Ambivalent Scale offer the following, “current biography” on Martyn Bates – realistically (?!?) entitled:
A Lifebook of Martyn Bates: An Often Errant, Incomplete & Wayward Chronology of Solo Songs & Musics
After releasing experimental/industrial tapes of Antagonistic Music/Dissonance (as Migraine Inducers), Martyn Bates formed Eyeless In Gaza in 1980 as a duo with Peter Becker. Eager to explore musical territories that veered crazily from filmic ambience to rock and pop, industrial funk to avant-folk styles, the duo steered hungrily and rapidly through several albums that culminated in the reflective swan songs of Rust Red September and Back From the Rains.
Citing a need to explore fresh territories and musical configurations/situations, Bates suspended Eyeless In Gaza activities in February 1987, leaving behind an eclectic legacy and influential body of work that has yet to be fully acknowledged by the press. Contributions to the soundtracks of Derek Jarmans’ The Garden and The Last of England followed, along with a series of solo albums that saw Bates armed with a 12-string acoustic guitar investigating traditional troubadour stylings whilst moving further and further from that particular context with each successive release.
Collaborations with This Mortal Coil’s Deidre Rutkowski (recordings later abondoned), troubled flirtations with bands Cry Acetylene Angel and Hungry i followed rapidly (possibly, in some respects Bates is too much of a control freak; ”if I work with more than one person at a time in any given creative scenario, then something about what I do becomes invisible”).
In 1992 Bates began working with self-styled poet Anne Clark, contributing to and writing for her album The Law is an Anagram of Wealth.
Bates happily re-united in 1993 with former colleague Peter Becker in Eyeless In Gaza – for work on the Fabulous Library Cd. Initially starting life as a Becker solo work (with Elizabeth S.), an invitation for Bates to contribute saw the album take on a hitherto unexplored aspect of Eyeless; with fresh impetus and enthusiasms for exploration and experimentation re-located, a permanent re-union was decided upon.
Meanwhile, ever the workaholic, Bates also continued to carve out a parallel career in a solo capacity, releasing a Cd with Scorn/Painkiller/ex-Napalm Death iconoclast M.J. Harris – released on the Italian label Musica Maxima Magnetica label, the Cd Murder Ballads (Drift) was essentially a marriage of ”isolationist” ambience with the ”murder ballad” form. Four long, desolate and beautiful pieces that stretch the boundaries of definition for ”isolationist” musics. A second volume ’Passages’ followed in 1996, with a third volume ’Incest Songs’ released in June 1998, completing the work. The trilogy was released as a 3 Cd box set by the Chicago based Invisible label, in July 2000.
1994
1994 saw the release of the first volume of Bates’ settings of James Joyce’s poems Chamber Music, Vol. 1 on Sub Rosa. Born simply out of love of Joyce’s work, Bates one aim in setting tunes to the text was: “to bring out in notes and music all the musicality that was already written there on the printed page … ” Bates envisioned the pieces as being “created about and around Celtic/English folk idioms … in a stark setting, almost a kind of essence of simplicity, like the very best folk tunes.” Virtually an acapella work for solo voice, Martyn Bates Cd release sees the first complete cycle of song settings of Chamber Music’s entire canon of thirty-six poems since it was written in 1902.
1995
Chamber Music Vol. 2 by Martyn Bates was released in November 1995 on Sub Rosa – thus completing recordings of the full song-cycle.
The release of the Mystery Seas Cd in 1995 saw Martyn Bates further exploring the seeds of ideas contained within his first solo work of some thirteen years ago, the criminally lost, legendary Letters Written collection. Comprising songs composed during that period (circa 1982) together with brand new songs in the idiom, this new collection of highly personal “letters” – organ-based songs and performances – is entitled ‘Mystery Seas (Letters Written #2)’. Haunted, richly melodic and lyrical these new recordings are most emphatically songs, and as such they veer away from the more “experimental” areas that Martyn has been working in of late. Recorded at Ambivalent Scale.
