Summa: diary (August 1-8, 2025)

Some things remain unrealisable for reasons that you may not be able to understand right now.

August 1 (Friday). 6.00 am: Proof of presence.

6.15 am: The launch of the blog-set about my recent adventures in East Anglia. 6.45 am: A communion. 7.30 am: The morning’s first cuppa — to ease the various administrations that required my attention, following the period of absence. 9.00 am: I walked into town for a mop-mow at my usual hairdressers.

The clouds that hung above the sea’s horizon clustered and morphed. In time, they’d dissolve into an undifferentiated grey mass. Since my time in Suffolk and Norfolk, I’ve become keenly aware the sky’s ephemeral topography. There, cloudscapes were expansive, spatial, and lateral in emphasis; here, they’re boxed-in and claustrophobic.

10.15 pm: Back at home, I sifted through, labeled, and filed photographs and sound recordings made while on holiday. 12.00 pm: Studiology. I searched for that ‘small opening through which I can re-enter [sound composition] effortlessly on my return’. My resolve is to complete a substantial draft of all 15 sound postcards comprising the Darkness Covered the Whole Land suite before recommencing painting. Presently I’m three sandwiches short of a picnic, as we say.

The unpacking almost complete, the new fridge magnets installed, and children’s footballs — that had landed on the lawn during my time away — thrown back over the fence into a neighbour’s garden (with the panache of the Lionesses’ goalkeeper). 1.00 pm: Porridge, with a knob of Christmas Jam, for lunch in August. And, yes (‘M’), I do realise that it’s not rice pudding. The meal was eaten from a Japanese, lacquered rice bowl, with a European-style desert spoon (‘borrowed’ by a family member from a southeast airline, many decades ago, in the days when you ate in the sky using metal cutlery). This was followed by two Chinese vegetarian pancake rolls served with a chili sauce — invented in 1908 by a man from India who was living in Malaysia, but which is now manufactured in the UK — on a Staffordshire ware-type plate. This is the postmodern condition.

1.45 pm: I reacquainted myself with the compositions I’d begun several weeks ago. For better and for worse, they were heard with fresh ears. There’ll always be wheat and chaff, and diamonds amid the coal dust.

August 2 (Saturday). 7.30 am: An extended ambulation (and speed-walk) and shoppery. ‘There’s a storm comin’ in’ (as the gas station attendant warned Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 (1984)).

9.30 pm: Home. Reading and writing. I eased myself into the morning, catching-up with BBC News online articles, including one about new types of dating app. (Not that I need one.) In my youth, the ‘dating agency’ served this function. It was often a seedy, backstreet ‘shop’ (one step up from a pornographic bookseller) for the sad and lonely. There, an advisor (often a woman, for propriety sake) would present the client with a ring-binder of profiles from which to choose a potential match (so I’ve been told). My only cognate experience was at the Funeral Directors, after my parents died, where I made my purchase from a catalogue of coffin models (each named after a different town or city, curiously), along with a choice of accessories, moulds, and other furnishings (such as combustible handles, for cremations). The experience was rather like ordering: ‘A Big Mac with extra mayo, large fries, onion rings, and a Diet Coke, please’, while grieving.

11.00 am: Studiology. I relistened to the composition dealing with the avalanche of coal that had descended on Pantglas Junior School. 11.15 am: Into the garden to address a paper-tissue-left-in-the-pocket-of-a-pair-of-trousers-that-went-through-the-wash sort of catastrophe of my own making. For three-quarters of an hour I lifted-off, with sticky tape, white flecks from my jeans and the lawn.

12.00 pm: I took-up one of the sound improvisations made before the holiday, to see whether it would fly. This would be a workout in the gymnasium of sonic composition. It’ll be deposited on the Studium site, when finished. As the work proceeded, my mind was drawn back to the radio transmissions and surveillance, high-voltage electricity, and the terrifying experiments undertaken, at Orford Ness, where I’d explored on July 20.

August 4 (Monday). 7.00 am: A communion. Storm Floris had arrived in the UK. 100% chance of rain, with gusty winds of up to 42 mph from the south-west, at 10.00 am. Aberystwyth would experience only mild effects, at her periphery.

8.30 am: A review of the week ahead. 9.00 am: Studiology. I uploaded Orford Ness 20 07 25 to the Studium website. Having closed my X [formerly Twitter] account prematurely, I set up a new @Threads profile to (along with my current BlueSky presence) replace it. What drove me from X was not so much Musk’s ownership and interference, along with the platform’s pronounced right-ring bias, but, rather, the excess of left-wing and centrist invective against Trump (who deserved all that he gets, in my opinion). The platform had become too divisive, repetitive, and wearing. I’ll miss those often uplifting, searching, and funny conversations with some of my followers, though.

Back to the avalanche composition. The descent of the coal slurry would’ve been sudden, fast, and furious. I don’t want to prolong the agony, as it were, in my representation. For much of the day, I focused on building just 15 seconds of sound, which I knew still wouldn’t be completely resolved by the close. Some have asked whether I find dealing with tragedies such as the Aberfan and Six Bells Colliery disasters either distressing or depressing. ‘No’, is the short answer. Because I’m not seeking to express my feelings in relation to the subject. Rather, the objective is to give appropriate form to ideas arising from the subject. This can achieved in an attitude of emotional detachment.

