Room40 publishes ‘Aki Onda: I Lost My Memory’

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An artist’s book has been published to coincide with Room40‘s digital re-release of the three volumes of Aki Onda‘s Cassette Memories sound project. The limited edition 23-page ‘I Lost My Memory‘ contains Aki Onda’s photography and his story behind Cassette Memories. I supplied a supplementary essay entitled ‘Tape, Psyche, Montage and Magic: The Cassette Memories of Aki Onda’ exploring Onda’s work and the esoteric uses of tape. Some further information can be read on the main Miraculous Agitations blog.

‘I Lost My Memory‘ also reveals, for the first time, the long-lost identity of an anonymous author writing in 1932, who battled memory fugue to pool his memories for a book of the same title: ‘I Lost My Memory: The Case as the Patient Saw It‘ (published by Faber & Faber).

Aki Onda: I Lost My Memory is out now on Room40 and includes download codes for Cassette Memories I, II and III.

Joris Van de Moortel, noise/music chemistry, and The Wire magazine on the artist’s palette

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Extreme detail of Van de Moortel’s ‘Bomb Culture’ (2019)

Noise, forever fizzing at the edges of musical vocabulary, forms the topic of an essay I’ve written for Joris Van de Moortel‘s new artist’s book ‘A Dubious Pilgrimage‘, out now. Van de Moortel is an artist/musician who terms his performances ‘Messes’, riffing on the Catholic Mass but with messier sacraments that assail guitars, amplifiers and other unsuspecting instruments to the point of overload.

The essay is titled “Van de Moortel’s Goception in the Mess: Byways in the History of Noise’s Ongoing Transmutation into Music”, and this noise/music transmutation is viewed through the lens of the literary work of a Victorian chemist and would-be poet John Carrington Sellars titled ‘Chemistianity (Popular Knowledge of Chemistry)‘ (1873). The made-up word ‘goception’ is deployed by Sellars in that work to signify chemical reaction – a neologism precariously invented by him to achieve poetic flow.

With chemical reactions – or ‘goceptions’ – in mind, a longer blogpost over at the main Miraculous Agitations blog examines some instances where artists have used physical copies of The Wire magazine as raw ingredient in artworks. The Wire is a catalyst Joris Van de Moortel often uses in his creative work, most explicitly in his ‘A love affair with Excess’ series where distressed snippets of text from The Wire‘s ‘Excess All Areas’ special 2019 issue are squirrelled into mixed-media artworks. My ‘Bomb Culture’ history of musical explosions text was thereby transformed into an artwork infused with Van de Moortel’s own performative lore.

Strangely, a Wire magazine feature I’d written eight years previously was artfully collaged in Allen Fisher‘s concrete poetry book ‘SPUTTOR‘ (2014). But maybe this isn’t so strange given The Wire situating itself within experimental culture? The fact that I’m by no means a regular contributor to the magazine suggests this is just the tip of an iceberg, and that artistic, collage, poetic/concretic, decoupage and personalisation uses of The Wire are to be expected?  An interesting topic to investigate…

Read more at the main Miraculous Agitations blog.  Joris Van de Moortel’s ‘A Dubious Pilgrimage‘ is available now.

Symbiotic processes

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A blogpost over at the main Miraculous Agitations blog introduces two very different projects I recently contributed to. One of these projects is titled Project Symbiosis, and, as it happens, the process of symbiosis forms the underlying theme of that blogpost (which is prefaced by a meditation on perceived ‘impossibilities’ pervading acts of promotion in my own recent wrigglings).

Project Symbiosis is a CD+booklet curated by Brighton-based audiovisual artist/author/filmmaker/circuit-constructor Ian Helliwell. It contains ten different interpretations of the same graphic score, including the original recording by the score’s composer, Malcolm Pointon. The exploratory score, Symbiosis, was published in Practical Electronics magazine in 1975 as an exercise in electronic music-making, intended to be realised on a ‘Minisonic’ synthesiser – its circuit also published by the magazine a year earlier. A supplementary booklet gives details on all the different versions (available via Public Information). I supplied a microtonal version of Symbiosis.

From the experimental to the (nominally) chart-bound: this year I was given the opportunity, to paraphrase David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, to patch myself back into the world’s mixing board of humanity by reworking a radio-friendly track about human relationships (whatever they are), entitled ‘Floundering’ by musician and sound artist Kalou aka Samuel Shelton Robinson. It appears on Kalou’s new album The Sculpture Garden, idealised as a cassette release (but also available as download). Kalou’s output ranges from postmodern experimental montage to quirky pop, zested with neurosis. The Sculpture Garden is Kalou’s most commercial release, and it rather obscures its creator’s deeper interests in offbeat sound engineering.

Ian Helliwell, and surprisingly, Kalou too, touched upon issues of visibility, audience engagement and ‘undergroundness’ on two separate broadcasts on Resonance FM last month, on William English’s Wavelength.

