(A further tribute to the recent sad passing of Protag,one of thee Heroes of UK DIY!.....much missed.)
I've
got an awful lot of Instant Automatons Stuff hanging about in my hard
drive that isn't complete or is homeless; and as they appear to be
popular with certain members of the Die or DIY? readership/listeners out
there, I have cobbled together a Retrospective of sorts to further
demonstrate the hissy majesty of Mark Automaton and Protag(RIP).(As seen
above with Technology).
You can also check out two of their early cassettes , "Blues Masters of the Humber Delta" and "Tape Transport" by clicking on the highlighted titles,just so.
'Twas late 70's in Grimsby, North Lincolnshire, United kingdom, and the dawn of Free music. The Instant automatons, gave you all their work for FREE,
if you sent them a blank c-60 and a stamped addressed envelope. This is
now commonplace amongst us bloggers,and file sharers, but in 1979 this
was a principled attack on the corporate fascists of the record
industry.
I'll leave it to Mark Lancaster (aka Automaton) to explain the politics of Free Music in his own words:
"One
concept that is most closely associated with The Instant
Automatons is that of "Free Music". It is also, I have
discovered, a concept that is widely misunderstood.
Free
Concerts have been around for ages, of course. That's
something that, even in our materialistic society, people can
get their head around. You go to the gig, you see the band,
you leave; it's ephemeral - there's nothing concrete for you
to hold in your hand, so you don't feel uncomfortable with
the idea.
But
when it comes to Free Music cassettes, records or CDs it's a
whole different tureen of seafood. Those who don't quite
"get it" fall into two distinct camps:
The
members of the first group are the ones who say: "If this is
a Free Music CD, why do I have to pay £3 for it? Why isn't
it free?"
That's easy. What you're paying for is what you're holding
in your hand - the plastic and paper. If we're selling
something for £3, it means it cost us £3 to manufacture it.
We make no profit from it - that's why the music is "free".
In actual fact, we were making a small loss on every cassette
we distributed via the good old "send in a blank tape"
method, because we would enhance the cassette with a sleeve
and a set of labels that we had paid for ourselves before
returning it to the "customer".
The
second group understands quite clearly that the music is
free from profit. They just don't understand why. That takes a
little more explaining:
Protag
once read an article in which Colin Newman of the band Wire
claimed that writing a song was simply a bodily function like
evacuating the bowels. Steve Lake, one-time bassist with
Zounds, said a similar thing: "Playing music was something we
did like eating and drinking, breathing and shitting. It seemed to be a natural function."
Our view was exactly the same - and I would have felt as
uncomfortable asking people to pay for my words and music as I
would have done asking them to pay for the carbon dioxide I
exhaled or the nitrogenous waste that came out the other end.
(As a sidenote: The Italian artist Piero Manzoni sold
cans containing his own faeces - the Tate Gallery recently
bought a can for £22,300 - and Australian-born painter
Margaret Morgan uses human urine, blood and faeces in her
works, but what that proves I have no idea.)
However - and this is the really important point - this was (and still is) a purely personal
ethic. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with other
people making a living from their art. It's just not for me.
I have to state this (to me) rather obvious fact, because I have been misunderstood in the past.
In my last year of school I tried my hand at sculpture. The
piece I produced was an emaciated human figure, rendered in
wire and plaster. Although it was essentially just a poor
imitation of the works of Alberto Giacometti, the art teacher
took a liking to it and said he would pay me £5 for it. I
said if he liked it that much, he could have it for nothing.
He was horrified, and proceeded to give me a lecture
about how, if one artist should give his work away, then all
the other struggling artists would not be able to make a
living, and no one would then want to become an artist and
there would be no art. Then, presumably, Western Civilization
would crumble. (You think I'm making this up, don't you? It's all true,
I swear!)Given
my well-publicised contempt for the faculty of my alma
mater, I'm sure you realise that this tirade just served to
strengthen my resolve. I think I can say, without fear of
contradiction, that since that day I have never made a single
penny from any creative work I have produced, whether it be
words, music, photography or graphic design.
And did Civilization crumble? I'll leave you to answer that one for yourself."
Hints For The Housewife (Deleted Records DEC003):
The Machine Takes Over
Nigel Wouldn't approve
Underneath the Wardrobe
Eating people no 2
Not So Deep As A Well (Cd-r 2002):
| Routine Habit | 2:20 |
|
| Invertibrates | 2:11 |
|
| Ignorance Is Bliss | 2:10 |
|
| Worchester Avenue | 2:38 |
|
| Catacomb | 1:59 |
|
| Too Big! | 2:00 |
|
| Violence | 2:42 |
|
| Drunk In Woolwich (On New Year's Eve) | 3:04 |
|
| Short Haired Man (In A Long Haired Town) | 2:35 |
|
| No Identifiable Sign Of Life | 2:52 |
|
| When The Pubs Close (Denmark St. Version) | 2:25 |
|
| Ballad Of The New Things | 5:43 |
|
| Emma | 1:34 |
|
| So It's Come To This | 2:53 |
|
| Gillian Is Normal (Boyce-Codd 2002 Remix) | 2:56 |
|
| Nothing Ever Happens To Me (Sam 'N' Ella Remix) | 5:04 |
Peter Paints His Fence EP (Deleted Records DEP001) 1980:
| A1 |
| Nice Job For The Lad | 2:45 |
|
| A2 |
| Laburnam Walk | 2:57 |
|
| A3 |
| New Muzak | 1:55 |
|
| B4 |
| People Laugh At Me (Coz I Like Weird Music) | 2:52 |
|
| B5 |
| John's Vacuum Cleaner | 3:19 |
|
| B6 |
| Peter Paints His Fence | 2:00 |
|
Radio Silence(The Art Of Human Error) - (Deleted Records DEC001) 1979:
The Dentist
Radio Silence
Weird Noise EP (Fuck Off Records) 1980
Electronic Music
DOWNLOAD this Retrospective Anthological Overview of the Instant Automatons HERE! and/or