6.00 pm: ‘Turned out nice again’, George Formby sang. Shadows of Ethelbert White (again).

August 5 (Tuesday). 6.00 am: Increasingly I’m coming across picture-captions on my social-media feeds, to the effect: ‘Be kind. No hurtful comments please’. This may be a sensitivity warning, but it can also suggest a means of manipulation: ‘Be nice. Don’t criticize.’ In other words: a passive-aggressive strategy for suppressing opinion.

7.00 am: A day away from composition in order to read, and to think more broadly about the present times and the shape of things to come, both personally and globally. These two realms cannot be considered apart from one another. My aim was to discern: what I need to do, as distinct from what I desire to do; what’s imperative, rather than merely important; those things that are fixed, and those which are fluid; what must be borne valiantly, and what can be healed; and what must be held fast, and what must be let go.

3.30 pm: Admin, correspondence, and planning for a trip to South Wales (the land of my mothers and fathers) in early September. This will be an opportunity to visit Aberfan for the first time too.

August 6 (Wednesday). The 80th anniversary of Hiroshima’s devastation by the first atomic bomb to be used as a weapon of war.

I visited Hiroshima in early April 2024. When I emerged from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and into the bright sunlight, after spending much time under low light in the exhibition rooms, my eyes burned and head ached severely. (I was suffering the onset of a rare reaction to a nasal steroid that was adversely effecting my optic nerves. For the remainder of my holiday, I saw Japan as through a mist.) Crassly I reflected, that if there was any place on Earth where one ought to experience — an immeasurably inferior degree of — physical discomfort, then, it was here. May we continue to heed the warning that this day represents.

Walking past the Genbaku [Atomic] Dome on a warm Spring day, some 160m from the epicentre of the explosion, it was impossible to envisage the catastrophic moment that had taken place nearly 80 years earlier. I looked to the sky and to where the entire world changed 600m above my head, when a great evil was released into the world. (A second Fall from innocence.)

Notes on Japan II (March 29-April 9, 2024).

6.00 am: Awake. 6.30 am: A communion. 7.15 am: Writing. 8.15 am: Studiology. I returned to the composition, and tightened up the section dealing with the fall of coal slurry and its immediate aftermath. In my mind’s-ear, the clock that stopped when the avalanche hit was now ringing. This was the sound of not only its alarm but also the ambulance and fire engine bells at the scene of the disaster, and also a wake-up for the dead, at the Resurrection.

10.00 am: Jet fighters were performing low-altitude flypasts in the area. I always have a digital sound recorder at my elbow. The sound of one pass was captured. Several witnesses described the avalanche as being like the noise of a jet-plane’s engine. Another, that it sounded like a washing machine. (In the 1960s, my parents’ Twin-Tub’ was, I recall, very loud, and shook visibly when on the spin-cycle.) These similes needed to be incorporated as sonic realities in the avalanche mix.

2.00 pm: I set the composition aside, and picked up one that I’d not yet begun. All I know for certain, is that it will include the names of the 144 victims.

August 7 (Thursday). 7.00 am: Studiology: A review of the week’s work. 9.00 am: I extracted from a list of the 144 fatalities of the Aberfan disaster (both children and adults) the 24 unique letters of the alphabet that comprised their names. To each letter something — a sound (the identity of which is still unknown to me) — will be assigned and uploaded to a sample pad. There, the victims’ names will be spelled-out (played). 24 is an integer of 144. It goes into the whole 6 times. Whether this has a fortuitous utility is also an unknown, presently.

11.00 am: A coffee and catch-up at my pad with Dr Anna Wildig. On the table of talk today: ghosts, cat-minding, conference presentations, drawing, travel, new opportunities, and friendship. 1.45 pm: Searching for that ‘something’.

Julie Brominicks kindly shared to my Facebook feed, news about a sound-art commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki held at the National Eisteddfod in Wrecsam, yesterday. ‘Interesting parallels with John Harvey’s sound art commemorating Aberfan. To my mind, anyway!, she remarked. (‘Spot-on, Brom!’) However (and this occurred to me only on reading her post), I strongly suspect that these atrocities had already influenced my Minor Miners (1925) suite of compositions, on the following wise. On leaving the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum last year, I heard the Peace Bell being rung intermittently at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, in the distance. The bell possessed a solemn, deep, and doleful sound. Somewhere below the level of conscious intent, it’s toll still resonated with my soul, and had influenced the sonority and pace of the bell ringing heard on the tracks.

August 8 (Friday). 6.30 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. I examined a recording of the hymn ‘Jesu’ Lover of My Soul’ played on piano, in search of the ‘something’. A beginning.

11.00 am: Coffee and conversation au plein air in the grounds of Aberystwyth Arts Centre with my friend, the artist, Saoirse Morgan. A seagull on the grass foraged for blackberries in the bushes. ‘Domino’s Pizza not good enough for you anymore, then!’, I barked. We talked about our travels, those who were once significant in our lives, the vagaries and conservative tastes the art-buying public, and the advantages of living somewhere other than Aberystwyth that’s better connected to the wider world.

12.00 pm: Back on the trail for the remainder of the afternoon: dissecting, subdividing, top-and-tailing, while painfully aware that I’ll be hard pressed to fit 144 names into a 3-minute frame.

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; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice