The Music for Idiots Documentary, Directed by Helena Gofff, now in after-production, started filming in mid-Wales in February, 2018 and is expected to go on filming indefinitely.

(Kaffe Discusses the appearance of LAPTOP in the Disco and the pseudo psycho-agglomerative perspective of this allegory in relation to fluffy rabbits).

Tuesday September 4.33 pm

Thrown out of artists residence at Smølnjord Gallery, Tromsø after two days for shouting at an unbelievably idiotic earth mother who let her stupid brat touch my bidet. No-one touches my stuff, ok! Transpired she was the daughter of one of the gallery owners. How was I to know?

Monday May 12.12 pm

The galactic Sonic Bidet project is now in its fifth year and accreting much material. The project slaves wear titanium hardened exoskeletons to facilitate working anaerobic environments in zero gravity. See ‘Useless Crap’ for more news.

Saturday October 10.30 am

Sonic Bidet commences in Herbert Van Rijn Gallery, Massachusetts. It’s an unholy dump of a place but they’re rewarding me royally. And the dollar is so strong against the Euro right now. So I don’t mind. I deserve it.

Monday October 7.13 am

Flying to Massachusetts in an aeroplane to oversee the installation of version 6 Sonic Bidet. I couldn’t very well fly in a boat, now.. could I, addlebrains?!

Sunday September 12.14 pm

Picnic with the gallery owners in Tromsø. It’s hideous. They’re all drooling Scandinavian Hillbillies but I daren’t say anything. I honestly didn’t realise that inbreeding was still practised in Europe. What am I saying??? Have you been up to Leeds lately? From what I’ve gathered, incest is part of their school curriculum.

Friday November 3.12 pm

Plumstead Marshes. My Sonic bidet installation at the Cosgrove Gallery, Dagenham has been terminated prematurely. The gallery owner’s son (Nesbit or Nesquik or some totally stupid name) managed to spill orange juice all down my brand new Wolford tights so I gave him a very hard slap. Anyone who knows me knows I love children more than everyone else but when it comes to little boys I firmly believe that you have to get the discipline in place early on. After all, it never did my dad any harm when my mum used to whack him round the mining villages. The gallery owner accused me of being – I quote – ‘A Kindergarten Nazi’. So I gave her an even harder slap. Which is why I’m driving home across Plumstead Marshes with the bidet in the back of my Mazda.

Thursday March 12.02 pm

This is my powder blue Mazda who I love more than any other person in the world. I love it to bits!! Perched on the front lid is my companion tree sprite – Tixie.

‘Suicide Kidz’ is a controversial project – part performance, part moving installation – that explores the transformative norms of boundaries as lived and ‘strokes’ (if I may appropriate the graphic art term) the real potential for dislocation within a suicide bomb attack.

Small children in care are fitted with special backpacks (part smoke machine, part radio receiver) and sent alone into what are known as the ‘soft targets’ of the city. Areas of perceived vulnerability such as shopping malls, bus depots, station concourses, large cafes – wherever there exists the possibility to inflict mass carnage and the inherent narrative of despoliation.

A micro camera is used to guide the children to their respective targets. The camera signal is relays their position back to base – base being an impromptu radio transmitter concealed in a moving van or atop a run down housing estate. The kids are directed towards High Frequency Youth Repellent Devices or Mosquitoes as they are commonly called.

As soon as the children come within range of the Mosquitoes, a series of special sensors trigger the backpacks to release clouds of noxious black smoke, simultaneously replaying ring-modulated sonic collages of the ‘final testaments’ of notorious suicide bombers at very high volume. In a crowded space the result is cataclysmic.

This usage of young wards of the state in a controversial context serves to conflate social disenfranchisement with the complex interplay of urban paranoia and end use gratification.
As a result, globalisation fantasies, gender, body art and disputed legality are foregrounded against a background of viral anxiety and mainstream visibility.

Suicide Kidz was commissioned by the Arts Councli 2016, curated by Hans Joachim Feller, facilitated by Louisa Ffoulks of AIB Associates with additional funding from Smirkett & Bloat Llb and is touring the USA and Pakistan from June onwards.

Our appearance at the 101st LMC Festival was a huge showstopper notable for one strange incident. No sooner had I started playing than every single member of the audience stood up and walked out.

Helena’s Cough (AKA SMASH GONDRY”S ARMS BEFORE HE PLAYS DRUMS AGAIN) features the high pitched incomprehensible caterwauling of Maggie Nichols mashed against a barely comprehensible libretto by Amanda McKittrich Ros.

