Martello Transmission: a song from under the floorboards

It’s night, and there is a gale blowing pitch dark. I am standing at the gate of a small wooden bridge which leads to the door of the Slaughden Martello Tower, close to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk Coast. Above the door, a light has been left on, keeping watch, and providing the tower with a filament of visibility in the darkness. Through a window the glimpsed illumination of a table lamp promises a sallow incandescent warmth, a warmth that waits and invites us in. 

I cross the bridge, ladened with the baggage of self-catering and the mute irony of a boxed-up blimp (a zeppelin shaped windshield designed to protect microphones from the noise of air). As I walk across, I adopt the autonomic gait of the funambulist, shifting the weight of body and baggage in immediate response to the turbulent airy whoosh that wraps around the tower.  Fumbling with a key, I struggle to open the heavy wooden door, double bolted with atmospheric pressure. As the door finally groans ajar, a hinge of air whistles, soughs, and susurrates. I close the weather behind me and lift a latch into the thick-walled silence of the empty tower.

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Built between 1808 and 1812, Slaughden Martello Tower is the most northerly of a chain of defensive towers built along the South and East coasts of England, in response to the threat of invasion by the French emperor Napoléon. The Tower is the last surviving remnant of the village of Slaughden; an important maritime port, which long since succumbed, not to the French, but to the tidal invasion of the North Sea.  

Modelled on a defensive Tower in Martella, Corsica, the translation to ‘Martello‘ was thought to have emerged as a consequence of the presumptive English Carry-On, that all Italian words end in ‘o’. With this slippage meaning shifts: in Italian, Martello derives from the hammer which strikes a bell and sounds a warning. Serendipitously if the ‘a’ of Slaugh shifts behind the ‘u’, we are left with Sluagh. In Gaelic folklore, the Sluagh are ‘Hosts of the unforgiven dead’ who take the form of gusts of wind:  carrying ‘off the soul of a dying person in a [fluttering] flurry of wings and screeches.

To the best of my knowledge, [the tower’s] effectiveness was never put to the test. The garrisons were soon withdrawn and ever since these masonry shells have served as homes for the owls that make their soundless flights at dusk from the battlements.
The Rings of Saturn. 2002. W. G, Seabald. 

In the ‘million-bricked’ up silence of the Martello’s shell-like, all sound becomes conspicuous. On the first of three nights stay, the dark is woken by the peal of whispered vowels and spontaneous consonants of a north-westerly, singing through the vaulted reeds of the tower’s architecture. Sighing out loud, a deep breath drawn through a fireplace disturbs in a deathly rattle, particles of soot caught in the metal throat of its current. Under the floorboards, 200 years old, the creaking songs of footfall haunt and hollow the stillness. Suddenly and from somewhere without origin, a dull thud hammers once loudly. It can only be moments before the tower follows Slaughden into the waves. 

Unstable or hesitant […] sounds and words, eroded yet persisting through time – a transmission that sometimes becomes a convulsion, deforming what is there still.
Singed. 2021. Daniela Cascella 

In the morning I open the storm door of the easterly window to find tomorrow rising yoke yellow over the squally horizon of the North Sea.

Radio, live transmission

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The architecture of the Slaughden Martello is a unique variation of the normal design. Instead of a single tower, four towers coalesce into a quatrefoil; a four-leafed brick clover.  Acquired by the Landmark Trust in 1971, the restoration of Martello converted the four towers into four rooms around a large, vaulted centre. Each tower and room correspond with the cardinal points of a compass; an easterly window peeks out over the North Sea, a northerly window looks toward the shingle-shore of Aldeburgh, through the kitchen, the front door looks back westerly across the bridge toward the river Alde, whilst a southerly aspect keeps an eye and ear upon the distant silent Mist of retired radio towers on Orford Ness. 

Eerie wooden structures more than eighty yards high which could sometimes be heard creaking in the night.
The Rings of Saturn. 2002. W. G. Seabald.

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Martello Transmission (edit). 19th February 2023. (06:50 mp3)

Arriving at Martello under cover of darkness, I smuggled in a cheap FM-transmitter, a bundle of radios and a folder of field-recordings collected on Orford Ness, some ten years hence. Here within this folder are the accosted derelict voices of ballistic pagodas and the encrypted Morse of air upon door hinge. In a clandestine FM transmission, broadcast from the tower’s vaulted centre, these confiscated voices mingle with others caught lurking in the stone tapes and wooden cassettes of Martello. Through the array of dysfunctional radio sets, weak modulating signals are transmitted live back into the ‘interfrequency’ of the tower, seeping through its walls, out to sea and over the horizon.

The broadcast opens with looped static of a tidal recording (a tide of silence) made over a decade ago, by immersing a silent grooved record into the incoming tide at Cley next the Sea. This is accompanied by the flued voice of the fireplace and pulled-chord chime of the tower’s entrance bell. The chime is rung by dance/movement artist Julia Hall, who enters the Martello and performs the compass of its architecture, opening and closing the four doors in a ritualistic circuit of west, south, east, north, west. This reel of latch and footfall performs in concert with the radios’ short waves of interference and the shingle shanties of rolled pebbles on floorboards.

