Summa: diary (August 24-29, 2025)

And in these difficult times …

August 24 (Sunday). 9.00 am: Ambulation 1: There were crocodiles on Plasgrug Avenue. These colourful creatures were made by a local origami enthusiast to serve as markers along the route of a special Junior Park Run event that morning. ‘They breed in the sewers, you know!’, I hollered to one of the race officials.

I approached the Promenade in a direction opposite to my usual ambulation: through the railway station (never around it) and the supermarket car park; under Pont Trefechan [Trefechan Bridge]; and alongside the marina. Quiet. The Bank Holiday weekend crowd hadn’t yet risen from their breakfast tables at the many B&Bs on South Beach.

Four young holidaymakers carrying a blaring mini-boombox walked towards me. ‘That won’t go down well with the locals’, I thought. Our music is the susurration of the waves, the call of the gulls, and the distant purr of the fishing-boats’ engines, as they leave the harbour and head north and south to secure the day’s catch.

2.30 pm: Ambulation 2: The hamlet of Ffwrnais [Furnace] — on the A487, halfway between Aberystwyth and Machynlleth — is named after the Dyfi Furnace. Built around 1755, this was a charcoal-fired furnace used for smelting pig iron. It harnessed the power of the Einion Arfon [River Einion] — cascading at force down the hillside — to drive, via a large waterwheel, the compressed-air bellows that heated the fires to the temperature of volcanic lava. The furnace is an impressive example of the earliest industrial technology, right on my doorstep.

Further back in time. Above Dyfi Furnace is Artists Valley, as it’s popularly known (because of its picturesque qualities), or Coed Cwm Einion [Forest Valley of the Einion]. It’s one of the rare examples of a temperate rainforest left in the UK. The insistent roar of the waterfall below occludes the drone of the traffic. All I could hear was a soundscape that hadn’t changed in thousands of years. (Trans-historical, sonic continuity.) Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin once lived somewhere around here.

August 25 (Monday). 5.30 am: Awake. 6.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. ‘Desmond Carpenter’. The conversion of the victims’ names into musical melodies is the systematic version of a randomisation technique that I’ve used on the current Darkness Covered the Land and several previous albums, whereby (in respect to the latter) a sound source is subdivided and reorganised indiscriminately by an algorithm. The systematic approach is, by contrast, intentional, and akin to the process of codifying texts as images that underlay The Pictorial Bible series (2000-15).

Today’s priority was to complete as many as possible of the sound-typed names. There are recurrent ratios between the number of letters comprising the forenames and surnames. For example: 3:8; 4:5; 5:5; 6:5; 7:10; 8.5; 9:6; and 10:8. Where a ratio fits more than one name, the same recording of typing is used for them all. There’s nothing to be gained by making a bespoke rendering of each, and something to be gained by limiting the range of type-rhythms contributing to the composition as a whole.

August 26 (Tuesday). 6.30 am: Awake. 7.15 am: Writing. 8.00 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s work. Having recorded all the sound-type names, I moved to shape the captures one-by-one. 8.20 am: In the distance, on the gathering wind, I heard passing traffic on the A44 (which runs parallel to my studio’s Velux window); the train from Birmingham International approach the station; a propeller plane pass overhead, high-up; bird call; a dog’s bark; and, at 8.28 am, the train’s departure.

‘Margaret Carsten’. The recording of the digital-typewriter’s sound was dropped in pitch by an octave, its frequencies enhanced in the range of 31-200 kHz, and the volume increased by 6dB. By these means, the faux clatter of the keyboard and the zip and ring of the carriage return were made to resemble those of a large, heavy-duty, and cast-iron frame commercial typewriter (‘built like a tank’, as they say) that was common in offices during the 1960s. My mother used one when she was secretary at the Abertillery branch of the Prudential Assurance Company Ltd, back then. I used to play in her office after school. It was there that she introduced me to the joys of carbon paper, correction fluid, index boxes, large manila envelopes, strongrooms, and shorthand. (The latter, I’m persuaded, first opened my eyes to the possibilities of text-to-image translation and visual language.) Today, I recalled the sound that her typewriter made; this was the model for my transformation.

