Demonstrable Progress (FARPOINT RECORDINGS FP082) is credited to Brian Duggan and David Bremner, but the audible part of the record is actually played and performed by Bremner. His short 9.09 min work has been pressed up here as a 12-inch record which plays at 45RPM. And it’s in orange vinyl too. Well, the wider work includes a video component, made by Duggan, and it’s making an artistic comment on the Sellafield nuclear power plant.
This nuclear power plant in Cumbria was probably expected to be a source of cheap and clean energy when it was set up after the war, but the 1957 incident soon put a stop to that optimism. Matter of fact, the plant even changed its name from Windscale, in what I suppose was an attempt at improving public relations by whitewashing, after that very name became associated with “nuclear incidents” as surely as Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Well, it’s decommissioned now and unfit for humans to go anywhere near it; Brian Duggan’s video depicts the robots and machines that have been sent in to clean up the mess, and their sole job is to process toxic waste. The orange glow of this record is starting to appear more sinister by the minute. Apparently Duggan’s film is full of underwater footage and we are invited to praise the aesthetic charms and nauseating colours of this “quasi-impressionist landscape”, while remaining mindful of the danger and the disaster involved.
Bremner’s music – played by four hands on the piano – is the musical soundtrack to this video work. It’s not exactly experimental music, nor is it especially impressionistic, if we’re looking for a classical music analogue to the murkoid footage. In fact the music is quite precise, resembling a Satie motif going slightly off the rails. If any living musician deserves this particular commission, David Bremner fits the bill perfectly – he grew up in Cumbria, Sellafield was part of the landscape for him, and his father even worked there as a nuclear physicist. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this record, but at least it’s original; a musician coming to it from noise or industrial genres would have come up with a predictably grim and apocalyptic soundtrack if given the same commission, whereas Bremner’s music is more ambivalent, full of mixed reactions, its emotional register not entirely clear. (29/11/2024)