Body with Organ - a radio play released under the name Hastings of Malawi.
Peter Arthur Desmond MacCarthy was an english linguist, phonetician and writer born in 1912. These are some of the words that he recorded.
Explanatory video for context.
Stethescope, brush, seizure.
Sound painting for human voice with randomly produced sine waves.
Duration 25 minutes.
HOM9 The Humanoid Robot That Can Read Braille - a 25 minute sound poem. HOM refers to Hastings of Malawi and HOM9 denotes the ninth album released under this name.
Hastings of Malawi playing live in Münster, Germany
Duration 10 minutes.
For pieces of metal, Formula 1 car engines, jet engines and the space shuttle.
Duration 37 minutes.
The eighth recording released under the name Hastings of Malawi - a digital only release available on the Papal products label
The random interaction between an upside down steel pan, three ping pong balls and a desk fan combined with the effects of rust and decay on half the insides of a piano and two cymbals played by a set of small motors.
An induction microphone amplifies the sound of the capacitor in a camera flash as it charges and discharges. The rotating steel drum in the middle moves the balloons and triggers a microswitch which sets off the flash unit. The sound is transmitted through an amplifier and speaker onto the pen. The drum rotates the manuscript paper. The device writes its own score as it plays.
Randomly activated clusters of organ pipes.
For cello and metal sheets featuring Bruno Guastella - cello and Aya Kasai, Lee Riley, Rob Shackleton, Veronica Cordova and John Grieve - metal.
When building a new supermarket in Hackney, London, Tesco Stores and Hackney Council commissioned a public sound art work as part of the development. The supermarket was built on a site where formerly there had been a street (Chalgrove Road). The work was an oral history of the missing road made from interviews with people who had lived on or near it between 1910 and 1970.
The map shows where the street used to exist
The audio file is an edited selection of some of the oral history. The Installation involved six audio speakers arranged around the site with random selections of oral memories played on each one evoking voices from the past that floated around the space.
(De)composition for saxophone and angle grinder.
CD recording of Hastings of Malawi live at the Klang30 festival in Vienna in 2023 available on the Klanggalerie label
The legs of these stacked tables have been cut, hammered and welded to create organ pipes. Air is blown down the pipes from a fan inside the table tops. Each of the twelve cut legs plays a different note of the chromatic scale.
A small cymbal was struck and then a car horn was attached to a car battery for 30 seconds, the cymbal was struck and the horn connected again - these two events were repeated until the audience left - Holborn, London
Saxophone blown by vacuum cleaner.
Two sixths of a piano with resonators attached with the insides of another whole piano, a steel sheet, three cymbals and a bicycle wheel.
A recording of all theses devices was used as the sound for this sound painting for projector and speakers. The video was derived from a fireworks display.
Duration 35 minutes.
Choreological Exchanges. The fourth Hastings of Malawi vinyl LP. A dance that takes place within the chain, or pipe, that is brain - mouth - telephone - telephone exchange - telephone - ear - brain. It combines the sounds of mechanical telephone exchanges, the voices of telephone engineers, digital voice synthesis and the voice of Yuri Gagarin. Released on the SubRosa label.
Decayed magnetic tape recordings of improvisation for tenor saxophone and car horns.
Old recording of tenor saxophone improvisation - speed changes created by magnetic tape slipping on playback device.
For sound sculpture and orchestra with film by John Grieve, Moholy-Nagy and ManRay.
Two minute Hiss Poem.
Duration 32 minutes
Nine saxophone improvisations.
duration 38 minutes
Eleven improvisations for alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, clarinet, snare drum violin and voice.
Ethnochoreological study.
John Grieve baritone saxophone, Martin Hackett synthesiser. (3 minutes).
Breathing Pipes (out of phase) - combines the work for thirty pipes with the work for small organ pipes pictured above
Duration 10 minutes.
Synthetic speech poetry. Randomly generated letters fed into a speech synthesiser and interpreted as Swahili and Dutch.
"Groan tubes" attached to bicycle wheels. Groan tubes are sounded by a reed which moves inside a plastic pipe thus changing its length and the frequency of the note produced.
Duration 25 minutes.
The seventh recording released under the name Hastings of Malawi - a digital only release available on the Papal products label
An electric motor drives a bicycle wheel which raises and drops a large hammer which in turn vibrates a steel sheet. The piece may be a version of La Monte Young's composition X (any integer - in this case 41) for Henry Flynt from 1961 which consists of an instruction for a performer to repeat a loud, heavy sound every one to two seconds as uniformly and as regularly as possible for a long period of time.
The three instruments pictured being played at a festival of futurist noise music.
For groan tubes, smoke alarms, car horns and marshall stacks.
Club Disobey - London.
Duration 35 minutes.
