[caption id="attachment_5528" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="Yuk, it's Paul Morley"][/caption] The PRS Foundation are in charge of monitoring royalties for musicians. They charge you a fee, then every time the latest Biffy Clyro single comes on the radio, they put a little mark in their ledger and, if you are Biffy Clyro, they make sure radio stations pay you for it. As you can imagine, they are silly rich. Richer, even, than Biffy Clyro themselves. So naturally it's big, benevolent entities like the PRS Foundation that can afford to use other people's money to sponsor costly outpourings of silliness like the £50,000New Music Award(billed in its bumpf as "bigger than the Mercury Prize" because the cash stipend is so sizeable). First off, some myths about the NMA exploded. The New Music Award is nothing like Scott Mills' Record of the Week. Hell, it's not even like Annie Mac's Record of the Week. It's a bit more like nauseatingObserverwriter and author of theworst music bookever written, Paul Morley's Record of the Week. If he had one. Yup, imagine the suck-faced word extruder in his black polo neck gushing gormlessly on about the post-structuralist redefinition of the sonic cloudspace occasioned by, say, J-Kwon's "Tipsy". Now imagine him applying the same ability to make up guff to an amplified hole in the ground. Congratulations, you've just imagined Paul Morley reacting to the 2005 winner of the New Music Award! In "Score For a Hole In the Ground" by Jem Finer, the hole was built in King's Wood, Challock, near Ashford in Kent. It was a medium-sized hole. A few people even managed to get out and see it. Few talked about it afterwards. In 2008, the second time it was issued, the prize went to a piece which "captured sounds from 24 different locations and broadcast them to each other, in 'collective composition'". This, according to its makers, was "based on the same principles as the connections in the human brain. It is music writ large across the country and, through complex technology, we can all create, listen and play a part in it." That's right. In 2008, the New Music Award went to a conference call. But conference calling and holes in the ground aren't the only NMA nominees. Such unmitigated losers asShlomo and his Beatbox Orchestrahave also been previously shortlisted. Some guy did a thing which was all about bats talking to each other, which sounds bad when you say it like that. But, does it sound as bad as when they said it like this? "[It will] process and sequence the sounds according to an algorithmic composition… The result, heard in situ continuously for four months, will be a four-dimensional experience based on the previous night's activity, and therefore never the same twice." For anyone so bovine as to be unaware what a "four-dimensional experience" consists of: well, it's a bit like that bit inTimecopwhere if you combine anti-matter and matter, they melt into a big pool of fizzing gloop. Any questions? Most tragic of all was shortlistee Django Bates, who decided that, if he won the £50,000 bequest, he would spunk the whole lot on a specially made bicycle which would, through a music box-style conjoinment of cogs, play a composition that lasted 365 days. The composition would be in counterpoint, so you'd have different parts of it played by different cogs on the bike, all synching together. And a human would be pedalling this fabulous bike around Britain for 365 days, until it had come to the end of its cycle. It's a very maudlin thought. Not only because it's the artistic equivalent of trees tumbling in forests: so purposeless and unlikely to be seen by anyone capable of giving a shit that it might as well not have existed. But, more pointedly, because there's something very melancholy about the thought of this self-satisfied art fellow pedalling across Britain and having the living shit kicked out of him by inhabitants of every town he passes through while his magical bicycle still farts out its ploopy contrapuntal tune, interrupting the blare of Basshunter from a local thug's phone. It seems to symbolise the great gulf between the popular and the avant garde. In fact, no wonder he didn't win – he should have instead made his pitch on the basis that he would deliberately bike his way into violent pubs and get his head stoved in with half a housebrick, thereby symbolising the great gulf between the popular and the avant garde. In 2010, it's just been announced that the prize will once again be issued, and Paul 'turtleface-turtleneck' Morley will be judging it. Obviously, we'd like to see it go to the bird with the biggest tits, but with him, DJ Bishi and Martin Creed all on the panel, we're going to have to make do with someone bashing a life-size model of Jordan's vulva against a timpani tuned to play "Mysterious Girl". So, in the timeless artistic spirit of hoping to make £50,000, here are some of our own New Music Award suggestions we'd like to throw into the ring.1. Adoration of the Maggie.Mrs Thatcher is blindfolded and walled into a life-size recreation of a Lebanese disco. The objects are all encoded with microchips that play bits of the melody of Little Boots' "Remedy", and she will only be released once she plays the entire tune in-sequence.Themes:Pop & politics has become a risible, stale mixture in this post-political age. Heartless Thatcher-bashing by the left ultimately debases her humanity – destroying the essential-nobility-of-persons argument that's at the heart of left wing philosophy. Little Boots rocks.2. Schrodinger's Caterwaul.A cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive isotope-triggered sampler. In accordance with Schrodinger's Cat, there's a 50 percent chance the isotope will decay, triggering a mechanism that will play Crazy Frog. But – and here's the genius – no one will ever know if it did or didn't, because the box is soundproof. Only the cat knows.Themes:Animals possess secret knowledge. The ultimate ineffability of life. Subtle play onThat Darn Catstarring Christina Ricci. Anti-vivisection statement. A bit like that guy who claimed to be starving a dog for his art show.3. Jedward is Dedward.Twelve dried turds are tuned to an octave of xylophone. Gareth Gates plays saccharine, cloying melodies on them, but every week one is eliminated, based on telephone voting by gallery goers, thus reducing his melodic options, until the "winner" emerges – a one-note tuneless bash job.Themes:Yer usual clever satire onPop Idol/X Factorshitelimination shows. Also a good opportunity to dispose of excess shit.4. Cut the Chord.A man rides round Britain on a bicycle tuned to A. At a level crossing, he is simultaneously hit by a train tuned to C, and a car tuned to E, thus creating an A-minor chord.Themes:None.GAVIN HAYNES
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
