PJ Harvey’s glass studio will put ‘energy of the recording process’ on view
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Version 0 of 1. PJ Harvey is to record her new album in a publicly displayed glass recording studio with visitors able to watch what happens, whether that is tedious longueurs, dodgy bass lines or, perhaps, moments of music history in the making. It will, say her collaborators Artangel, be a “mutating, multidimensional sound sculpture”, as Harvey, her band, producers and engineers work on the hugely anticipated follow-up to her 2011 album, Let England Shake. Harvey came up with the concept of inviting the public to watch what will be, in effect, an architectural installation. She said: “I want [it] ... to operate as if we’re an exhibition in a gallery. I hope visitors will be able to experience the flow and energy of the recording process.” Her studio will be a box in a wing of Somerset House in London that was once used as the Inland Revenue’s staff gymnasium and rifle range. Michael Morris, the co-director of Artangel, said they had been working with Harvey for more than a year on a project, which will help to demystify a process normally out of bounds to the public. He said: “Polly’s approach to songwriting and making films is very much like that of a visual artist and we got talking about how the process of making a record could be displayed rather like an exhibition and what that might feel like.” The studio will have one-way glass, so Harvey and her team will have no idea when they are being watched. “It will be warts and all,” said Morris. “There will be some visitors who experience longueurs, the tuning-up of a bass guitar, the integration of a horn section. There will others there when she happens to run through a couple of songs from start to finish. It is very much a lottery.” It is not the first time an artist has allowed people to see them at work – Serbian artist Marina Abramović spent last summer at the Serpentine Gallery in London where she was the work – but there is no precedent for a recording artist of Harvey’s stature to open themselves up in this way. “We have deliberately avoided using the word performance because we don’t want to build up the wrong expectations,” said Morris. “The truth is none of us really know what it will be like. Polly doesn’t know. We don’t know. We think we have an idea but I suspect we’ll be surprised when it unfolds. It is uncategorisable.” The project is called Recording in Progress and the collaboration may not end with the installation at Somerset House. “We will continue to help Polly try to reinvent the different stages of the record as it is released and promoted to see if we can have a different perspective on how these things happen,” said Morris. The studio will be installed in the recently opened New Wing of Somerset House, using space that has variously been used as an Inland Revenue staff recreation room and gymnasium and, around the time of the first world war, appears to have served as a civil servants’ rifle range. Somerset House’s director Jonathan Reekie said it was an exciting project for them. “The people who are being most brave are the musicians and Polly herself. It is an extraordinary thing to want to do. Polly will be just doing her work. She won’t be paying attention to the audience ... she won’t be performing for them and it will be complete pot luck as to what visitors might get.” Reekie joined Somerset House last year and the Harvey project feeds into his aspirations for the site. “One of the things I want to do here is to make it a place about artists making work as much as it is about us presenting work,” said Reekie. “I think that is something missing in the centre of London. It is a repository for lots of work that is created elsewhere but not much is made. “Our idea is to build up a community of artists and makers here at Somerset House who will complement all the creative businesses and organisations already based here. There is a real need. London is a great cultural city but we’re also in danger of making it prohibitive for people to live and work here and I think that is a real problem.” Recording in Progress will take place at Somerset House from 16 January to 14 February with visitors paying £15 for a 45-minute time slot between 3-6pm on Tuesdays to Fridays and between 1-3pm on Saturdays. Around 3,000 tickets were available for the event, all of which sold out within a few hous of going on sale, said a spokeswoman for Somerset House. It will be Harvey’s first return to the album recording studio since the success of Let England Shake, which won her the Mercury prize in 2011 – the only person to win it twice. In recent years, Harvey has established a growing reputation for writing music for theatre, collaborating with Ian Rickson for a Broadway production of Hedda Gabler and, last October, Electra at the Old Vic (pictured). In October she will publish her first collection of poetry, The Hollow of the Hand, a collaboration with the photographer Seamus Murphy. |