The piece could conceivably be described as a 37 hour 93 act noise onslaught cum music hall circumlocution which enjoys an autonomous periphrastic status as an quasi-imaginary set of performance ‘rules’ derived either from one of my adapted ‘Kaffe’ Ouija boards or the conditioned reflex.
(Conceptually, this is the equivalent of Houdini dressing up as Annabella Lwin and singing lead vocals with Bow Wow Wow).

These ‘rules’ camouflage the deconstitutive capabilities of the text by re-transmitting over a selection of open network nodes (pirating reconditioned CB radios and Sky TV’s decommissioned satellites) and recompiling the audio via ‘point of contact’ bargain hi fi speakers concealed at selected points in a few carefully chosen high street boutiques.

Thus, a happy shopper rummaging through the panty rack in an Antwerp branch of Dorothy Perkins will be unawares that the sound they are making is being merged with extracts from the libretto and relayed to A Bathing Ape franchise in SoHo, NY.

This conceptual self indulgence prefigures further blood and bones magic. I find it all very chic, thrilling as it brings to mind an enthralling ‘voodoo’ documentary I saw a few years ago on Channel 4 – narrated by the dreamily shabby Stephen Rea.

After the show, Maggie Nicols insists I try a plate of her vegetarian sausages. They taste like burnt plastic bags stuffed with pieces of old twine. As a strict vegan, except during the week, I am naturally curious about the ingredients and how something purporting to be food could be so revolting. Maggie informs me that her sausages are filled with vegetarian pig blood and vegetarian cow parts and will put much needed hairs on my chest. I rush out into the car park and am violently sick over Trevor Wishart’s brand new lime green Audi Quattro.

Sonic Bidet for one speaker, bargain bin version of my Kaffetronica software so I up the artistic ante with minidisk of supersonic ant noises fed through an old Rock-Ola jukebox located behind a curtain on the other side of the hall. Rather excellent and this set up should earn me many plaudits. Strange to be working in mono again after all these years but the organizers could only get one speaker of my much traveled bidet working. The fantastic thing about installations is that performance is exactly the same as rehearsal.

Amazing space! Each noise seemed to dwell in the air forever, like imperishable tree sprites. Not surprising as the hall has a 94-ish second reverb – but , hey, who’s counting anyway? One thing that did annoy me was the floor. It was quite unnavigable as it was more or less completely covered in discarded chewing gum or ‘chicle’ as it’s known locally. Most of the audience stood a long way away from me but they must have enjoyed my bidet immensely because no sooner had they entered than they’d almost all left. The ones stayed who ventured closer and loved it when I shouted out them to ‘get their stupid feet off my kettle lead’. The last thing a top installation artist like me needs is to have one’s bidet unplugged in the middle of the show by a clod-hopping idiot.

My final thoughts? ”Something that began so slowly could keep going on for so long“.

The day after the installation closes, the GOMP organizers turn up with the exhibition flyer (see below). ‘Great timing, retards!’ They look greasy and pleased with themselves, handing me a copy as I board my tuk-tuk to the airport. The flyer is unreadable. A brain damaged moron with a large fork stuck in its head could have written something better.

On to the airport. La Aurora, as it is known, is the most disgusting, backward, ugly, filthy, desperate, degenerate, primitive, frightening, criminal excuse for an air terminal I’ve ever had the misfortune to experience. Almost as minging as Heathrow Terminal Five. And, contrary to my explicit instructions, I couldn’t see one poster advertising my fantastic new range of lingerie for women.

‘Aurora’ is South American for ‘dawn’. That sets me wondering – when it will dawn on the obtuse festival organizers that their unique version of the English language is not in use in any other parts of the world. You might as well try and translate the flyer for yourselves.

Monday December 2014

Week 1: Burnt instrumental exploration with Oleg Klegg and His Gaunt Twangers at a dirty basement in Utrecht, ripped Goshka Macuga poster hanging from the wall. Plugging in brand new Behringer effect pedals and bits of my original Christmas tree – who said I’m not a sensational/seasonal bitch when I want too be?!!

Wednesday in July
I am stunned by a large wasp. I thought I’d crushed it with my copy of Heat magazine, it suddenly springs back to life angrily and stings Quentin, my querulous sound engineer, repeatedly on the nose. Thank heaven it had the good sense not to sting me.

Sunday December 2014
Week Three: Copying transcripts from an archive of half broken Milwaukee dictating business machines circa 1962. Stomu Yamashta and Henze’s take on Ho Chi Minh mixed into a ground down audio paste with twinges of Clint Mansell’s epidural Aronofsky soundtrack – fed open mouthed to a fuzz box and relayed around the room by speakers. I sit doing my email, dragging the mouse so slowly around the mousemat that the sound engineer becomes enraged, storms over and takes a swipe at me with his expensive soundfield microphone.
“We pay you a small fortune to come and perform and you sit there doing your emails”, he yells, quite apoplectic.
“Best save it for the mosquitos, Tantrum Boy’, I tell him. “I hear they bite little pricks this time of year’.

