Return of Fisher/Barton’s londonunderlondon after 20 years

The impact of the collaborative work between Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, specifically their audio essay ‘On Vanishing Land’ (released on Hyperdub imprint Flatlines in 2019) has been a slow but powerful permeation (more of which below) – which has led to a renewed focus and interest in their first work of this kind, londonunderlondon originally broadcast on ResonanceFM in 2005 – culminating in this renewed version transmission: londonunderlondon.

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Part of this renewal of interest has emerged with the release of audio essay/sonic fiction Astro-Darien by Hyperdub founder Steve Goodman in (as Kode 9) and By The North Sea from Robin Mackay both in 2022. These releases have (alongside On Vanishing Land) underpinned a recently published book on the topic Sonic Faction edited by Barton, Maya B. Kronic and Goodman. Which was also part of an event at the ICA in London in early October.

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Urbanomic have a transcript of the re-formed transmission: londonunderlondon, which contains Barton’s newly recorded four and a half minute intro to the piece in which he explains some of the context for the piece’s inception and structure. This includes he and Fisher’s shared sense that the 90 minute length of the original commission (to fit with the duration of a specific programme slot on the radio station) was excessive compared with what they wanted to achieve, but which they nonetheless still filled.

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I can’t recall where the specific impetus for the original londonunderlondon came from, although an additional mode of the overall form definitely came to be found in some of Mark Fisher’s brilliant later experimental mixes (one of which here; look what fear’s done to my body) in which he would mix songs/tracks and samples (including overlaying some tracks to transformational effect). The overall effect of these mixes was to create an affect and sonic space that channelled Mark’s understanding of song dynamics with the narrative impact of film and television dialogue samples to create unique atmospheres and co-renderings. The sense of space and rhythm, the arrivals of narrative snippets with and as parts of music’s already full ambient power to charge spaces with feeling and it’s own intrinsic crypto-meanings and mysteries – instinctively grasped and brilliantly understood and deployed.

Around the new millennium Mark and Justin had been living together in Hackney, and when I first moved to London in 2000/2001 I slept on their couch before eventually taking Mark’s place in the flat when he moved to Bromley. I quickly established a recording space and this was a productive time in which I felt conversations, ideas and productions within the network and the friends of the time had a sense of possibility that hinted at extraordinary potentials.

When I was first hearing about the concept of londonunderlondon I was asked if I could record and engineer it – I was of course delighted. I also recorded a reading for one of its’ fictional extracts (used in the original broadcast version), which (as I recall) came from Michael Moorcock’s book ‘Mother London’. I was not sure about the reading which was a literal first take – but they had no such concerns and in it went.

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We had an additional session which I recorded on Hampstead Heath (in beautiful sunny weather) where two of the ‘witness’ portions of Justin’s piece When Space Breaks Open were recorded. There may have been one or two other brief recording sessions at my flat at the time and I did some early sequencing for the project while also showing Mark the rudiments of track sequencing and processing on the workhorse audio editor of the time Cooledit (which I favoured for its simplicity).

Around that time, I became caught up in a family circumstance which meant I was unable to continue to assist the project directly. Mark took over the sound editing – completing it on time for its broadcast on Resonance. I cannot fully recall how the track Isn’t it one long moment? which I had been working on for an album around then – became incorporated. They may have asked me for some music, or more likely I may have given a copy of the album to Mark, but I was happy to have it used (following Delia Derbyshire for a powerful section of Mark’s reading). I had been experimenting with an aspect of organic-souding flanges and rising falling oscillations and it seemed to me that Mark and Justin chose and used the piece extremely well.

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The sense of a new emergence occured when the piece was broadcast in 2005, while its duration made it somewhat unwieldy and the pair gave copies on double cd to those who had participated and others in the wider group. It still felt like something vital and different – a space of thought of a different kind. Albeit that the project could also very much be seen as a precursor and build-up to their defining project together On Vanishing Land. The pair certainly learned from it, for a start they understood that londonunderlondon – being a radio commission was also made inflexible by its reliance on copyrighted and already released music – something they remedied for On Vanishing Land when all the tracks were commissioned. As such, there were things that were not in its favour to the same extent, another of which being its final sound quality.

