joshgeffin

[joshgeffin]

A Guitar Teacher’s Guide To The Apocalypse

Wednesday 18 March 2020

The schools are still open and I go to work as usual. Except it’s not like usual. There’s an eerie quietness at the bus stop and the tube platform is thinly populated at rush hour. When the tube train stops and the doors open only a few people board despite there being loads of space in the carriage. Others wait for the next train - they are keeping their distance. I shake my head in disbelief but wait as well. I look furtively around at the other passengers, many of them wearing face masks. We’ve arrived in that far-off dystopian future I think, this is it. I have a sense that these people feel short-changed for having to go to work today, and I do too. I’m angry that the government haven’t already closed the schools as a social distancing measure, as they have in France, Spain, Italy. Yet freelance teaching is my livelihood so I’m going to work.

As it turns out, being at school is something of a salve. The children are just getting on with life. They are not oblivious - a few of them mention the C word - but they don’t seem too affected by it. The lessons are just like any other week. There’s a global emergency but I’m still sitting down with Toby, playing “Wrong Postcode” in the key of G. Then in the key of D. There’s a pandemic going on but at 12:30 it’s time for Guitar Club. It feels good to be doing something, however small, that is useful, contributing to some semblance of normality for these kids, though I feel uneasy about not social distancing by being here - I speak to another teacher who is similarly conflicted. I feel much admiration for the core staff who are keeping everything going, and doing it with a smile. At one point I wonder if this has all been a bad dream, maybe everything is as normal. But then I see someone walking around wiping door handles with disinfectant.

Later, I read that schools have been ordered shut in Scotland and Wales from Friday with England likely to follow. So I will be off work, like so many others, for the foreseeable. As a self-employed person I don’t know what will happen to my income but so many others are in a similar boat so I don’t feel alone. I’m sad that upcoming concerts, teaching and gigs have been cancelled but I’m also curious about what this space will bring, how I will adapt and what I will create, and how the world will change and respond. I feel that some light will emerge from the darkness. I don’t know how I will fare with isolation but I have been speaking with people on the phone and online and I feel a strange sense of connectedness within the distance. 

[joshgeffin]

New instrumental album HUM & GLOW

I have new album of… instrumental Americana? Atmospheric country? Cinematic folk? Wordless songs? Ambient guitar music? Landscape music? Whatever it is, it materialised over a year or so of bedroom improvising between work and life and walks to the Lea River (northeast London). I sat in my room and played guitar and when something felt right I recorded it. I wanted it to be organic and intuitive, I didn’t want to spend too long composing or rehearsing. The first track on the album, “Out Back” (named because it made me think of sitting on a back-porch in prairies America), was the first I got down and I recorded it off the cuff – some acoustic guitar chords that sounded good on the day, full and resonant and open, then layers of electric guitar using volume pedal and slide. It came out with a kind of looseness and simplicity that I loved, rough around the edges but also rich and atmospheric. It was reminiscent of the country music I was listening to (Lyle Lovett was on heavy rotation). I was keen to make more of the same so I recorded several other riffs as well as pieces I had been playing around with for a few years. I experimented with effects pedals and edited the recordings to keep only the best stuff. Gradually I had 5 or so then ten or so of these instrumental pieces, these ‘wordless songs’. I enjoyed the directness of making music without words, of not taking on the larger task of writing lyrics and shaping songs. It allowed things to flow quickly and it seemed to serve the emotional landscape I was going through at the time. I didn’t want to get bogged down in describing it, I just wanted to feel it out. Some of the pieces still sounded like songs and have song structures. I guess that’s what I know so that’s what comes out. “Hum” is the least song-like – no acoustic, just electric. Most of the album has central acoustic parts with electric volume swells drifting in and out but this track is made up of only volume swells. I’d seen Daniel Lanois play live around this time and his music was an influence on this sparse electric sound. The biggest point of reference for the album as a whole was William Tyler, whose album Modern Country blew me away. It was one of those moments, I had already started recording these tracks and thinking what are they? when I heard this album and it kind of fitted. It seemed a similar aesthetic. I thought about adding more instruments to the tracks but decided to keep the album simple and minimal. I wanted it be great background music, not grabbing for attention but offering a soundscape to be in. I’ve been told it’s cinematic and I would love to work with film but even on its own I hope it can be a mood to go to. The cover image is a photo I took travelling in Canada, near Algonquin Park in Ontario, some years ago. The scene of a deserted gas station at dusk stayed with me as I was looking at ideas. It seemed to match the spaciousness and liminality of the music – an in-between place and an in-between time.  

HUM & GLOW is out now on all digital platforms

Track Listing:

Out Back

Red Yellow Green

Hum

Glow

Not In The Negative

River

January

Brightside

Old Man Fingers

Written and recorded by Josh Geffin

Mixed by Sonny Johns

Mastered by Tom Leader

Cover design by Owen Tozer

Buy at Bandcamp

Follow on Spotify

[joshgeffin]

Folk Night

Sitting on the bus one morning I hear a conversation behind me, two guys talking about music and a festival called Fire In The Mountain. As we get off at the same stop I say “I’ve been to that festival!” and we strike up a conversation, telling each other about our musical projects. One of them runs an Irish folk night in a nearby pub and invites me to come along and play a song. A week or so later on a Wednesday night I catch a bus down the hill to the Maynard Arms. As I enter through the swinging double doors with my guitar on my back I have the sensation of walking into a room of sound – loud, amplified traditional folk tunes played by a four-piece sitting in the corner. One of the guys I met on the bus, Adam, playing banjo along with two fiddlers and a guitarist-singer. Adam nods to me as I walk up and asks me to listen to the balance of the instruments, to let him know if anything needs changing. After half a minute I give a thumbs up – sounds good to me. A woman who seems to know the band is sitting on the table next to me and we exchange intermittent chit-chat. I sit back and listen to four or five tunes, letting the music wash over me, the ups and downs and runs of melodies, interlocking of the different instruments, pulsing of the guitar. I like the guitarist’s style and focus on his technique as he slides chord shapes up and down the neck, letting open strings ring and strumming eighth notes, creating a driving, droning, percussive rhythm section of sound. I’m impressed by the fluidity of his wrist movement and the sixteenth-note flourishes he adds to mark section changes and build shape into the music.

After a while I get the you’re on next nod and think, what shall I play?? Adam tells me he’s not very keen on the acoustics of the venue – too reverberant, too many hard surfaces, “an aircraft hangar of a place”. As the band vacate the ‘stage’ (a bench) I approach and get permission to use the guitar – easier than plugging in mine. “Can I tune the E down to D?” No problem. I sit down, tune it and start fingerpicking the chords to “Dink’s Song”, an American folk song (also known as “Fare Thee Well”). I feel confident playing this one; the guitar part is engaging and the song is simple and affecting. People who like folk music often know it. The musicians are stood in a line near the stage, watching me and listening, and some of their friends on a nearby table are interested in what I’m doing; the rest of the pub seems oblivious – they’re here to socialise. But I’m enjoying playing. My voice feels quiet and I try to let go of more volume, opening up in my belly. Adam sits down next to me and starts to join in on mandolin. I can see nodding heads. Each time I sing the high note of the refrain I’m thinking, am I going to make it? and I always do, cleanly or less cleanly but cleanly enough. I finish as usual by humming the tune in unison with the guitar part. There’s applause and Adam says feel free to do another. “Do you know Angeline The Baker?” I ask. He thinks for a moment and then just launches into it and luckily he’s playing in D so I join in and there we are, playing it, playing it around and around and I’m enjoying the pushed note in the second part, playing it up high on the neck, and the pumping bass of my thumb on the sixth and fourth strings. 

Lastly I play “Won’t You Go My Way”, in A instead of the usual Bb as that’s easier to play along to and it doesn’t make much difference to me because I’m using a capo which I clamp on fret two. String three is buzzing and the guitar is not as bright sounding as I’m used to. “I love that song,” one of the musicians says as I leave the stage and settle back into my chair, listen to a few more tunes from the band and finish my drink. I give the musicians a thumbs up and a smile, making my way to the doors and out into the night.

[joshgeffin]

Both hands

I’m going to release an album this year and I’ve been reading how-to articles – how to get on a Spotify playlist; how to create a one-sheet; how to grow a fan base. As might be expected, they all talk about online presence and so I’ve started to engage more online – posted videos of me playing to Instagram, put this blog on Facebook, updated my Spotify profile and uploaded my back catalogue for digital distribution. Releasing music can be an anticlimax; after everything that goes into creating a piece of work it's disappointing when ‘not much happens’. Of course, you do it for the love of it. You love the process of writing and creating and you want to keep doing it, you have to keep doing it. But art is also about having an audience – a listener, a viewer, a receiver. That’s how an artist feels connected I think, feels they’re doing something useful in the world. It’s what makes it real. Sometimes putting music out has felt like letting go of a handwritten note into a big windy city and hoping it somehow reaches the right person. What I’m realising increasingly is that this side of things – promotion, visibility etc – requires more energy and engagement than I have been willing or able to give it in the past – that the thing people say about ‘putting yourself out there’ is kinda true. And whilst online is important, lately I’m thinking that putting yourself out there is perhaps best taken literally – going to gigs, playing live and being part of the music community.

In the morning I teach two guitarists in the secondary school before going downstairs for three beginner piano lessons in the primary school. I set up a keyboard, two small orange chairs, and get a piano book and a set of rhythm cards from the office. My first student, Kiara, is in Reception class and just four years old. She’s so small that when she walks down the stairs she has to bring both feet on to each step one at a time. I say she can sit on the left to play the low notes today if she likes. We start with some copy rhythms – I play a bar and she copies it back then I ask her to make some up for me to copy. I pick up her notebook to see what I wrote in it last week. “‘Sheep In The Farmyard’ – colouring in. So how did that go?” “Good,” she says, looking down, smiling tentatively. I flick through her book to find the page she’s coloured in. “Wow,” I say, “that’s fantastic, well done! I like these green bits! Okay, shall we have a go at playing the background music now?” I point to her starting notes – C in the left hand (do) and C together with E in the right hand (do and mi) – and count us in. I sing the words over the top and she joins in, playing with both hands and singing – a small triumph. 

Sometimes I ask do you want to play it faster or slower or do you want to play it louder or quieter but today instead we play it in a new key. I point to F and explain that now this note is going to be the ‘do’ in the left hand and show her the corresponding notes for the right hand. Then we try it in F# – using the black notes – before moving on to “Rabbits In The Rain”, singing it in tonic sol-fa with hand signs for each note. As we transfer it to the piano, it’s painstakingly slow. She finds it very difficult to coordinate her hands. Fingers do things she doesn’t want them to, go in the wrong direction and trigger other fingers inadvertently. But she does manage to play the whole song, at her own pace, and it is an improvement on last week. We do a few more songs and we don’t have time to play Switch today. I write in her notebook what we have covered and a new colouring in task for the week. 

“Okay, let’s get you back to class.” Out we go, up the stairs, taking the shortcut into the light rain and wind, through the infant playground to Kiara’s classroom. I help her put her books back into her book bag and the bag into her drawer. Off she turns without a goodbye into the blur of children in maroon sweatshirts walking around, building stuff, some noticing me, looking up, curious, smiling for no reason.