Noise, drama, Jeremy Beadle’s noise research, the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, and the earliest published story by Mark Gatiss

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As a freelancer, many pitches and proposals become little more than yelps into an abyss. At the end of 2019 I’ve decided to relinquish a continually rejected article by posting it in full at the main Miraculous Agitations blog for people to read. Ironically, it’s about noise and the ways anti-noise campaigners promote their cause. In fact, like a nest of rejected Russian Matryoshka dolls, the blogpost also contains the essence of my BBC radio documentary pitch on anti-noise campaigning which has been rejected in various forms over the years. In all, the text implicitly questions how we process noise – in all senses of the word – and the paradoxical ways that noise might be countered (with passing reference to the instrumentality of celebrity and popular culture), all presented via deep archive archaeology. The core of the piece concerns The Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, one of the ‘noisiest’ anti-noise campaigns ever seen in Britain, and something I’ve been collecting material on for many years.

The odd synchronicities that often arise whilst engaged in long-running archival research is also in evidence – subtle links between disparate sources; ethereal silver cords amidst the noise. One unusual discovery was of the earliest published story by stage and television’s Mark Gatiss – ‘The Anti-Noise Machine’ – an extraordinarily rich science-fiction nugget penned by the writer/actor aged eleven.

Read more at miraculousagitations.blogspot.com : “Noise, anti-noise, drama, Jeremy Beadle’s private noise research, the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, and the earliest published story by Mark Gatiss (set in the year 2023)”

‘Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester’

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Filmmaker William English (of ResonanceFM‘s radio show Wavelength) has just released an artist’s book loosely themed around Leicester, or rather, Leicester-as-a-state-of-mind. I worked on its graphic design, and even supplied a rather discursive foreword. It’s titled ‘Perfect Binding: Made in Leicester‘ and to encapsulate the essence of it is tricky, but a new blogpost over at the main Miraculous Agitations blog offers some perspectives on it. Anybody interested in the psychologies behind mid-20th century counterculture will find much to chew upon.

‘Thwarted Histories of Electronic Music’ @ Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology salon, Copenhagen

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Last week I gave a presentation titled ‘Thwarted Histories of Electronic Music’ at a special sound archaeology salon organised by the Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology as part of the Gong Tomorrow festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. There’s a long and digressive blogpost covering it on the main Miraculous Agitations blog.

My talk was about the pre-history of electronic music, but also acknowledged the ongoing dynamics that bring about thwarted histories in the historical continuum. Thwarted histories are discovered whilst scrounging across auctionhouses, second-hand bookshops, bins, and other venues at culture’s tail end – the histories I presented were excavated in this way… They included Johann Baptist Schalkenbach’s electrical music, Alfred Graham’s Victorian feedback device, the first electronic sequencer of 1925, and Delawarr Laboratories thought-to-frequency Multi-Oscillator. It has been an enduring source of surprise to me that these unknown episodes I’ve excavated have not found wider interest among publishers (I did self-publish a comb-bound edition of ‘The Magnetic Music of the Spiritual World‘ in 2015) and in the light of this I’ve come to theorise that ‘thwarted histories’ have an almost occult aspect wherein their essence of neglect can somehow persist into the present-day.  The question is: how can this thwarting force be grappled with?  Possible answers were touched upon during other talks at the salon…

Read an extended summary of the salon over at the Miraculous Agitations blog.

A pre-postmodern “wild bit of writing” in 1860

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A new blogpost over at the main Miraculous Agitations blog examines a few 1860s publications of the Brighton printer and publisher J. F. Eyles, and reveals a very curious ‘pre-postmodern’ text (described as a “wild bit of writing”) appearing in an 1860 issue of Eyles’ newspaper, The Brighton Examiner (one of the many interesting newspapers not yet available online as a digitised resource, currently existing only as restricted/fragile volumes held at The British Library).

eyles-banner

The Delaware Road : Ritual & Resistance trailer

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The Buried Treasure label’s monumental project ‘The Delaware Road‘ returns this August, 2019. The multimedia extravaganza previously unleashed its haunted wonders within a time-capsule-like decommissioned nuclear bunker in 2017, combining folklore, science, theatre and magic (under the auspices of the shadowy ‘Corporation’) and of course there were plentiful sonic emissions! (Radionics Radio was among the Corporation’s worshipful, diffusing tones in the medical bay).

This year, the psychoacoustical-psychogeographical jamboree returns to a secret military base located just a dowsing-rod-wobble away from Stonehenge. ‘The Delaware Road: Ritual & Resistance’ will be jam-packed with thrills – tickets are now available here.  There will be an extraordinary collection of artists involved.

Buried Treasure released a teaser trailer which happens to be soundtracked by a Radionics Radio piece ‘Frequency Cluster’ (live at the Delaware Road) available on the label’s Creeping Cinquefoil compilation.

A line-up of the acts is viewable on the tickets page – surprise additions are expected! In a rare live outing, the as-was Sound and Music-sponsored Radionics Radio joins the happening with a special one-off electroacoustic microtonal diffusion (more details soon), once again bringing the Delawarr Laboratories radionic frequency-diffusion techniques to The Delaware Road…

‘Picasso 1932’ @ The Tate Modern – Audio Guide

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The headphone audio guide at the Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Picasso 1932: Love, Fame & Tragedy plays host to a medley of new original musical pieces I composed (on instruments both post-electronic and more conventional sorts) with the complex dynamics of Picasso’s inner life at this period firmly in mind. The audio guide was produced by the talented Samuel Shelton Robinson.

Picasso 1932 runs from the 8th March to the 9th September.