WFM: DAY 32. 8.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Having denuded my inbox, I steamed-up the computers in readiness for a day of sound-file mangling. First on the agenda was ‘file and folder-ordering’. As the Noisome Spirits (indeed, any) project grows, its helpful to establish a structured depository for ideas. I’m dealing with a sub-suite of compositions about a hugely destructive sound that accompanied some manifestations of malevolent spirits. The audients’ sense of their everyday-world being, in that moment, violently ripped into pieces seemed to chime with our experience of the pandemic, presently.

Today and tomorrow, I’d be working on (a) ‘Such a Noise as if All the Hedges About Were Tore to Pieces’, and (b) ‘The House Was Going Away’. Agendum 2: ‘Return to the texts and continue making notes’. The sound works must begin and end with the written source.

11.00 am: Respite:

(a): I considered my response to: ‘a sound in the air — like the braying of an ass, but more disagreeable (something hellish and more tangible in the sound)’. ‘Like’ suggests resemblance, as opposed to actuality. ‘The braying of an ass’ was the nearest equivalent sonority, drawn from his everyday experience, to the evil spirit’s noise. As significantly, the audient recognised, too, the sound’s disparity. Sound check: ass braying on YouTube. It resembled the screech and creak of a print drying-rack at the School of Art. (I’d recorded the sound for an improvisatory collaboration with my colleague Dr Roberts, called ‘This is One of The Most Useful Things’ (2016).) The source sound recorded for that occasion became my starting point today.

House (detail) #8:

1.45 pm: Close listening to the source began. Again, I transferred the digital source to tape, and back again at half speed. Something had begun. The sound had potential. In some way or another, it had, now, to define an aerial landscape as much as it did something akin to an ass’s bray. 4.30 pm: A sun-blessed walk down Llanbadarn Road, through the cemetery, down Plas Grug Avenue, and home via the Buarth. (Half-an-hour, exactly.)

7.30 pm: A reflection on the day’s work, before returning to writing and to someone else’s dairy, for 2010. Idealists have a hard life. This one had expected much (too much, too soon) of themselves. There are many lessons for all of us to learn from another’s life lived. Repentance and resolve must be accompanied by grace and self-forgiveness, as well as an acceptance of that pardon which comes from above. Meaningful and lasting change takes place gradually and haltingly. In the end, we transcend our life only when we surrender it.