James Hazel

About the Work

James Hazel’s work pre(care)ious (s)core no. 2 (transposing aspiration) explores the artist’s relationship with their working-class family. Through the recent shared act of deconstructing an old piano, an incidental type of sonic practice emerged from socioeconomic necessity. Throughout the residency, the materials and documentation from this process will be reassembled into a text, video and sound installation.

From the Artist

pre(care)ious (s)core no. 2 (transposing aspiration)

The conditions for this score arose in 2018, my parents were forced by the Department of Housing to relocate to a two-bedroom flat in Gosford. Shifting was no easy game. Not least by the problem posed by the prospect of rehousing the half-tonne piano which sat in my old room. Because we didn’t have enough money to hire a piano mover, my father suggested that we break apart the old student piano to make it easier to relocate. In lieu of access to other tools, my father used a hammer to do this. 

Towards the end of this process, I asked dad if I could record the sound of our activity on my phone (a type of ghoulish memorial).  On that warbly mp3 file, compressed time and bit-space constitutes an affective record of my father’s bodily vulnerabilities –  his groans and strains: the piano wood cracking; the deep, dark resonance of the strings reflecting these sounds back; a transmuting process of “becoming-father” or “becoming-piano” – of one form becoming another through refrain after refrain unto flesh – suggesting a deeper poetical vivisection… a feeling that the stoicisms and brooding silences that he regularly performs to get by are just bodily defence mechanisms – a way to prevent the external resonating with his soft insides that had been all fucked-up by his difficult upbringing. 

For in and beyond each chromatic clang of that recording, I realised that, due to my father’s traumatic past (one haunted by housing insecurity and homelessness) a part of him was hidden to me, much alike the mechanisms that made that wonky, broken piano somehow ‘work’ despite all that had been displaced. In this sense, late-capitalist induced trauma produces a hollowing-out of sorts – something I understood with a degree of heightened sensitivity after our sort-of-duet of ‘playing’ the piano collaboratively that day; a disarming affray that traversed two classed modalities across the piano-strings as calcified fossils – frozen like an embalmed medical specimen from another unreachable time, another place. 

Audio Recording: Precarious Score No.2