Familiar things

8 February 2023

So much is so familiar here – I’ve heard the accents a thousand times before, seen the Starbucks and Krispy Kremes on their imperial advance into British culture, we have motorways and car culture back home too. And yet at the same time so much is alien – endless ads on the freeway: ‘WRECK?’ ‘Life is short. Get a divorce.’ ‘There IS evidence for God.’ Who’d have thoughts to call a supermarket ‘Harris Teeter or ‘Food Lion’.

On the drive to the Harris Teeter for lunch I spy a giant brick building, maybe 16 stories high, singularly towering over a flat horizon. I ask if anyone knows about it – Greg does. Apparently it is a giant empty hotel, the Heritage Grand Hotel, which was built as part of a failed theme park. Possibly part of the reason for its subsequent failure is that this particular theme park’s theme was God. A God-themed theme park!!! Yes sireee. A local hugely successful televangelist, Jim Bakker, made millions from his TV evangelism. As the story goes, God told him that his next project shoiuld be to build a Christian theme park, and so he did. It became the third largest theme park in the world, with five million visitors per year.

Eventually though the theme park collapsed around him in a cataclysm of disasters - he was mired in controversy for drugging and raping a secretary, which began to put punters off, and then tax fraud lawsuits and a hurricane (an act of god?) which ripped apart half of the buildings on the site conspired to put an end to ‘Heritage USA’. The great big towering Heritage Grand Hotel still stands, empty and looming over the flat wide terrain, a monument to the strange and yet hugely powerful marriage of boom and bust capitalism and religion which finds a home in this part of the world.

Jim Bakker ended up in jail, serving only five years of his 45 year sentence for fraud. He got back on the horse, and now prophesise the coming end of days, and does a successful line in promoting emergency survival products.

Super Bowl

7 February 2023

Apparently the superbowl is coming up next week. ‘Oh I don’t really pay attention to it – I follow college football’ says Shawn, ‘if you don’t mind which team wins it’s just like watching a ball go back and forth in front of a camera.’ This has always been my experience with trying to watch American Football.

‘The half time show and the commercials are great though – that’s what you watch the Superbowl for.’ Apparently Shawn even appeared in one of these famous advertisements. If he hadn’t been living in a ‘right-to-work’ state he would have made tens of thousands of dollars from this appearance, but only earned $2,500. For saying one line.

Everything’s bigger in America

5 February 2023

Bryan Adams and Meatloaf suddenly make more sense when you’re actually working in a big warehouse with real american guys and power tools. It doesn’t seem so cliched or inauthentic when you’re surrounded by the same accents and the same big-ness that come across in these epic anthems about desire and manly, chivalrous love.

‘Everything’s bigger in America’ - this saying is true – big cars, big meals, big pianos, big skies, big roads… and big problems. But it turns out that they have a saying here which is similar – and demonstrates beautifully the relative nature of our sense of scale. The saying here is ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’.

The use of single-use plastic is rife here – I thought we had it bad at home, but here it’s just silly. Coffee machine pods, bottled water at every turn, wine bottles wrapped in two plastic bags by the guy at the till. I told him we have to pay for plastic bags in Scotland. I don’t think it really registered. He was impressed to learn that I was here to build an art project. ‘You must be stacked’, ‘they payin’ for your flights to get over here an everything’? At first I was at pains to say that no, actually I wasn’t getting paid a huge amount for it, but really what it came down to in the end was that I am being paid to do something that I want to do, and love to do – in that way I am stacked. I guess that’s kind of what he meant. And relatively maybe I really am stacked.

In the Kitsch-en

3 February 2023

I sit at the table – laptop out, an empy packet of crunchy granola ‘raisin bran’ awaits its transport to the recycling pile, reminding me that I don’t yet actually know when the binmen come. I’ve added another cardboard box to the overflowing pile of dry rubbish – and that will be full once the raisin bran goes in.

On the wall of the air BnB bungalow I’m staying in is a clear kitsch instruction - ‘EAT’ - the command is shouted at me in capital letters on a circular backing, made to look like it’s constructed from wooden slats, but also to look like a plate? - it is neither created ‘artfully’ from recycled wood nor is it a plate. Maybe it’s not meant to be a plate? Maybe it’s just a white circular backdrop for what someone must have thought would be an endearing word for me to meditate on whilst in the kitschen-livingroom. But I know it’s meant to be a plate because next to it an oversized spoon and fork hang from the wall – these too are reproductions, plastic I guess, and painted with a wood-grain effect to appear as though they have been hand-carved.

They are so convincing in fact that I couldn’t resist just now but to take a closer look – I lifted the fork off the nail on which it was so tenuously hung. It was heavy, weighted just like an exotic hardwood, but I could now see the brush marks, getting a sense that it was made from some kind of dense polymer. I tried to re-hang it and it dropped to the ground – of course I’ve just broken three of the four fork ends! Nightmare! Though it has proved my suspicions – behind the skin is a white, hard and brittle, almost crystalline material – it was molded after all. Ironically it will probably be almost impossible to replace – I’ll have to see what I can do with some super-glue. 

This double fake is enlightening – the article provides an insight into the social environment. It seems that authenticity is no longer valued – so that the appearance of things becomes more important than the process or story behind the thing. These objects, displayed on the wall, unabashedly tell a story of creativity, bespoke endeavour, home-making, lightness and frivolity. But this story sits only on the very surface – a thin veil covering both the physical surface of the object and the metaphorical surface of my perception – just behind this film of awareness is a deeper, more complex story of extraction, mass production and acceptance of forgery. Post-truth apathy. A broken fake fork and all you can [think of is] EAT.

The boy in the laundry cupboard

2 February 2023

We are being put up in a nice, small bungalow, with a handy porch for the car to live in. Driving is everything – my routine is car-based. There aren’t even pavements in the neighbourhood where our airB&B is based. There’s an open kitchen-livingroom and three bedrooms. When I arrived Tim was in one, but now I’m on my own – working in the days and having a few hours every evening to cook dinner, wash, catch up with emails and read or watch a bit of telly.

Two nights ago I was also doing my clothes washing when I got the fright of my life! The big washing machine and dryer (everything is bigger in America) are housed in a room next to the car porch, which you can only access from outside. I’d managed to lock this door accidentally last time I did the washing and the key isn’t in the house, so I had to call out the people who manage the property to get them to unlock it – finally now I could do my washing!

It was 11pm and I was in my pyjamas when I grabbed the torch and went outside in the dark to fetch my nice clean washing. I opened the door with my eyes down and there in front of me was a mobile phone – it wasnt’ mine, and in my confusion I thought it must have belonged to the handyman. Strange – I picked it up and reached to open the door of the dryer. As I brought the light up I suddenly noticed there was somebody curled up on top of the dyer! A sudden fright – with 100 things passing through my head at once… then a doubletake. There was definitely someone sleeping on the dryer. They were crunched up awkwardly, using a box of fabric softener as a pillow.

‘Errrr, hello?’

Shining my super-bright torch into the space in front of me, the details of what I could see started to emerge. A curled up youngish man in a light blue jumper, matching trousers and multi-coloured silvery trainers – the whites of his eyes opening reluctantly, and a white spittle in the corner of his mouth.

‘Hello? Are you OK? Can I help?’

It took a while before he answered – with a murmer. His eyes were circling and his tiredness was clearly fighting to keep him asleep. I offered him some water, and told him that I’d just found his phone on the floor, which roused him. I brought in the water and I noticed the sour smell of someone who hasn’t changed their clothes for a long time and has been sleeping in corners. He was clearly scared, but didn’t want to go anywhere else, and was saying that his phone was dead and he hadn’t been able to charge it. Then I offered him some food and he said yes – he hadn’t had anything to eat since the morning.

I went back in to the house to heat up some pasta in the microwave – and had a moment to assess what the hell was going on. After the initial jolt of fear I recognised that this boy had possibly been more scared of me with my bright bright torchlight and my strange accent. I’m in America, so he could have a gun… but I guessed that if he was going to hold me up or steal something he wouldn’t be just crashing out in the washing cupboard. Anyway, I went back to him with the pasta and handed it to him. As he started to figure out the food, sitting on the washing machine, I started to get a sense that he was just really in need. I had to face up to my prejudices – could I really invite this random person in to the house? Would he steal everything? There’s an iPad in there…. Etc.

