05 Jun Suze (The cough song)

Dylan, B. (1963) Suze (The cough song) Studio Out take.

Suze (The cough song) is a simple, acoustic tune, it has a guitar, a harmonica, and it goes wrong. It illustrates the beauty of the artist’s hand/voice being seen/heard, and has a strange spark in its disruption. Fingers pick the steel strings – a short journey along a sweet tune, then it soars on the discordant notes of the harmonica until the spell of imagination is broken by a sudden cough. When they return to playing after the cough, it’s the same music, but it’s not the same. The spell is broken, and it marks the end of that recording. Eliot (2009) describes this kind of rupture or wrongness in Dylan’s music as a musical displacement, and perhaps in a sense an assertion that “any attempt to capture the sound is doomed”[1] (p269).

It is a sketch of a song and illustrates the power of the unfinished, and the rawness of the process of making art. It is like a painting when there is more to do – there are still possibilities, they are still in process, still alive and in a perpetual state of becoming (Dylan in Scorcese, 2019)[2].

This project explores landscape through a recursive process of revisiting and overlaying memories. Dylan’s music is woven by displacement and memories of place; of returning, of recursion, with repeated sounds and small shifts in the retelling. Within the project the concept of the sketch is also important. The potential for an unfinished work to perhaps bridge a gap between representation and seeing the process of the works own creation and a possibility for the viewer to be drawn into an embodied experience through the materiality of the work.

[1] Elliott, R. (2009) The same distant places: Bob Dylan’s poetics of place and displacement. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 32, No. 2  pp. 249-70

[2] Scorsese, M. (2019) Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story