As I noted here, it took an improbable 8 years for me to record and finish the album ‘Blade of Earth‘ which was posted to Bandcamp in 2021. As my love of music has been influenced by so many incredible artists and styles of song (and sound), the album needed to reflect that variety and still be of a consistent voice.
There were many effective songs dropped from inclusion as they did not fit in with the overall trajectory, however as the process of compiling the album neared finality, I knew there was a song missing and I knew what kind of elements it needed – that this would establish almost a sound-median of the album – at least in terms of its sonic tools. The consistency of the actual voice of the song (as a song) would relate to the others on a different level (more akin to the question of kinds of melodic, rhythmic and timbral expression).
When this final piece of the jigsaw arrived, it had an unlikely resonance to it. I had the vocal idea in February 2017 and started developing it from there. Lyrically I began to realise there was a connection to something. It wasn’t clear to me at first, in fact it was a while before I understood what was also at play alongside my efforts to write about the transformative power of nature, the trapped aspects of human living – potential steps as part of the mystery of the world. This was because in January of that year, collaborator and friend, the brilliant, media-bending, mind-sending writer Mark Fisher had taken his own life.
I saw that in fact, in many ways, the song reflected things about what I understood Mark had brought to my life and others. I knew I had placed one reference – his liking the idea of portals over doors as metaphor or image for transformation in being.
Of course the glaring element lyrically was the somewhat disturbing refrain about one’s mind being taken over. Disturbing and yet how else to understand when someone as extraordinary and multi-faceted as Mark could be taken in the way that he was? While I had a very specific vantage from which that line had arrived, I was simultaneously aware of how it could represent elements of modern subjectification and cognition; depression, capitalism etc. And ultimately it was meant as a statement of defiance…
If you know just how, as we learn to see,
Tune right through to now, the swarm becomes the bee,
Fear locked the gate, the sentries made us blind,
Things echo but you wait, for the song beyond the mind,(break)
You can take my mind over, but you can’t have my being,
you may take our minds over, but we’ll be free again,In the woods so fine, silence to undrown,
there to mend past time, light unveils the sound,
doorways that turn through, dimensions we combine,
portals become you, love stands the undefined,Now, we’ll dance to the edge,
We’re taking out the dead,
Now, we’ll dance to the edge,
Following the thread,You can take my mind over, but you can’t have my being,
Daylight Whispers (Solar Violet)
Something arrived over us, its there in our feeling,
You may take our minds, but we’ll be free again,
out through the daylight whispers, loving guide us.
I felt it was a strong offering lyrically, with a chorus as potentially dark, it needed to have a balance as much as possible with lines of flight. I tried to channel those concepts and experiences that had had a powerful effect in changing my life. The necessity of quietening the mind, of spending time in remarkable or powerful places (like the woods) engaged in perceiving. Experiences I had had with friends, staring at the light coming through the leaves, animated by the wind, allowing them to be a glimmering, bejewelled presence, had been among the most extraordinary I could remember.
Again I was aware of a resonance of Mark, of a summer evening when he’d lived in Bromley in the mid 2010’s, with the small reading group that had been taking place for a year or so, we’d gone to a nearby wood. At a certain point we’d heard the sounds of other people in the distance and Mark had quoted T.S. Eliot ‘human voices wake us and we drown…’
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In a way, I wanted Daylight Whispers to function almost as a map, the de-territorialising of many of the concepts, including the practise of becoming and using the body and senses in different ways. The key in such meditations as described in the woods ‘light unveils the sound‘ of listening – that listening, while gazing at light through the leaves and while one’s attention is spread through the entirety of the body, as a key to escaping the normal mode of interiority in subjectification. While also making contact with a facet of the planet that is not essentially a human construction and therefore at a higher level of intensity than most of the coralled segmentations of human production.
‘There to mend past time…’ the idea that being in such places helps us to heal, as a part of suggesting in the wideness of human life, the worlds that we are; ‘the dimensions we combine‘ while coming back to Mark’s observation of portals. An inference or connection to the idea that the transcendental in transformation is as much about what changes of the being themselves experiencing new perceptions as altered facets of life and being, leading to changed arrivals of the everyday and its matter. And that likewise to change milieu or context of perception-and-being is simultaneously escaping or transcending that habitual structure of relation and ontology.
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In a way, the connection that seems most to define Daylight Whispers in relation to Mark was that moment in the woods. Knowing also that the emphasis of the song had to be towards the lines of flight, the outside resonating through it, the final line (which became the title).
