Summa: diary (July 27-31, 2024)

A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more (Jeremiah 31.15; Southport, July 29, 2024).

July 27 (Saturday). 7.45 am: An ambulation. Veils on rain headed northward on the horizon. Where, yesterday, white cumulus clouds bloomed, a leaden blanket now bore down. Such are life’s vicissitudes too. Elevated feelings may fall like a barometer’s needle at the onset of bad weather. Doors close, suddenly; hearts are betrayed; and bad news breaks-in like an armed assailant. The sea flattens the peaks and troughs of the mind’s agitations. She is a confidente with whom you can share a yearning, and before whom you can be weak and broken.

Lunch: egg and chicken. I’ve always found the combination problematic. Setting aside vegetarian and vegan sensibilities, there’s something more than vaguely repulsive about the combination, verging on the improper. A day of domestic fixing and tidying, and re-producing tracks from my juvenilia in between.

July 28 (Sunday). 8.30 am: Off to ‘Brum’ (Birmingham, England) to meet my younger son and his fiancée and her family for lunch. Few travel eastward at this time of the morning on a Sunday. Borth (the next the town along the coast from Aberystwyth) burned bright in the sunlight. From there, the train traced a horizontal line from one side of Wales to the other. 11.35 am: Arrival. We took lunch at the same Chinese restaurant as on the occasion of my early-retirement celebration weekend in 2022.

Once family members had dispersed to take their respective trains home, I headed for the Chinatown district of the city.

En route, I passed a former British School. The building looks like a fortified prison. I was a beneficiary of the British School system during my primary education. In the nineteenth century, they provided universal free education for working class children, and teacher-training well into the next.

Today was the anniversary of J S Bach’s death. I’d visited his grave at St Thomas Church, Leipzig, Germany in 2005.

The jazz bass player and composer Charles Mingus spoke of Bach’s contribution to not only music but also other dimensions of human achievement:

Creativity is more than just being different. Anyone can play weird — that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complex is commonplace. Making the complicated simple — awesomely simple — that’s creativity. … Bach is how buildings got taller. It’s how we go to the moon.

Bach is also a precursor for visual artists who (like myself, during The Pictorial Bible series) implement systematic strategies and modularity in process of construction. His development of melodic inversion and reverse-contrapunctual movement have been a mainstay of my own sound composition too.

July 29 (Monday). 9.00 am: The Jewellery Quarter is, I imagine, one of last functioning craft-specific industrial zones in the UK. I moved from a gold valuer (whose premises was as secure as Fort Knox) to a jewellery maker. The latter has a customer who’s already commissioned three engagements ring. He must get through fiancées like ice lollies in hot weather. Finally, I enquired at a clock and watch repairer about revitalising a family heirloom. The shop has a ‘dead box’ under the glass-topped counter. It’s full of pocket watches that weren’t commercially viable to restore to working order. Each ‘died’ at a different time. As will we. (I recalled a diary blog about the watch my father received from his employer in recognition of twenty-five years’ service.)

Before taking the train home in the afternoon, I took respite from the heat and crowds at St Philip’s Cathedral. Edward Burne-Jones’ stained-glass windows at the east and west ends of the church are among his best works. And I’m no fan of his.

July 30 (Tuesday). 8.00 am: Writing, correspondence, appointments, and a review of the week ahead. 9.15 am: Studiology. Orientation. I listened again to the EVP recordings made by Jürgenson and Raudive, and noted the salient sonic characteristics of the samples of purported ‘voice entity speech’. As importantly, I’m attended to the background sounds as well as the noise of the medium on which the original recording was made and of the medium onto which they’ve been re-recorded for commercial release:

low-tone rumble/hum
high-pitched tone/whistle
words spoken as though they were being sung
low-tone clicks
voice, as though speaking through ring modulator
mid-tone accompanies the spoken word
click of switching tape recorder on and off
surges of distortion
noises, as though some activity was taking place in background
voice heard over a music broadcast, like the transition between and superimposition of two radio stations
two different musical sources played over one another
several spirit entities speaking over one another
sounds and voices that suggest distress
recordings that appear to capture the ambience of the room in which the voice speaks
the sultry, sexual voice of a woman
conversations between spirit entities, as though extracted from a documentary interview or film soundtrack.

1.30 pm: An ambulation: Today, the beach and its environs looked like a 1970s over-colourised picture postcard. And the donkeys were back! I can’t remember when was the last time I saw them. I suspect that they’re no longer ridden by children. Just for show and petting. The town was teaming with tourists.

2.30 pm: Back at the desk. One of Raudive’s recordings is of Winston Churchill, supposedly, making the enigmatic utterance: ”Mark you. Make believe, my dear. Yes.’

Extract from: Konstantine Raudive, Breakthrough, UK: Vista, 1971.

3.00 pm: Radiophonics. I began the of process of manufacturing pseudo-EVP samples, beginning with a trawl of radio-band frequencies on several analogue devices, moving from shortwave to medium wave to longwave to FM. In so doing, I’d returned to my earliest endeavours in sound manipulation: Ion-on-Iron (1977).

July 31 (Thursday). 7.30 am: Correspondence with friends and writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I reviewed and edited the radio samples that I’d extracted yesterday. Today’s task was to manufacture and overlay speech fragments. I searched in my Aural Diary archive of sound recordings for voices of the dead. The Internet provided me with 78-rpm recordings and cine-film soundtracks of Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Oliver Lodge — three of the principal sceptics and advocates of Spiritualism in the early twentieth century. In one extract, Houdini says: ‘There is nothing supernatural about this’, referring to this latest escapological trick. It would likely or not be his judgement on EVP too. Too much time spent with the dead induces a creeping melancholia.

1.45 pm: Working in glorious mono. It’s no small task to deliberately contrive a sound that appears entirely fortuitous. My aim is not to create a realistic representation of an EVP. To do so would mean burying the voice too deeply in the the distortion field to be audible to the untrained ear. My aim is not to imitate but, rather, to interpret.

4.00 pm: An ambulation through the cemetery (of course) and the avenue.