Friday November 2017
Week 4: Practicing the violin once again. The pain in my wrist entrenches me in my humble e-pinion that the violin and its mortifying tones are strictly for annoying the critics. By the banks of the Rhine the following morning it is placed in a tulle-lined little oak coffin and pushed gently upstream.

Week 5: Its clear. I want to use the crap I see all over this town, and trap it in a clear yellow resin of epoxy – before setting fire to it. PING!

Week 2: I receive the most insolent letter from a twerp who calls himself Eddie Prevost. The NERVE! I quote:

‘Dear Kaffe. You may have heard of me. I was once a big name on the improv scene. I have been out of circulation for a while but am hoping to get back in the game. My mates have told me you are the one to talk to. You have all the right connections and a big heart. Also, I have to say, if the photos I’ve seen in the Marxist version of Heat magazine are anything to go by, you are a rare stunner and extremely fit lady. I’ve included some of my lyrics for you to set to music. If you would help me out I would be eternally grateful and will count you a friend for life. Please please, Mrs Kaffe, I know you won’t close your doors out on an old improvising geezer who has fallen on hard times. Looking forward to our fruitful union.
Yours faithfully
‘Fast’ Eddie Prevost.’

Here is a taster of the ‘lyrics’ the ineffable dolt sent me:

‘Factory labour
is being exploited.
They’re working all night
And they’re working all day.

The greedy fat bankers
Are really delighted.
They’re making the money
Without needing to use eBay.’

Having been brought up correctly, I immediately write back:

‘Dear Eddie, you stupid stupid little man. Do you really crawl around your cramped and dirty council house bedsit imagining that the world’s top improvising laptop and installation artist – the great Kaffe Matthews – has the time or inclination to add even one hemisemidemimoorilemmyquaver of her brilliant music to your asinine scrawls. What planet are you on, moron?!! You insult my sympathy for revolutionary politics with your lyrics – banal dullard pinko witterings of the direst stamp. Are you certain they were not actually written by a piece of wood? Listen carefully. Do not dare bother me again or my lawyers will bury you. Period.
Lossa luv, babes Kaffe xx’

Week 3: Performance? Does it really require human agency. Is not the machine better equipped for the rigors of a 48 hour electro-operatic gestation ritual? We are preparing Act 9 for Ludo Pondswitch’s Opera ‘Sin in a Moving Car’. Sparkling Detroit wheel rims and the smell of butch men coated in axle grease spring to mind – but I step on the thought, my toe crushing a gormless bug.

The 48 hour performance approaches within 12 hours including 41 hours of non-sonic performance Eating the Brickbat at Der KunstKracker 12 West Berlin.

My software today has been developed by iKLUdGe and TTPcom – hybrid Max MSP from San Fran. After a turgid start from my collaborators I take command of the rehearsal, weaving a half-modulated threnody that is to be found drowning out the wearisome drone of the duxianqin and kicking some ass. Later we have a breakthrough.
A beer pickled triple barreled Welsh rock singer (Ydris Muhammed-Celwyn-Jones) has been located in Merthyr Tydfil who can voice the part of Tennessee Okri, the jejeune bloated patriarch of the family– fabulous!! The female side of the Improv ‘rumour mill’ says that Ydris has a nasty rep for touching up the ladies. He’d better not try anything on with me, mind – or I’ll whip him up an impromptu orchidectomy with my Kitchen Devil and have his male organs shipped by slow surface mail to the Orkneys.

The awesome Tam Dean Burn, (what an actor!) will join us to play Lord Heligan and under the glare of a 12 watt energy saving lightbulb (nightmare) deliver his usual rant through a twenty six channel sound system. In an effort to confound the audience they’ll be asked to leave their bicycles unlocked by the nearest open window. In all, an exemplary peripatetic show especially when one considers the audience will be walking home after their bikes are stolen.

