS Music is probably similar to what Merzbow listens to in order to get to sleep at night, and that is truly no bad thing at all.
