Issue 493

Huge thanks to the staff of The Wire for asking me to expand on these ideas, and also to Dom for his help giving the work some intellectual spine, and Rosie for her introduction and in depth explanation of the work of Zygmunt Bauman. No thanks to Lambeth Library Services for putting the free-to-use computers in the same part of Brixton library as the quiet study area.

It is a massive topic area, and even with the limits I put on the scope it’s still a skim over the potential waters. Here are some avenues of discussion that were left on the digital cutting room floor of the essay in pursuit of hard fact and word count:

• Big digressions on field recording and ‘subjective field recording’

• Big digressions on the more ‘weird’ end of this stuff (refried standing stone)

• Class politics of performance and consumption (duh)

• Rote behaviour on the British left becoming stuck behaviour (can summarise as ‘we march because we march, we sing because we sing’)

• Racialised politics of the white British AKA the orcish brythonic other

• Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia in comparison

• My personal theory about the psychic shock of moving to London from RBUK (rest of bourgeois UK AKA some Wessex exurb) leading to a reaction that becomes a quest for ‘truth’ and ‘solidity’

But these are all of course massive topics. If you want me to write stuff down about any of the left out sections, let me know - either for your mag/website/zine or just for a quick blast on here.

I mean look at this

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this essay, either here or elsewhere - hit me up on email, Instagram, all the usual channels.

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George Rayner-Law is a sound worker from South London. He co-operates Brachliegen Tapes and is one half of the group Degradation. He took the opportunity to expound on the work of Throbbing Gristle:

TG are almost impossible to get a handle on, event at the current distance from either of their phases of activity. Better understood as an art unit than a musical group, TG are inseparable conceptually from the fully DIY label they operated, Industrial Records. The vast majority of TG’s live performances were released on Industrial Records at the time of the group’s original operation between 1976-1981, and their studio resources were so limited that the group generally scavenged their master tapes from BBC radio studio bins.

So, perhaps it should be simple: an official TG release is anything released on Industrial, or, an even tighter canon: anything reissued and canonised by Fetish, and later by Mute.

But this dividing line is very faint; TG’s first album is only available as a bootleg of a private cassette, despite being far more compelling than 20 Jazz Funk Greats. I think to understand the troubled question of canon, the lens of performance art is key. The power of TG bootlegs lie in their pitch and varied nature as documentation of art practice that sits outside the ‘catalogue raisonné’ more than ‘improper’ musical releases. There is no hidden material, no cutting room floor, just a fixed body of work organised and reorganised.

I’ve not featured this in the article but it’s also a great bootleg - and a double LP so a full set.

Almost exclusively, TG bootlegs were released after the 1981 ‘Mission Termination’, and prior to the 2000s reactivation. To extend our art metaphor, we must consider the TG market during this period. Clearly there was a greater demand for the group’s material than was available. semi-official releases, such as Assume Power Focus and Special Treatment also served a market while presumably generating some revenue for the members. But these semi-official releases also function as a form of retrospective processing, as a series of interrogative lenses on what the body of work was, and how to make sense of it. Cosey’s liner notes to Special Treatment make the 1978 performance it is edited from, and that wider period, sound like a semi-recalled dream.

With bootlegging, questions of authorship are fascinating, and with TG these questions are sometimes more rewarding than the material itself. In Throbbing Gristle bootlegs, there is a lot more to explore beyond mere object fetishism or collector impulse.

Here is a quick list of my personal picks of the Throbbing Gristle bootlegs - all should be available online:

• Funeral In Berlin - the best TG record there is, official or bootleg. An LP of the less rhythmic tracks from their two Berlin live performances.

• Rafters: TG Psychic Rally - Maybe the tightest TG live, the 12” version of Discipline emerging from the mist at the end.

• Dimensia In Excelsis - the night before Mission Of Dead Souls, and much much grubbier, closer to ‘76 TG.

• Industrial Studios 8 Track 18 March 1979 - Exactly what is says on the tin. A lot harsher than CD1, a lot more meditative than 20 Jazz Funk Greats. my go-to TG studio recording.

Sleazy and Chris having a Sunday afternoon fiddle circa 1980.

This cat is better at visualising its goals than I am.

2023’s resolutions

Stop Saying

• ‘Class position’ when the word ‘class’ would do - an annoying and obfuscating habit.

  • STUCK - But now I say ‘material context’ too much. I suppose this was a 12 months that focused on things and not people. Not sure if that’s a good thing.

• ‘role or function’ - not sure where this crept in but really is just a more hectoring version of ‘purpose’.

  • FLOPPED - If anything this has become worse but is now limited to mostly something I say at work. So, a lot more tolerable, as that’s a horrible mindset to be in anyway.

• ‘-mode’ - infantilised online-ism. It’s no longer 2020, and I’ve functionally gone monkey mode already so why use that frame.

  • IRRELEVANT - Society caught up and exceeded me on this one. Completely normal so not an issue.

