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Saturday 15 November 2014
THE BIRD AND THE MONKEY: BLOOD ON OUR HANDS video & song
Written in the week following the Scottish Referendum, Blood on Our Hands' lyrics splattered out onto paper as a stream-of-consciousness raw outburst of disappointment in the result, and a recoil from the daily flow of newsfeeds from around the World trumpeting Horror, Injustice, Celebrity and Size Zero models.
BLOOD ON OUR HANDS FREE DOWNLOAD SINGLE
The Bird And The Monkey - Blood On Our Hands (Athene Noctua Records).
Written, played and recorded by Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian at BPlusMEquals, Galashiels, Scotland, 2014. Published by Sentric Music. Mastered by Steve Muzzaman Murray at Mix2Master, Hawick, Scotland.
Written, played and recorded by Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian at BPlusMEquals, Galashiels, Scotland, 2014. Published by Sentric Music. Mastered by Steve Muzzaman Murray at Mix2Master, Hawick, Scotland.
TheBirdAndTheMonkey at London's Exploding Cinema
The music video, Eat Your Star, by Scotland's Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian (The Bird And The Monkey) is being screened this Friday (26 September) at the 'Exploding Cinema Disposable Film Show' at the Cinema Museum, 2, Dugard Way (off Renfrew Road), London SE11. Doors open 6.30pm. £6 entry.
The Exploding Cinema has
championed the weird, the underground, the lo-fi and the experimental
from London and beyond for several decades.
The Bird And The Monkey were
enraptured by a sampler of the Exploding Cinema's oeuvre presented by
Duncan Reekie at the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick
in April 2014 and are delighted to be included in this weekend's
programme, which comprises films shot in alternative formats:
'phones, tablets, Kidicam, CCTV or what have you.
Eat Your Star, was
created using stills shot on the iPad.
TheBirdAndTheMonkey: Orphine review in the Border Telegraph
The Bird And The Monkey's second short film, Orphine, had its World Premier in the Art strand at London's Portobello Free Film Festival on Sunday 31st August 2014.
THE BORDER TELEGRAPH, WHAT'S ON, 13 SEPT 2014
Galashiels Orphine shines on the Portobello screen
GALASHIELS filmmakers Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian shone on London’s silver screen last weekend.
The cinematic couple’s latest short film, Orphine, was amongst the highlights of the Portobello Free Film Festival
The 12-minute piece is a captivating story of loss hauntingly retold through a veil of lyrical poetry, gripping cantation and striking imagery.
Borrowing heavily on the epic Mesopotamian poem, The Hullupu Tree, Orphine swaps the banks of the Euphrates for bridges in and around Gala Policies.
But uses the narration - In the first days, in the very first days, In the first nights, in the very first nights, In the first years, in the very first years - to great effect.
Swan and Simian, who are better known for their musical collaboration The Bird and the Monkey, originally created the skeleton of Orphine as part of a video-art installation, commissioned for the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick earlier this year.
It explored autobiographical experiences of motherhood, sexuality and near-death experiences. And the finished film which grew from the April exhibition follows a similar path.
Orphine, exquisitely played by Swan, enters the underworld in search of death to bring back her unborn child.
The Pagan-esque narration and thought-provoking, almost disturbing, imagery is contrasted by a sweetly sentimental score to create magical results.
Bowing more to the likes of Paul Morrissey or Jean Cocteau than Scorsese and Speilberg, Orphine will have limited appeal.
But that shouldn’t detract from delights on offer in Gala’s very own Underworld. Swan, who is a fine art graduate, told us: “ Orphine slips between borders, between the realms of the living and the dead, consciousness and the dream.
“Personal history is filtered through the lens of mythology, one woman becomes every woman.
“It draws on both the autobiographical and on mythology: particularly the classic myths of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern reinterpretations in the cinema of Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau, the art of Louise Bourgeois and the Surrealists, the writing of James Joyce, the Symbolist Poets, the Beat writers and the Magical Realists.”
Winner of One Minute Film Challenge May 2014
The Bird And The Monkey's 60 second short, Atrocity, was the May 2014 winner of Renderyard's One Minute Film Challenge.
