Summa: diary (July 22-26, 2024)
Why seek ye the living among the dead? (Luke 24.5).

July 22 (Monday). A groggy weekend of side-effects from the shingles vaccination (which reduces the risk of dementia, I read) and on-going food intolerances. The theory: my immune system has been kicked into hyper-drive (it’s normally ‘just’ over-reactive) by the inoculation, and has taken to cracking with the proverbial sledgehammer every nut of moderately problematic food stuff that enters my body. (I’ve a complex of food intolerances.) This morning, the shivers, aching, and nausea have diminished. The week began, as always, with the ritual preparation of daily doses of hypertension and vitamin tablets.
As Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, yesterday, the media’s attention shifted away from the Trumpton to Washington. The hopes of the Democrats have been reinvigorated. I wish for the party the same success that Labour secured in the UK. Camalla Harris would get my vote simply because she buys jazz records on vinyl and her step-children are named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. Late evening, I caught up with the state of the nation address given by The Rest is Politics podcast.

8.15 am: Writing and review of the week ahead. 9.00 am: Studiology. With the second-phase amendments to the archive nearing completion, I returned to the ‘Einspeilunge’ project. The Aural Diary includes two conversations with the (now) dead. One was between my mother and a neighbour (who knew everyone’s business) in the former’s bedroom at Abertillery in 1986, the year before she died. The other was between my maternal grandfather and me. We talked about his life in coal-mining. Our conversation took place at Nantyglo Hospital (where I was born) in 1989, the year before he died. Both engagements were recorded using a Sony Walkman. Neither capture has been useable hitherto, due to the distance of the microphone away from the participants in the first recording, and the intrusive sound of a loud TV in the hospital’s day-room in the second. However, for the purposes purposes of this project, these limitations are a bonus. There’s something simultaneously wondrous and unnerving about listening to the sonic simulacra of those who have passed from this reality, and to the internal ambience of buildings (like the hospital) that no longer exist.
2.00 pm: I honed-in on the TV broadcast that dominated the second recording. An afternoon of sample extraction, followed by an ambulation. 7.00 pm: Back to the archive. (In the background, I listened to political blogs about the rise of Christo-fascism in America.)
July 23 (Tuesday). 8.15 am: GP’ing and correspondence. 9.00 am: Studiology. Just as I started processing yesterday’s TV samples, workers outdoors begin cutting concrete flagstones … loudly. The samples require little processing. As the work proceeded, I reminded myself of the characteristics of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) recordings: harmonics introduced; slower; rhythmic; different languages; phased; backwards; and absences. 10.45 am: I reviewed the recording featuring my mother and a neighbour. There’s a brief moment when children playing outside can be heard. I can hear the same sound coming from beyond the studio window, right now. I can also hear the train arriving in the far distance. Along with these sounds, I see an image of their sources in my mind’s-eye.

11.15 am: I played a recording made at my late mother’s funeral tea, which was held in the lounge at my parents’ home in July 1987. There was nothing of any ‘use’ (with regard to this current project) in the content, with one salient exception. Above the overlay of competing adult voices, that of a young boy can be heard saying: ‘I’m fine’. He was killed in a road accident shortly after graduating from university, a decade later.
1.40 pm: While sorting through my material memorabilia boxes, I came across an inventory to the archive of the College of Psychic Studies, London. As historic items go, they don’t get more interesting than this. The ‘trumpets’ mentioned below were used in seances to amplify the voices of the disincarnate. In one sense, the trumpet was the acoustic predecessor of EVP technology: a physical means of facilitating spiritual communication. Does the archivist know what’s recorded on those open-reel tapes, I wonder? ‘Records’: I enjoyed the idea of music for seances. Music, it was believed, elevated the spiritual energy in the room and attracted the spirits — like moths to a flame.

