Summa: diary (May 1-9, 2025)
Deliver me from idealism, and help me to live and work with what I have.
Never forget the rapture of those crazy days.
May 1 (Thursday). May Day. 6.30 am: Proof of presence.
8.00 am: Writing and various administrations. 9.30 am: Since my return from York on Monday, the Six Bells [working title] project has developed into a three-part account of the colliery disaster. Part 1 references the day of explosion, at 10.45 pm on June 28, 1960; part two deals with John ‘Chopper’ Davies’s supernatural experience of the event, at 10.45 pm on the 25 th anniversary, on June 28, 1985, while drawing; and part three honours this year’s commemoration, on the 65th anniversary of the disaster. I moved from one to another throughout the morning and early afternoon. I suspect that all three will be resolved together.
7.30 am: Studyology: I returned to the project description, to align it with the compositional developments that had taken place over the past few days. By this stage in the project, the logic of each piece, and of the album as a whole, is clear and set. It remains for me to ensure that all the implications are acted upon. The project can no longer become other than it is, presently. Pareto optimal is on the horizon.
May 2 (Friday). 6.00 am: Awake, along with the wood pigeons. Sunlight presses-in through the blind at the side of my desk. 6.45 am: Studyology. I took up the project descriptor for the final time (notionally). ‘Don’t over-explain, John!’, the inner-tutor admonished. ‘Don’t deny the mysterium’. 8.20 am: A car with an open window, playing music loudly, passed in the street below my study. How far will it have to travel before I can no longer hear it?
9.00 am: Studiology. I returned to ‘Minor (June 28, 1985)’, and endeavoured to insert a ‘glitch’ section, to evoke that period when Davies’s arm went numb, and something else took control of the drawing. Even the most abstract of my compositions possess a ‘narrative’, or a ‘programmatic’ aspect, that determines its significance, moment-by-moment. Back to ‘Minor (June 28, 1960)’.
8.00 pm: The wood pigeons were cooing, once again, as the evening light declined.
May 3 (Saturday). 6.00 am: Awake. 6.30 am: This day repeated yesterday, to begin.
7.30 am: The neighbourhood birds sang their peane of praise skyward. An ambulation and shoppery. The town was unusually quiet for a bank holiday. Quieter than most Saturdays, even.
9.00 am: I returned home, laden with milk and greens. ‘Minor (June 28, 1960)’ was modified, and reviewed one last time before being laid aside for a week. This would enable me to re-engage with the project with fresh ears, while furthering other ambitions in the meantime. 9.45 am: Desktop clear-up.
10.30 am: Resourcing: paints, substrates, boards, and brushes. For sometime images have presented themselves to me in connection the Aberfan [working title] project. Superficially and analogically, they resemble the soundscapes I’m constructing. In order to exorcise these images, paintings will need to be made. Whether or not they ever see the public-light of day is another matter. I don’t wish to hold a hostage to fortune. But this I do know: the pictures will be 4:3 format, small scale, and painted in blue-tinted monochrome. Thinking about the colour of a cathode ray TV, in the 1960s: I’m searching for the colour that I remember — over 50 years later — not the colour I saw, back then. It had some resemblance to that of a common or garden pigeon.
Without love … I am nothing.
May 5 (Monday). Bank Holiday. 6.45 am: Awake. Yesterday evening, I watched James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown (2024). A conventional narration in many ways, but one that was focused. It deals with the controversy surrounding Dylan’s introduction of electric instrumentation into the traditionally acoustic genre of folk music. His contemporary Miles Davis would experience the same censure when he deployed an electric piano on Miles in the Sky (1968). The album also marked the beginning of his jazz fusion period. Folk and Jazz purists have never forgiven these artists. Both were not only pioneers but also committed to growth and change. They had no truck with so-called ‘heritage’ music, and were willing to sacrifice a sizable proportion of their following in pursuit of integrity and innovation.
7.15 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I took up where I left off the Aberfan [working title] project. The priority this week is generating further musical material, extracted from 78-rpm recordings of the hymns played at the mass funeral for many of the school children and others killed in the tragedy. Today, I’d be in second gear and granting myself permission to engage with other, lighter things in between bouts of analogue-digital conversion.
Just how close to either despair or oblivion have our internal follies and external conflicts bought us?
May 6 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: Writing, reviewing, and correspondence. 9.00 am: Studiology. ‘What happens when I combine this with that?’ Nothing ventured, nothing gained. By lunchtime I had a melodic line, of sorts, that fused independent brass band and a choral settings of the two hymns, played at 1/8th speed in reverse, superimposed, edited, reordered, and reduced to 3-minutes length.
‘It doth not yet appear what [it] shall be‘, to adapt the Apostle John’s adage. Some compositions begin as a sound, and only afterwards find their subject within the general scheme of things. The clay must now be molded. This process will take far longer than anticipated, I’ll wager.
May 7 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. ‘Listen, slowly’, the inner-tutor entreated. Abrupt transitions and gentle elisions. Once the melodic sequence is established, the whole will be worked over to re-equalise and adjust the relative volume within and between the constituent samples. The beauty of discontunuity.
11.00 am: Coffee at the Arts Centre, followed by a view of Anthony Shapland’s Liar Liar. In essence, and this is not to demean the achievement in any sense, he has applied the craft of Foley work to fine art.
Liar Liar uses hidden techniques of filmmaking – props, filters, light and sound. On one level the exhibition is about illusion and disguise; on another it draws on Shapland’s life-experience of rural queerness, growing up performing straight. It gave him the sense that if he was passing and blending-in then the landscape around him was just as malleable and fluid, constantly evolving, always temporary – a story.
Aberystwyth Arts Centre website (accessed May 7, 2025).
12.30 pm: Every pass over the melodic line results in significant changes. For the remainder of the day, I disassembled and reassembled elements of whole: ‘healing’ the broken; smoothing the rough places; and making their path straight.
May 8 (Thursday). 80th Anniversary of VE Day. 7.00 am: Writing. 8.45 am: Studiology. I proceeded in the same vein as yesterday. Now, the melodic line had an emotional tenor, which will serve (as is often the case) to filter out those elements that do not accord with the dominant sentiment. In so doing, the line is transformed into a composition with a distinct character. Its complex mood of sadness, hopelessness, and fear evokes, to my mind, the period when the exumated bodies of the children were taken to Capel Aberfan and Bethania Chapel to be laid, washed, and identified by family members.
My father was transfered to the Army Reserve three years after VE DAY (May 8, 1945), in 1948. He was 18 years of age, and served in the Army Catering Corps. Conscription, or compulsory military service, had begun in the UK in May 1939, when he was too young to be called up. While trained for combat, the only ‘weapon’ Dad weilded in action was a vegetable peeler. He was demobilised a year later.
Robert Prevost as been elected Pope Leo XIV.
May 9 (Friday). 6.30 am: A review and revision of a document about academic search categories for an acquaintance. 8.00 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Off to the dentists to check-up on the status of my recently installed crown and for a minor filling that had been long slated for attention.
10.00 am: Studiology. Strip back, rearrange, restate. Gradually, an order, progression, and pace are revealed. ‘Listen with your heart, John!’, the inner-tutor reminded me. ‘To what does it beckon?’ Gradually, I’m remembering passages when away from the composition. In my books, that’s a good sign. 3.30 pm: The layout of the composition was completed. I laid it aside until Monday.
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