[joshgeffin]

Pace

I’m having trouble containing the chaos. In front of me are eight seven-year-olds each armed with a noise machine (miniature guitar) and the primary objective to have as much fun as possible. There’s a lot of excitement and shouting and strumming and plucking. Big personalities who like pretending they’re on stage – one who intermittently stands up with his guitar in a stadium rock pose. Also quieter ones who don’t enjoy the mayhem – I feel I need to maintain a sense of order if not for myself then for them. Keeping the pace up helps, moving quickly between activities – songs, games, movement, notation, playing by ear… And asking lots of questions: Who can show me how to play the ‘la’ for Step Back? Who knows where to put your thumb when you’re doing walking fingers? Who wants to choose if we play it faster or slower?

We learn some one-finger chords (C and G7) and I strum a rhythm and ask them to join in then sing “Go Tell Aunt Nancy”, an American folk song, over the top. It’s a song they know and some of them sing along. We play it a few times then I pick up a set of rhythm cards, fanning them out in front of me. “Who wants to choose a card?” The hands shoot up. I ask four children to choose a card each and place the four cards in a line on the floor like bars in a piece of music. “OK! Rest stroke on string one. Who’s going to be the last one to get ready? Ready-And-Off-We-Go!” After we play it once I ask who would like to choose a card to turn over. “Now we have to play that card from memory!” In a few minutes all the cards are face down and we’re playing the whole line from memory. A few children seem to have it, others play something entirely different very enthusiastically; some look at me, bewildered. “Hands up who got it all right?” I ask. Everyone raises a hand.

Tube observations… A man on the stairs feverishly shaking snacks from a box into his mouth. Standing in the carriage, overheating in winter clothes but too crammed to remove layers. Someone’s phone lighting up, a message. The whack of the carriage against rails. A man with half a sandwich and a newspaper, sitting and staring at the floor, not eating or reading. A slim, delicate wrist close to my face. The doors zipping open. Screeches, bangs. The relentless tannoy. Our grim determination. 

Sometimes instead of getting the bus from the tube station I walk home through the woods. Its late afternoon in February, cold but the sun out. Trees stood like columns of light in the darkness. The playing field bathed in sunlight and kids doing football training, their hollers carried on the air. I sit on a bench, close my eyes and let the sun warm my sun-starved face. Birdsong – the sound of spring finally coming. I don’t want to leave. I go the long way around, deeper in, up and down slopes, feeling stones in the mud underfoot, a vast web of bare winter branches moving overhead, eventually coming to the gate and the road and a short walk home.

[joshgeffin]

Dynamics

On Wednesdays and Fridays I teach at a primary school in Chelsea. It’s a lovely school in a beautiful neighbourhood near the river. The atmosphere is warm and relaxed but with strong discipline and codes of behaviour (when teachers shout I get the impression it’s for the greater good rather than a power trip). There’s lots of laughter, and extracurricular activities going on all the time. Excellent music provision – concerts, bands, a choir. Children’s artwork on the walls and posters with words like peace and kindness (and a sense that these things are genuinely being thought about). School lunch is delicious and healthy and integrated into the curriculum. I enjoy sitting with the children and other music teachers in the gentle clatter of the hall at lunchtimes, pupils asking questions (”Are you married?”) and telling jokes (”What animal says Oom?”). The school is small, one class per year, and there’s a tangible feeling of community. It’s state-run and despite the super-affluent area seems demographically varied.

I leave the house early to get a seat on the tube at Bounds Green, put on over-ear headphones, listen on repeat to a track by Jonsi & Alex and try to meditate. Half an hour later I’m at Hyde Park Corner getting the 19 bus which takes me through Knightsbridge and the rows of designer flagships to halfway down Kings Road. I like walking in the cold bright air through the pretty backstreets, passing expensively dressed people and parked sports cars, to the school on a peaceful pedestrian cut-through near a big church. My experience of London is so diverse. Chaos, poverty, speed, uber-commerce, refinement, threat, thrill, abundance, beauty, madness... There’s something about this little school far enough away from the noise of the main road and high-end retail, in amongst the tall, ornate houses and tree-lined pavements, that feels calm and healthy. A kind of innocence and spirit that I find positive and grounding in my life. 

