Summa: diary (March 10-14, 2025)

‘[Inquisitive electronic sounds play]’, Unsolved Mysteries [documentary series] caption, Netflix (2025).

March 10 (Monday). 8.00 am: Unpacking, writing, preparing the latest blog for publication, and computer desktop re-organisation. 10.00 am: X [formerly Twitter] suffered a major global outage caused (it was later revealed) by a cyberattack. (Part of me wished it would never revive.) I’m saving the notification below, issued during the hack, to reassure me of my innocence when faced with some of life’s myriad other failures to come:

10.30 am: Studiology (with a fresh mug of tea to hand). A reorientation to the Aberfan [working title] project, and an extraction of useable samples from last week’s sound manufacture. Each sample needs to be described in terms that suggest either what they allude to in the real world of acoustic phenomena (if representational) or the mood and ambience they evoke (if abstract). Some samples straddle both categories:

12.00 pm: I reviewed the catalogue of sounds produced to date, to ensure that their nomenclature was consistent with that of the latest batch. 3.00 pm: A review of the project’s structure, which is far from decided. I cannot force the issue; a solution will present itself at the right time. ‘In the meantime, John, pursue what can be known’, consoled the inner-tutor.

4.00 pm: An ambulation through the Municipal Cemetery.

March 11 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: A communion. (My focus until Easter will be on Lenten disciplines.) 7.45 am: Walked into the front garden through the garage; put out the recycling bags; the wind blew; the garage door slammed shut. I was now locked out of the house. (Sigh!)

8.00 am: A review of the month ahead and incoming mail (including the implications thereof). 8.30 am: Studiology. A review and preparation of samples that I’d forgotten about, and equipment sourcing. Things are coming along in small ways. Some ideas subdivide, like cells. I’m building more or less free-floating parts — parts that meet the mark — rather than working towards finished compositions. When I don’t know what to do next with one, I move on to another. Thus, I’ll complete the whole suite like a jigsaw puzzle, rather than linearly, track-by-track.

My childhood experience of the Aberfan disaster was mediated through images: moments remembered from TV broadcasts and newspaper photographs. Recollection, accordingly, is fragmentary. In my mind’s-eye, I can see an album of photographs.

1.30 pm: A shoppery at a supermarket, followed by a dental appointment. I was measured for a crown, which necessitated a 3D-scan of my mouth. The resultant image looked like a prosthetic from a horror film. Dentists have far more interesting kit than GPs. After all, who these days is impressed by a stethoscope and blood-pressure monitor?

3.30 pm: Studiology. I returned to the developing the composition about the mass funeral, removed the choral section, and worked on that independently. It took 3 hours to shape 20 seconds of sound … and still it wasn’t resolved.

March 12 (Wednesday). 8.30 am: A short ambulation to retrieve prescriptions and meet myself on the beach. (Looking out at the horizon and back to then.) ‘Do you want this antihistamine on repeat prescription after the hay-fever season is over?’, the assistant asked. ‘My nose knows no season’, I replied. 9.15 am: Studiology. ‘Now where was I?’: listening and adjusting, second-by-second. Listening to the sound of a choir heard as though ebbing and flowing on the wind. One Saturday afternoon in the mid-1980s, when I was living off City Road, Cardiff, the Rolling Stones were playing at what was then called the National Stadium, one and a half miles away. From the back garden, I could hear the strains of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ swell and fade as a south-easterly current waxed and waned.

11.30 pm: Coffee and conversation with my friend and colleague Dr Dafydd Roberts at the university campus. We discussed his latest project Gŵyl Ffynnon Garon (held at the end of February and beginning of March), funding, Wales-Japan initiatives, and how to reach the admittedly small audience there is for the type of sound work we make.

One element, above all others, that has won some attention for my own work is the theme of supernaturalism and the paranormal. It has served as an unintentional hook, one that arose naturally out of the subject matter and my own enthusiasms. Recently, I watched two documentaries, the first about the so-called ‘Welsh triangle’, which was centred on Broad Haven [Aberllydan], Pembrokeshire, in 1977, and the second about putative UFO sightings following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan, in 1986. At the risk of rolling my own eyes, there’s a potential for creative engagement with stories like these. Whatever their credence, a culture’s interpretation of such phenomena reveals a great deal about its beliefs, cosmology, and imagination.

2.00 pm: I returned to shaping the fragments of composition already underway.

I’m still thinking about Aberfan [working title] in terms of remembered still-images. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, colliery disasters were often memorialised in picture postcards. The Scottish photographer Walter Benton of Glasgow specialised in recording scenes of disaster. He produced a series of 25 photo-journalistic postcard-size photographs of the Senghennydd disaster in 1913 — showing scenes of rescue, vigil, the removal of the dead, and funerals. Newspapers at the time would have carried reprographic engravings made from drawings produced in situ, and half-tone photographic prints — far inferior in resolution to Benton’s postcards. Pathé News had begun releasing silent newsreel footage only three years before the disaster, in 1910. Once played at a local cinema, they would never again be seen by an audience. The postcard, in contrast, provided a permanent and scrutable account of events.

No postcard series was made to honour the Aberfan disaster. And yet, there they are in my mind’s-eye. Just thinking in these terms enables me to more clearly see a way forward.

March 12 (Thursday). 8.30 am: Studiology. Several albums in The Aural Bible series are subdivided into tracks prefixed with indicators that suggest pictorial formats: ‘scenes’ in ‘Image and Inscription’, Bible in Translation (2016); ‘plates’ in Penallta Colliery: Sound Pictures (2022); and ‘panels’ in Affirmation (2024). An album comprising ‘postcards’ introduces, for me at least, an unprecedented challenge. The postcard format is uniformly A6 (148 mm × 105 mm (approximately 5.8 in × 4.1 in)). Thus, logically and consistently, the suite’s compositions would all need to be the same length, and relatively short: exactly 3 mins, in this case.

I began reconfiguring the tracks under construction to the designated length. My intermediary objective is to bring four compositions to a substantial conclusion before beginning others and recommencing sound manufacture.

I returned to the film footage, taken by the BBC and independent companies, of the mass funeral at Aberfan. The woman whom I’d interviewed about her personal experiences, while visiting Aberfan at the time of the disaster, had remarked: ‘Words could never express’ the grief and sadness felt at that time. Sound and music fail, too, ultimately. The music accompanying British Movietone’s newsreel Aberfan. The Final Tribute (1966) recording of the event, is, to the contemporary ear, at odds with scenes depicted. There’s a version of the film with no sound — other than the whirr of the camera’s mechanism . Another newsreel made by British Pathé, in 1967, appears to comprise soundless dallies. Remaining silent before the horror and its aftermath is, perhaps, a more apposite response. At the close of the latter reel is footage related to the exhibition Hommage a Pablo Picasso Peintures, held at Galeries National Du Grand Palais, Paris (November 18, 1966 – February 12, 1967). It was initiated by the French novelist André Malraux to celebrate the artist’s 85th birthday. A strange juxtaposition.

1.30 pm: An ambulation and a shoppery. 2.30 pm: An exploration of mechanical ‘silence’, and the clicks, scratches, and ‘blumphs’ on the films’ otherwise mute soundtracks.

March 14 (Friday). Yesterday evening I read the French-Algerian philosopher Jaques Derrida‘s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, which he first presented at John Hopkins University, USA, on the day of the Aberfan disaster. One phrase in the text struck me forcibly: ‘a model of catastrophe’. Such was the National Coal Board’s policy of coal-tipping above Pantglas Junior School.

7.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Studiology. A review of the time-adjusted compositions. 10.30 am: The focus was upon the conditional ‘silence’ of the funeral, beginning and ending with the camera and film reels’ noises.

1.45 pm: My third attempt today to collect and cash-in a prescription from my GP surgery. 1st attempt (8.30 am, surgery): Sorry, we can’t locate the prescription. Come back later; 2nd attempt (12.00 pm, surgery): Sorry, we found it just after you left, on the doctor’s table. (12.30 pm, pharmacy): Sorry, the pharmacist is taking a one-hour lunch break. Come back later; and 3rd attempt (1.45 pm, pharmacy): Success! But the three power-walks uphill did me the world of good.

3.00 pm: I tentatively began working on a fifth composition, on the theme of water, and selecting two books for reading during the remainder of the month. The three commitments share some common threads.

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