Summa: diary (July 18-24, 2026)
Past lives /passed lives.
July 19 (Saturday). 7.45 am: The rising sun’s low rake illuminated the underside of the Royal Pier. It’s a fascinating structure. Like the inverted roof on a 19th-century railway station. I wish some local entrepreneur would have the vision to extend the existing structure to its original length. Saturday morning breakfast at The Hut. As usual (invariably): a gluten-free blueberry flapjack covered in yogurt, to eat, and a hot-white chocolate, to drink. I enjoy the anticipation of the familiar and known. As one young woman in my remote past once told me: ‘You’re a creature of habit, John!’
9.00 am: Studylogy. While waiting for software to update, I posted correspondence related to the new sound project. Its conceptual framework is becoming clearer. Thus, I’m persuaded. But whether I can pass on my enthusiasm to others — who may, perhaps, wish to collaborate on the project — is another matter. The thematic core comprises history, a hymn, a tragedy, a haunting, and a place between two ‘worlds’. They are, for me, familiar subjects. I hope to visit this permeable boundary in early August and September, and undertake initial field recordings.
July 19 (Sunday). 9.15 am: On Sundays, I walk the Promenade in a clockwise, northerly direction. One day, I’ll meet myself coming toward me. Walkers and bathers were enjoying the end of the heatwave.
1.30 pm: A family video-call to celebrate one of my son’s special day. Double-take: two photographs — of him and me — taken when we were 2 years of age. Our piano-playing techniques could not have been more different.
July 20 (Monday). 6.00 am: A review of the week ahead. Some things will be an irksomeness to the flesh and others, a thrill to the soul. 8.00 am: Studyology. I returned to grant seeking. My databank of potential providers has burgeoned. I only need one to respond positively.
11.00 am: I took up the notes that I’d made on Saturday, related to the next sound project. It has got under my skin. The themes are sufficiently removed from those of the Aberfan disaster project to suggest new directions, approaches, and collaborations. Change is not something you wait around to happen; you must force the issue, sometimes. If there’s one thing worse than failure, its two successive successes of the same type. Whatever I choose to do next will stretch me to my limits. This is the compact that I make with myself, always.
The story so far: Two events, 50 years apart. One takes place in 1888 and the other, in 1938. Two men: one (the ‘Antecedent’), an MP and coal merchant, the other (the ‘Subsequent’), a well-known conductor and composer. Both are Welsh. Both are waiting for a train at the same station and on the same platform. One dies and the other composes what would become a hymn tune, while they wait. One haunts the platform, thereafter (so the story goes). The ‘Antecedent’ is folklore; the ‘Subsequent’, history. But there is a third man present too — myself — who alights upon a memorial plaque commemorating the ‘Subsequent’, 79 years later, while waitng for a connection on Platform 3 in 2017. (The memorial had been set-up by the ‘Subsequent’s’ son, in 2004.)
July 21 (Tuesday). 8.30 am: Studiology. I reviewed the existing mixes of the album with a view to making small adjustments in the light of last week’s revision of two tracks. Small changes in respect to particulars send out ripples than effect the whole.
‘Why did you give up painting?’, someone asked. ‘I didn’t, I gave up paint’, was my response. ‘Painting’ is an attitude of mind, a mode of thinking, an approach to the subject, and a way of life. Below the surface level of the medium, there are commonalities between image making and sound making. For example, pictorial attributes such as structure, perspective, space, ratio, surface organisation, relational form, tone, colour, pattern, opacity and transparency, layering, application, representation, and abstraction, each have their analogical equivalent in my approach to sound composition.
The are also conceptual and methodical processes shared by my painting and sound composition. The Pictorial Bible series’ codifying of biblical texts as visual images has informed the letter-by-letter translation of the victims’ names into melodic phrases in the 144 Variations project.
July 22 (Wednesday). 6.30 am: I continued composing a list of questions (which I’d begun yesterday evening) to address to the son of the ‘Subsequent’ about his father’s composition, this evening. I’ve only got one shot at this. So it’s best to be prepared.
This has been the first overcast morning in a while. I’ve missed the grey canopy and bland light. ‘It’s gonna rain’ on the weekend.
7.30 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studiology. I took up where I left off yesterday on the album’s re-mix. Cut, cut, cut, wherever possible. The contrast between the Darkness Covered the Whole Land and 144 Variations albums is stark. The former provides a broad historical sweep of the tragedy; the latter represents an individuated response to the same. Darkness has a far wider emotional range. There’s melancholy and sadness, but also terror and alarm, and everything in between.
4.00 pm: An ambulation along the Promenade, northward towards Constitution Hill. The sea glistened; its roar was gentle — almost hushed. At this time of the year, we locals share our town with holidaymakers who either sunbathe, or swim, or angle away the afternoons.
7.30 pm: A telephone conversation with the ‘Subsequent’s’ son, the Welsh conductor and composer Owain Arwel Hughes. My description of the new project must have sounded like the plot to some bonkers operetta. Nevertheless, it captured his imagination. He agreed to extend me the copyright on his father’s composition. I now have the amber light to proceed. But first …
July 23 (Thursday). 6.00 am: Studyology. I’m down to my last three funding providers. All are arts related. 8.00 am: Studiology. I pushed on with the remix, applying to the whole new principles and practices that had arisen from the parts. I added a 2,000 kHz sine wave at the close of the track entitled ‘Let Me Tell You About My Dream Last Night (October 20, 1966)’. The decision was inspired by a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. A monolith has been found buried on Clavius. Having been excavated, a team of astronauts undertake an examination. After one of them touches its surface, the monolith emits a loud and piercing high-frequency. Both in the film and on my track, the sound is painful to hear, beyond human control, and signals that something of great significance is about to transpire.
7,30 pm: I attended the Solem Quartet’s performance of works by Steve Reich and Kate Bush at Theatr Arad Goch. Reich’s music has had a profound influence on both my sound composition and visual art practice since 1999. His early compositions, ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (1965) and ‘Come Out’ (1966), turned my creative outlook on its head when I first heard them as an undergraduate at art school. However, it took decades before their influence surfaced in my own work. While in San Francisco in 2011, I went to Union Square, where Reich had captured the source material for ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ on a cassette-tape recorder. I felt like a pilgrim standing on holy ground.
This evening, the quartet played Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ (1988). An assured performance. Unfortunately, the backing track — on which the voices of commentators could be heard — suffered from an inadequate PA system. Hearing the testimonies clearly is imperative. For out of this narrative, and the speakers’ speech patterns, proceeds the shape of the music. Alice Zawadski’s compositions and delivery were a revelation. The suite of Kate Bush songs, sung by Zawadski and arranged by William Newell (one of the quartet’s two violinists), provided an intelligent and heartfelt reinterpretation of the songs’ soul. It made me want to return to the originals.
July 24 (Friday). 7.15 am: An ambulation along the Promenade, with particular attention paid to the sea today. Many runners, beating the path before work began. 8.25 am: I called-in at the railway station to watch the 8.27 am train depart. The experience is one of those few remaining continuities with my infancy. (‘The man with the child in his eyes’.) Platforms are, in any case, moving towards the forefront of my mind these days.
8.45 am: Studyology. Writing (with Reich and Bush playing in the background). 10.00 am: Studiology. Remix resumed. The current album has certainly tested me to my limits. What was conceived as a 6-track suite developed into 16-tracks. What was conceived as one album became two, composed in parallel. It is the subject and not the artist that decides the scale.
Perseverance and fortitude are just as important as technical ability and imagination, when it comes to creative endeavour. As I never tired of repeating to my fine-art students: ‘It’s hard work only when you work hard’. By 5.00 pm, the second remix was complete, and the album — so much the better for it.
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