Today I arrive with time to spare and play piano in the quiet of the practice room before school starts. 

A post shared by Josh Geffin (@joshgeffin) on Jan 27, 2018 at 12:22am PST

I have 23 students over the two days, each having 20- or 30-minute lessons. Fridays I teach Guitar Club. We’ve been playing songs from Guitar Basics; a 12 bar blues piece and a Spanish pastiche called “Fiesta”, both with three guitar parts of differing ability. The boys always want to play the bass part – it’s the closest we get to Rock, which is their Holy Grail. (“Can we play Rock now?” is probably the question I get asked most, to which the only satisfactory answer is Yes.) “Who knows what ‘dynamics’ means?” I ask today. Harry says, "soft and loud". “Soft and loud, well done. Does anyone have any ideas for how we could use dynamics in this piece?” Isabelle suggests that as each line repeats we could do each first time loud and the repeats quiet. This works well. Dynamics really add a lot when working with children (and in general, I guess). It’s such a simple way to make things more musical and engaging. As we play, the piece seems to have a new sense of occasion and I feel confident we’ll be ready for the Spring Concert in a few weeks.

[joshgeffin]

Lamborghini!

Getting off the 134 bus for the Saturday music centre I meet two colleagues and we walk through the school grounds together. The playing fields are frozen and it reminds one of them of winter rugby as a schoolboy. Big puffs of breath hit the air as we laugh and walk. Today I have six one-to-one lessons and two guitar groups – four and a half teaching hours. Jack, six (“and three quarters”), alternates between excited eagerness and heavy sighing after concentrated effort. He has good technique, holds the guitar as I suggest: right wrist arched away from the guitar, left hand thumb on the neck, feet flat on the floor. Some students don’t take to it so easily. One of my efforts to encourage another pupil to sit well was to assign a car name codeword to each technicality. Thumb on the neck became “Maserati” and “walking fingers” was “Lamborghini” – it worked for a while!

Ali, 14, is studying for a classical guitar Grade 4 exam. I began teaching him when he was six; now he’s leading a guitar group at his school, arranging music for ensemble and a confident improviser. It’s great to see. Red & Yellow Guitars, a group of seven year-old guitarists, is fun but challenging. I have to become a slightly different person. I’ve learned to be that person quite well now, firm and positive and occasionally stern. Able to raise my voice when needed and cut through the noise. To begin I strum a rhythm loudly on my guitar and they know it’s Copycat, focus on me and strum it back. Next we play the same game with rest-stroke and then I ask who wants to be Copy Boss. The hands shoot up – today I choose Theo for sitting well. He plays a few rhythms and the rest of the group copy him. Then we play Call & Answer where everyone gets to make something up in response to the previous person’s riff.

I’ve been working on some new instrumental music, most of which came out of a creative period in the summer holidays. The recording process felt more intuitive than how I’ve worked previously. A feeling of allowing what came to come, not complicating things too much, not trying to make something impressive. Just keeping it simple and showing up consistently. It’s mainly acoustic guitar compositions with layers of improvised electric guitar, lots of volume pedal swells, slide, reverb. I’ve been listening to Country and Americana in the last year and that’s in there, as well as folky elements and hints of post-rock.

[joshgeffin]

Mosaic

I’m in a practice room at a school in North London, teaching a bass part for John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” to a boy in Year 9. Then I’m showing one of his yearmates how to play “Bonecrusher”, a heavy metal song from Rock School Grade 2 which uses palm muting. We work on the first four bars only. First we clap the rhythm of the notes then I ask him to play bars two and four while I play bars one and three, then we swap. I have a tea break with one of the instrumental teachers. We exchange notes about students and laugh. I watch the sun bathe the playground, lighting up the wooden bench seats. The whole school is in the field for class photos and I like the unusual feeling of emptiness, no one around except us with our mugs of tea and the sun and wind outside in the mid-morning and a cleaner passing through.

In the evening I go for a short run in the slanted light down to the trees by the canal. I have a bath and listen to a podcast by NPR music, an interview with Matt Berninger, the singer from the National. He talks about his creative process, saying he doesn’t have neat files for each set of song lyrics or even each album but instead has one document with words in it and pulls out words and phrases for various projects in an intuitive way. He has a fluidity between projects and across art forms that I find inspiring, and somehow relieving.

Jack, six, plays “Rabbits In The Rain”, a two note song, three times - on three different strings, one after the other. I ask him if he wants to play it faster or slower: “faster!” Next we play “Fox”, the two-note accompaniment (which I explain as “the background music”, a phrase I got last week from another student) and then the melody – “the song”. We use a technique called “mosaic” which I learnt training with DaCapo Music Foundation. The student plays just one note to start with – all the E’s for example – and the teacher plays the rest of the notes, then gradually the student adds other notes until they can play the entire melody. The idea is to keep it musical and in tempo throughout the learning process. We only get to three out of five notes today. That’s what teaching is like, things are part-learned and unfinished and left there for this week. It makes me think about process as opposed to end product, that perhaps things are always in a state of being learned, that we are all in a perpetual state of becoming.

[joshgeffin]

Tuesday

October 3rd 2017

My first lesson is at 3:45pm with David, a man in his forties. We play “Take It Easy” by the Eagles, strum the chords and sing, each take a solo. It has a good energy. We also play “Your Song” by Elton John; a Tom Waits song; an American folk song called “Hang Me” (from the film Inside Llewyn Davis) to practise finger-style; “These Days” by Jackson Browne; and go over a B natural minor scale which he uses to improvise on “Fields Of Gold” by Sting.

(Before work I go to the river. The sun coming in and out, the water moving softly. I try to let myself just be there, relax and be open. I enjoy the sun on the back of my neck. I crouch down, squatting, watching the river, turning my head this way then that, looking down then up the river, noticing the trees hanging over it, feeling the ache building in my legs, pressing into the ground so my spine can lift and lengthen like in yoga. I sit against a tree trunk and play with conker shells – spiky but not sharp. I turn at the sound of a black waterbird with a white head diving into the water and see it coming back up.)

I walk from David’s house to my second student, ten-year-old Ethan. He’s studying Grade 1 classical guitar and loves working towards exams. He wants to get level with his sister who is on Grade 2 violin. Teaching has its ups and downs but today I thought as I do sometimes that it’s a privilege to work with people in this way, to build these one-to-one relationships over weeks and years. We go over his exam pieces, making notes about things to improve such as dynamics and right hand technique. I write in his notebook and draw five 10-minute practice boxes with the days of the week (Sunday and lesson day off) which he can tick off each time he practices.

Next I teach thirteen-year-old Emily. The room I teach her in is her father’s consulting room. There are books on psychotherapy and Buddhism, poetry books, a copy of the red book by Jung. For a while there were lots of toy animals on a shelf – Emily said they were for her dad’s work. I glance at the book spines and feel inspired. It’s got a good feel to it, their home. We play “Hallelujah”, transposed to make it easier to sing. We do a strumming version and a fingerpicking version. We play “Caje Sukarje”, an Eastern European folk tune with syncopated rhythms. We start learning “And I Love Her” by The Beatles and recap a finger planting exercise from last week. I walk home and it’s almost eight by the time I get back.

[joshgeffin]

2016 round-up

The year started with an exciting trip to BBC’s Media City to play on the Marc Riley show for Victoria Hume, promoting her Closing EP (which has just been championed by Lauren Laverne in her best of 2016 list). It was the first time I had played on live radio and was a little nerve-wracking but all went well and it was a fun trip with Victoria and (viola and musical saw wizard) Quinta. Back in London I also got to do my first TV appearance when Victoria was invited to play on the Ayala Show with full band - you can see that here

The early part of the year was taken up with recording my own EP, Rocks Of Bawn, which came out in June. The five tracks are all traditional songs, inspired by my time working for The Song Collectors Collective. I was delighted that so many wonderful musicians played on the EP and pleased it was well received: “a welcome and sensitive breath of fresh folk air” according to Sam Lee and the blog Bright Young Folk said it “contains remarkable depth and gravity.” We launched the EP at New Roots Presents, a brilliant London folk club run by Rory Carlile, and also performed some songs on the Nest Collective Hour on Resonance FM – my second radio appearance of the year!

