Looking up an old tutor of mine who had impressed me, to see if his spoor of publications was distinguished in the field, I came across a lengthy tribute to a different professor - one I had not been engaged by nor vice versa of that I am sure. And popping out of this obituary, there was the surprise of an early appearance, decades before Derrida’s book, of the phrase “archive fever”:
“This archive fever lasts for life, I can see. There’s quite a company of the afflicted out here” - that’s Philip Jones, in 1957, talking about the joy of deep immersion in research, while in Italy poring over Medieval documents.
Does this mean the expression has a long if obscure history in English? (It is after all only the translator’s rendering of Jacquey’s mal d’archive which literally means either / both “illness of the archive” and “in need of the archive” - craving the archive, crazed from too long in the archive.
Ironic too that one of his students that he most likely would have seen as least likely to become a historian, did in fact become a historian, of sorts - poring over not manorial inheritance documents of the Middle Ages but old music papers. A victim of archive fever in his own right, or write..
But wait... the mystery deepens... by chance, reading, finally Borges's short story "The Library of Babel", I stumble on the phrase "feverish library"
But it is rendered as a quotation.... now is it in fact a quotation, a real one, or just a fictitious one that Borges pretend-cites?
The passage is much quoted on the internet but always attributed to Borges not to its "source" (if one even exists)
The Borges story dates to the early 1940s.
Back to Jones, my old tutor (RIP).
No, he was not one of my favorites, A rather dry, slightly tetchy fellow... who evidently found it a chore to have to sit through our execrable essays - in my case, always written at the last minute, in an all-nighter, so that during the tutorial I would be struggling to stay awake... my efforts did have the benefit of being short, brisk, and relatively stylishly written, unlike the offerings twice as long droned out by my fellow students... but Jonesy seemed to give more credence and respect to the dronework, since it evidenced a dogged diligence. Clearly he dearly wished to be back in his beloved archives, poring over primary sources, inhaling their sickly must, like the characters Friedrich N warned about in The Uses and Abuses Of History.
So it was with an unseemly amusement that I noticed that nearing the end of his eulogy, the scholarly colleague of Jones admitted, more or less, that Jones's grand opus on the Italian city-state was a dense, barely-readable affair, the work of someone who had succumbed to archive fever but not known how to conquer it or prevent it from rendering the resulting history unnavigable
But I take this not so much as spur to schadenfreude as a warning - a kind of memento mori even - that any kind of writing will sooner rather than later grow useless to later generations, outmoded, exposed, and just simply gathering dusty irrelevance with each passing decade.
Writing, then - like research - is only worth doing for the fever itself.
I saw that American family sitting glumly in the tea room area of the farm shop the other day. Although the dad may actually be a Brit - he’s got one of those grating in-between accents. Passing their table on the way to my favorite nook, I heard him muttering disagreeably about the deficiencies of the bagel that lay forlornly half eaten on his plate. Honestly, anyone with a pinch of sense wouldn’t order a bagel in that kind of place. A scone, a granary bap, a nice white roll, a flapjack…
They do seem a downcast bunch. But I suppose having to move, lock, stock and barrel, in such a hurry... I really ought to make more concerted efforts to integrate them into the community, such as it is. But they don’t look the sort to be making jams or cheese straws for the church fete.
On to other matters....
Well, the big news in the parish is a new album by Position Normal - Modern & Unique 2.
It is indescribably good. Which I mean literally - I can't describe it.
All the quaint creaky crinkled quirkily chuneful qualities of classic Poz Normal (Stop Your Nonsense, Goodly Time etc) meshed with the unmistakably digital-now. A sort of hyper-brite murk, cobwebbed with glinty glitches.
I say that but looking at the press release, the sound palette is all acoustic and electronic, barely digital at all! And there's material, or constituents at least, in there that allegedly date back to the late '80s. Pre-Bugger Sod.
It's a headscratcher
Release irrationale:
All lyrics and stories written and performed by John Cushway. Instruments played here:. Piano (a real one and a software one). Guitars: Aria Pro 2, Yamaha acoustic, electric Italia Maranello, Double Bass, Congas, Bongos, Tambourine (wooden), Shakers (one egg shaped, the others are all made to look like fruit and vegetables). And synths.
2 samples though. One of a dog barking twice and a drum and bass sample from a 90's D&B Sample CD on the last hidden secret bonus track Techno Non-Stop (Party Party Drugs).
Oh and look here - a movie about or involving Position Normal
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Activity from the village elders!
Including posthumous activity... which I suppose is pretty ghostological if you think about it.
Now I remember as a boy cycling past Pendley Manor and slowing to a near-wobble as the big lawn came into view - goggling at the contorted calisthenics cavorted by what looked like naked or nearly-naked figures. Turns out this was the dance troupe of Ernest Berk, an avant-gardist in exile, whose radical choreography was accompanied by equally radical electronic music for movement composed by his good self.
Trunk already issued a chunk of this stuff (Electronic Music for Two Ballets) but somehow I missed the heaping double-CD portions of Berktronica that came out last year via the Huddersfield Contemporary Records label - a bumper serving of the first of these two sorts of avant-electronic that I really really can't get enough of.
Release irrationale:
This double CD represents the first substantial publication of the electronic music of Ernest Berk. Only two works from his catalogue of over 228 pieces were published during his lifetime in the early 1970s. Following the collapse of the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln in 2009 it was generally thought that all materials were lost. The project team comprising Prof Monty Adkins, Dr Sam Gillies and Ian Helliwell have managed to source early digitisations of some of the master tapes from Martin Kohler (who was a PhD candidate at the time) as well as other sources across Europe. The project team have then selected 18 representative tracks from Berk's oeuvre composed between 1957-1984. They have then worked with Dr Richard Scott and Jos Smolders to digitally remaster these works for this release. The CD features a bespoke cover design by Ian Helliwell and has been produced by Monty Adkins. Extensive liner notes about Berk's work have been written by Adkins, Gillies, and Helliwell.
Ernest Berk was one of the earliest and most prolific composers of electronic music in England and yet his work is almost completely unknown to the wider public. With only a few pieces ever made commercially available in limited circulation, much of his output has since languished in obscurity until now. Huddersfield Contemporary Records is pleased to release this newly restored and remastered 2CD collection of the work of Ernest Berk.
Berk was a true polymath, working throughout his life as a composer, percussionist, dancer, choreographer, teacher, actor, and mime artist, often assuming many of these roles in the same project. He composed over 228 works of electronic music between 1957 and 1984, many of considerable length and often used to accompany his own expressionist contemporary dance productions. Diversed Tapes is a compelling overview of Berk's revolutionary catalogue. The collection includes End of the World (1957), his first work for magnetic tape, and one of the first electronic works composed in England, and Diversed Mind (1967), his work for one of the first public concerts of electronic music in England at Queen Elizabeth Hall and performed alongside music by Daphne Oram, Tristram Carey, and Delia Derbyshire.
Berk's music is at once radical and yet still accessible, rooted in a deep appreciation for melody and rhythm. Listening to this collection in a contemporary context, one cannot help but be struck by how much his music prefigures more current musical trends. Tracks such as Wings Over the Valley of Death (1961) and Kali Yuga (1962) utilise the sorts of dark ambient droning soundscapes that are ubiquitous in electronic music today. Vibram (1973) is a long form electronic improvisation evocative of contemporary modular synthesis performances. Against 7/4 (1967) and Janet Calls it Blue Ribbon (1972) contain the kinds of sophisticated electronic music gestures that evokes connections to later works of acousmatic music by figures such as Bernard Parmegiani. This is more than just a document of the past – rather, there is much to be enjoyed here by contemporary ears with contemporary musical perspectives.
This compilation is still just a small selection of the music Berk wrote during his lifetime, but it is an attempt to illustrate the diversity of his catalogue. Richard Scott and Jos Smolders have worked tirelessly to restore and remaster these, until now, lost recordings to bring out their greatest possible shine, and to allow us to finally throw a light on this important body of work.
More electronic ballet music from the venerable and (like Berk) long-no-longer-with-us Daphne Oram - Beauty and the Beast, a collaboration with the composer Thea Musgrave, made for the Scottish Theatre Ballet in 1969. Released with minimal fanfare only days ago. You don't seem to be able to buy it in solid or immaterial form anywhere - but it's out there on the streamers and YouTube.
Clangers-tastic stuff. From Daphne's heyday at the Institute up Dancersend way.
Standard Music Library seem to be putting out a bunch of vintage stuff, some of it a bit 80's and hyperbright, but some fine work by familiar names like Brian Hodgson, such as this spacy 1975 effort Encore Electronic, a collaboration - or perhaps simple adjacence of compatible works - with a less-familiar name, Reginald J. Lewis.
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Younger elders, if that makes sense - a rare sighting of... but I'm sworn to secrecy. Or rather charged with the challenging duty of alerting without revealing. Let's just say, if you ever h.arked to the waftings of A.R.Kane's fellow-travelers and sprite-children, give a glisten to these emissions from melody snakes. Not really "hauntology" but the next parish over, yet certain to trigger ghostly tremors in the memoradelic sector of the brain for some of us.
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A missive from our Canadian twin town East Gwillimbury!
Tony Price alerts us to his latest project, Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre - self-released on Maximum Exposure and described as “a sonic eulogy to my favourite work of art: The recently shuttered Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, a world-renowned brutalist architectural wonder designed by Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama as a centennial project for Canada. It is a stunning landmark that is largely representative of the post-war utopian outlook that permeated through Canadian culture in the 1960s. Last summer, the Conservative Government of Ontario announced its abrupt, unexpected and controversial closure, a decision that was supposedly based on an engineer’s report warning of a small percentage of roof panels at risk of collapse after decades of neglect.
“Musically, this record is almost entirely made up of synthesizers and saxophones, played by Toronto avant-garde saxophonist, Colin Fisher. If I had to throw you an elevator pitch I would say it sits somewhere between Terry Riley, Fripp & Eno, Boards of Canada and Don Cherry's "Brown Rice".”
Neat parameters and it does actually fall squarely into that quadrangle
The inspirational touchstone and monument to bygone utopianism
God bless and protect Canada and the Canadian people!
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From our Italian twin town Potenza Piscene...
Fast approaching their tenth anniversary of operation, Artetetra (have we reached 6th World Music yet?) release the evocatively titled Crepuscular Elixirs by the German-Finnish outfit Grykë Pyje in just a few weeks time. You can hear most of it already here.
release irrationale:
It has been six years since Grykë Pyje (forest ravine in Albanian) stretched out their high sensitivity feelers for the first time into the greatest of outdoors to bring us fascinating, multilayered soundscapes and introduce audiences to their signature, crystal-clear fifth-world compositions. Working on the idea of using music as a way to pierce the fabric of myths from yonder thanks to a wide array of synthesis, sound superimpositions, patchworking and manipulations, blending hazy shards of experience and imagination, in their fourth LP, "Crepuscular Elixirs", Grykë Pyje spins further adrift from its previous works, trying to increase the level of intricacy.
If recent experiments engaged with the sonification of sacred herbariums and the reimagining of chants and myths from the animal kingdom, for the brewing of their latest musical potion, tracks were built around skew and Oddly-hypnotic resemblances of grooves dodging well-trodden patterns. These bumping and stumbling primal rhythms pervading the album were inspired by the inconsistent pulse and timbrical variety of animal noises: a hammering woodpecker, croaks and ribbits from frogs or the scraping of ants at work. Rhythmic backbones were used as free territory to imagine the entire and alien world around the sounds of this pseudo-fauna.
Indeed Crepuscular Elixirs is an apt title for this bizarre conflation of fiction and natural science, magical miniaturism and microscopic realism. With its bizarre world of supernatural charlatans, hazy incantations and invisible accesses to an impossible bestiary, Grykë Pyje creates sixteen tracks of pure audio alchemy where it’s impossible to retrace the songs’ various layers, rather compelling one to listen to the compositions as a moving thing in its whole. Sounds lift up one another creating texture, mimesis and confusion, incredibly entangled, blurring the line between transmutation and sonic manipulation.
With Crepuscular Elixirs, the duo’s organico-mineral soundscape is sharper and more detailed than ever before. A type of listening requiring allure and curiosity, but that repays with a seemingly endless rediscovery and wonder. Now let this seemingly alive bag of sonic illusions open a new chapter in the excitingly chaotic, fantastic world of Grykë Pyje!
"Potion Seller, I am going into battle and I need your strongest potions."
"My potions are too strong for you, traveler.”
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Here's a recent-ish mix made by Luke J. Murray aka Stonecirclesampler for The Wire.
"The mix is a hauntological blend of washed out ambient, dub and grime, threaded together with samples from horror films and TV."
Tracklist
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Stonecirclesampler Hauntology Primer (Intro)”
Stonecirclesampler “Television Of The Stones (Rainfall version)”
Old Grime White Label “After Leaving The Cliff Overlooking The Pacific Ocean, Rainfall Began To Fall Silently On The Car Roof (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler version)”
Stonecirclesampler “Save The Stones! (Rainfall Widens The Cracks In The Concrete Slowed Down VIP)”
Superior London Pulp “The Real Occults In The Pubs Of The East End (Wire mix acid edit)”
Old Grime White Label “Untitled 2010 Techno (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler Fourth Dimension version)”
Old Grime White Label “Rainfall Falls Silently On Concrete Rooftops (Ambient Grime edit)”
Stonecirclesampler “A Bygone Age (Rainfall version)”
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Shivers Of Weird Landmarks, The Time Is Out Of Joint (Outro)”
A postcard from Luke alerts me, and now you too, to a new release:
"Just put out a village inspired 7" single last week called 'Somebody's Found Your Allotment' after seeing a sign for a missing bike outside an allotment gate near where we moved to recently, the title I thought has a sort of weird yet brilliantly funny slightly off-kilter energy! I was going for a bit of an early Ghost Box drift energy, swanning about on a secret allotment with lots of spring rainfall and shivering gloom!"
It's excellent - doesn't really remind me of Ghost Box, though - if anything maybe the train tracky echo-delay after-trails music heard quite early on in Stalker ... meets Burial "South London Boroughs"
Actually Luke J / Stonecirclesampler seems to have had a small flurry of releases recently:
A long track with an even longer title - The Neolithic Stonecircle Near The Record Shop With A Hauntology Section & The Rituals, Traditions, Morris Dancers & Folk Plays In The Village Pub Through The Mysterious Green Door Past The Bronze Age Burial Mound In The Conservation Area With It's Inland Water, Murky Depths & Unseen Serpents
Talking of Ghost Boxiness... here's a Belbury Poly remix of a Keith Seatman tune - brief preview here below but fully available only as a vinyl single viaCastles in Space Subscription Library Singles Club
It's a taster for a new KS album Counting to Ten Then Back Again
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Release irrationale:
Overspill Estates EP is a new four track EP from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, which delves back into the Your Community Hub sessions to uncover some gems that had been forced off the album.
Gordon Chapman-Fox, the genius behind WRNTDP says “I’d worked on these tracks for the best part of a year, and, in my mind, they were a fundamental part of the whole Your Community Hub project. I was heartbroken when they couldn’t make it onto the album, so it’s an enormous relief to see them come to life here.”
The initial concept for the fifth WRNTDP album was to expand beyond north Cheshire, and dedicate a track to some of Britain’s other New Towns. Being part of the project from early on, these four tracks were dedicated to Basildon, Cwmbran, Redditch and Harlow. To give an idea on how long these things can take to gestate, the opening track "The People Of The Town was performed at the End Of The Road Festival in 2022.
The album cover is an image from the half-modernist, half-mock Tudor houses that were built in Birchwood, Warrington in some of the last large scale building projects that were part of the New Towns.
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FinallyShindig recently devoted a large and lavishly illustrated article, by Camilla Aisa, to the subject of Hauntology, which includes a gargoyle photo of yours truly for reasons unknown, and quotes from Beautify Junkyards and Jonny Trunk....
Why now, I wondered?
Then suddenly it occurred to me that - instead of monumentally tardy, it might in fact be topical and even jumping the gun ever so slightly. For later on this year... it'll be the 20th Anniversary of Hauntology... if not as an emergent sound-zone (you could date that to 1999/1998 - Stop Your Nonsense, Music Has A Right To Children) then as a christened phenomenon...
Some sneaky snaps I took hastily, furtively, while in the village newsagents.
