It’s question time
What do you want? It’s a simple question, you might think. But the variety of reactions to the title of DJ Mary Anne Hobbs and musician Anna Phoebe‘s collaborative art project for Manchester International Festival next week, would suggest a rather large can of worms has been well and truly opened.
The project itself revolves around a one off live performance at Aviva Studios’ South Warehouse on July 15, which will see Phoebe (above, left) playing violin and Hobbs (right) weaving together electronics and field recordings. But it extends well beyiond that. For starters, a board asking the question has been installed in Central Manchester, with the public invited to write their answers or – for the more discreetly minded – post them into the attached postbox.
The board had just gone up the day we catch the pair – Phoebe talking to us close to the sea in Deale, Hobbs on the north bank of the Thames in Central London – for a chat on Zoom. Three or four days later, we get emailed a progress picture, and the Manchester public has definitely got busy. The pair’s avowed ambition that things should, ideally, “get really messy”, had clearly been fulfilled already.
“I’m obviously a huge fan of Mary-Anne through 6Music,” says Phoebe, who also co-presents the acclaimed Radio 4 music show Add To Playlist. when we ask how the two of them first hooked up. “We met through Alan Cooper at the Turner Contemporary, when Mary-Anne was hosting from there. She was a supporter of my music early on, and then started having these crazy ideas that she’d feed me. So we started collaborating that way, really, when you asked me to write some music based on the beach. Then during lockdown you asked me to talk about what it was like being by the beach but during lockdown. Then you were asked to DJ, to do a set for the Tate Britain and we worked together on that set, and we’ve been collaborating ever since and we’ve become good friends.”
“It was wild really,” Hobbs recalls, “I came across this force of nature in Anna, and as she said, our relationship developed over lockdown. I remember reaching out to her and saying “do you think it might actually be possible to collaborate with the sea?” And she said ‘why not, I’ll go down to the shore and see what happens and send you the results.’ What came back was one of the most exquisite pieces of music I think I’ve ever played on the radio, called ‘By The Sea’ and made especially for the show.
“Then our professional relationship opened out. She’d say things like ‘oh it was five in the morning and I went out into the depths of the forest to see if I could collaborate with the nightingales. I thought this is my girl, you know?! Maybe we can try something.”
So when Hobbs was asked to create a piece for the Tate Modern’s repoening in 2023, she turned to Phoebe and the pair created a ‘living artwork’ performance.
“Me and Anna played this wild, improvised piece that people seemed to love,” Hobbs continues, “That was the genesis point, really, of this project. Then we were commissioned last year to do the 6 Music festival, which we did at Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, which was terrifying, because we played a piece that went live to air on 6Music, half an hour long. We’ve just been at Glastonbury together… One of the ideas, one of the foundational centrepieces of the practice is that we’ll never play anything twice. You’re either with us in the present moment or it’s gone.”
If there’s a healthily giddy excitement in the air as the pair discuss their work, then that’s probably down to the seat-of-the-pants type improvisation that has become their modus operandi. There’s little if any rehearsal, although Hobbs usually directs proceedings by mapping out a direction of musical travel, literally in map form. It’s a way of working that suits Phoebe just fine, she says.
“What really excites me about working with Mary Ann is that I feel like I’m put in these positions that are totally out of the box. Mary Ann creates these conditions and you never quite know what you’re going to get, which is essential to Mary Ann’s essence anyway. If you’ve listened to her radio show or read her words, you’ll know anything can happen. As an artist, that’s so exciting to be around. You know you’re going to be challenged. Your sonic boundaries are stretched, but there’s a clear intention to everything that happens.”
For such conditions to thrive, of course, there has a to be complete trust between the participants, something which Phoebe says is definitely in place. “I forget how potentially terrifying it could be,” she laughs.
The key, she says, is to focus in on the intention of the space, whether that be the Tate Modern’s industrial utilitarianism or the ancient woodlands of Glastonbury, and work on leaving their mark on it.
“We’ve come to this understanding that it’s a radical undoing of everything we’ve ever known before,” Hobbs continues, “and that’s incredibly exciting. We might begin with a manifesto, that could be someone else’s, that we’ve taken a seed of inspiration from, or I’ll write a manifesto or draw a map, so that’s embedded in our subconscious, but beyond that the space is free to interpret. It’s a great place for me to be, especially with a musician as accomplished as Anna – and as fearless as Anna! It’s an amazing feeling to be on stage with her.”
In the case of What Do You Want?, the conditions are – in the pair’s words – to get as many people involved in the work as possible. “If you think of the biggest threat to creatvity right now,” Phoebe states, “with the tech companies and AI, it’s the removel of the human out of music. With Mary Ann, it’s like ‘how can we pack as much human activity into this?’”
As for how you translate the community’s reponse to the question via the board into music, well, it’s early days. “The board only went up yesterday,” Hobbs says, “so we’re scrambling through the first iterations of the responses.” One reaction already in, though, arrived in the form of a lengthy poem from Middlesbrough street artist that Hobbs knows. “You get everything from that to ‘I want chips for life’!”
“‘What do you want?’ is a fundamental question,” Phoebe adds. “Even within one question, it’s multilayered, It’s interesting to see how people respond, some people get shellshocked by it. Some people are quite humorous about it, others take it quite seriously. Some people use it as a platform for their activism. But also, there’s that quietness to it as well. The live performance, because people aren’t asked to actually respond during it, so as well as the public expression, there’s also an inward expression.”
The July 15 show is not the end of the experiment, either. Hobbs explains that the whole project is actually divided into three parts, with the billboard being stage one, the performance number two and a film from a young filmmaker as a response to the work to complete the set.
“Hopefully this will be become a regular part of the practise,” Hobbs tells us, “if the financial conditions are right. We’re going to take a chunk of the money and we’re going to gift it to a film maker who we love called Josh Bridge and say ‘would you like to make a response to this work in some way? It stands alone as your own piece.’ That’s kind of how it functions, it’s a three step piece.”
So when Hobbs laughs and admits “it’s an experiment – we don’t know what’s going to happen,” you know not only that they mean it, but also the uncertainty and unpreditability is fuel to their creative fire in itself. In an industry that, especially these days, can be carefully controlled and monitored in minute, statistical detail rather than governed by exploration, inspiration and insitnct, it’s a refreshing bit of chaos. Whatever happens, you suspect, it will be worth hearing and watching.
And as for that question, what do you want? Well, in our case, what we want is a little bit more magic and craziness along these lines, please… Thanks for asking!
Ben Willmott
What Do You Want? is at South Warehouse, Aviva Studios, Manchester, Water Street, M3 4JQ on July 15.
The What Do You Want? billboard and postbox is at 1 Hilton Street, Manchester, M4 1LP.