In the tower FM reception is poor, but the Martello signal breaks through clear. Tuned in and out its song flickers briefly, before disappearing off air in the atmospheric mush of radio silence. 

Oh – we sowed our signals and we reaped the air. We eavesdropped on Plasetsk by loop. Algiers by backscatter; we tracked the flights of planes, the arcs of missiles, the paths of ships, the movements of train.

But we also picked up what wasn’t uttered.
Ness. 2019. Robert McFarlane & Stanley Donwood. 

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Pebble Shanties: A song from under the floorboards 2023. (01:27 mp3)

Advertisement

Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp

A new album of seven Séances for air guitar hour hand and harp is now available on Bandcamp.

In a concert of paranormal music, notes are plucked from thin air as the haunted strum of votives, hour-hands, and the missing fingers of an amputated doll’s hand, play upon the strings of an electric guitar and abandoned autoharp . Divined in séance with the breeze and occasionally breaking through the interference of a faulty guitar socket, invisible melodies emerge, cluster and evaporate:

teasing […]
sound out
of

substance: the
air
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syllables: 

Earth as Air. Gustaf Sobin

The ethereal music of aeolian instruments, has long been associated with other worlds and ghostly communication. In his poem, The Eolian Harp (1796), Coleridge refers to: ‘Such a soft floating witchery of sound’. For Coleridge music sleeps in the air:

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air 
Is Music slumbering on her instrument. 

William Jones, the 17^th century natural philosopher, proposed that this ‘slumbering music’ originated not in the strings of the harp [or guitar], but in the air itself. The instrument operated as a ‘sound prism’ ‘[refracting] the wind,’ dividing [divining] and revealing ‘vibrations […] already present in the air.’

Séance for harp hour hand and bird song. 2021. Film still.

As a premonition of the album’s forthcoming release, a new short film made in correspondence with the piece Séance for harp hour hand and birdsong is available to view on Vimeo.

The full septet, Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp, is available as a digital download via Bandcamp. The album download includes a bonus track, Séance for stones radio mast hour hand and harp, recorded in 2021 at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight, and featuring the litho-telegraphy of a pebble tapped on a missing radio mast, choreographed and performed by the movement artist Julia S. Hall. As the former location of Marconi’s radio experimentation station, Knowles Farm was the site of the first ‘over the horizon’ wireless transmission to The Lizard Telegraphy Station, Cornwall in 1901. This track, which featured at the Helicotrema X festival of recorded audio (Venice, Barcelona, 2021) is also included with the hand-rendered, artist limited editions. These physical editions are available in three forms: 1. Artist edition audio cassette + album download; 2. Artist edition A6 Séance card + planchette + album download; 3. Very limited full set of, audio cassette + Séance Card + planchette + album download. Full details below.

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Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp:  Artist Ltd Edition Audio Cassette C40
Cassette + album download + bonus track
Edition 6
An artist limited edition audio cassette. Hand rendered each cassette is individually numbered and signed/dated with an artist edition stamp. Designed and produced by the artist, the cover/insert is printed on tracing paper and each cassette and case hand labelled with individual letters and numbers referring to its position in the edition sequence. The cassette includes the bonus track, Séance for stones radio mast hour hand and harp, recorded in 2021 at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight.

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  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp: Artist Ltd Edition Seance Card
A6 Seance Card + planchette + album download + bonus track
Edition 20
An original artist edition A6 postcard, printed on luxurious 600gsm superfine card, uncoated on both sides.
This artist edition postcard has three visual variations (readings).  Hand numbered, signed/dated with the artist edition stamp, each postcard is accompanied with a free album download and a rubber-stamped hand planchette, which may be used to hold séance with other worlds. The postcards have been shuffled and will be sent out in the order divined by the shuffle.

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Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp:  Full Set: Artist Ltd Edition Audio Cassette and A6 Seance Card
C40 Audio Cassette + A6 Seance Card + planchette + album download + bonus track
Edition 5
Combined artist limited edition of A6 postcard (with hand printed planchette), audio cassette and full album download including bonus track.

Please note: Cat is for scale purposes only and not included in package.

All digtal and physical media formats are available via: sebastianehegarty.bandcamp.com

three horizons

a new work for framework: afield.
Broadcast on Resonance FM
Sunday 13.06.21
11:00-12:00.
Listen live via Resonance FM

Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station, 2018.

three horizons, a new work for framework: afield, will be aired on Resonance 104.4fm (London) this Sunday (13.06.21). The programme will subsequently be broadcast on a number of radio stations world-wide and also be available to hear on the framework radio website.

Curated and hosted by Patrick McGinley, framework is a radio programme and listening community that has been broadcasting on the resonance 104.4fm since 2002. The show now airs on twelve radio stations around the world, with editions, streams and podcasts available from the framework website. ‘Consecrated to field recording and its use in composition’ framework acts as a creative frequency ‘a folk-tool in a new folk movement, a community driven exchange point for creators and listeners alike.’ The show operates in two formats, a regular edition curated and produced by Patrick, and framework:afield, ‘a guest-curated series produced by artists from all corners of the globe and based on their own themes, concepts or recordings.’ As an artist interested in the perceptual geographies of sound and listening, I began to tune in around 2005. In 2007, Patrick very kindly aired the 2nd edition of my collaborative project, mo[nu]ment – a 7” vinyl record of the silence held in memory of the Indian Ocean, earthquake, and Tsunami in 2004 (crudely recorded from my bedroom window in Winchester), which framework listeners were invited to re-record directly from the framework broadcast.

Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station, 2017.

My sound-works have been included in several editions of framework since then – my mam recorded an intro for the show around 2006. But this year is the first time I have contributed to framework: afield. The new sound work is called three horizons and is based on my ongoing series of covert micro-FM transmissions at locations along the southerly listening coast.  These transmissions began in 2017 with the first of two unofficial, covert residencies at the Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station, Cornwall, where in 1901, the first wireless radio signal, sent by Marconi from his ‘experimental station’ at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight. Not only was this the furthest a wireless signal had travelled at that time, it was also the first ‘over-the horizon’ transmission. Prior to this, it was believed that ‘the operating range of wireless would be restricted to the [optical] horizon.’ But on the 23rd of January 1901, in what became known as ‘Marconi’s first great miracle’ the arrival of three dots, a simple dit-dit-dit, at The Lizard Wireless Station, signalled not only the letter ‘s’, but also an escape from the visible and concrete, a flight from the material into the airy immaterial and unknown.Isolated and remote, the Lizard Wireless Station is on the very periphery of the terrestrial. When the rain comes down and the fog comes in the horizon evaporates. At night everywhere disappears. Each residence concluded with a live micro-FM transmission: Tuned in through an array of portable radios, the broadcasts were based on field-recordings made in a local landscape haunted by the architectural and archeological remains of communication and listening technology.

Concrete base of Marconi’s transmission mast at Knowles Farm, Isle of Wight. 2021

Fog Signal Building, Dungeness. 2019.

first horizon [extract]

Although based on field recordings the residencies began to bring sounds into the landscape, not only through transmission, but also in the fields of sound recorded. These fields include sounds hidden from audition and unavailable to human ears: the muted harmonic hum of antenna and automatic Morse of loose wires. But they also include instruments and technologies that might contribute to, and compose with the landscape. The air harp, a second-hand autoharp, prepared with the flotsam of things found and discarded, conspires to pluck voices from thin air, whilst the litho-telegraphy of pebbles collected from the localities of transmission, and used to tap out the dit-dit-dit of Marconi’s test signal. This geological intelligence tests substance and briefly brings into presence the absences of landscape. Sounding out and listening in, on abandoned radar rooms, the cracked silence of sound mirrors, and redacted subterranean hollows of cold war surveillance.  
On the Isle of Wight this palpitating tap, transmits the extinguished light of a 14^th century lighthouse, once attached to St Catherine’s Oratory, whilst the rap of a pebble on the remains of a concrete base, lurking in the field behind Knowles Farm, summons forth the lost signals of Marconi’s transmission mast¹.  

St Catherine’s Oratory and Lighthouse (built 1328). 2021

Concrete base of Marconi’s transmission mast erected in 1901.

Second horizon [extract]

The micro-FM transmitter has little power, and the signal is so weak that no one can tune into to hear. I am broadcasting to no one, and no one is listening.  For Framework afield, I have re-composed three horizons from the four broadcasts. Appearing in reverse chronological order each horizon corresponds with the three sites of transmission, remembering signals received and sent through the landscapes of the Isle of Wight, Dungeness and Lizard peninsular. Beginning with extracts from this year’s micro-transmission from the room at Knowles Farm where Marconi had conducted his early wireless experiments, the first horizon appeared with the misplaced bellow of Lizard Lighthouse foghorn. In the original Knowles broadcast, I used this acoustic beacon as a focal point, to locate the broadcast frequency and tune in through an array of radios dispersed into the landscape of the room. 

The sound of the foghorn is a lonely voice, in a lonely place, which seems to empty the landscape where it appears. In her fascinating recent book, The Foghorn’s Lament, Jennifer Lucy Allen, refers to Ray Bradbury’s ‘evocative and florid description of the foghorn’ as: ‘a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door and like trees in autumn with no leaves.’² The audible hinge of a door opening into the first of horizon, welcomes in the empty loneliness of the misplaced Lizard foghorn, here haunted by the absent voice of the St Catherine’s Lighthouse foghorn, an instrument visible through the room’s window, but whose signal, ‘discontinued’ in 1987, remains now unheard³.

Disused Chain Home Radar Early Warning Station, St Boniface Down, Isle of Wight. 2021

Hythe Sound Mirror, near Dungeness. 2019

third horizon [extract]

The three horizons are haunted by the apparition of places unseen and sounds unheard: on the Isle of Wight, at a disused radar station, rain taps catastrophic messages into the water of a cattle trough, beneath which lies the abandoned secret of a cold war listening station. Whilst in roughs above Hythe near Dungeness, a crumbling sound mirror, tapped out into presence, keeps an ear out, for sounds yet to arrive. 

The Lizard foghorn looms and lows over the horizons, returning to close the second horizon, it opens the third in a brief characterful ⁴ duet with the three electronic beeps of the Dungeness fog signal. This final horizon disappears in an echoic flutter of geological telegraphy, as pebbles tap out the acoustics of a derelict World War 2 radar room, and the Lizard foghorn returns to signal absence. Lost in an empty sea, this sonic beacon keeps vigil, calling out for a response that never comes. And in this lonely [depressive] position, sound remains, pining for the lost, forgotten, and unheard.

I would like to thank the dance artist, Julia Hall for her creative participation, choreographed telegraphy and critical ear. I wold also like to thank Patrick for providing this opportunity and his relentless commitment to field-recording and the listening community.

Post transmission at Knowles Farm, Isle of Wight, May 2021.

three horizons will be broadcast on framework: afield on Sunday 13.06.21 from 11:00-12:00.
You can listen live via Resonance FM

You can also listen again via the framework website

framework always needs support to continue its commitment to field recording audio. You can help by becoming a patron via:
patreon.com

1. The wooden mast was rumoured to have been sold, cut and appropraitely repurposed as a ladder.
2. Allen, J.L. 2021. The Foghorn’s Lament. London: White Rabbit
3. The St Catherine’s Lighthouse foghorn has had several voices. In 1948, Aubrey de Selincourt, described its changing tones : ‘[…] formerly it was a sick bull’s iterated bellow; now it’s a ghoul-groan ending in a grunt.’ A sound he ‘bears’ because he ‘cannot forget the ships and the men on them … listening.’ Aubrey de Selincourt. 1948. Vision of England: Isle of Wight. London: Paul Elek Publishers.
4. Every foghorn signal, like every lighthouse beam is designed with a distinctive ‘character’, which enables it to be identified as belonging to a specific place. In fog signals this code is, the number of blasts and silent periods in each minute. The character of the Dungeness foghorn echoes Marconi’s test signal, with a succession of three quick blasts.

Off the leash

Piss Walk № 6 is the first of my stained perambulations to be published in the form of a limited-edition set of 13 purchasable A6 postcards. Printed on uncoated 600gsm card and seamed in ‘sunny yellow’ the photographic sequence retraces the sixth of my early morning ‘lockdown’ walks, as I sniffed around the back streets of Winchester and along the river Itchen. Each card is rubber stamped on the reverse, with the date of the walk and numbered with its position in the sequence of damp patches encountered that day.  As discussed in a previous post, my lockdown walks had no predetermined purpose other than a modicum of exercise and time away from the paralysis of Zoom. Rebecca Solnit notes that the casual acquaintance of a meandering stroll ‘allows you to find what you do not know you are looking for’. My meander, coupled with the quiet physical vacancy of the ante meridiem environment, acquainted me with the occasional and previously unnoticed, damp trails of urine left by the toilet of local hounds. It became my habit to follow and photographically collect these moist encounters. A habit that has resulted in the creation of an unintentional archive of (to date) thirteen Piss Walks.

On the leash of the dogs’ morning privy, I tail the stained criminal records of an intimate act in a public space: an evaporating souvenir of corporeal presence. The obsolete technology of the picture postcard would therefore seem to be an appropriately ephemeral method of recording and mapping these trails.  Sent back to where we are not, addressing those we are apart from, the cheap, disposable souvenir of a postcard, announces presence whilst confirming absence. As it passes visibly through the public body of the Royal Mail, the postcard reveals a dysfunctional relationship with intimacy, a mischievous liaison, characterised by the saucy offence of seaside communique and an obsession with bodily function. 

The 13 postcards of Piss Walk № 6 have now been sold and sent. Protected and concealed by the hard-backed buff of a manilla envelope, each postcard has passed modestly through the systemised transit of national (and international) mail. Extending the scent of canine territories from Winchester to Brighton to Bristol, Wolverhampton and beyond the sea to Canada, the postcards are a souvenir of an evaporated walk, a memory dispersed, fragmented and lost in the post. 

In a second limited-edition, Piss Walk № 9 has been published as a complete set of ten postcards. Archived and preserved in an ironically acid free box, the postcards will remain enveloped and unsent as part of the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library.   

I am also delighted that the damp traces of Piss Walk № 4, have been included in Right Here Right Now, Observations, Speculations & Hallucinations; a new book gathering together the personal lockdown of numerous artists, designers and writers. Published by Book-Lab 2020 (isbn: 978-1-71680-539-4), designed and edited by Danny Aldred, RHRN is ‘a kind of visual atlas [providing] multiple perspectives of the same moment.’ There are plans to exhibit the book at the Design Transfer Gallery (Berlin) later this year. 

Right Here Right Now is available in a print on demand format from: https://bit.ly/32AAx7X

I have thought I might ‘celebrate’ the end of the pandemic by offering a Piss Walk Tour of Winchester. In direct competition with English Heritage, Jane Austin’s House and the public tours of private education, the Winchester Piss Walk Tour would meet beneath a plague flag on Water Lane and proceed along the river Itchen, through the Water Meadows, around the u-bend of Winchester College, before passing down the cloisters of Winchester Cathedral and finally through the Water Gate, past The Quaker Meeting House and back across the bridge to rejoin Water Lane. Along the way I would recount stories of infamous stains and perhaps leave a trail of Piss Walk postcards in our wake. DM to reserve your place. 

Nothing here now…

Peter Christopherson: Nothing here now but the recordings

Constrained Radio, a weekly show for SoundArt Radio in Devon, is curated by the writer, artist, and teacher Mark Leahy. For the latest edition, Nothing here now, Mark and I collaborated on a montage of found sounds, field recordings, documented paranormal voices and experimental music.  With a title shamelessly cut from the Industrial Records album of early tape experiments by William Burroughs, the co-curated hour invokes and divines the unseen, uncanny and ethereal landscapes of the unknown.  Radio is a perfect channel for such sonic divination. Steven Connor writes, ‘what is heard in the atmospherics [of radio] [is] the fracture and fluctuation of time; […] a time out of joint.’  Marconi himself believed that his wireless signals might ‘pick-up the sounds of long-dead men […] drowned in the Atlantic.’ In the magnetic ether of radio transmission, the past and the future ‘leaks through’.

‘What I say goes.’ writes Connor. Our voice leaves and takes the air. According to Konstantin Raudive, the vocal entities of EVP, expressed a preference for communication via the airwaves, with one voice proclaiming, in what I like to imagine is an accent somewhere between the Carry-on of Kenneth Williams and vaudeville of Frankie Howard: “What a rascal, switch on the radio!” Raudive believed radio was so popular on the other side: ‘…various groups of voice entities […] operate[d] their own stations.’

Nothing here now, opens with a premonition, during which various sonic entities breakthrough: Edison taps out a spiritual telegraph, whilst a mother speaks with her departed son, a fragment of Radioland is found as a test signal tap, tap, taps on the wooden shell of Marconi’s Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station in Cornwall.

In three movements the broadcast mingles the possessed voice of children and EVP excavations of composer Michael Esposito, with airs of animal spirits recorded in Xingu in 1975 and looming ‘disturbed trance’ of Alice Kemp’s ‘A Gold Blade To The Back Of The Head.’

The second movement opens with Sally Ann McIntyre’s, Collected Huia Notations (2017), which ‘re-collects’ from several western musical transcriptions, the extinct voice of the Huia bird. Transcribed to wax cylinder these vanished ‘songs’ can be heard quietly disappearing again. Stephen Cornford’s, Electrocardiographs of a Cathode Ray Tube (2016), medically and methodically surveys the surface of expired technology. This section also includes a recording of my performance of Séance for six radios at the John Hansard Gallery in 2019.

Sally Ann McIntyre

Seance for hour-hand and harp

The final movement opens with the paranormal music of Séance for hour hand and harp: the tapping hour-hand from a dismembered clock plucking music from thin air. A found answerphone message from my own archive of found recordings is followed by Gwen’s Prayer (2005) from David Clegg’s Stories from the Trebus Project, a project where Clegg worked to capture the stories ‘of people living with dementia; stories ‘from the edge’ that would otherwise have been lost.’ The broadcast concludes with Alice Kemp’s Secret room accessed by a passage written in green ink (2016) and Psychic TV’s Proof on survival. Recorded without microphones, using Zuccarelli Holophonic, Proof on survival records the sound of soil falling on a coffin as, ‘Ringo’ (a skull, which is also the transmitter for the Zuccarelli system) is buried ‘alive’ in a grave in Farnham.

Nothing here now is broadcast on SoundArt Radio at 12pm on Wednesday (24/06/20). If you are in Totnes you can tune in on 102.5 FM or you can listen live on-line at: soundartradio.org.uk There is a full track list on the soundart radio website and the programme will also be available in the soundartradio archive.

Coincidently, the cover of “Nothing here now but the recordings” (1981), was designed by Peter Christopherson and the album curated by Genesis P-Orridge, who also wrote the sleeve notes. Genesis ‘dropped he/r body’ in March of this year.

 

 

With thanks to Mark Leahy.

Piss Walks

Piss walk 11:1 31.05.20

The arrival of ‘lockdown’ allowed me to indulge in daily early morning walks. My regular walk around Winnall Moors Conservation Reserve was unavailable, the Moors being closed due to recent flooding, so my journey had to take another path. Leaving home, I followed the meandering course of the river Itchen, down Water Lane, along the Riverside path, passing mam’s bench out to St Cross Hospital and then back along St Faiths Road to the water meadows, past Winchester College to Inner Cathedral Close, through the Water Gate toward Water Lane and home. With occasional variation this transit has become my habit.

At this early hour the streets and paths of Winchester are relatively empty, my solitude broken by the occasional key-worker, a competitive dribble of runners in pursuit of a personal best, and the hesitant, stray perambulation of dog walkers. Perhaps it is the quiet vacancy of my journey that focused my attention on the wet trails left by the toilet of dogs. Or perhaps because the piss was so fresh, it left a conspicuously dark trail, a trail which later in the day may have evaporated. Pulled by gravitational force, each stream of dog piss flows away from its source, immediately discovering and tracing its own unique path of least resistance. If this pee were a river, it would be running toward another body of water; a lake, the sea, an ocean. But this melancholy flow, rarely makes it home, the stream of piss, meanders, pools, dwindles and expires.

Piss Walk 6:14 08.05.20

Piss Walk 7:8 10.05.20

As part of an ongoing series of piss walks, I started to photograph the urine trails. These photographs draw a map of my daily promenade, but also that of the dogs.  You might even say that the dogs are taking me for a walk: I am on their tail, visually sniffing after their presence. The dogs too are following, inhaling the wet perfume tales of absent mongrels and pedigrees, which linger in the air. Steven Connor, considers all walking ‘a kind of self-ghosting.’ The dogs and I walk invisibly with each other, haunted companions following the ghosts of presence recently departed.

Although the intention was to document rather than curate, there was some aesthetic pleasure in the wandering form of particular trails: the piddle finding its course, as it seeks out the guttering cracks in tarmac and paving slabs. Whilst some trails fade over time, the stain of others remains conspicuously strong. They become familiar landmarks in the landscape of my walk, surviving until the rain pours down and the stain erased.

Piss Walk 7:10 10.05.20

Piss Walk 9a

There is a rhythm to the piss walks. Certain popular locations offer a sudden glissando of wet notes, interspersed by long periods of dry silence and the occasional damp patch. The reason for this melodic popularity is perhaps more architectural than bladder related: the perpendicular elevation of post or wall offers a place for the urine to mark. Perhaps the mere sight of an elevation incites a call of nature, or perhaps the fragrance of that call induces others to reply. The walls of Winchester College are a very popular – I like to imagine that the mutts of Winchester are using their kidneys to pass vernacular comment on the inherent inequalities of the private education system.

Piss Walk 1:10 15.04.20

Piss Walk 4:7 15.04.20

The perpendicular is not the only landmark of preference. The corner of a path or road also seems attractive. In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers the corner a haven: ‘we take refuge in a corner’, it encloses us in ‘an imaginary room [rising] up around our bodies.’ An intimate, interior space of solitude: ‘in our corners we remember […] the silence of our thoughts.’ In opposition to the security of this poetic right angle, the reflex of a corner in the road, is an edge-land, a non-place, where the familiar meets the unknown: we do not know what is around the corner. Perhaps the profusion of pee is a way for the dogs to cope with the anxiety of this displacement, a method of owning and knowing where they are. Or perhaps it is more thuggery in intent, each dog scrawling a stinking tag on the perimeters of their manor and telling the rest of us to ‘piss off!’

Piss Walk 3a: 1 18.04.20

 

 

Fog Signal Transmission

 
A perfect summer’s day. Sunshine, slight breeze. The Ness ablaze with flowers.
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

Prelude

Seagulls flocking over Ness [field-recording]: 02:00 / mp3 / 2019

At 9:15 AM on the 24^th July 1991, the Post Office collected a hand-written envelope, that had been dropped into a letter box in New Romney near Dungeness. A day later, a bright orange envelope, addressed in a flourish of black ink, fell onto the floor of a one-bedroom flat in Park Fields, Wolverhampton.  Addressed by Derek Jarman this envelope is kept between the pages of a copy of Modern Nature.

In June this year, Modern Nature featured on the BBC Radio 4 series, Book of the Week.  Beautifully read by Rupert Everett the programme was recorded at Prospect Cottage, Jarman’s home in Dungeness. Everett reads from the desk where Modern Nature was written, and an orange envelope inscribed. The letter enclosed within that envelope ends with the words: ‘Dungeness is all flowers.’

Since receiving the letter in 1991, I have wanted to return to Dungeness and see Prospect Cottage in full flower. This summer, twenty-five years after his death I finally returned. I say ‘return’ although I had never actually been to the Ness. And yet, having waited so long, it does feel like a return of sorts, a return to somewhere I have never been and to a memory I am yet to forget.

Starlings Transmitting [field-recording]:  02:32 / mp3  / 2019

Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.
Ness speaks. Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks
bracken and lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale deception.
Ness speaks […] transmission, reception, Ness speaks
pure mercury, utmost secret, swift current, rapid fire.
Listen again. Listen back. Listen to the past of Ness […] [1]

As part of the ‘fifth continent’ Dungeness is set adrift, detached, flat and exquisitely bleak. Closer to Calais than London the Global Positioning System of my mobile, ignores Brexit and positions me firmly in France.  On the shingle, the derelict shell of a wooden shed [2], is thought to have been built by Marconi as part of his experiments with the transmission of wireless radio signals across English Channel. The airwaves still chatter in the frequent modulation of broken English and spoken French. Like many of the buildings on the Ness, Marconi’s ‘Wireless shed’ has been converted into a modernist holiday home.

A physical and architectural neighbour to the Wireless shed  [3], the Fog Signal Building is part of the Trinity House Experimentation Station [4]. In August of this year it became the site of my most recent covert residency and micro-FM transmission. The industrial bungalow lies low in the shingle at the very tip of the headland. Rising from its flat concrete roof, the perpendicular pluck of a decommissioned radio tower breaks cover, transmitting a ghost of presence in the horizontal empty – Ness. Every morning a small electronic murmur of starlings settles on the tower, briefly recommissioning transmission.

Fog Signal Building once housed the air pumps, whose compressed breath, mouthed through an array of six horns, tested the distance and propagation of fog signals. An architectural ghost of these forgotten voices remains in a monochrome tower of mute horns, which peaks over the sine waves of shingle, bellowing silently, out to sea.

Formed through longshore drift, the ‘dangerous nose’ of the Ness is constantly wiped by oblique incoming winds. And yet the landscape seems strangely still, evacuated of presence, it oxidises quietly. On the horizon the sea is visible, but it’s sound remains distant and remote, an audible rumour behind a vast tide of shingle.

Considered one of the quietest places in the UK, in the 1920’s the Ness was referred to as ‘the nearest approach to silence […]’[5] and selected as a good site for the large array of three acoustic mirrors at Great Stone (aka Denge). The early warning system of these concrete ears extends along the Kent coast, from Denge to Hythe, onto Dover and the South Foreland Lighthouse, where in 1899, Marconi conducted the first international radio transmission.

As part of the Hythe Acoustical Research Station, the sound mirrors at Hythe were constructed by the Air Ministry in the 1920’s with the largest of the two (30ft) being completed in 1929. Designed to survey the air, the mirrors listened out for the incoming propulsion of enemy aircraft. Although successful in tests, by 1936 the acoustic premonition of sound mirrors was superseded by the electromagnetic scan of RAdio Detection and Ranging.

Hythe Mirror gunfire [field-recording]: 00:41 / mp3 / 2019

At the summit of The Roughs, overlooking the beached military ranges below, the largest of the Hythe mirrors survives. Tagged and crumbling, its cracked concrete ear still listens. ‘[A]lone with nothing particular to listen to’, perhaps as Derek Jarman writes, ‘this is [its] finest hour.’[6] As I ascend the hill and reach the mirror, I hold a microphone out into the oracle [Auricle] of its hollow, and I am suddenly confronted with a burst of gunfire, the echo of its acoustic shrapnel shattering the mirror’s derelict silence. Francois Bonnet notes that ‘the echo, produced by the repercussions a multiplied sound […] establishe[s] a supernatural sonorous environment’[7]. Brandon Labelle also recognises the ghosting of acoustic delay when he writes: ‘the echo is a sound that comes back to haunt [ …]’[8]. Just as the mythical Echo wasted away,  her bones turning to stone, so too the percussion of the ballistics recurs, an echoic and fugitive spirit, mineralised in the concrete of the mirror.

Air Harp n.3: 04:12 / mp3 / 2019

My previous transmissions at Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station were composed of sounds found and recorded in the surrounding landscape. At Fog Signal I decided to not only listen into the landscape, but also introduce other sounds into it. The ‘air harp’ is a cheap second-hand auto harp, ‘prepared’ with the flotsam of wood, screw and polystyrene washed up onto the Ness. Performed by the wind, this automatic aeolian harp, uncovers the murmuring music of sea breezes.

But from where and whence do these ghostly melodies come? Athanasius Kircher, who first described the Aeolian harp in 1650, ‘surmised that the wind comes in rays’, plucking the strings and causing them to sound. Whilst, in Physiological Disquisitions, the 17^th century natural philosopher William Jones proposed that the music of the Aeolian harp originated not in the strings, but in the air itself. The harp operated as a ‘sound prism’ ‘[refracting] the wind,’ dividing and revealing ‘vibrations […] already present in the air.’[8]

Pebble arc: 02:40 / mp3 / 2019

Fog Signal Transmission [harp and signal] edit: 03:00 / mp3 / 2019

The transmission at Fog Signal, begins as the beam of the Dungeness lighthouse automatically announces night fall. A line of pebbles cast onto the shingle, traces an arc of auditory space and presence.  The auto harp sounds, divining the air and revealing a concert of signals already present. I transmit to an unknown and unknowing audience, the transmission, like sound itself, disappearing in the moment of its appearance. Signals lost are sent, received and lost again. No one is listening, nothing is heard.

 

Footnotes

[1] Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood, 2019. Ness. London: Hamish Hamilton. p.5

[2] This shack appears in the landscape of Jarman’s The Garden (1990).

[3] It is difficult to confirm that Marconi built the ‘Wireless Shed’ in the 1890’s.  The building is also refereed to as the Decca Radar Station, built by the Decca Navigator Company in 1961.

[5] Fog Signal Building and the Experimentation Station complex were redesigned by the Interior Architects Johnson Naylor

[5] Richard N Scarth. 1995. Mirrors by the sea. North Elham: Minnis Print Ltd. p.5

[6] Derek Jarman. 1991. Modern Nature. London: Century. p.72

[7] Francois J. Bonnet. 2016. The order of sounds. Falmouth: Urbanomic. p.25

[8] Brandon Labelle. 2010. Acoustic Territories. London: Bloomsbury. p.15

[9] Thomas Hankins & Robert Silverman. 1995.  Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 94-95.

not arriving and then

And our ears
Are formed of the sea as we listen [1]

On Saturday the 4^th May 2019 a final silence was lost to the sea off the coast of Holy Island, Anglesey. One of four such disappearances, this concluding silence sank beneath the waves of the Irish Sea on a bright spring day, in [plain] sight of the South Stack Lighthouse. The Metadata of a photograph taken at the time of disappearance, positions the silence at an altitude of 72.07 m with the global coordinates of: Latitude: 53,18.1428N / Longitude: 4,41.3708W.

