After studying philosophy and being an absolute fiend for music, I was first encouraged into blogging in 2004 by Mark Fisher, whose K-punk blog created a massive stir and helped propel some of Mark's best and most important writing. In the meantime, I had moved from South Wales where I had grown up, and via the midlands for a number of years ended up in London. For a while making improvised music with the Eidetic Band (some stuff came out through Bo'Weavil). In the intervening time, making music and writing have been a mainstay of focus, while also exploring some visual arts techniques. Rattle Journal (edited by Jon K. Shaw and Tom Robinson) published a few pieces both fiction and otherwise, musically, the focus went to recording written songs to make available and more recently live performance with the Fear of Fluffing improvising artist collective of Hackney Wick. Solo work as Solar Violet https://solarviolet.bandcamp.com
(AR 2022)
space life in ambient electronic music (Part 1) Expressions of spaces I came across this great piece of music which is also a remix while recently checking in on the LA artist Deru (Bejamin Wynn) some of whose earlier co-credits have included amazing work and sound design on the Avatar /Korra US Anime series, as […]
Drawing by Artist Marc Ngui It seems to me that a very useful concept in philosophy is affect. This is something other than the everyday way we use or come across the word. I thought it would be helpful to put this definition up here. From Brian Massumi’s introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and […]
Intensive relations and sound (a paper) Felt like a good time to post a copy of a paper on sound I wrote some years ago, having found it coming up a few times in exchanges recently. It was written for a symposium as part of the Cybersonica Festival in 2005, although when I re-read […]
Throughout Neil Young’s 2012 autobiography Waging Heavy Peace, he reserves his most potent cosmic utterances for talking about Crazy Horse, the electric group which has backed him since the mid sixties and with whom he intimates if not directly references the experience of sonic journies into the furthest reaches. This though is a section […]
‘4 Way is empty. Use it: it never needs filling. An abyss so deep it seems ancestor to the ten thousand things, it blunts edges, loosens tangles, softens glare, mingles dust. A clarity so clear it only seems real, whose child could it be? Apparently it precedes gods and creators.’ I’ve posted links to David […]
What an amazing episode of the old children’s programme Willo the Wisp from the beginning of the 80’s. Moog the (proto-/semi-/pseudo-) dog arrives at abstract thought for the first time and then discovers humour in the same vein before being trapped by the nasty Televisual-witch Evil Edna, who amazingly convinces him to trap himself in […]
Pixies changed things, when they came along. I recently put together a playlist for a friend and it’s been amazing to be immersed once again with their spectacularly punchy, brilliantly melodic music that edges between pop and harsh, screeching theatre of experience. They’re also credited with bringing loud-quiet-loud approach to playing live which among other […]
While walking through the desert of London’s interstitial spaces at night and troubled by something I had encountered, I found myself composing a response to Laurie Anderson’s wonderful track Walking and Falling. We had forgotten you, And we had dreamed you, but we couldn’t remember you, We had forgotten you, And we had […]
Female singers in the warping planes of tone Part 2 (and Part 1) Playlist link The idea of a playlist can take on different forms, although I feel the most important thing is simply to remember that each song is an open door and at a different cast or angle of the day or night, […]
I was extremely fortunate to be able to catch Indonesian duo Senyawa recently at Café Oto. It’s rare to hear things this good. The story of originating elements in their sound appears to have been a kind of break-out towards avant garde and experimental music while maintaining a strong feeling for the tranditional, folk forms […]
Part 1 The album Broadcast and Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age gives us sounds which are warped and blended to form songs and other mysterious, evaporated fictions arriving as if by faded and semi-arcane means of transmission. It grasps at the outermost of our shared senses and memories of magical stories […]
Female singers in the warping planes of tone (Part 1) (note about Youtube*) Originally, this was going to be posted as a playlist with a few additional notes, but as a task it quickly took on its own dimension – involving questions that arise from listening to the songs of some extraordinary female singers from […]
Here are some works I produced for an exhibition in 2014 at the Wentrup Gallery in Berlin by the artist Florian Meisenberg. I provided 30 pieces in all, which were printed in the gallery as part of a show reflecting a creative diversity and intertextuality of the digital age and the internet. […]
Having just recently caught up with Mr Robot season one (twice) am struck by the extraordinary edges that the story potentially gives us. The first thing to say is how well cast and acted it is, there are recurrently some excellent performances, none more so than Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, whose face is a […]
I became interested in the practise of Datamoshing a few years ago when it was drawn to my attention by a friend. There’s been an abiding and arguably necessary tradition of artists, technicians and others exploring a medium to the point of its own exploratory deconstruction (William Basinksi and his corroded audiotape pieces is an […]
reflectivewavelengths 