A RINGING IN THE EAR

Rip It Up, Issue 181, 1 August 1992, Page 10

A RINGING IN THE EAR

Sick of the same old well-rehearsed bands playing the same old wellrehearsed songs at the same, tired old venues? Seeking excitement, nonconformity, surprise? There could be a cure. You need ... Tinnitus! An ear affliction of the most positive kind, that is, one where even the performers don’t know what’s going to happen next; it could be good, it could be bad, but, hell, at least it’s interesting. , ' Mike Hodgson (aka The Projector), Angus McNaughton (he of Incubator fame) and Ashley Turner have been the core of Tinnitus since 1986, when they performed regular shows to Christchurch audiences ranging in number from 36 to 400. Their most recent work was the second Rotate Your State, a surround-sound-visual-scape at Auckland’s Gluepot, which Hodgson organised and which involved about 50 performers. It lasted eight hours ... “I like time,” says Hodgson. "I think that music should pick you up and shift you to another place in your mind and when you come back down to the realisation that you’ve actually gone somewhere within yourself, that you’ve shifted your subjective state to another space and that’s why we’ve worked with long form, like seven hours live to air on radio and nine hour all-night shows."

So that people will have been on a journey? “Yes — which won’t always be pleasant. It’s not always about being nice, it’s about being challenged, to be prepared to find yourself somewhere else five hours later which you would have no way of getting to if you hadn’t participated in the whole process.”

There’s a definite thrill in the spontaneity of a Tinnitus performance. At their first live show at an art gallery in Christchurch Hodgson, McNaughton and Turner played bits of metal, drums, trombone, guitar, effects machines and a sampler while the audience painted canvases. Sounds groovy. A guitar line in a piece you’ll hear on their soon-to-be-released CD won’t have existed a minute before it was played live. Hodgson says it’s a sound and a feel that couldn’t have been achieved in a rehearsal room and it’s this constant surprise that drives him. "We live on the edge because we’re doing music that people have never heard. Like we put out a tape once that’s on the studio side of the CD and that got thrashed on UFM, then we put on a show a week later and got a really big audience and we did this piece of really industrial construction work where we actually built a sculpture and everything we used was wired up with triggerable mikes and we had video and stuff — completely the opposite of that tape and the audiences couldn't cope. By the end of it most of them had gone.

“Maybe it’s totally anarchistic in a way. We don’t do it for money, we don’t do it for our careers — we give value for money every time because we give to the maximum and we also use systems that other people don’t even think about using. But maybe we don’t supply enough for people to hang around. Most things work, they definitely work for us. I’ve got hours and hours and hours and hours of documentation and we use that all the time and we’re always bringing work back.” It seems to pull apart... .

“And pulls together. Entropy with form. It’s not just break down — it’s break up.”

Is there a danger that it’s more fun for you than it is for the audience?

“For sure — without a doubt and I’m sure that’s often been the case. That’s another reason why we’ve never gone for reviews. I don’t particularly want my work criticised by a music journalist, I prefer to have the work taken for what it is by the people who are there who want to be there. We’ve had some successful shows and we’ve also had some disasters.”

Involvement in a ‘normal’ band does not interest Hodgson at all. “I like to break down the traditional form. I go and see bands and I’ve got nothing against what they’re doing. I always wanted to be a musician, but I’ve never been able to, because I wasn’t prepared to put in the time it takes to learn an instrument. So I’ve managed to master the art of being able to play a really wicked guitar line once, or spot edit it onto the multi-track.” These days, Tinnitus is largely a technical process, less and less live, but still the organised confusion it has ever been — as the dictionary definition of entropy goes, a measure of the disorganisation of the universe. Their next performance is in conjunction with Freak The Sheep in a couple of weeks’ time. Expect the unexpected.

FIONA RAE