Summa: diary (July 1-4, 2025)

The Age of Slight.

July 1 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: Proof of presence.

Over the weekend, I watched (for the umpteenth time) Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011). In one scene, during Jim Prideux’s interrogation, insistent sound is played through headphones to break his resistance. In Sidney J Furie’s The Ipcress File (1965), Harry Palmer is subjected to sensory assault (sound and image) in an attempt to brainwash him. In the former, the sound is conceived in terms of a musique concrètesque collage; in the latter, as repeated overlays of harsh electronica. I saw The Ipcress File on TV in the late 1960s, not long after Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (1967-8) TV series was first broadcast. (This, too, had a scene of sound-induced brainwashing.) The series’ soundscapes and effects included reversed music and slowed-down speech and breathing. (Just a year earlier, in 1966, the Beatles track ‘Rain’ included a reprise of John Lennon’s vocal track played backwards.)

On reflection, these examples shaped my enthusiasm for sound manipulation from an early age. The use of sound and music as instruments of torture has a long history. Who was responsible for composing the material? Sound leaves no scars or bruises, other than on the mind of the victim. The perfect weapon.

7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I pressed on with the two compositions that I’d addressed yesterday, in parallel. 12.00 pm: ‘Let go … for now, John’. 12.30 pm: In the background: younger son and his wife, having queued since 5.00 am for tickets to today’s play at Wimbledon, were watching a match; elder son was watching the same on TV over lunch; and a NHS chicken pie and chips takeaway from our local hospital was being consumed at home.

1.00 pm: A review of the morning’s work and four of the fifteen tracks comprising the album that have yet to get off the ground. Having dealt with abstract sound for the last month, I returned to one of the two hymns sung at the mass funeral: ‘Loving Shepherd of Thy Sheep’.

3.15 pm: An ambulation and reflection. I’ve so much personal history, that it’s difficult to discern the outlines even of the landscape’s major features any longer. I’m too often ploughing-up furrows that should remain buried.

July 2 (Tuesday).

To whom much has been given, much will be required (Luke 12.48).

7.15 am: A communion. There may be times when you’ll perceive no virtue in your work, and hold the lowest opinion of yourself as a maker of things. There may also be times when you entertain too high an opinion of your work and yourself. Cultivating a ‘sober estimation’ (to borrow from the Apostle Paul) requires discipline and rigour. We must be honest with ourselves about what we excel at and what we do only passably well. As my gardener informed me, even good branches need to be pruned away in order for the better ones to thrive.

9.00 am: Studiology. On with one of the four tracks that have yet to be composed. ‘Who Sinned?’ references the Tribunal to the Aberfan disaster, which was appointed on October 26, 1966. It sat for 76 days, during which 136 witnesses were interviewed, 300 exhibits examined, and 2,500,000 words heard.

The subject matter is, thus, characterised by a formidable intensity and complexity. The Tribunal also embodies an account of the disaster, and what lead to it, that is both detailed and summative. Many different voices, examples, perspectives, opinions, and analyses. This was my starting point. The title ‘Who Sinned?’ is taken from a dialogue between Christ and his disciples regarding the reason why a man was born blind. Was it his own or his parents’ sin that this caused this disability?, the disciples puzzled. It was neither, he replied (John 9.2-3). Similarly, in the narrative of the tower of Siloam, which fell on and killed 18 people, the crowd asked him: ‘Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?’ (Luke 13.4-5). Again, his answer was no. In both narratives, people wanted names to blame, and to establish a basis for causality. This was the essence of the Tribunal’s remit.

The composition about the transportation and tipping of coal waste is titled ‘A “Model of Catastrophe”‘. It’s a quote taken from Jacques Derrida’s lecture ‘La Structure, le Signe et le Jeu dans le Discours des Sciences Humaines‘ [‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’], which was first presented at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore on October 21, 1966 — the day of the Aberfan disaster. The phrase aptly describes the National Coal Board’s failure to act on the known risks of continuing to tip coal waste above Panglas Junior School. This was a disaster waiting to happen, the Tribunal concluded.

The album (formerly known as Aberfan [working title]) is now called Darkness Covered the Whole Land: 15 sound postcards. The first part of the title is taken from the description of a natural phenomenon that occurred at the time of Christ’s crucifixion (John 15.33). It also summons the image of the coal slurry that engulfed the school, and the collective grief felt in not only the land of Wales but also the wider world.

‘Sound postcards’ refers both to the tradition of documenting and memorialising coal mining disasters in the early twentieth century (see: Summa: diary (March 10-14, 2025)), and the evolution (begun in 1903) of the traditional picture postcard, whereby sound was inscribed on its surface in the manner of vinyl recordings. The content was either a short piece of music relevant to the scenes depicted or a message from the sender. A ‘wish you were here’ that the recipient could hear. My ‘postcards’, on the album, are both commemorative and sonic, but imageless.

July 3 (Thursday). 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Writing. 9.30 am: Studiology. A review of ‘Who Sinned?’ 10.00 am: There is one composition that I’ve fought shy of confronting. It focusses on the dreadful avalanche of coal slurry, and the sound thereof. No more, no less. The morning and afternoon was set aside for manufacturing sound material. My starting point were details extracted from stills of film footage documenting the disaster. These were subsequently converted into RAW files and, thereby, made readable within a sound software environment. There, they were saved using different codices, which produced a variety of results from low-tone grumbly groans to scratchy screeches.

Curiously, when some of the sound file were were converted back into image files, they reconstituted as ‘ghosts’ of themselves. (See, for example, the ‘featured image’ for this post.) The original was, as it were, folded in upon itself; its composition, abbreviated; what was outside, turned inside; and formerly solid areas became translucent. Moreover, the image was now constructed of alternating light and dark horizontal lines reminiscent of the picture received on a 405-line television in the mid 1960s. A gift!

After lunch, I let rip and generated a range of utterly dispiriting but eminently appropriate deep drones using square-wave oscillators and modulators.

July 4 (Friday).

‘Blessed are the feet of those who bring good news.’

7.30 am: A communion. 8.00 am: An ambulation: meeting friends; rejoicing with those who rejoice; weeping with those who weep. 9.00 am: Writing. 9.30 am: Studiology. As the sun broke through the clouds and the clatter of the distant departing train carried across the town and seeped through the studio window, I moved into darkness.

If any composition is going to tempt me into literalism, it’s ‘A “Model of Catastrophe”‘. ‘You’re not producing a sound effect remember, John!’, cajoled the inner-tutor. Thus, I began with a mood-setter: a sound, like that of a deep and reverberant horn, which took me back to another, like that of the shofar — evoked in my suite ‘Image and Inscription. Scene 7: The Decalogue (Ex. 20.1–20)’ — which, in turn, took me back to the foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, which I heard while close to Fort Point — where Kim Novak’s character jumped into the Strait in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) — in 2013.

1.45 pm: A good morning’s work. I’ve now achieved a beginning. And I know the end, thereof. The transitioning from one to the other … that’s the tricky bit. The avalanche, witnesses testified, sounded variously like a low-flying jet aircraft, thunder, an earthquake, and (most curiously) a washing-machine. The sound is first heard in the composition ‘Let Me Tell You About My Dream Last Night (October 20, 1966)’. This immediately precedes ‘A “Model of Catastrophe”‘ in the track order. The former is imaginary — heard in the context of a premonition, the latter in the context of reality (as it were). Thus, the two representations need to be simultaneously alike and dissimilar. 5.00 pm: Enuf!

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; Studium; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice