With Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: “the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice’.
‘Pilgrimage from Scattered Points’ is a film about the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Cornelius Cardew formed the orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1968 and published their draft constitution in “The Musical Times” in June 1969. The constitution set out the framework, which would dominate the orchestra’s musical work for the first half of its existence. It proposed a fluid community where students, office workers, amateur musicians and some professional composers would gather together for performance, music making and edification.
Born 1978, Glasgow; lives and works in Glasgow.
Luke Fowler’s practice is multimedia in its perception and outcome, with analogue filmmaking at the core. ‘Filmmaking for me is very much a social process’ he says, stressing the importance of collaboration with other artists, musicians and writers. His work investigates the social rules, conventions and disciplinary practices that underpin mainstream society, serving to marginalise a minority to living on its edges. He unflinchingly observes its viscous undercurrents to bring to the surface awkward and unresolved complexities at its crux.
