The first of the four projects of Equal Shares, a collaboration between the Contemporary Art Society and Film and Video Umbrella to commission new moving image works by artists is Everything I Have Is Yours by Open Music Archive (Eileen Simpson and Ben White). This ambitious film and sound work looks back to the first decade of the UK pop charts (1952–62), in the company of older musicians, now in their 70s and 80s, who were the original ‘teenagers’ of the Greater Manchester music scene. The film focuses on this diverse group as they re-engage with public-domain recordings from the formative era of the birth of pop, and incorporate these classic, timeless sounds into new musical creations.
As the musicians play, they individually and collectively interact with digital technology, recalling archive sounds ripped from 1950s and early 1960s shellac and vinyl chart hits. Copyright-controlled elements of the original records are separated out and copyright expired samples are released, through an algorithmic process, to enable collective use for the project and for future sharing. As the group triggers sounds from the past, the camera continuously tracks its way through the assembled musicians, echoing the circular loops of the music itself. What results is a vivid sonic conversation, an intergenerational call and response that traverses the private, personal and public, as well as a work that highlights the importance of Greater Manchester as a creative mainstay of music and popular culture in the UK. Everything I Have Is Yours will premiere at Salford Museum & Art Gallery in July 2019 and an edition of the work will enter University of Salford Art Collection.
