Summa: diary (August 1-9, 2024)

August 1 (Thursday) 8.15 am: A communion. 8.45 am: Studiology. I edited and finalised the pseudo-EVP samples that I’d constructed yesterday. 11.00 am: At the Arts Centre, it appeared as though the entire of Africa was present. Suddenly, I was the white minority. It turned out it was only the entire of Ghana; they were attending a convention run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. My raison d’etre this morning was a long-overdue coffee and conversation with the artist Saoirse Morgan.

Having generated two sample sets, the third will derive directly from the Jürgensen and Raudive records. Typically, I need to manufacture many ‘bricks’ before I can begin building the ‘wall’.

August 2 (Friday). 8.45 am: Studiology. On with the fourth sample set. comprising words and phrases culled from a movie recording, made in 1930, of the distinguished British physicist Oliver Lodge. The objective is to extract them from their native context — a discourse on magnetism and other invisible forces — so that they can float free of their subject matter. At the close of his explanation, Lodge moves towards a more metaphysical discussion of ether and matter, and of the latter’s inferiority to the realms of the unseen. After the death of his son in World War I, he became a Christian Spiritualist and sought-out mediums by whom to contact him.

I was drawn to the birdsong in the background of the recording (which was made outdoors). Simultaneously, nearly a century later, I could hear the same from my studio window. In an age of perpetual change and upheaval, such continuities are reassuring.

The fifth sample set is derived from recordings made at early-twentieth British seances. The extracts will be modified to sound like mid-century EVPs. I’m astonished how truly great minds, such as those of Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle, were taken in by the hokum of duplicitous mediums. Like Lodge, Doyle had also lost a son in the war. Grief may drive reason and discernment into abeyance. One medium on the recordings channelled the spirit of the composer and piano virtuoso Frédéric Chopin. He was Polish. However, his spirit spoke with a pronounced French accent.

August 4 (Sunday). 1.30 pm: At the end of a rich and fulfilling weekend with our younger son and his fiancée, we hugged and said ‘goodbye, for now’. The next time we meet, they’ll be getting married.

In the background, right-wing, racist thugs were ‘taking back their country’ by perpetrating acts of vandalism, arson, looting, violence, and intimidation against immigrants and Muslims, in some of England’s cities. Their actions serve only to unite their opponents — who might otherwise not share common ground — against their cause (which is to ascribe a dignity and purposefulness to their motives that’s undeserved).

August 5 (Monday). 7.00 am: A communion and exercise. 8.00 am: A review of the week ahead. 8.15 am: Studiology. A review of sample-set E of the Einspelungen project. The set will needed to divided into E, F, and G, such were the number of useable samples extracted on Friday. 10.30 am: A blood test at my GP surgery. Even after drinking four large flasks on cold water, the syringe still found it hard to locate a vein. Would this need to be a Stanley knife and plastic bucket job? I left the nurse looking Trumpish — as though I’d survived an assassination attempt on my arm.

11.00 am: The file samples were too large to be accommodated on the sampler’s SD card. They each needed to be reduced from 96000 Hz/32 bits to 44100 Hz/16 bits. 2.30 pm: Adjusted samples uploaded, I turned my attention to the cassette-tape recorder aspect of the table-rig’s second strand. Several devices, including a micro-cassette recorder, will be used interchangeably.

4.00 pm: An ambulation. 7.30 pm: I continued developing long-form samples (of 10 minutes duration) of choral singing, taken from the Aural Diary archive, that have been subjected to randomised reorganisation. The results are compelling, in and of themselves. Sacred music was used in Christian spiritualist seances to draw spirits to the room.

August 6 (Tuesday). 8.15 am: The rig-table now has three elements: 1. electronic sound (strand 1, FilterBank 2); 2. pseudo-EVPs (strand 2, sample launcher); and 3. divided and reconfigured excerpts of music (strand 2, cassette players). In this respect, the (notional) performance set-up reflects the constitution of my compositional work: abstract sound, voice, and music. The reconfigured music (the sounds of small-group and congregational hymn singing) has a fractured, a cubistic, and an unresolved quality that seems, to my ear, to chime with the dislocations and disorders of these present times. Perhaps this is an (albeit fortuitous) example of how the outer world of events seeps into the inner world of the imagination. Today, news broadcasts and social media posts show riots and protests in England, Bangladesh, and Venezuela. At first sight, I failed to distinguish which country was being depicted. A world in travail.

At about 20-minutes past the hour, I hear the train arrive. At about 29-minutes past, I hear it depart. This schedule measures out my mornings and afternoons. 12.00 pm: I began transferring the digital recordings of small-group and congregational hymn singing to cassette tape in real-time. I read in between conversions.

