A whirlwind of collaboration: the 3hundredand65 story tweets

I've been turned into art. I am Damien Hirst's pickled shark. I am Damien Hirst's bling skull. I am Damien Hirst's Last Supper (he may not have done that one).

There's a thing called 3Hundredand65 where an illustrated story is told in a year's worth of tweets. We all get to do a day: in my case, I tweeted fifty days in where I stripped the protagonist of his clothes and covered him in tea. No doubt the 364 other authors may take the story in a different direction.

And what authors. My comrades-in-365dom include Chris Addison, Ian Rankin, Stephen Fry, Bill Bailey, Irvine Welsh, Jonathan Ross, Neil Gaiman, Tim Burgess, Clint Boon, and many many more. Oh and plenty of unknowns like me too.

I found it a strange experience because I'm very picky about my writing and who I work with. So for example, in my tweet I killed off a whirlwind that was annoying me only to have a whirlwind return in today's tweet. And you find yourself compromising with other people's writing styles... well, not compromising... collaborating.

Having your tweet turned into an illustration by the immensely talented Dave Kirkwood (an abstract of which is included in the above picture) is another level of powerlessness you get with true collaboration. Sometimes that leads to tweeters trying to lead the illustrator on with their tweets - as I did. 'I'd like this, this and this in my illustration, please!'. This whole project is fun, liberating and surprising.

If all that wasn't enough, you can now find me on 'Collaborate', a limited edition print featuring all the authors from the first three months of the project. My name is listed, and if you're wondering which is my speech bubble, it's the good looking one. There'll be a meet-up in a Manchester pub next weekend too, where no doubt the print will be on sale. (Edit: here's the poster about that.)

3hundredand65 is raising money for the Teenage Cancer Trust, who provide specialist services to young people diagnosed with cancer. The project is all about raising a profile, so if you're vaguely in the orbit of the planet "celebrity" and you haven't signed up yet, get in contact with 3hundredand65 and become one of the tweeters.

And yes, that includes celebrity modern artists and their chopped-up fishes.


Further Fats: We Were Spending Precious Time

The Greenroom must be saved: thoughts from a humble gorilla

The Arts Council England's decision to cut all of its funding to the Greenroom is the equivalent of grabbing Manchester by its hoody and kneeing it in shakermaker.

The Greenroom, snuggled beneath railway arches near the Cornerhouse cinema, is an unusual mix of theatre space, studio room, cheerful bar and balcony gig zone-type-area. It is unique even in Manchester and it has seen out Thatcher, Madchester, the Hacienda, the IRA bomb, the Commonwealth Games, D:Percussion, Manchester's noughties retail revival, Anthony 'Mr Manchester' Wilson and Frank Sidebottom.

But now, a government intent on an ideological stripping of much that is valuable about Britain has forced the fickle finger of the Arts Council to flick this amazing venue off its books.

I spent many hours in the Greenroom helping build its Greenroom United archive site by interviewing friendly punters and artists of all different shapes and colours, from Graham Massey to Lip Service to Franko B. Editing the audio of those chats late into the evening gave me an awesome sense of history about the place.

I also became part of an exhibition called We Were Spending Precious Time, in which I gave my own walking tour of Manchester. You can see me featured in the first video on the Precious Time site (that's me at the very start).

I played a gorilla at the Cabaret Formerly Known As Bucket, which still rates as one of the greatest performances by any actor, living, dead or future.

The Greenroom is part of me in several ways, then. The Financial Times called the cuts a "surprisingly bloodless affair". My blood is boiling. I'm going to set Frank B on 'em.

This decision stinks of an arts body playing it safe in the extreme. The Greenroom is an awkward, gangly 28-year-old and not the Latest Big Thing. I like awkward, gangly 28-year-olds.

The thought that the Greenroom's future may not be so rosy fills me with horror. There is no organisation in Manchester that will take risks with performers on the same scale, with the same support, and with the same acceptance of failure and success as sides of the same coin.

The Greenroom's future must be secured.

Greenroom director Garfield and his staff face some crucial decisions. One thing is certain: the Greenroom has lots of friends it can call on. The picture at the top of this post is my gorilla character being led by cabaret host Gareth Cutter, and overlayed over that is the name of every artist whose story was told on the occasion of the venue's 25th birthday.

There are so many names, you can barely see me emoting gorillaness like the actor that I am.

