Being & Nothingness

 Issue #56 of TQ has just been published. I urge you to buy a copy, for many reasons, not simply because there is a complementary, complimentary zine about Shunyata Improvisation Group included. In that additional publication, I have these words about Sunyata Improvisation Group included, which makes me very proud and humble -:

Shunyata Improvisation Group: An Overview

The Shunyata Improvisation Group (we’ll go with SIG for short) have become a central part of my cultural existence in 2022. I first heard tell of them last October when they announced a free gig on a Sunday afternoon at the Unitarian Church on Ellison Place. I was all set to go and then, three days before, Mike Ashley sold Newcastle United, necessitating my attendance at St James’ Park instead. I would point out that sport and music are of equal cultural validity, so there was no way I’d exchanged the aesthetic for the demotic.

As a result, I was forced to wait until Auntie Joy 2 in Ryton at the back end of March before I got to see SIG. It was an epochal moment. I was stunned. I was captivated. They converted me in a house of the Anglican Communion. I nurtured my love of their somnambulistic, pastoral fragility, accompanying them in early May at the Late Shows in Cobalt Studios. Initially, I produced words; half scripted and half improvised, then I sat in on acoustic guitar while the TQ paterfamilias strutted like a pacific James Brown doing “Please! Please! Please!” on a 1960s telecast.

Subsequently, SIG appeared at the first TQ Lit & Phil soiree. They began with 2 minutes silence, then produced 28 further ones of bucolic, meditative pulchritude. I adored them even more when I discovered the improvisational quartet have practices. A discussion led to the discovery that these exploratory sessions end with the group sitting down to a meal together. I don’t think I understand what the zen principles they build on actually are, but I’m keen to find out. I am a devoted follower who travelled to my childhood haunt of Saltwell Park on July 10^th to see them perform.

Shunyata Improvisation Group: In Saltwell Park

Moving across Tyneside by public transport is an arduous process at the best of times. Trying to get from High Heaton to Low Fell on a Sunday that is simultaneously the hottest day of the year, the Mouth of the Tyne Festival and rugby league’s Magic Weekend makes it into an ordeal, as it takes the unbearable static stasis of delayed or packed buses and dials it up one louder than most people can bear. And yet there is beauty to be found among such tribulations.

Entering Saltwell Park from the Bensham entrance on a day when the verdant green grass of the northern field appears polished as it falls away to the boating lake where the water glistens like glass, the world is fixed and fabulous. As children, perhaps as many as a dozen of us would walk up and over Windy Nook Bank from Felling, feeling the ground quickly slip away as we descended through Deckham and Low Fell, anticipating the joys of a visit to Saltwell Park on breathless July afternoons like this one, whiling away the interminable six weeks off school in boisterous play and heat hazed contemplation in the baking heat of our early-70s adolescence. Half a century later, the floral clocks and statues commemorating the good deeds of long dead local dignitaries remain, hinting at a bygone era of sepia-tinged civic pride and Sabbath promenades providing solemn recreation for working families, away from the terraced grime and grinding poverty of industrial labour and insanitary living conditions they endured on the other 6 days of the week.

We walked the top path, eschewing the delights of Pets’ Corner, but skirting and admiring the rebuilt splendour of Saltwell Towers, the genteel tearoom, the privet maze, the bordering crematorium and thence to the splendid rose garden where, in stifling heat where the only breeze comes from the flapping wings of the resident doves, flying in languid formation, Shunyata Improvisation Group hold court. Initially, the four constituent members had wended their own madrigal ways through the woods, converging as guru shepherds and method teachers in the garden, though we’d missed that. I’d last heard music in the park in July 1981; a Gateshead Council sponsored Festival of Youth had included a Battle of the Bands talent contest, where Total Chaos had headlined, promoting their debut 7”; There Are No Russians in Afghanistan. No such Kabullshit today…

SIG were organic and beautiful; at one with nature. Gently they coalesced with the laughter of scootering children, the excited yelps of overheating puppies, the lowered breathing of shade-hungry pensioners in straw fedoras and the clicking shutter of a Hasidic cameraman. Sounds of nature and sounds of nurture. I fell asleep in my lover’s arms as the band played on; the rise and fall of her breathing acting as an amniotic, percussive soundtrack. This was Dirty 3 on quaaludes. This was a good day. This was an honour to attend.

Shunyata Improvisation Group: On Disc

According to the discredited workerist theories of Trotskyist cultural analysts, Northern proletarian males have always seen their job, regional identity and social class as the most important influences on their expressions of self-image, as these things give them a pervasive sense of empowering masculinity. Aesthetic preferences, positive attitudes to education and learning as a whole, as well as issues relating to personal sexuality tend to be of greater significance for those males identifying more with soi-disant petit bourgeois values. Such pleonastic opinions are, of course, errant nonsense, especially as they vouch aesthetic primacy for the likes of Sleaford Mods, like a contemporary version of latter period Cardew with an accompanying cider carry out, over anything experimental or non-linear in approach.

Such bovine, testosterone-tainted, autodidacts would hate the Shunyata Improvisation Group and their natural affinity to the non-hierarchical, impossibilist Socialist tradition, for they produce music that is democratic, egalitarian and free from any hint of self-aggrandisement. Nowhere is this more accessible in their oeuvre that the 2020 CD Pivot Moments. Recorded at Heaton’s First Avenue studios by a previous iteration of SIG that included Kate Oswell and Tobias Sarra, as well as NofC and trubba not, Pivot Moments is a modest banquet of almost carnal sensory pleasures. This is not just Come Taste the Band #2; it is almost an invitation to Taste Cum with the Band such is the ecstatic gourmandism found in the words.

Pivot Moments, while suffused with smatterings of pastoral, contemplative guitar phrasings and the gentle interplay of sound and silence, is an astonishingly rich half hour of spoken recollections. The two complementary mixes of the same piece, by trubba not and Joe Murray from Posset, turn mundane memories into gnomic aphorisms. It features human voices of those involved, narrating, reminiscing, telling tales during lockdown. The focus is pleasure, based on David Howcroft’s diagram intended for noting the sensory responses of the reader to any pieces of music. SIG talk to us of the feel of sand between your toes, the true taste of honey, losing yourself in a dusty book or clambering over waste ground. Infinite moments of minimal, private joy we can all relate to, because they are truly pivotal experiences. This is an addictive disc; I return to it repeatedly, seeking out every nuance of sound, experience and meaning, using it as an aid to introspective thought and contemplation. Truly beguiling.

I love the Shunyata Improvisation Group, live and on CD. The sheer euphoria found within the second piece, Refracted Intention, makes one return to this disc, again and again. It has changed me. I often play it when I leave the house so it can change the fabric of my home for the better.