Now into my fiftieth year (thirty two of which chasing elusive sonic dreamings…) I have at different times arrived at the realisation that it is possible to intend our listening experiences in life to cross a threshold towards hearing everything as part of an ongoing song of occurences. I think composer, musicians and theorist Pauline Oliveros with her theory of Deep Listening was opening a position of perceiving outside the bandwidths of our habitual normalities, where sound takes on additional dimension with our perception. A worthy reminder as La Monte Young also once said in the now out of print book Selected Writings ‘we should experience them <sounds>for what they are, a different form of existence.’ I posted a paper (Engines of Transformation) here which explores aspects of sound, perception and intensity, originally written for a conference in 2006.
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Looking back now, I was a little surprised to see that I first started work on this album in 2022. Having finished its predecessor blade of earth I was aware that I had some songs and bits and pieces that I had finished over the years, some of which I really liked, but which had not found any projects or formats that suited.
So the idea for an outtakes/b-sides type of album came to mind. I knew it would be highly varied in terms of styles of music, but this made sense for this kind of album. What quickly became apparent when I started compiling old mixes, was that some things I simply could not use – insufficiently developed or too rough, but also what came into focus was that there was an opportunity to take something much further than had originally occurred to me. As a result, a significant amount of new material was also generated or used, sometimes mixed or re-mixed to suit the emerging feel of the piece. In some respects, it felt like it began to guide itself…
‘…into the skies, mother nature’s eyes, I want to get back…’
‘Get Back’ – Solar Violet
I also realised, picking up from blade of earth, that this would continue the approach of using different styles of music, alongside an idea that genres are more like musical families than anything else, offering the potential to experience different types of expressive intent in the personal acceptance of our musical choices and understanding.
Guided primarily by the myriad capacities of sound to inspire, to express and to play a part in altering the possibilities of our perception. Through these crystalisations of sonic modes; songs or pieces or tracks and cuts, expressively locked into the underlying singular instances of drone, rhythm and harmonic forces.
‘…The stars are coming through… (What to do…?) The silence inside you…’
‘Inch of Dare’ – Solar Violet
The idea emerged of a mutant radio transmission or broadcast, The eponymous Transversal Radio Hour.
At a certain point, I couldn’t help but also be conscious of how something like the Faust Tapes had been such an amazing point of musical departure with its genre-striding and bending – it’s early and easy casualness with moments of juxtapositional radicalisation of the affect of encounter – ambient spaces, folk-pop, abstract but meaning-laden dirges, concrète eruptions and subtleties, proto-post-punk. And yet at the time of release in 1973 Faust insisted it should not be considered an album release, but a bonus in response to the appetite for their music which had come out of the UK.
Yet different in approach, I was also struck by Mark Fisher’s mixes, made to explore different theories and ideas amidst societal and cultural forces and circumstances, but which sometimes featured conversational scenes and samples from films or television that re-framed and re-oriented the accompanying music, creating different trajectories as an emergent phenomena (here is Mark’s mix the metaphysics of crackle). Together with our mutual friend Justin Barton, it was Mark who pioneered the sonic essay form which Hyperdub have been releasing through imprint Flatlines. Having played some role in these projects by the pair, it would have been unusual for me not to have also been influenced by these longer form hyper-cogent essays / sonic collages.
‘…I was in a snowdrift… Looking for a dream…”
‘Snowdrift’ – Solar Violet
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To also invoke the plurality of our shared worlds of experience, running through us as dreams and fragments, expressions and beliefs… to invoke the intensity of films and dialogue, the conversations of drama in exploring our predicaments of life, but also in making new fragments, delineations and threads to try to maintain and heighten the overall impact across the sensations of our receptivity –
yet to really work, an awareness that it must act as (or be) a dance as well, an ongoing creative flow that maintains an exploration of sound – that communicates across itself to work. All the while spun through and around vignettic or aphoristic crystals on creativity from MF Doom, T.S Eliot on the mountains, or 80’s Kids tv show Children of the Dogstar’s Dogon meditation on indigenous cosmic knowledge, or reforming Nigel’s Kneale’s Year of The Sex Olympics jingle into the horn section on track Code of Being’s crepuscular electronica.
“They’ve forgotten what’s inside sound… (No I don’t know why) They’ve forgotten what mountains found…“
‘Outside Together’ – Solar Violet
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I received feedback on the album from Justin Barton which I thought could be shared here:
It is definitely a doorway album. It has an eerie aspect, but when you focus the lens the view includes the escape-path, the Futural path… It has humour and the tone with the Very good song melodies has a faint, evanescent quality of sadness, and I think it’s important the title points to a non-ethnically placed overtoning – the current of alterity breaks through here, a sense of an Other way of being, an inhabiting of the Steppe of woken faculties…
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Finally, while putting this post together, I realised it needed something additional at the end. As such, I set about putting together a shortened sampler-style version of the album, which finally came in at 6 minutes and to which I thought I could add some basic videography from archives I’ve shot in recent years.
While working on this mix, I couldn’t help but find a kind of humour or lightness in the idea of a potential imaginary sonic droste effect that this project – already materialised in transitions and segues and merges, could micro-condense further in intensification of its melodic, hook-related attributes.
At the same time, it was great to find some video sequences shot last year in Walthamstow Wetlands in London. I recall the feeling that there was something there, as I watched the far side lake reflections of the Wetlands’ visitors walking across the horizon paths. Yet for this project, it only started to cohere when I flipped different parts of the footage to form a theatrical style vignette out of the environment. Somewhere among the inverted correctitude of horizons now featuring the water’s wind-born perturbations and ripples across the skies and spaces.
It felt like the perturbations that one wishes would move through the intensive body of human-kind, a wave of waking to the necessities of adopting Love, adopting the reality of larger realities, the reality of the necessity of Freedom.
‘…we taught you… because you already knew…’ (Kung Fu 1972)
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