11.00 am-2.30 pm: Travail, as I changed from one mobile phone network to another. Life is too short; nerves are too frayed. 5.45 pm: After the rain shower:

August 27 (Wednesday). 6.00 am: Awake. The day begins with a long glass of iced water. A cold shower would benefit me more, but I’ve not yet the courage. My body is still too much in charge of me. 6.30 am: A communion. 7.00 am: Studiology. I continued transforming the typing sounds. Many lay before me, still. 8.20 am: I heard the train arrive (again). 8.30 am: And, as the train departed: ‘Gwyneth Collins’. 9.30 am: The rain returned. 10.00 am: Transformations complete. While I can’t complete ‘144: a biblical number’ before the full list of victims’ names is drawn up (following my visit to the Glamorgan Archives next week), I can at least explore the composition’s character. ‘Michael Collins’.

11.30 am: Tea and talk at the Arts Centre with my friend, colleague, and fellow sound composer, Dr Dafydd Roberts. Our conversation took-in the perils of prevarication, good working-from-home practices, empty-nest syndrome (that is, when your children finally leave home), and those places for which our hiraeth was strongest (which weren’t all in Wales).

I explored the From Ceramics to Sound installation by William Cobbing, Abi Haywood and Copper Sounds. The latter’s work I found particularly engaging, and suggestive of other ideas and possibilities:

Each artist explores how the medium of clay can be activated through performance and technology, treating sound, like clay — as a malleable material.

1.30 pm: I began a trial construction of the ‘144: a biblical number’ composition, using the completed type-sounds as my material.

August 28 (Thursday).

‘The band sounds like typewriters’ (Joni Mitchel, ‘Edith and the Kingpin’, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975).  

5.00 am: Awake. 5.30 am: Breakfast (A break from intermittent fasting, which I often take midweek.). 6.00 am: Writing. 7.00 am: A communion. 7.45 am: Studiology. ‘Peter Collins’.

I reviewed yesterday’s trial. ‘I don’t like the little bell accompanying the carriage return!’, the inner-tutor grumbled. He was right; it sounded too literal, cliched, and up-beat in what’s otherwise a somber composition. Edit. Edit. Edit … (135 times). The samples were adjusted and abutted, and looked like rows of Campbell’s Soup cans in an Andy Warhol screenprint. The overlaid lines of typewriters sounded like rain — the rain that poured down upon Tip no. 7 for three days before it slid pitilessly through the school. As I worked, the fierce rain (a ‘biblical rain’) fell outdoors. A recording was made and set beneath the ‘typing pool‘ of clacking keys in the sound session.

10.00 am: ‘Raymond Collins’. 10.30 am: An organisation of the tracks within the stereo field. 2.00 pm: An ambulation, advisory, and shoppery — in preparation for the week ahead.

3.00 pm: My ears had had their fill of rainy typewriters. I closed them, and opened my eyes instead. For the remainder of the afternoon, I added to the digital-conversion-failure photograph set.

August 29 (Friday). 6.00 am: I awoke to heavy clouds. 6.30 am: Writing, and correspondence with an old friend who’s passing ‘through the valley of the shadow’. 7.00 am: A communion. 7.30 am: Studiology. I pressed on, this time, with a batch of variations — ‘Susan Crotty’; ‘Brian Davies’; ‘David Davies’; and ‘Michael Davies’ — to get to the bottom of the list on page one of six.

Next week, I shall visit by cousin (my ‘father’s sister’s girl’, as she was known in the family) and her husband. They live near to where Thomas W Kennard’s magnificent Crumlin Viaduct (built 1857) once met the west side of the Ebbw Fach valley in South Wales. The last trains crossed on my fifth birthday, in 1964. It was demolished a year later.

For many years, my cousin has been compiling a history of my father’s side of the family. Using parish registers, principally, she has traced our lineage back to George Harvey in the mid-18th century. One of his sons was also called John Harvey (1808 – ), about whom nothing else can be discovered. In all likelihood, George was a native of Chew Magna, Somerset. Either he or some of his progeny, along with many other families, emigrated to South Wales to work in the coalfields. Abertillery’s Somerset Street bears witness to the considerable influx of immigrants from that county to the town. It’s a problematically narrow street. In one of his propagandist radio broadcasts, Lord Haw-Haw — the wartime British-Nazi quisling — threatened to widen it with a Luftwaffe bomb.

10.00 am: I re-opened ‘144: a biblical number’, returned to the recording of my pianist playing ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’, processed the file at -50% of its original speed and through a randomising algorithm, and introduced it to the composition. There was something peculiarly and unexpectedly apposite in the relationship between the sounds of the piano and typewriter. (‘As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’, to summon Comte de Lautréamont (1869).) The two machines have the same action and analogous components: keys, which are mechanically joined to either an action- or a key-stack; which activates either the hammers or type; which strike either the strings or the paper (through the inked ribbon).

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