But what else could I do – I felt mean awkwardly standing there watching him eat while hunched over, sitting on the dryer. Calling the cops in this context could literally be a death sentence! I considered making a comfy space on the laundry room floor for him – but there are two spare bedrooms in the house. It began to dawn on me that I might be about to offer him a bed. At the very least I could let him inside to eat.

I told him he could come and eat at the table, but that he would need to respect my stuff. He agreed to come in. He was really hungy. While he was eating he told me that he had been thrown out by his mum. ‘I shoulda seen it coming’ he said a few times. He told me his name was Chris, and that he was 23. He was thrown out 8 days ago. I don’t think we was on drugs – he’d just been left out in the cold, wandering the neighbourhood and his mobile was completely out of battery.

When I told Chris I was here to build a Pianodrome he said ‘I was kinda in to that kinda thing at school’. Instead it turned out, he works in a ‘sub’ shop making sandwiches, and he was working there tomorrow. To prove it he showed me his cap. ‘I can’t see this being my career’ - ‘my manager is happy with it, but it doesn’t work for me.’ I noticed a tatooo on the back of his right hand – I asked him to show me and he pulled up his sleeve: ‘Self-made’ he said, showing me the black cursive lettering across the back of his hand. He has four siblings, a couple of them older, with families and a younger brother just starting college. It sounds like his mum had just got fed up with him still living in the house and had kicked him out finally.

He wolfed down the pasta, which he complimented, especially the ‘cheesy bits’ and then suddenly got strong stomach cramps. At that point, cliutching his stomach he looked scared, until I reminded him that if you don’t eat for a while and then eat quickly that’s what happens. Maybe he thought for a moment that I had poisoned him? Of course he just needed to lie down and digest.

I started to realised that I was going to offer him a bed – there is space in the bungalow, and why not? I didn’t feel threatened, but it did keep my mind occupied throughout the night. I offered him a shower and a bed – but he was clearly uncomfotable and just sat on the sofa. I told him to lie down, which he did – and closed his eyes, and then in a short moment he was asleep. I covered him in a blanket and went to bed – not until after I had gathered a few valuables and taken them in to my room for the night. I told him I’d be getting up early to go to work, so we’d be leaving the house at 8.

The next morning he was on the phone when I arose – to his 2 year-old daughter and her mother it turned out. She was staying with her mum who was not willing for Chris to stay with them either. I made him some breakfast - bran flakes (in this country they are covered in a film of sugar), he commented about them being the kind of ‘healthy’ food that that his mum eats – then he took something like a 40-minute shower, came out and poured the breakfast into the bin cause it had gone soggy. By this time I was eager to get going to work, and had been trying to get him to wrap things up and leave for an hour or so. I suddenly got a sense for the kind of frustrations his mum might have been challenged with which might have led to him being chucked out.

I got his number, we said good bye and he left the house. I had a good excuse for being later than expected at the workshop.

The first Pianodrome Charlotte volunteer day

31 January 2023

Today 9 volunteers turned up to get stuck in to taking apart pianos - it was an amazing experience to share what we know so well from back home, and to find such enthusiastic and like-minded people so far away. The group was really diverse and really reminded me of the kinds of turnout we get in Edinburgh when we run these kinds of events. There were of course differences. Around half of the people who were there work in the city - and that means essentially working in banking or insurance. Shawn brought a huge box of Dunkin' Donuts along.

It’s Krispy Kreme’s! Photo credit: Matt Wright

And we discovered an amazing sawdust pattern which came out the back of one of the pianos which had been dismantled. The patter shadows the ribs of the soundboard - all the sawdust which had accumulated in the back of the soundboard dropped out on the floor when the piano was turned around, forming this amazing hashed pattern. But the really cool thing we noticed was that there were a few large empty circles in the pattern. These corresponded to much smaller holes in the soundboard. I realised that these must have occurred when Dray was working on removing the bridges - these need to be tapped out with a combination of paint stripping spades and wooden wedges. This continued banging will have been vibrating the soundboard, causing a pressure change inside the cavity underneath and, like the hole in a subwoofer, pushing air in and out of the hole as it resonated. The air coming in towards the floor will have blown little puffs of sawdust away forming these large clean patches!

