Luke Fowler: Pilgrimage From Scattered Points
Until March 18; Modern Institute, Glasgow

At the tender age of 27, Glasgow artist Luke Fowler has an impressive list of credits to his name. As well as running his own post-punk multi-media label, Shadazz, and playing in the band, Rude Pravo, Fowler has just completed his third documentary. Having made films in the past about Scottish psychologist RD Laing, and underground musician Xentos Jones, this time Fowler turns his attention to Cornelius Cardew and his legendary Scratch Orchestra.

The Scratch Orchestra was formed in 1968, with a revolutionary constitution. It was to welcome amateur musicians from all walks of life, to make experimental music in unusual places. People were encouraged to invent different kinds of Scratch Music: sounds created with unorthodox objects, drawn from non-musical notation, and in some cases they were entirely silent acts of performance.

For a few years the orchestra managed to stir up healthy doses of controversy, until a political rift sliced through it, separating the hardline Maoists from the “bourgeoisie idealists” and causing the whole community to fall apart in 1973.

This subject is perfect for Fowler, whose DIY aesthetic and instinct for collage make an ideal partner to the orchestra’s few recordings. Some wonderfully honest interviews have been coaxed out of former participants, some of them clearly still traumatised by their memories. This new material is combined so deftly with archive footage that it’s difficult to distinguish between the two; Fowler has achieved an overall look of scratchiness without a whiff of artifice.

Fowler is adept at making the most of archive material, combining old audio with creeping camera moves and nifty little homespun animations. This necessary dislocation between sound and visuals becomes a virtue in his hands, applied even to the new material, where talking head and soundtrack are wilfully separated.

Fowler’s editing echoes the anarchy of Cardew’s music without ever losing the thread of the story. The film is buzzing with the energy of little scraps of sound and picture, scratch editing to match the scratch music. But it’s never self-indulgent, and Fowler’s love for the subject matter becomes our own.

At one stage Cardew explains that the singers of a particular piece, fighting against loud drums, are doomed to fail, like Buddhist monks chanting in the lee of a waterfall. It’s suggested too that the orchestra, with all its contradictory energies, was doomed to failure despite its great potential. The happy end to the tale is that Fowler, wrestling with these same contradictory forces, succeeds.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.03.06