Dolente … Dolore: The Inferno of Malcolm Lowry

Alan Dunn recently asked me to contribute some music to The Lighthouse Invites the Storm, a festival of celebration for Malcolm Lowry, running around Liverpool from the 17th to 29th of July. Below is the fruit of my labour, along with a description of the rationale for the piece, which is also available for free download from my bandcamp (which includes a PDF of the liner notes).

Alan had chanced to hear a track from Hesperian Garden while simultaneously auditioning Balam Ronan’s field recordings from the Mexican Día de los Muertos celebrations. He asked if I’d be interested in contributing something hallucinogenic and mescal-fuelled, so here is my response: an electroacoustic re-imagining of Balam’s documents; a trembling, drunken dream with flashes of heaven and hell – the celestial and chthonic – punctuated by the sound of carnivalesque street bands drifting in through an open window…

Not desiring to literally interpret Lowry’s multi-faceted, ‘churrigueresque’ work, I focused on a number of images that I found potent, both from Lowry’s text, and from the biographical detail and academic interpretation surrounding it.

Sustain//Decay

I am pleased to say that I have an article published in Void Front Press’ new collection Sustain//Decay. Edited by Owen Coggins (Open University) and James Harris, this 289-page collection brings together writings on drone music and mysticism by a diverse range of authors, amongst them Kristina Wolfe, Kim Cascone, Eyvind Kang, J.-P. Caron and Drone Box representing perhaps the speculative and luminescent side of drone mysticism, while Coggins, Harris, Absentology (Mark Horvath & Adam Lovasz), Steven Shakespeare, Joseph Norman and others explore the heavier, doomier side: rounding off the collection with an interview with Sunn O)))’s Atilla Csihar.

My piece is titled Inner-Sense and Experience: Drone Music, Esotericism and the Hieroeidetic Field, and looks at the role of the esoteric imagination the production of drone music. It develops Arthur Verluis’ concept of the hieroeidetic, which can be described as the imaginative space that exists between artist/audience and the art object:

Echoes from Hesperian Gardens

I’ve just released Hesperian Garden, a 28-minute EP comprised of recordings I made in preparation for Listen to the Voice of Fire back at the start of March. You can listen and download at my Bandcamp page (- and I’ve also added an option to download all Bandcamp releases in one fell swoop for £14!).

Listening for the Voice of Fire

I am pleased to say that I will be participating in Aberystwyth University’s Listen to the Voice of Fire event on the 3rd of March at the National Library of Wales. There’s a pretty diverse range of musicians and academics involved – and tickets can be found here. I am pleased to say that Our Glassie Azoth are on the bill – and indeed, the whole event is organised by Mr. Glassie Azoth himself, Dafydd Roberts. OGA was a great inspiration to me during the early 2000s. Experimenting with an Amen, a split between OGA and side-project Alphane Moon is a particular favourite – especially the way it mixes alchemical imagery, drone and noise, interspersed with sweet, whispy Nick Drake-like miniatures.

Catching up…

Things have been unspeakably busy for the last few months! Doing a PhD part-time, alongside teaching and working on the new Hawthonn album, provisionally entitled Flood, has meant the blog has lapsed a bit. However, I hope to write in some detail over the Christmas break about on of my recent obsessions: the music of Kristina Wolfe.

The Bright Sound Behind the Sound

I am very pleased to say that my article The Bright Sound Behind the Sound: Real-World Music, Symbolic Discourse and the Foregrounding of Imagination has been published by Interference: A Journal of Audio Cultures.

This piece develops from a paper read at the Alchemical Landscape panel at the 2015 ASLE-UKI conference at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. I must thank Yvonne Salmon and James Riley for inviting me to present – their general support and enthusiasm has been hugely encouraging over the last year. It is also framed as a response to Kim Cascone’s Transcendigital Imagination, which highlights the potential of digital workflows to deprecate imaginative involvement with the source material.

My article is quite critical of Schaeffer’s overly reductive interpretation of phenomenology and the consequences of this on academic discourse around music developing from real-world sounds. I approached my response to this issue from the standpoint of Romantic poetic consciousness whose tenets are congruent with Kim’s use of terms such as ‘anima mundi’ and ‘imaginal’, and whose assumptions on being and nature persist as ‘givens’ amongst many artists – myself included. Of course, alternate phenomenologies which incorporate personal and subjective response, such as hermeneutic phenomenology, could also be entertained as alternatives to the forced objectivity of the Schaefferian interpretations, although I did want to highlight the particular ‘gnostic’ or revelatory experience at the heart of the poetic encounter with the world: an area I am currently exploring through the methods of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) in a new paper.

Below I have pulled out some other posts on this blog which may also make useful companion pieces to this article:

Merlin, Mellotrons and the Poetry of Consciousness

Imaginal Acoustics: On Subtle Listening, Sound-Shapes and Time

Circumambulating the Black Theatre

Robert Fludd: Of Music and Mind

 

Talking and Exhibiting

I hope the following might provide some distraction while my beloved country tears itself apart. At present I’m for embracing cosmic anarchy and seeking solace in the transcendent: the only territory impervious to toxic political manoeuvring!

Anyway, plenty of news: Hawthonn’s first interview was published in The Quietus. We must thank Russell Cuzner for concisely editing what was quite a long and far-ranging conversation.

… of course, this was coincident with the release of our second album, Sea-Spiral Spirit, on Reverb Worship. The physical edition is now sold out (although there will hopefully be second edition), although the digital edition is still available and includes a 15-minute bonus track.

Fragments

This blog has been a bit quiet of late, although that’s not to say that things haven’t been bubbling away behind the scenes: expect quite a lot of news in June in the form of a new Hawthonn album, our first interview, a new academic paper, and possibly even an art exhibition… or two!

Until then, here’s a little summary of other things that have been going on over the last few months!

First, I’m very honoured that Ben Chasny has created a page dedicated to my Hexadic compositions on his Six Organs of Admittance website. Working with the Hexadic system over the last year or so has been a great experience – whereas much of my early music was (poly)modal, Angelystor and my studies into Josef Hauer have seen me adopting a more atonal language. His book on the Hexadic System fit perfectly into this arc of development. As I explain on the page, I often use transposed versions of each Hexadic field to create two voices. Sometimes these are independent, sometimes they function in terms of melody and harmony.

A Hexadic field and centre tones mapped to keyboard.

The pieces on Sorath were all very formally written, exploring various approaches to the system in a fairly methodical way. More recently I’ve been exploring approaches to improvising within a series of Hexadic progressions. To this end, I’ve been writing a little Max for Live patch to help quickly explore Hexadic material and to facilitate swift improvisations on the same. The results have been quite engaging, here’s an example:

2015 in Text and Sound

2015 has been a very, very busy, but rewarding year. Here’s a little recap on some things that unfolded over the last 12 months.

Writing

Being involved in The Alchemical Landscape project really pushed my academic writing this year. I think The Bright Sound Behind the Sound is probably my best and most coherent writing to date, and will be preparing it shortly for journal submission. It was also a pleasure to submit work to two independent projects: Phil Barrington’s The Golden Age of Bloodsports (collected writings of Jhonn Balance), and Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. The final paper of the year, “Good Books to Call By” enjoyed a very positive reception at Exploring the Extraordinary 7 and marks a new series of avenues to explore. Finally, I worked with my long-time colleague Nigel Morgan on Parametric Composition a comprehensive guide to algorithmic composition, which you can preview here and buy here!

The Many-Coloured Earth: Visionary Creativity, Imaginal Landscapes and the Hermeneutic Imagination [Academia.edu]

The Bright Sound Behind the Sound: Real-World Music, Symbolic Discourse and the Foregrounding of Imagination [Academia.edu]

“Good Books to Call By”: Speech and Materiality in the Necromantic Workings of Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis [Academia.edu]

‘For Learning, Not for Show: Esoteric Books from the Coil Estate’ in The Golden Age of Bloodsports [Academia.edu || PDF]

‘The Haunted Fields of England: Diabolical Landscapes and the Genii Locorum’ in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies [Buy]

Sounding

Layla and I are both really pleased by the reception of Hawthonn, which we released in April and has been positively reviewed in The Quietus, Active Listener, Forestpunk and Modern Mythology, and also made #21 on The Quietus’ top albums of 2015. The ‘limited’ digital edition of 72 copies including Holophones (80 minutes of bonus audio) and the journal of our workings has sold out, but the unlimited edition is still available!

We’re working on some new material for either an album of EP before embarking on another major themed project later in 2016.

Another highlight of 2015 has been experimenting with Ben Chasny’s Hexadic system. The system was inspiring in many ways, and I wrote a two part blog to complement some of the ideas that I found it evoked. The collected Hexadic experiments are available on Sorath, and it was my intention to create an album that demonstrated the flexibility of Ben’s system away from the fretboard… although I hope to sit down with six strings in the near future. Six Organs’ recent Hexadic II is getting great reviews, too!

Not sure 2016 will be quite so insanely productive, but… we’ll see!

Field Studies & Search Ensembles

Some recent bits of news:

Andy Paciorek, illustrator and instigator of the Folk Horror Revival forum, has recently edited a 498-page book of writing and interviews around the idea of ‘folk horror’.

Contributors include Adam Scovell, John Coulthart (writing on David Rudkin), Sharron Kraus, Gary Lachman (on WIlson’s The Outsider, and also interviewed himself), Grey Malkin, Chris Lambert, and more. There are also interviews with Kim Newman, Philip Pullman, Drew Mulholland… so, if you like pagan things, landscapes, the uncanny et al, take a look. It’s quite cheap and any profits will be donated to environmental, wildlife and community projects undertaken by The Wildlife Trusts!

I have a piece included called The Haunted Fields of England: Diabolical Landscapes and the Genii Locorum, which uses the idea of the diabolisation of pagan landscape features to trace the development of the genius loci from semi-benevolent tutelar daimons of Antiquity, to the ghouls and monsters of the Anglo-Saxon imagination and the treasure-guarding demons of Medieval and Tudor magic!

You can order Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies here.