Music in a Pandemic
MAX REINHARDT
Oxford has had a building which houses a market on its High Street since it was officially opened around 250 years ago, in 1774, when it was officially opened.
That was the result of a well-intentioned, if snooty, joint initiative by Town [the Town Council] and Gown [the University] to clear 'untidy, messy and unsavoury stalls' from the streets of Oxford. Originally designed by John Gwynn – also architect of the glorious Magdalen Bridge – whose original market space grew in size as the 19th century wore on, because of high and growing demand. Because of recurring dismal wet weather, and thanks to the joys and ambitions of Victorian engineering, it also became a totally covered space with a gothic vaulted roof.
Pre-pandemic the market had become a bustling, labyrinthine, boho home to numerous traders, way beyond the 18th century vision of the original stalls, which supplied the City with garden produce, pig meat, dairy products, and fish. Here in the 21st century, 50% of the space still features food and beverage retailers, such as greengrocers, bespoke butchers, an unbelievable cheese boutique, bakeries and cafes. However, those have been joined by numerous purveyors of clothing, hats, jewellery, shoes, ‘gifts’ and stockists of ‘unusual items’. Most of these shops are larger than the original stall sizes, which means fewer businesses in total, and, when you factor in the growth of Oxford as a shopping destination, less footfall than in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Nevertheless, the Covered Market had transmuted into an overflowing and iconic well of sustenance for those seeking retail therapy away from the boombastic brands and the neon hard-sell of the various shopping malls in the city.
And with eight wide-open entrances scattered round its block size perimeter, the market retained its historic close connection with the streets. And indeed with Oxford City Council, who still own the Covered Market and announced a £1.6m investment in the fabric of the building.
But then came Covid 19 and 3 periods of lockdown; and now for many weeks at a time the place repeatedly became an empty shell with locked gates.
But then inspiration struck, and the idea took hold that if people and products couldn’t pack the place for the duration, then perhaps live music could fill the cavernous space and lend its matchless vibe and spirit. Music had the power to saturate the vaulting roof, the long lonely aisles of closed shops, to embrace the window displays, hanging signage, white rabbits, and other Alice paraphernalia.
Maybe music could remind the whole glorious, but now eerie hauntological shebang that the city and its denizens had not fled or vanished, but were just in hibernation, while we fought a virus ... as humanity has done since the dawn of its time on this planet?
The inspiration came from Nicholas [Niko] O’Brien, co-director of Upcycled Sounds , an Oxford-based audio production company which is also a fertile soil, focus and facilitator for musical and sonic experimentation from folk music to sound art:
"Music is a special way to bring a space to life. I’ve always been fascinated by that both from an acoustic perspective ... the way that the acoustic changes the sound of the music and the way the audience hears it ... but also the music makes you experience the space differently and it somehow gives you the time to take in things, to draw your attention to details and feelings you’d miss if you were just walking through. So I’ve always had this fascination with putting music in places which aren’t your normal concert hall, venue or recording studio. I’ve always been looking for more of those opportunities. So when it came to the lockdowns, all these spaces were suddenly empty and we thought it’s going to be a lot easier to work in them. All the people who own them or run them might be more amenable to trying something different. Somewhere you could go where you didn’t need to buy a ticket, where you didn’t usually hear live music, a place which is regularly filled with people just pursuing their regular activities." [Nicholas [Niko] O’Brien]
They got in touch with Oxford Contemporary Music, a unique and invaluable organisation, a producer working with an evolving range of musicians, composers and sound artists whose work is always exploratory and experimental, creating events in all kinds of different and unexpected environments, as well as having an exploratory education and mentoring dynamic.
And between them the project began to take shape.
"The Covered Market were so excited to join in with the project", Hannah [Jakes] Jacobs, Upcycled Sounds co-director, waxed lyrical. "They’ve had a really difficult lockdown with all their struggling independent business tenants, local artists and a lot of shop closures. Sure if you wanted a shopping venue in the City that wasn’t all about the brand then this was it, but it had become very empty and devoid of the liveliness it normally has. They were just happy to bring some new life into the space in a different way."
So the Live Session Series began to take shape: a series of bitesize gigs from 5 artists/bands, filmed playing live at the Covered Market and going out online over the summer of 2021 on OCM's and Upcycled Sounds' YouTube and social media channels.
"A lot of the sessions were shot at night which was amazing. It’s got a completely different character ... kind of beautiful but a bit eerie.
One of the night porters took us down to the cellars ... they are creepy as ... and he was saying it’s definitely haunted, and he’s there at night nearly all the time." [Hannah 'Jakes' Jacobs]
There are apparently all kinds of tunnels under there, connected to the Town Hall and various pubs, boarded up now, but they make for fertile nooks and crannies for all manner of spectral weirdness:
"Hopefully the music in the Covered Market will awaken some curiosity about the building and the events that are rumoured to have taken place in it", Niko concluded, but the hint of subterranean weirdness followed us as he took us back towards the music.
"We wanted to find locations within the market which somehow reflected the vibe of the artists."
The triumphantly inclusive list of artists and the supremely eclectic range of music covered were almost instantly agreed between Upcycled Sounds and Lauren Spicely from Oxford Contemporary Music:
Native Dancer from the jazzier end of the spectrum; the quirkily iconoclastic performance poet/musician/jazzer Alabaster dePlume in impromptu quartet form; the mediaeval and meditative sublime solo violin and vocals of Flora Curzon; award winning radical DIY noisenik, sound artist Loula Yorke; lyrical songstress and iconic solo emerging artist Feeo.
Native Dancer, who get their name and their inspiration from Wayne Shorter [Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis Quintet + Weather Report], were placed in the central square, and it just so happened that that had become one of the most deserted areas of the marketplace.
In fact it looks like they're playing in a ghost town in the deep midwinter, in spite of the spellbinding vibrant jazzy warmth of their music.
You can hear their total virtuoso of a jazz vocalist, Frida Touray sing "I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s magic ... leave me to breathe I’ll be alright here …" and you begin to wonder if it's the building playing the band, or vice versa.
Somehow it sounds like the building chipping in again, when the unconditionally unique Alabaster dePlume intones the following spoken word lyrics in his performance: "broken like everybody ... looking for their way".
Alabaster had much more to say about the gig:
"One of the many things I make sure I do, before I perform, is feel the floor, and know where I am, and look at it, and speak with it, greet it and feel that I am there. This helps me to get out of my 'thoughts' and 'doubts', and it also helps me to get out of the way of the song. The place where we are has a profound effect on what we do there. Yes, I spoke with the covered market that day. The workers have brought art installations. The place itself felt reflective, and like it was humouring us, like it knew something we don't know yet. It's not my place to speak on its behalf, though.
Naturally, I won't be able to give the same performance in one place as I do in another, nor in the presence of some people, as I would in the presence of others. That day, I was in a great deal of emotional distress. I was learning to step forward, carrying something the size of a moon, while accepting that this immense thing that I carried was actually very light, at least as light as air."
[Alabaster dePlume]
Feeo’s heartfelt and elegiac performance of her song ‘feels like we're getting older doesn't it’ looks and sounds like the perfect words to be singing in the eerie emptiness of this historic public space. She’s mostly backed by her looped layered voices singing the changes – which gives it a spiritual, choral feel. Her voice is weighted with the sadness of time running out. The darkness seems to be gathering around her in the film as she sings out, with a beautiful fragility, the true poetry of her lyrics ‘I won’t be the fool waking up to haunted sheets babe …. Being lost is a bit like being free’
From a completely different perspective, but with the same level of engaging intensity, Flora Curzon’s virtuosic solo performance on violin and vocal made the building sing its song of ages past. She explained her relationship with the building, and the building’s relationship with her performance.
"The Covered Market in Oxford is a place I've visited many times in my life. I had never thought to make music there, but with the lockdown continuing on and the market almost completely deserted, it made all the sense to embrace its acoustic resonance.
The half-indoor, half-outdoor nature of it allows for the wind to sing through the passageways and reverberate all around the rafters; meanwhile the more industrial and electronic sounds that are part of all modern spaces hum along.
The slight eeriness of the lockdown taking hold in what had been a buzzing marketplace for many hundreds of years somehow seemed to make way for these less immediate aspects of the space to take up a place in the soundscape. I sang an adaptation of a melody written almost a thousand of years ago by the visionary saint Hildegard of Bingen [one of the earliest female composers that we know of]. Bringing such an old meditation into this temporarily muted public space felt almost like a conversation with the Covered Market at its most naked and most raw." [Flora Curzon]
Loula Yorke’s latest EP Crowd Control 2 was released on Tigerforce records just before Christmas 2020, and with sound pieces like 'Rush Hour', 'Eat Out to Help Out' and 'High Streets', she was clearly exploring what the pandemic was doing to us and our communities. Her contribution to the series made the market building, for just a short moment, become representative of what was happening across the planet: with what she describes as the "common affective thread" tying us all together.
She has explained her current work and practice in more detail :
"Unable to get out into ‘the field’ to record, what with there no longer being crowds, and with everyone’s social contacts with the outside world necessarily mediated by digital at present in any case, it felt fitting to mine pre-existing recordings for the crowd noise. I looked to libraries and sound collections for recordings made of groups of people gathering together, in different circumstances and different types of spaces. I made no distinction between places I’d been or had a personal connection with and places far-flung [to me], other people’s worlds I will likely never get near to in person. I figured at present we are tied by a common affective thread: feeling the same subtle changes, confusion, and paranoia: all oscillating wildly perhaps between allowing ourselves to feel a little casual to thinking “oh well I guess this means we can never see each other again then?” about dear friends and loved ones, swinging back and forth countless times each day." [Loula Yorke]
If [it's a big ‘if ‘, I know, at the current time of writing] we swing towards an optimistic view of where we might all be headed, when it’s safe to get back in the water again, it may well be that the online delights of the Live Sessions Series kickstarts some regular evening gigs at the Covered Market, as life and live music hopefully begin to bloom once again across the city, and indeed, the whole planet.
In the meantime, the Covered Market Live Sessions, engineered and mixed by Upcycled Sounds, filmed by Ross Harrison and co-produced with OCM, are becoming available, one by one, on the Upcycled Sounds and the OCM Events Youtube channels.
– Max Reinhardt, June 2021