Adam Bohman ~ AUDIO PIECE + FOUR COMPOSITIONS FOR PREPARED VIOLINS AND OBJECTS

Adam Bohman remains the real deal. For decades he has occupied a singular place within British experimental music, creating works that dissolve the boundaries between sound poetry, musique concrète, improvisation and everyday observation. Twelve years ago I made a short film about his artwork for Café OTO, and this new cassette serves as a reminder that few artists are able to transform the mundane into something so consistently strange, funny and revelatory.

The first side, Earlsfield, Wimbledon, Raynes Park and New Malden – A South-West London Odyssey, unfolds as a kind of psychogeographic travelogue. Armed with a cassette recorder and an inexhaustible curiosity, Bohman wanders through the high streets of South West London, cataloguing estate agents, dental practices, cafés, charity shops, bus routes, tiles, wrappers and toilet rolls with the same meticulous attention.

At one point, Bohman describes an incident: “There is a man shouting at the road, he obviously has seen a friend, he seems slightly antagonistic, he is waving his arms about, I have absolutely no idea what the situation is, how serious it is, and I suppose, when all is said and done, it is none of my business.” Later, he catches fellow musician Romuald Wadych “red-handed,” working as a postman.

There is no hierarchy between the significant and the trivial. A £3.99 coffee, a peeling shop sign, the colour of a wall surface, a Korean barbecue restaurant’s telephone number, or the discovery of Dylan Thomas’s correspondence in a charity shop all become part of the same flowing narrative, punctuated by descriptions of the weather and precise time stamps (although the watch may be running two minutes late).

Bohman is the flâneur as accidental anthropologist. His slight speech impediment, deadpan delivery and cut-up editing style only enhance the charm, while the cassette medium itself lends the piece the feeling of an intimate field notebook. The work drifts from Earlsfield to Wimbledon, Raynes Park and New Malden without ever arriving anywhere in particular. Appropriately, it ends without resolution. There is no destination, because the act of wandering is the point.

Side B shifts from observation to sonic excavation with four compositions for prepared violins and assorted objects. Here Bohman coaxes unlikely voices from springs, knitting needles, metal, plastic, cork and glass. The titles—Bell Peppers, Bedsprings and Brontosaurus, Angle Poise Porpoise Protestations, Phosphorous, Figs and Airvents and Vicious Viper Vituperation Suite—are quintessential Bohman: playful, alliterative and slightly absurd. The music itself explores friction, squeaks, scrapes and resonances, moving between delicate probing and frantic sawing. It is as if the objects themselves have been granted temporary agency, revealing the secret conversations of inanimate matter when no one is listening.

Taken together, these two sides form a surprisingly coherent whole. Both are concerned with attentive listening and the overlooked details of everyday existence. Whether documenting the commercial landscape of suburban London or uncovering the hidden acoustic lives of springs and pieces of metal, Bohman approaches the world with the same restless curiosity. The result is a cassette that is funny, inventive and quietly profound: a celebration of exploration for its own sake.

P.S. Magenta Manifesto, Bohman’s hot-off-the-press collaboration with sopranino saxophonist Danny Kamins and soprano saxophonist Adrian Northover, maker for a fitting footnote. Bohman’s prepared strings and objects continue to scrape and rattle merrily through five pieces of uncompromising improvisation, with the two saxophones happily joining the rickety rumble. There is an irony here that Kamins addresses directly in the liner notes: improvised and avant-garde music can now be studied for a degree. Bohman, meanwhile, remains resolutely himself—a sincere and original voice on the periphery. (Gianmarco Del Re)