Agonism

The LMC arose from a series of meetings surrounding Musics, which preceded the LMC as such, beginning in 1975 and until 1979 serving as the organization’s main discursive outlet. Membership proved many-headed, including ‘second-generation’ musicians like Beresford, Toop, Nicols, and Paul Burwell, ‘first-generation’ stalwarts like Eddie Prévost, Stevens, Bailey, and Parker, and additions like Sylvia Hallett, Susanna Ferrar, Kazuko Hohki, and many more into the 1980s. At its core, what united these musicians was an interest in open-ended process and experimentation with it — improvisation broadly conceived — as well as a shared sense of organizational necessity. By this time, Stevens’s all-important Little Theatre Club had folded, and in 1975 the Unity Theatre had burned down, occasioning a newly enlivened zeal for founding an organization that would dedicate itself to artistic experiment in the wake of these and other missed sites. As Toop puts it, ‘the LMC was formed by [a] slightly newer lot of musicians because everyone was fed up with playing in bad rooms above pubs or nowhere at all’.Footnote ¹⁶ Membership surged into the hundreds within a few short years, yielding a space where ‘anyone could join’, and as Burwell remembers, ‘individuals were free to act on their own initiative on behalf of the LMC […] one was free for instance, to put in grant applications calling oneself the LMC, as an organisation carried greater weight than an individual’.Footnote ¹⁷ The Collective adopted a perceptibly democratic mindset on the musical front, organizationally, and in terms of personnel in this context, with the effect that the organization’s programming became as Hydra-like as its membership. Ad hoc ensembles were standard; mixed media, ‘world musics’, and sound sculpture entered the fray; and collaborations flourished with performance artists, dancers, and even with the London Film-Makers’ Co-op that was situated next door.Footnote ¹⁸ Improvisation remained the centrepiece of these activities. And yet a key desire of the Collective entailed stylistic, medial, and cross-genre convergence, not least within the Collective’s home base at 42 Gloucester Avenue in Camden, itself rough around the edges. One member described the space: ‘The laundry downstairs and the Kings Cross main line out back ensured there was noise coming in. As for noise going out, there were flats across the road, our soundproofing consisted of closing the windows […] Then there were fire regulations (“You can’t do that in here”), charitable status (“We can’t give you subsidy to do that”), and a lack of toilets.’Footnote ¹⁹

Artistic convergence and maintenance of the space were enabled in part by the LMC’s structure, which, as noted, included a Collective constitution, elected leadership, a member-run newsletter, and flexible booking. It was a stance typical of the time. As LMC member and journalist Sue Steward remarks, ‘self-organization ha[d] been a key-word’ in Britain’s improvised music circuit since the 1960s, animating the discourse and practice of the Little Theatre Club, the Continuous Music Ensemble (which later became the People Band), the Music Improvisation Company, the Scratch Orchestra, and many more, not to mention important free-music labels like Incus, Bead, and Emanem.Footnote ²⁰ Extending Stevens’s oft-quoted vision of improvisation as ‘another little life’, the LMC displayed a collective liberationist, anti-hierarchical, countercultural attitude in this milieu.Footnote ²¹ For this reason, critic Trevor Barre has described the LMC as a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’, or ‘TAZ’. In the spirit of an off-the-grid rave or free festival, the LMC, Barre entertains, reflected the utopian-tinged ‘idea of a space, physical, psychological or metaphorical, in and around which a culture of resistance can be formed’, be it against the capitalist mainstream, restrictions of state subsidy, or reactionary music institutions.Footnote ²² But I contend that the LMC operated differently. For one, it was established for practical rather than solely idealistic reasons. And as we’ll see, not only did some LMC affiliates eschew organizational autonomy in favour of the pop charts and mainstream circuits, but many worked hard to obtain support from the Arts Council, the Greater London Arts Associations, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and related funding bodies. To borrow from Stephen Graham, the LMC was ‘co-determined’ by such entities, providing an example of a crucial moment in the UK when state funding was made available for avant-garde and experimental activities across the arts, with no small degree of ambivalence among recipients.Footnote ²³ What’s more, discord pervaded the LMC in far from consensus-directed or ideal ways. ‘Squabbling’ was routine.

Consider a statement circulated by LMC member Richard Leigh concerning organizational dysfunction at the Collective. ‘The LMC lives up to the first part of its name’, he penned in the 1980 document. ‘It is in London; but as for the rest of it, some doubt is permissible. The musicality is in doubt [… and] as for “Collective”: the LMC is clearly not that. All the work is done by a small fraction of the membership. Nobody goes to anyone else’s gigs. We are split into two antagonistic camps: the new fashionable “punks”, and a herd of prehistoric relics with saxophones.’ Moreover,

Beresford was just as blunt about the atmosphere created at the LMC itself and in Musics. ‘The dynamics of the current [Musics] meetings depend more on pointed silences, emotional blackmail, mumbled asides and semi-sneers than on direct statements’, he once maligned. ‘The collective is a morass of impersonality. We trivialise each other’s contributions.’Footnote ²⁵ It is a mode of interaction that saturated Musics’ pages as well, provoking debate and discord about topics precisely to do with the magazine’s plural vision. ‘I’d like to express some alarm as to the course MUSICS seems to be taking’, wrote contributor Peter Riley in one issue’s ‘Letters’ section. ‘When MUSICS was first mooted, I understood that it was going to be a magazine to serve the community of free improvising musicians in this country.’ And while he found it ‘natural that the magazine should extend its coverage to “other” musics’, Riley was nonplussed that some writers gave ‘ethnic music, instruments, sound environments etc.’ greater attention than improvisation in an ostensibly purer complexion. ‘I accuse MUSICS of musical liberalism’, he concluded, while branding one article a ‘blatant piece of musical fascism’ in light of its brazen political tone.Footnote ²⁶ To be sure, Riley’s ‘fascist’ label is strained; ‘fascists’ did not populate the LMC nor add to Musics’ pages. But the message is clear: the LMC and Musics were agonistic through and through, furnishing conflict, disagreement, and division in ways that on the face of it may seem counter-productive.

Yet conflicts of this kind are not necessarily problematic. As Mouffe might say, ‘the very condition of possibility of the formation of political identities is at the same time the condition of impossibility of a society from which antagonism can be eliminated’.Footnote ²⁷ And squabbling wasn’t always so toxic nor targeted; many members showed ‘agonistic respect’.Footnote ²⁸ The generational distinction flagged by Leigh — the perceived rift between first and second generations of free improvisation in Britain, the LMC’s ‘prehistoric relics’ versus ‘fashionable punks’ — offers a good example of this latter sort of divide, while pointing to artistic expressions that I believe exhibit practices of freedom that contrasted with existing improvisative ideas. Beresford’s work and the conflicts that this exemplar of the second generation introduced into the Collective help to bring this friction into focus.

A good illustration of such friction appears in ‘Technique and Improvisation’, a 1978 round-table discussion transcribed and published in Musics wherein Beresford found himself in conflict with Parker, a first-generation contributor to the titular subject of conversation.Footnote ²⁹ Beresford kicked things off during the chat, and in his gambit drew a distinction between what he labelled ‘instrumental’ versus ‘performance’ techniques, a seemingly reasonable heuristic given the LMC’s increasingly multidisciplinary profile. But it also made sense given Beresford’s expressive interests, which exceeded musical improvisation to encompass theatrical elements, comedy, popular music, and the rethinking of musicianship in highly performative ways. On the performative side, he could play the piano with his feet (Figure 1).Footnote ³⁰ But these so-called ‘performance techniques’ unsettled Parker, who responded to Beresford’s suggestion by stating, ‘now, the question of what technique is, is confused by the deliberate use of incompetence as a technique’, with the word ‘now’ implying consternation toward generational change. Parker jabbed again: ‘I’ll turn it back to you [i.e. Steve] and say, what do you mean in a performance where you play the piano like a child, when you have a fully developed technique?’ Beresford defended his practice:

Figure 1.