TheBirdAndTheMonkey interview & pics at Alchemy 2014
THE BIRD AND THE MONKEY Interviewed at The Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2014:
Interviewer: Jason Moyes
Photographer: Patrick Rafferty
Among the many artists producing moving
image installations for this year’s event are The Bird and the
Monkey. Comprising of Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian, The Bird and
the Monkey’s debut short film ‘In The Dark I Sat’ premiered at
London's Portobello Film Festival. They were later commissioned to
create the ‘Sung To The Crows’ video-art installation for the
festival 2012.
Sarahjane’s background is in fine
arts and she graduated with a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from Gray's
School of Art, Aberdeen. Roger Simian spent years dabbling with DIY
indie zines, video, writing and home recording. The aim of The Bird
And The Monkey they say is to draw on these backgrounds to produce
left-field mixed-media art, music and film.
One of the key messages to come from
the Alchemy Artists’ Filmmaking Symposium and the various Q&A
sessions over the festival has been the importance of collaboration.
The Bird and the Monkey’s installation ‘ORPHINE’, which they
describe as “One woman's descent into the Underworld to save the
one she most loves”, includes sculpture, video projections, music
and writing and is a prime example of where a meeting of minds can
result in some stunning work.
“We both come from slightly different
backgrounds” Sarahjane tells me as she steps out of the room they
have taken on the third floor of the Crown Building on Hawick’s
High Street. “I’ve got an arts background and Roger’s got a
writing background but we want to bring those elements together. We
talk a lot, communicate a lot, shift things around a lot, have a lot
of different ideas, and we’re really looking for the magic to work,
and that’s really how we collaborate.”
As a working musician Roger has
recorded sessions for John Peel and played at Glastonbury and the
infamous South by South West music festival in Austin Texas, so has
experience of collaborating as a band as well as with Sarahjane. As
with the creative writing and recording process within a music
studio, creating a bit of friction between collaborators can often
lead to more creative results. “We step on each other’s toes”
he laughs. “I’ll annoy her by suggesting things to do with the
sculptures and sort of saying 'can I stick this up here, can I muck
about with that', and she’ll be doing the same with the words as
well like 'I hate that line you’ve written, it’s just a lot of
rubbish'. Often it’s just a big creative argument that’s going
on. But then it all comes together, we find a kind of harmony.”
Coming from Galashiels in the Scottish
Borders, Roger and Sarahjane are two of small team of local artists
making a contribution towards the festival. Others include Pat Law
and Richard Ashrowan whose installation is also on show in the Crown
Building in Hawick, Jedburgh based sound artist James Wyness who is
collaborating with pioneering French video artist Jacques Perconte on
a live performance and Mhairi Law whose work is being screened as
part of ‘Dreamland 3’ on the final day of the festival. Roger
hopes that people from the Borders come to the festival and
experience some of the work will be inspired to lift a camera.
“It would be good if more people from
the community could get a bit more excited about the experimental
side of this, and start doing things themselves. We were watching Dr
Duncan Reekie talking about low budget DIY film making and how anyone
can do that so we really hope that people come and check out shows,
check out films and maybe think about going and giving it a shot
themselves.”
TheBirdAndTheMonkey at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2014
ARTISTS:
Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian (The Bird And The Monkey)
EVENT:
“Orphine” – video-art installation at The Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
VENUE: Room 307, Crown Business Centre, 20-22 High St, Hawick, Roxburghshire, TD9 9EH
DATES: Thurs 3rd April (12-6pm) / Fri 4th (10-6pm) / Sat 5th (10-6pm) / Sun 6th (10-5pm)
FREE
ENTRY
Based in the Scottish Borders, Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian have been collaborating as The Bird
And The Monkey since 2010
on left-field music, videos, writing and art.
Tracks
by The Bird And The Monkey have been aired on Radio 1/Radio Scotland
(Ally McCrae & Vic Galloway), BBC 6 Music (Tom Robinson),
AmazingRadio (Jim Gellatly) and on the soundtrack of BBC2 / Switch teen drama, The
Cut.
Promo video, Do You Wanna?, was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival 2011 to be screened at Edinburgh Big Screen for two weeks.
