Summa: diary (September 21-25, 2026)

September 21 (Monday).

‘It’s as though ideas are in the air, searching for someone to realise them. Then, they tap your shoulder and whisper: “It’s you!”‘ (Correspondence, September 19, 2026).

7.30 am: Writing and reviewing the tracks’ texts on my Sound site for the Darkness Covered the Whole Land album, which will be released one month from today on the 60th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster (October 21). 8.45 am: Then: ‘Clank, crash, clank, crash, crash, clank!’ Bottles of liquor fell from the high shelves of the pantry onto the hard tiles below. Much moping and shard collecting ensued, along with the curious smell of coffee syrup.

9.30 am: To make up time, I worked on two projects in parallel. I was resigned to the prospect that this would be a disrupted day. 2.15 am: A hospital appointment. ‘It’s my left foot, nurse!’ We die from the feet up. John Keats was of that opinion, if I remember correctly. The Podiatry department was at right-angles to Endoscopy (Greek: ‘to look inside’). ‘Things could be worse’, I encouraged myself. ‘Insoles, Professor’, the nurse prescribed. ‘You shall run again!’

2.45 pm, and into the evening: I pushed on with proofing the tracks’ texts.

September 22 (Tuesday).

‘The task looks gargantuan because you’re forever measuring the height of the mountain rather than making an ascent — step-by- step’ (Correspondence, September 19, 2026).

7.00 am: I had a poor night’s sleep, and woke at 4.00 am unable to return to Morpheus’s arms. My mind was intent on understanding certain circumstances in my life. ‘Be ye reconciled to reality’, the inner-tutor admonished. Ageing moves us from one era of our existence to another, often imperceptibly. Occasionally though, the transition is abrupt. For me, early-retirement (however well it was managed) felt like a train that had juddered to a halt on one line before switching to another going who knows where. People perceive me very differently, now. In the eyes of a few, the person whom they knew and the functions he’d fulfilled have gone. The present me is unknown, untried, unpurposed, and uninteresting. (Each to their own.)

Every era has a different game-plan. There are for me, now, new challenges for which the old strategies simply won’t do. And then there are the paradoxes. For example, I value friendships more than in any previous period of my life, while at the same time seeking greater solitude. ‘Oh for goodness sake John, count sheep’, the inner-tutor chastened.

8.00 am: While not at my most alert, I continued to pursue errors, omissions, repetitions, and inelegances in the album tracks’ texts. 2.00 pm: That task completed, I held an hour-long online discussion with my co-collaborator, the artist Elizabeth Lloyd, about a proposed side-project. It’s refreshing to think in parallel with another maker, especially across medial boundaries. Time together changes us both. Elizabeth (Libby) is a fiercely determined artist. Her work is ambitious, challenging, engaging, and superbly executed. She’s the kind of artist who makes me want to make images.

4.00 pm: An ambulation.

September 23 (Wednesday).

‘Who entered the fuller life’ (gravestone inscription, Municipal Cemetery, Aberystwyth (September 20, 2026)).

7.45 am: I released ‘William Rees’ from the 144 Variations album. He was my age when he died, and had lived at 7 Moy Road, immediately below Pantglas Junior School. His terraced house would have been among a number that were impacted by the avalanche of coal slurry from Tip 7, and later demolished.

8.00 am: I reviewed several files sent by my collaborator, so that I could begin conceptualisation.

2.00 pm: A postponed video-call with Margaret, Stephen Chilton’s mother. She’s a wonder, and a very senior lady who is always grateful for the life that God has given her. Even though she’s suffered the loss of two sons and two husbands. Margaret continues to instruct me in much. During her working life, she had been a nurse, a primary school teacher, and a marriage-guidance counsellor for the Roman Catholic Church. Margaret only narrowly escaped becoming a nun. (‘Men!’, she said, smiling.) A life spent in the service of others. I should email Pope Leo and request her canonisation. Margaret’s ‘God bless!’, at the close of her conversations and messages, holds, I’m persuaded, much sway with the Almighty.

3.00 pm: Having mapped the ‘ground-matrix’ of my sound response to the side-project’s visual component, I was more confident about proceeding. 4.00 pm: An ambulation.

At right-angles to the side-project: Around 1971 to 1972, when I was 11 or 12 years of age, my parents bought their first colour TV. In the UK, the only programmes broadcast outside the midday and late-afternoon to late-evening periods were the wonderful Open University courses (which began in 1971) and a series of colour set-up films on different subjects. The latter enabled engineers to calibrate the tricoloured electron guns of the cathode-ray tube when installing a TV in the home. The one film I watched repeatedly was Evoluon. It represented a non-narrative documentary about the Expo held in the Netherlands in 1968.

The Expo had a spaceship-like exhibition centre. It was filled with artefacts representing innovations in the then present and to come, in a conjectural future. The spirit of that Expo was utopian — society, it was proposed, was being ushered toward a brave new world facilitated by science, technology, and the arts. (Reference to the natural world is almost wholly absent from the film.) From today’s perspective, it was a woefully optimistic vision of the decades ahead. Some of the soundtrack, too, is futuristic in conception: buzzing and bleeping electronica, dissonance, noise, and repetition. I was mesmerised. The film opened a window in my head that has remained open ever since.

September 24 (Thursday). 6.3o am: Review and writing. 8.30 am: Back to the side-project and to thoughts about the sounds of cosmic background radiation and pulsars. The themes of the project are space travel, sci-fi, utopian futures, and communicating across vast distances and time. I’m using image-sound conversion processes to transform the design for a floral rug into something that resembles low-grade radio transmissions rubbing shoulders with Bebe and Louis Barron’s Forbidden Planet’s (1966) soundtrack.

One of the sound graphics arising from the translation looks like the type of modernist mural you might have expected to see at the Festival of Great Britain, London, in 1951.

1.30 pm: An ambulation and shoppery. On the left, my latest passion; on the right, my long-time addiction.

2.30 pm: One image-sound translation I undertook, using a rather exotic codex, extended far far longer than anticipated. Its notional temporal length equalled 408, 807 years. Rounded up, 409,000 years is significant in our solar system. The Internet informs me:

Exactly 409,000 years ago, Earth experienced an orbital alignment known as the ‘Stage 11 maximum’. Astrobiologists and climate scientists study this era to track variations in solar radiation (insolation) reaching Earth due to cyclical shifts in our orbit through space.

and

Regarding Alpha Centauri: ‘Traveling to a system at that distance using current chemical rocket technology (like the speeds achieved by the Space Shuttle) would take approximately 409,000 Earth years.

September 25 (Friday). 6.45 am: Writing, review, and correspondence. 9.00 am: Back onto the Magic Carpet. At this stage in the development, I’m focussing on generating useable material with which to construct. Inevitably, I garner far more samples that can possibly be used. Less is less, in some contexts. In the abundance of samples is liberty.

2.00 pm. The process of construction commenced. Alongside, I began categorising and profiling the 80 samples and their subsets that I’d extracted over the past day and a half. There are sounds that I recognise from their presence in other compositions. However, their significance changes in a different context.

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