Stop Doing

• Getting sick - it’s not fun anymore, very hard to live a life striving for Meaning when your own bod is leaning into workshy protection methods.

  • FLOPPED - I am stronger in body but not in mind, but at least the sites of my psychophysical distress have moved on a bit. Novelty factor at least.

• Not getting out when I planned to get out - Related. Immanent social anxiety is boring at this point! And only boring people get bored.

  • STUCK - Though maybe I am just making fewer plans… Is that really success?

• Move from video-games-as-opium to conscious consumption - the issue here of course is that opium is great.

  • FLOPPED - But maybe a better reposition than I was in 2023? Reading a lot more books so that is something.

Do More Of

• Getting out more - Not just the positive of the negative above; make more plans, take trips when I can. All that stuff.

  • FLOPPED - Maybe excusable by moving house and related time stuff. The axis of my life has half shifted; I’m on the ordinal now. But need to find the gaps in the ordinal. Though that said, I did leave the UK for the first time in about 4 years, so that’s something.

• More radio - only done one bit of radio in the last two years, which is basically nothing. No sensation like it.

  • STUCK - I had a piece broadcast on Resonance in January, so that counts. And will be doing some more radio stuff later this month if all goes to plan.

• More university work - Feeling like I’m behind all my deadlines at the moment, need to get longer stretches in rather than circling round as I’m used to on my own projects. More focus - hence the procrastination platform you are reading this on. But also these deadlines are all my own deadlines. Maybe I just need to…

  • FLOPPED BUT ALSO IRRELEVANT - If I felt behind then, that is nothing to how I feel now, and have felt since October or so. But the work I am doing in that context remains Good, and is maybe even getting Better. So irrelevant.

• Relax - the physical state more than the mental state. Avoid dead time as that is not relaxation!

  • FLOPPED - To such an extent that I think I might have something wrong with me; calvinism with none of the benefits.

• More work with GRM tools - A bit hyper specific but feels like an area of practice I am super super exited about focusing in on.

  • STUCK - Though they all broke in a recent Logic up date so haven’t for about 6 months.

Daniel Teruggi gearing up to do some kind of jitsu that breaks GRM Tools plugin integration.

Overall that is more flops than anything else, but also most of these flops are not distressing, or have improved into coping strategies. Not necessarily good, but feels Fine. Using this, I’ve devised 2024’s resolution list, including some bonus ball rollovers.

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2024’s resolutions

Stop Saying

• Nothing for this category - maybe I have transcended auto-cringe? Or maybe I am just not speaking to enough people.

Stop Doing

• Getting sick - Though realising maybe nothing can be done about this, and it is the temporally-locked human condition. The systems are working perfectly, I just don’t interface with them well.

• Making lists of work to do as a displacement activity of doing the work - The best advice I ever received was from an old friend, Will Tomlinson, when I enlisted his help to work on some tape loop stuff about a decade ago. He told me to do the work, then work out if it’s good afterwards. The fascist ordering of the world (AKA my list making habit) gets in the way of this pure state of being. Need to curb it. But of course that is hard when I am always…

• Getting stressed at all deadlines - Just developing an allergy to them full stop. Used to find a great freedom in them, knowing that something would be what it was by a certain point, no more stressing over it. But that system broke down somewhere in about 2022. Maybe I have too many outlets; I am my own stakeholder to manage.

Do More Of

• Work with hardware sound wise - Just a victim of moving house and having no shelves at the new place. Need to properly unpack the studio. Theoretically an easy fix. So why not do it?

• Getting out the house - Especially now Iklectik is RIP. That was functionally my local, I was there 3-4 times a month for about 6 years. Need something to fill that hole, though I think that might be impossible.

• getting out the house (casual jaunts edition) - AKA going for a walk and that, getting the train to a hill, walking up said hill, walking back down, that kind of thing. Following my own legs. Though maybe I’m just missing this because of the miserable winter we are easing out of rather than any great change.

• Working without self imposed deadlines as much as possible - See above. Related is rebuilding a sense of trust in my own taste. Hard thing to do, as you can only feel it out really.

• Relax - Impossible goal but let’s dream big.

Man at war with his own status as a sensorial being, 2024.

Ultimately, it’s all quite simple - I need to have more bend and flex in everything I do. Of course the world is a nexus of Obligation and does not function like that. But every period in my life where I’ve been able to dissolve the experienced concept of Time has been far more dealable with than those where I haven’t. Let’s see if I can solve that formula in the next 300 days. Otherwise, see you next year for yet more exhortations to relax.

TECHNOPARK MEETS THEME PARK

I’d not been to Cambridge for about 10 years. The immediate change I was hit with is that the first building out the station is a gigantic Mischon De Reya office, an incredibly on the nose representation of what the British economy actually is - services for global thugs, a valet class and the minimum ecosystem to sustain them. A pure tendril of Starmerian evil.

Kettle’s Yard itself is on the other side of central Cambridge from the station, an essentially straight line through the middle of town. This meant that the stereotypical ‘Cambridge stuff’ is largely unavoidable. This walk, then, had me dwelling on the old forces, the unreformed bodies that are about as old, or older, than the state within which the nominally reside - The City, Oxford colleges, and Cambridge Colleges, among others. In a very real sense I did not feel like I was in Britain. This was amplified by the fact I didn’t see anyone in visible distress in the streets - homelessness, begging, disorderly drinking, untreated injuries, etcetera. This stuff is hidden, rather than absent, of course - Cambridge has one of the largest social divides in England. But, again, this invisibility of poverty gave an overall sense of a place that existed primarily to be a photo backdrop for the post-imperial bandit class’ grandchildren.

At this point, I am having constant flashes of Mushroom from Massive Attack’s quote about listening to Pink Floyd to understand the ruling class:

In short, I am having a very sensorial Bad Time. Stopping for a cigarette and a think, I realised I was experiencing a very strong sense of visceral memory.

I had interviewed for Cambridge when I was 17, and was put in the pool of candidates that were ‘good but not for this college’; I had three interviews with different colleges in total. Therefore, my near-total experience of the town was that of a 17 year old on the judgment chopping block, a ‘good for a state school student’ (an actual quote from the notes of one of the interviews) ghost at the wedding. And on that Saturday, I was experiencing fear curdling into anger, as wise Yoda once said. My back was fully up.

EXQUISITELY LAID CONCRETE ACCESS RAMP

Arriving at the gallery, things were a little better; the space itself was very pleasant and calming, in the Norwegian prison way that is the best one can hope for in the current planning system. The exhibition was good, especially a Madelon Hooykaas video work (that unfortunately isn’t online) consisting of slow black and white layer dissolves. Much of the work was the kind of thing that is a byproduct of a creative life rather than grand art. By that I mean work made domestically, using scrap, junk or cheap materials. This is a good thing, but it means there were few statement pieces; nothing outside the realm of something my dad could’ve had in his flat, made by a friend in 1976. I like this a lot, but it was quite funny realising that artists from all over the world, when working at LYC in Cumbria (Li Yuan-chia’s gallery), made British work.

Li Yuan-chia, Untitled, 1993

All in all, a very nice, genteel space. But every member of the public there over the age of 21 looks like a trustee of some sort or other. This is the future Lib Dems want etcetera.

DURATION HAS A QUALITY ALL OF IT’S OWN

Nick’s work started at 1.30, framed by one of Takis’ Signals. That work is part of a long running series of small variations, and Nick’s work was similar. He used techniques, tools and gestures from his grab bag to collage together. His mask made from dried chillies, the wind up tape player, the gold leaf, the pouring of oil into buckets - all these pre existing elements came together, via practice, into a new work.

Nick framed by a Takis

After moving through the galleries, playing a tape recording of Li Yuan-chia whistling, he laid out a red carpet in the foyer, and very slowly, deliberately unpacked buckets, oil and tea from his rucksack. The oil is poured into one of the four gold leafed buckets, and then repoured into another bucket, in continuous, hours long action, each time the position of the buckets on the carpet re-choreographed. As it is repoured it strips more and more of the gold lead at a microscopic rate, literally enriching the oil. This is the kind of fundamentally satisfying meta-texture that can only become apparent in work that is hours long, and by the end the oil seems more gold than oil.

Once he has started pouring, a recorded loop of two phrases starts, that runs for the next four hours. Very slowly, the phrases, one mandarin and one english, get out of phase with each other, moving from one following the other to sitting on top of each other, motto into mantra. The loops lose all meaning and become pure texture, like a fan hum in an air conditioned space. This creates the territory necessary for this kind of systems based, devised work, a new set of rules.

These phrases brought to mind a work we collaborated on in 2021, You Will Not Feel This Way Forever. This was a video work of Nick’s I did the soundtrack for, for a show at the ICA. I can’t find a link for it online, but it consisted of, visually, Nick moving oil and paper in and out of a bucket in a sparse, black space. Sonically, very small metallic sounds phased in an out over a half hour repeat, while traditional Chinese string instrument samples I had time-stretched to 120 times slower scraped and wailed in the background, and Nick’s voice repeating the title, masked and transformed, ran constantly. 2021 feels like a lifetime ago, maybe more than one. Not because of vague lockdown era framing, but more that I feel entirely alienated from the person I was then. Why?

Nick, carpet, golden buckets, tea.

Thew work ended by collapsing into communality, with Nick inviting the audience in to share tea with him within the circle. This turned the space of performance into a space of encounter, but what kind of encounter?

Interaction between the public and performance art interventions is always a fascinating topic; often watching the audience reacting and calibrating their reactions is more interesting than the work itself. In this case, up until the tea drinking, I felt a constructive or useful tension between the performance of the work and the operational framework of the institution. By inviting the audience in and changing the framework the tension is diffused. Is this a useful counterpoint to the earlier stage? Maybe. But not to my taste.

Overall, though, I thought it was a very successful piece. It was mind wiping, as any durational focus is, but allowed me to be able to access that focus, which isn’t a given. It replaced reality with its own set of rules; once you’re there, you’re stuck in there. This was only disturbed by the continued hostility of durational performance work to the humble smoker, having to duck outside fulfil my base needs.

RUSTICATION

Leaving Cambridge, I felt a great sense of relief, not least after cutting through the crowds of tourists and throngs of teens with BCNR accents. On the train back I tried to read my book, but was still destabilised by what had been opened in me, though I’m not sure what of that was Nick’s work and what was the malignant town itself. When I got home, I felt profoundly odd for many hours; the simple repetitive pouring motions were there when I closed my eyes and my tinnitus felt especially, disablingly rough. All in all, support your local live artists and boycott your local feudal body.

It’s been a long time drawing together, so apologies if it doesn’t fully hang together or explain itself - what is self evident to me might not be self evident to others.

ARI

Ari played this as the centrepiece of a DJ set in a Tottenham warehouse in 2019

This February was the third anniversary of my dear friend Ari’s death. It’s the first anniversary to feel ‘normal’, as in post-covid - the first one was a literal desolate lockdown trudge and a smoke. This one just felt like The Void, a crushing laden certainty. A fixed certain event from the past, as real to me as Pompey’s victory parade or the General Strike. A story from another time before now. Even as recently as December, it felt like an impossibility, an unobservable riddle, a non-object. Or, it felt like a clear consequence of structural issues, a chain of causality. Now it feels entering into myth, now doubt to phase back into the real in a few years’ time. A closed book soon to be blown open.

TIM MARCELLINO

Tim went through a period of obsession with this song, watching the video for breakfast daily

The last weekend in March was the tenth anniversary of my dear friend Tim’s death. His sister had organised a memorial in Edinburgh, where he he had partially grown up, and I went along. A deeply strange event in many ways, a ten year death celebration. I realised this was maybe the only ritualised secular event I’d ever been to with no equivalent or analogue in a liturgical calendar. I’m not sure if it was a social event subsumed into memory, or a memorial event clouded by socialisation; maybe this intellectual conflict between between the past and the future is what animated it. For me, it felt like it resolved into a focus on the living, a recognition of there being no freedom in the past. Ritual-systems as a way for the living to continue to live, human closeness and immediacy the purpose.

Maybe this is why I felt a deep deep sadness, a kind of immediate emotional state that couldn’t or wouldn’t be animated further - just the immediate active sensation of sadness. Even if I wasn’t entirely alienated from the person who was me who had experienced many other emotions around his death ten years ago, I think that other emotions would have been very hard to come into the experience, given what felt like the function of the day.

We shared photos of the lost and the dead from back in the Cameron era, we drank, we chatted.

He was a man who’s name was not his own, feeling like almost a fiction, a lightness of existence. We are alright, for the continuous now.

Views over Edinburgh & Leith, 25 03 23

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Tim Rayner

I’m sure this was the funniest thing going in 1968; I hated hearing it as a kid

As I write this it is 263 days since my dear father Tim’s death.

In early January, I was packing up and sorting through the last bits left in his flat, packing up books, taking down his art.

His collage; a final project with a 50 year prep time

I kept coming back to the Wire song A Public Place: “moving through the contents of another man’s life… his last mortal remains”. Of course, the song is actually about pigeons eating a man’s vomit on Euston concourse; an early encapsulation of neoliberalised shittification. Both readings work in the context of the flat clear; we are the leeches on the cadaver, there is no other physical record of an existence left.

Moving through the contents of another man’s life

Later in January, half a year since he died, I started writing this piece. I felt a strong sense of finality, of nothing left but the certainty of grief. The cycle of quotidian unreality & death administration was winding down, mundanity was reasserting itself. The absence of conversation between me and him was aching much sharper than before.

I think about Godard’s death, and how much he would have loved it - someone at the edge of his art, declaring he was no longer able to work and so euthanising himself. A model he would wish was brave enough to emulate, I think. It feels almost like the nouns are almost the same shape, but not the same words. When he was in hospital, he would tell people he was a film maker. I remember going through his film archive with him, finding the last rejection letter for a documentary job, evidentially the last one before he gave up trying. He was more anxious then than I had ever seen him, almost unable to breathe. The time passed was no protection from the emotion.

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A few weeks later, we were at his grave, planting an english willow in cold January clay. A day that felt like the hard scrape of finality against imagination, against game-systems of guessing. There is no ‘would’ with the dead, they do not meaningfully exist, and I cannot agree with making a kind of phantasm. No time for nonsense, but no ability to grasp on to ‘sense’.

I feel trapped in my relation and role to him rather than able to view him as a person. This feels like a sharp change since his death, as throughout his life he was always 'Tim’ and not ‘dad’ and we felt like associates, not relatives, let alone paternal/filial. Maybe I resist memorialisation and solemnisation for this reason, a desire to keep things complicated, but no method to do so beyond freezing them. I think about his often-repeated claim that the Wesleyite Methodists, the tradition he was raised in, were eminently sensible people in all regards but two: that they believed in God, and that they believed in Heaven. Of course, he missed the most important, the only material one, off - that they all folded into the Tory firmament at the first whiff of working people’s power developing in this country. Their dissent was as a privileged position.

In a lot of ways, dissent as a privileged position sums up his life very well. He was in exactly the right time and place to say a lot and need to do very little. It was the arc of a life placed exactly to get the full sweep of the Trientes Gloriouses, and be in a position to accelerate out of the collapse of that settlement. He died when things were souring, the wheels coming off the post-imperial system, no more assets to strip.

He was able to go to Cambridge as a not very smart man, spend a year building a room-sized sculpture out of wax instead of learning, and then be part of the first generation ‘lucky enough’ to not have to be some kind of imperial functionary, but able to pursue a life of idle creativity. Self expression as the highest virtue, the self and the ego fully centred because what else was there to do?

For reasons I don’t quite understand I’ve recently been fixated on trying to get to grips with the Pink Floyd hyperobject. I think, really, I’m trying to use it as a mirror or lens to understand my father’s cultural place in the world - everything I’ve said above is completely true of the Floyd. As is the core true virtue being cold hard cash, the iron core of that class. Unlike them, and so many of that generation, though, he never reached into bland Americanised proficiency - but was that deliberate or just a lack of velocity and/or opportunity?

Of course, he had every recored from Piper At The Gates Of Dawn to The Wall - he was a fan in their ‘before’, such as there was one. And when I was a child, he loved their carbon-copy decendents, Radiohead. Those records are all gone now beyond that first 1967 LP - the only one that doesn’t feel like a brand extension exercise. That is really the ultimate freedom he had, to be able to not think he had a class position or outlook. A man who thought he was more alone than he was.

Reading this back, comparing what I have to say on each of these people, all their own force in the world, the overriding feeling I have is a great excitement at the prospect of the passage of time. It will pass, and in doing so erode these emotions, these thoughts, the brutality of the everyday making this all Less Complicated. I hope one day to get to a position of just thinking of the abjection of his death, free of these questions.

DIY Remnant, Jan 2023

On Thursday (2nd Feb) I was a slight loose end, so thought I’d take advantage and have a gander at the Alexander: Making Of A Myth exhibition on at the British Library.

I’m inured to the hostile environment (in all senses) of the Euston Road these days, but the public-private-plaza-policing zone outside Kings Cross I’m still unable to adapt to. I think maybe the thing that makes it un-normalisable is the consistent, multilayered branding of Kings Cross station itself since the renovation - every element seems themed around ‘The North’, ‘Northern’ and other related signifiers. It feels like it’s trying to do powerful symbology of ‘RETVRN’ to people from EG Darlington, but from a London perspective just makes it feel like an evil gentry force that doesn't want to be there, and doesn’t want you there in front of it reminding it of this urbane hellhole full of black mould. I’ve always found this odd compared with Euston, which has no such false market identity, especially given it goes to the parts of the north where people actually live. Maybe this is due to its’ nature as more of a commuter station, but most likely the pure evils of branding via the lens of the rail franchise system.

Anyway, after a hyperunpleasant hyperconsumerist fag I sauntered down the road to the British Library.

There’s a wider discussion to be had about the role of the British Library forecourt in the Blair Era imaginary of what England could be (piazzafication, changes to licensing laws)

The library had its usual sharp divide between youthful library punters and ancient masked up exhibition punters. The classic unsustainable structure you see in a lot of exhibitions in London at the moment - unless you are under 21 or over 60 you can’t afford the time or money to actually see this stuff unless you have some kind of discount swizz going.

THE EXHIBITION ITSELF

As for the make-up of the exhibition, there was a nice number of clips from film, for example Michael Wood’s Alexander show from ‘97 (the program that sent me as a child down the hole that would end up with studying Ancient History at university), and 1941 Indian film Sikandar. I would have liked a greater range of non-book or print objects, but really what can one expect; It’s the closest thing they have to shareholder value as a library. The framing being more about the evolution and plurification of the Alexander Romance more than directly narrative was also a successful approach.

Production wise, the staging was very trendy: patten-printed scrim dividers everywhere. Scrim is in! It’s cheaper than plaster covered stud walls I think? Or just the continuing all-powerful legacy of the 2018 Anni Albers exhibition at the Tate. It did do the job, so this shouldn't be taken as criticism of trend-chasing.