Promo video, Do You Wanna?, was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival 2011 to be screened at Edinburgh Big Screen for two weeks.
In
2012 The Bird And The Monkey's debut short film, In
The Dark I Sat –
a surreal science fictional romance - premiered at Portobello Film
Festival in London and had its Scottish premiere at Alchemy Film
and Moving Image Festival, in Hawick, in the Scottish Borders.
That same year Alchemy’s Creative Director, Richard Ashrowan, commissioned Swan & Simian to produce the moving image installation, Sung To The Crows - an absurdist crime-scene, inspired by the anonymous 14th century Borders Murder Ballad, Twa Corbies - in a spooky abandoned office, Room 307, on the third floor of the Crown Buildings on Hawick High Street.
Sung To The Crows featured: experimental music (melancholy modern classical strings fading into a dark industrial track) and an audio soundtrack made up of whispering voices, cawing crows and trickling streams of water); multiple video projections and loops (a VHS tape spool spilling to the floor from a dismembered male mannequin torso; the distraught bride wading through a river, her white dress adorned with red sequin blood-spatters and cold blue hand prints, a redheaded woman silently screaming her rage at us, crows conspiring and taking flight, the psychedelic dream-wanderings of the bride). These projections seemed to be watched by a brooding male figure in league with the crows, hundreds of black feathers scattered around the tail of his admiral coat, and the ghostly bride, whose wedding dress stood elegantly, its trail reaching back towards the crow-man, 10,000 sequins hand-sewn into the fabric.
Other artistic and sculptural elements included: homemade photocopied crow wallpaper, a flashing blue police light, sticks painted white like bones, and the words of a morbid villanelle stencilled in gory red across the walls:
‘Patient crows,
you plucked the dreams from my eyes,
as I lay down too early one cruel night.
Bereaved, I leave my horses to the flies.’
The Bird And The Monkey must have done a pretty good job of tidying up after
themselves, because they’ve been invited back for more!
The theme of this year's Festival is 'Dreamlands', and The Bird And The Monkey will be presenting Orphine, the tale of one woman's descent into the Underworld to save the one she most loves.
The theme of this year's Festival is 'Dreamlands', and The Bird And The Monkey will be presenting Orphine, the tale of one woman's descent into the Underworld to save the one she most loves.
BIOGRAPHIES: The Bird And The Monkey
Raised in Dunbar, Sarahjane Swan graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from Gray’s School of Art. Degree work included a 10 foot wave of fish skins, customized gentlemen's suits, abstract forms created from snake slough, free notebooks bound in fish skins that stank so much their recipients had to store them in freezers, and a document of contrasting religious beliefs. One work, inspired by the Heaven’s Gate Cult – 39 death masks housed in a travel suitcase - appeared as part of the graduates' group show at the RSA. After Gray's Sarahjane moved to London to design camp sculptural artifacts for a flamboyant nightclub, then on to New Zealand for three years to babysit for her sister and grow pumpkins. On returning to Scotland Sarahjane picked up a guitar and began recording strange lo-fi acoustica songs on a mono cassette recorder and painting herself blue for serpentine-dance performance-art videos down by the loch.
Brought up in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, Roger Simian, played and co-wrote songs in various alt-rock bands, released LPs on one major and several indies, played festivals (from Glastonbury to SxSW) and recorded BBC radio sessions for John Peel and others. All the while he dabbled in experimental writing and creating his own cut ‘n’ paste zines and DIY music videos. Roger’s fiction and poetry have been published in Scottish literary magazines, Chapman and The Eildon Tree, and his arts reviews have appeared in the Scottish edition of The Big Issue. He recently graduated with a BA (Hons) Open and a Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing from the Open University.
The aim of The Bird And The Monkey is to draw on these backgrounds to produce collaborative experiments in video, music, writing and art.
THE BIRD AND THE MONKEY - BOWERY BUMS ep - Tribute to Lou Reed
Scottish indie pop experimentalists, The Bird And The Monkey
(Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian), pay tribute to Lou Reed with a
song about the Velvets to Voidoids / CBGBs / American Punk scene and
all the boozed up romantics who ever haunted the Bowery from 1645 to
1979. The Bird And The Monkey - Bowery Bums ep
1/ Bowery Bums
2/ Meet The Maelstrom (Temples of Grandeur)
3/ Eat Your Star
4/ We Sing Ourselves To Sleep
RELEASE DATE: 21st Jan 2014
All songs by Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian.
