Disarm vid:
youtu.be/cQeC2cui_so
Recorded at Egg Mantis towards the end of 2018, Live Scraps is a musical performance by Harry Burgess of Adult Jazz. With just voice and guitar, Harry sang for a seated crowd in a small railway arch in south London, spontaneously stitching together songs, melodies and refrains. Drawing from folk music, and the seam of experimentation common to his band – the tape is an artefact of a simple and affecting performance.
"I was keen to just play with the basics like melody, single guitar notes, and two note chords, but also trying to be dextrous with them. And no strumming!! With Adult Jazz things take a long time to sculpt into what we want them to be, and it was refreshing to do something impulsive, do the work in the feeling of the performance, and not dig too deeply into slick execution, to document something warts (doors slamming, Heineken cans hissing) and all.
The tape comes with a print of an essay I wrote called Fall Of Troy (some of which was published earlier this year in Pilot Press’ Queer Anthology of Sickness) about my dog, Troy (FKA Bonedigger). I knew when giving this performance I was going to travel home the next morning because we had decided to kill him, as he was very old and sick. I’m not into the euphemism putting down, let’s not beat around the bush. So the performance became a kind of swansong by proxy. He was used to me speaking for him. The intensity of emotion around the decision took me by surprise, and the kind of ethical storm of owning a pet reared its head up again in me. He brought me so much joy!" - Harry
Each copy of Live Scraps / Fall Of Troy comes neatly packaged in a ziplock aluminium foil pouch; the essay is printed on a recycled paper and folds out to A3 size with the reverse doubling as a poster. Designed by Samuel Travis.
released July 12, 2019