| SUMMARY... |
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| Format : Compact
Disc |
| Catalogue Number
: META21CD |
| Label : Metamatic
Records |
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| Release Date :
25
February 2009 |
| Country : United
Kingdom |
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You move on and
unknowingly leave ghosts behind. Memories, photographs, notebooks,
recordings. Evidence of other lives. Former self walking down
lost streets. Occasionally you meet again.
In a room sealed up at the end of the last century, an old radio
tuned into vanished stations. Music from twenty years ago. Electricity
and ghosts.
This was Spitalfields and Shoreditch, East London early 1980's.
Derelict. Layers of soot blackened the walls. Dennis Severs,
Gilbert and George, Raf Samuels and a few others living there.
Poorest part of London. Plague pits under the streets, Roman
temples underneath, pagan temples under those. The eradicating
clamour of Commercial Road and Shoreditch High Street. Out of
all this mayhem of memory and time, a Hawksmoor church rimed
with dirt and soot rising into the grey skies.
Our building had been an Edwardian department store, then empty
for fifteen years. Trees growing from the upper storeys when
we moved in. Corner of Holywell Lane and Shoreditch High Street.
I built a studio in the basement and began recording. I remember
trying to make connections in this little laboratory, and always
feeling I'd failed. Lost between synthesizers and hymns and cities,
churches, electricity and memory. So I put the tapes away and
forgot about them.
All those fragmented elements - attempts to capture ambiences
remembered from singing in a church when I was a child in industrial
Lancashire, another lost city. Trying somehow to draw lines in
and out of all the other fragments and glimpses - Victorian psychic
experiments that eventually arrived at electricity radio and
television. Trellick Tower as a church of blackened modernity.
The Paris Arcades, Parc Monceau, Avenham Colonnade, Suicide Bridge
and Electricity Pylons. Architectural Music. City as Memory.
Derelict Lancashire mills built on patterns from ancient Rome
seen again in New York. Electrochemical recordings of the dead
producing glowing media ghosts - Marilyn, Bogie, Cary Grant,
Rita Heyworth, voices of TS Elliot, WH Auden. Photographs and
films of demolished buildings, lost versions of New York and
London.
In Central Manhattan in the 1970's I'd made notes to write hymns
for buildings and streets. Wanting to connect ancient embedded
church music to modern cities via electronics, without disrupting
continuity. The continuity was the point. Ghosts and electricity.
Drawing lines between Lancashire, Rome, New York, Paris and London.
Trellick Tower and Brakhage. Film as a bioelectrical medium.
Discovering the unrecognised present. Walking and dreaming.
Geometries of coincidence, recognition, connection. Later discovering
fragments of writing and ideas that chimed with many of these
in Sinclair, Doctorow, Burroughs, Auster, Brakhage, Ballard,
McLuhan, Weiczs-Bryant, Kneale, Pessoa, Ackroyd, and De Bord,
among others.
The studio occasionally flooded an inch or so at the street end,
even when the Thames water table was not high. Surveyor said
this was the old Holy well overflowing. Water arriving from rainfall
somewhere else.
Some Archeologists had recently caught diseases from excavated
plague pits nearby. The ground and the air seemed permeated with
resonant molecules conducted by Thames water and the holy well
and London traffic and God knows what else. All swirling slowly
around the walls of the building in the streets and underground.
Permeating the entire area.
These recordings were made in that time and place. Discarded
songs from a lost city. Psychic electricity reaching between
buried streets and particles of magnetised iron, on tape made
from the solidified remains of prehistoric forests. Carried on
electromagnetic impulses, crackling through time and place, into
the air again. |
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