1996
1996 saw the long overdue first appearance of Martyn Bates work on the printed page, with a Stride books book entitled Imagination Feels Like Poison: Selected Solo Lyrics 1982-1995. A companion Cd release (going by the same title) convincingly threads together several strands of Bates’ past work, whilst adamantly embracing further new developments – a haunted, mesmeric “folk” music, quite unlike any other.
1997
Recording Songs of Transformation, in collaboration with Max Eastley, at A-Scale studios. “An exciting time, creatively. Max is a strange and spellbound creature with an eye trained to the unusual – and an ear for the unheard.” Eastley and Bates strove to pitch Eastley’s script/visualisation/ film-script/play The Song Bone – inspired by Songs of Transformation, but had little success at that time. Bates is of the strong opinion that “every dog had his day – all this of this rich vein of work will be tapped, when the time is right … .” Songs of Transformation is to be released by Musica Maxima Magnetica, early in 2006.
Gigs with M.J. Harris, performing Murder Ballads, in Berlin and Paris.
Writing Just After Sunset. Rehearsing and demo-ing the material at A-Scale.
1998
Recording Just After Sunset – with Anne Clark, in Hamburg.
Re-released in 1998 Imagination Feels Like Poison Cd initially released to complement the book of the same name. This album more than stands up in its own right, as a separate and distinctive release. Comprising new interpretations of songs extant 1982-1995 hitherto unheard, the album is primarily a collection of songs (occasionally threaded through with fleeting “illustrative atmospheric” sketches); a music brightly bittersweet, conjuring up ghostly and vivid invocations of folk/psych. Voice and, perhaps surprisingly, Banjo (an unusual choice for Martyn Bates), are the principal instruments that carry this music, a skeletal, simplistic music, deftly coloured and fleshed out by inventive use of Autoharp, Percussion, Whistles and Pump Organ. Constituting totally solo recordings (co-produced and engineered by Eyeless In Gaza’s Peter Becker), this collection bears the distinct air of the highly personal/autobiographical, with dedications and references to the authors family.
1998 also saw Bates making engaged in a rare ‘non-musical’ artistic endeavour – in the form of a literary contribution to the collection of tributes and epitaphs entitled My Kind of Angel: In Memoriam W.S.Burroughs. Bates’ piece of “fleeting impressions” was written out of the “sole desire to acknowledge the ambiguity of this most dangerous and saintly of souls – this warning bearer & ecstatic singer & dancer in words.”
1999
1999 saw the birth of a new partnership with Orchis’ Alan Trench – sometime collaborator with Nurse With Wound and Coil. Naming themselves Twelve Thousand Days, the happenstance and unlikely amalgam of Bates and Trench successfully produced an exotic first album full of a strange kind of melancholic ‘dark-folk’, somewhat mysteriously entitled In the Garden of Wild Stars.
Throughout this period, Bates continued to steadfastly tread a bewildering parallel career to the continuum of the various activities of Eyeless In Gaza – often intersecting and blurring, and cross-referencing work in various idioms with a “wild and gleeful abandon” of the kind that has, on occasion, caused less generous (or perceptive) critics to point to a root cause behind Bates’ apparent lack of a wider ‘mainstream’ success.
2000
A rare live solo outing – performing as part of the Terrastock festival, Seattle.
Essentially, 2000 allows a “year of re-assessment” and, to quote Bates again “2000 was a year of search and redefinement” – providing Bates with an opportunity to “undergo a period of personal research.”
2001
A second Twelve Thousand Days album is recorded and released, entitled The Devil in the Grain. Released by Germany based Iceflower/Trisol release set-up.
Another rare solo outing, a solo acoustic concert in San Francisco.
2002
The Texas independent, NDN Records release a new Martyn Bates mini-album Dance of Hours.
2002 also saw the reissue of Just After Sunset, the album by Martyn Bates & Anne Clark – settings of Rainer Maria Rilke. The re-release adds extra tracks: live footage of Martyn and Anne performing some of this music at the Strange Noise Festival, in Germany 1997 – a new lease of life for this quietly appreciated, Europe only release.
2003
Twelve Thousand Days begin recording From The Walled Garden. Martyn has this to say about the ‘protracted release-time/gestation period’ of certain works – e.g. Songs of Transformation, From The Walled Garden: “I’m a great believer that there is such a thing as ‘the right time’ for a particular release. This has more to do with strictly personal standards than the exigencies of a fickle market.”
Hand/Eye release: ‘Seven Yellow Gypsies’ on a 2xCd sampler release that also features a fine cross-section/plenitude of wyrd-folk, including StoneBreath, In Gowan Ring etc. etc.
2004
Troum collaboration: awaiting issue.
Rare live appearance in the form of Twelve Thousand Days debut gig at the Small World mixed media festival in Lincoln.
Eyeless private party gig – a quiet celebration, in the form of a “low-key” return to the public stage! Other, more public performances are promised, with the proviso, as Bates says that “each concert HAS to be something of a special occasion or circumstance – beyond our music – in order to validate appearances.” The watchwords appear to be “Wait & See”.
2005
As well as an extensive, renewed acceleration of activity with Eyeless In Gaza, 2005 sees a broadening of A-Scale’s association with US wyrd-folk rising lights – the Dark Holler group of labels: June 5 seeing the issue of Bates’ Leitmotif mini album, as part of Dark Holler’s ‘the folklore of the moon’ series. (Bates shares the June Moon slot with a parallel release by Kawabata Makoto of legendary Japanese band Acid Mothers Temple).
Further film soundtrack work also featured on Bates’ agenda – completed in 2005, writing the score for The Resurrection Apprentice, a short directed by filmmaker Dan McQuaid – colleague/collaborator of/with Larry Fassenden/Jim Jarmusch. The work was realised in tandem with Bates’ most treasured and long esteemed collaborator, Pete Becker – who played on several pieces, recording and engineering the work in his customary inimitable style.
The year also brings some well-deserved recognition for Martyn’s work in the field of so-called ‘wyrd-folk’, or avant-folk, as Martyn himself had sometimes called it. This much welcomed affirmation comes via the wonderful website known as The Unbroken Circle.
July brings a new release by Twelve Thousand Days, with their new mini-album At the Landgate. The mini-album will be released via the Polish label Shining Day – also available direct from A-Scale Mailorder. This release will serve as a ‘taster’ for the third Twelve Thousand Days album – From The Walled Garden. The recording sessions for this release have been completed, and the album is mixed and ready to go – and is promised for an early 2006 release. More details to follow.
August 2005 see the Swiss independent label Shayo Records re-releasing the Mystery Seas album, with corresponding solo Martyn Bates concerts (performing with In Gowan Ring) in Paris and Bruxelles.
On the tour, a Cd-Ep will be on sale of with two new works by both Martyn Bates and In Gowan Ring.
Also, there is the promised recording of a Martyn Bates “new album of songs” – being a primarily keyboard based new album, entitled Endless Trees. The album threatens to be something of a ‘special’ project, in that Bates’ states: “my aim is to create an album of stillness and silence … I want to try to re-create a cathedral-like sense of calm and focus. Via songs which are both melodic and meditative at one and the same time – putting across the placidity and sense of place that can be accessed at both the centre of a solitary & tall forest and in a tall & teeming city.” The album will be released by A-Scale/Shayo in Europe & by Dark Holler in the United States.
Another area of work that has stimulated a long-held fascination for Martyn Bates is to finally see a public exploration. Constituting a ‘satellite’ project for Bates – the project is entitled Seven Voyages – comprising a conglomeration of musicians formed expressly to perform a live music score (by Alan Trench) to Benjamin Christiansen’s silent film of 1922 – Häxan. The film has been hailed as an “hallucinogenic masterpiece” – influencing some of the conceptions at work behind Buneul & Dali’s L’Age d’Or.
