Electric Landlady by Malcolm Green

Malcolm Green (b. 1952) is a British artist, dancer, and publisher. His eccentric, liquid ideas seem to come with a smile. Or is it a wry grin? His colorful paintings, usually adorned with phrases, are little riddled plaques. Luckily, Malcolm is of the ilk of visual artists who also records audio works (this multiplicity is always interesting to me). Green’s own label Seedy CDs / Sieh Dies issued a number of CD-rs between 2000 & 2005, including many of his own works, along those by friends Jan Voss and a CD-r reissue of Dieter Roth’s classic Die Radio Sonate. Green is, in fact, a memeber of the Dieter Roth Academy - and furthermore gracefully ropes the pillars of Roth into his own artistic process.

When I approached Malcolm about republishing an album, Electric Landlady excited us both immediately. It is the sound of an Epson 90-dot matrix printer running sheets of the score for John Cage’s 4’33”. It is piercing, though I’ve uncovered a world of ricocheting meaning in between the lines. Green says, “this particular rendering of Cage’s handwritten score is in fact somewhat contrary to Cage’s intentions, because every performance on the Epson 90 will be more or less identical. For this reason I have titled it differently: ‘Electric Landlady’ – in honour of a felicitous misprint of the famous Hendrix record I once encountered in Italy.”

The subsequent tracks are beautiful, harmonic re-renderings of the printer’s voice, “played live without post-editing, …with the (accidental) addition of a booming guitar sound that came with the PC programme I was using.” Electric Landlady concludes with a jaw dropping DJ-remix of the printer, with airplanes and dogs flying high above a field of beats.

Founded in 2012 by Sean McCann.
Focusing on abstract and beautiful music.
Sometimes just one of those things and sometimes both of those things.

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