4 JAN 2019 10:49:13

you're listening to the sounds of the back yard at 54 cambria road. sounds of planes, hens, wild birds, squirrels, traffic, a train, a fly, a drill. you're listening with new headphones. it's a bright blue day with light blue partially open sky, translucent skeins of clouds, a woodpigeon quite high, a plane quite high – crisp sharp sounds – little reverberation, as if the sound field is fully explicated to the listener: set out in space (ramified, branching, distributed) and imagined through time (extended, open protocols) with flapping and engines combining with crows, goldfinches, and aircraft operated by a variety of carriers. it opens into the future, but it involves very old motifs, familiar in landscapes back to the earliest records. none of these sounds have been heard before, but many of the elements are familiar. a small scratching sound in the right channel creates a kind of micro signature, something like the way a small set of stitches evokes a cryptic register of signification in the textile: Hidden Writings by Anni Albers. it's a kind of jittery oscillation like a heart flutter, you could say, scratchy and dry. this is not a tentative intervention. it is not a trial. it exists as a clear enunciation, yet barely noticeable under first inspection: a shift in timbre and speed. you can think of the yard as a textile and the calls and scratches on it as lines and patches. it is also a link that a line in a weaving has occurred over a long period and process, passage and re passage of the shuttle, operation and re operation of the levers holding apart the woof and the weft – really the clear execution of a plan long made and stored by the weaver when they set up the loom. the bad gardener also makes preparations for forms to emerge over time, through a combination of laziness and neglect together with plans (for forestry, woodland management, rewilding) partially understood and poorly implemented. the place is an explication of the threads that go into it, in the way a pot for Bernard Leach is an explication of the maker. it reveals everything about them. their aesthetic and ethical compositions can be imagined, on that basis, by reverse engineering – the pot – the wood in winter. the bones of the Park are visible, RC says of Stave Hill – on this basis we make our plans. your own practice is both cruder and more oblique, you think, you wonder – if that is accurate. on one hand the plans you execute are provisional and contradictory – you aim to leave the area alone and you go away. but then you come and plant some fruit trees along the edge. on the other hand, you tolerate long periods of indecision and inaction while you are distracted, waiting with one ear out for something to present itself. that posture of attention, you think – which comes and goes – alternating, you can say, between acute sensitivity and gross indifference – bland habit enters and strolls around the property like an agent – also: periods of distress render the whole thing inaudible, the way you can miss whole sections of a piece when your mind is unconsciously overtaken by other things – you return to a different situation

– in this way you might experience the yard

– or some other way.. the opening of possibilities within the ambit of the yard is, perhaps, its rough undeclared overall desire and the impulse for its distribution. the limits of those openings – the way those openings alternate with occlusion at each moment, is also the occasion of its un–ease its frustrations and its incompletion

the flat world as elaborated by Meinong and brought so evocatively into focus by Tristan Garcia, especially, as well as sketched, explored, articulated in brilliant fragments by Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton in some sections – we can say this world has formal and practical parallels / affinities with the world subtended by the streambox and the headphones. all the labour to build the streambox with its SASS type microphone array, the Simple48 microphone schematic by ricardo lee and precursors – all those dirty hours – as well as the curiously parallel if much bigger scale project over 3 generations at Grado Labs to build these headphones which you have been given as a gift – these/those all create the flatness Garcia will describe – flat in the sense of: flat organisation – an entity without hierarchy or preference, in which comprehension and intensities shift like the flow of winds over the surface of the field and through its various textured vegetation ( <) PS's story about the garden with the sounds of secateurs )
– the wind moves through the grasses by the old fort, stirring the dry grasses and bringing the landscape to a kind of life, playing over it, at the same time as it animates the archive of the soldiers whose bodies invisibly lie on the land and in its soil and metabolized / transfigured in its grasses from the disastrous battle at Takadachi in Mutsu Province:
summer–grass | : | warrior | 's | dream | 's | site

– you were not/all watching Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise by Thomas Mugge. the neighbours complained about the music of the Arkestra practicing day and night. this isn't music, Sun Ra said. you heard sun ra play Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk and you heard members of the band including the sax player David Gilmore talk about why they decided to stay in that band and in that house all those years, to explore the 'advanced intervals' Ra was expounding. Ra was filmed on a rooftop somewhere, perhaps in Cairo, perhaps in Philadelphia, and among Egyptian artefacts in some collection. He wore different colour robes and iridescent hats, sometimes with strands of wire sticking out of them. when it was hot, he sweated profusely, his face becoming beaded and drenched when he played the piano or the organ, creating startling dropouts, swirls of mashed notes with his forearms and shoulders, alternating with fragments at the high end – very clear and surprising.
this /that combination – with diy costumes, Ra's enunciations regarding history and his own mysterious spiritual being, delivered deadpan, together with ritualistic performances by the Arkestra, and periods of you can say: inspired original playing – this/that combination creates a memorable and unique impression on the group, after going out shopping and cooking a meal of vegetables, pulses and rice. planes cross the sky. do not be distracted from the level of the collective – new solidarities among the poor, digital artists, non human ensembles
12:10:56

live stream captures via VLC/new_captures/vlc-record-2019-01-04-10h47m37s-http___locus.creacast.com_9001_london_camberwell.ogg-.ogg

Credits / References

Bashō: 'At Takadachi in Mutsu Province' from Road to the North, 1689–1691. In Makoto Ueda: Bashō and his Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. p242.