Ambivalent Scale offers the following biography on Martyn Bates – entitled:
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 and Becker 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 Jarman’s’ 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 Deirdre Rutkowski (recordings later abandoned), 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 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 a cappella 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 album 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 witnessed 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
The 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 development/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 eventually being released by Musica Maxima Magnetica early in 2006 – with a track (‘The Death of Polly’) featured on the Virgin release Crooning on Venus. Tracks from Songs of Transformation still receive play on BBC Radio 6 with regularity.
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, at Thein Studios in Hamburg.
Re-released in 1998: Imagination Feels Like Poison album. Initially released to complement the book of the same name, this album was felt by Bates to stands alone in its own right, and worthy of a quite separate 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 (then 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 author’s family.
1998 also saw Bates 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 allowed a “year of re-assessment” and, to quote Bates again “2000 was a year of search and redefinition” – providing Bates with an opportunity to “undergo a period of personal research.”
2001
A second Twelve Thousand Days album is written, recorded and released, entitled The Devil in the Grain. Released by Germany based Iceflower/Trisol labels outfit.
Another rare solo outing, an acoustic concert in San Francisco.
2002
The Texas independent NDN Records release a new Martyn Bates mini-album Dance of Hours – written and recorded this year at A-Scale, and considered by some to be a ‘third volume’ of the Letters Written series.
2002 also saw the reissue of the Just After Sunset, 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 often 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
Martyn Bates records an album in collaboration with Troum, a ‘.meditation’ on the works of W.B. Yeats.
Rare live appearance in the form of Twelve Thousand Days debut gig at the Small World mixed media festival in Lincoln.
Eyeless In Gaza live appearance at a ‘private party’ gig – a quiet celebration, and a purposely 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 saw a broadening of A-Scale’s association with US wyrd-folk originators – the Dark Holler group of labels – with Dark Holler’s Hand/Eye imprint licensing Martyn Bates’ Imagination Feels Like Poison Cd/book package as well as several other Eyeless In Gaza titles. June of 2005 sees the issue of Bates’ Leitmotif mini album, as part of Dark Holler’s ‘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). Other contributors included Current 93, Tim Renner, and In Gowan Ring.
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 work in the field of so-called ‘wyrd-folk’, or ‘avant-folk’, as Martyn himself had sometimes called it. This much welcomed affirmation came via the wonderful website known as The Unbroken Circle.
July saw a new release by Twelve Thousand Days, with their new mini-album At the Landgate. The mini-album was released via the Polish label Shining Day, with this release serving as a taster for the third Twelve Thousand Days album – From the Walled Garden – the recording and mixing sessions for the album having also been completed by July 2005.
In August 2005 the Swiss independent label Shayo Records re-released the Mystery Seas album, with corresponding solo Martyn Bates concerts (performing with In Gowan Ring) in Paris and Bruxelles.
A Cd-Ep was made available on the tour, featuring two new works by both Martyn Bates and In Gowan Ring.
Also, much work was undertaken on the recording of a Martyn Bates “new album of songs” – being a primarily keyboard based new album, entitled Endless Trees. The album was slated “to be something of a special project”. As Bates stated at the time: “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.”
In this year, another area of work that has stimulated a long-held fascination for Martyn Bates finally saw a public exploration. Constituting a ‘satellite’ project for Bates – the project was 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 Buñuel & Dali’s L’Age d’Or. Seven Voyages debut took place with a showing of Häxan at the Boston International Festival July 1st 2005.
2006
In 2006, two substantial Bates related releases were issued via the Sub Rosa label – Plague of Years by Eyeless In Gaza, and Your Jewelled Footsteps by Martyn Bates. These compilations, uniquely, covered the whole of Eyeless in Gaza/Martyn Bates’ careers, with tracks licensed across several record labels. Plague of Years offered examples of the hitherto un-compiled experimental side of Eyeless in Gaza’s work, whilst Your Jeweled Footsteps afforded a long-neglected first opportunity of an overview compilation of Martyn Bates’ solo oeuvre.
Twelve Thousand Days’ third album – From the Walled Garden – was released by Shining Day. Playing material from this album, Martyn Bates (together with Elizabeth S.) performed at a concert in Geneva in September of 2006, along with Larsen and Baby Dee.
May 2006 also saw the release of To a Child Dancing in the Wind, Martyn Bates’ collaboration with German electronic duo Troum, on Transgredient Records. The album comprised works by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, with Bates singing and playing occasional harmonica against a backdrop of ‘stark grandeur’.
2007
Bates’ very first ‘public’ musics release – Dissonance – was reissued in 2007 on Cd & Lp. Beta-Lactam Ring Records issued THREE editions of Martyn Bates (Migraine Inducers Dissonance/Antagonistic Music) first ‘mythical’ Dissonance release – this previously tape-only release having not been available since early 1981, and is variously described as being a “noisy tour de force and scream of frustration” over Bates’ earlier adventures in music – which helped clear the vision for what was to come. A glimpse of this evolution could be glanced in the even more rare ‘Americas version’ of Dissonance, later released in the US, one could catch glimpses of musical light seeping in here and there through cracks in the wall of noise, giving hints of the early Eyeless sound. There were other musicians cast in a similar situation at the time as this work by Martyn Bates – like Throbbing Gristle, DDAA, David Jackman, Clock DVA – who gave expression to their own frustrations in similar fashions – but Dissonance is very distinctly different in being more personal and determinedly idiosyncratic reflection of its author as opposed to being definitively part of a broader contemporary movement.
