Abyssal Labs 3: Cissbury Ring, 05​.​05​.​13

Some new music from Simon Hopkins.

It features me in the mix on guitar. Taken from the same sessions that produced this AND this.

In keeping with Simon's ongoing project to produce meditative music (essentially Dark Ambient), this addresses notions of mindfulness in post-industrial society and looks at evolved solutions to deal with paradoxes inherent in any search for stillness within the noise.

It comes in varying lengths between 15 and 30 minutes to suit your needs.

Thanks and love to Simon for considering my efforts worthy enough to be used.

Boom Logistics - Fourth (2013)

Being such a Jack of all trades I'm still occasionally prone to making music with others, especially when asked nicely. At the end of last year I was proud to be asked to contribute to a couple of the projects currently underway by Simon Hopkins.

One of these - the Abyssal Labs project, which concentrates on industrial ambient drone work for urban meditational purposes, has already been mentioned on this blog. Soon to be released on his Bandcamp site, Fourth is, erm... the fourth Boom Logistics album which features contributions from Pete Marsh on double bass, Matt Walton on acoustic guitar and myself on electric guitar.

My parts were all laid down in Simon's front room in one very productive day last year (see pic above). A testament to the power of mindfulness! I was reasonably proud of my contributions, but Simon's worked long and hard on recontextualising them in a series of dark drifting pieces.

Several previews have been placed on Youtube in advance of the actual release, and here they are. Many thanks to Simon for making me sound like a proper musician.

Drone, boom, bash...

Apropos of nothing - I still do music. usually in the wee small hours. And it shows.
But by way of a reminder: I tend to put all my stuff on Soundcloud.

In the last week, a pair of new bits - Blue At The Throat is a guitar/loop/live improv-type affair. All guitar:




...and in contrast, Blowhard is composed entirely from the sound of one foghorn, a murder of crows and a processed radio. Sorry about that... :

Robert Wilson's 'Walking' - Holkham Beach

'I'm walkin' by myself, I hope you understand…' Jimmy Rogers: Walkin' By Myself

Last Sunday I took part in what i can only describe as Robert Wilson's latest project. I say 'project' because Walking - a three mile-long experiential trail across some of Norfolk's most incredible countryside defies categorisation. Part-installation, part-meditation, part-theatre, it was first staged in Holland and is segmented by 'events' in the form of structures and sound sculptures dotted along a route marked by white stones. Before the walk begins you are given specific instructions about ejecting any phones, cameras, gadgetry or timekeeping devices that would distract; walking speed (slow); and the length of the whole experience (about five and a half hours). The entire walk is conducted alone, at a minimum of 50 yards apart from fellow punters.

I mention these instructions because it seemed to be on this point that myself and other walkers were at odds. I overheard one woman describing it as a 'metaphor for fascism'. That was a shock to the system for someone who felt as though he'd been given a glimpse of nature's innermost mysteries…

I loved the whole thing. But then, I'm no stranger to the benefits of what both CBT practitioners and Buddhists call mindfulness. I practise meditation (almost) daily and have long since been a (and I hate to use this word) believer in the positive power of this 'work' on oneself. But I'm not here to proselytise, but to offer my own explanation as to why my fellow travellers (as well as Susannah Clapp in her Guardian review: but we'll get to that) found Walking to be such a disappointment.

Firstly, my own experience was issued instructions to walk at a snail's pace, feel the rhythm and 'let 'the way show itself' in silent contemplation, was pretty bog-standard fare for anyone who's done walking meditation or done mindfulness exercises. Slowing the body and maximising the sense of 'nowness' such solitude incurs run counter to our regular urban pace. Meditation seeks to remove past or future and allow the individual to fully engage with the here and now. Wilson's piece sought to share this potential with anyone willing to surrender themselves for once to something that challenged old habits.

Beginning with complete darkness, opening onto something that looked like a set from an unreleased Jodorowsky film, where a giant black pit embedded in sand offered up an ominous rumble. It was here that my first shock came. Other walkers stood in a circle around the pit, waiting to be led to the next stage. Suddenly a loud click and beep was heard. yes, the man next to me had smuggled along a huge Nikon SLR. The jarring sense of being wrenched from what felt like an arcane sharing ritual was huge. At LAST I understood what Robert Fripp hates so much about people photographing or taping a performance. Almost immediately, I wondered if he was a plant. He became more brazen and started walking around the huge enclosure while the rest of us stood as still as caryatids.

But from that point all was solitude and peace. Passing reed beds, their rustling defining the space around you, while waterfowl explored the huge blue and white skies, you entered dark green copses, crossed alien dunescapes carpeted with luminous mosses until you reached a glade filled with song.

The song, as has been widely publicised, is actually a recording by Tom Waits of crickets, slowed to the speed that matches the equivalent a human lifespan. The result does really sound angelic. Played by speakers hidden in trees as you take a rest, it quickly fades as you finally enter the strange, gothic pine forests that dot the sand's edge at Holkham Beach. By this point you're noticing everything to a degree that's almost hallucinatory. Every footstep has its own sound, every spider web is a miracle, every gnarl of bark a landscape. Small red berries positively GLOW. Who needs mushrooms?

Finally you approach the sea, through a huge mud cone with its own ambient soundtrack. I won't reveal the last masterstroke, except to say that you're left literally floating under the sheltering sky, with only the roar of the faraway waves anchoring you to the earth.

Does that sound like a metaphor for fascism? Just checking…

So why did people object? A simple explanation was that they were mostly retirement-age tourists who'd picked up the leaflet about Walking from some local cafe/information centre/hotel lobby,holiday cottage and had thought it looked like a reasonable way to spend an afternoon. It was heavily advertised as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival.

But leaving aside the counter argument that even the leaflet was pretty clear about WHAT Walking was about (and the conditions it imposed), I think that there are even more interesting reasons for negativity.

Returning to Susannah Clapp, there's certainly a case for saying that Walking failed on several levels. Wilson himself often feels his own projects fail in some way. That, for me, makes the whole thing more worthwhile. I like art with flaws. And it's obvious that Clapp was sold a pup in that Walking isn't actually an art installation. The paucity (as she sees it) of the number of 'events' along the way, makes her feel rightly ripped off even if she does seem to have got some positive stuff from the experience.

But you get the sense that it was more the PACE that annoyed her. The same woman that used the F word also seemed horrified that WHEN ASKED to walk slowly and alone people had GONE ALONG with this 'brainwashing'. Furthermore it had meant, apparently, that she couldn't 'stop to look at things'. I was flabbergasted. Ample warning had been given and yet it had angered her, and surely the slowness meant you saw far MORE than normal, albeit in a gradually, constantly transforming landscape.

On this point I think Wilson should take some responsibility as well. Even though he'd been specific about Walking's aims in interviews in the national press, perhaps more on-site instruction would have either prepared, or completely repelled doubters. Yet, even irritation is a reaction, and maybe it's just as valid as my hippy-drippy take. Man.

More fascinating is the possibility that Wilson had merely shown smug fuckers like me that we're right about mindfulness. One thing I know, after half hour daily sessions of attempting to do NOTHING, is that it is hard. REALLY hard. I read this recently and it reminded me that to sit for extended periods can be like doing 15 rounds with yourself. You emerge bruised and raw. And it's that rawness that means you're getting somewhere. No one wants to let go of the construct, the myth of ourselves and truly face what we are, as well as see the world in all its real beauty. And when we're made to do it it can often result in anger. It leads to stuff like this, too.

That is why a slow walk, through a world of wonders we so rarely see, might not be the thing for you after all.

Here's The Jam to make my final point:

The Wheel

Hurrah for this. It still pops up in my mind on a regular basis. posted by Tom Coates six years ago, it signifies a kind of lost Golden Age to me, when the people I worked with, at least tangentially (they worked in the same office) were making great leaps forward in online thinking. While I hardly understood what Tom, Dan or any of those other brainy guys were doing, I was infected by their self belief - a quality I seem to have a minus amount of - and the way in which they taught me not only to use the web but how to enter into the spirit of the web. I didn't pretend to understand most of it, and I doubt Tom even remembers me, but this picture stands for something i still believe in.

I'm quite aware that the WAY I use the web these days is positively neanderthal, being the equivalent not really of a quill versus a touch screen interface, but more like some cave man banging his head against a cave wall and writing something crude in his own blood. But I did at least learn a little about the semantic web, the possibilities of what we quaintly used to call web 2.0 and erm… alt tags. A swerve of events and I'm working in social media: a field that is fabulously buzzy and equally venal. In fact more venal, let's be honest, now. I'm not, and have never have really been in the business of selling things. That doesn't mean to say I haven't DONE it. I was, after all, a bookseller for over a decade. But looking through these pages i wonder if anyone thinks I'm just being a second-rate PR company? Which brings me onto this:

In the tradition of middle-aged self-examination, I've been trying to reassess what exactly 1) this blog, 2) my photography or 3) my music are FOR. As Balthus said:
[Art] is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

The first of the three is best answered here. Not that this is in any way definitive, merely an attempt to make it clearer for myself. If you flick back through the virtual pages of this stupid thing you'll find that most reviews or commentaries - post-my questionable Lost-watching days - are mainly positive. They're about things that I loved and want you to see if you have eyeballs and opposable thumbs. How bland…

Well, yes and no. I do seem to have a gift for the hyperbolic. Everything's 'fantastic' and amazing' and 'genius'. This is now often hatefully branded as 'passion'. Everyone must now have 'passion' for his or her field. It's what helps a sad little blog like this become widely read. 'What comes across is the passion for X': how many times do you hear that a day? Food, clothing, the manufacture of dog biscuits. They can all be done with passion.

Well, my point is that the word's overused (in much the same way that 'genius' is) - and that this blog's full of 'passion'. So where's the critical distance that I grew up worshipping in MY favourite cultural critics? I read a few of my old reviews and I see a flash of that sometimes: the ability to constructively pull apart a faulty mechanism and point out its flaws with fairness and erm… passion. But it mainly got me into trouble.

At some point in the early part of the 21st century, in tandem with the rise of the internet as our prime means of communicating, we lost the ability to handle such stuff, often it seemed for fear of offending the people who were possibly passionate for something that you passionately hated. The result of this cultural shift was the awful five star 'marking' systems that blight arts pages. While the writing's often exemplary (YOU try summing up anything in less than 250 words) it still leads to lazy reductionism - three being bad and four good - for the reader. This is why I always hated the Observer Music Monthly. It made everything seem great. But everything isn't great. 90% of it is bad or mediocre. 9% is perfectly nice. And maybe 1% is truly marvellous.

I've long-since decided to eschew some quixotic crusade for a critical press that tells it like it is. I even understand why any culture needs to prop up its own infrastructure by constantly coaxing people to try new stuff. Most people don't consume it, or at least only a fraction of what's on offer. Culture needs all the help it can get. But I now realise that this blog should 'fess up to the fact that in most cases my hymns to the latest film/play/book/album/gig that gets me scribbling are there because I genuinely love whatever it is. This blog is also not a brothel. It will not sell you stuff that is useless: only recommend stuff that you're free to reject, or disagree with. And above all; stuff that I do really feel has some kind of worth.

The 'irritability' quote in the blog title (from this) doesn't imply that I want to be angry all the time: find pleasure in being mean or gratuitously negative. In fact, it means that I react to those things that make me feel something. pleasant or unpleasant. Also, as a man who truly believes in the concept of Karma, I fail to see the point of using this blog to merely bitch about all the things that make my life, your life, anyone's life more of a living hell than it already is.

I'll still reserve the right to write more critical prose. Ridley Scott's Prometheus was such a giant let-down that I felt compelled to at least point out WHY. If only, again, more for my OWN purposes: writing does help you think more clearly. And I've actually held off writing about Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie, just for the reason that I loved it so much that I would easily exhibit more of that puppy dog passion. But in the end, you'll just have to trust me. If I write about something in glowing terms, I mean it. I really do. my next post will be about two films about London that I haven't seen (one by Julien Temple, one by Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting) and may contain references to the Olympic opening ceremony (despite my promises not to write about the Olympics): I'll probably love 'em. Just warning you...