come here…go there

Pi presents a podcast and launch event for Five Years and Mutton Fist Press respectively. This iteration for the roaming arts organisation aims to essay on the ideas, themes and subjects surrounding the act of wandering, articulated through narratives, song, sound enquiry and monologue. Wandering suggests an element of passivity, a simple observational amble perhaps. The artists that have been invited to participate in this project demonstrate that this can be more complicated, political, humorous, thoughtful, melancholic, self-examining, useful and nuanced. The podcast and launch will be framed within a monologue narrative, 4 chapters in length. Pi has asked the invited artists to use these chapters as a starting point to build their own ideas from. Loose Baker starts things off by recounting the first chapter, only to be usurped by an automaton for the second. The upper hand is taken once more by Baker for chapter three, only to see this see-saw of narrative battle once more be taken by a robot for the finale. A draw? Phill Wilson-Perkin presents the sounds heard by a sculpture of Lenin, dead and buried under a car park of a north London housing estate. the sounds from a threatened estate shopping centre, whose miss-management may have driven its architect to suicide. the sounds heard by the surviving work of a communist sculptor all played through a drying approximation of his new material, Pericrete. Miezarute (Adam smith and Kieko Takahashi) perform itinerant troubadorial ballads. ‘Three songs of just passing by, seeing what catches the eye, forever missing the prize, with a merry band that sighs’. Hannah Dargavel-Leafe submits’ Round, About’ a looping landscape constructed from field recordings made on a walk between two roundabouts chosen as points on a map. Mark Siebert offers ‘stuck in the middle distance’, an analogue, wistfully melancholic perambulation of among other things ants on a beach, as well as a horse and lion engaged in conflict. Georgina Wesley proffers ‘Whats your background’, a series of works consisting of real-life experiences which have been juxtaposed with narrators which stereotypically would not be connected to the narratives which they are relaying. A series of manipulated monologues that concern race, identity and location. SamTaylor offers a new work asking questions of identity within football empires, gentrification and stepping into the afterlife. AE Hutch’s ‘Return Journey’ is an audio-visual mix-tape pulled from imaginings whilst wandering around “Tornado Sands” and the surrounding island. Tornado Sands is an imaginary place AE Hutch first visited on his album “Picnic At Tornado Sands” in 2009. The launch event will include sculptural, pictorial and moving image works to augment the aural offerings of the podcast. Lisa Cradduck has furnished the above content of the podcast with its very own cover image, a lino-print of William Boothe’s poverty map of London, crumpled into a illegible ball, ‘Cronic Want’. Gareth Berwyn has provided a lino cut/etching entitled ‘Dick on a Train’. Editions will be available to buy at the launch,