Bates’s collaboration album with Max Eastley – Songs of Transformation Cd with Max Eastley – also saw its release in 2007. Recorded back in 1997, Virgin Records UK had originally planned to release the album, but since Kevin Martin (Godflesh etc) left the company – (Kevin was the guy who was then responsible for a&r at Virgin, and who had been handling the project) – it was shelved until the release on Musica Maxima Magnetica.
Writing of the material which would comprise A Map of the Stars in Summer album. Also, much time and effort was expended editing and re-writing for the printed page the material for the accompanying book. The book – Bates’ third book of ‘lyrics and other writings’ – was published by the Brussels based Moments imprint in 2008.
April 2007 saw the publication of a fine article on Eyeless In Gaza & Martyn Bates in the April, 2007 issue of The Wire magazine presenting a fine insight into aspects of Martyn Bates’ solo works in particular. Eyeless In Gaza – Patterns under the plough.
2008
July 2008: in collaboration with Nick Grey Bates contributed melodies and vocals to a piece entitled ‘Couvre-Feu’, for the new album by Nick Grey & the Random Orchestra entitled Spin Vows Under Arch – released on Beta-Lactam Ring Records.
A Map of the Stars in Summer album and lyrics book by Martyn Bates was issued by the Brussels based Moments imprint – collecting together mostly previously unpublished Martyn Bates & Eyeless In Gaza lyrics (120 pages). The book was issued with a Cd containing 5 new songs by Martyn Bates and also one new song by Eyeless In Gaza.
Mid-2008: in parallel with an extensive Cherry Red Records re-issue programme of Eyeless In Gaza albums, Martyn Bates’ first solo albums – Letters Written & The Return of the Quiet – tying in nicely with the larger campaign.
In the August of 2008 Martyn Bates collected a prestigious Mojo Award on behalf of Eyeless In Gaza, for their contribution to the Pillows & Prayers releases, and also specially recording a song for a Leonard Cohen homage album for the magazine.
2009
For Martyn Bates, 2009 proved to be a year pretty much away from the public eye, save for the occasional live concert outing – one such occasion being headlining slot at a Sub Rosa artistes evening concert in London – for a rare solo performance. It is true to say that during 2009 much of Bates’ creative endeavours were engaged in writing words and music. To be strictly accurate however, it is nevertheless fair to observe that Bates’ solo activities – and it is an observation that stands continuing on into 2010 – have during the past few years pretty much taken a back seat to the work which Bates sees, as “the heart of my work … the best of my work, which is always done with Peter Becker I feel … .” Which is to say of course, working with Peter Becker, on Eyeless In Gaza related projects.
On the re-issue front meanwhile, hitherto hard-to find material was finally made more generally available in 2009, with Martyn Bates’ three 1988-1990 solo albums finally re-released (in mp3 format only, at present) – Cherry Red records making available Martyn Bates’s long unavailable solo albums from the period when Eyeless In Gaza (temporarily) did not exist (1988-1991). Love Smashed on a Rock (Oct 1988), Letters to a Scattered Family (February 1990) and Stars Come Trembling (Oct 1990) all now being available for download via iTunes etc.
2010
This extended spell of song writing and recording continued apace throughout 2010 for Martyn Bates – writing and recording both with Eyeless In Gaza, and in solo works and other collaborations.
However, this obsessive current modus operandi has not stopped Bates working on a vast array of material for the Mythic Language box set by Eyeless In Gaza – a multi cd set which also features a Martyn Bates solo album entitled Morningsinging. This huge undertaking is essentially a retrospective of previously un-issued archive material ranging from live tapes, ‘lost’ archive studio recording, demos, and radio sessions for the BBC, stations in San Francisco, Germany, Belgium, Holland. A Boxed Set, it also comes with a 5 inch Eyeless In Gaza vinyl single, plus two books by Martyn Bates – November: Inky Blue Sky a 100 page book of “lyric fragment/xerox experiments, set up to mix word and image” – and a second book entitled Notes on Mythic Language (a book about writing).
2011
With the new year, Bates’ redoubtable zest for the music continues on, with Eyeless In Gaza continuing to demand much of Bates’ attention, interest and passion at present. However, the Bates’ songwriting meanwhile nevertheless continues to take on new and fresh shapes, for both the band and for solo musics – with the veiled promise for 2011 of a long awaited “completely, totally solo acoustic album … I feel that it is the right time for an album of pure songs, songs denuded.” Watch this space … .
Other older comments/announcements
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 a cappella 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 Cd released by A-Scale in 1995 they told 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 ……
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