August 7 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: A communion. 8.00 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I made an alternative version of sample derived from a hymn sung at a seance in the 1930s. In theory, both versions could be played simultaneously. 11.30 am: A tape-test on the rig-table. After some hiccups (due to ignorance on my part), I was in business. Thereafter, my task was to improve the tonality, sound balance, and sound field of the two cassette-tape sources.

3.00 pm: I stepped away from the studio to itemise my concerns regarding the operation of strand 1 thus far:

• Can the two strands of the table-rig be reconciled, sonically?
• Can strand 1 be stabilised, and made more predictable and controllable?
• Where is the discipline?
• Could strand 2 alone provide sufficient material and methods for improvisation?
• Can either an electric guitar or turntable have any art in this set-up?

4.00 pm: An ambulation.

The violent and riotous behaviour seen in some English cities, presently, doesn’t represent a conflict of ideology. The perpetrators of these crimes are manifestly incapable of reasoned and systematic thought. (They think with their boot, instead) Essentially, it’s an antagonism between two irreconcilable conceptions of the ‘good society’. On one side are the misguided, misinformed, appallingly ignorant, prejudiced, mindless, and short-sighted. They’re governed by a hatefulness and resentment that has nowhere else to go; lacking both historical awareness and the wherewithal to consider alternatives; possessed of a madness that overrides self-control and obfuscates morality; and easily led by scurrilous leaders who stoke the fires from the shadows. On the other side, are the vast majority who disavow this malign expression of English nationalism by this very small minority. They love England too, but their ardour is articulated through tolerance, large-heartedness, a strong sense of justice, and a belief that only communal solidarity and political solutions can ease societal discord.

August 8 (Thursday). 7.45 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I addressed my second point (above): ‘Can strand 1 be stabilised, and made more predictable and controllable?’ 10.30 pm: ‘No!’, I concluded. The FilterBank 2 unit was too temperamental when used to an end for which it wasn’t designed. The incorporation of a guitar in its stead would introduce a too musical source. The alternative needs to be ‘abstract’, to serve as the counterpoise to the ‘figurative’ inputs of speech and song. I embarked upon a rethink of strand 1, beginning with a turntable. 12.00 pm: A test-bed assembly of a partial new strand 1 on the large white table.

2.30 pm: I’ve begun reading Howard Fishman’s biography To Anyone Who Ever Asks: the life, music, and mystery of Connie Converse (2023). I first came across Connie Converse last year in the Guardian review of the author’s book [see link, above]. In essence, she was a singer-songwriter in the 1950s who never found an audience and, frustrated and depressed by her sense of failure, deliberately disappeared in 1974. She was never seen again. All that remains of her musical output are recordings she made on a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder at her apartments in Greenwhich Village, New York, and at an private music salon hosted by a graphic artist in that city, along with some handwritten music manuscripts. Converse, too, was a visual artist, as well as a writer, editor, and political activist. In Fishman’s opinion, she ‘failed’ because her music didn’t fit into any established and marketable musical genre. It was too idiosyncratic and without precedent. Originality can be an artist’s undoing, sometimes.

I’ve been intrigued by stories of gifted and original musicians and composers who never caught the public imagination in their lifetime. Rather than throw in the towel, they persevered in obscurity in the hope that an audience will one day be found in either their lifetime or afterwards. Determination in the face of indifference is to be lauded above talent, in my opinion. To this end, they ensured that their work would be discoverable in the future. Converse placed her music tapes, manuscripts, essays, and letters, along with an itemised inventory, in a five-draw metal filing cabinet kept by one of her brothers. Which is why, today, her music has found an audience at long last.

August 9 (Friday). 7.30 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. A familial sound-editing commission to begin, followed by an appraisal of the week’s work and a little 78-rpm record sourcing on eBay. My mental map of the table-rig is changing, dramatically. To secure a solution, sometimes you have to demolish the building and construct another on the same foundations.

11.00 am: Coffee and biscuits at the studio of the artist Susan Forster. Should an artist seek to address contemporary issues in their work, ideally?, we asked. Personally, I’ve never sought to be self-consciously relevant. An old-school modernists at heart, I believe that the work’s formal integrity is my primary concern. If it happens to also reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, then let it do so. (And by that I don’t mean, ‘then all the better’.) To my mind, the function of art is not to inculcate moral lessons. It has no obligations other than to itself.

1.30 pm: Writing. 2.30 pm: Turntable practice. 3.00 pm: Domestic duties in town.

…

Coda

My immediate family comprises members representing European, Chinese, Indian, and mixed-ethnic heritage. It’s a rich and fulfilling blend of cultures, traditions, and perspectives. (Not to mention cuisine.) We enjoy and appreciate one another’s differences and complementarities. We’re integrated, and it’s wonderful.

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.