If our last Kick-About together saw us journeying into the weird and wonderful world of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, this week’s prompt is no less otherworldly: Delia Derbyshire’s 1968 soundscape Pot Au Feu…
James Randall
“Listening to Delia’s composition, I was reminded of the title of an old exhibition catalogue I had: ‘What modern was’. I really enjoyed the piece. Starting off with the whoosh, it took me to air travel and some of the noises reminded me of blinking lights. This took me back to long past holidays when we would go back to see family in Canada and you would always have to break the trip with a stop over in Hawaii – always late at night, and you would fly low over yellow lit misty streets…”
Graeme Daly
“I downloaded some free-to-use experimental electronic noise. In 3D, I then modelled some scribbles akin to sine waves and then connected the scribbles to the sound using a plugin which drove both elements and made the static scribbles bob and dance to the sound. I could have kept fiddling with this and I could have taken it much further, but still enjoyable to play with that powerful plugin again.”
@graemedalyart / vimeo.com/graemedaly / linkedin.com/in/graeme-daly / twitter.com/Graeme_Daly / gentlegiant.blog
Phil Gomm
“I didn’t get where I wanted with this, and where I wanted to get was to some strange and spooky little moving image piece. I even had a name for it: ‘A Derbyshire Postcard’, but hey, nevermind. As it is, I’ve probably got some explaining to do; and so, in a sort of nod to Derbyshire’s embrace of new technologies, I first asked ChatGPT to give me a recipe for Pot Au Feu – in French, which it dutifully provided. Next, I asked an AI-generated voice to read it aloud, which I recorded. Next, I took that recording into some video editing software and scaled up the resulting audio-wave so I could then photograph it via a webcam. That done, I then took the images of the Pot-Au-Feu-generated peaks into Photoshop, where I colourised them to produce the sort of otherworldly landscapes and fogged vistas that Derbyshire’s own Pot Au Feu so strongly put me in mind of. There was another turn of the wheel in which I re-photographed the resulting landscapes via the webcam and processed everything several more times in homage to the multiple transformations enacted by Derbyshire. Maybe another time.”
Kerfe Roig
Cosmic, of course. And cosmic communication. I painted a bunch of mandalas and picked out the two that seemed closest to the essence of the music. On the first one I did some asemic writing, then I cut it up and rearranged the pieces and put it inside the outside of the second mandala, which I also cut up and rearranged. But I embroidered some messages on that one. I photographed #2 on black, and also with its original ground. It felt good to get back to some painting.
kblog.blog / methodtwomadness.wordpress.com
Marion Raper
“One of my other favourite pastimes besides arts and crafts is playing the piano. I only learnt for about four or so years and was never that good, but the basics have always stayed with me and I recently revived playing again during lockdown – when I found I was actually enjoying making music. After thinking about this Kick-About , I wondered if you could see or paint the essence of music what would it look like? Early electronic music seems to be rather discordant and otherworldly: if I tried to paint it, I would use very monochrome colour with perhaps straight lines and simplistic structure… So instead, here is my interpretation of Jumping Jack Flash!“
And from the esoteric, monochromatic sonic abstractions of Delia Derbyshire, to the gleaming, marbled excesses of Murano glass. Have fun!
Red's Kingdom 
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