Bassline

Bassline

 

Bassline is a ‘city-specific’ large-scale sound and video installation revealing the transit of a line of individual walkers as they follow a double-bass player carrying their instrument through the city. The images taken by body-worn cameras captured at steady intervals are projected on translucent screens in a linear subterranean space. They reveal the city in time showing both different locations in the same moment as well as showing the same location at different times.

The line of screens is accompanied by a solo bassline and the voices of the walkers who have recorded their passing impressions.  Bassline is a formal exposition of the city as a physical space haunted by and co-composed, moment by moment, by the bodily memory of its diverse inhabitants.

It was installed in Vienna in the U-Bahn in a service tunnel between two stations in Vienna Festwochen, 2004 and later in Car Park 5 of the Barbican Centre in London, 2009

It’s like a ghost train whose carriages are made of the flickering images of lost streets and whose passengers are disembodied voices… wonderfully impressionistic, eerie and moving
Time Out London

Bassline captures the transience of city life and a sense of ghostly, layered history
The Independent

Bassline: London was produced by Artsadmin, co-commissioned by barbicanbite09 and supported by Arts Council England.

VIDEO BASSLINE LONDON

LINKED

LINKED

Commissioned by the Museum of London, Graeme Miller’s ongoing project opened in July 2003 as a massive semi-permanent sound work and off-site exhibition of the contemporary collection of the Museum of London. It is arguably the largest sculptural entity in the capital

Stretching across from Hackney Marshes to Redbridge, the M11 Link Road was completed in 1999 after the demolition of 500 homes, including Miller’s own, amid dramatic and passionate protest. Concealed along the three-mile route, 20 analogue transmitters continually broadcast hidden voices, recorded testimonies and rekindled memories of those who once lived and worked where the motorway now runs. The narratives encapsulated go back almost 100 years and run up until the last drastic moments of these buildings. They appear as they are recalled and spoken about.

Over these years some of the transmitters have been lost – to a lorry crashing into a lamppost, to accidentally being taken down by contractors, to weather, time and entropy. Amazingly many have endured and have become an almost secret layer of the landscape of East London. It is not only time to refurbish this work, but time to look at how it works in time and how public art endures or de-commissions itself.

With this in mind Graeme Miller is currently looking to stage Re-LINK taking place September 24th and 25th 2022: the first annual 48-hour restoration of the entire network that will also include a reflective public conversation between former residents, interviewees and interviewers, sound and radio artists, eco-activists and, as ever, the wider curious walking public

 

Read 2003 Catalogue Essay THE ARITHMETIC of BELIEF by Alan Read

Transmitter Excerpts

Counterpointer

Counterpointer

Counterpointer is a score for live performance, recorded video and live music commissioned in response to Situationist International and the legacy of Guy Debord. It was performed live in Paris and Glasgow 2017 with citizens of the cities who made spontaneous responses to unplanned locations using handbells.  The live space, the city outside it and the pre-recorded videos assemble into an unrepeatable concert of gesture and sound.

Commissioned for Reviewing Spectacle by the University of Kent and presented at How to Drift, CCA Glasgow (2017) and Théâtre de l’Échangeur, Bagnolet (2017)

Wild Car

Wild Car

WILD CAR is a 75minute film shot in the winter of 2019 from an improvised rail vehicle, the Wild Car. The footage, captured on iPhone 7, follows narrow-gauge railway tracks across Europe from the rail-side houses of Kent in England to the north of Denmark and to the south of Sardinia (via Poland) and joins it together in a single mesmeric journey. The viewer is taken across what seems to be an impossibly empty and almost imaginary landscape. This is Europe in bardo – suspended in its own atmospheres. It is a trauerarbeit, a work of mourning made in the year of Brexit, that both laments and celebrates the scale and weight of Europe in the detail of its small geographies.

WILD CAR was commissioned by Creative Folkestone and Sardegna Film Foundation and supported by Arts Council England. Screenings include GROUNDED Film Festival (2022), Fotofestival Łódź (2022), Creative Folkestone (2020).

VIDEO EXCERPT WILD CAR

Comet in Moominland

Comet in Moominland

Released on Finders Keepers Records, Graeme Miller’s new score for the Film Polski, “fuzzy felt” Moomins follows the adventures of the Moomins as they struggle to deal with apocalyptic events. This adds to the collection of releases on the label of the original TV themes by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill. The score was performed live-to-picture in 2017-18  by Graeme Miller and Jamie Telford at UK venues including Blue Dot Festival, Festival Number 6, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Royal Albert Hall.