Seven Voyages debut with a showing of Häxan at the Boston International Festival July 1st 2005. Further performances are scheduled, including one at the ICA.
About Martyn Bates song settings of James Joyce’s poems Chamber Music A-Scale writes this:
1994 sees the release of Martyn Bates settings of James Joyce’s poems Chamber Music, Vol. 1 on Sub Rosa. Born simply out of love of Joyce’s work, Bates one aim in setting tunes to the text was ”to bring out in notes and music all the musicality that was already written there on the printed page … .” Inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets and the airs of John Dowland, Joyce’s richly musical texts lent themselves readily to the mellifluous style of Bates song writing … with Bates envisioning the pieces as being ”created about and around Celtic/English folk idioms … in a stark setting, almost a kind of essence of simplicity, like the very best folk tunes.” Virtually an acapella work for solo voice, and air utilised, allowing Joyce’s exceptionally beautiful poems to truly breath.
Written whilst a young man in his early twenties,Chamber Music was Joyce’s first published work and is essentially the story of ”first love” passing from illumination to disillusionment – it’s a much neglected and maligned work, often over-shadowed by the colossal heights that Joyce’s later works achieved. These later works (Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake) are reverently treated as high art by scholars, a feast for ardous intellectual wrangling and dissection. Often coldly cerebral, this misguided approach must surely contradict the true spirit of Joyce, whose actual work is often ribald, lusty, deeply compassionate and humane – hence Bates use of warm, loosely ”folk” idioms in his settings of Joyce’s texts, providing a musical context that facilitate Joyce’s subject.
Martyn Bates Cd release sees the first complete cycle of song settings of Chamber Music’s entire canon of thirty-six poems since it was written in 1902.
Chamber Music Vol.2 by Martyn Bates was released in November 1995 on Sub Rosa.
Mystery Seas (Letters Written #2) (A-Scale 018, 1995, Cd)
You, Looking to Me for a Sign/Shorepoem/Calm of Dark/Imagination Feels Like Poison/Trade Winds/Over the Waters/Everywhere There’s Rain/Empty Pages/Midday Coming Misty/On the Beach of Fontana/Sky After All/Fragment (Little Star #1)/If I Could See in Everyone/Of Night/Gift
About this [highly recommmended] Cd released by A-Scale in 1995 they tell us:
1995 sees Martyn Bates exploring further the seeds of ideas contained within his first solo work of some thirteen years ago, the criminally lost, legendary ’Letters Written’ collection. Comprising songs composed during that period (circa 1982) together with brand new songs in the idiom, this new collection of highly personal ”letters” – organ-based songs and performances – is entitled ’Mystery Seas (Letters Written #2)’. Haunted, richly melodic and lyrical these new recordings are most emphatically songs, and as such they veer away from the more ”experimental” areas that Martyn has been working in of late. Recorded at Ambivalent Scale in March thru’ May 1995 (by Eyeless In Gaza’s Peter Becker), this music is drenched in the myriad resonances of ”folk”, whilst simultaneously circumnavigating any rigid and limiting definition. (”Folk” = the ”folk soul”, the ”collective unconscious”.) With voice/lyrics to the fore, and with a (for the most part) skeletal, simplistic instrumentation, Mystery Seas evokes a music of creaking ships, echoes, of distant sea-shanty, light thru’ broken stained glass windows, blighted misfortune, morning light, searching glances, of each story running thru’ them of salt water, clear rhyme and reason, of each mask, of a night sky – tall wall of no more, of floods of thought/unsettling fetters, of ”tears or words seeming to rip the surface, alerting and dumbfounding at one and the same time”: – songs of a beautiful secret to own ……
Go to:
Martyn Bates Homepage
Martyn Bates Discography
Martyn Bates Interviews & Reviews
Ambivalent Scale Homepage
Eyeless In Gaza Homepage
Eyeless In Gaza Biography
Eyeless In Gaza Discography
Eyeless In Gaza Interviews & Reviews
Peter Becker Homepage