The quartet of missing silence consists (or consisted) of four single-sided records; each cut with a silent groove and lost to the seas surrounding the UK over a period of four years (the Irish Sea, North Sea, English Channel and Celtic Sea). Each record is labelled with a request for return, care of the British Library Sound Archive. A small advert placed in the Lost and Found section of The Times newspaper announces the site of the silence lost. Published on the day of disappearance, this advert functions as both a premonition and record of loss. The announcement, together with a photograph of the sea into which the record disappeared, and an empty, preservation grey, archival sleeve, are the only ‘proof’ of the records existence and its silence being lost.

In his book Sound, Michel Chion considers the ear as ‘a link between different worlds (real and imaginary) and different registers (physical and mental).’[2] Just as the silence lost directs our listening toward an imaginary absence of sound, so too the circumstantial (physical) evidence of loss requires that we imagine and believe silence once existed and has now disappeared. The emptiness of the archival sleeve quietly anticipates return, a return that may enable silence to sound [again]. And in this silence lost, we listen without listening for, we place our ear against the shell of sounds that have not yet been caused to vibrate. [Waves…]

not arriving and then
not arriving [3]

 

With thanks to Trish Bould for her help, photography and metadata.

[1] W. S. Merwin, “Coming to the morning” in: The rain in the trees. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf , 2018), 37

[2] Michel Chion, Sound: an acoustical treatise. (London: Duke Universty Press, 2016), 18

[3] W. S. Merwin, “The Sound of it” in: Garden Time, (Hexham: Bloodaxe book, 2016), 9

 

 

 

 

the silence after

Silence and weak signals live: part one [edit] 5:23 / mp3 / 2019

Silence and weak signals live: part two [edit] 5:28 / mp3 / 2019

Silence and weak signals live: part three [edit]  5:27 / mp3 / 2019

To mark the end of the exhibition of Various Silences at Winchester School of Art Library, I performed a short micro-FM transmission in Library 2. Silence and weak signals: for five poorly tuned radios, was accompanied by the live dissolve of a cretaceous ammonite, a dissolve that quietly released the fossilised air of ancient C0² into the atmospheric lull of library stacks. The performance begins with a damaged silence as I take Silence on Loan from the library shelf and drop the stylus into its groove.  Tuning into the dead air between radio stations, I find silence and weak signals coming through the radios, whilst the tapping of the library shelves and architecture, calls substance into question and asks for a response from elsewhere.

Each day of the exhibition, a page of the erased found novel Red Silence: for the missing, was turned. As I removed the novel from the exhibition, the silent dust of language rubbed out and unsaid, remained on the cabinet floor.

Over the horizon

Tapping the air: weak signals at nightfall.
Off the Beat(en) Track.
Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art, Ontario, Canada. 2019

On this day, one hundred and eighteen years ago, a test signal was sent from Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight to the Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station on the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall. At 5.32pm (the same time that I now post this here) a Post Office Telegraph was handed in at the Lizard Village Office, confirming receipt of the signal and declaring Marconi’s test ‘completely successful.’ The transmission was ‘a world record for long-range wireless propagation’ and the first time a wireless signal had been transmitted ‘over the horizon’. Prior to this, it was believed that ‘the operating range of wireless would be restricted to the [optical] horizon.’ (Rowe) But on Wednesday the 23rd January, 1901, in what became known as ‘Marconi’s First Great Miracle’ the arrival of three Morse code dots at The Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station, signalled not only the letter ‘s’, but also an escape from the visible: a flight from the material into the airy immaterial.

In that same year, at Poldu, some six visible miles from the Wireless Telegraphy Station, Marconi had begun construction of the largest transmitter ever built. The Poldhu station was charged with determining if wireless signals could be transmitted and received over the fathomless horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. On the 12^th December 1901, the faint dit-dit-dit of Marconi’s test signal transmitted from Poldhu, was heard some 2100 miles away, at a receiving point on the appropriately named Signal Hill, in St John, Newfoundland, Canada. The signal was too weak to operate the Morse printer and could only be confirmed by the (h)ear(ed) witness of Marconi and his assistant George Kemp. Without visible evidence, the existence of a signal was disputed, even today the authenticity of the transmission continues to be questioned. Pat Hawker, a writer for the journal Radio Communication, states: ‘[W]hatever clicks Marconi and Kemp heard on that windy Newfoundland cliff, they could not have originated from the three dots automatically transmitted from Poldhu.’ That the existence of this inaugural signal of wireless communication should be so spectral and suspect, seems appropriate for a medium in which the perimeters of the real and imagined, the here, there, then and now are so diffused.

Tapping the air: weak signals at nightfall is a recording of a micro-FM transmission, composed and performed live at the Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station in August 2018.
The transmission was based on field-recordings collected on the Lizard Peninsular and surrounding environment; a landscape littered with the history and architectural remains of listening and communication technologies. The transmitted soundscape mingles local sounds with recordings made on the Isle of Wight and physically transported over the horizon to the Lizard station. The architectural ghosts of towers, wires and blast walls are sounded out by the air moving through them and the by the geological dit-dit-dit of Serpentine pebbles tapping out Marconi’s test signal upon them. The transmission began as the first illuminated arc of the Lizard Lighthouse signaled nightfall: weak signals lost in and to the visible landscape.

Tapping the air: weak signals at nightfall is featured on the NAISA Radio programme, Off the Beat(en) Track. Curated by Darren Copeland, Artistic Director of New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), the programme is available online as part of the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art.