Copyright Athene Noctua Records, 2014.
Bowery Bums – the lead track from the latest EP by Scottish subterranean-pop experimenters, Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian - is a hybrid: a patchwork quilt of a song, stuck together from pieces like a Hannah Hoch photomontage, a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, the lightly toasted remains of Victor Frankenstein's reanimated monster.
Copyright Athene Noctua Records, 2014.
Bowery Bums – the lead track from the latest EP by Scottish subterranean-pop experimenters, Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian - is a hybrid: a patchwork quilt of a song, stuck together from pieces like a Hannah Hoch photomontage, a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, the lightly toasted remains of Victor Frankenstein's reanimated monster.
Scottish
Borders based duo, Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian – aka The Bird
And The Monkey – began collaborating on left-field songs, music
videos, experimental short films and art projects in 2010.
Swan - a
BA (Hons) graduate in Sculpture from Gray's School of Art - had taken
to writing art-house acoustica on a cheap mono cassette recorder with
a Dobro Guitar, and painting herself blue for serpentine-dance
performance videos down by the loch (as can be seen in The Bird And
The Monkey's Daisy James On The Pincushion video). Simian - guitarist
with John Peel favourites,
Dawn Of The Replicants - spent years dabbling with DIY zines,
homemade Dadaist video clips, experimental writing & lo-fi
4-track portastudio home recordings.
Right
from the start, the aim of The Bird And The Monkey was to draw on
these fertile backgrounds to produce left-field mixed-media art,
music & film. The Bird And The Monkey's songs have since been aired on
BBC Radio 1, 6 Music & BBC2 teen soap, The Cut. The video, Do You
Wanna?, was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival 2011 to play on
Edinburgh Big Screen in Festival Square for two weeks. Debut short
film, In The Dark I Sat, premiered at London's Portobello Film
Festival 2012. The pair were later commissioned to create the Sung To
The Crows video-art installation – inspired by the Borders Murder
Ballad, The Twa Corbies - for the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
2012.
On
hearing of the passing of Art-Glam-Punk Poet Laureate, Lou Reed (on
27th
October 2013), Swan and Simian decided it was time to complete and
record their song Bowery Bums for release on Athene Noctua Records.
Simian had written the verses quickly in the late 1990s, right after
reading Clinton Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk
History for a Post-Punk World. He was intending a trashy throwaway
tribute to the 60/70s New York/Detroit punk scene: The New York
Dolls, Velvet Underground, MC5, Iggy & The Stooges, CBGBs, Patti
Smith, Tom Verlaine's Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids,
Blondie and Talking Heads. At the time Simian was playing guitar in
Dawn Of The Replicants. The dumb-punk Sonic Youth style of his latest
song didn't fit with DOTR's quirky set, so Roger's multitrack demo
cassette and scrawled lyric sheet were stuck in a shoebox to collect
dust with all the other Ones That Got Away.
Nearly a decade and a
half later Sarahjane Swan was listening to her collaborator's hissy
recording of the CBGBs song and announced that it was “daft and
delinquent” but that she liked it and wanted to “fix it”. Swan
demanded a new “Patti Smith piano bit in the middle” and got to
work researching the history of New York's Bowery district,
scribbling lyrics in her infamous leather-bound notebook. She was
determined to bring a measure of subtlety and pathos to the song: to
celebrate all the boozed up romantics who have haunted the Bowery
since the 1600s. Swan was fascinated by the Bowery's dichotomy: the
contrast between the upmarket boutiques, fashion and affluence of
today and the district's past as a colony of the nameless down and
outs, those luckless skid-row benefactors of the American
Meritocracy's disregard, whom the punks of '77 were stepping over on
their way to the club.
And
so, in this fashion, The Bird And The Monkey have pieced together
their ode to Lou Reed's city and its inhabitants.
BOWERY BUMS video
Eat Your Star video
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