Summer Haunting

Aye, it’s been a while I suppose. There’s been lots of things happening behind the scenes I suppose which I’ve not posted here for various reasons (primarily revolving around slackness).

Top of the pile I guess has been applying for the MFA here in Dundee and the excessive filling out of funding applications to attempt to take some of the brunt of the £3400 invoice for the course. I received an unconditional acceptance and start back at DJCAD in September.

In addition to this, I’ve managed to get a job at DCA as Gallery Assistant where I start at the end of this month. For the interview, I had to do a little presentation on a piece of work which I decided would be Bill Drummond’s ‘For Sale, A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind by Richard Long, $20,000’ (why I decided to pick such an awkward title to say, I have no idea but it paid off in the end and led to a strange little sequence if Drummond based intersections including the reading and thorough enjoying of his most recent book ‘100’ and then last weekend the fantastic broadcast on Resonance FM of score #398 for the 17, ‘At The Age Of 59’ which saw The Man playing a song (or audio) from the full 59 year long performance that has been Bill Drummond and talking about what these pieces meant to him, now mean to him and offering general opinions on the state of the universe over the course of 13 hours (while simultaneously building a bed in the studio). One of the most interesting and enjoyable pieces of performance that I’ve experienced in some time.

We had a bit of a pulling out of the stops for the release of TVO’s ‘Red Night‘ tape release on Broken60 which featured quite a lot of additional inserts and pieces, details of which you can see by clicking the image below.

Red Night

So, moving on, I’ve had three pieces selected for inclusion in NowhereIsland Radio, a broadcast event taking place at the beginning of August to coincide with Alex Hartley’s fantastic NowhereIsland reaching Plymouth. Elsewhere, my previous release on Broken20, The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep is to be included in its entirety in Scottish lens based auteur Alastair Cook‘s forthcoming ‘Little Forks’ project, which I’ll obviously share more details on once they emerge.

There has been a slow expulsion of audio works since the last post ranging from subsurface textures to full on noisy pedal improv business, draw your own conclusions.

An Insect Kingdom by Erstlaub
Barge Adrift by Erstlaub
Bohm’s Mandala by Erstlaub
The Wall Is A Circle by Erstlaub
The Stone Speaks To The Tree About Time by Erstlaub

Finally, I’ve posted up a highly compressed (not easy to fit 72 minutes of audio/video into a >500mb file without compromising lots of quality) full version of Marconi’s Shipwreck which some of you might have seen as part of Crossing Point, my degree show exhibition. This will be available on DVD and digitally from Broken20 in the next month or so, I’ll post up once it’s out, in the meantime you can dive in below.

Just as a little note also, I’ve temporarily disabled the old Erstlaub site as it was starting to fall to bits, I will update it fully at some point but in the meantime it redirects to the more active parts of my site. You can still contact me through the usual channels if you want to give me a big pile of money, replace my dying macbook or just give me a hug.

I’ll just take a quick moment also to point out a couple of things I’ve recently absorbed which I completely endorse. Bela Tarr’s Turin Horse, man, just the biggest, most beautifully produced piece of metaphysical bleakness I’ve come across in ages. 2 and a half hours long and made up of just 30 shots, it’s strange to think that this is Tarr’s last film but also strangely fitting for a man who is so paced that he sometimes makes Tarkovsky come across like Michael Bay. I also finally got around to watching Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) which manages wonderfully to mirror Sebald’s scam of making a piece of work that is sort of about something while not actually being about it and being largely about something else entirely. I loved it and of course the underpinning by The Caretaker’s ever evocative soundtrack was the icing on the cake, well worth the tenner or so on Amazon.

Until next time.

D