Interview with Alistair Quietsch, pt. 2
Part two of a conversation with the Glasgow artist, musician, and DIY organiser.
Alistair Quietsch is an artist and designer living and working in Glasgow. He helps co-run the experimental gig series 1.5 Months in Glasgow showcasing underground and experimental music with collaboration as its core tenant. Current projects are Mhenwhar Huws, SMIRK, ZUNG! and God Damn The Son.
Alistair spoke to me at The Space on 10th May, 2024; I’ve split the transcript into two parts. In part two, below, Alistair discusses Glaswegian culture, lessons from art school, the importance of community, and more. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Eli Thayer: What is the importance of having communal spaces and DIY venues, and why is Glasgow such a hub for that?
Alistair Quietsch: A lot of people always cite the leftist influence of the shipbuilding, and the commune-type thinking behind a lot of that kind of stuff. That and Red Clydeside are obviously big things. But, having been to the art school, I know that the European City of Culture status and funding that the city got in the 90s is what made the big boom. The young British artists boom in the 90s was happening down south, and the same thing was happening up here. That’s when you got Ross Sinclair and all these other artists because there was basically a working artists unemployment payment that you could get. But because there were so many empty shopfronts and derelict buildings -- like this place! Shit like [The Space] is all over Glasgow. Once artists find a place, they’ll all congregate at it.
That’s what Kinning Park [Complex] was. Initially it was run by community interests and artists that had taken over the building. And their history is really fascinating, ‘cause they just did a sit-in, basically. It was a mothers and toddlers group. They ran their own communist-like working women’s group which took over the building and ran a nursery in it. When the council tried to shut it down they all protested and stopped it. Then the artists moved in -- Peter Howson was in there, and other folks -- and they were the ones who kept it going. Their own interest was to have studio spaces, be involved in the community, run art clubs for the kids, that kind of stuff. Spaces like that, they happen out of necessity, really.
I think also, on a more philosophical level with art and being a creative person, you’re gonna be creative no matter what. Your life drive is to create. I can’t go days without drawing, or working on music, or some other thing that’s not just sitting and fucking watching TV, eating hamburgers. You’ll always be driven to do that. Artists need a home, and a place where they can do that kind of thing. If it’s not provided for them they’ll find it, and eventually they’ll make it themselves. Culture needs culture. Communities need culture, and civilization needs culture. It’s frustrating that funding is cut for things all the time. They’re always like, ‘Oh, you want to go and draw? Well, that doesn’t affect our economy at all, so go off and piddle-de-dee all you want.’ But really, [the artists] are the ones that are making character within your civilization. It’s the same thing with big music festivals. That’s bringing people into your culture, making a difference by creating enjoyment and variety. It seems so stupid and frustrating that local government is constantly cutting funding for things that bring us joy.
When I came out of art school, I hit a hard place losing my studio space and losing my purpose of being at the art school and working on my stuff. When you lose your studio space, that’s a big blow. You’ve got a lot of shit that you can’t store. So it was a godsend getting a studio at Kinning Park Complex. I would go there sometimes, not even to make anything, just to be in my space. The nine years I was there, I thoroughly made it my studio, just by making it so ungodly and messy. I remember I was interviewed about Kinning Park Complex for a guy’s video degree, and I was saying that the importance of having that space is that it makes an artist feel like a real, true artist. It’s having this place to go and try out ideas, fail, succeed. Having a space is important because it gives you that time to not do anything and just think or experiment. Art’s always about learning through playing. Some ideas might sound awful, but at least you tried. Painting, too, is very much like, ‘I wonder what would happen if I did this?’ and just learning through that. Having a studio space is the physical embodiment of that. It’s a potential space for things to happen.
I imagine Rafe [Fitzpatrick] and Jer [Reid] would also talk about that, about the energy of creative endeavours in a place together. With experimental music and the improv thing, this thing that you’re honing most of the time is your listening, respect, and focus on other people’s actions. And your own reactions, and your own actions, and their reactions. That attentiveness. Because we’ve done so many improv things in here, it’s funny to think about it as a place for focus. But with the SMIRK thing we’re getting drunk every time we’re in here. So it becomes a place for laughter and all that. But other times I’ve come in with people to try out ideas that haven’t worked, and it’s been really frustrating. We’re not connecting. That’s part of the journey with free improv. It’s easy to play only with people that you know, so you’ve got your sound and your reactions are gonna be the same. Tony Bevan talks about that. He doesn’t like playing with certain people anymore, because he’s played with them so much that he feels like he’s not learning anything, he’s not reacting, he’s not being on his feet. It’s almost playing by numbers.
