Summa: diary (November 23-29, 2024)
‘Till the storm of life is past’ (Charles Wesley, Jesu Lover of My Soul (1740)).
November 23 (Saturday). 7.30 am: A conscious attempt to reach out to sound artists, together with electroacoustic, electronic, and electronic practitioners and recording labels, on Bluesky. Those I’m following are assiduously avoiding political debate, and appear to be left-leaning. As one contributor remarked on the contrast been this platform and X [formerly Twitter]: ‘I’d rather be in an echo chamber than in a cesspit’. Many of the recent converts to the platform are building a new community of like-minded followers from scratch. Therefore, they’re quick to follow me back.
8.30 am: Shoppery which, on a small scale, I enjoy. 9.30 am: Business admin, and a return to the second draft of the book proposal until lunchtime. 1.45 pm: My bespoke 7-inch disc had arrived. On it is recorded one side of a 78-rpm record. Side A of the disc has the content recorded at normal speed; the other side, the same recorded at half speed. This mode of analogue data transfer (for want of a better term), and size of format, makes the medium more readily manipulable (DJ style).
November 24 (Sunday). 2.00 pm: An ambulation. The waves of Irish Sea was pushed hard against the fine-pebble shore, drawing breath and exhaling a gristly Brownian noise.
November 25 (Monday). 8.00 am: Writing. News of the weekend’s flooding in South Wales — notably and severely in Pontypridd — is being particularized on my social media feeds. Aberfan had been effected too, I was told. In 1966, three successive days of heavy rain had contributed to the sudden the slide of slurry into the village on October 21. Yesterday, a landslip from an old coal tip in Cwmtillery, a ward in my home town of Abertillery, was caused by the inundation.
Abertillery is running its first (to my knowledge) life- or figure-drawing provision. And its proving popular. In my early years as a fine art tutor, I taught life-drawing classes to the public in the context of the, then, University College of Wales, Art Department’s Open College of the Arts provision. Folk paid good money to experience the humiliation of what they could not do. But they persevered. A number were inspired to apply for further- and higher-education courses. Others, signed up for more of the same, as well as courses in portraiture, landscape, and still life. All confessed that they hadn’t received any instruction in how to draw (other than from photographs) while at school.
9.30 am: Studiology. I’m exercising ‘over-kill’ in the context of file processing: producing far more variations than I’ll use, while exploring a broad scope of possibilities. Where do my mind and heart travel when I hear the modified samples on playback? 10.30 am: Dai ‘The Greek’ (as he calls himself), a reliable electrician, removed the now defunct microwave oven, of over 20 years service, from the kitchen unit and replaced it with a new one. 11.45 am: Respite anticipated.
12.00 pm: A rationalisation of the studio recording set-up. I should’ve done this a decade ago. Both rigs’ output are now routed to the same analogue/digital interface, connected to the studio computer.
1.45 pm: In the afternoon, I began work with the 7-inch rpm data transfer of Jesu Lover of My Soul. 4.00 pm: Ambulation. Eventide.
November 26 (Tuesday). 7.15 am: Morningtide.
7.45 am: Writing. This year is the 55th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (1969). It was one of those albums I was given by someone who’d hated it. This and Atom Heart Mother (1970) are the only two works by the group I own. I’ve never been a fan. There’s one track on the former — ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ — that, in retrospect, I regard as being a door opening for me. It’s composed of vocalizations imitative of strange creatures and a vociferous primeval Scot, and what sounds like percussive finger wrapping, overlaid, and played at different speeds, forwards and backwards. I realized, for the first time, that an engaging composition — one which bore repeated listening — could comprise sound alone. To that end …
9.00 am: Studiology. Tip No. 7, which slid mercilessly into the school an its environs at Aberfan after the rain, was heaped upon a mountain spring — which had further undermined the tip’s stability. There’s a sound fragment of running water in the background of one of the unedited news film footage about the disaster. I listen in order to better comprehend its acoustic character. I’ll make a field recording of a spring that’s in a secluded part of Parc Natur Penglais on an early morning, when there’s little traffic on the road nearby. Securing the sound of heavy rain won’t be such a challenge at the moment, I fear.
When I was young, there was a tip at the top end of what is referred to as ‘the extension’, beyond the sports ground at Abertillery Park. As the photograph below shows, it had been growing at least since the early 20th century.
This was the one of the spoil heaps produced by Rose Heyworth Colliery (which can be seen in the far distance). Over the decades that followed, it grew into an imposing dark-grey cone. I could see it from my bedroom window, over a mile away. My friends and I would climb a third of the way up the slope, and slide down on corrugated cardboard — much to our parents’ consternation. The tips were constructed by dropping spoil over the designated ‘tipping point’ from buckets suspended from an aerial rope-way, which was elevated on pylons. (See: The Road to Penallta Colliery 1: Genesis.) I was reminded of that tip on confronting Kogetsudai, in the Zen Gardens during my recent trip to Japan. (See: Notes on Japan (March 16-28, 2024)).
2.00 pm: I returned to processing the 33 rpm/78 rpm recording of Jesu Lover of My Soul. Above all, I’m searching for feeling.
November 27, 2024. Glorious day. 8.30 am: Another descent into the pit of business accounts and tax returns. 10.00 am: Studiology. I continued processing the hymn on the larger and smaller rigs, using analogue and digital versions of the recording. The static groove at the tail-end on one of my 78-rpm records, played at very slow speed, sounds like rainfall — like the rain that fell upon Tip no. 7 before it, too, fell. Perhaps there’s the sound of a mountain spring buried somewhere beneath a record’s content. On the album Noisome Spirits (2021), natural sounds were fabricated from unnatural sources. Nothing appeared to be what it was. Which was also the essence of the purported visual and auditory apparitions addressed in the compositions. (The cover photograph of the Ebbw Fach river was taken at Abertillery Park’s extension.)
Listening to the sound of a brass band played in reverse, and at very slow speed for a long-time, was enervating. Music for death-beds. Oddly, immediately after I wrote that sentence one of my X [formerly Twitter] followers messaged me regarding a elegiac piece of music they were listening to, and commented: ‘Will they play this in our suicide pods?’ Synchronicity.
2.00 pm: I’m used to working with ‘lo-fi’ source material — such as a well-worn 78-rpm records, hissy, faded cassette tapes, and barely listenable wax cylinder recordings. The challenge is to redeem the sound from the inadequacies of its medium. I’m holding back on composition for as long as possible and, instead, making fragments that have, as yet, no conceivable position in the whole.
4.00 pm: An ambulation. Grace and gratitude.
November 28 (Thursday). The first day of meteorological Winter. Frosted rooves. 8.00 am: Preparations for a field trip to, and field recording at, the Dingle — which is close to my home. The days of heavy rain had made the path muddy and slippery. I trod gingerly on a floor of fallen leaves. The course of water was forceful and noisy too. The course of the stream meanders from the foot of the woods above. There are relatively quiet and gentle, as well as ferocious and loud, passages of water way. An ideal subject for sound recording, in many ways. In terms of sound studies, this is as close as you get to drawing en plein air.
9.30 am: Back at the studio, I reviewed the harvest. The sounds, when detached from their visual accompaniment, don’t always resemble their source. Rain and waves are other examples. What the brain hears is oscillations of white and Brownian noise, predominantly. To create a plausible rendering, the sources need to be overlaid, re-equalised, and, on occasion, slowed down and allied to fabricated sounds.
10.30 pm: I continued processing 78-rpm records played in reverse and at low speed. 2.00 pm: The making of thunder. (Should I need some.) 2.45 pm: Reading. 3.30 pm: A little virtual DJing. 4.00 pm: There were industrial-type noises arising spontaneously from within the heart of the ‘small rig’. What a gift. Never forget that the equipment can make its own contribution to sound composition. Honour ‘the ghost in the machine’.
November 29 (Friday). 8.00 am: Writing. 9.30 am: An ambulation and hair dressing appointment. 10.45 am: Home. Taxing (for the remainder of the day). ‘Music Maestro, please!’ (to ease the tedium): a Spotify ’60s Mix’. This is my comfort decade, as far as music is concerned.
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; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice