Excerpt from an unattributed review of Manchester's Art Car Parade 08.09.07
And so to the winning 'Tonefloat', a moving musical sculpture looking more like a dadaist battle wagon, it's acid green electro-camouflage presenting it's 'gentle cargo' of tuned milkbottles in a fashion more suited to the terrorist chic of a suspect device: revealed were the inner workings of batteries, wires and magnetic detonators - waiting for the impulse to strike another blow against the social fabric perhaps ? The approach however was well received by a freq army of young volunteers, drawn to the low-slung melodic cocktail dispenser by the open-source nature of it's interface, with a simple midi keyboard secured to an outriders' seat, their untrained fingers were able to hammer out atonal rhythms with the blunted envelopes of the milkbottles, to an accompaniment of samples seemingly redeployed from a black-book sonic armoury. There was obviously some quirky delight to this awkward electro-acoustic anomaly, as it served to charm the public and win over their vote as 'Peoples' Choice' – would they have been so willing if they were more aware of the subliminal references to the militarisation of everyday life, the project's guerilla glamour only slightly disguised by the appearance of the vehicle's operators' in lab-coats and glasses, an image more at home with corporate sponsored death squads - those not content with simple murder, but having to ratchet up the terror with their exquisite torture of ordinary souls, semi-concious bodies dragged through razor wire prior to decapitation and the skewer. For what ? So the Management can enjoy heated leather seats and a box at the Colosseum ? So the 'Artists' were sitting on recycled carpet and were treated to a winners' cold buffet at a student bar, many magnitudes apart maybe - but through the toxic vapours of their petrol engines and militarist aesthetic, are they too not fatally complicit in a theatre of petty bourgeois inhumanity : clowns at court ? gentle gnostics ? You decide – it's your vote that counts, after all.