Places like this, obviously they need to exist. And people find a way of making it happen. The difficulty is, what’s your model for running a place? Wasps Studios obviously has a big financial model, and they’re not making enough money out of their artists anymore and want to put up their fees. All the Wasps artists are striking against the rent increase because the increase is ridiculous, something like 200%. They’re throwing it back to Wasps and saying, ‘Why don’t you find a way to generate more revenue?’ They could run a community cafe or something, because they’ve got these huge spaces that they own and aren’t doing anything with. Whereas places like [The Space], which are like anarchist, DIY-type venues, may have a lease where they don’t need to pay much money, but the problem is that they struggle to maintain the building. Lots of things need maintenance, and if you’re not taking in a lot of money, it’s a struggle and you’ll eventually shut down.
Kinning Park Complex kind of hit that point. We had a manager who saw us through the war years of fighting the council, and he had a Greenpeace background so he was really good at getting press attention. But when peacetime came, he was still on war mode, and it started to turn inwards and create personality clash issues. They got a new manager who was more community-focused and worked to open the building up more. We had dance classes, and community meals, and management asked the artists to come down and contribute. But not a lot of them did. A lot of the artists just wanted their own studio space in which to work and pay low rent. In the run-up to the building closing down for the roof repair, the manager was like, ‘We want you guys to contribute, or your rent will increase.’ Once we shut down and the artists moved out, they never went back because they couldn’t afford it. They’d probably become comfortable, either in new studio space or doing their own bedroom art or whatever. That was 2019; not long after was COVID, so if you had a studio space you wouldn’t be able to go there anyway. And now that the artists aren’t there anymore it’s lost its soul, its rich cultural history. Those kinds of spaces can exist, but there’s the politics of how it runs as well. The Pipe Factory up the road is one as well. You need to have a board that’s good at finding funding. That becomes party politics.
The big thing about the art school and the art scene is you get a lot of confident, self-assured people out of it. A lot of people went on to become fundraisers; they knew where the money was or they learned about the admin of arts funding, and a lot of them go on to run places like The Pipe Factory because they know how to write a funding application. They might not make great art, but they can write a really great funding application. For a long time, that’s been the go-to model. With funding getting cut more now, they’re having to find alternative methods of funding.
In a way, that’s the great thing about running 1.5 Months as a DIY thing. It’s run for several years and its success has been in not relying on funding. It’s a small thing, but the main costs are venue hire, poster printing, poster distribution, and paying the artists. If we relied on funding we would probably get more money, but each year I don’t know if we’d get the same amount. We skip all the admin and hassle of that by doing it as a DIY thing. The downside is that we can’t put on big touring artists that we want to put on. You can have a big presence online, but you might not have any money behind it.
That’s kind of how I see the Glasgow studio scene. Artists and musicians will make it happen and find places to do it, but it’s about the money too. Here, it’s a pay-what-you-can model. I don’t know how it works, but you need to be realistic with it. All the bands are asked to pay what they can afford. I assume people with high-earning jobs that work a lot of hours are backing it more, but I don’t know.
ET: You came up playing mostly metal and rock. Did you grow up surrounded by that music?
AQ: My household was more ‘90s pop. Some of my early favourites were Crowded House and Tubular Bells. But it was when The Offspring became more popular, and when the nu-metal scene hit, that was the same time that I was getting into my mid-teens. My friends were listening to it, and I ended up going to the Cathouse and getting my first girlfriend. I was like, “This metal thing’s cool!” I was a really angry teenager, and it spoke to me immediately. It still speaks to me. People that don’t have a metal background don’t understand how it can speak to you that way, how you can identify with the anger and frustration. One of my favourite bands is Tool, and it’s always going to be. Love it or hate it. Maynard’s lyrics on Ænima and Lateralus were profound as a kid, as quite a hurt little boy.
That added into the decision to go to art school. As a creative person, my best friend has always been my creativity. When you recognise your skills in high school, that was me talking to who I really am, when I was painting and drawing.
ET: You said you come from a fully self-taught music background, and also went to art school. I’m thinking about the contrast between the untrained music background and the highly-trained art background. How do you approach multi-disciplinary work, and how do those differing experiences interact?
AQ: It’s about questing, chasing the dragon. I’ve talked about that a lot, about creativity and about getting the hit from something looking, sounding, or coming out good. You are striving for this great-sounding thing, or this great painting, or for it to balance well.
The big thing was that art school kind of killed art for me for a while. It was full of cliques. Similar to high school, I was not part of the in group, and all the in group people seemed to naturally meet each other, brownnose each other, and do quite well in the scene. When I was at Kinning Park I kept on trying to get shows, and I wasn’t getting any shows, and I realised that the stuff that I was doing wasn’t popular and also wasn’t of interest to the gatekeepers. Whereas music was happily going along, and it was easier to get a show in a pub than to get a show in a tiny gallery space that was kept at arm's length by somebody. I became very disenfranchised with the art scene, so the two never really married up for me -- art and music together -- at that time.
I loved the way that [Glasgow School of Art] taught. I just loved it. I went in every single day, constantly painting. As I got closer to the end of 4th year, I proudly wore these disgusting paint-stained jeans. I remember trying to go to a pub one time, and the bouncer said, “No, you can’t come in if you’re a painter-decorator in work gear.” I said, “I’ve just come from art school,” and they said, “Well, that’s even worse!” I had to go get changed.
When I came out of art school I didn’t really have a plan, and started doing all these shitty, menial jobs. I worked for Glasgow uni, I was doing care work, doing little weekend art classes -- just free flowing. I had my studio though, which was grounding, and I had my creative practice, though I didn’t know where that was going.
I didn’t want to ruin music for myself by going and studying that for another four years, or getting in deep with theory and all that, so here is where the music and art never really touched each other.. Even though I have a lack of understanding of music theory, I remember at Big Noise I got one of the double basses and was just playing around on it, and I came down and some of the other people were like, “Oh, that was great to hear you play the double bass… it was quite loud…” But Jen (one of the founding musicians there) was like, “That was so refreshing, because it just sounded like you were having fun! It’s so nice to hear someone not just painfully playing scales over and over again.” And I laughed, and I thought, “That’s what makes me different from all of you.” That’s the big thing about coming from the metal scene: in school, we were the weird, geeky kids that were into comic books and prided ourselves on being weird. That’s stuck with me still.
So I never wanted academia to ruin music for me, even though lately I’ve been asking a lot more questions about notation. I’ve written two scores, but that was purely with the aid of Sibelius. Laura Cioffi played one of my pieces on flute that was all notated. But I have no plans to ruin music for myself by studying it.
The big thing the art therapy degree taught me was to unlearn what I learned at art school. At art school you’re learning how to make it as an artist. In my first year, they made us all sit down, and said, “Look at the people around you. Only one of you will be involved in the cultural scene ten years from now.” I think experience over education is just as valuable now. You gotta learn on your feet. It’s precious.
While I was at Kinning Park in about 2012 I was part of this uber-drinky clown art performance group with Ben and Tom Newell. It was there that visual art and music blended, by bringing instruments in to the performances and giving them to the audience members and painting and decorating this giant box we dragged around town to our performances with the wheels fucking falling off halfway there and all sorts. But I’ve never been into trying to ‘paint music’ or anything like that. My visual art and my music to me are quite separate, save for the fact that they are both usually ‘abstract’ in some regard. I’ve made a few graphic scores -- one of which was played recently in Edinburgh by a trio -- and designed all the posters for 1.5 Months, but that’s the only time that the art meets the music.
ET: There’s a history of musicians emerging from GSA. Do you think there’s something to the way the school teaches and the focus on more free-flowing personal practice that leads students to do more music and art beyond their degrees?
AQ: Not having class times definitely frees you up. Right across the road was the club, which was where lots of people wanted to go. You can’t deny that there’s an intermingling with the art scene and drug culture. It’s funny because at that time there was another kind of short-lived alternative metal thing, a bit Shellac-influenced. In the scene -- this is like 2008-2010 -- there was Take a Worm For a Walk Week doing their hardcore thing like The Locusts, and the guys who went on to become Golden Teacher were in a band called Ultimate Thrush. This was also when Rob Alexander was running the Winning Sperm Party stuff, so there were the pop-up gigs with punk/hardcore backgrounds, or slacker rock shit, and they had a generator and would go out and do a gig and then run from the police. In third year I was pals with folk who knew folk in that scene, and that was connected to the art school. Gropetown, Smack Wizards, Gummy Stumps; they all had ties to the art School.
