Splash’n’Klang is a musical practice developed by Out To Lunch in response to various problems facing modern music. Over the course of the twentieth century, recording wrecked the old composer-score-musician arrangement, enabling advanced music to dissolve the distinction between documentary sound and composed score (see Derek Bailey, Iancu Dumitrescu and Frank Zappa’s “Wolf Harbor”).
However, although they play by ear and could invent every note, thus making each performance unique and extending musical variety and delight into infinity, most non-reading bands survive by reproducing known quantities. In order to encourage the musicians of AMM All-Stars to suspend musical time and pay attention to the sounds immediately in front of them, Out To Lunch records Splash’n’Klang in his bathtub: running taps, rattling the plug, pouring water from jugs, making bubble sounds, and striking floating bowls and glasses with plastic chopsticks. These rituals are then played during the weekly improvisation session by AMM All-Stars which constitutes Late Lunch With Out To Lunch, a radio show on Resonance FM (2-3pm Wednesdays). Splash’n’Klang was partly arrived at through email discussions with guitarist I Digress Indeed about listening to records whilst washing up, and noticing that emancipated music (Sun Ra, Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Eugene Chadbourne, Music With My Insane Friend, AMM All-Stars) renders each kitchensink noise vibrant, delicious and beautiful (“the thud of a saucepan as it hits the zink” as Richard Evans put it). OTL wanted to find a way of injecting these beauties into his broadcasts. He also acknowledges that humans and animals delight in water sounds because they remind them of urination (see James Joyce’s Chamber Music), and also of time spent in the womb and ancestral memories of all life’s oceanic origins. On 12th February 2019, possibly due to the drama of freeing a pigeon brought in by his two cats (Brella and Sox), OTL recorded a record-length Splash’n’Klang, and realised his application to this instrument had reached some kind of peak. So the soundfile was offered to I Digress Indeed (guitarist of Music With My Insane Friend) and this duet (one of three) resulted: “I can now join the pantheon of my personal household gods, and die happy” quoth Lunch.
Out To Lunch – Splash’n’Klang, pigeon rescue
I Digress Indeed – Guitar