Steve Beresford, in Brian Case, ‘Murdering the Popular Song’, Melody Maker, 29 September 1979, p. 28. Photo: Roberto Masotti.

It merits mentioning at this juncture that the apparent schism between first and second generations is likely overdrawn. After all, ‘first-generation’ improvisers like Parker, Bailey, and Stevens helped to co-found the LMC, and players like Beresford and Parker had worked together with mutual regard.Footnote ³¹ Yet the round table indicates that real differences persisted across generations, and commonly, such distinctions had indeed to do with musicians like Beresford’s reassessment of technical skill. Through the 1980s, that practice adopted a palpably meta-critical orientation that not only issued ‘performance techniques’ of new varieties, but introduced additional squabbles at the LMC and in Musics. A certain reflexivity toward performance, I propose, enlivened second-generational ‘practices of freedom’.

One aspect of this orientation was ‘anti-virtuosity’, a phrase that Beresford himself did not use, to my knowledge, but which has been employed by critics to evoke his work in decades since.Footnote ³² On one hand, ‘anti-virtuosity’ emerged from an interest in multi-instrumentalism, an enterprise whose deemphasis on mastering a single instrument by its nature barred virtuosity. As Beresford puts it,

Hence recordings like The Bath of Surprise (1980), Beresford’s first solo studio release, which features a bevy of ‘toys and other anti-virtuoso devices (random voice interjections, primitive electronics, whistles, etc.)’; gigs with Alterations, the now legendary ensemble that Beresford played in from 1977 and that enlisted hand percussion, drum machines, found objects, pipes, and rubbed balloons (the group’s 1984 recording My Favourite Animals exemplifies this buffet); and also the standard instrumental set-up that he pressed into service in other solo recordings (the fully developed pianism noted by Parker is likewise shown by these releases).Footnote ³⁴ In brief, Beresford’s ‘anti-virtuosity’ was defined, in part, by the exploration of instrumental hardware and their technical affordances. ‘Affordance’ strikes one as a keyword when appraising Beresford’s output of this kind. He seemed to ask: what might a technology or medium avail and how can it be retooled for investigative purposes? His multi-instrumentalism mixed with multi-stylism, too, as in Alterations gigs and numerous other projects from the 1970s onward, including Beresford’s sea-shanty group the Promenadors, the Three/Four Pullovers, and a host of pop-connected projects that I discuss further below.Footnote ³⁵

In addition to ‘anti-virtuosity’, multi-instrumentalism, and multi-stylism, Beresford’s reflexive practice scrutinized the notion of a ‘quality’ performance. One way was through the Portsmouth Sinfonia (PS), the classical orchestra based at the Portsmouth School of Art where musicians played instruments for which they lacked training.Footnote ³⁶ Beresford played trumpet there alongside several other LMC members, and although notorious for coarse performances of the art-music canon, the PS ‘wasn’t a case of people hamming it up’, he has said. It consisted of those

The attempt is what made the PS interesting, Beresford felt; it was less a failure, joke, or childish incompetence than an experiment in instrumental in/ability and even in the democratization of classical music to those in the know. It is an attitude toward performance that interrogated wider musical norms as well. In a 1977 interview, Steve Lake asked Beresford about the presence of this mindset in his improvisations, suggesting that he might be troubling the ‘common ground’ for playing. ‘It’s a very interesting word, “ground”,’ Beresford responded. It’s ‘implying a basis […] like a jazz musician would use a chord sequence. Or an Indian musician would use a raga.’ Beresford complicated such frames, explaining, ‘if I’m going to talk about success in terms of performances I would say the only way you could assess it would be to consider how many terms I’m questioning. How many terms I’m at least trying to overturn.’Footnote ³⁸ At times the very idea of ‘free’, or what Beresford calls ‘intuitive’ performance in the interview, constituted one taken-for-granted term. ‘There’s an intuitive response which is just a style’, he relates:

And so we return to generational rifts, as evinced by Beresford’s quip about then-current Stevens reception. Elsewhere, Beresford commented similarly on what some improvisers termed meta-music, a formulation that would seem proximate to his work.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘I think all music is meta-music’, he told Melody Maker,

Music is mediated from the start, Beresford maintained, voicing an outlook that contrasted with this one from Parker: ‘[I am] interested in the disappearance of detachment and the disappearance of the distinction between music, musician and listener.’Footnote ⁴²

Parker wasn’t alone in seeing an ‘organic relationship’ among components, and so I will conclude this opening discussion by gesturing to other musicians with whose attitudes Beresford clashed. A frequently cited example is 1977’s Company week, the annual festival organized by Bailey, where Beresford was received as disingenuous by visiting musicians from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the USA. As Ben Watson has summarized,

Beresford recalls that the Dada-esque performance ‘pissed Evan off’, while visitor Anthony Braxton chose to ignore the meta-musician for the rest of the week (‘[by] Sunday Braxton still thought my name was Pete’, Beresford has shrugged). An audience member acted more aggressively: ‘This guy came up and was very violent with me […] He didn’t actually hit me but I think he was trying to intimidate me because he did not like what I was doing.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Granted, the intensity of these interactions could be more legend than truth. Still, that Beresford made waves at Company, of all places, a festival that Bailey envisioned as a forum in which to stage encounters among improvisers of different philosophies, commands pause. His combination of critical detachment and puckish performance implies something new at the time, a set of agonisms at odds with extant interpretations of freedom.

We now turn more squarely to ‘practices of freedom’ at the LMC. How might Beresford’s interpretation of freedom resemble such a practice? Beresford complicated notions of intuition, spontaneity, virtuosity, technique, and style ensconced institutionally at Company and the LMC and embedded in behaviours, habits, and dispositions within the community, refining a second-generational, ‘meta-musical’ approach. In Foucauldian parlance, he ‘problematized’ what it meant to be a free musician, forging (non-)techniques whereby ‘one detaches oneself from [action], establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Benjamin Piekut continues this line of thought:

Some comrades at the LMC problematized gender in a comparable fashion, modelling distinctly feminist practices of freedom and subjectivities.

Feminism

Indeed, some LMC members approached the symbolic representation of gender and the position of women in free music from decidedly meta-critical angles. An exemplification of the first aspect would be filmmaker Annabel Nicolson, an LMC co-founder, Musics co-editor, and affiliate of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, the LMC’s neighbour on Gloucester Avenue.Footnote ⁴⁷ Take Nicolson’s best-known piece, Reel Time (1973) (Figure 2). Manifesting what at the time was called a ‘structural/materialist’ aesthetic in film, the work experiments with the medium’s constitutive properties by repurposing the technologies, techniques, and exhibition-based components by which cinema might function.Footnote ⁴⁸ Simultaneously, Reel Time ironizes ‘women’s work’, a concept prominent both in feminist circles of the 1970s and the piece’s formal characteristics, which feature a moving image of Nicolson using a sewing machine that is run not through a standard projector but an actual sewing machine operated by the artist in person. As if to sew into being the image of gendered labour that Nicolson simulates on site, the filmmaker complements this play of mirrors with a regular projector, casting her shadow onto a second screen, as two audience members are recruited to read from two instruction manuals, one titled ‘How to thread the sewing machine’ and the other ‘How to thread the projector’. Yet Nicolson politicizes the personal even more complexly throughout the piece, proceeding to use the sewing machine’s needle to puncture her projected image, causing the celluloid to splinter and break until replaced by light. Critic Kayla Parker deems Reel Time a form of ‘productive mimicry’ to this end, as it erodes the misogynist fantasy of womanhood that Nicolson’s work of women’s work refers to and literally embodies, ‘mimics’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nicolson practises freedom from this reified portrayal, inserting herself into it in person and on screen so as to negotiate the identificatory possibilities that gendered social convention at once limits and accords.

Figure 2.

Nicolson’s film/performance Reel Time, 1973. Image from http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/annabel_nicolson/reel_time.html.

Problematizations of this kind proved multivalent and furnished important means of expression within the feminist visual, filmic, and performance arts in 1970s Britain. As art historians have extensively documented, similar assaults on ‘woman as sign’, achieved through techniques like collage (Gee Vaucher’s work springs to mind), revealing on-site performances (Carolee Schneemann or Cosey Fanny Tutti), or Brechtian strategies of estrangement (Mary Kelly), permeated fine arts and popular avant-gardes alike.Footnote ⁵⁰ But if Nicolson examined the symbolic of gender in film, how did related efforts occur in free music? And how did they pose agonisms and antagonisms in conjunction with the LMC?

The standout case would be the Feminist Improvising Group (FIG), an LMC-connected ensemble whose members attended to representation but also geared their critiques toward the male-dominated milieu of free music generally and at the Collective specifically. Noted for an irreverent style that blended free music, comedy, theatricality, popular song, and more, FIG was the first all-women improvising ensemble in the UK, comprising a core of five to eight players — Maggie Nicols, Lindsay Cooper, Georgina Born, Annemarie Roelofs, Sally Potter, Corine Liensol, and Irène Schweizer, to name some — who to different degrees merged this demeanour with European second-wave feminism.Footnote ⁵¹ That political aesthetic can be discerned in the Group’s debut performance, which took place in 1977 at the inaugural Music for Socialism festival at London’s Almost Free Theatre. As recounted in Musics, the ‘set began unobtrusively with a bit of cleaning up on stage — and at first this housework went unnoticed, as it normally does by those serviced. Soon, however, the servility of the cleaning woman (Maggie) grew into irritation with the whiney demands of her child (Corine)’, whereafter ‘Lindsay and Georgie appeared before the[se] musicians swung into some virtuoso bits and pieces on cello and bassoon’.Footnote ⁵² The point of such performance was partly to lighten the festival mood; as Musics put it, FIG made for ‘a welcome contrast with previous performances[,] which had been singularly humourless’. But the chief takeaway laid less

Moreover, and in doing so, FIG problematized Beresford-style experimentation by putting a feminist spin on the toys, found objects, and even household appliances that some second-generation musicians had used to reimagine improvisation. As Musics wrote of FIG’s use of appliances: ‘The hoover, softly whirring in endless vacuity, and the Kenwood mixer, grinding and circling, were shown for what they are — not liberators [… but] women-assigned instruments that allow precious little room to improvise.’

There are several ways to interpret the Music for Socialism gig further, and indeed scholars of British free improvisation have discussed FIG’s politics with this example in tow.Footnote ⁵³ I prefer, then, to consider how FIG’s pioneering praxis presented not only agonisms and antagonisms within the LMC’s orbit, but to interface that dissensus with democratic self-activity, institution-building, and grassroots empowerment at the time. Such elements became common in the improvisation community, as we’ve seen, and they were similarly pronounced within the women’s movement that FIG members, and Nicolson, were invested in.Footnote ⁵⁴ In an analogous discussion, political theorist Anne Phillips has distinguished between what she terms ‘conventional pluralism’ in democratic settings — the negotiation of abstract ‘interests’ of import — and ‘radical pluralism’ — which focuses on ‘groups that are defined by a common experience of exclusion or oppression, thus on identities’. Whereas the above-cited men debated ‘interests’ like technique, style, performance practice, and capital-P Politics, it would seem that FIG compounded this sensibility with a ‘radically pluralist’ perspective that necessarily meant antagonisms on a social plane. We needn’t sentimentalize FIG’s ‘radicalism’ in this respect; as we’ll see, members were aware of poietic incongruities. But Phillips’s nomenclature helps to illustrate how FIG’s idiosyncratic practice was ‘less amenable to a politics of accommodation or compromise’ than their numerous male peers were, and ‘far more likely to encourage fragmentation or mutual hostility’ given attempts to unsettle gendered mores.Footnote ⁵⁵ FIG members’ own discourse on the matter makes that antagonism plain, while pointing to ‘practices of freedom’, as I represent them, that navigated artistic scenes in fundamentally ambivalent ways.

An essay by Cooper, published in Musics as ‘Women, Music, Feminism~Notes’ in 1977, evidences one FIG member’s commentary in this vein. At once a historiographic, sociological, and critical analysis, Cooper’s text was wide-ranging, having aimed to analyse the history of women’s musical position in Europe and the West with examples spanning courtly love song, the ‘hysteric’ figure in opera, ‘cock rock’ lyrics, and gender-conscious dissidence by then-current women experimentalists.Footnote ⁵⁶ Far more than a survey, though (‘to see women’s positions simply as a series of roles prescribed by society into which women meekly fit (or not) is inadequate’, she insists), Cooper stresses that any properly feminist analysis address the systems, institutions, and vocabularies that govern political expression, reaching a conclusion that may at first seem to voice a separatist agenda.Footnote ⁵⁷ She writes:

At the same time, Cooper rejects ‘some sort of radical feminist ghetto’, proposing in its place a ‘pluralistic approach’ operative inside and outside active institutions. Although she doesn’t mention the LMC in her analysis, the bassoonist’s publication of the essay in Musics indicates that we can read her conclusion as relevant to Collective deliberations, especially as they concern institutionality and what she calls ‘existing economic and power relations’. ‘In sketching the historical background to women’s position in music’, she pens,

To say that all FIG members subscribed to Cooper’s ideas, notably the socialist-feminist inflection of the foregoing passages, would be incorrect. The same could be said about political lesbianism within the Group, which as Born recollects was one among ‘plenty of undiscussed differences and fractures’ that she, Cooper, Nicols, and so forth grappled with in divergent and agonistic ways.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, it does seem that the Group adopted Cooper’s call for ‘pluralistic’ musicking in a few senses. On one hand, and in line with Cooper’s insistence on ‘diversity’ in women’s music, the Group performed with a multi-stylistic array of women artists; at 1982’s Women Live festival, for instance, FIG members played alongside Liensol’s rock band Jam Today, artist Anne Bean, polymath musician Julie Driscoll Tippetts, Nicolson, and many more. Additionally, the Group partook in such festivals in adjacence with organizations like the LMC. Women Live was an LMC-sponsored event, as at least one archived document makes evident (Figure 3).Footnote ⁵⁹ Put succinctly, FIG promoted musical pluralism through collaborations with other women, whose collectively facilitated events could work toward social pluralization at organizations whose chiefly male membership veered in a patriarchal and certainly homosocial direction.

Figure 3.

Flyer for Women Live, May 1982. UAL.

To be sure, though, tandem efforts to alter the women’s movement musically or the improvisation scene socially were met with difficulties. FIG’s performances brought ‘squabbles’ and more serious conflicts in both domains. Consider how some male improvisers responded to what Nicols has called FIG’s ‘social virtuosity’, an ‘anti-virtuosic’ method with strong links to social relationships. ‘The politics of FIG were in our social and physical relationships’, Nicols recounts.

It would seem that Schlippenbach’s criticisms stemmed less from a concern about technique than from a general anxiety toward witnessing an all-women group performing. The affect was typical and is betrayed by the repeatedly deployed phrase ‘these women’. Roelofs clarifies:

But criticism in feminist communities could likewise be tough, as writer Val Wilmer’s account of an appearance at the 1977 Women’s Festival at Drill Hall makes clear. ‘The Drill Hall concert left many women at a loss’, she reports. FIG’s performance ‘was a freewheeling, improvised piece, played by forthright musicians who obviously knew their instruments. But the “free music” idiom was unknown to most of the audience, and unease and uncertainty were expressed about whether, being so “inaccessible”, it was an elitist concept.’ The irony is apparent. FIG’s ‘social virtuosity’ and anti-elitist hamming at Music for Socialism proved dense with meaning in the improvisation circuit, but at the Women’s Festival these ideas struggled to resonate. Wilmer was similarly unconvinced, remembering that ‘Lindsay Cooper’s description of a piece which used [a] cake-whisk, hairdryer and vacuum-cleaner did not necessarily endear me when I yearned for the dramatic lovecry of Albert Ayler or the double-clutching drumbeat of a New Orleans parade’. Still, she sympathized with FIG, stating that ‘it was bitterly frustrating for the musicians involved to be rejected in this way […] They were under attack from the quarter where they most needed friends.’Footnote ⁶² In a 1979 profile of the Group, Schweizer characterized FIG’s mission as one of ambassadorship, ‘to reach out to a broader audience, to more women both as listeners and as potential improvisers’ in an effort to transform free music’s masculinist tilt.Footnote ⁶³ If Wilmer is to be believed, free music itself could hinder this possibility.

There is a great deal more to say about FIG and their history. But I hope these paragraphs have shown that the Group strove toward a ‘practice of freedom’ that addressed the intersection of gender, homosociality, aesthetics, and grassroots organizing as a thoroughgoing problematic. Why reiterate ‘practices of freedom’ at this juncture? Recall Nicols: ‘Music is about liberation, jazz is about liberation, that’s the word to focus on.’ For FIG, feminism was the philosophy and improvisation was the method for approximating this condition, yet neither were pursued without obstacles — agonisms, squabbles — as is testified by FIG’s negotiations in both male-dominated and women’s spaces. To borrow from Goldman again, FIG navigated ‘tight places’, desiring to ‘escape confinement’ in relation to patriarchal norms, ‘only to enter into or become aware of another set of strictures’ from contiguous spaces.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nicols’s desire for freedom was incomplete, in process, as freedom tends to be. The Group’s practices of freedom unfurled rife with ambivalence and productive contradiction, evincing once more the negative-dialectical and unresolved nature of the relentless pursuit of the ‘free’ in ‘free improvisation’. Albeit connected to wider political struggles, FIG’s disruptions are brought to the fore in their confrontations with men, specific individuals whose discourse and actions reinscribed oppressive structures. Still other LMC members engaged practices of freedom more abstractly, confronting men but also ‘Man’, a historical construct that some scholars insist informs normative conceptions of the human at large. I contend that posthuman subjectivities were a partial result.

Posthumanism

To wit, I am guided in this project by debates in the posthumanities, notably by theorist Rosi Braidotti, who portrays ‘the posthuman’ in two ways germane to Collective projects. First, some LMC members challenged legacies of humanism, its epistemologies, and conceptions of subjectivity, which, as Braidotti reminds us, classically reflect the liberal idea of a unified subject juxtaposed against an external world.Footnote ⁶⁵ By modelling alternatives, LMC members endeavoured to sidestep the baggage linked to the humanist figure par excellence, ‘Man’, that supposed subject of History whose coherence was felt by some critics to be in jeopardy by the middle of the twentieth century, when the women’s movement exposed his masculinity, decolonization showed his imperial desires, anti-racisms clarified his whiteness, and the New Left revealed his taste for capitalist subjection. Braidotti refers to such confrontations as ‘posthumanist challenges’, which decentred ‘Man’ and his representations — Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, Hegel’s Geist, Kant’s community of ‘reasonable beings’, and more as time went on — as lower-case constructs, products of social, discursive, and economic power held by a select group of European men. It is a strain of thinking that supported democratic theory as well, whose themes of self-possession, individualism, and rational progress had by mid-century become newly militarized; ‘the platitudes of Cold War rhetoric, with its emphasis on Western democracy, liberal individualism and the freedom they allegedly ensured for all’ contrasted sharply with what many LMC members had hoped to accomplish in their considerations of self-organization and the ‘free’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Second, some LMC members adopted more telltale posthumanist attributes as part their expressive activities, which entailed appeals to ecological attachment and bio-acoustic relations across species and media. Put succinctly, I assert that we can discern twofold posthumanisms at the LMC: what Braidotti would call ‘anti-humanist’ posthumanism and a posthumanism interested in the critical engagement with non-human entities and vitalities within a relationally defined environment. Both resembled a subject ‘constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable’.Footnote ⁶⁷

A striking manifestation of ‘anti-humanism’ can be found in ‘A Method’, a piece published by LMC member Max Boucher in Musics in 1976 (Figure 4).Footnote ⁶⁸ The entry is a playful détournement of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, wherein Boucher replaces passages from the 1637 text with his own; in effect, he negates Cartesian epistemology and its subject/object split, while in turn positing an encompassing approach to improvising based on uncertainty, relationality, and the upending of self-plenitude. Whereas Descartes’s ‘first rule was to accept as true nothing’ in order ‘to avoid carefully precipitancy and prejudice, and to apply my judgement to nothing but that which showed itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind’, Boucher’s was ‘to accept as true everything that I [do] not know to be evidently untrue’ and ‘to trust spontaneity, to doubt nothing but that which show[s] itself clearly and distinctly to my mind’. And while Descartes conducted his thoughts ‘in an orderly fashion’, and made ‘so complete an enumeration of the links in an argument [… that] I could be sure I had missed nothing’, Boucher reproached logic in favour of allowing ‘thoughts to conduct themselves’, ‘to never assume that I could be sure I ha[ve] missed nothing’. It is an anti-humanist philosophy that LMC members David Toop and Paul Burwell may have termed radical structure. Footnote ⁶⁹ ‘The radical is simply the art of event’, Toop once wrote in a think piece on the topic, promoting open-ended processes that would disrupt reification: the creation of art works or ‘objects’, as ‘we tend to term any event a thing and convert any idea into an intangible “object”’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Against that Descartes-like duality, Toop proposes a ‘time-based image of interlocking networks’, a form of artistry spawned from multiplicity, emergence, and distributed interactions in which dispersed senses of self become acute. As he enthused in a Musics review of a recording by improvisers Paul Lytton and Paul Lovens, ‘the interaction between [Lovens and Lytton] is close enough to justify “was it me?” as a question to themselves’.Footnote ⁷¹ The duo had created a wash so entangled that discrete soundings became ambiguous, troubling the self’s coherence and object-obsessed norms inherent in that tacitly humanist supposition.

Figure 4.

Max Boucher, ‘A Method’, Musics, 6 (1976), p. 1.

Through the 1970s and 80s, problematizations of this variety took many additional forms at the LMC. Yet possibly the clearest instances of LMC members’ anti-humanist sensibility involved experiments with acoustic ecology and soundscapes, as the landmark festival known as Music/Context brings into focus. Spearheaded by Toop in 1978, Music/Context comprised a series of performances, workshops, and a seminar that collectively aimed to provide ‘an overview of soundwork specifically concerned with contextual problems and relationships’.Footnote ⁷² Musics covered Music/Context extensively, revealing that, on the creative side, LMC member Hugh Davies made a set of ‘Environmental Music Projects’ investigating how public space could be treated as found sound and even found music; John Taylor wheeled a custom instrument resembling music-box technology (named a ‘multiple wheeled ratchet or linguaphone’) through London’s Brockwell Park to interrogate how sound changes in transit; Parker, Toop, Nicolson, and others partook in a thirteen-hour improvisation called Circadian Rhythm, which re-thought temporal context by drastically stretching the duration of an improvised set; a sound-walk, called the Camden Canal Project, broached how sound travels through London’s waterways; and much more. The Canal Project in particular, though, throws the festival’s Boucher- and Toop-like relationality into relief, inasmuch as a kernel of the project was to explore how the listener, while walking, gets enmeshed in their acoustic surroundings. Organizer and participant Michael Parsons relayed his experience at the canal as a ‘break down of the distinction between intentional and unintentional sounds’, suggesting that the very conceit of a ‘standard’ musical performance, in which ‘we intend to make sounds and we intend people to hear them’, was called into question. ‘I found myself in an ambiguous situation in which I’m really not sure whether I’m doing [anything] intentionally to make sound or whether sounds are a result of what I happen to be doing.’Footnote ⁷³

Being ambiguous, ambient, and ambulant, the Canal Project brought acoustemological imprecision, or what Burwell may have called a ‘biospheric’ scenario.Footnote ⁷⁴ As he wrote in a 1974 artist’s statement, one goal of Burwell’s work was ‘to explore the relationship between man, objects and natural phenomena […] I am an active, functioning part of the Biosphere, acting as an agent of change, and reacting to change around me.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Toop, Davies, Parsons, Taylor, Parker, Nicolson, Burwell, and others heard the world as they heard themselves, attending to how embodied listener and site co-create each other ‘in multiplicity’ and ‘across differences’. Such an orientation went hand in hand with initiatives more widely cited in sound studies literature, for example the World Soundscape Project associated with R. Murray Schafer and his research group at Simon Fraser University, which LMC members were aware of and studied.Footnote ⁷⁶ It caused ‘squabbles’ as well, as we saw above in the annoyance expressed by Peter Riley toward ‘ethnic music, instruments, sound environments etc.’.

Posthumanist motifs are obvious in Music/Context. On one hand, contributors engaged ‘anti-humanist’ decentrings of the subject/object divide, troubling once again the delusions of unified subjectivity inherent in liberal-humanist discourse and its attendant presumptions of self. Additionally, the event’s biospheric dimension suggests an Uexküllian Umwelt, cybernetics-style interconnections, and an interest in Nature that appear frequently in the posthumanities. To this extent, it is tempting to associate Music/Context with earlier developments in the 1960s and 70s avant-garde, such as technocultural celebrations of cybernetics or even Cagean ideas like abnegation of the self and ‘differentiation within multiplicity’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Toop, however, has clarified that his own investments departed from Cage’s quietism, and that cybernetics, while important, was of only passing interest to him. ‘Ecology’ was key, and in this way he feels that his work resonates with recent new-materialist theories and their stress on vibrant matters’ entwinements.Footnote ⁷⁸ ‘That sense of ecology became very, very important to me’, he has said:

It is a mindset that points to the other aspect of posthumanism in the LMC’s gravitational pull: cross-species imbrications and enquiry into relations between humans and media technologies.Footnote ⁸⁰

Toop’s work in these areas shines, particularly his ongoing experiments with bio-acoustics vis-à-vis non-human animals. Good examples of this appear in his participation in the Artist Placement Group (APG), a collective associated with artists Barbara Steveni and John Latham and designed ‘specifically to put artists in an organizational structure on the same professional basis as everybody else’ and outside usual expressive forums.Footnote ⁸¹ Toop’s project in the APG concerned the Centre for Life Studies at the London Zoo, where he staged performances — one involved a water-filled fish tank accompanied by tapes of pre-recorded birds and mammals — and investigated subjects in communication theory. In effect, his ‘own playing had [become] very strongly connected with bio-acoustics’ while at the Centre. As he told Melody Maker, ‘just listening to birdsongs has changed my flute playing totally’. What’s more, this non-human appreciation catalysed a rethinking of the social, even ‘was-it-me’, dynamic of improvising. ‘One thing I’m particularly interested in’, Toop stated,

Toop’s combination of bio-acoustics and the social dynamics of performance arose in several other publications, and indeed bio-acoustics informed much of his non-improvisative output.Footnote ⁸³ A set of conceptual pieces from 1972 entitled the Bi(s)onic pieces includes a segment called ‘Lizard Music’, which tasks an unspecified number of performers to repeat ‘a figure, phrase, cycle, sound, etc. to create a feeling of stasis’. ‘Lizards are studied’ in the meantime.Footnote ⁸⁴ Another bi(s)onic event was ‘Human/Carp/Chubb’, which incorporated live fish sounds and human vocalizations. But perhaps the best known of Toop’s pieces to integrate non-human animal sounds is ‘The Divination of the Bowhead Whale’, a track recorded on Toop and Max Eastley’s New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1975). It ‘shows the influence of that marine mammal’s generally low-frequency range/narrow bandwidth’, wrote a reviewer in Musics, and Toop remembers that it was inspired in part by the ‘bioacoustic signaling of bats and whales, particularly those too high and too low to be heard by humans’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Furthermore, New and Rediscovered indicates the final dimension of LMC members’ posthumanism, as it involved an interest in bio-technological elaborations by means of experiments with organology. The savvy reader will be aware that New and Rediscovered arose from a series of undertakings; it was not only a recording — the fourth release on Brian Eno’s Obscure label — but linked closely to an instrument-building push and a publication of the same name featuring Toop, Lytton, Parker, Burwell, Davies, and Eastley. The project also complicates this article’s stress so far on democracy.

We have observed how LMC members interrogated art’s technical underpinnings. But New and Rediscovered stands out among these endeavours, having aimed both to invent new instruments and to recruit then-hot research from the natural and social sciences according to which musical devices were ‘rediscovered’ and played upon.Footnote ⁸⁶ The publication shows that Davies conceptualized the ‘sho-zyg’, an instrument composed of found objects ‘inside an everyday container, such as book-covers, bread bins, accordion files, [and] radio and TV sets’, whose name can nonetheless refer to ‘any instrument (usually amplified)’ built within such a container.Footnote ⁸⁷ Burwell built a ‘gong tree’, which comprised ‘car hubs found on the streets of London’, with some mimicking the ‘Tibet and Chinese model’ of gong construction. Parker’s contribution departed from the British Isles as well, premising his ‘heteroglottal clarinet’ on the instruments of the indigenous Warrau group of South America. Meanwhile, Eastley constructed sound sculptures that trafficked in wind (‘aelophones’), water (‘hydrophones’), or both (‘hydroaelophones’), and Toop created a ‘prepared guitar’, which entailed the fastening of crocodile clips to guitar strings that convert ‘the guitar into a small orchestra of gong and bell sounds’.Footnote ⁸⁸ On one hand, the goal of New and Rediscovered was a corrective. As Toop wrote in the project’s supplemental text, ‘the almost peripheral nature of [organological] activity has meant that the development of the music has outstripped the development of the tools’.Footnote ⁸⁹ New and Rediscovered wished to rectify this paradigm. In addition, though, at least one contribution suggests an ambition to experiment with bio-technical fusion. Named the ‘Shell Hat’ and worn on one’s head as a piece of clothing, the ‘instrument’, fashioned by Toop, consisted of stones and shells and reflected a philosophy its maker dubbed ‘Quartz’, a sartorial disposition that ‘primarily exists as [a] tool for a kind of meditation’.Footnote ⁹⁰ He elaborated:

The ‘Shell Hat’ availed a ‘practice of freedom’, it would seem, not just from the liberal-humanist self as discussed above but from taken-for-granted modes of musical embodiment.