Monday 30th June

I am unprepared for it. My rented Skoda breaks down in the middle of the edge of nowhere – Texas.
Rampant curly snakes, a wailing wall of heat and cold Taco Bell. I pick up one of the more unusual serpents which has darted behind a rock. Mottled, it has a curious bone structure attached to its rear end that makes the most intriguing skeletal rattling sound. I wonder what species it can be as I never encountered this particular subfamily while studying for my two zoology degrees at Uppsala. For those of you untutored in Zoology, snakes are classified thus:
Class: Reptilia
Order: Squamata
Suborder: Serpentes.
Family: Sly and the Stone Family

Coiled around my arm, the snake playfully opens its jaws as if about to strike but one look from Mistress Kaffe and it changes its mind. Snakes are just like men. Full of huff, puff and bravado but so incredibly easy to deflate.
To my surprise I find I like the desert. It reminds me of the Caterham branch of Top Shop on a rainy Shove Wednesday afternoon – empty but lots to look at if you keep your eyeballs open. Eerily bright space and clouds in the shape of a fat co-op till lady that fluff endlessly over the cactus punctured land. Today, even the clouds are full of huff and puff but not much of the bravado stuff.
I am picked up my a strange young man in a hockey mask who, having elicited the information that I am somehow connected to ‘The Music Business’ (HUGE QUOTATION MARKS) proceeds to torture me with his turgid math rock Emo demos while driving the three hours to the nearest service station. Yeauccch!

Midnight. I finally reach the haven of a cosy motel, run a hot tub, fix myself a large and vivacious Rum Collins. And then the bulb blows.

Friday October 2020
Touring – dates in the Danzig corridor, Stalingrad and a commission to play on a billionaires 202ft yacht in Monaco harbour. Despite my unshakeable Socialist convictions I accept. On deck alone together after my brilliant performance, Mr Loaded Billionaire has a grope and makes a pass. I fend him off, even though I am hopelessly tipsy pipsy wispy.
It might seem like I am quite a sober girl, the truth is I can most often be found drinking prosecco. I have been addicted to it since I was twelve or so. Next to always jonesing after laptops, it is my worst habit. And I drink the classic variety–with the absolutely nose-tingling levels of gaseous effervescence. I do not know exactly how much I drink a day. I don’t care to figure it out—perhaps I am afraid to know. But I drink so much the prosecco company agreed to deliver it to my home in a tanker. My individual daily prosecco consumption rivals the amounts they sell at the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden. Mum has been telling me since I was twelve I was going to go insane and have the teeth rot out of my head. So far my genius, and obsessive attention to brilliance, has kept away the teeth fairies (in fact I attribute my ability to communicate with tree sprites to the prosecco:))

Thursday Jan 2015
Week One: Group installation in partnership with Error 404. I can never remember their names. Our venue preps are threatened by a gang of angry neighbours who storm the space demanding that I be quiet. I yell ‘Tacit!’, followed by, ‘Eckuf off, you scumbots!’. The use of pig Latin in close association with the most vulgar expletives never fails to deter the intruder but, as usual, the spineless organisers cave in. Uncomfortable closed back earphones are to be imposed after 6pm. The useless things aren’t even stereo – yes, it’s ‘back to mono’ as the limpid 70’s decal once fulminated. This stupid restriction, however, adds to my fury at ever getting involved in this pathetic project. Are all artistic collaborations doomed to go the way of that iconic 1940’s relationship breakdown – Breton and Jean Dubuffet, two bitter scorpions stinging one another to death in an empty desert for ownership of the mantle of Art Brut? PING!

Thursday September 2015
Week Two: We have come over to Ojinaga in Mexico to buy authentic peasant clothing off the locals. If there’s a cheaper way to source one’s xmas prezzies then TELL ME!
There’s little choice and nothing that’s useful on that score but the difference in colour ‘twixt garish surface and visible poverty impresses. It must feel great to be able to cast off the bounds of technology and live with so little.

Wednesday Feb 2016

Week Two: So, here i am! in Austria. Yay yay… land of the laptop loonies!
!t’s currently 9.30 in the morning and i’m sitting next to a heated swimming pool, with lots of pink flowers and mountains and a dead body floating face down. It’s all very Sunset Boulevard meets Brian Jones. Curiously absent from this Hollywood reconstruction is Michael Barrymore, surely the icon of Swimming-Pool-as-History. The Hotel manager, Herr Hanfstaengl, is going mental and the guests are in various ‘states hysterical’.

Here are some pictures I took during the journey here.

I should send out a big up to that yummy hunk Klaus for driving, because I got to see so many more beautiful places than I would otherwise! And when I got bored with scenery I could gaze at Klaus’ telegraph pole biceps and huge bullish neck. He’s built like Andre’s Equivalent 8, only ‘minimal’ is not a word that comes to mind when fantasizing about Klaus. Undeniably, the working class male is both subject (i.e. the willing director of his own potency) and object (to be gazed upon by others for his latent desirability). Mmmmmmm…

More working for a day or two then I’m going to take my first holiday in weeks. The local police have arrived – Closeau eat your heart out – and are trying to fish the body out of the pool. Hopeless! I wish they’d hurry up. I’m dying for my early morning dip.

Saturday July 2016

Week One: How much have I changed the contrast and brightness controls in my own mind to avoid seeing the nightmares I never want to see ? Have I finally forged my own Holy Grail – an index of self-deception?

And what will my sweaty promoter see as we stand and stare in the saw-toothed heat and I move farther and farther away to avoid his jarring B.O. except for rubbish strewn brutality of a Californian afternoon?

For my matinee performance I am allowed a choice of piano. I dismiss the Steinberg out of hand. The Bosenlundgren is certainly attractive, as is the tinkly Bechstein but in the end I plump for the architectonically unmusical stresses of the Renzo.

Friday April 2016

Week Four:

Oversee the installation of my sonic bidet in Bruges. It’s a group show of the worst kind. The gallery owner calls me frantic and freaking out at 9 in the p.m. She’d returned to pick up some flyers and discovered that one of the American artists who’d been locked in the space during the day (they needed to hang 357 radios from picture hooks for some obscure no doubt conceptualistic reason – Americans!!) had gotten caught short and mistook my sonic bidet for the you-know-what.

The owner suggests that I catch a bus over and bring some cleaning materials and rubber gloves. I generally scream and threaten death, pain and extermination to the gallery owner who promptly sends a taxi to collect me. She’s also agreed to muck out the bidet under my supervision. It’s brill. While she scrubs and cleans I slip away undetected to the American’s stupid installation. Deftly, perching on a stool, I place a doggy doodoo I scooped up off the sidewalk on top of one of the radios. Revenge is sweet, is it not? Anyway, I’ve done them a favour. As part and parcel of the tradition of re-imaging urban ideation, a turd in an installation marks it out as part of the magical social realist category.

Tuesday in July

Week One: Imagine Helen Fielding meets the Psycho Cop 2 meets a stale packet of cheese flavoured Doritos in deepest Guatemala. Well I am there. A huge and spacious, Greystoke themed apartment, (BFG-sized by British standards), no evidence of design, appalling ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane’ artwork, no electric kettle or hot water bottle. Thank the Saints that it’s sweltering outside or the Kaffe shit really would collide with the fan. When I examine the bathroom appliances I find that they are all broken and the bed is propped up by numerous copies of Houellebecq’s Atomised. They’re all in Spanish which I certainly don’t read or care to understand. What luck!

Thursday 14th February

Alright yes, I admit it. I adore your pudgy little fascinated faces staring back at me as I perform – oh audience – don’t take your love to town!

Back to the room where they make you practice how to spell practise / Dien Bien Fooey- oh teacher, where art thy golden slippers ?
I shift gears on the tarmac of abstraction – spinning wheelies of invention – burning an imaginary performance of rubber trumpet licks and male squealing from “Men Under Heel” instead.

Monday May 2018

Week Three: Good news at last! In October my software engineers will announce my new processing software. My brilliant engineers have given the software a working title – Phoebus Bulwark – but this is a temporary state of affairs. It will have to change to something that features my name prominently – Kaffesomethingorother. Here’s a tip for all you young electronica artists. Never miss an opportunity to furnish and enhance the brand.

Also new is a small Kaffe web app that sits in your browser that allows me to remote control music the music you’re listening to. I will be streaming my music via services such as iTunes, Streampad, SeeqPod, Pandora, MyFlashFetish, Last.fm, Sponge, and at least 257 other music players. I’m proud to say that the Kaffe tech team has now become an integrated part of our collective web life delivering loads of Kaffe music and video streams along with some other cool ideas – most of them MY ideas. (Ever tried to find a prosecco outlet in Santa Monica?) Under my guidance the boffins will be working with my other engineering teams to integrate my personalized web tools into other Kaffe! ‘online products. It’s all about sustaining and nourishing the brand.

We’ve also been having a lot of success with my 3D Web Media Player (which internally we fondly call The Square Kaffe), the brainchild of Hrafnkell Birgisson. My Media Applications team has been building on Hrafnkell’s great work to improve the player and finally put it in the hands of some of the top bloggers in the digital music space. (Brilliant thought she is, Hrafnkell has zero understanding of the meaning of the word ‘Deadline’). Watch this space, music bloggers!

Tuesday February 2019
After eleventeen years of not bothering to do much about it, we at last are presented with a spanking permanent creative space.

Little Tye Cottage, The Cuttings, Snapes Crackling, Essex.
At last the work that is Music for Idiots work can really continue to work – working. Working the work. God bless you Arts Counlic UK. And for covering the road tax and full party girl insurance on my little powder blue Mazda. PING!

Laptops, like horses, alter the credo of time
Ed Baxter – Figaro/Pravda

The Toppibots meet up to plan our next move. After the last shambles I’m taking no chances and will be telling everyone what to do. Dierdra argues with me that in order to make the music of free electronic laptop improvisation there can be no leaders. I have a simple two part answer for her. First, I inform her that if she doesn’t shut up I will have her thrown out of the band, even though I’d really really hate to have to do that. Then I tell her how much money she’s going to get paid on our upcoming Japan tour. On hearing this she shuts her fat mouth and starts eagerly agreeing with everything I say. She’s such a squirming sycophant!

The Toppibots. Left to right – Tixie, Kaffe, Mitsuka. Andrea

The Toppibots band:
Andrea Neumann ~ ever since she went crazy and turned on her partner Annette Krebs like a demented rotweiler, I’ve wanted to work with Andrea. It was under my prodding that she gave up twanging that stupid piano frame and took up a proper instrument – the laptop. Based in Leipzig, Germany when she’s let out of the fruit and nutcase farm.

Mitsuka Yoshida ~ international bukkake artiste extraordinaire, she works exclusively with female puppets – a gesture which has scandalised the traditionally male bukkake community. Even though she’s a vital part of our group in funding terms, I can’t help but feel there’s something creepy about people who spend their lives among puppets. It’s like working for the Arts Council. Mitsuka is also the mother of 6 abandoned brats so either she is very fond of screwing or else Japanese contraception isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Her base – Xinjing, Manchukuo

Kaffe Matthews ~ performing micro-conceptual works, injecting loud corpuscles into quiet bodies, dreaming up outdoor sonic projects that generate blissfully huge funding, proposing steam driven aleatory systems encased in musical concrete ‘n’ diamante cyborg exoskeletons. I am also an international catwalk style icon beloved by millions. Crush, kill, destroy! Base – Essex and The Isle of Unst, UK.

Dierdra Radigue ~ composing for missing instruments, blagging, rock band arranging. Base, Paris, France.
Two weeks into rehearsals, Andrea decides to stop taking her medication and we have to return her to the asylum in Germany under armed guard. Quite out of the blue, she has embraced radical Islamic fundamentalism and is arrested trying to buy large quantities of acetone and nails. If only she’d told me she wanted to re-do her nails. I have warehouses full of nail varnish remover stored in Essex – along with several tons of Mac make up – just in case the economy collapses.

Short of a member, I take a huge risk and promote my companion tree sprite Tixie Pow Wow Golly Nosh to the band. This causes some consternation among the other band members who can neither see nor hear Tixie. Even that dyed-in-the-wool animist Mitsuka insists that there is no such thing as tree sprites. After I pull the heads off a few of her dolls and mutilate them she generously agrees with the other band members that I am best placed to judge ‘sprite’ issues.

Reconformed, the plan is to drive forward the Toppibot’s new post-tedium project – a generously funded five month long residency in Japan, January 2021. Joy in new lackey Omorashi Yagai brought on board to facilitate this.
E’er, I will gaze upon Mount Fuji Corporation. PING!

Tree Sprites

In a post-financial age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairies, eldils and tree sprites should be respected.
– Will Hutton, The Economist.

All too many of my friends and admirers find it disconcerting to discover that I, Kaffe, one who has a naturally incredulous, fiercely rational spirit should believe in tree sprites. Tree sprites are a phenomena reported by many improvisers who utilize wooden instruments. Contrary to common opinion, when the tree inhabited by a tree sprite is cut down, the sprite neither dies nor moves on to a new forest. The sprites become trapped in the wood, which is why you’ll never find a tree sprite in a saxophone even though many a puffy-cheeked improviser will tell you otherwise. Violins and cellos are entirely another matter. I often come across expensive instruments whose stupid owners have no inkling are home to a bushy-tailed garrulous tree sprite.

It is still the custom in many parts of Europe to cut down a tree and bring it into the city. People cut branches and fasten them on every crib and pied a terre. The intention of these customs is to bring home to each dwelling the blessings which the tree sprite has in its power to bestow.
J.G. Frazer – The Golden Bough

I remember being in the middle of a long conversation with a violin a few years ago when its owner – an obnoxious Scandinavian lady called Charlotte Hug – frog marched over like a toad and demanded I explain why I was talking to her violin. Apart from giving her my filthiest Kaffe look (rumour has it that it can spilt a rock in half) I ignored the rude cow completely, made my apologies to the noble, gentle sprite and took my leave gracefully.
I do feel dreadfully sorry for tree sprites doomed to a life of almost solitary confinement but the plain fact is that many people and in particular improvisers are just too plain stupid to see what’s in front of their fat faces!

You will hear many contradictory things about tree sprites. How they are described though depends on who has witnessed them. Smart insightful gifted people such as I, Kaffe, know that they excel in demonstrating such abilities as agility, knitting, IT skills and pandemonium. Some regard them as agents of Satan or the Conservative Party while others see them as a nuisance to be terminated by throwing the offending tree sprites wooden base of operations onto a crackling fire. Like the vampires in Buffy or Blade III, once their homes are burnt the poor sprites burst into flames and are utterly liquidated for all time.

Kaffe and her first sprite experience

She is the fairies’ midwife,
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider’s web;
Her collars, of the moonshine’s watery beams;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film.
— Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene IV

My first encounter with one occured when I was eleven. During summer hols, I was out camping with a group of boys who adored and worshipped me. We had a gigantic fire burning and the boys were working frantically to ensure I remained warm and dry and cosy as a miserable persistent rain was falling. As I sat there eating the Ambrosia creamed rice, hot chestnuts and strawberry jam that Edwin had rustled up for me, some fast moving creature came down from a nearby tree, whacked me on the head, and flew back up the tree while laughing an eerie cackling kind of noise. Thinking about it now, the sprite sounded a lot like Maggie Nichols, although I didn’t know this at the time.
At first, I was very angry. Very angry indeed! I was just slowly eating my pudding demonstrating my superior ladylike manners to the boys, minding my own business, when this beastly being bashed me on the head, even though I was the last person it should have hit. There were five typically dumb members of the male species to hand, all of whom one would have thought made far more sensible targets than myself.

But then I realized that I was the only one who perceived the sprite. Hitting me very hard on the head was the sprite’s way of making contact with the only special and extrasensorily gifted person in our little group – moi, Kaffe. I had been chosen!

How I met my companion sprite – Tixie Pow Wow Golly Nosh.

Everyone who is familiar with my amazing work assumes that my companion tree sprite – Tixie Pow Wow Golly Nosh (to give its full name) – must live in one of my violins. This is rubbish and a lazy assumption.

Here is the story of how I befriended Tixie. I was performing in Brussels with a bunch of idiot musicians and, fed up with their inability to listen to my excellent suggestions, decided to get some fresh air. ‘Fresh’ and ‘Air’ are not two words that come together readily in Belgium so let’s simply say that I took myself off for a wander around the flea market at Place Jeu de Balle and around Rue Blaestraat.

As I wandered past a dusty smelly antiques shop I distinctly heard a thin little voice call out, ‘Kaffe. Can you come in here please’. The voice sounded so small and desperate that instantly my heart went out to it. I imagined a defenseless child in parlous circumstance. Once in the shop, however, the only thing that greeted my eyes apart from the mound of overpriced junk was the shabby proprietor – a dirty grubby old man who was probably born masturbating to animal pornography.

Again, I heard the little voice. ‘Kaffe, can you buy me please. I’m trapped in this old 30’s wooden tennis racket’. The voice did indeed seem to be coming from an old tennis racket.
‘What are you doing trapped inside of a tennis racket?’ I asked.
‘Shut up, you idiot’, shouted the little voice. If the shopkeeper sees you talking to a tennis racket he’ll have you locked up in the asylum with Andrea Neumann faster than you can say “John Wall”.
‘Can’t the proprietor hear you speaking?’, I asked the tennis racket.
‘Look. I told you once. Just shut up and do as you are told. Pay whatever the shopkeeper demands for the tennis racket. He hates you stupid English and if you haggle he’ll tell you to fuck off’.

So it was I ended up giving the shabby disgusting proprietor the equivalent price of a Mulberry Jody shoulder bag for a ridiculous old tennis racket. The grip tape was frayed to nothing, the hoop was warped, the handle was bent and the string face had very little to commend it. Put it this way. Throughout my life, men have described me as fit. As a young girl I excelled at many athletic disciplines and still do. Indeed, I have chased many a male opponent from the court with my backhand. I simply couldn’t see myself hitting an ace with such a useless racket.

Once we were out of earshot I began questioning the racket. The answers came thick and fast and were satisfactory.

‘I am a tree sprite’, said the little voice. ‘My name is Tixie Pow Wow Golly Nosh and I lived in an ash tree until the bad men of the British Lawn Tennis Association came and chopped down my home. Relocation, relocation, relocation. They took me to a saw mill and divided me into a thirty seven superior quality tennis rackets but naturally my consciousness could only live in one individual racket so I chose this one. I’ve sat in that shop waiting thirty eight years for someone raving mad enough to hear my voice to come along’.
‘What happens when they come along’, I asked, not realizing the tree sprite was talking about me.
‘You are the raving nutter who came along. I’m talking about you, Kaffe, ya dumb Essex munter’, said Tixie.