The next major event of 2016 for me came when I was asked to perform as a “Troubadour” for an exhibition by Ragnar Kjartannsson at the Barbican Art Gallery. This was definitely the strangest job I’ve ever had and quite possibly the most rewarding too. It involved playing a song on endless loop whilst wearing pyjamas and drinking beer. For two months. True story. You can read my blog about the experience here.

Other highlights included reuniting with Amy Walker to play some shows promoting her latest album Unravel; some barn stomping gigs with The Trad Academy Shanty Choir (particularly one at a naval base banquet – lots of healthy guffawing in dinner jackets!); a session for a forthcoming reggae EP and one for a new documentary film. I was also delighted to be promoted to Senior Teacher with The DaCapo Music Foundation, a music education charity I work for; I’m now teaching a large guitar ensemble, a teenagers folk/pop group and a group of beginner adults alongside my one-to-one students.

In the latter part of 2016 I’ve been writing and recording some new music and I’m looking forward to getting my head down in the new year. First gig of the year is supporting Victoria Hume next week, January the 4th in Hackney.

Wishing everyone a very happy new year!

[joshgeffin]

Ragnar Kjartansson, Barbican

So far today I’ve played the song about 60 times. It’s just gone 1pm; another 80 or so to go after lunch. Not that I’m counting – each rendition blends into the next and the piece becomes a long, polymorphous soundscape. It slows and swells, drifts and softens. Sometimes it almost falls apart, but it doesn’t stop until 6pm when the troubadours strum their last and the gallery closes.

That’s my job this summer – professional Troubadour. I’m performing as part of an exhibition of Ragnar Kjartansson which runs at the Barbican until September 4th. Hailed by the New York Times as “one of the most celebrated performance artists anywhere”, Kjartansson is well-known for his use of music, romance and repetition. In Take Me Here By The Dishwasher: Memorial For A Marriage, men with guitars sing and play a three-minute song on loop whilst drinking beer in their pyjamas to the backdrop of an Icelandic love fantasy film clip (featuring Kjartansson’s real-life mother and father). 

On the one hand it seems like the greatest job in the world, paid to lounge around on a sofa, drink beer and play guitar. It’s like “being on holiday” said Ragnar in a rehearsal pep talk. “But it’s going to be tough” he added. That’s the other side of it – boredom, monotony, aching fingers, the never-ending earworm that accompanies every waking hour.

The musicians approach the challenge in different ways. Some take up a position on a mattress and stay there most of the day, strumming away, getting up only for toilet breaks; others like to wander around. A few have tried to get drunk (though three beers a day is the official limit) and some aim for spiritual reverie. One performer just spent half an hour walking backwards slowly through the exhibition space. 

There are ‘breakthrough moments’ too. Suddenly I become aware of the mechanics of vocalising in my body, my throat opening and the pressure in the roof of my mouth. I feel present. I hear the sound of a neighbouring musician, our parts locking together beautifully. It’s a kind of meditation.

The reactions of visitors range from puzzled to enchanted, amused and intimidated. Lots of people chuckle and occasionally someone will try to strike up a conversation with us. One woman passed on a mystery note to a lucky troubadour. All sorts of people pass through – arty types, tourists, babies, businessmen, day-trippers, musos. My grandad came the other day – he thought it was pretty good.

Right, I’d better get back to it... There’s a strange comfort in sinking back into this big soft beast of a song and taking up my post among the forlorn, tipsy cry of the full-time troubadours.