8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studiology. Illtyd Mountain, like Milfraen Mountain (which John ab John climbed) is open to air currents coming from all sides of the valley. In the absence of any other acoustic phenomena, the sound of wind can evoke a vast space. In this present composition — ‘What is Here’ [working title] — it also serves as a quiet interlude prior to the tumultuous noise of whatever was there. And given that the whatever is heard on the witness’s right-hand side only, the sound of wind blowing across the stereo field helps to obviate the discomfort of absence (like a sudden deafness in one ear); as, for example, when a channel on a set of headphones fails. (Half stereo is not mono.)
My instinct was to work quickly — covering the ‘canvas’ before organising the ‘shapes’ — in order to grasp the essence of the composition as soon as possible. By this stage in the development of the suite, I’ve an immediate instinct about what doesn’t pass at the quality bar. Deletion is without prevarication these days. I took no prisoners. This was a tight piece in its own way, albeit simple in structure. The general principle of removing all excess ballast was applied with the greatest of rigour.
A scream:
Is what constructed from my reading of the witness’s shout of consternation: ‘In the name of God, what is here?’ Thus, the exclamation is turned into the source of his alarm. The scream is somewhere between a cry of aggression and of great pain. (A scream for our times, perhaps.) It sure as heck frightened me. Enough! My ear was saturated with the composition.
While constructing the scream, I alighted upon a possible method of generating a whistle-like sound for the composition entitled ‘Black Man Standing’ [working title]. I recorded my reading of the account, and made an initial foray. 4.30 pm: I pulled the plug and launched out into the parting light.
Yesterday, a good friend of mine sent me a recent photograph of my childhood home in Abertillery. On my previous visits to the town, the house had appeared forlorn and abandoned. Now, someone was taking care of it; the house is a home once again. We reminisced about our exploits in the front room. On Saturday afternoons, several of us would gather to listen to the Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman show, play our latest vinyl purchases, or lay down a track for an album, or learn a new composition that one of us had written. Band practise was an enormous effort: amps, guitars, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder had to be schlepped from one end of the town to the other. I cannot but help think that those years were among to most influential in terms of my subsequent development.
