THE ART ISSUE ART ISSUE
new toy, due to start stealing limelight away from Cybraphon any minute now. ‘I can just hear Cybraphon casually dropping in, “me and Aidan hung out in London actually – we spent a night together”.’ Where Cybraphon brought to mind 19th century mechanical bands, with instruments lining its antique wooden frame, Unravel is a sleek, contemporary beast, in dazzling white and bright blue plastic. Visitors to SWG3 pick a 7” single from a box of records – INXS, Julee Cruise, Tom Waits and Chris De Burgh are all in there – then play it on the turntable. Unravel’s Hammond organ, tubular bells and drum-kit spring into action, and Moffat’s voice is piped through speakers.
But Unravel reacts to the room, measures weather conditions and the size of the crowd, and responds accordingly. Shyness or a show- off streak may skew the performance and make Moffat burst into song, with FOUND on backing vocals, or a gloomy day of rain may produce a more downbeat, whispered spoken word version of a story. Where Cybraphon’s mood is altered by the volume of Tweets and Facebook ‘Likes’ it receives, just one negative Tweet about #unravel can bum it out immediately, and bring on a melody in a minor key. ‘Cybraphon was pretty whimsical,’ says Ziggy Campbell (see far right),
who co-wrote music for Moffat’s lyrics with band member Tommy Perman (below, second from right). ‘Unravel is a lot meatier, and much darker.’ They left the storytelling up to Moffat, who picked ten songs, wrote stories inspired by them, then made different versions of them all. Sometimes only two or three words vary from one version to the next, but very dainty amounts of fi ne tuning let Moffat amplify details with hard-hitting effect. For example, in a knuckle- bitingly awkward-to-overhear drunken voicemail in ‘More Than Everything’, the narrator begs the girl, ‘Please pick up, I know he’s with you.’ But swapping ‘he’ for ‘that prick’ in another version adds a different tone, like a colour fi lter over a camera lens. The listener wants to cringe one minute, or maybe put a comforting arm round Moffat, then will suddenly feel the need to push him into a taxi home.
A clock inside Unravel also lets it know when it’s past the watershed (4pm, for those who’d prefer to hear the uncensored version). When ‘The Minister’s Daughter’, which plays when ‘Freak Scene’ by Dinosaur Jr. is picked, comes on in the morning it might tell of a coy girl rebuffi ng Moffat with a slap in the face. But in some post-watershed versions Moffat ends up ‘punished and pummelled and pumped’ by her. And a carrot. So did Moffat have to dig deep into his imagination for
subject matter? ‘All ten stories are based on true events from my life,’ Moffat offers, unblinking. ‘I’m just not telling you what version is the truth.’ So the man who fl ips on Babestation after his girlfriend leaves in tears; the shy, clumsy teen; a sweating lad lurking outside HMV to catch a glimpse of ‘workskirt arse’–- they could all be him in disguise. ‘Put it this way, I don’t think any of these are exaggerated to the point where I’m not capable of it,’ he smiles.
Already the FOUND team have been approached about doing a TED talk on Unravel, and are smoothing out details of an Edinburgh Fringe show this August. Plans for a phone app are being discussed, as well as a book and record further down the line. ‘Nowadays we’ve got so used to the idea of a record or an MP3 being this absolute, perfect product, a set rendition that stays the same over time,’ says Campbell. ‘It’s like the truth; that’s meant to be something fi xed and defi nite, but it can vary a lot. Unravel is supposed to be a medium that shows how unreliable the narrator can be.’
‘People want to hear and read things that they don’t talk about themselves,’ adds Moffat. ‘No one’s nice all the time, and rather than lying about something that’s happened, I think it’s healthier to just come out with it. I don’t get easily embarrassed, you could say I have no shame. So the truth – whichever version that is, is fi ne with me.’
UNRAVEL will be open to the public from Fri 20 Apr–Mon 7 May as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art at SWG3, Glasgow. For more info, visit unravelproject.com.
29 Mar–26 Apr 2012 THE LIST 19