Summa: diary (July 7-10, 2025)
Being in command of myself. That’s the thing.
July 7 (Monday). 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings. 5.45 am: Awake. 6.30 am: A communion. 7.15 am: Writing.
8.00 am: Studiology. On Saturday, I manufactured further altered images derived from RAW format conversions of JPG screenshots, taken from newsreel footage of the Aberfan disaster. The ‘glitch’ phenomenon, which I’d haplessly alighted upon last week, is the fortuitous outcome of a software limitation.
The Photoshop Raw file format does not fully encode the image mode and size, among other things. The image may not be fully restored when you re-open the file.
You’re telling me! Moreover, the format does ‘not … fully’ restore the original consistently either. Often, it’s reconstituted as a slurred (albeit engaging) version, reminiscent of an ‘off-channel’ cathode-ray tube TV image. I returned to the RAW files, and persevered further in the hope of edging the abstract ‘miscodings’ towards figuration. A good deal of success.
9.30 am: Back to sound, and a review and tweaking of last week’s endeavours on the compositions. 11.00 am: Further sound manufacture on the guitar rig. Better and more terrifying solutions to the avalanche track ensued. 12.00 pm: An extraction, editing, and equalisation of useable samples.1.45 pm: An afternoon of judiciously inserting the new material into the current two compositions. (I should’ve been a surgeon.)
How would Jimi Hendrix — who’d visited Aberfan in 1967 — have interpreted the sound of the avalanche?, I wondered. (See: Summa: diary (April 5-10, 2025).) I listened again to his astonishing rendering of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, two years later.
Remembering London, today. Last thing at night before bedtime, I’m rewatching BBC TV’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). It’s set in London. In one scene, a character passes a street sign that reads ‘Sussex Gardens’. Its close to Paddington Station, where the trains from South Wales arrive. My parents booked a family room at the same B&B on Sussex Gardens every time we visited the Capitol. That was in the mid to late 1960s. (Less than half a decade later, the city would endure the beginning of the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign.) The accommodation was, if memory serves me, called The Barrymore. (Hotels stressed the definite article, in those days.) Today, the only business with a kindred name is the Barry House Hotel. But it’s located at the right spot, close to the junction of Sussex Gardens and London Street. My recollections of those times, like the photographs Mam and Dad took, are entirely in black and white.
July 8 (Tuesday). 7.15 am: A communion. 8.00 am: Writing and correspondence with friends. I’m a little jaded; my days have become too routine; my activities, too confined; my social circle and engagements, too narrow and intermittent. Next week’s holiday break will come just at the right time. A journey to places unknown (to me); the sight of a sea I’ve never before seen; ambulations along different paths. The break will be (for me) an opportunity to step back from my activities, review what has gone before, and look toward the far horizon. A time to cast off, and a time to gather (as Kohelet [קֹהֶלֶת] had learned through experience). A time to repent, and a time to resolve. A time to unpick, and a time to mend.
9.00 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s work on the current compositions. I pursued the avalanche piece further. Sounds, like unto Azrael trumpeting. A portent of what was to come. Heard not on earth, but in Heaven only. Included in the composition is a ticking clock, like the one at the school that stopped precisely when the avalanche struck. Here, it’s also a ticking time bomb and death’s metronome.
2.00 pm: Back to the guitar rig. For the purpose of this recording, part of the array needed to be placed on the floor and operated in the conventional manner — using my foot. I wanted to generate a lot of material, with a view to scouring the drivel for that which glistened in the sunlight, while treading a thin line between noise and experimental music-orientated genres.
It’s said that, on average, only ten people read a published academic paper. Compare that with the hundreds and thousands who idly redden the little heart and repost the latest ill-conceived, misinformed, and ephemeral X-post by some flash-in-the-pan cultural icon about the latest cause célèbre that’ll be forgotten by lunchtime. It really doesn’t bear thinking about.
A Facebook response to Julie Brominick’s recent blog ‘The Salt Path Spectre’, about the vicissitudes of publishing books on travel, and the pressure on authors to conform to tried and tested templates (or else):
I’ve just finished watching a documentary about the life and work of Jane Austin. She endured disappointment after disappointment at the hands of publishers (booksellers) who preferred to play safe and follow the dictates of an established market for the obvious and predictable. ‘More of the same, please’. Their need to turn a profit, then, was as acute as it is today.
Austin stuck to her guns, followed her heart, and pushed the boundaries of her genre like no one else had done before. A pioneer, many times over. Had she taken publishers’ advice, we’d not be reading and talking about her still. It took just one publisher to see the quality and ingenuity of her writing, and take a risk.
July 9 (Wednesday). 9.00 am: Studiology. I reviewed the guitar pieces that were manufactured yesterday. Inspection and dissection. I’m listening for three things: first, the sound’s fitness for purpose, in the context of the composition at hand; secondly, material that may be better suited to other compositions in the suite; and finally, residues that possess sufficient merit to enter the Studium archive.
11.00 am: A visit from my friend, the artist Susan Forster. Much chin-waggery about the sorry world at large, travel, and the influence of literature on our childhood imagination. I read very little fiction as a child, and far less as an adult. My appetite was for history, then, and later for autobiography, biography, theory, and poetry too. My maternal grandfather and his son had a glass-fronted bookcase that included the complete works of Charles Dickens, leather-bound copies of the Reader’s Digest, and bound volumes of mining and technical engineering and popular science magazines. (A typically socialist library.) The latter were illustrated with photogravure plates of machines, whole and exquisitely-detailed part, and photographs of objects that looked like the props from 1950s sci-fi B-movies. These works had a significant impact on my visual imagination — one which would come into play when I began art school.
July 10 (Thursday). In my dream, I visited my Dad’s house in Abertillery. (He was a widower then.) There, he’d commenced an ambitious decorative scheme, painting large, pale yellow, delicately impastoed, chrysanthemums on the dining-room wall, in the manner of Henri Fantin-Latour cross-pollinated with Claude Monet. (Dad was neither an artist nor an interior designer.) The flower variously symbolises longevity, fidelity, joy, optimism, grief, and mourning. It’s also referred to as a ‘mum’. In the context of night world, perhaps it represented my absent mother.
7.15 am: Lounge curtains drawn open, expectantly: ‘Glorious morning!’ 7.30 am: A communion. 8.00 am: Writing. 9.00 am Studiology. After a little uploading, I made adjustments to the beginning of the avalanche composition while preparing the extracted electric guitar samples for further processing on the new ‘small-rig’. This will be my final day of composition before the holidays. I want to leave the project not with everything battened down but, rather, with a small opening through which I can re-enter effortlessly on my return. Starting something from scratch after taking time out is unnecessarily difficult.
12.00 pm: I continued to make a list of ‘Sound-Things To Do’ by the close of tomorrow. 1.45 pm: While modifying some of the guitar samples, sounds were heard that I recalled from childhood. They resembled the off-station signals received on a shortwave transistor radio (exactly like the one below), which I hid under my bed clothes, late at night, when I should’ve been sleeping. The sounds were variously ship-to-ship communications, reflections off the ionosphere, and barely audible, distorted, and distant broadcasts. Collectively, they evoked (both sonically and visually) an imaginary mid-Atlantic seascape of darkness, surging waves, glowering clouds, punishing rain, billowing winds, and the deep drone of ships’ engines. It became a ‘place’ of sanctuary, to which I had recourse when the real world pressed too hard. The experience was made tangible in my first sound composition ‘Ion on Iron’ (1977), composed when I was 17 years of age.
I WILL OBSERVE A DIARY SABBATICAL UNTIL AUGUST 1, 2025.
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