The last time scrim was so central to a creative product

The linkup with Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s megaproduct Assasin’s Creed was also done quite tastefully, amazingly. It was just a projection of the imagining of Alexander’s Tomb from 2017’s Origins around a replica of a theorised sarcophagus. It was actually well integrated compared to current VR & AR fads in exhibition curation.

The most curious and knotty element of the production for me was (of course) the sound. There was ambient sound piped in throughout - a modulating balance of bowed metal, distant chimes and the kind of ‘ancient wind’ FX that would be familiar to any consumer of Channel 5 level history documentaries. This placeless invocation of a kind of ‘generic mystery of the ancients’ sound mirrored quite well, I felt, the exhibition’s positioning of Alexander & The Romance as a cross-cultural corpus of work - a kind of generic ‘pastification’. Of course, ancient Greek and Iranian music is also hyper-grating to the modern western ear so I can see why they didn’t go more ‘accurate’ with the sound. But still, as an attempt at indicting a mood in visitors it felt quote odd. Can one talk of a melodramatic exhibition?

ALEXANDER THE HISTORICAL OBJECT VS ALEXANDER THE CULTURAL OBJECT

Overall, the exhibition was good, and worth a visit, but felt like it was missing some key historical & mythopoeic context, both in what Alexander himself was likely drawing on and other examples of his wider effect on culture.

For example there was no discussion or explanation of the Diadochi, which is vital if nothing else for understanding what happened to his body after death, which they cover in some (completely contextless) detail. No explanation for why people then thought his physical corpse was powerful/important/a source of legitimacy, only that people later thought it was. But that sense of power had to come from somewhere! There was the briefest mention of Lysimachus as ‘A king of Thrace’ who minted some of the earliest coins depicting Alexander with horns - but surely the information is that he was Alexander’s schoolfriend and personal bodyguard is key context! Myth making about one of your oldest compatriots is very different to myth making about the world’s most powerful man.

There was also no discussion of diadems or crowns, an especially bizarre oversight considering Alexander is the person who literally innovated the concept in European culture, and it was widely commented on by both his contemporaries and people in the immediately succeeding centuries. Crowns are one of the most potent and enduring cultural objects we have in the world, so the absence was completely senseless.

Alexander with both oriental diadem and horns of Zeus-Amun

Further, while there was a lot of chat about his claiming of the mantle of Amun / Zeus-Amun, there was no discussion of him & his father’s own claimed direct decent from Heracles and therefore Zeus. Not only is this an interesting example of the literal ‘making of a myth’, it explains his trip to Siwa and his right to claim descent from Amun. There was also no discussion or reference to the fact that the image of him with horns, coupled with stories in the Alexander Romance, linked him to the antichrist and therefore Satan in medieval Europe, and is the likely reason that Satan is depicted as ‘the great horned one’ - that seems like fundamental myth-making, and a huge hole!

MEDITATIONS ON BLOCKBUSTER-LITE

Saint Sisoes discovering the corpse of the sustainably-scaled paid exhibition

All in all, despite my gripes at the missed opportunities, this was a good visit, and a very successful example of ‘blockbuster-lite’ exhibition design. That is to say doing a blockbuster exhibition on a smaller budget, in a smaller space, and presumably with a narrower audience draw than a classic blockbuster, while still informed by and to an extent partaking in the arms race that ‘blockbuster’ has become.

Blockbuster itself though, is both a poison and a prison. As I said above, I don’t think the system of having innovative or novel production to stand out in the market, so having to raise prices, thereby making the exhibition inaccessible to the productive middle segment of society is sustainable at all for any institution, especially with the continuing post-Covid collapse in audience numbers. It also functions as a poison for audiences, a kind of educational HFCS that leaves the public as mewling kittens who can only seek out ‘content’ and not ‘information’. very little is to be gained from the presentational arms race, especially now for-profit no-information ‘experiences’ (Immersive Van Gough the best example) are on the scene. It’s not one ecosystem and any effort to treat it as such should be seen, even if entered accidentally, as financialised poison in the cultural well.

Alexander: Making Of A Myth runs until 19th Feb at the British Library

Me being tormented by my own reversion to a cringe mean

Stop Saying

• ‘Class position’ when the word ‘class’ would do - an annoying and obfuscating habit.

• ‘role or function’ - not sure where this crept in but really is just a more hectoring version of ‘purpose’.

• ‘-mode’ - infantilised online-ism. It’s no longer 2020, and I’ve functionally gone monkey mode already so why use that frame.

Stop Doing

• Getting sick - it’s not fun anymore, very hard to live a life striving for Meaning when your own bod is leaning into workshy protection methods.

• Not getting out when I planned to get out - Related. Immanent social anxiety is boring at this point! And only boring people get bored.

• Move from video-games-as-opium to conscious consumption - the issue here of course is that opium is great.

Do More Of

• Getting out more - Not just the positive of the negative above; make more plans, take trips when I can. All that stuff.

• More radio - only done one bit of radio in the last two years, which is basically nothing. No sensation like it.

