Mister Salmon is an identity adopted by UK multi-disciplinary artist Andrew Stones, for the release of the album Mister Salmon ...in Yorkshirama (2010). Initially, the persona was a means to explore the cultural paradoxes of a northern-English life. It remains as a performative device for Stones's music where it is closest to avant-folk and pop.
Certain "Mister Salmon" songs adapt the emotional directness and poetic grammar of folk, although the use of a disguise is a declaration of disinterest the authenticity offered by any self-defining tradition, ethnic group, or school of musical virtuosity.
The music draws on disparate kinships: with the DIY "self-creation" ethos of UK punk and post-punk electronica, with UK art-school culture, with outsider art, with 1970s "krautrock" bands reclaiming established musical forms for artistically-partisan, but non-chauvinistic ends.
In other words, it's only the accidents of personal musical history, and algorithmic churn, that could provide Mister Salmon with a “volk".
With Mister Salmon, folk forms, avant-pop and electronica are filtered through a sensibility versed in audio art, musique concrète, and soundtrack composition. Arrangements use conventional instruments (guitar, mandolin, organ), artist-built devices (bowed and mechanically-lashed strings, sampled reeds and pipes, unconventional percussion), and elements from an archive of demos and field recordings accumulated over decades.
Mister Salmon Cries Out (Digital EP, 2020) comprises three tracks - Curlew, Men and Mice, and Nature Trail. Curlew and Nature Trail are ballads for the anthropocene, about projecting ideas onto the natural world, even as human overreach is being reappraised.
The tracks on Mister Salmon Cries Out are from a larger suite of recordings imagining the perspectives of different creatures, such as a fly, a wolf and its prey, the members of a nature cult, a nature-documentary addict, and others.
Mister Salmon ...in Yorkshirama (Album, 2010) is a synthesis of soundtrack and song, structured like a fragmentary biographical movie in ten scenes, recalling northern Britain in the 1970s and 80s.
Cultural mythology about transcending nature (escaping fate) is a long-established theme in Andrew Stones’s work. It's central, for example, in the multi-channel video-sound work Salmon Song (1986) where the life-cycle of the salmon is also the main metaphor.
The name 'Mister Salmon' is a container for paradoxes, specifically: the projection of epic status onto the life-cycle of a creature that is, in fact, doomed due to it's atavistic connection to the hatching pool from which it came; and the tendency of humans to self-identify as being outside-of or 'post-' nature, even though our existence depends almost entirely on the myriad chemical, physical and other interrelationships we call "the environment" (as if we were not part of its complexes).
Put another way: a salmon wouldn't call itself "Mister"; and a "Mister" might think himself less vulnerable to the predations of nature than a mere fish. The ‘Mister’ part of the name is antagonistic to biology and time, the animal part is a reminder that both are inescapable.
Email: management[at]mistersalmon[dot]com
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