Why O Why (Trumpets and East Kilbride)

My enthusiasm for Cyptic might come from their history - I identify them as one of the key companies who emerged from the aftermath of 1990s' City of Culture - or their restless experimentation. They've got a couple of entries in the Fringe this year - Sven Werner and Robbie Thomson reprising their shows from Sonica - but are slipping in one Cryptic Night before August.

I am not sure whether Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride is a general cry of despair or merely a cheeky reference back to composer  J. Simon van der Walt's inspiration (a film selling the virtues of the New Town back in the 1970s).  Either way, van der Walt is digging deep into his past, reviving both memories of a glorious age that hasn't stood the test of time and a character who first appeared in another Cryptic action, Ted The Trumpet.

Ted the Trumpet is a sadly neglected pioneer of that quintessential 1970s sound, light music electronica. Combining the old fashioned taste for something stylish (unable to handle the complexity of jazz and finding the post-hippy mellow rock not soothing) and science fiction instrumentation (it requires a fixation on the future for a decade to allow Tangerine Dream to flourish), LME heralded the arrival of intelligent techno and ambient (made for people too mashed to make it to the rave in the late 1980s). 

J. Simon van der Walt takes up the story. 

‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride started life as a dream. This happens to me a lot: I’m a musician, after all, and I have dreams where I hear a piece of music. Quite often when I wake up I can remember at least some of it: I rush to write it down or even just sing it into my phone before it goes.

The piece I heard on this occasion – it was the morning of the 3 June 2012 – seemed to be for a rock band? Plus a section of orchestral French horns?'

'Made some notes, forgot about it. Couple of days later, aimlessly surfing around as you do, I stumbled upon this 1972 public information film about East Kilbride. Suddenly a whole chunk of memory descended upon me. I remembered the two different times in my life when I lived in East Kilbride, particularly a period in the eary 80s where I was busy dropping out of an ill-advised science degree at university, listening to a lot of Hawkwind, and teaching myself to play guitar. Suddenly, the dream made sense: I knew what I was listening to, I knew what it was all about.'

'And the Ted Edwards stuff? A misdirection, perhaps. Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards is a fictional alter ego of mine. He’s the person I would have liked to have been if I’d been born forty years earlier: he’s Raymond Scott, he’s Daphne Oram, he’s my dad’s golfing buddy who owned a radio shop, he’s Erik Satie. Or maybe he’s a complete unknown: he’s Ziggy Elman, he’s the guy who first came up with the npn-pnp astable multivibrator circuit, he’s some guy who’s into birdwatching.'

'He’s a useful vehicle: someone I can have in my show, someone who might have been in East Kilbride in 1972, might have played in a rock band, might have had a day job as a chemist at the National Engineering Laboratory. Someone who might, after all, be a composer. Kind of.'

CCA, Thu 4  2013  £5