July 4, 2020

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’ (Isaiah 30.21).

WFH: DAY 83. 6.00 am: I’d struggled, to no avail, to return to sleep. I ate an early breakfast (which meant that I’d be hungry again by 9.00 am). There was admin to look over in advance of the Online Open Day on Monday, and correspondence to return related to possible and impossible futures. (I felt daunted; I felt excited, I anticipated loss; I anticipated gain, I hoped for honour; I prepared for shame.) 8.30 am: Into the studio, where I sourced conversion plugs and set-up a sound session on my computer in order to begin reconstructing the second composition. Mercifully, I’d been able to retrieve most of the lost files associated with this work.

11.00 am: A Saturday treat: half an almond croissant (made with sour dough), courtesy of the local Farmers’ Market:

My policy is to construct each section of the whole as though it was the whole, as though everything else hung upon it. Which in truth it did. ‘Listen out for the samples’ sufficiency, John! Don’t gild the lily.’ I began constructing a compositional ‘spine’, to which the ‘ribs’ of other samples will be joined. It’s a collagist process. At this point, composition is most like painting: laying-in areas, taking them out again, and overlaying samples. (Sounds are always translucent.) Definitionally, ‘painting’ is the practice of applying not only paint but also any other medium to a solid surface. My matrix is a digital surface — a dark-grey ground on which the samples are arranged like pigment swatches of different ‘colour’ (a term that’s shared with music). Each colour occupies a position within the sonic field — in either the foreground, middle distance, or background — depending on the levels of reverberation and loudness that characterize their sound profile. As in paint-directed painting, sound-directed ‘painting’ is, in part, about defining spacial depth.

I had a map:

After lunch, I started on the ‘ribs’. Inevitably, they’ll cause the ‘spine’ to mutate; it’s a symbiotic relationship. Alongside, I manipulated raw samples to substitute for those that had proved unrecoverable. While searching through my file-recovery folder, I alighted upon a 6-minute+ sample of a single repeated sound. It was complete unto itself. Startlingly so. I listened, and heard a trumpet — such as that which will herald Christ’s return (1 Thessalonians 4.17). The tone was at one and the same time majestic and terrifying.

Albrect Altdorfer, ‘Last Judgement’, woodcut, 1513 (Wikimedia Commons)

The sound did not relate to any one of Jones’ narratives. And yet it summoned a sense of the supernatural that was the essence of his collection of spirit auditions. And, I realised, this gem would not have been discovered had not the two compositions needed to be recomposed.

As England, today, takes off the breaks from lockdown, 10 Downing Street issued the following official and errant regulatory tweet (later withdrawn): ‘You can only meet people who don’t live with you outside. Whatever the weather’. It reminded me of those paradoxical and impossible statement-based works made by Conceptualists such as Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry in the 1960s.

4.30 pm: ‘Close the book, John.’ Walking.

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