(Bella Union, 1999)Russell Mills is primarily known for his extensive album/book cover art as well as for his audio/visual art installations. For the second time, Russell has taken upon constructing a musical collage, calling upon his friends and clients from the ambient/art/experimental music world. Mills has taken their contributions and reshaped them with the help of his "sonic mirror" Tom Smyth. Working together as Undark, they've pieced together a darkly invigorating pastiche, Pearl + Umbra :
"There was never a game plan to assemble some kind of virtual supergroup, it just so happens that I've been extremely lucky to have worked with and for some of the most innovative and influential sound-shapers in contemporary musics from that past twenty years. Thankfully these musicians, many of whom have over the years become good friends, entered into the open-ended "collage" spirit of the project and generously provided me with a plethora of sounds. These ranged from 80 guitar "noises" from Kevin Shields to about 10 glorious melodic drifts from Roger Eno, to solid bass runs from Bill Laswell to a vocal track from David Sylvian, amongst others.
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Kurt Schwitters is a German artist who died in Ambleside and who is considered by many of the world's art critics/writers/academics as being one of the most important figures in 20th century art. Well he's been a hero of mine for years and I'd been thinking of his legacy - he worked in collage, abstract, made from the discarded everyday.
The other thing that kept fascinating me were questions of what collage is in contemporary life and culture. I kept finding a link between what Schwitters made and his writings, performances and poems (phonetic and more formal) and cultural norms of the last 40 years. The way that all contemporary forms are created and received/perceived are all prime examples of what Schwitters set into motion 70 -80 years ago. TV programmes, videos, news coverage, radio programmes, magazines, the use of sampling and other technologies in recording of sound,newspapers, novels, design, advertising, art, etc., - all are forms of collage; dislocated, disparate elements re-contextualised; all mediums capable of shifting in any direction chronologically from reality to the imagined, from dream state to known fact, from documented past to possible futures, etc".
The other thing that kept fascinating me were questions of what collage is in contemporary life and culture. I kept finding a link between what Schwitters made and his writings, performances and poems (phonetic and more formal) and cultural norms of the last 40 years. The way that all contemporary forms are created and received/perceived are all prime examples of what Schwitters set into motion 70 -80 years ago. TV programmes, videos, news coverage, radio programmes, magazines, the use of sampling and other technologies in recording of sound,newspapers, novels, design, advertising, art, etc., - all are forms of collage; dislocated, disparate elements re-contextualised; all mediums capable of shifting in any direction chronologically from reality to the imagined, from dream state to known fact, from documented past to possible futures, etc".
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