Summa: diary (October 5-11, 2024)

Make a space that only you can occupy.

October 4 (Saturday). 8.30 am: An ambulation. 9.45 am: Studiology. I set myself to learn how to use new, and deepen my understanding of old, equipment. A few European manufacturers appear to be translating instructions using an AI algorithm. The resultant meaning is sometimes imponderable. The explanatory leaflets had to be decoded through practical application, and rewritten in simpler and more memorable terms. Throughout the day, I practised on the newly acquired Twin Looper, using a turntable input. It’s a rudimentary set-up that exemplifies the virtues and potential of simple means.

There’s a folder on my studio computer named ‘IDEAS’ (in block-capitals). It contains provisional notes and drawings for sound projects that either never took-off or are awaiting their time. None are ever deleted. One file is called ‘Solemn Sounds’ (a quote from Psalm 92.3). The phrase resonates with the mood of sounds produced by the ‘small-rig’. Henceforth, ‘Solemn Sounds’ will serve as the provisional, collective title for improvisations made on it.

October 7 (Monday). A tiresome dream, on waking, in which I searched for the question that underlay everything I do. ‘Lighten up, John!’, the inner-tutor sighed (rolling their eyes). 7.30 am: A review of the week ahead. 7.45 am: A review of last week’s research in history and practice. The two disciplines, or approaches to the subject, orbit one another like binary stars. 8.30 am: Picture research: invisibility and silence. (God walking in the garden, and Adam and Eve hiding.) My research as an art historian began, and continues to engage, with the theology of God’s unrepresentability. It’s a theme that has also informed my art practice, and undergirded the rationale for The Pictorial Bible series, from 1999 to 2015.

1.30 pm: An ambulation. 2.15 pm: Sourcing and procuring new sound equipment. 3.00 pm: I further developed and clarified my taxonomy of biblical sounds. This will continue to be revised as I become more attuned to the nuances of how sounds are referred to in the text. A new sub-mixer arrived. This will replace the 4-channel switching mechanism on the strand 1 oscillator and filter board. It will permit the board’s 4 effectors to be faded in and out independently, as well as in combination. An exercise in control optimization, in other words.

7.30 pm: The ‘Solemn Sounds’ project required source material — an interpretable object. There was no 78-rpm recording of Psalm 92 (from which phase is taken) available for sale online. I settled for a pressing of the ‘Old 124th Psalm’. The lyric is taken from the Genevan Psalter of 1551. It’s a solemn prayer of thanksgiving for God’s deliverance from sure death at the hand of the enemy. The record was released in 1950. Shellac production had given way to 33 1/3-rpm vinyl records by the 1940s. So this record is a very late example of the antecedent medium. I’m drawn to the surface scratches and static of a shellac record, and the compressed, now worn, and lo-fi tonalities of the sound. It yields no advantages; you really have to work it hard to bring forth form. For me, there’s the added exhileration of allying a medium from the turn of the 20th century, as well as a far older text, with contemporary sound manipulation technology.

October 8 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. Strand 1 refit and testing. Once the strand was divided, the curse of stereo struck again. The movement from a mono output to a stereo input was resolved by doubling the former. This produces a ‘faux-stereo’ image. 11.30 am: A review of the Sherman FilterBank 2 unit, which is now in the loop of the oscillator and filter board. I made a list of parameter tests to be undertaken after lunch.

3.30 pm: Dental check-up. No immediate problems, but a forecast of possible heavy weather ahead. The (literally) bite-size X-ray plates taken of my mouth’s interior are a memento mori — an anticipation of my final state, fillings and all. O!, the ageing and slowly crumbling architecture made from enamel, dentin, and cementum. However:

We do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.
2 Corinthians 4.16

October 9 (Wednesday). 6.30 am: Writing. I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the layout of the ‘small-rig’. Of necessity, it has been built on one of the studio’s large table tops used for equipment development and testing. Presently, cables clutter the surface. Ideally, they would be routed off and beneath the work surface. While ergonomic, the array looks haphazard, confused, and provisional (which it is). To my mind, it’s visually unsettling — a state of affairs which presents an unnecessary obstacle to playing and listening. The substrat (the tabletop or pedalboard onto which the ‘small-rig’ will be moved) should be like a theatrical stage: with only those props used in the course of the drama visible, only those actors who’re in the scene on stage, and all the paraphernalia of the performance — the electricity supplies and patch cables — kept out of sight.

9.00 am: Studylogy. On with the book, and an examination of an engraved illustration of one aspect of the Creation narrative, from Genesis, Chapter 1, and verse 2:

Wenceslas Hollar (1607-77), ‘Chaos’ [n.d.] engraving (first state).

The King James Version renders the Hebrew as follows:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Here the word for ‘spirit’ is rûaḥ (רִיחַ). It can also be translated as ‘wind’, as in the New Revised Standard Version:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Hollar’s interpretation, with its churning, driven waves, would appear to have been influenced by the latter rendering. My practice is to describe pictures to myself, in writing. It trains my mind to eyes to see, and my mind to know, before I begin the process of interpretation.

October 10 (Thursday). 6.45 am: Correspondence. In a letter to a friend about their recent experiences of ‘ghosts’ and choral evensong:

Choral evensong is, I find, consoling on many levels. One of the great English traditions. I often listen to it on BBC Radio when working. Something takes place when a choir is singing in the reverberant interior of a capacious church. The sound soothes the soul, and points us beyond the here and now to the possibility of a far better state of being beyond. This is an encounter with ‘spirit’ of an entirely different order. 

9.00 am: Studiology. I pressed on with transferring the equipment from the large white studio table to a pair of elevated pedalboards, which I’d designed for public-workshop engagement on the theme of circuit bending a decade ago. In this arrangement, cables fall beneath the work surface like hanging vines. (The fruit of that event is Open (2015).)

The Amazing Bending Professor, Open Day, School of Art Gallery, Aberystwyth University, October 18, 2014.

October 11 (Friday). 7.00 am. Ode:

8.30 am: A day of start-stop visits from workers and to my GP surgery for a COVID vaccination. 9.30 am: Studiology. Sourcing possible means of extending the rig-tables, while maintaining the limitations of the tables’ boundaries. Weight distribution is also a factor. A slow morning moving furniture around the ‘room’, as it were, re-establishing the rationale of connections and placement. Having taken the rig apart, I’ve now an opportunity to interrogate the parts and the whole from the ground up, once again, as well estimate how long the assembly might take to put together in a (notional) performance context. Lunchtime, the ‘Old 124th Psalm’ shellac record arrived. The final component of the ‘small-rig’ to arrive is a second Twin Looper.

I continued to develop my program of learning each device comprising the ‘small-rig’, as though it was a discrete musical instrument. Control and dexterity are my objectives. The best improvisers know their instruments inside out, and where every note can be found. Musical ideas in their head can be transmitted to their fingers immediately. This is not some innate ability; it has been acquired through consistent practise over a long time. There’s no short cut. The sound rig is like large box of pristine watercolour tablets: engaging in and of itself, and laden with potential. But capable of producing an inchoate mess, if the artist has no practical knowledge of colour mixing.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021)Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: SoundFacebook: The Noises of ArtXInstagramArchive of Visual Practice

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