But like all practices of freedom, these activities encountered constraints, complexities, and contradictions — plus new asymmetries of power. This is evidenced by what will surely strike readers as New and Rediscovered’s appropriative and even orientalist qualities. As evoked by ‘Australian Aborigines’, ‘the Eskimos’, ‘the Yakut shaman’, the Warrau group, and ‘Tibet and Chinese models’, some LMC members were keen to draw influences from musics around the globe in ethically ambiguous ways. Some engaged in ‘eclectic exoticism’, what John Corbett has identified as a longstanding strain in Euro-American avant-gardes, grounded in motifs of ‘exploration, discovery, terra incognita, [and] Eastern wisdom’.Footnote ⁹² Several more LMC-associated projects fit this bill well, and to this extent LMC affiliates’ apparent posthumanist ethos would seem to contradict itself, as their anti-humanist posthumanism reenacts one of liberal humanism’s hallmark characteristics: a certain colonial gaze, which in this case predicates itself on expressed respect for and fascination with music- and sound-making worldwide.Footnote ⁹³ It was an approach not immune from criticism in the free improvisation scene. Remarking on the use of instruments ‘which are ethnic in origin’, Bailey wrote crassly that such performances provided ‘an aural event about as far removed from the directness and dignity of ethnic music as a thermo-nuclear explosion is from a fart’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Corbett critiques Toop’s later writing as well, particularly 1995’s Ocean of Sound, a monograph that broaches the global interconnections and genealogy of ambient musics and which Corbett sees as non-reflexively ‘optimistic about the politics of cross-cultural inquiry’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Put differently, there are limits to treating the LMC as a ‘democratic’ endeavour, unreflective as some members seemed to be, in New and Rediscovered and elsewhere, with imbalances of power entailed by race, nation, and coloniality. To say that LMC members pursued the gamut of Braidotti’s ‘post-humanist challenges’ would be inaccurate; decolonization and anti-racism ignited core transformations in twentieth-century politics, which LMC members were aware of but deemphasized within their organizational strategies, notwithstanding acute cognizance of the worlds of music foundational to and in excess of Eurocentric practice that would dovetail with the pluralistic visions we saw earlier.Footnote ⁹⁶ In other words, the structural disruptions that FIG pursued in relation to gender had no salient parallel on the level of racial composition nor representational politics. As time went on, the former, demographic component weighed on Toop especially. He has put it bluntly: LMC meetings comprised ‘large groups of racist, sexist men aiming for the revolution’, and he has voiced an exasperation that in part triggered his resignation from the Collective in 1980, as I flag below.Footnote ⁹⁷ Toop recognized asymmetries built into the LMC’s arrangement, linked indelibly as it was to larger dynamics of whiteness and misogyny in British society as well as radicalisms at the LMC, each of which one doubts he’d exempt himself from as innocent given the reflexivity that has made his poiesis so compelling for decades. Ambiguity, contradiction, imperfection, and perpetual self-scrutiny: these were intrinsic to each of the ‘practices of freedom’ as I’ve sketched them in this study, with this practice of freedom indissociable from the problem of colonial modernity that underlies the liberal-humanist subject.

Neoliberalism

Earlier, I noted the generational rift between ‘fashionable punks’ and ‘relics with saxophones’. The characterization bore truth, as several LMC members of the younger generation drew on and partook in the popular music industry, traversing with agility those ‘great divides’ between art and pop, high and low.Footnote ⁹⁸ Beresford toured and recorded with dubby punk band the Slits, appearing on 1981’s Return of the Giant Slits; stood in as a studio musician with dub pioneers Prince Far I and the Arabs on 1980’s Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter 3; played in the ‘mega-band’ New Age Steppers formed out of the On-U Sound label; and much more within the era’s punk-reggae continuum.Footnote ⁹⁹ Toop likewise played on the Prince Far I record, and along with Beresford produced and arranged karaoke pop band Frank Chickens, with LMC member Kazuko Hohki as a group figurehead.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The twosome dabbled in pop culture on the journalistic front as well, having co-founded the pop-sensitive magazine Collusion with other LMC affiliates, and Toop independently proceeded to write in magazines like The Face and publish books like The Rap Attack (1984), the first major study of hip-hop.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The list of such engagements goes on, with LMC member Terry Day part of Kilburn and the High Roads, which later formed the core of Ian Dury and the BlockheadsFootnote ¹⁰²; slightly younger associates involved in the Door and the Window, Lemon Kittens, 49 Americans, and other projects into the 1980s; and LMC founder member David Cunningham embroiled in numerous activities that receive comment momentarily. In short, multiple LMC members articulated ‘popular avant-gardist’ ambitions, combining experimental-aligned arts, discourses, and material conditions with those of the commercial cultural field.Footnote ¹⁰³

And they did so in ways that caused additional squabbles in the LMC’s confines, as Toop’s 1980 resignation letter from the Collective helps to illuminate.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ ‘From behind the wall of smugness, arrogance and inhumanity’ displayed at a recent LMC gathering, Toop felt that some members had polemicized themselves into obscurity. Targeting those specifically Marxist voices aiming for the revolution, he continued: ‘We are talking about “identifying with the proletariat” and destroying ourselves for the principle of total collectivism.’ But ‘the facts now are that the LMC is about to formalise its descent into the ghetto where it will exist blind to the realities of musical life in the 1980s’, engaging esoteric argument instead of what Toop frames as the LMC’s original mission: ‘to combine an adherence to musical & political principles with an effective programme for making our music a social fact’. It seems that popular music constituted one fact of this kind, a reality of musical life warranting concentration in its own right and integration into improvisation. Toop summarizes:

That Toop wished to complement improvising with music from the popular field is clear. Yet I am especially intrigued by his deemphasis on ‘total collectivism’ in favour of embracing the mainstream in a tacitly independent manner. The late 1970s was the ‘do-it-yourself moment’, after all, and in conversation with LMC members, I have been told that the punk-infused ideology matched closely musicians’ existing efforts to do things on their own, both within and away from the LMC’s collectivist foundations. Although it is unclear whether he adopted the ideology explicitly, one such member was Cunningham, whose prolific output from the time aligned less with the anarchic ethos often tied to ‘DIY’ and more with a petty-capitalist variant of it valorized by dominant media and political discourse. In 1984, Prime Minister Thatcher claimed that she ‘came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society — from a give-it-to-me to a do-it-yourself nation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Some journalists spoke of Cunningham similarly, pointing to a market-savvy profile that appeared to dovetail with Thatcherite neoliberalism and its stress on entrepreneurship. Needless to say, LMC members abhorred Thatcherism. ‘We were all very gloomy about Thatcherism and the culture war that had been gathering force in those years,’ Toop recollects, ‘spearheaded by clocks-go-back characters like Mary Whitehouse and those in the Thatcher government determined to suppress liberal ideas of all kinds, feminism, LGBT rights, multiculturalism and artistic experiment.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And to be direct, I do not wish to depict Cunningham as blithely self-interested, profit-obsessed, or unwittingly part of a neoliberal avant-garde.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Rather, the present section considers how some ‘practices of freedom’ blended left-affiliated ideals and artistic experiment with market-conscious conduct that betrayed a Thatcherite hue without being synonymous with it, necessarily informed by wider political-economic developments albeit opposed to their deeply conservative implications. For one, Melody Maker supposed that Cunningham’s work ‘might have at least as much to say about survival in Thatcherite Britain as a bondaged howl from the streets’, as with punk’s rebel yell.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ And critic Paul Morley called Cunningham an ‘entrepreneurial polymath’ who ‘is nothing if not enterprising, and very matter of fact about it. He is a part, or a focus, in an overall pattern that is emerging in modern rock.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is to this ‘overall pattern’ that we now turn.

With ‘entrepreneurial polymath’, Morley was likely referring to Cunningham’s panoply of activities at the time, which were simultaneously creative, managerial, and production-based. One thinks of his independent record label, Piano, which resembled Eno’s Obscure in that both distributed farther-out music with a wide audience in mind. Releases on the label include Grey Scale (1976), an album of ‘systems music’ composed by Cunningham himself that gives a good sense of Piano’s early aesthetic complexion. One piece on the record, called ‘Error System’, entails a bevy of instruments relying on gradual process and repetition, as individuals ‘play a repeating phrase’ and ‘as soon as one player makes a mistake[,] that mistake is made the basis of his repetition unless it is modified by a further mistake’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Other label artists included Beresford, composer Michael Nyman, Peter Gordon, and, notably, General Strike, an experimental dub group devised by Cunningham, Beresford, and Toop whose all-white make-up reminds us of the complexity with which Afro-diasporic musics like dub were fraught, from solidarities to recuperations and beyond.Footnote ¹¹¹ On one hand, then, Piano extended LMC affiliates’ popular avant-gardist proclivities. Cunningham himself reflected on such language. There are ‘problems of being categorised into being avant garde’, he told Melody Maker. ‘That’s why Obscure is so good, because somehow they avoid being avant garde. It’s probably better being a pop musician’s pet, a hobby, than being an avant garde musician.’Footnote ¹¹² On the other, Piano indexes a bigger paradigm whereby young creatives seized infrastructural conditions to produce innovative, challenging, and even political sounds while bumping into mainstream circuits. Toop might call this ‘entryism’, an apparently common tactic in the 1970s and 80s. ‘It’s where you sneak in political ideas through pop music’, he has said. ‘David Cunningham’s idea was just to create records that people really liked but there were things going on in there that very much came out of performance art and experimental music’, which, he half-joked, ‘put acid in the water supply’. General Strike exemplifies this approach. Commenting on the band’s first release, ‘My Body’ (1979), Toop remembers that he ‘took the lyrics from Foucault writing about madness, which nobody ever spotted but that’s where they came from, and then the B-side was Steve and I playing a kind of reggae and me reading passages’.Footnote ¹¹³ Subtle provocation, artistic experiment, and pop-inclined distribution: such was Piano’s ‘do-it-yourself’ arrangement in a nutshell.

Another possibly ‘entryist’ band was This Heat, the iconic rockers whom Cunningham managed and produced for a time at the studio and former meat-refrigeration facility Cold Storage; the band’s debut album, This Heat, was released by Piano in 1979. The story goes that Blackhill Enterprises, the firm that had overseen This Heat, found themselves preoccupied with bigger acts and turned the group on to Cunningham to ease the company’s schedule; they paid the ‘rent for Cold Storage by standing order’, Cunningham conveys, ‘something they forgot about for a number of years […] they controlled the publishing on the first album, even though they never did any management – they sort of devolved that to the band and myself’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Cunningham and This Heat employed the studio inventively while there, for instance on the opening track of This Heat, ‘24 Track Loop’, which NME described as

Additionally, Cunningham assisted with bits of This Heat’s Deceit (Rough Trade, 1981).Footnote ¹¹⁶ The release marked a transition in the group’s catalogue, most acutely in its left-wing messaging that captured the anxiety felt by many Britons about the Cold War and Thatcher’s ‘special relationship’ with the US. Mike Barnes writes of the political aesthetic this way:

These motifs are palpable on the record, from the closing ‘Hi Baku Shyo’, which is subtitled ‘Suffer Bomb Disease’, to the protest songs ‘SPQR’ and ‘Cenotaph’ to a variety of Marxian messages that demystify capital’s deceits. Still more acts of the popular avant-garde pepper Cunningham’s catalogue as a producer, from new-wave band Palais Schaumburg to the punk group Mo-dettes to Jayne County and the Electric Chairs, and more.

What do we make of Cunningham, a putative entrepreneur, enabling politically conscious music with General Strike and This Heat? Does the radicalism communicated by these groups not diverge from Thatcherite competition, profiteering, and rightward self-interest — Thatcherism’s ‘ethics of enterprise’?Footnote ¹¹⁸ The ideas would not seem to jive, but what interests me about the propinquity is less the expressive intentions per se than the material, discursive, and behavioural bases that formed their conditions of possibility — the calculus by which an independent venture like Piano got hooked into a Thatcherite scenario. Perhaps the best example of that orientation is the Flying Lizards, the noted new-wave group and most visible of Cunningham’s projects in the 1970s and 80s. Founded in the late 1970s at the Maidstone College of Art, the Lizards were not a ‘group’ in the typical sense; rather, they were a fluid ensemble unbeholden to a fixed personnel, acting as a revolving door through which musicians came and went. Cunningham was the Lizards’ sole consistent ‘member’ and the only one to sustain contractual relations with Virgin, the group’s mainstream label.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In effect, ‘members’ proved flexible, gig-oriented, aligned not with what Toop — who played with the Lizards — calls the ‘hierarchical writing set-ups and the eternal marriages of [a] “group”’, but with an untethered approach.Footnote ¹²⁰ For this reason, Melody Maker regarded the Lizards as a new ‘way of doing things, in the studio and in the mass consumer market’, exhibiting a petty-capitalist and self-reliant sensibility that was not uncommon among artists from the period.Footnote ¹²¹ If the Lizards represented a ‘practice of freedom’, then their quasi-entrepreneurialism sported the veneer of enterprise but would again rebuff a Thatcherite programme. In an appraisal of rock band Henry Cow, Georgina Born has scrutinized leftist cultural production in the 1970s that resided ‘somewhere crucial between full-blown corporate capitalism and the quite different but just as marked forms of cultural, ideological, and aesthetic closure and policing that tend to characterize statist and other kinds of subsidized cultural institutions’. For her, the nexus enabled ‘pluri-potentiality’, an irreducible zone in which radical, even anti-capitalist subjectivities may be realized.Footnote ¹²² Cunningham’s work approximated this context, as did other LMC members’ projects, but in the case of the Lizards, we witness a stronger and more ambiguous association with capital than do Born’s expressly communist iterations. The group’s hit song throws the complexity of this position into relief.

That song was ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ (1979), a cover of Barrett Strong’s Motown single of the same name that was popularized in Britain by the Beatles’ own cover from 1963. Beloved for its deadpan humour and sparse yet danceable textures, the song changed Strong’s original radically by means of the studio ingenuity employed by the Cunningham releases mentioned above, and it was an unexpected success in part for this reason. The record cost the equivalent of a mere four or five pounds to fabricate, Cunningham has suggested, but returns have vastly outnumbered investments in the time since, generating income not solely from sales and public appearances — it peaked at number five in the UK charts and the Lizards staged a memorable performance playing the song on Top of the Pops — but from TV adverts, films, and more that persist today.Footnote ¹²³ One critic describes the song as a ‘post-structuralist act of appropriation’, an irony-laden détournement of Strong’s earnestly masculine and materialistic pleas; in contrast, Lizards frontperson Deborah Evans-Stickland sings in near-monotone, complemented by a quirkified sound world that Cunningham devised in the studio. During one session, he

But there is also a Thatcherite dimension that Cunningham discussed with me during an interview. Before we met, I watched the BBC documentary Better than the Original: The Joy of the Cover Version (2015), in which Cunningham spoke of the song’s materialism as a sign of the PM’s ascent to power, an ‘ongoing rush of madness and greed [that] was in the air’.Footnote ¹²⁵ ‘Money’ signalled a zeitgeist, the documentary suggested, but it suggested nothing more. I asked Cunningham whether he intended to ironize that ‘greed’. ‘From my point of view it’s ironic,’ he clarified, ‘but I’m sure that there are people who heard the record and took it at face value and thought, yeah, a hint of greed.’

As ever, irony can be easily misread — by a bank, but also by listeners, who in this case interpreted the song as unbecomingly money-hungry.

There is another aspect of ‘survival in Thatcherite Britain’ that merits comment in Cunningham’s career, and it relates indeed to the matter of survival, which he invoked unprompted during our conversation. Music was not a full-time job for the musician, nor was it for other LMC affiliates; as would be common under neoliberalism, gigs add up for artists, demanding a performance here and a commission there, a part-time job combined with a passion project within unstable circumstances. ‘I was always very conscious of survival,’ Cunningham told me,

The Flying Lizards were one among many creative, managerial, and studio-driven achievements of Cunningham’s, that along with This Heat, General Strike, and so many other things remind us of the economic challenges artistic workers deal with. It is customary in neoliberal discourse to prize innovation amid precarity, to admonish nimbly inventive behaviours in situations that are structurally placed against you — a ‘do-it-yourself’ resourcefulness that remains a touchstone in the creative economy.Footnote ¹²⁸ Cunningham was aware of and conflicted about this, adopting with acute self-consciousness what Wendy Brown might call ‘a calculus of utility, benefit, or satisfaction [measured] against a micro-economic grid of scarcity, supply and demand’ specific to neoliberal governmentality.Footnote ¹²⁹ Or to borrow from Matt Stahl, Cunningham resembled an ‘unfree master’, ambivalent about the politics of work that he had meagre choice not to navigate by dint of the pop-industrial field.Footnote ¹³⁰

In the end, though, what was Cunningham’s precise relationship with the LMC? What do we make of the fact that almost all of the activity discussed in this section took place beyond the LMC’s premises? And how might that indicate a ‘practice of freedom’ within or away from the Collective? Cunningham was a founder member of the LMC, attended general meetings, went to events, and contributed to Musics on occasion; his articles in the magazine include a technical piece called ‘Jack Plugs and Sockets’ and a dialogue entitled ‘Music & Food’.Footnote ¹³¹ But it would be incorrect to say that Cunningham stood at the organizational core of the LMC — to say nothing of his status as an ‘improviser’, as his time was devoted more squarely to other methodologies. Yet it is exactly that blurred position that commands pause, as it illuminates the LMC’s gravitational pull and the variegated practices it attracted that were irreducible to ‘improvisation’. As we have seen, improvised music in London was not only a rarefied act, but an engaged space that touched comedy, performance art, feminism, varieties of Marxism, composition, acoustic ecology, non-human entanglements, instrument-building, rock, dub, new wave, and more, with Cunningham’s position evoking these latter elements and their political-economic milieux. For us to appreciate the LMC, analyses must exceed the LMC and bounce back, with Cunningham’s work being no exception.

***

This article has attempted to demonstrate two interrelated things: how the LMC fostered an agonistically democratic environment on institutional and artistic registers, and how such a rhetorically pluralistic attitude furnished practices of freedom that I have presented as second-generational, feminist, posthumanist, and idiosyncratically entrepreneurial. There is much more to say about each of these areas and the LMC-associated artists pertaining to them. Commenting on the burgeoning neoliberal political climate and Alterations, for instance, Toop recalls that ‘performances became more aggressive and electronic’ by the early 1980s,

And readers may question my semi-detached treatment of ‘entrepreneurial’ musicianship amid the dawn of neoliberal policy, considering not how actors ‘resisted’ neoliberalism nor cynically promoted it, but how they addressed practically the structures they found themselves in. Whether subconsciously or despite themselves, we might say that LMC members displayed traits of ‘dexterous, virtuosic self-reliance’, propounding a ‘powerful model of social conduct in which the abstract values of neoliberal selfhood are performatively realised as concrete narratives’.Footnote ¹³³ I trust we can sympathize with that multivalent condition — not least those of us working in the neoliberal university — as with the equally variegated selfhoods of the other figures discussed in and omitted from this study. Additional work thus remains to be done on the many-sided careers of LMC members then and thenceforth as critical scholarship on the Collective starts to percolate.

Likewise vexed were the squabbles sketched above, and by elaborating on them I have sought to extend critical improvisation studies, not to deflate what seem idealistic currents in the literature — celebrations of democracy, improvisation as a sign of freer social relations — but to tweak the discussion’s tone. Numerous writers acknowledge improvisers’ responses to and negotiations of conditions of unfreedom, the use of improvisation as a tool for ‘imagining alternative futures, addressing trauma, sustaining resilience, and modeling, if not inspiring, solidaric relationships’.Footnote ¹³⁴ By no means would I deny that reality, and in fact my emphasis on practices of freedom matches closely such scholarship’s interest in fabulation, those desires and sets of actions meant to complicate the self’s stability and to refashion it imperfectly, ongoingly.Footnote ¹³⁵ But we’ve seen the theme, and with the language of ‘agonism’ one appreciates the squabbles, debates, and problematizations that pervade constructions of political subjectivity and indeed undergird the proleptic imaginations constitutive of many avant-garde communities’ collective bases.Footnote ¹³⁶ It is the definition of these elements that undergoes persistent contestation, and the confrontations witnessed in Musics, LMC performances, and Collective debates help to foreground this structurally and deliberately unsettled state of affairs.

Further, I hope that my framing of the LMC according to four practices of freedom will serve as a reminder of the social, economic, cultural, and political atmospheres that LMC members both contributed to and were a part of. Granted, my framing is imposed, not strictly part of the terminology employed by the actors themselves. But what might it mean to think across second-generational, feminist, posthumanist, and market-linked registers within late-1970s and early-1980s London and at the LMC? To borrow a then-current term from cultural studies, we might say that the LMC articulated elements among the myriad practices detailed throughout, but also among ‘ideology and social forces, and between different elements within ideology, and between different social groups composing a social movement’ that were brought together in a manner that ‘is not necessary, determined, absolute, and essential for all time’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The LMC united a disunited mixture, a contingent array indexical of intersecting trajectories that a more ambitious project would need to chronicle in greater detail. It solidified its identity at the time of punk, post-punk, and their leftist, anarchist, right-wing, and non-sectarian varieties; of self-organized musicking that proved crucial among improvisers and suffused popular avant-gardes as well; of feminism’s own dehiscent presence across art worlds and media; of a reckoning with the natural and social sciences, post-1968 anxieties, and the sensation that ‘human’ sentience is at root political and dispersed; of the perpetual encroachment of capital that by the early 1980s would trumpet the economization of all areas of life; and more.Footnote ¹³⁸ What further dots are to be connected to these terrains? How do the squabbles so recounted or the practices of freedom portrayed pertain to them? I hope to have got the ball rolling with such questions, as they bear implications yet to be recognized among scholars of improvisation. May our own squabbles over them ensue.