I was going through old photo folders looking for a research screenshot and turned up this photo from November 2017, which would have been this gig at the Cafe Oto. I have a feeling I took the photo to send to Juha van’t Zelfde.
Philip Jeck died a year ago this week. With this wizard’s apparatus, he could haunt a room with sound. He is much missed by this listener.
NO SOUND IS LOST is the new 3 track EP from UK musician Laura Cannell featuring Violin, Overbowed Violin and Voice. It was improvised & recorded inside an empty shipping container in the Norfolk Countryside in March 2023.
Immediately outside of the container is a cattle field where two pairs of leaping hares stop to watch and listen before bounding off into the dusky undergrowth. A five hundred year old oak tree stands rooted and broad in the centre of the field and the nearby A146 road sends high pitched racer-boy revs across the fields.
Inside the 40ft container is another world. Up close it’s a non thing. A box. But inside, after the twist and crank of heavy door handles is a vast empty space where there shouldn’t be. All I want to do is play, to hit the sides with violin soundings, for them to ricochet among the metal grooves of this oversized shopping crate. The container holds the sound inside a room that shouldn’t be there.
My favourite piece of Barthesian advice runs in a different direction: ‘It’s when you lift your head that you’re really reading.’ The greatest gift a work can bestow might be the semi-free association it inspires. ‘Barthes applied this floating quality to the entire sphere of language, to reading, to every utterance, to all conversation,’ Bois says, and follows up with a tip of his own. Wait for ‘the click’ in your response to a given piece, ‘that sudden, insouciant turning of the key’ that releases a rush of ideas. ‘Let a swarm of thoughts bounce off a snap; let the signs proliferate over and around an opposition, an analogy, before putting them in order.’
(Having to finish this draft post on phone because I woke up to discover broadband and tv were down and may not be coming back today. Contact will be phone text only)
(edit: back up)
Crunch week! Also, Greenwich Mean Time! Which I forgot about! And woke up at what turned out to be 1140am on Sunday! And was very confused! (I knew I’d wake up late, because I spent Sunday afternoon splitting, digging up and replanting a giant phormium, which required me to dig out and lift a ton of broken hardcore that somehow got buried in the garden years ago without our knowledge. But not that late.)
Anyway, this week I’m on double-time, wrapping the DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT polishes while scripting and outlining on other projects.
ON DECK: immediately, finishing one script and going through DEPT MIDNIGHT 101 one more time. Hopefully 102 as well. And, if it stops raining, tying up some plants. I lost a blackberry to the storm early Sunday morning – it woke me up at 4am, because it sounded like someone blasting the windows with gravel.
INBOX:
LISTENING:
READING: 836 posts backed up in my RSS reader!
SHIPPING FORECAST: Let’s see how much I can get done this week.
This tends to reinforce modern suppositions that part of Beethoven’s ancestry was non-European, probably North African. It also contributes to our understanding of his own sense of non-typicality and outsiderness.
A recent study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claims to have proven a theory that air pollution inspired the painter Claude Monet to create the hazy, ethereal paintings that sparked the Impressionist movement, according to a report by CNN.
The study focuses on Monet and the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whom were active during the Industrial Revolution, which saw steam engines and coal-powered manufacturing plants emit unprecedented amounts of smoke and soot into the air.
Interesting, but seems to ignore that both artists had visual issues throughout their lives, and both developed cataracts.
Keith Berry just very kindly sent me his new record! Listen above or click through. I approve of the title, obviously, having been a Ballardian for forty years…!
Just arrived. Thanks to Cate Winter for alerting me to the existence of black hollyhocks and finding a place where I could buy the seeds. Amazing thing to do.
I took a look at this monstrosity today and thought – today’s the day to clear the hardcore out of the corner of the garden, cut and split this, dig it up and replant it somewhere else. 15 minutes later the sky went dark and the temperature dropped two points. So maybe this is a weekend job.
ON DECK: Scripting! Since apparently I won’t be lifting and digging. Going to see if I can land a whole script today.
INBOX: 70
LISTENING: Unclassified
READING: LRB
LAST WATCHED: BIG SKY, BIG DREAMS, BIG ART – episode 1 of which is apparently unavailable on streaming for some reason
I never log my Kindle purchases, for some reason. This was on sale today. I miss being a novelist, so I presume this will on occasion make me wistful.