Just a short note to say that my entheogenic audio sculpture, Climbing The Peacock’s Tail has been selected for exhibition at the upcoming Uncanny Sound group show opening in Cork this week.
There are also a couple of recent posts by NTC operatives over at the website including my own ‘Modular Synthesis As Psychic Weaponry”. Read them here. There will be a reprise of sorts of my sonic interventions centred on Gair Dunlop’s ‘Atom Town’ coming up at the start of October at the DCA, Dundee. I shall post more information once details are finalised.
Another couple of entries from the last few days in the, not entirely effective, canon of trying to focus energies into something other than mental self-consumption.
An entheogenic audio sculpture built around the concept of liminal spaces and superimposed visual and aural repetition of subconscious patterns within the listener.
Inspired by personal subconscious excavations, chaos theory/self similarity across different scales, the essay “The Cult of The Peacock Angel” by Erik Davis and Crowley’s poem Liber CCXLII:
“Ah, could I tell thee of
These infinite things of Light and Love!
There is the Peacock; in his fan
Innumerable plumes of Pan!
Oh! every plume hath countless eyes;
–Crown of created mysteries!—
Each holds a Peacock like the First.”
And from somewhere entirely unexpected, I suddenly had the inclination to try out a little idea I’d been toying with which then spiraled out into becoming a visualisation for my last release on Broken20, The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep.
I’ve recently been working through a series of movements concerned with building organic audio fail systems within modular synthesis focussing primarily the idea of surface and mechanical noise which I’ve compiled as a 30ish minute set titled “Unfolding Inwards”.
It’s been a while since I last posted so figured I should do a little round up of things.
Just before London, I had a little walk across the Tay Road Bridge, I think I might have a bit of writing to do about bridges but before I get around to that I made this little kinetic piece titled OooOooOoo:
“The circle, a representation of unity, an endless cycle, a continuous line with no start or end point. Ouroboros, the snake eating it’s own tail, the suit of Disks in the Tarot representing earth, a depiction of consciousness, the internal and external. Rings bind, Pi fails to resolve itself to infinity. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, it simply changes state and position. The world turns, loops and repeats. Loops repeat. Repeat.”
The Atom Town screening on June 23rd went down well although I’m not entirely convinced that I’d recommend getting an overnight bus from Dundee to London if ; A. You are completely unable to sleep on busses, and B. You don’t want to slip into some surreal performance based mental wormhole. But still. My piece was received well, the inclusion of repetitious rhythmical elements (lets not call them beats eh?) came as a bit of a surprise to some, it was genuinely humbling to meet and have a little chat with Ken Hollings and of course it was really nice to see Gair’s film presented in such a lovely space as Arts Catalyst. Afterwards I hung out with Thor and Keung up Dalston way and had a good catch up with the HPLL old guard. You can read some transport based rambling here.
On my return, I started manifesting an idea which had been rattling around for a little while regarding mark making as an audio impulse. Early sketches (if you’ll pardon the expression) using pencil and charcoal on cartridge paper can be heard below.
Other than that, I’ve managed to get a few quite important proposals in for potential works next year (fingers crossed on those) which I’ll hopefully be able to have a bit of chat about soon and also got involved in really short notice in a performance as part of Dundee Live which as synchronicity would have it tied in quite closely with the Marks of Delay pieces.
“A live audio treatment of Joss Allen and Joanna Foster’s piece ‘A Slip Of The Other’s Tongue’.The piece uses two typewriters connected by a moebius strip and explores the relationship between text, physicality and audio. This treatment is for four piezo contacts, mixer, a 20 second delay loop, effects processor and control interface. I purposefully restricted the effects to only a few in order to try to focus on restraint and flexibility within a reductive context.
The performance took place as part of the Dundee Live festival in the Central Library in the Wellgate Centre, Dundee on Friday the 8th of July 2011.”
There are a few other irons in the fire but let’s see what happens there. In the meantime, I’m all about Edwin Abbott’s absolutely stunning 1884 published satire/exposition of extradimensional space/time – Flatland (which you can read online here although I got a nice new copy for about £4 off amazon) and this morning I took delivery of the mighty Grant Morrison’s Supergods: Our World In The Age Of The Superhero which is part memoir, part academic close reading of comics and part magical conjecture and pantheonic comparisons which make frightening sense of an awful lot of things. I really can’t recommend either highly enough.
I’ll be performing a brand new, purpose built set of musical interventions at the the London screening of Gair Dunlop’s Atom Town: life after technology. Here’s the abstract:
“Dounreay Atomic Research Establishment is a sprawling monument to solidity, optimism and analogue engineering. The intangible alchemies and sense of romantic science at its heart are trapped like amber in archive film and in its colossal structures. Over the last two years, unprecedented access to the facility and to the UKAEA Archive at Harwell have allowed Gair Dunlop to explore the dream and the consequences of high science in a remote community.”
Inspired by retro-futurist aesthetics of the post-atomic age, the new audio work has been built as a requiem to forgotten dreams of old technology, the ghosts of futures passed. A sketch from the writing sessions can be heard below. Expect plenty of bleeps, sweeps, clicks and white noise.
The screening takes place at 7pm on Thursday 23rd June at Arts Catalyst, 50-54 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PS and will also feature a talk by Ken Hollings (an absolute hero of mine) who has written an essay for the exhibition catalogue. Do come along, it’d be ever so nice to see you there.
I’ll also take this opportunity to thank everyone who came along to my performance of The Breath Between Marks at the closing event of Cabin: Codex last week. I’ll maybe post up some documentation and any video/images that surface soon.
This Friday, 27th May, will see me performing The Breath Between Marks at the closing event of the Cabin: Codex exhibition, downstairs in Centrespace/VRC at the DCA in Dundee, 6pm – 8pm.
The score has been constructed using elements taken from the artists’ books which are on display and mirrors the curational narrative of a journey from urban to rural space. Here’s a short excerpt of a recording of a run through the piece.
So, what does Erstlaub get up to in the dead season between terms at artschool? A nice relaxing holiday? Caiprinhas by the pool?
Well no. It would appear that he just powers on, doing slightly crazy things in a misguided attempt to keep the endless roar of the universe at bay.
This week, I got around to thinking about tape as a physcial format (an extension of earlier investigations with Blown and The Decline of Physical Memory i guess). I recorded about 40 minutes of recently built synth work over to cassette and then dubbed it additionally onto another 2 tapes.
One tape I immersed in hot soapy water for 45 minutes, the other I immersed in cold water and then froze. Once I’d dried out the tapes and recaptured the results, the effects were a little bit too subtle for my liking, I was more interested in the artifacts of process than the original source material so, in order to magnify the texture and inconsistency, to get right into the cracks between things, I slowed the playback process down to a quarter giving each pop and click, each modulating texture the space and time to unfold under its own weight.
The result is a 2 hour 20 minute and 16 second ultra-reductive piece titled ‘The Persistence of Decay’. The experiments were originally intended for submission to an upcoming tape series for Broken20 but, well, it’s not going to fit on a tape now is it? So, I decided to just leave it out there as an Mp3, floating in the ether.
You can get it here, it may appear elsewhere at some point in the future but it’s plans are undefined as yet. If anyone makes it through the entire duration, get in touch and I’ll maybe buy you a cupcake or something.
“Sound sculptor Erstlaub’s new release reprises a similar theme to that of his last Highpoint Lowlife release, Sleepwalking Into The Underworld, and a similar sonic palette. His music is characterised by beautiful long periods of droning ambience punctuated by tiny flickers in the backdrop and drawn out climaxes, like the final second before a massive dancefloor track drops stretched out to a 45-minute eternity. The title fits the soundworld perfectly; during the final few seconds before dropping off the mind heads off into free-associative freefall in which consciousness remains for the briefest of moments, a sensation the album accurately recreates in wind-tunnel greyscale. Erstlaub has just recorded an excellent new mix for Broken20’s podcast series, BrokenCinema, which brings together film soundtrack music that’s inspired the label and works as a nice counterpart to the album. Download it here.”
In other news, I got my results for 3rd year of my TBA degree and I got an A1. There’s some debate about whether that mark’s ever been given out before so I’m feeling very surreally pleased about the sketch. Bring on the chaos and intensity of 4th year, already starting to seed some pretty big plans for what may well become a masive and all consuming project but I’ve still got a ton of research to undertake before I start to manifest it.
For the completists among you, you can get a wonderful digital copy of Issue 4 of Satellite here, the largely awesome DoJ student produced zine which I have something of a habit of contributing to. There’s a pseudonymously published piece in there that I wrote, as a sort of psychogeographic primer. Enjoy.
Thanks to the people that inspired and kept some semblance of sanity around me throughout 3rd year, you know who you are.
To coincide with the release of The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep, I decided to put together a little companion mix traveling through the psychic landscape of some of my favourite corners of cinema. Obviously you can take the list of films and directors as a recommendations list also.
Get it free here but I’d recommend subscribing to the BK20 podcast via iTunes or whichever delivery system you use. Here’s the spraff on it.
Erstlaub – BrokenCinema
When he’s not forging mystical drone behemoths out of the void as Erstlaub, Dave Fyans is also the Art Director here at Broken20 and something of a cinema obsessive. He’s put together a mix in the form of BrokenCinema, an 80 minute collection of soundtrack music based around films, directors and musicians that have particular resonance within the context of the basis for the label, summed up perfectly by his favourite director Andrei Tarkovsky in the following quote.
“The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age they give the name, saba, which literally means “rust”. Saba, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Saba, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.”
(Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting In Time).
Track – Artist (Film – Director)
1. Valuska – Mihaly Vig (The Werckmeister Harmonies – Bela Tarr)
2. Paris, Texas – Ry Cooder (Paris, Texas – Wim Wenders)
3. Guitar Solo 1 – Neil Young (Dead Man – Jim Jarmusch)
4. Once Upon A Time In The West – Ennio Morricone (Once Upon A Time In The West – Sergio Leone)
5. Camille – Georges Delerue (Le Mepris – Jean-Luc Goddard)
6. Fratres – Arvo Part (There Will Be Blood – PT Anderson)
7. Die Nacht Der Himmel – Popol Vuh (Nosferatu – Werner Herzog)
8. ANS 01 – Coil (Enter The Void – Casper Noe)
9. In The Summer – Terry Riley (Lifespan – Sandy Whitelaw)
10. La Valse De Marienbad – Francis Seyrig (Last Year At Mariendbad – Alain Resnais)
11. Bach 1 – Eduard Artemiev (Solyaris – Andrei Tarkovsky)
12. Into The Night – Julee Cruise (Twin Peaks S01E05 – Lynch/Frost/dir. Lesli Linka Glatter)
13. Willow’s Song – Paul Giovanni (The Wickerman – Robin Hardy)
14. Ghost Of Love – David Lynch (Inland Empire – David Lynch)
15. Clockwork Orange Theme – Wendy Carlos (Clockwork Orange – Stanley Kubrik)
16. Op – Gil Melle (The Andromeda Strain – Robert Wise)
17. Air – Delia Derbyshire (Enter The Void – Gasper Noe)
18. Sycamore Trees – Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With me – David Lynch)
19. I Only Have Eyes For You – The Flamingoes (Rabbit In The Moon – Kenneth Anger)
20. Over and Done – Mihaly Vig (Damnation – Bela Tarr)
A couple of reviews surfaced over the weekend for The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep. Annoyingly due to a vague technical distro issue, the running time is being reported/referenced a few places at 28:46 although the album definitely has a running time of 42.55. Just one of these things.
“By means of modular synthesis”—that’s how Scottish drone artist Erstlaub describes the providence of his work, and it’s hard to think of a string of words that signifies more in this context. They speak to literal process, of course, but maybe even more so to the kind of granular attention—to texture, timbre, tone, etc.—that gets paid by those who get really, really, really into sound. For just a little less than 30 minutes, “The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep” stays static and evolves, planting a pole in ambient stillness but following a through-line that moves in minute ways. It sounds a bit like Gas with rusty water towers in place of trees, or even more so like the product of a lot of listening to Eliane Radigue. The title doesn’t fit especially well: there’s too much tension suggested here, or at least implied, to fall into slumber.”
Then a nicely fuzzy and glowing review from Boomkat. Pretty pleased to be mentioned in the same breath as Jeck/Kirby/Koner.
“The latest transmission from Ruaridh TVO’s Broken20 imprint is an extended workout from drone specialist Dave Fyans AKA Erstlaub. The album is apparently is inspired by the sound that enters Fyans’ mind in the brief moment between wakefulness and sleep. “Aware of this clarion call but powerless to act”, he says. “I know this sound inside out, a minute piece of sonic cartography that contains all the information in the universe, like the whirring of a vast organic hard-drive as the processor performs a memory dump between logic and something much bigger…much weirder. Delay lines feed back to Omega Point; choirs of particles stream towards event horizons. Perceived time holds no sway here; this vast but tiny sound contains all of time and space and possibility.” Though in truth we have no freaking idea what this sound he’s banging on about is, the music that it seems to have inspired is wonderful, and yes, it vividly evokes the liminal space opened up as unconsciousness beckons. There’s real grace and poise to this half-hour piece, dubbed-out percussion rubbing against drones of near-liturgical heaviness, its richly detailed but somehow very pure atmospherics carrying the listener from dank underground interrogation chambers to celestial heights and back. Inner space investigations rarely come as deep or as absorbing as this, and Erstlaub’s real talent is in coaxing big emotion out of subtle, miasmic drift. A hearty recommendation for fans of Leyland Kirby, Thomas Koner and Philip Jeck.”
You can purchase it for the really almost too good to be true price of £4.99!! from the Boomkat link above. Thanks for the ongoing support.
D
ps. I just realised after copying over the RA review that I’ve never actually heard Radigue although I’ve seen her name around quite a lot. It’s a pretty good comparison, I’ll probably check out more of her stuff but, alas, it will always be Delia that rules my heart when it comes to amazing temptresses of sound.
pps. after a wee bit more research on Radigue, the whole thing seems to resonate entirely to my theory of post-cultural premonition. Despite having not actually heard her before yesterday, I can REALLY see the connection, even down to her method of working (all modular, one continuous take, etc) So if anyone out there fancies buying me a Buchla and an ARP2600 then I’ll be more than happy to test out the continuity.