Photo credit: Matt Wright

Up the Interstate 77 to Charlotte

27 January 2023

The sun shines on the accumulation of tower-blocks that is Uptown Charlotte as I drive up the freeway – the Interstate 77. Charlotte is a banking boom-town – steadily growing through aggressive gentrification over the last 20 to 30 to 70 years. Almost everyone I meet has arrived as an incomer from somewhere else in the States. I have heard a couple times from proud locals that Charlotte is the second biggest banking centre in the US to New York. I’m heading in to town for a meeting with donuts to discuss programming with Robert Krumbine and Tim Scott, Robert’s ‘main music guy’. 

We're building America's first Pianodrome in this unlikely skyscraper - this place is obsessed with newness and gentrification, and the city has a history of essentially clear felling old parts of town to make space for big new developments. Hopefully we can create a living example of what can be achieved by taking a different kind of attitude towards materials and people, one where we acknowledge how much we already have, and where we work with what is already around us. 

Today we started

10 January 2023

Today we started pulling pianos apart. After all the years of planning, the months of anticipation, the weeks of preparation and the days of travelling it’s great to finally be here and hands on.

It's a crisp cold bright morning. Blue skys and frost on the grass. Lead builders Shawn and Greg are in early today. After Quinn’s gourmet breakfast of ‘huevos pericos’ – eggs with chopped onions and tomatoes – and my first turn driving the rental car - on the right-hand side, with the steering column on the left and an automatic everything which surprisingly turns out to be almost too easy - we join them. Following the satnav I haven’t a clue where we are. Everything looks similar. Without a car here, nothing is possible. There is just so much space. It’s all eight lane highways, trees, a river and at a junction, large empty parking lots and single storey buildings with big signs; a McDonalds, a gas station, a church; food for your body, your car and your soul. There is a billboard with a grinning moustachioed lawyer and the slogan ‘Hit by a Truck?’.

Already the warehouse filled with festival floats, theatre sets, tools, shelves of boxes of assorted stuff from various past projects and an enormous pumpkin feels a like home from home. Greg and I pose with an outsized lever with the words ‘off / on’. This is going to be fun.

Broadly speaking and to my relief the America pianos are similar in construction to the European pianos that we are used to. This means we won’t have to make any dramatic changes to the designs. They seem to be on average less tall, deeper and of solid construction, in fact quite a few of them are player pianos with pedals and bellows and elaborate steam-punk mechanisms inside.

Shawn starts pulling apart a piano and finds treasure under the keys. As well as old coins, and ephemera, bits of paper, a rubber band, a paper clip he finds, of all things, dog food. Lots of it. How, I ask you, did that get there?

Kibble in a Kimble

Our producer this side of the pond, Kat, arrives and we meet with Matt and Laura and Tom from the Pianodrome back in Scotland via Zoom. We swap jokes and progress reports. How strangely normal it is to chat despite the 4000 miles between us. Then Pete and Steve arrive with a van full of half dismantled pianos. It’s clear that previous attempts at building Pianodrome Charlotte got much further than I had thought. This is great news as it will save us a lot of work this time round. The rest of the as-yet undismantled pianos, two shipping containers worth, collected and stored over the last 3 years, arrive on Friday. We get to see inside the Grace Church earmarked as our venue come spring on Thursday.

Today Kat joined the dismantling crew in the afternoon and it feels just like countless piano dismantling sessions previously with tunes on the stereo, folk swapping stories and helping each other out with tricky corners and heavy lifts, exciting discoveries of small treasures and wonder at these extraordinary constructions; historic objects at the intersection of engineering, craftsmanship and music.

The sun streams in through the big doors open to the fresh air. This feels like it’s going to work.

Greg turns it on for the camera

Pianodrome Charlotte, North Carolina

When Robert Krumbine the creative director of Charlotte Shout festival asked 'how do we make a Pianodrome' at the Pianodrome at the Pitt in 2019, I think I said: 'you just need to start by getting a warehouse and filling it with pianos'. Well, now they have a warehouse and 40 something pianos and for the next three weeks they also have me.

According to Google Flights which compares the carbon footprint of the various transatlantic routes on offer, my flight dispersed around 450kg, about two upright pianos worth or perhaps a very large concert grand, of CO2 into the atmosphere over the ocean to get me here. A geodesic ribbon of arctic guilt tethers me to my homeland 4000 miles away. I had better make this trip count. But my CO2, along with the 100 or so more tonnes required to fire the other couple of hundred passengers, their agglomerate baggage and the crew to serve and pilot them, the fizzy drinks, the inflight entertainment system, the hulk of the plane itself at close to the speed of sound half way across the globe, has surely already dissipated.

I felt sick. Not out of moral panic or, for that matter, any other kind of panic. I love flying despite the occasional dark spiral of the mind; 'what if we crash in the sea will I ever see my children again?' etc. I felt sick from the many-times recycled air, the unpredictable juddering, the noise, the cramped and sweaty-backed seat and the bright sun at night as we chased it west, never allowing it to set. Unnatural. Yuck. Man, was I glad to get off that plane.

Despite my moral misgivings and occasional physical discomfort I have already started to enjoy myself. There is an excitement in setting out your suitcase and your shoes the night before. Taxi in the dark to the airport. Orange-gold sunrise soaring through high, cold cloudscapes on invisible air. Breakfast at Heathrow. Shawn picking me up at Charlotte International and driving me to our air B and B in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Roads and trees. Lots of trees breathing the CO2...

And the arrival of my best man Quinn. I haven't seen him since my wedding 8 years ago but we still laugh into the night. He has flown from California so time-wise we are almost exactly out of sync. Since his Mum's house in Paradise CA burned down she has moved to Ashland Oregon (you couldn't make it up) where she helped an old bookseller set up shop with her insurance payout. Quinn has brought me a book. Creative Processes in the Human Environment. It fits perfectly with this project and with another book I was reading on the plane: 'Why we make things and why it matters'. What is a Pianodrome in fact? An interactive sculpture? A venue? A movement? An elaborate piece of furniture? As I understand it I am here to try to help to seed a creative community.

The Historic African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church where we are installing Pianodrome Charlotte is in the middle of a district where in the early 20th century this was at the centre of one of the most prosperous communities of people of colour in the world dubbed ‘Black Wall Street.’ In the 1950’s name of development hundreds of people of colour were forcibly rehoused to the suburbs to make way for a public park in a process which Robert described with sadness as 'predictable’. The Grace Church is one of only three historic buildings still standing. This feels like a complex and potentially volatile environment to be installing an interactive sculpture and a significant landmark culturally, geographically, architecturally and spiritually. Our lead builder here, Shawn, says the church and the Pianodrome are a 'match made in heaven' and I agree. But how does this translate to earthly reality?

Maybe music is the key? There is a Jazz bar next door which apparently has a good vibe and strong roots in local black communities. Also a choir associated with the church with gospel heritage may sing in our Pianodrome. Andrea Baker's 'Tales of Transatlantic Freedom' is touring the US on the back of her at the Old Royal High during the Edinburgh Fringe last summer. There are possibilities. And race is one of many axes on which diversity of the creative community may be measured. 

It's getting light. The sun that finally got away over the horizon last night has already come back round this new day and caught up with us. Quinn gets up. He is three hours behind and I am five hours ahead. I am wearing the tattered remains of a Moroccan djellaba he gave to me 20 years ago as a night shirt and he takes a picture of me in our big garden where the trees line the freeway behind. I am looking into an oil drum where we might burn piano offcuts. He remarks that my white pointy hood makes me look a bit like an imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. Rock Hill is where the railroad, the product of the life force of people enslaved to the empire of my ancestors once came to a full stop on the big rock that gave the town its name. Probably shouldn't wear that outside. Looking into the darkness of the drum and thinking back on the last 24 hours I wonder where I am and what my journey holds?

To my surprise and delight in the departure lounge of the Edinburgh airport I stumbled across, of all things, a smallish grand piano. Some 250kg of endless carbon-free entertainment for the assembled transitory anonymous. I took the opportunity to sit and improvise trying to be gentle so as not to jangle the nerves of my co-travellers this early in the morning. I was probably playing for nearly an hour. I finished with a couple of Bach preludes in C major and then C minor and when I had given way to a small child trying some bass notes I noticed, with a wry smile, the words on the purple circle on the floor which serves as the stage; 'haste ye Bach'. 

A young woman who had come to sit nearby for most of my performance, a gesture which I had felt in some way conferred the freedom of the departure lounge on me, smiled and said 'thank you for this good time'. I thanked her in turn. This exchange marked for me, in a most subtle and powerful way, the start of my journey. Apt that it should be a piano, with its sequestered stories and carbon and its gift - the spark of creative connection - that should set me on my way.