At that point I propped Tixie the tree sprite who lived in a tennis racket up against a pharmacists and calmly walked into a tobacconists. I was gone for fifty minutes as I also decided to have a latte in Café Nero.
When I returned, Tixie was furious.
‘Where the hell were you and what were you doing? You’ve been ages!’, screamed the little tree sprite.
‘I was shopping followed by a leisurely quest for latte if you must ask’.
‘What do you mean by leaving me in the street, you slag. I might have been nicked by the Brussels version of a gang of Essex chavs. What the fuck were you thinking, woman?!!’
‘It’s easier if I demonstrate, Tixie’, I replied. ‘In my left hand is a can of lighter fluid and in my right is a powerful cigarette lighter’.
‘What are you going to do with them’, said the sprite, whose voice shot up by and octave and two semitones. Tixie seemed to have lost all its arrogance in one fell swoop and was now sounding extremely nervous and frightened.
‘Simple. I’m going to burn your disrespectful little tree sprite ass into a pile of gilded splinters. And then I’m going to incinerate those splinters until there’s nothing left of you but a pile of fine ash ash. Then I’m going to cremate the ash ash until each particle is as burnt as a hashish addict’s fingers. How does that sound?’

The results were as I expected. Nobody – I repeat – nobody defies Kaffe and gets away with it. Tixie was terrified and straight away promised to obey my every whim, no matter how imperious and demeaning, until the end of time and never to be rude to me again let alone speak out of turn in my presence. Tree sprites are very very unlike people in that when they make a promise they have to keep to it for life. My very own tree sprite – called Tixie no less – how cool is that??!!!

Laptop Sprites

An artificial-intelligence program called the Electronic Judge is dispensing justice on the Brazilian streets. The program is installed on a laptop and methodically witnesses reports and gathers forensic evidence at the scene of an incident. It then issues on-the-spot fines and can even recommend death sentences.New Scientist, May 2010

Despite becoming accustomed to Tixie the tree sprite who lives in an old 30’s tennis racket, no-one was as surprised as me to discover that laptop sprites exist as well. Many is the time I have been in the middle of a laptop concert when the laptop sprites intervene. This is delightful! No sooner do the Laptop sprites take possession of a laptop than they carry one’s improvisation off into unexpected territories. Often, I am reduced to mere spectator, which is excellent. It gives me a chance to catch up on my emails in the one place I can escape the paparazzo, the needy, clinging fans and my battalion of fawning lackeys – onstage. PING!

An 83 channel composition but only 62 of the channels seemed to work at a time.

As I read my latest copy of Heat magazine I decided that strategies of human competitiveness needed rounding out and investigating. Humans have survived on this planet for longer than I care to remember, even though in the Jurassic Park Ages we were almost wiped out by a big dinosaur. Not that I’d ever eat dinosaur meat but it’s not as though I could anyway because dinosaurs died long ago from too much climate change. Is this the fate that awaits us?

Even so, I can’t help feeling that had the dinosaurs invented Pret a Manger they would still be among us. Can you imagine what a dinosaur Pret would be like? Racks stacked with puffy tacos packed with small mucky mammals.

The Chopped Nuts and Fruit Case is more than just a site specific performance – it is effectively an initiative to detrivialise and duplicate certain imitative tendencies within synchronical human structures e.g. the art of the rip-off in traditional Western opera, Eastern westerns, Northern rock and Southern Rail. The soundtrack is simulated laptop music with lots of funny snackles, crackles, pops and plagiarism in it.

The piece is realised through a close inspection of Chinese DVD piracy, emangungu masks as used in the initiation rites of young men among the Bembe and Vivien Leigh’s portrayal of The Queen of the Borg in the original Star Trek series – the image as other. Director Elia Kazan (who like the actor Sterling Hayden cravenly capitulated at the HUAC hearings) said of Vivien’s acting – ‘She’d have crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance’.

I have often thought I would crawl over broken glass to heighten one of my performances. But, naturally, being me and being brilliant, I’d dress up first in a thick Kevlar catsuit so I didn’t get scratched. PING!

Conceived by Kaffe Matthews
Concept by Kaffe Matthews
All suggestions by Kaffe Matthews
Directed (as per Kaffe’s instructions) by chua gim teck
Visiting Artist/Tea Maid (invited by Kaffe) – Nobo Kwamk
Text (all original ideas by Kaffe) by Con Malto
What meek staff!

Con Malto and Nobo Kwamk @ Palais de Tokyo Weds 2018 – photo by William Bradford

After a weeks tortuous workshop in Scunthorpe Royal Infirmary the work will open at at the Nancy Reagan Theatre Festival, Los Angeles, October 02st 2014.