Summa: diary (June 21-26, 2025)
June 21 (Saturday). Summer Solstice.
A girl without a cause / A name for what you lose / When it was never yours (Scritti Politi, ‘The Word Girl’ (1984)).
7.30 am: An ambulation. Stop. Facing seaward, I breathed in. The cool breeze caressed my skin. Still. Silent (but for the gulls). Waiting. Beckoning.
9.15 am: Correspondence with my able web-technician, and a review of Diary (September 15, 2018-June 30, 2021). This covered the period of: COVID, and the challenges it presented for teaching and research; walking and discovering the natural world afresh during lockdowns; great loss, as several good friends left this world prematurely under tragic circumstances; friendships that burned brightly, but quickly turned to ash; poetry; great strides forward in sound practice; my ‘golden age’ as a teacher, and preparations made to walk away from it, before the inevitable decline.
Words, words, words. I discerned patterns of unfulfilled hopes, folly, and repeated errors, along with failures of courage, tiresome repetition, and evidence of misdirection. There were times of stuckness, and of an inability to let go sooner. Too much working out, and too few solutions. Fruitless self-serving analysis. My advice to myself often went unheeded. There were self-betrayals and desperate remedies. (Same old same old.) Much had been was omitted, for discretion’s sake. (Enigmatic confessions substituting.) There were cursed days, and encounters that I wish had never taken place. But there was, too, a cumulative wisdom that could be perceived only with hindsight, and through introspective-retrospection.
Reflections on the Summer Equinox of June 21, 2019, West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury, England.
June 23 (Monday). 7.00 am: An awakening and a communion. Sunny, but far cooler. 8.15 am: Writing, and correspondence with a friend in need. 9.00 am: Studiology.
I took up the composition that I’d laid down on Friday. (In the distance, on the wind, I heard the train arrive and depart for Birmingham International at 9.28 am.)
In the final chapter of David Novak’s Japanoise, he discusses the cassette culture of the Noise genre in the 1980s. In the period from 1972 to 1975, I made cassette recordings on behalf on my band mates (copied from reel-to-reel masters) of the music we’d laid down. One cassette of each album would have a cover, collaged from photographs of the players, painted with poster paint, and titled with Letraset. It had an insert with the album’s details typed on thin paper, neatly folded. They were of a very limited edition. Singular. (None are extant.) Photocopying machines weren’t readily available, and printed in poor quality black and white only. Copies were expensive too. Unbeknown to me (How could I’ve known, back then, in an age before conspicuous connectivity?), other front-room parlour bands and solo musicians were doing the same. Today, there’s a resurgence of the practice: cassette releases in an edition of one; hand designed; and idiosyncratically wrapped. The sound recording is accorded the status of a unique visual artwork.
12.30 pm: Back to sound generation. In the background: the subject of Modern Painters, the magazine launched by the art critic Peter Fuller in 1987, came up in conversation. I’d subscribed to it until the mid 1990s, when the increasingly traditionalist, conservative, right-wing anglocentrism of the editorial policy (steered by Fuller and Roger Scruton) became unbearably nauseous. I gave away all my issues, and have never read the rag since. The journals and magazines that made a lasting impact on my outlook on art and culture, during the formative period of my education were: Afterimage, Artforum, Art History, Art International, LensCulture, Llafur, and Studio International.
1.45 pm: Review and, then, forward. Pushing at my own boundaries. 4.00 pm: An ambulation, via my GP surgery, to the university campus at the top of the hill. I took in Unsettled Lives: War and Displacement in Wales at the Arts Centre. Less an art exhibition, and more a museum exhibit — but no less informative for that. For example, I didn’t know that 4,000 children from the Basque Country were evacuated to Wales following the Nazi bombing of Guernica in 1937 (memorialised by Picasso’s painting of that title). 7.30 pm: My final evening of website problem-tracking.
June 24 (Tuesday). 7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. A frustrating start to the working day: my Adobe account had signed me out, and my multi-effects stompbox failed to output to the amp. 10.00 am: Fixed! Begin again, Michael Finnegan. I returned to yesterday’s composition, and extracted appropriate (and other) samples derived — at that afternoon’s session on the rig –from a roll call of the names of the first six children killed at the colliery. Legible voices, however much they’ve been modulated, are too ‘figurative’ for my purposes. The Aberfan [working title] suite is semi-abstract; it aims, rather, to summon places, events, actions, and their associated moods.
There’s a Rosa ‘Mortimer Sackler’ bush in the garden that has climbed in and around the remains of a dead tree, which a surgeon ‘murdered’ in a frenzy of excess rigour. On first sight, the two plants look as one — as though the tree has miraculously returned to resplendent life. The sight, at this time of year, fills me with hope. More recently, this species of rose has been renamed Rosa ‘Mary Delany’ (after the English botanical artist) to remove its association with the Sackler family, who own Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company which produces OxyContin, the highly-addictive opioid which ruined many lives.
11.30 am: Rationalisation. Construction. Integration. Adding is the call of the day. 2.45 pm: Enough, for now. I returned to the composition that deals with the conveyance and tipping of coal waste. In parallel, I began exploring the guitar rig’s handboards and pedalboards, paying attention to effectors that don’t exert a significant effect within this network.
June 25 (Wednesday).
‘Love and then do what you will’ (Augustine).
7.30 am: A communion. 8.30 am: A readying for the day. 9.00 am: Ambulation 1: To town, to deliver a parcel, and to receive a haircut. A transcendent morning. Although I’m persuaded it is, more, the condition of the heart that gives rise to such an experience. 10.00 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s work on the compositions and guitar rig.
11.00 am: Ambulation 2: To the village of Llanbadarn Fawr, for a chin-wag and tea with my friend, the artist, Dr Anna Wildig. My friends, to a woman and man, engage in conversation that assiduously steers clear of small talk and trivialities. We chart the ocean, deep and wide. I return from our voyages, vitalised and enriched. I’ve also ‘acquaintances’ who are more than happy to talk about their lives in response to my questions, but rarely ask me anything about mine in return. They assume that their opinions are also mine, and that if they’re OK, then, I’m OK. Friends and acquaintances whom we have in common are criticised to my face. I can only assume that I’m criticised to their faces too. A few of these acquaintances remind me of my shortcomings, but never confess their own. We depart one another’s company, they feeling vindicated and I thinking: ‘you’re unlikely to graduate to friendship with me’.
2.00 pm: Back in the studio for the afternoon, I modified and mapped the guitar rig, and prepared to record sounds tomorrow.
June 26 (Thursday).
Goodbye to you / Charlotte Pringle’s due / I’ve had enough for one day’ (Pink Floyd, ‘Summer of ’68’, Atom Heart Mother (1970)).
7.00 am: A communion. 7.45 am: Writing and an update of family and friends’ profiles. 8.30 am: Studiology. A review and modification of yesterday’s work on the first six children and tipping compositions, with a view to discerning what sound-types needed for the latter. Too low signal strength at line-level input, alas. This was possibly caused the increased resistance produced by the long cables which stretch from the guitar rig at one end of the studio and the analogue/digital interface at the other. This week’s work in the studio has been characterised by serial and unanticipated problems that I’ve not encountered before. 10.00 am: Trial, testing, and developing a workaround. 11.30 am: The solution was to set-up a recording sub-station close to the rig, while simultaneously feeding the rig’s output into a guitar amplifier, so that my efforts could be monitored.
12.00 pm: Only now did I begin laying down sound. But the morning of problem solving was not wasted. The process of diagnosis and remedial action adds to my accrued understanding of the equipment and its pitfalls. 12.15 pm: A review of the Minors for Miners album, which will be released on Saturday to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Six Bells Colliery Disaster.
1.30 pm: An ambulation and shoppery, strictly within the high street boundaries, for some weekend provisions. My younger son, his wife, and her family would be gracing the town tomorrow. 3.00 pm: A good harvest of serviceable grinds, squeaks, clunks, and crashes from my engagement with the guitar rig. The recordings would require editing, and further modulation and adjustment when inserted into the composition for which they were intended.
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