See the full list of people here. See a larger version of the picture on Twitpic.

Now get onto the Arts Council and complain.

See also: thoughts from The Drunken Chorus; thoughts from Cutteruption. If you have also defended the Greenroom on your blog, let me know in the comments and I'll link it here.

The Gospel According To Aphex Twin

> See a video of this talk here

Bright Club Manchester invited me to give a talk at their debut event at Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester. So I decided to set up a new religion and present it to the unsuspecting masses.

My brief from Bright Club was to talk about something I'm passionate about and to make it entertaining. My brief to myself was to make it sound convincing whilst making absolutely no sense whatsoever. It also had to be utterly un-fanboy, so there are no details. Just silliness.

You can stream the full audio for the Gospel According To Aphex Twin here. Meanwhile, here is the full text.

Gospel According To Aphex Twin

I'm here to present to you tonight a new religion based on modern electronic music, and by the end of this you will be converted. It's based on the holy trinity of the analogue drum pad, squelchy bass line and bearded geeks in bedroom studios. This is the gospel according to Aphex Twin.

To understand this gospel, you need to go back to the prophets. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who were working with George Martin before he became that bloke to do with the Beatles. Who knows what the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is most well known for? (Audience response: "Dr Who!") Doctor Who theme tune, absolutely right. Ron Grainger's notes to them contained annotations like 'swoops' and 'wind bubbles', it really was a fantastic new sound.

In the beginning also, there were hippy-haired men in sandals. Some of Pink Floyd's more experimental was as close to techno as you're ever going to get. I've not got time to go into this now, but the Beatles really do provide the missing link between skiffle and the Chemical Brothers (come and ask me afterwards!).

In the beginning, also, you had the puritans. Kraftwerk, who were clean and clinical, who stood there on their podiums giving sermons about wild ideas like pocket calculators and autobahns.

But I'm talking about modern electronic music. In the 80s, a lot of electronic music was about going out, getting dressed up and going dancing, so you had new wave, hip hop, rave. But this is about what happened after that. When the musical missionaries brought Detroit house music over to Europe, it became something different. We know it as electronica, intelligent dance music, armchair techno or, my favourite, braindance.

You had people like LFO who did this really ordered warehouse techno, which made Kraftwerk look like a free jazz band: they were cold and ordered  - and looming (you know when you get that feeling when the One Show's about to come on?). It brought techno kicking and screaming from the dance floor into the pizza-box strewn living room of the ravers.

This whole group of bands gave us the new scriptures to follow. The Artificial Intelligence series of CDs was brilliant stuff. Their record label described it as: "You could sit down and listen to it like you would a Kraftwerk or Pink Floyd album.” This was radical for that time, it really hadn't been done before. Although that manifesto was later used to excuse trip hop, which is wrong.

You had Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92, our bedraggled poster boy tonight. On that album - it's a beautiful album - there was a sample from the Charlie And The Chocolate Factory film, the one with Gene Wilder, “we are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams” – for me that was inspiration, it was like the Martin Luther King of electronic music.

And Orbital's brown album, so-called because it didn't have a title. It was their second album and it was so unifying and so uplifting that if you go to an Orbital gig now, it's like they're the early hymn writers and people are raising their arms in unity and in worship. The NME called Orbital's second album “as warm as plasma and as eerie as ectoplasm”. And incidentally,I wasn't sure how to fit this in: Orbital are named after the M25, and I wanted to do a section based on bands named after roadways. I've only got The Streets, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and Muse...

So what are the beliefs of the Gospel According To Aphex Twin? Salvation can be found experimentation. We will encourage you to question and to challenge. So we've got Flying Lotus paying tribute to Alice Coltrane on his new album and Bjork has been working with techno pioneers for most of her career.

Salvation can be found in repetition, that Hot Chip refrain of "the joy of repetition is within you". Repetition in this religion is not essential, but it helps you reach a new, higher state of consciousness (something falls down at the back) or make people collapse. Repetition is a political thing also: a previous government tried to make repetitive beats illegal. Some of you might remember the Criminal Justice Bill was a big thing. Repetitive beats technically became illegal, but it became law. Fighting it was a bit like like banging your head against a brick wall continuously and ironically.

Salvation can also be found in staying underground. It's easier for me to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for electronica to get into the singles chart; it just doesn't happen. Autechre, who are the Mancunian purists of techno music, are wilfully obscure. I run a website on electronic music and for a while I ran a thing called Chartwatch where I would track the progress week-by-week of electronic acts in the singles chart. It wasn't very successful, and I've got a few of the entries here:

- No new electronica in the singles chart.
- Still no new electronica in the singles chart.
- Simply Red are in the top 40, I'm off for a cry.

So it didn't really work. Speaking of Simply Red, it brings me to the one unforgiveable sin, which all religions must have. The unforgiveable sin in this new religion is mediocracy. If you are, for example, The Orb and you record a 40-minute single Blue Room and it accidentally rockets up the charts and so you go on Top Of The Pops on prime-time TV and you're not sure what to do so you play chess, that is brilliant. If however, your album ends up on coffee tables, you start hanging out with celebrities and you've got lyrics like "there was snow, white snow", then you're Coldplay.

Extremism is encouraged in the Gospel According To Aphex Twin. Like all good religions, extremism is encouraged. So Venetian Snares, one of my favourite bands, he sounds very much like a barrell of nails being rolled down a cobbled hill. I'd particularly recommend the albums Cavalcade Of Glee And Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms, Filth and Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole.

I'm here to increase my religion, I'm here to grow my religion because I had to fit it into the theme of tonight. So will the Gospel According To Aphex Twin work? We will get organised, we will make Brian Eno pope. Electronica is dominated by a lot of the hallmarks of religion. So you'vbe got worshippers in communal ecstacy, you've got white middle-class, socially-inadequate men all over the place and also electronica's very good at looking down its nose at other people not quite doing it right.

I'd like to end with a bit of involvement, if you'd like. This is where you become part of the new religion. I'd like to end with a call-and-response, a piece of liturgy. This comes from when Lady Gaga and La Roux and Ladyhawke were first getting successful and the Guardian ran a piece about "chicks with synths", that was the new thing. So I wrote a letter to James Blunt suggesting that perhaps he get on the bandwagon and... you'll see.

If you can say the bits in bold, but please can you say it loudly and clearly and with conviction:

We join together in the Gospel According To Aphex Twin.

Aphex Twin is the daddy.

This is the First Letter To James Blunt, chapter one.  

Thanks be to Aphex.

Dear James Blunt. You should become a chick with a synth.

Amen to that.

You need to buy a nice shiny silver synthesiser and get it into every publicity shot you can.

Praise be the synthesiser.

You will, of course, need to alter your gender. I once cut the leg off a teddy bear with my dad's nosehair clippers... I'm sure changing your sex wouldn't be much different.

Get to the point.

I pledge my all to the Gospel According To Aphex Twin and his holiness, Brian Eno.

I will experiment.

Yes I will.  

I will embrace repetition.  

Yes I will.

I will embrace repetition.  

That’s not funny.

I will follow the holy order of the analogue drum pad

Thum!

and the squelchy bassline.

Pyow!

Lead us not into Maroon 5 for ever and ever.

Amen.

This was the Gospel According To Aphex Twin. Thank you very much.

You can stream the full audio for the Gospel According To Aphex Twin here.

Like New Years Day to the sound of Autechre

My recent drunken dabbles into the world of art included We Were Spending Precious Time, when some slightly stalky art types followed me around Manchester and documented my journey in an exhibition.

Part of the deal was me writing text for the exhibition, which was cut up and displayed amid a woven route on the wall of Manchester's Green Room.

Here, for the first time is that text. This is exclusive. You may want to write the word 'exclusive' inside a ten pointed star in red marker pen on your computer screen. That's how exclusive this is.

My journey traced recollections of profound silences in music events...

Three music events with three silences: one terrifying, one reflective, and one with its own strange beauty.

We started in the cold desolation of Jersey Street, where I recalled a terrifying clubbing experience at Sankey's Soap. Some, um, medication sent my body temperature into a dangerous downward spiral: the sweaty electro faded to silence as my vision tunnelled and I faced my own mortality. I recovered with the help of a friend and I was dancing again by the end of the night, but it scared me; silence has never felt so lonely, especially in the crowded vitality of Sankey's.

Track this journey: Why not play Modeselektor's 2000007 with the volume turned down?

Our next stop was Nexus Art Cafe on Dale Street. The Christian community Sanctus 1 meets here, and I am their resident DJ. I bed their services with ambient electronica, so whatever is happening -- people chatting, people taking communion, candles being lit -- there is a constant soundtrack of Boards Of Canada, Global Communication and the like. Silence in churches can be filled with fidgety echoes, but when I fade the music in Sanctus 1, the silence seems pronounced and, I hope, more reflective.

Track this journey: Why not play Susumu Yokota's Grass, Tree And Stone with the volume turned down?

We finished our journey on the balcony of Dukes 92 in Castlefield, where I remembered the days after the IRA bomb. The council threw a huge party here, with 808 State, fireworks and 20,000 party people. Other areas of town were windowless and wasted. The empty streets had a strange silence filled with unattended shop alarms -- like New Years Day to the sound of Autechre. The sparkles of glass strewn over concrete made Piccadilly Gardens more beautiful than it will ever be again.

Track this journey: Why not play 808 State's Cubik with the volume turned down?

I've discovered this new thing called CDs / Still time to spend time with Fat Roland

Fopp in Manchester is flogging some cheap Warp CDs

I got each of the following for £3 each (see pics below). Plus the glorious moviefilm Sunshine for a handful of groats too.

That and Max Tundra's Parallel Error Beheads You for £1.99 and a squids postage from Manchester Vinyl Exchange's ebay site.

The joy of it all sends a tingle through my happy hat. I can afford more expensive albums, but the cheapness makes it fun. I'm into CDs. Recorded music is alive: Bill Drummond is wrong.

Of course I haven't played any of these. I've been too busy with Spotify.

Are you still here?

Don't forget that you can still see me in an exhibition at Manchester's Green Room. We Were Spending Precious Time tracks a journey I made through the city on the theme of silence within live music events. I'm on a video which is streaming as part of the whole thing. I was forced to watch it, and my bits are a bit windy (ahem) so you have to listen up to hear me. Which fits my silence theme nicely.

The full text of my exhibition piece will go on this site when the run ends. We Were Spending Precious Time is on for another week and a bit, after which me and Lindow Man are going on a long post-exhibiting holiday together.

We Were Spending Precious Time

Come and say ahoyhoy tonight at Manchester's Green Room. I will be popping on a few CDs for your listening endurance. I have ripped an okay-ish CD and called it Harmonics For Quiet Dogs. I have used orange felt-tip on the cover. If you followed me on Twitter, you'd already know this of course.

Here are the event details as published on the Green Room website. I'm also one of the 20 volunteers and, if you're unlucky, you'll see my fizzog on a video. I don't like the idea of being on a video.

"Sometimes…Co gathered over 20 volunteers this February to create the We Were Spending Precious Time installation. People were ‘bought’ out of work, college, shopping, sleeping… (whatever it is they do), and asked lead a journey around Manchester that means something to them. This installation documents the experience.

"The exhibition opens with a launch event on Friday 6 March, featuring special guest DJ Fat Roland."

I'm really looking forward to seeing what other people did for the exhibition, especially Mr Heroes Of Lego. Feast your surfin' eyes on more exhibition details here.

Art exhibitionism: swarfega meisterwerks, Dutch prostitutes and-- oh sack being clever, just COME SEE ME DJ!

I am going to become a piece of art.

I will be suspended in an Elmo costume sixty feet above Picasso's grave, whence I shall be painted by 14 naked monks using only humous and swarfega as paints. (Elmo is pictured above, comforting a friend with an eating disorder.)

The actual real truth is a tad mundane. I was followed around Manchester by some dodgy art types, who then documented my journey. The result can be seen in We Were Spending Precious Time, exhibiting in Manchester's Green Room from Friday.

Because I'm not one to pass up a chance to slowdance my ego, and because the dodgy art types are my wonderful chums at Sometimes, I shall lend some twisted ambience to Friday's launch night with my first city centre DJ slot for a while.

Expect a smattering of Flying Lotus, a sniffle of Squarepusher, and a splatter of the new Growls Garden track by Clark, released at the end of this month but yours for the hearing on Friday night. Do come down, from teatime onwards at the Green Room.

While I'm talking art, check out an exhibition I've had a hand in creating.  From today, Nexus Art Cafe will play host to 40 Days Of Public Solitude, where we lock up 40 people over 40 days, one day at a time. They will be isolated and alone, but entirely in public view because they'll be locked up in a window - like Dutch prostitutes.

See a live video stream of the space here. Clever, huh?  I'll be writing more about both exhibitions as the next couple of weeks drag their relentless way toward the budding hell of spring.