The fifth Hastings of Malawi LP. Individually lathe cut transparent acetate disks presented in a transparent cover. Sounds of electromagnetic induction, sounds of internal combustion engines with clarinet, saxophone and voice interpretations of numerical data transmitted between Mission Control and astronauts during the NASA Apollo and Mercury space missions . Released on the Papal Products label. Available here
Duration 30 minutes.
30 steps towards a. The sixth composition released under the name Hastings of Malawi. A Self help method. Released on CD by the Papal Products label. Available here
Piece for dustbin, half a bicycle, two electric motors and twelve saws.
Two resonating devices
duration 10 minutes
For 52 saxophones. Overtone interaction. Incorporates the full normal range of the baritone, tenor and alto saxophones. With digitally created loops. The notes are layered systematically - each ascending tone is faded in at five second intervals and then faded out in the same order after a few minutes.
Twelve consecutive chromatic notes on the tenor saxophone recorded to quarter inch magnetic tape and spliced into loops with tape in the traditional way. Mixed by Clive Graham. Released on the Paradigm Discs label.
Duration 4 minutes.
Talking to Don about bigfoot.
5 minute excerpt
Collaboration with French sound artist Christian Renou (aka Brume) released on the Rotorelief label in 2017 available here
Nihil Unbound is one of the most unsettling albums I have. Given that John Grieve’s primary listed instrument is a tenor saxophone, such a statement sounds incredulous. Yet this is menacing. Animal, dark violence soaks this black vinyl. Hold it up to the light, and a glimmer of deep red leaks through.....The sound is a smart intersection of digital, analogue, acoustic and instrument sources. There is bashing about but almost as if happening haphazardly around you. This melds with other, more immediate sounds and provides a truly uninviting structural ambience....Much of what might be mistaken for synthesizer underlayment is, I believe, processed and manipulated low saxophone notes. Noise saturates. Voices growl intermittently. Whatever slight tweak, processing, or recording acumen used turns them truly demonic.
Myrtie Lake - www.special-interests.net
A steel sheet vibrated by a motor and manipulated by other motors and a hand saw - recorded at the BBC with sound artists Clive Graham, Clive Hall and Michael Prime. Mixed by Clive Graham. Released on the Paradigm Discs label.
The interaction between overtones created by small low voltage motors with strips of tape attached used to vibrate cymbals and piano strings and with a small weight added to vibrate a steel sheet. (the piece builds over a period of two minutes and then continues for 16 minutes before fading out over two minutes)
From Windchest to Pipes as Metaphor - a microphone travels along the insides of a church organ from the windchest where the air is produced to the pipes.
Two organ pipes of slightly different lengths around eight foot tall. The audio was recorded by moving a microphone from side to side in front the mouths of the pipes. The sound is in the low frequency range so may not be heard on mobile phone or laptop speakers.
Five improvisations for clarinet, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones. Total 17 minutes.
Solo baritone saxophone seen from the inside.
Recordings of Individual organ pipes combined as a digital evocation of the inside of a church.
Flourescent tubes - Hackney 1987.
For piano and electric motors
For sewing machine, electric motor, guitar bass drum and hihat cymbal.
All albums released as Hastings of Malawi can be seen/heard/bought here.
The first was the 1981 "classic masterpiece" album by the "legendary" Hastings of Malawi who were John Grieve, David Hodes and Heman Pathak.
The album was released in 1981 as Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth by Hastings of Malawi on the Papal Products label.
Reissued in 2017 on the Belgian SubRosa label on red vinyl, just like the original pressing and then again on gold/black vinyl. Described as dada, underground, post-industrial, concrete music, DIY, punk. Available from SubRosa
Features Pat Simmons who was the voice of the UK speaking clock between 1963 and 1984.
"Rarely has an album so consistently made me question what the actual fuck is going on" - The Wire
....a heavily beguiling session of dadaist lo-fi concrète, coruscating haywire synths, the speaking clock and lots of acousmatic clangour ...Strikingly future-proofed by way of its outlandish, disclocated temporality and punkish disregard for convention, - untrammelled, explorative madness. ...one of the wildest records you’ve never heard before. - Boomkat
Followed by "Visceral Underskinnings" -
The inclusion of the word ‘visceral’ in the title of Visceral Underskinnings is apt. This two-track, forty-minute record toes the line between music and sound art as well as incorporating blasts of pure noise. Machines malfunction, strange voices chant, seasick computer melodies ghost in and out of the mix, and structurally the sides have plenty in common with the surreal collage of the album’s artwork. It’s a challenging record, but persevere and you’ll realise that Hastings Of Malawi have given us a Dadaist masterpiece. - Bleep.com
Two organ pipes, two cymbals and dustbin. MOMA Oxford UK
