As my brother and I sped through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada on the Amtrak from San Francisco towards Colorado, we trialled the idea given to us by a friend that the band Grandaddy’s washed-out indie rock made complete sense when listened to the Californian countryside. It seems a trite idea to me as we plugged into the ipod, but as the wasted, sun scorched desert usurped the horizon, and civilization faded away in the distance, songs from 2000’s The Sophtware Slump took on a new resonance.
I am sure that the album’s tales of post-industrial fall out help its cosy partnership with a land recognisable as the final resting ground of LA and Las Vegas’ criminal unfortunates: the forgotten and fallow land of rattle snakes and circling ravens. And yet it seems to me that it is their sound that most approximately resembles these barren lands. Something about Jason Lyttle’s strained whisper, and the sparse, atmospheric guitars gleams across the sand and the tumbleweeds.
Similarly, though with very different affects, the drawn out riffs of Southern Californian luminaries Kyuss, as well as every other band ever connected with Josh Homme resonate in this landscape. The music of both these bands seem to sweep across the desert plains; their subdued undertow, the lethargic smoky ambience.
Ry Cooder’s slide guitar on the soundtrack of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas is, finally, for me the most successful exemplar of what I am talking about, removed from the shadow of cities.
Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas
In the opening scene where Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis wanders through a sublime American desert landscape, Cooder’s gliding, fragile guitar exclaims the desert’s secrets: death, longing and a world bigger than man. It sets the tone for Wender’s stunning portrayal or rekindled memories, and retraced steps. The history of America seeps through Travis’ journey.
In the novel Generation X by Douglas Coupland, one of the characters, Claire, exclaims exactly this wilderness to be the land she would find her one true love in, found by way of a dowsing rod. This analogy seems appropriately aware of the degree to which the desert might stand in for another world, removed from everything civilisation has made us think we are, or want.
***
And so I was surprised to find all of the above feelings and emotions stirred in a modestly sized and disproportionately shaped room in the city of London, where a charm of finches graced by and plucked a sea of Gibson Les Pauls in Céleste Boursier-Mougenot new exhibition in the Barbican’s Curve gallery space.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, From Here to Ear, 2007
c/o Jeni Rodger @ flickr
The exhibition has two parts, and they complement each other wonderfully. The first, darkened half of the curve space takes the viewer down a slatted wooden path through what appears to the expanding pupil to be a dusky desert scene, all sand and small scrub plants. Huge inverted silhouette projections of fingers sliding up and down guitar necks grace the walls which loom over you accompanied by an uncomfortable hum (an amplification of the sound created in the processing of the video signal itself, apparently). The darkness is foreboding, and yet the spidery hand movements appear operatic in their graceful meanderings.
c/o barbican_centre @ flickr
Following the wooden path further around the curve, the viewer breaks out of the darkness into a bright, too bright at first, and pleasant beach scene. The desert scene instead becomes habitable – or maybe playful –as the white walls exclaim abstraction: the homeliness and knownness of the gallery space which both allows and encourages an interaction with the space in which the aforementioned finches exist. In which they seem to have always existed. This is an axe-god’s private garden, the post-industrial oasis which will replace Soho’s Tin Pan Alley.
c/o barbican_centre @ flickr
And yet it is here that the guitars, reverb up to 11, echo the traces of the birds’ path with a sombreness and disquiet evocative of the darkness from whence one came.
The hum of video processing links into the misrecorded, awkward capturing of the birds’ fleeting footsteps. Evaporated moments resonate through the gallery, and machines whirl into action clunkily, desperate to catch up with the real moment they rely upon as their raison d’être.
The exhibition’s two halves resist and pull at one another. The dark and light appear both distrustful and somehow understanding of each other, and only in the light abstraction do we find solace. The mechanical, electronic, over processed world remains thoroughly unwanted. The oasis appears to blossom out of the dark before.
The birds appear a very simplistic but evocative rendering of life in control, and aware of technology, yet somehow blissfully seperate from the beast which attempted to become it.
The birds appear as us after tools have lost their functionality. We are left to enjoy the scraps in serenity.
***
Seeing the desert in California, I felt drawn to its mysteries.
Watching Paris, Texas, I feel kinship with Travis’ loss of self, and the aptness of his surroundings as a way of losing touch.
Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas
Reading Generation X, I wondered where Britain’s desert might be, awaiting me with open arms.
Listening to Kyuss or Grandaddy now, I dream of these open spaces.
At night, and in incomprehension, I can only shudder at what lies around us, and dream again, of that which might lie beyond.
ALMF 