• More university work - Feeling like I’m behind all my deadlines at the moment, need to get longer stretches in rather than circling round as I’m used to on my own projects. More focus - hence the procrastination platform you are reading this on. But also these deadlines are all my own deadlines. Maybe I just need to…

• Relax - the physical state more than the mental state. Avoid dead time as that is not relaxation!

• More work with GRM tools - A bit hyper specific but feels like an area of practice I am super super exited about focusing in on.

  

  Me in December 2023, self actualised and cracking out the induction coil mics

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Sound Work Life

I’ve maybe worked on a wider range of stuff sound wise than in any other year, in character if not for output source. It’s also been more laptop based than any time previously. I bought a new laptop in late 2021, and Leadlined was the last project I worked on on it. My new machine is like a gorgon compared to the last - before if I wanted to do granular work beyond 2048 granules the old one would shut down, the new one can do 10x as many in real time. As a result, I brought in the year working on a number of granular etudes, my favourite by far being a reworking of Darling by Family Fodder into a crowded mist of vocal tones - I’ll upload it at some point.

In terms of stuff I’ve actually put out this year, my very favourite is the Oyster Card 5” simply because it’s a perfect art-object - all thanks to D for the idea for the form and the concept. A big, stupid, grinning mono beast. I think it’s a great model for the future - pure gestalt work.

Improvised recording with others has been a major joy in 2022. Degradation recording in June is still a huge sculptural project; about half of The Yule Goat came from this session, but there’s hours of good material yet to find a home. Amplified traffic improvisation will be with you in 2023.

The other best bit was the CROSSOVERS improv from November - hopefully more work with these performers again soon. A a very engaging blend of sounds and spacings for sound, sounds as good now as it did recording it which is a rare feeling.

The big lodestone in my sound work this year was Leadlined. The first recording for this was on Brexit night in 2020, and it would have been out in 2021 if not for shopping it about and pressing plant delays - but still, for everyone else it is 2022 work. Sisyphean body of work in many ways, but it achieved many things I’d wanted to do for a long long time. And the response to it has been super heartening, but the most important response to it was playing it to my father while he lay in bed, eyes shut, convalescing from chemotherapy. He called it proper art.

It’s very hard to examine it as a thing-in-the-world, as he died two days after it came out - all the sense of it as an existing thing is only in that continuing unreality.

Gallery Life

Early in the year I was busy finalising work for ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, a 24 hour long durational performance work that was staged in Singapore on 11th March. I focused on creating sound for and helping devise sound perfomance-forms. This was building on, and kind of functioned as the crescendo for, a body of work with Nicholas TWY, a live artist I’ve been working with remotely since 2020. I integrated various sounds and forms from our earlier projects into a an hour long piece that went from 0BPM & 20Hz to 1000BPM and 20,000Hz over the course of an hour, before resetting back to functionally nothing which was played in a coffin structure Nick was trapped in, along with some other sounds playing back in the space via tape loops - it sounds stupid but my favourite part of the whole project was cutting up and processing Billy Joel loops. hopefully the images below help get a sense of the work.

Overall a cycle of work I am very happy with, especially the video piece ‘YOU WILL NOT FEEL THIS WAY FOREVER’ that was shown as part of The Last Breath Society. I’m always looking for more opportunities to do more installation and accompaniment work, it offers an analytical way of working that is incredibly freeing.

Label Life

We put out 14 releases through Brachliegen this year, which seems insane. Overall a way of working I’m very happy with, though I think 2023 will be a year of ‘fewer, more focused’. My very top favourite things we put out this year (not involving me) are below:

LIKE WEEDS - LEFT BEHIND

Starting the year with a great slab of tone from a real master of the form. Kenny was very kind to work with us, and this record seemingly made us seem like ‘a real deal’ to a lot of people. Perfect supermarket music.

Jo Montgomerie - Those Things Beyond & Within

The first time I heard ‘Those Things…’, it completely disabled me. I was in a room that was completely empty save for a bluetooth speaker, painting it gallery white. The sounds crept up form the noise floor, vibrating the floorboards more than my eardrums. I had to stop, leave the room, reset myself. Really amazing stuff. Also was discombobulatingly loud when I saw Jo live in the summer.

Knowing - Pyre Hymns

Really great evolving, undulating music. A big influence on my own sound work this year.

University Life

I started an MA in Sonic Arts this October, which I’m finding helpful to my general practice in many ways - not just access to facilities, and access to new information, but a kind of more loose approach to working that is very freeing at the moment. I’ve been getting properly to grips with reel to reel, and have created a large body of work done straight to stereo quarter inch tape - hopefully will be out and accessible in some format beyond just the assessment.

It’s a proper enjambement of people from different backgrounds and practical frameworks, which I’m enjoying - though I think I’m the only fully ‘self taught’ person on the course, which felt shocking when I sussed it out and now feels merely slightly worrying. I’m not sure where the place for what I think of as sound work is in the academy, but it’s proving fruitful, so far, to try and find out.

Overall Thoughts On A Year Of Sound Work

2022 is probably my second busiest year for sound work, ever - maybe 2014 or 15 feel busier when I remember them, but that was more a period of a lot of gigs and nothing else going on in my life. Now I do a lot of sound work and have plenty of other stuff going on alongside. Looking back at what I’ve been involved in this year, even if some of it was holdover 2021, it feels almost unreal, like it doesn't all fit together within the framework of 365 days as I remember them. I think the key thing is my processes, especially decision making ones, are tightening up. I’ve worked a lot to a 1/4/8 track mentality in 2022, and it’s worked out well. I feel in a good position for the rest of 2023, university deadlines excepting.

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This is the first in a small series of pieces looking back on my experience of 2022. A run-through of the new-ish records that I most enjoyed this year. By that I mean stuff that was new to me in 2022, and released this side of 2020. I’ve also not included stuff I was involved in in any way on this list - that includes Brachliegen releases.

Of course this isn’t an accurate representation of actual listening habits (eg no Big Black version of The Payback, no Jon Hassell), but that’s fine.

I’m going to broadly separate into mood or sound-world, but more for ease of navigation for you, the reader - these are not strict categories at all. No ranking anywhere.

I’ve linked to everything possible to do so, I hope this is something you can dip in and out of while listening.

Noise

Michael Ridge - Microcassette Sessions & More Microcassette Sessions

I discovered Michael’s work tag hunting on Bandcamp. His understanding of his own process is outstanding, and is really forcing me to up my dictaphone techniques.

Sun Yizhou - Noise Floor

The release that led to me contacting Sun for his Brachliegen release Ruin. Great no-input abstraction.

Prayer Rope - Without Seeing And Without Knowing

Proper straight ahead noise, proof that the classic critique of non-figurative work (‘anyone could do that!’) is both completely true of noise and entirely not the point. It’s very hard to create work this compelling with no limits.

Misery Engine - El Sayyid Nosair

Righteous, perfect noise. Learn while you listen! The tape also came with a great poster.

Rhythmic Work

ex.sess - Relic

One of many great ex.sess releases this year. Hard in exactly the right way.

Tom White - Restless Leg

Great physical music, the wonderful boundary of improvised and non.

Drone

En Creux - Phantasm

Hard to pick from all the En Creux releases this year, but this one edges slightly by being the most immediate on first listen.

Jo Montgomerie - Collection2: Solway

Amorphous flowing work. The kind of thing you forget you are listening to, even when loud. Perfect bus music.

Yann Gourdon - Yann Gourdon

On the much dronier end of the wider Alpine early music thing. I’ve found myself turning over from side B to side A more than once. Also the last record I recommended to my dad.

Melody

Percival Pembroke - Other Worlds

A perfect melodic sensibility - picking up the baton that Rob Haigh left in New Cross back in the 80s.

Xeno & Oaxlander - Vi/Deo

After a few years away from them, X&R have moved on & beyond ‘coldwave’ in ways I wouldn’t expect - proper Munich gloss and digital drums.

Eli Kessler - Scary Of Sixty First OST

Is this soundtrack outstanding? Not really. Is it even well composed for the film? Debatable. But I’ve listened to it too many times for it not to be on this list.

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I’ve had more than a few conversations in the last few years, both face to face and digitally, where the question of ‘where people can read my work’ has come up.

Beyond my tweets - almost all dashed off without a second thought - and the bits I co-draft for Brachliegen, there isn’t really anything out there. Most of my best writing takes place in long running emails and DMs; I try and keep to the correspondence routine of a 19th century German baron, or at least bourgeois householder.

I love conversation, breeze, chat, and have note after note of ideas to follow up, build on, interrogate - but no real space to do so.

I’ve also tried many times in my life to keep some kind of diary, but mostly these slip into a kind of unbearable-to-read back reflexive solipsism which is of no use to me.

So what I’m trying to do here, however sparsely, is create a kind of, for me, 7th category of writing. Stuff that is not:

1. Day job writing (emails, reports etc)

2. Academic writing for my MA (though may crossover in areas discussed)

3. Tweets (tweets are great and I love writing them but it is best as parlour game stuff)

4. Personal correspondence (though may cross over between audiences)

5. Diary (the only diary I have ever kept at and liked is my Dream Diary Twitter thread, but that is obviously limited and partial in what it covers)

6. Not already covered writing for creative pursuit - personal research notes, lyric, text for Brachliegen, that sort of thing (though may cross over in content and approach)

I’m going to start with some pieces looking back at my own personal 2022, that will hopefully lay out the boundaries of what this space will be, at least initially.

As to why specifically this form rather than any other, I have gotten more and more into Substack-as-medium from a subscriber perspective, as I can engage with it as email rather than website. A huge conceptual difference, for me at least, and I hope something that works for others also.