‘Out through the daylight whispers, loving guide us.’
The realisation upon hearing Mark’s invoking the T.S. Eliot line, that during our waking life, our brief daydreams and islands of lucidity, micro-escapes and abstractions, give us a truer moment of connection, a more authentic and alive expression of our selves. That these moments can be drowned within the act and works of the arriving normativity whose prescribed direction is in unknowingly shutting down the spaces of freedom and creativity around them. The quiet culling-edge of the human social assemblage.
As such, among a code that returns one constantly to the panniers of the normalising-self, our ‘way out’ – the subtle invisible gesturing of something outside ourselves that (as per the Dao de Ching) constantly seems to be ‘occurrence appearing of itself‘. Under such circumstances – the voice of becoming, of the planet and planetary; the expression of transformation toward wider realities and pecerption – such a thing, in its multiple, gentle insistence, could only ever be a whisper, amid the noise, the hubub, the ocean of conversation that arrives pre-drowned.
As an expression of the mode of the problematic in terms of subjectivities (a starting point) there are surely few better things than Beckett’s ‘Play‘. Anthony Minghella’s dramatisation for the Beckett On Film project in 2001 I recall finding especially startling. Like encountering the substrate of our lives in expression.
The need to escape the confines of such a substrate never becoming more crucial.
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While I probably made a start on the Daylight Whispers video a year ago, the shots and sequences that in the end became the video for Wood Spirit Opening began around a similar time as a series of experiments using mirrors and kaleidoscope effects.
For Daylight Whispers, I envisaged using footage I’d taken over the last few years using GoPro and other cameras, some of which included trips walking to the Rhinogydd mountain range in North Wales (the southern extent of the Eryri National Park). Also including swimming in lakes north of London, driving across the Severn Bridge with my brother and a host of footage of flora and fauna. Among these were elements I was filming during my lunch hour in the local park in Kennington, south London.
I had been aware with Daylight Whispers that a performative element would be needed – or that the body behind the music needed to in some way be present – and set about a few filming sessions in my East London flat (playing guitar, at the typewriter). This gave more of a freedom to continue experimenting when it came to Wood Spirit Opening – which it felt was somewhat freed from those constraints to follow its own immanent consistencies.
At the very least in abstract terms, the video needed to engage with the songs lyrical form (as simple as it may be), while expressing the same connections with the planet as a line of flight. I was aware, that with luck, the two would deepen each other as a ‘story’ of something in life terms that could express the possibility of perception obscured from our worlds of the everyday, yet sited in and as the world itself.
I had considered Wood Spirit Opening to be among the least conventional of the album’s songs, but felt it had something that shone through its mix of the electronic and natural, with its improvised synth-mutated vocal line. Among my friends, musician and artist Arran Bolders developed a connection with it early on and in the end named it and provided ink work for its cover. It felt as though he had added some of the final elements it needed and which on my own – would have been somewhat diminshed from where it had ended up (in retrospect, how else could I have embodied an aspect of ‘let it go yeah‘ except to give up aspects of the song’s final creative steps to a friend).
In terms of the video, for a while I remained unsure there was viability in the project, until re-discovering footage I had been experimenting with earlier, which created the blurred-out walking humans which apper near the beginning of the video. I knew then that at the very least, it would be possible to convey human beings, in a kind of unknown aspect, amidst the fog, on a journey – occluded and mysterious, askance off beams of light and immersed towards nebulous trees.
The spirit of the song (if we can talk about such things) is after all in part an ode to lightness (‘All the rivers and their light shine, you know‘) while it is also a light that suffuses and comes through the planet (‘the rivers… the wind… animals calling…‘) What is also resonant here and probably as good a concluding comment as any, is that the ‘Burst through rays‘ of which the song speaks are also something else ‘…past the sunlight, shining out…‘
In this event, it seems to me that the song is not only an attempt to open an intensity in relation to the planet and its unknown aspects, but also expressing to some degree the energy of what it is to break-out (to ‘burst through‘) and locates this as something planetary. It points to the thought that in any attempt to travel further in intensity, to stalk the apertures of ‘wider realities’ – we can have no greater ally in all practical senses than the space and the feeling of the planet itself. As transforming an undertaking as the requirement to also re-configure one’s image and concept of the planet as a whole, around its most extraordinary and mysterious aspects. From the dark side of unknown dreamings, and the sunlit expanses of its deserts and jungles, as an existence suffused with life and unknown aspect, something that we can say wakes in us as we wake in it.
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reflectivewavelengths 