Luke Fowler

The short film Patrick, the artist’s most recent work and screened in Spain for the first time, shows fragments of the life, not the biography, of electronic music composer Patrick Cowley (1950–1982), a pioneer in the use of the synthesiser in disco, the producer behind anthems such as Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) [1978] and the remix of I Feel Love by Donna Summer (1978), and a composer of peerless high-spirited and vibrant tracks that defined that era of unparalleled freedom before the AIDS epidemic hit America’s West Coast. The screening is accompanied by an exclusive lecture-performance: Jorge Socarras, another San Francisco disco legend and friend and collaborator of Cowley’s, will play some musical highlights from the era and talk about Cowley’s legacy, accompanied by new 16mm images by Fowler.

Music making forms an inescapable element of Fowler’s oeuvre, whether as a specific process, a life enterprise, the expression of a countercultural position or some combination of the three. Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett) is a suitably loose-limbed biography of gay Canadian composer and electronic music pioneer Martin Bartlett (1939-93), gliding freely between text, photo and video, salient figures, devices and locations and the personal and the professional, with retro computer graphics, an insightful voiceover and Bartlett’s own music on hand to tie the many moving parts together. For Christian has composer Christian Wolff discuss his compositional strategies in voiceover to free-flowing images of his Vermont farm, while Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins) interweaves the recording process for the artist’s titular piece shot from countless different angles with sounds and images from Fowler’s own daily life: filmmaker and subject as one. Patrick, screening as a Spanish premiere, marks a return to the biographical, a sunny jaunt through San Francisco and the surrounding landscape in search of the traces left behind by trailblazing disco producer Patrick Cowley, who died of AIDS in 1992, as Fowler encases his pulsating flow of luminous images in Cowley’s sparkling sounds.

What does it mean to listen? Although many of Fowler’s films pose this question, the A Grammar for Listening cycle places it front and centre. These three collaborations with sound artists—Lee Paterson, Eric La Casa and Toshiya Tsunoda respectively– comprise beautifully enveloping sound and image recordings at various locations, including London landmarks, rural and industrial settings in Scotland and other nondescript markets and parks. Part one labels its different locations and the sounds being recorded there, just as part two withholds the same information, while part 3 puts the act of recording on direct display. Do we read sound via image or is it other way around? And if context shapes perception, when does that become a grammar? Depositions takes the idea of listening in a different direction, compiling a jittery blend of archival footage culled from ‘70s and ‘80s BBC documentaries that illustrates how the communities of the Scottish Highlands were constantly asked to justify their existence, even as their answers were never truly heard. Yet there was so much more to be listened to beyond these banal depositions: the sound of a landscape, of bone cracking in a crucible, of wind and water, of song.

The opening quartet of three-minute shorts are flickering portraits of the titular people who each live in the same Victorian tenement in Glasgow, none of whom are ever seen. Their lives are conjured up instead by shifts in light, views out of the window, textures, shapes and patterns and any number of books: four distinct individuals shaped by the same divided up space. All Divided Selves, which landed Fowler a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize, is a frenetic, collage-like biography of famed Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Fowler draws on Laing’s countless appearances on UK television and radio to this end, combining this ample archive material such that chronology is irrelevant and repetition more than permitted. The idea is convey the protean Laing’s position within society: a foreign body jutting out of an establishment just waiting to chew him up and a node through which all the primary movements of the period flowed. Fowler’s own 16mm footage is spliced into these past images with spasmodic glee, taking up their motifs at times but also diverging from them at will, thus producing the sort of stream of pure sensory experience that Laing himself sought to grasp: form and content ravishingly intertwined.