Erstlaub

Partial update, partial freeform rambling (sorry, in the psychogeographic/subconscious archeology context I should really call it ‘a mental derive’) I guess. Degree Show is rapidly encroaching, time appears to be folding in on itself and, while weeks are passing in the blink of an eye, the inevitable conclusion still feels decades away.

First of all, a little conjecture in progress, I’m working away on material for degree show and various forms applying to do a Masters degree and trying to obtain the funding to allow me to do it so am faced with the age old nightmare of trying to classify and categorise one’s work slightly more socially acceptably than ‘it’s just what I NEED to do to stop my universe from collapsing in on itself’, this afternoon whilst wandering the City Centre, the following thoughts came to me.

There is something of a ‘fashion’ in art at the moment for activism, the packaging and selling of ‘issues’ as a vehicle for social change (or something along these lines). It strikes me that the works I’m currently involved with can’t really be seen as trying to stop global warming, or the capitalists, or antisocial behaviour, or whatever other big things are currently making headlines but what I am attempting, is a form of micro-activism. By presenting the viewer (I always struggle to give people experiencing art a collective generic term but that’ll do for the time being), with my observations, I hope to instill their confidence, or open them up, to reappraising their own relationships with space, both the physical spaces they inhabit, and to give weight and reverence to the invisible kindgoms constructed of thought and memory and light which we all build within us. Whether utilising the mechanics of psychogeography or producing a physical manifestion of an emotional space through sound and/or visual art, giving people the opportunity to excavate space, to view it from a different perspective, by delving through the layers, of history, emotion, cause/effect, time, etc. helps people to become more sensitive to causes around them and to highlight the fact that we are all just parts of a much larger complex machine, but still equally important (you can read this as history, society or more abstracted views of continuous time if you wish). Giving the people the motive and means to explore and engage with space, internal or corporeal, with a view to wider social change.

As I say, it’s a concept in progress, happy to have any discussion on or around the subject. And so, to me slightly grumbling about academia for a little bit.

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with ‘research’ in the way that it’s dressed up within an academic art context, hell, I’m not going to try to start addressing the issues I have with art in an academic context but I digress. In supporting material which I’ve previously handed in for assessment purposes I’ve always made a clear point that, in my opinion, research is a constant and indefinable process, every drain cover, line of text, cloud, passing face, overheard conversation, film, book, wallpaper, etc. is a potential flashpoint for inspiration and it’s not something I tend to record and catalogue, things have a habit, especially on a subconscious level, of presenting themselves as the only obvious direction to take on a project. It slightly appalls me that in order to tick certain academic boxes, that people end up sitting googling every single other artist who has worked in a vaguely similar field or medium, a self defeating practice. When you start down that path, it doesn’t take long for self doubt to bite and you decide that ‘your’ idea has already been done a thousand times, far better than you were going to do.

So, that said, I’ve compiled a list of artists and works which I feel have some level of reference worthy note with respect to the collected works which will be exhibited as Crossing Point (this is the non-working title for my degree show as opposed to any previous iterations which may have appeared). This list is by no means exhaustive, hell I’m not even sure that it’s accurate but here you go, because boxes must be ticked (and I figure anyone googling for really cool people might end up here by accident) I present you with a big bunch of names of people and things which I deem influential to me as a practicing artist.

J.G. Ballard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Patrick Keiller, Will Self, Iain Sinclair, The Conet Project, D. Defoe, G. Debord, Xavier De Maistre, J.F. Lyotard, Bill Drummond, Peter J. Carroll, Aleister Crowley, Edwin Abbott, Franz Kafka, J.L. Borges, Herbert Ponting, Kurt Vonnengut, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Browne, Chris Petit, Paul Virilio, Italo Calvino, John Cage, William S. Burroughs, Jim Woodring, Chris Marker, Alvin Lucier, Edgard Varese, Torsten Lauschmann, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrik, Lars Von Trier, J.L. Goddard, Casper Noe, Tom Weir,  Charles Avery, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, David Toop, Nietzsche, David Foster Wallace, Scarlet Thomas, NVA, Stewart Home, LPA, Leyland Kirby/The Caretaker, William Basinski, Jacob Kirkegaard

And here’s a list of slightly more specific works which I’d claim as a loose, very incomplete bibliography to the works which make up Crossing Point.

A Journey Round My Room – Xaver De maistre

London, Robinson in Space, Robinson in Ruins, The Robinson Institute – Patrick Keiller

Tlon, Uqbar – VL Borges

What I Believe – JG Ballard

Slaughterhouse V – Kurt Vonnengut

Lecture On Nothing – John Cage

The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, Supergods, et al. – Grant Morrison

From Hell, V for Vendetta, The Moon & Serpent Theatre of Marvels, Unearthing – Alan Moore

The Naked Lunch – WS Burroughs

The Inhuman – JF Lyotard

The Invisible City – Italo Calvino

Flatland – Edwin Abbott

17, $20,000, 45 – Bill Drummond

Rings of Saturn – WG Sebald

The Conet Project

The Book of The Law, The Book of Thoth – Aleister Crowley

London: City of Disappearances – Various, Ed. Iain Sinclair

London Orbital, Lights Out For The Empire, Orbital – Iain Sinclair

The Society Of The Spectacle – GE Debord

Restless Cities – Various, Eds. Beaumont & Dart

Assorted Works – Stewart Home/LPA East Section

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland – Johnson & Boswell

Sculpting in Time – Andrei Tarkovsky

More or less the entire back catalogues of Coil, William Basinski, Arvo Part, Steve Reich and countless others.

The other thing which is incredibly difficult to put into a list like this is concepts/idioms/events “I REALLY like the aesthetics of crackly SW radio” just doesn’t feel like it fits, so it goes.

Ok, if you made it all the way down here, well done, I’m sorry, sometimes these things just have to happen, anyway, I had the absolute delight of seeing a quite scratchy 35mm print of the greatest film in the entire universe ever (Tarkovsky’s Stalker) last week and in tribute, made an audio piece in which I mentally revisited the train journey into the Zone. It’s called Schuhart’s Burden after the protagonist from Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers which the film is based around. You can download it if you like.

Schuhart’s Burden by Erstlaub

Degree show is coming along nicely, I’d say I’m about 60% installed or so, sorry I don’t have any pretty or interesting pictures for you in this post, they’ll be along soon.

Cheers

D

So, I figure it’s about time to start trying to rationalise this year’s work leading up to degree show. I think that maybe if I put it down in writing then it’ll help me resolve a couple of issues (or more likely give me a better picture of quite how sideways my brain is going).

At present, the working title of the show is “A Return” although this is highly likely to change. The exhibition is, intrinsically, an investigative excavation into internal space comprising of four main works (although there might be a couple of additions depending on the overall narrative flow of the space). The works can be broken down as follows.

Spanning

A concrete poem of sorts relayed via static floor projection, the text lays out a manifesto on being receptive to the notion of crossing between internal and external space, the concept of a ‘bridge of light’ has been plaguing me for a while, an updated version in some ways of De Quincey’s Northwest Passage.

The Numbers At The Threshold

A partner piece to Spanning, an audio/text work, based addressing the same area, each letter of a prose poem has been transcribed using a one time pad  and then relayed as a numbers station broadcast, a willful obscuration of message. The speakers playing the looping audio and the text will face each other in a space which visitors will pass through, breaking the line of sight between the message in both forms, inhabiting the space that lies between (both literally and metaphorically). more…

The Numbers At The Threshold by D.Fyans

Marconi’s Shipwreck

Having crossed over the threshold pieces, the next piece in the grand narrative is Marconi’s Shipwreck. This is a 72 minute audio-visual longform drift piece built from individual movements, composed entirely in modular synthesis which act as small, self portraits based on mental states arising from dissatisfaction with the subverted  21st century ideas of connection and interaction. With the rise and rise of f*cebook, it dawned on me that relationships have become, in many cases, little more than the pressing of a button, people becoming so entrenched in the technology that their every move is a capturable, saleable, marketable commodity to be sold to the highest bidder – we have become a population obsessed with taking photos of us having a good night out to post online to prove we were having a good night out rather than actually enjoying ourselves. Maybe I’m just rapidly becoming a grumpier, older man but this piece followed by a talk by John Armitage on Virilio led to me finally disconnecting from that site. The underlying idea that since Marconi invented radio, the signal to noise ratio has been increasing and now, we find ourselves scuttled in a sea of information/data with very little actual content or purpose within. The accompanying visual treatment uses an old TV set, a projector and a video camera set up in recursive feedback systems, the screen noise being captured and reprojected into itself building sets of visual static for the viewer/listener to scry with, searching the noise for some form of pattern or cognitive landmark. Marconi’s Shipwreck will be released on DVD under my Erstlaub persona on Broken20 (hopefully by very late April).

A Return (working title)

This is where things get a little less opaque and difficult to define. Over the last year, I have been undertaking what I’ve only recently decided I’m comfortable enough to class as ’subconscious archeology’. Consider it the application of the fundamentals behind psychogeography applied to internal space (or non-space if you like). So, in 2006, my life changed majorly, I responded in the only way I could by channeling Erstlaub and making my first album to get a proper release ‘On Becoming An Island’ on Highpoint Lowlife (you can get the whole thing for free here). Given the passage of time, I decided to go back and try to make sense of the landscape, to conduct (as proper as you can get with this sort of thing) a proper geographic, historic and cultural study of this space and it’s disappearance from the physical.

Now, normally I’m a bit of a control freak. I come up with the concept for a piece, the manifestation of thought presents itself clearly and the piece is realised. In this instance, I consciously decided to let go, to let the project direct itself in as organic a way as possible. This has led to a number of different, intertwined narratives, interventions between ‘real world’ events and people and the fictional metaverse being explored, the writing of folk song, founding/realisation of mythological beliefs, all manner of things. Almost everything contained within the project has significance, the names, numbers, concepts at play all have anchors within me or have been based on decoded subconscious interactions, the reference points are all of interest to me, certain authors are referenced (or alluded to), philosophies and observations recirculated from the external world into this internal space. The piece then in some ways exists to highlight that the kingdoms we build within us are as, if not more, important than the corporeal, four dimensions we inhabit in day to day life.

Chronacair Songs 4 by D.Fyans

The piece manifests itself as a ‘museum’ of artifacts for the viewer to engage in at the level they choose, hopefully with a view to considering the validity and importance of their own internal spaces. A return will consist of  a curated dialogue between text, audio, video and other physical objects.

Well, that’s probably a bit too much noise/not enough content but then I’ve always ended up hoisted by my own petard. It’s obviously a fairly static set of exposition, it really will be all about experiencing the show first hand so please do come along to Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee between the 19th and 26th of May 2012, I’ll be in the White Space in the Time Based Art studio (follow the arrows on the floor).

So it goes.

D

And bang! Just like that Degree Show 2012 starts to encroach like a gigantic stressy spectre.

I expect I’ll have quite a lot of chat on this in the coming months but here’s the latest piece that’s nearing some sort of completion (although there are still quite a few physical details to work out).

I’ve been looking for an excuse to tinker with what is (to me at least) one of the most aesthetically pleasing mysteries of the 20th century, the Numbers Station. Given the opportunity to write some obscure prose, make an approximation of a one-time Vernam Cipher, transcode it and then use modular synthesis to build a homage to the beautiful world of shortwave radio, I was pretty much as close to being in my element as I’ve been in a long time.

The Numbers At The Threshold exists as a liminal piece, a manifest of the ‘bridge of light’ that’s been troubling me for some time – a means of passage between external and internal space, the collision of different realities. The piece will be installed near the entrance of my degree show as a mark of the subconscious crossing over point between the realms of internal and external space and will play on a constant loop.

The full text will also appear alongside the transmission with a view to highlighting the temporal disparity between message and receipt, a willful obscuration of content.

The Numbers At The Threshold by D.Fyans

Just as a little nod to both the mental and geographical relevance, the melody at the start is a version of  The Associates – Party Fears Two.

Special thanks to the wonderful and talented Uschi for generously offering her voice for me to put words (or numbers) into. Go and check out her soundcloud, she good.

More to come soon I’d imagine.

D

Having finally reached a stage of absolute frustration and annoyance at the Situationists from somewhere in the midst of my dissertation, I decided to make use of the whole ‘know thy enemy’ chat and throw myself in head first. I guess I’m more used to the derive when it comes to psychogeography so I decided to set myself up a little game of chance.

I decided on a duration of 1 hour to start things off. Entertainingly, within about 4 coin tosses, I’d found myself very close to my house, being directed up what I can only describe as an arcade that I’ve never noticed before. The part of my brain that’s recently been obsessed with Benjamin’s Arcades Project found this amusing.

Here are the results, it dawns on me that I didn’t record a few instances where chance dictated that I go straight ahead instead of turning so the figures are slightly off I guess. More to think about for the next game.

I plotted out the route I’d been led down (above) and put together a little flash film of the journey (below). There were a few interesting discoveries along the way that I may write about at some point and there are a few possible pieces of work that may or may not arise from the game. You can take a look at a few more bits (more to follow) on flickr. I’d say it was quite enjoyable but I think it could be improved with more time to poke around, I felt a little against the clock having set myself a limit of one hour. Time permitting I’ll hopefully give it another go with some modifiers thrown in.

D

Just a little post of a couple of recent things that I’ve not put up here yet.

First up is a soundpiece I made, I guess sitting somewhere between the old days of Mille Plateux and current wanderings towards broken techno.

Nostalghia by Erstlaub

Then moving even closer to techno, I produced my first remix in years and years. It’s based on a forthcoming Broken20 release by Nanorhytmn, it’ll probably appear in the BrokenZero free remix release that we’re putting out to partner the full thing.

Nanorhythm – Amniotic Haze (Erstlaub Dub) by Erstlaub

Finally, a total departure, a little visual haiku. I’d recently been to an artist talk by Ken Cockburn about he and Alec Finlay’s The Road North project which helped me tie together a few loose ends that had been floating around in my head for a few weeks. Mirroring the profile of the Law with content relating to explorations recently undertaken.

Lots coming up in the next few weeks from Broken20.

Also, I just saw Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia at the DCA. Amazing! Possibly the best contemporary film I’ve seen since his Antichrist which had a similarly profound impact. Can’t recommend enough.

Cheers also to all the people at the Shared Imagination Symposium this week for some interesting talks and ideas and for at least pretending to enjoy Gair and I’s Atom Town themed ‘performance lecture’.

D

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.

Marks of Delay by D.Fyans

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.

The Ghost Other by D.Fyans

“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.

D

The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep picked up a nice little post over at Drowned in Sound this week. Here’s what Rory Gibb says.

“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.

D

Since Thursday I’ve been collating the elements I collected from the Centre for Artists’ Books at the DCA for use in a score to be performed at the opening/closing event for the Cabin: Codex exhibition (which one it is is still TBC). Today saw the manifestation of the score itself. Quite interestingly, when laying out the elements, I’ve started to mentally build the piece and be able to hear certain parts. I’m really looking forward to actually getting in about the interpretation of the score. It reads in three sections, from top left to bottom right, equal visual space devoted to urban/threshold/rural although the duration of each movement is at the performer’s discretion. The sound reads from the bottom to the top in terms of frequency, bass components at the bottom, higher frequencies at the top of each section.

(click the image for a larger view)

The credits for the original elements are below although I’ve yet to get the final list of full titles/references so apologies for any inconsistencies, all images are the property of their respective artists (although I’ve re-interpreted/altered some in the name of artistic license).

Urban

DAVID SHRIGLEY     Err

JACQUELINE DONACHIE     3,832 Miles     D111

SARA MACKILLOP     50 Envelope Windows M109

PAVEL BUCHLER    Travelogue/Between B.233

ANE HORT GUTTU Modernistisk Reise     G116

LAWRENCE WEINER 10 Works

BERNARD BORGEAUD     Parc Saint Leger     OS.103

?? W.133

Threshold

SARAH MACKILLOP     32 Photocopied Pages     M108

PAVEL BUCHLER     2200^th Anniversary of The Great Wall     OS104

WEPRODUCTIONS Back To Back

THOMAS A CLARK From Alder Roots

THOMAS A CLARK Three Troilets

THE MAXMARA COAT

PROJECT Style Substance

JIM HAMLYN Shorthand Basho

ZOË IRVINE     By Air & Sea     I.101

HELEN DOUGLAS,

TELFER STOKES     Water on the Border     S.139

Rural

RICHARD LONG     Selected Walks 1979 – 1996    L114

RICHARD LONG     No Where   L116

WILL OLDHAM,

ERIK WESSEN     Forest Time    OS.121

JIM HAROLD Empty Quarter H107

NEW ARCADIANS     D.121

HELEN DOUGLAS Between The Two

HANS WARNDERS Checklist

JORN EBNER Mobile Settlement

Time to get building the sounds I guess.

D

<2010>Sleepwalking Into The Underworld, The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep, Highpoint Lowlife, Broken20, n_ilk, more artschool business, moving house, Dundee, Peter Christopherson (rip), Morrison, Moore, Sinclair, Keiller, Petit, Bill Drummond, Invisible Cities, Ballard, Batman & Robin, Lend Me Your Ears, Mapsadaisiacal, Que Belle Epoque, Always Everything, Alastair Cook, Ruaridh, Dave, Thorsten Sideb0ard, Sietse, Clark, Aitken, Gordon, Louise, Mandelbrot, The Feral Orchestra, Paris Texas, Skeletons, Down Terrace, Another Year, The White Ribbon Ivor Cutler, Philip Jeck, Mark Vernon, Improvising, The Elements, writing, questioning things, circular activities, banjo, apophenia, mysticism, subconscious interventions</2010>

It has finally escaped from liminal space and you can buy it. Limited to a run of 100 DVDs for just ¬£6 including P&P or available as a high quality mp3 download. Get yourself over to¬†http://highpointlowlife.com/ to make it happen. It’s also available from Norman Records.

Erstlaub – Sleepwalking Into The Underworld from thorsten sideb0ard on Vimeo.

Erstlaub – Sleepwalking Into The Underworld by sideb0ard

Here’s a little bit of conjecture about it by me.

The piece is based around the concept of being drawn to places of resonance where the separation between different time periods are thin, specifically areas of historic spiritual importance, the title refers to the theme of ancestor worship and the idea of bodies of water being portals to the underworld. Visually the piece calls back the recurring themes of isolation within the vastness of the universe and stillness as a measure of time.

The piece is an expanded hypersigil created as a response to real world ideas and emotions but the space that exists between this inspiration and the final output is more than just a straight “musical” process. Elements of music theory, physics, maths play a part, as do the deeper concepts of chaos/pop magic, dimensionality within the universe and non-linear time.

This type of creative process involves taking an idea, feeling or element of will or intent and translating into sound by means of taking individual modular elements and focusing, refining and condensing them into self contained, autonomous systems, usually with an inbuilt “fail” system removing the technical purity and adding a more organic edge. Larger pieces are then constructed out of a series of these small systems and again, several of these will be combined in sequence to create a narrative in the same way that sigils are formed and sequenced into more complex hypersigils.

The real power lies in the charging of these hypersigil constructs, when performed/captured, this series of slightly chaotic systems, each built with very specific intent, start to resonate with the others, waves stack or phase, things start to beat against each other or harmonise. The construct becomes one solid, vibrating, continuous piece of energy – there are ebbs and flows, things come into focus before pulling away again, fire, water, earth and air elements shift against each other, ghosts, memories, feelings, secrets, doubts, all hang there in space, imprinted onto time, burning, a perpetual motion engine of pure crystalised will.

The sound is pure synthesis with no samples or field recordings used and was recorded in one take with no post editing or overdubs using a Nord Modular G2, Behringer BCR2000 Controller along with boss re201 and dd20 delay units.

The video was shot on a Nikon D90 and edited in Final Cut.

Thanks.

D