Mark had done an admirable job putting everything together, although had I been able to continue working on the project, more of the rudiments of sound engineering would have been incorporated in the final piece. I am aware in some of the intervening period Mark fully went with a punk ethos in affirming the roughness of the final mix, articulating it alongside his DIY aesthetic and potentially repudiating those who would claim quality-autocracy in their judgments over it.

For some of the reasons above, londonunderlondon was always unlikely to have a second life or to be taken up by a distributor where licensing requirements would be paramount and where format issues were counted against by its duration. It also felt natural that attention moved on, On Vanishing Land was produced and was successfully received, suggesting this was part of a journey that would yield additional powerful productions.

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In the subsequent years I did not much think about londonunderlondon, I had (like everyone) had the multitude of life to deal with, difficulties and dearths, estrangements and enchantings. Something must have triggered a curiosity in my mind however, as in 2014 I dug out the soundfiles I’d been given after its transmission and at some subsequent point began working on them. A primary motivation had come from listening and finding difficulty with understanding words here and there, crystalised by something in the following passage of Mark’s section Necropolis Now:

Television was the unhomely vortex around which the 1960s British domestic scene was organised, the Chinese box display unit opening out the so-called interior onto the media landscape. The wired kids who watched, entranced, had consumed the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs with their breastmilk.

Mark Fisher; londonunderlondon

When I misheard ‘wired’ as ‘white’ and had a sudden internal shudder at the idea of this phoneme breeding – and realised that I had to repair the audio.

The process of going through the dozens of distorted peaks, where the volume had clipped in the mixing-down process was fairly arduous. I imagine even by that time, there were tools that would automate this, to an extent I had access to some of them then, but I seemed to have preferred going through each one and individually attempting to recover the profile of the sound wave from its attenuation. I created a selection of custom noise reduction profiles and filters to help, but it remained labourious, especially as there were sections of audio which were not themselves clipped peaks, but had been peaked and distorted at a previous process in the sequencing/mixing.

While I worked on it off and on for a prolonged period, it was also that there seemed no particular motivation or timeline at this point and after a while I simply stopped working on it.

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In 2017, Mark took his own life, which must have inevitably at some point made me think of londonunderlondon again. In fact it wasn’t long after Mark’s demise that a version of londonunderlondon appeared on Youtube. When I found it, I realised it was an unhelpfully truncated, unmoored version – which reminded me again of the unfortunate condition of some of the sound. What also struck me as intensely unhelpful was that it was solely attributed to Mark, when I knew Justin had been as intrinsically guiding and responsible (and had written its other major section).

Nonetheless it wasn’t until 2022 that Justin indicated he had been thinking about londonunderlondon as something with the potential to be re-worked to better channel the intent that they had had for the piece, alongside the necessity of its original form for transmission. I was able to tell him that I had done most of the clean up which the conversation would have implied and confirmed I would finish that work over the next few months.

By January 2023 that clean up work had been completed and Justin had also worked out the form that the piece needed, what had to be removed, what needed to remain, as well as a very precise requirement to take samples from some of the recordings, to be replicated elsewhere in the piece as a way of reinforcing its multiplicity, connecting with itself at different moments and transections. As we did not have access to the original sequencing file and recordings, I was able to use the newest features of Davinci Resolve to isolate the voices so that they could be re-used.

Although I had cleaned the piece up, I was aware there was still some more equalising and mastering to be done when the piece was mixed and played for a Sonic Faction event at the Karst gallery in Plymouth in February 2023. Justin had by this time decided that the title for the re-tooled version was to be transmission: londunderlondon. Whether it will have any further life in terms of availability or release remains to be seen. For now however, we have access to it on Soundcloud (as per the embed; top) following it’s playing twelve days ago on NTS Radio (as a Flatlines promoted transmission). Alongside Urbanomic’s recent documenting of the text we are presented with the best opportunity to experience and absorb the startling and powerful worlds of thought and abstraction rendered by this piece – finally found closer to the heart of what bore it in its original form, twenty or so years ago.

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transmission: londonunderlondon image: concept and location – Justin Barton, Photo and processing – AR