Another great record from The Slate Pipe Banjo Draggers, the project of UK player Andy Rowe. Find Hour Film (NO LABEL) is a collection of 11 vague and drifty near-songs played in his endearing ramshackle DIY style, formed from acoustic guitar playing enriched with tape edits and samples – rhythm loops, added odd sounds, and found tapes, about which more shortly.
Interestingly, this new release has been published in a variety of shapes and formats – besides the cassette version, there’s the digital download and the minidisc editions, and the one-hour film that Rowe has put up on Vimeo and YouTube; it’s explicitly intended as the “moving picture” version of the album, and not simply a collection of accompanying music videos. What I’m trying to get across is the artist’s aim to move towards a single, cohesive work of art that can simultaneously exist across several different platforms. He even offers limited-edition (one copy only) artefacts in the form of a cassette inside a refurbished Walkman player, and a VHS print of the film (good luck finding a player for it). Part of his strategy here has been to repurpose old media by re-recording over it, a familiar trick perhaps to anyone who was alive during the 1980s, but it’s also part of the general aesthetic that was used to create Find Hour Film in the first place. It turns out that Andy Rowe is a tremendous hoarder of old stuff, including audio and video recordings on just about every format you can think of, even including Super 8 mm film and (probably obsolete) dictaphone recordings and home video camera tapes and discs.
In collecting this “large personal archive” as he calls it, he reminds me very much of Mark Vernon, the UK composer who is likewise drawn to old and forgotten recordings, snapping them up from market stalls and tables wherever he finds this material on his international travels, and repurposing them in his electro-acoustic compositions to bring back the voices from the past. Conversely, Rowe may not have much of an agenda here beyond the very process itself of “renewal, recycling and regeneration”, and all of Find Hour Film is a testament to the power of mixing up and repurposing these found sources, a work of collage and bricolage on a grand scale, all of these odd sounds and voices floating freely in the framework of his musical chuntering and trundling loops. Even the musical components join in this game; it seems a good deal of his musical instruments were found at car boot sales and charity shops, pre-loved devices and orphans just waiting to find their true home in the hands of caring foster parent Rowe. In all these tracks, it’s the voice fragments that really hit home for this listener – spoken word clips that stand on the verge of turning into rather poignant or fragile statements, a form of rough poetry. It might be that none of them quite deliver on that promise, even with powerful titles such as ‘Bird of Death is Singing to You’, but the general cumulative effect of the set passes on impressions at a subliminal level, saying something to us about the sadness and banality of everyday life.
A unique work, and one that abides closely to its intended themes of recycling, emerging as a coherent and self-contained artistic statement. From 7th June 2022.