I grew up in the 80's in a small town and a village in South Wales near Swansea. I studyied philosophy at Warwick University in the 90's and as well as being where I discovered making music, it was where I was introduced to philosophies and those studying it which would influence the directions of my life profoundly. 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 to London, for a while making improvised music with the Eidetic Band (Rob Mullender, John Brown, James Dunn) some material from which came out through Bo'Weavil alongside various self releases. While making music and writing have been a mainstay of focus, I have also enjoyed exploring visual arts techniques. Rattle Journal (edited by Jon K. Shaw and Tom Robinson) published a few writing pieces both fiction and otherwise. Musically, the focus went to recording written songs to make available and more recently live performances with the Fear of Fluffing improvising artist collective of Hackney Wick (and the Butoh dancer Mai Nguyen Tri. I also made music and undertook some recording work for Mark Fisher and Justin Barton's audio-essays/sonic fictions londonunderlondon and On Vanishing Land (released via Hyperdub imprint Flatlines) as Farmers of Vega and Freakuency.
Solo work as Solar Violet https://solarviolet.bandcamp.com.
(AR 2024)
Having re-entered the world of work and paid jobbism (I found myself walking down the street the other day, seeing everyone coming into life as working beings at 8:00am) it was impossible not to see it as a vast seething time-set operationality existing within the context of the majority of human life and being. The […]
When I first started playing frisbee in the early 2000’s, I had no idea about it, in some respects I’ve still no idea. I recall not being that enthusiastic but it was something my friends were playing, so I would go along to Clissold park in north London and play in the summer and really […]
By the end of writing this piece, I had the feeling that my entire being was thrumming, vibrating with a kind of singular joy of being and feeling that really only the most special music creates. It was also that the feeling included a sense of luck, that to live in the same world as […]
The piece ‘Joan Clayton’ (below) from the soundtrack to the TV Series Penny Dreadful contains an elegiac movement in the middle of Abel Korzeniowski’s composition (which commences around 1:52) commemorating the death of the character of the old witch Joan Clayton, whose powerful turn in the show was always told in flashback. The movement also […]
I started writing this piece in January, got distracted, but felt it worth finishing, to share the discovery of a fine Australian duo; Kllo, made up of musicians Chloe Kaul and Simon Lam. They released their second album ‘Backwater’ late last year and it has some tracks which have resonated with me to a really […]
I love Lorca. I first found him through Linklater’s amazing Waking Life, where those haunting words rang like a clarion. ‘The living iguanas will bite those who do not dream…’ I had to know more, and soon found Bly‘s beautiful translation of the 1930 poem ‘The City that does not sleep’ (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne) when […]
I recently watched for the second time, the 2007 debut film by French writer-director Céline Sciamma, Les Naissance des Pieuvres (Birth of Octopuses) translated for its English language release as ‘Water Lillies’. I first saw this film about 8 years ago and was left with a feeling that it was one of those films whose […]
Thinking today about the idea of the ‘ghost in the machine’. The phrase was coined originally by Gilbert Ryle in 1949, to attack Cartesian dualism (the idea of the mind as a distinct, disembodied vector of the material of the body). It was subsequently used as an analogy to the functioning of more primitive parts […]
I was struck recently by the duality of the old adage ‘write what you know.’ For me this has always resonated in terms of beat, the beat of spaces, the beat of people and what they do, how they interact… what you know (within which is always also located what you do not know). But […]
I lacked any sense of 80’s sci fi story Ender’s Game until 2013 when the film adaptation came along. I had a quick look into it then, noted some controversy as a story and from comments of a homophobic nature by the author Orson Scott Card. It was notable also that the book has been […]
Here’s a fascinating 2013 piece by Andrew Robinson (theorist and activist) about Deleuze & Guattari’s work on the state and the relation with different forms of ‘war-machine’ (a problematised term he does well to unentangle) as well as the correlatives of social dynamics of relation and production (the dimension of the social field). Its written […]
Here is an interesting video about root networks of trees, fungally empowered that allow for a transferrence of material between the network. The arborescent is contrasted in Deleuze and Guattari with the rhizomatic. “… It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought… Thought is not arborescent, and […]
I recall hearing an interview with Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals once who commented that one of the most difficult gigs he’d ever been a part of with the group was when they had had to follow the band Suicide on stage to play live (I had no idea who they were at […]
Here’s a great and short video outlining some of the ways this incredible music has influenced western classical composition. There are other ways of considering how this music has been opened up to the outside, but the Gamelan has such a unique and extraordinary sonic presence that it is hard not to fall in love […]
Recently I found myself becoming more and more entwined with listening to some of the outstanding work from composer Max Richter, which brought with it a few thoughts about the classical church organ in certain forms of composition. Born in West Germany and then brought up in Bedford in the UK , Richter has come […]
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