I think going to art school, like I was saying, teaches you a philosophy of approaching creative practice. The biggest thing that art school teaches you is to have creative drive; to be driven to see projects through. I’m thirty-seven, and I’ve seen lots of people talk about starting something, or start something and never finish it. I’ve done that a couple of times, but for most projects, I’m like, “See it through. See it fucking through!” I think that art school is the thing that makes you do that. Obviously it’s also about the fact that being a middle class white male is going to make it easier for me to see a project through. I don’t have as many barriers preventing me from accessing things as other people do. But getting into art school also boosts your confidence and gives you that drive.
At GSA, you just had your studio time. You would have crits with each other where you would just fucking demolish each other, and then you would meet with your tutor every so often, and then you would have your end-of-year review. But you were pretty much left to your own devices. So you did need to be confident in what you were doing… or not! You could be unsure in what you were doing, but you just had to keep doing it. In a weird way, it’s a bit like therapy where you have to see through your own shit to resolve whatever your creative thing was. The influence of that on the music is definitely there.
In terms of improvising and playing together, it’s the same thing. If I come in with an idea and it’s totally not working, I’ve gotta see it through. Because it’s all about experimentation; that’s always been the main thing. I guess that’s why I ended up being an abstract painter more than anything else. It’s pure expression, and it’s experimentation with the materials. It’s the same thing I bring in with the double bass, using objects and trying to find new sounds and trying to surprise yourself. Jesse, my American pal, talks about it as the ‘bag of tricks’. You can quite quickly come to know your bag of tricks to where you don’t surprise yourself anymore. It’s difficult because you’re doing live questioning that sometimes can become live failure, and you need the confidence to do that and the security to be okay with embarrassing yourself in front of people. I think art school is definitely tied into that experience. It’s all tied together somehow.
It’s funny trying to think back on the things that are formative influences. Obviously, if I lived in a different city -- actually, I’m not a big fan of that ‘what if’ stuff, it’s impossible to tell -- but I think that being in Glasgow, there’s a lot more opportunities to fall into this kind of thing than other places. See, I’ve been lucky that way. I’ve not had to move anywhere because it’s here. The groundwork has been laid through numerous generations making a scene. So why bother going to fucking London? Not that I would, I hate London. But people come up from Leeds and things like that. There’s a drummer that we’re going to put on in September that’s coming up from Bristol. Bristol! Which is a fucking cool city. And I’m like, “Why!?” I don’t know if it’s for work or whatever reason, but they’re one of many people that I’ve met who say, “I think Glasgow’s such a cool place, I want to go there and see what happens.” I can’t imagine doing that somewhere else, because everything’s here. The culture’s here.
ET: Was there anything we didn’t get to that you wanted to talk about?
AQ: Another thing that I was thinking about was my own improv philosophy. I’ve never read any improv books – it’s more an experiential thing. I think that because of my rock and metal background, I still bring with me wanting to have a semblance of rhythm or melody in there at some point, but avoiding the psych-jam band thing. A great experience of being in a metal band was you learn how to jam and play around with shit.
A big eye-opener working at Big Noise was seeing classical education from classically-trained musicians, classically teaching little kids. Some of them were open to a bit more experimentation, but others were like, “This is how we do it. We learn by repetitively doing the same thing, week in, week out, until they fucking get it.” And it’s like, Jesus Christ, that is brutal! That goes back to that point about learning through play. Creativity is playfulness, and there’s something really odd about militantly teaching this.
I’m watching On the Edge - Improvisation in Music, and it’s interesting seeing that this classical notation thing is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. The ability to jam, feel the room, feel the vibe and all that is longer-standing than the pure notation shit. But I still do hang on to some kind of form and rhythm. I think of it in visual terms as being an ‘all-over painter’, and I don’t think I’m an all-over painter. Jer can talk about seeing it in minute-by-minute blows, and he remembers the overall shape. I don’t see it that way; I just see it in the moment, and afterwards I’m like, “That was a good one,” or “That didn’t work so well.” That’s kind of my only real awareness of it sometimes. But in terms of the strictness of trying to avoid something, I’m not one-hundred-percent into that. There’s a lot of people that were like that in the Soup, Zuppa large ensemble thing, which was a precursor group to GIOdynamics. A lot of them are like the minimalists. They’re like, “No, no, no. Avoid all rhythm. Avoid all notation.” Which I can be into, but maybe not half an hour of that.
I think that going to GIOdynamics is a test on your ability, but also your patience. It’s a test on everything: your ability to listen to people, to feel the room and what’s going on. There’s also that decision-making of, “I am not into this, and I don’t want to contribute anything.” It’s interesting to challenge yourself to not play, to decide that you don’t want to contribute to whatever thing everyone’s doing, or ‘the big swirl’. I hate the big swirl, that formlessness.
Soup, Zuppa was interesting. There was this hilarious one where three students came with a bag full of chains, and that was all they had. All they could do was try to find a new sound with this bag of chains. They were all tittering with themselves at first, but they quickly realised that other people were really serious about this. We just sound like a bunch of idiots. There’s that dichotomy of it being really silly, but improvisers are deadly serious about it. Some people are like, “I’ve dedicated my life to improvising.”
I love that it’s serious and silly. It’s chin-stroke-y and pretentious, and makes sense that a lot of art people are part of it. I take it seriously. I can joke and shout out shit, but if I’m playing I’ll be deadly serious. It’s weird. I remember the first time I saw Fritz [Welch], because I’d been studying clowns. I was fascinated by Fritz because he puts on these goggles to keep his glasses on his face, and then he does all this [imitates exaggerated mouth sounds]. I’ve seen people laugh at him before. It is comedy, but he’s also quite serious about it. He’s this modern day clown, in a tribal, traditional sense. This otherworldly, jester-type character, conjuring up otherworldly material.
Having played with Mhenwhar for seven years now, our sound world is weird improvised moments and the post rock upbringing that the others have, and rock elements like barre chords that will make melodic moments, and then back into the improv thing, and back to that. We would always really comfortably do that. So when I’m improvising, I’m always coming at it with this Mhenwhar background of, “This is how I’ve improvised with other people, and I quite like playing that way, so let’s see if this model fits. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. John [Magill], the viola player that used to play with us, he’s really into noise music. I’ve taken that into my toolkit as well, so I see how that fits into the improv thing, and the new classical idea.
I’m trying to play with Zeo Fawcett, and we were doing a big thing with lots of speakers in here. It’s this constant, “Let’s try this thing.” It goes back to painting, just always trying out new ideas. I wasn’t into noise music three years ago, so let’s give that a shot. You’ll see me as a country singer next time, I’m sure!
You can take stuff away from improvising that’s gold. There’s benefits to being able to play around with it in that way. It’s the same with GIOdynamics, hoping that you’ll find gold in there. There’s been a couple of times where there will be one that I’ll want to listen back to a lot, because I’ll remember it being emotionally powerful. That’s the big thing with playing with Tony Bevan as well, because he can be all raucous -- big, fucking, bass sax player -- but there’s times where we’ve had these really beautiful melody lines together, that create really magical moments. I am more romantic-feeling based, not as analytical. I imagine if I was purely anti-rhythm and anti-melody, I would only enjoy it if it was really free, crazy… skronk. But when I’m more realistic, I do like the pure weepy bits that do feel like some big, romantic swooshes.
That’s the great thing about playing with that New String Collective that Peter [Nicholson] has organised, the big, romantic string swells. As a big, improvising group, when you naturally fall into that it’s like, “Wow, this is fucking powerful. The String Collective being around, the ability for people to nurture that and want to do it, I don’t know where else you would see that.
But GIOdynamics is a social thing as well. I definitely go to see folk that I know. Giving Jer a hand with set-up sometimes too, I’m buying into that communal thinking. There are elements of the anarchist philosophy that I really like. Going back to Kinning Park, I painted murals for them. Thinking about paying for studios through communal acts, it’s like, “How much blood do you need to give until you’ve paid off your studio?” But trying to be involved, I ended up being a cleaner for a while. When I first started, there was a rota, and you were expected to clean the halls and toilets yourselves. It’s the same in here; we’re meant to clean it up and keep it tidy, but usually there’s only a few of us who do it. It’s such a trendy thing to talk about community, but you’re really up against it because the phone is so appealing, and lying down and not doing anything is appealing, and not bothering a lot of the time is appealing. So when these community things happen, I wonder if in the ‘90s and ‘80s more people came to do them because there were fewer distractions. It’s hard to push yourself to go give a hand sometimes.
That ties in with the 1.5 Months thing, putting gigs on, promoting them, giving people a platform, trying to get them to meet others and open a community, create some sort of hub, or nurture the thing that’s already there. My girlfriend, Ali, and one of my best friends, Neil, have told me that I’m always doing things all the time. And I say that it’s just my creative drive to do things, but it’s also that drive to get people to meet each other, and to nurture this culture that’s here. Because it has nurtured me.
Alistair will perform with his improvising ensemble Mhenwhar Huws at the next 1.5 Months on 19th July. Further information about Alistair and his work is available at: www.cargocollective.com/alistairquietsch