THE ART ISSUE
I T ’ S T HE WAY I
T E L L ‘ E M
A sentient Aidan Moffat machine full of roguish tales. A band made up of instruments that play themselves. A prism for seeing how the past is affected by the present. FOUND and Moffat’s project together, #Unravel, is all of these things and more, as Claire Sawers discovers
18 THE LIST 29 Mar–26 Apr 2012
A s the old saying goes, there are three sides to every story: yours, theirs, and the truth. Or in the case of Aidan Moffat’s latest storytelling project, there is his version, her version, and somewhere, maybe lost forever in the mists of time, the facts about what actually happened.
In a ‘new interactive sound installation’ at SWG3, Glasgow, Moffat can be heard telling different versions of the same stories. There are dewy-eyed memories of a teen holiday romance that ended with a moonlight grope in a rowboat on the lake (or, did the girl actually knock him back after the disco? Or was he a gent, and did he knock her back?) Then there’s the time his ex-girlfriend moved out of the fl at they shared, and he was an embarrassing, ‘howling, hysterical’ emotional wreck (or, was it the ex who couldn’t keep it together, and him who comforted her?) Tales of strawberry wine and ecstasy; police being called to deal with a stalkerish, jilted schoolboy; a self-harmer; a frisky policeman’s daughter – the different tellings of Moffat’s tales explore the nature of memory and truth.
Moffat was approached by the Edinburgh-based art-pop band, FOUND, last year to collaborate on a sound-meets-storytelling project they dreamt up – like several of their other projects – on the back of a beer-mat one night in the pub. What about an unreliable record player which played a slightly different version of a song each time the needle hit vinyl? Using their love of invention and product design, the record player would trigger a self-playing band – beautifully constructed of course, its minimal surfaces hiding state-of-the- art software. But what if the mood of the lyrics could change depending on the weather, or the
number of people listening at the time? They liked the idea that the truth could vary depending on how well the story was remembered, or what mood the storyteller was in. ‘They called me exactly at the right time actually,’ nods Moffat, over a pot of tea, his recognisable Falkirk accent coming from somewhere underneath a beard and an electric blue cagoule. ‘I’d been reading a bit of experimental literature, and some stories by [1960s British novelist] BS Johnson. He did a book in 24 unbound chapters, they were like little pamphlets, and you were encouraged to shuffl e them up. McSweeney’s have tried similar things too. Mark Saporta, a French guy who was reprinted not long ago, his writing got turned into a phone app that shuffl es itself.’
Not only had he been thinking along similar lines, he was a fan of FOUND’s work. He’d seen FOUND’s robot-operated Chinese dulcimer in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens back in 2008, and collaborated with them during last year’s London Word Festival, when they took along Cybraphon, the ‘emotional, musical wardrobe’ that won them a Scottish BAFTA.
Both Cybraphon and Unravel – machines designed with help from longtime colloborator, Professor Simon Kirby (pictured opposite, far left) from the University of Edinburgh’s Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit – have a very sensitive side, and don’t react well to criticism. Cybraphon was designed to be a robot diva – going in the huff and playing sad songs if it wasn’t being paid enough attention on Twitter and Facebook, but bursting into jaunty tunes if its popularity was on the rise. ‘I can imagine Cybraphon trying to wind up Unravel actually,’ says Moffat, about FOUND’s