One item on the inventory has a distinctly Duchampian cast to it: enigmatic, melancholic, and deteriorating — like ruins. Solon was an archaic Athenian statesman, lawmaker, political philosopher, and poet.
WHITE PAPER PARCEL: Messages from Solon. 1927-28. Handwritten, just about readable. January 1886-1889 (not the same handwriting), writes ” … my father George Whitlock Nichol”. Dedicated to IBN by AEB. Whole content is crumbling away.
7.30 pm: An evening finalizing the Archive of Visual Practice. There’ll be no razzmatazz accompanying its release. It is, by its own definition, already out-of-date and a dead-thing — insomuch as nothing will be added.
July 24 (Wednesday). 8.15 am: Studyology. Writing. Presently, my X [Twitter] feed is a micro-world of cultural, political, and religious crosstalk and angry exchanges. Correspondents shore-up their prejudices by aligning themselves to those of like-mind and closing their ears to naysayers. In this age of polarization, tribalism, and hostility, the common courtesies of mutual respect, receptive listening, and a measured response cannot thrive.
9.00 am: Studiology. After a telephone call to wish my 93 year-old father-in-law a ‘happy birthday’, I returned to yesterday’s work. This morning’s task was to prepare samples of the TV broadcast and my grandfather’s voice in readiness for a test-run on the sampler. ‘Fire’ away.

Over the weekend, I watched Wim Wender’s documentary homage, Tokyo-Ga (1985), to the great Japanese film-maker Yasujirō Ozu. In the latter part of his career, Ozu reduced his means to one (the same) camera, one lens (50mm), and one (the same) cinematographer. He also forsook zoom-in and -out and panning shots. The camera was fixed. These limitations were not, however, limiting. They were a discipline and a practical exemplification not so much of ‘less is more’ but, rather, less is enough. Today, there’s a temptation for artists in all mediums to aggregate unto themselves every device, material, and technique available. Begin with one thing, and add another only if the first proves too restrictive.

1.45 pm: A walk to the School of Art to pick-up the desk stands that Phil Garrett (studio technician, museum and gallery curator, and tutor) had kindly prepared for me. These will be used to raise the rear tear of the rig-table and as a cable conduit.

2.15 pm: An afternoon with just one device — the sampler — reminding myself of all it could do, and how to do it. 4.30 pm: Thereafter, I prepared the stands for integration with the rig-table tomorrow.
July 25 (Thursday). 6.45 am: Arise. 7.30 am: A communion, and correspondence with friends who are on the periphery of communication — those whom I’ve not seen in many years, and others whom I’ll likely never see again. I’ve not quoted from the wisdom of X [Twitter] before, but there was an unattributed post that dropped down on my feed this week which struck me as poignant, to the effect:
There are those who we can have only in our hearts, rather than in our lives.
I’m not referring to the departed. Instead, to those who once featured significantly in my life. But either time, distance, circumstances, disappointments, disagreements (very occasionally), or proprieties have carved an unbreachable gulf between us. Mercifully, they’re few in number and remain in my affections. To quote from William Cowper’s hymn:
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void,
The world can never fill.
9.30 am: Studiology. Identifying, diagnosing, and fixing equipment problems. 11.00 am: Strand 2 of the rig was up and running. 11.30 am: Strand 1, likewise. The objective was to provide each component in the rig with an opportunity to justify its continued presence. A few effectors failed at this bar and were replaced.

The initial test-run made some encouraging noises, as it were. And not a few very unnerving ones too. This is a very powerful setup. 1.45 pm: At the output mixer and recording end. Improvisation and no-input sound production ought to be recorded at all times. You never know when something of merit might arise. Every section of the rig throws-up its own distinctive problems. And some problems prove to be intermittent and inscrutable (for now).
July 26 (Friday). 6.30 am: Arise. 7.00 am: A communion and writing. 8.00 am: An ambulation while the sun still shone. I was aware of being unusually attentive to things that I’d barely noticed before. I walked more slowly; stopped more often to look. The sublimity of the ordinary. As intense as it was fugitive.
9.30 am: Having constructed and tested the table-rig, rather than begin to work with it I wanted to step back from the project in order to survey the broader landscape of explorative sound-based projects, and future ambitions. A personal shake-down and stocktake. My list of ambitions has become fixed and finite, of late. I’m interested in many other activities and ideas besides, but their pursuit is necessary presently. To apply the Apostle Paul’s principle of spiritual living: ‘“Everything is permissible,” but not everything is beneficial’ (1 Corinthians 10.23).
12.00 pm: Studiology. I returned to my recording roots in 1973, and reinvigorated tracks that some of my Abertillery friends had laid down in our parents’ front-room ‘studios’ on cassette and rudimentary reel-to-reel tape recorders using appallingly insentive microphones. (In comparison, the early Velvet Underground recordings sound high-fidelity.) NOT SUITABLE FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION.
2.00 pm: A chin-wag with my friend and former PhD Fine Art tutee, the artist Wayne Summers. 3.15 pm: Back to surveying.




See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice.