Summa: diary (October 26-31, 2024)
Make something of each day. Make something in each day.
October 26 (Saturday). 7.00 – 9.15 am: Breakfast; an ambulation; shoppery.
10.00 am: For the remainder of the morning I wrestled to reassemble a recalcitrant metal and wood-slated bed. My Dad’s hammer broke in the process. It may well have been as old as I am. Gone to that great tool shed in the sky. To town, again, to purchase my first rubber mallet. At the counter I asked the assistant: ‘Will this minimise the blood-spatter pattern?’ He froze and stared at me, until I released him from my fiction.
October 27 (Sunday) (The end of British Summer Time). 8.30 am : Morning glory.
In the Municipal Cemetery, there’s the, now, supine gravestone of John and Elizabeth Humpreys. The former was a 49 year old mariner from Aberystwyth. He ‘was lost at sea on his passage from Liverpool to Bahia, South America’ in 1869. Bahia is a state in Brazil, and was the site of a failed attempt to found a welsh settlement called Nova Cambria [New Wales] in the 1850s. This was some 15 years before the establishment of the more widely-known and enduring colony [Y Wladfa] in Patagonia, Argentina.
October 28 (Monday). 7.00 am: Proof of presence.
7.30 am: Writing. A squeaky large lorry trundled slowly outside my study window. It sounded exquisitely pained — like a heart-broken animal or a high-pitched, aching saxophone solo. 9.00 am: Studiology. I returned to the ‘large rig’ and listened to my recent 78-rpm record acquisitions from start to finish and at the correct speed. I still find the disc’s hell for leather rotations rather alarming, as though it’s likely to spin off the deck. The turntable in conjunction with mixer’s filters on the ‘large-rig’ enable me to produce dark and troubling sororities, analogically, that were, previously, only possible on the digital audio workstation (DAW), digitally.
Both the ‘large-rig’ and the ‘small-rig’ will be used to develop sounds contributing to the Aberfan [working title] project. (Over the weekend, what had been the seed of a possibility broke through the soil.) Henceforth, the Einspeilungen and Solemn Sounds improvisatory projects will be like moons orbiting Aberfan — serving as not only a means of illuminating the darkness of the unknown but also a test-bed for exploring, apparatus, processes, methods, and techniques. 11.30 am: I tidied the studio (which is one one of those productive prevarications that I won’t admit to myself). ‘It’s a way of clearing the mind in readiness for proper work, isn’t it, John’. ‘Of course it is, John’.
1.45 pm: Shoppery in town. (A necessary outing, rather than a strategic avoidance strategy.) 2.30 pm: I conducted a ‘small-rig’ test recording. 3.00 pm: A little reading. 3.30 pm: Further reading of the Hansard account of the parlimentary debate about the Aberfan disaster tribunal’s report. (In the background: Karl Jenkins‘ (who used to be a member of Soft Machine) Cantata Memoria For the Children (2016).) One of the parliamentarians contributing to the debate was ‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher (member for Finchley)’. Rarely do I have anything favourable to say about this politician. However, on this occasion, and at this juncture in her career, she demonstrated persuasion, a command of details and argument, and (unexpectedly) compassion for the suffering community.
6.00 pm: Eventide.
October 29 (Tuesday). 9.00 am: Studiology. Today is the first time since June — when the first rig was conceptualised and the construction begun — that I’m in a position to begin recording. Thus, 3 months and no composition — by design.
11.00 am: A visit from my friend and former PhD Fine Art tutee, the artist Anastasia Wildig. 1.30 pm: Back into the studio. The muscles ached in my arms, legs, and back. I worked wearily and blankly throughout the afternoon. In the evening, I sat and made notes.
October 30 (Wednesday). 8.00 am: I was still feel very under par. A day for sitting down at the desk rather than standing in front of the rigs. 9.00 am: But first, I needed to complete the installation of a compressor/limiter unit on the ‘small-rig’. This will tame the FilterBank 2’s output. 9.30 am: Mind idling, before half-focusing on the work of the electroacoustic composer Daphne Oram, and her electro-mechanical and opto-electronic interface, the Oramics Machine. I’d alighted upon a call for contributions of exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds long (following the length of John Cage’s infamous composition) for a compilation album dedicated to her. This was an opportunity to think outside my own box.
In my groggy state, all I had the capacity for was easy-peasy, manual tasks. Inspired by Oram, I made marks with a correction-fluid pen on the magnetic surface of a cassette’s tape. Oram had made drawn, or otherwise adhered, occlusions on 35 mm camera film, to modify the dimensions of sound visually. My approach was to disrupt the chrome oxide surface, and render it inert. Thereafter, nothing could be either recorded or played on those sections covered by the additive.
Tape, like vinyl and shellac records, is a malleable medium — a surface that can be cut, erased, broken, stretched, and drawn on. In the past, I’ve modified discs only. (One example contributed to the track ‘Write the Vision and Make it Plain Upon Tables’, from The Biblical Record (2019) album.) Today, after a 50 year hiatus, I was reintroduced to the vexations of tape splicing.
October 31 (All Hallow’s Eve). In the liturgical calendar of the western Christian Church, today begins a period for remembering the dead — the faithful and the martyres. For those of an errie-inclination, today reminds me of a recording I made, fortuitously, overnight at The Noises of Art conference in 2013. A digital recording device was accidently left on over night after the last event, which was held in the rehearsal room at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales. A section of the recording was preserved in the Aural Diary archive as ‘The silences of (September 6, 2013)’. I noted:
Curiously, between 2.30 am and 5.30 am (when one would expect the Arts Centre to be void of personnel), the microphone picked up a number of clacks, several of which were similarly sounding and very loud (at 0.25 and 0.34 on the recording). Later (at 1.43), there is a somewhat different noise, but again singular, percussive, and abrupt. Further on (at 2.07), we hear what sounds like someone trying a door handle (although there are none on any of the doors leading to or from the studio).
8.45 am: Studiology. Sluggishly, and feeling worse than I did yesterday, I made a start on recording on the partially occluded cassette tape that I’d adjusted yesterday. 11.30 am: On, then, to converting images of Oram’s hand-drawn waveforms into sound, by enhancing their contrast and changing the file postfix from JPEG to RAW — a format that’s readable as sound in a DAW environment.
My eBay purchase of a 78-rpm shellac recording of Charles Wesley’s ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’ (1740) arrived. This was one of the hymn’s sung at the mass funeral of 81 of the 88 children claimed by the Aberfan disaster in 1966. The record was made in England, and released on the Eclipse label (which operated between 1931 and 1935). There’s little information on the label other than the genre (‘Sacred Music’), and a generic descriptor of the context and performers (‘Church Recording with Choir’). One of the record’s previous owners was ‘Adams’. The site in Stoke-on-Trent, England, where C S Armstrong once retailed is now an open space.
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