Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!
This BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance.
Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score.
And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.
As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West).
There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962.
The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.
I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.
There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness.
One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.
"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.
"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "
Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"
Trunk Records recently put out a very nice compendium of short spooky works by long-term local resident Elizabeth Parker, who'll be familiar to many parishioners from her volunteer work for the Radiophonic Workshop. The vinyl long-player is called Future Perfect. And what an attractive cover!
This piece in particular struck me as Caretaker-adjacent in theme and vibe if not texture and method
Release rationale
Elizabeth Parker is a composer you may not have heard of until now. Well here she is, in all her musical glory, having worked for decades at the front line of British electronics, radiophonics, soundracks and more. This is an album full of musical ideas ahead of the curve, with contemporary technology that was to go on and very much shape the future of sound we know now. From classic tape loop techniques to modern sampling concepts you will find dark ambience, drones, beer adverts and drifts into space. This is the first ever Elizabeth Parker LP and represents (with 26 tracks) a very small retrospective of her extraordinarily prolific and commercial output. Not to be missed.
Ms. Parker back in the day being interviewed about soundtracking The Living Planet
An Electronic Sound interview with Parker, in which she talks about being "the last" Radiophonic composer and also her encounters with Delia Derbyshire.
A Sound on Soundinterview about Parker's post-Workshop career
Christmas Day 2022 marked 50 years since the original broadcast of the ground-breaking BBC supernatural thriller, 'The Stone Tape', written by Nigel Kneale.
In early 2023 Hidden Britain commissioned a group of UK based musicians to produce a new piece of work inspired by this extraordinary 1972 TV film.
The result is a 16 track tape compilation which blends reimagined theme tunes and Radiophonic incidental motifs with dark ambience and hauntological synth explorations.
The artists involved in this release come from some of the finest electronic and experimental labels currently operating in the UK, such as Wayside & Woodland, Clay Pipe, Castles in Space & Spun Out Of Control.
Out in late October, in an edition of 50.
Limited edition C90 transparent cassette tape with foldout artwork inlay and exclusive sleeve notes by writer and comedian Stewart Lee. Also ships with an exclusive A3 Risograph print on 270gsm Colourset paper.
Tracklist
1. The British Stereo Collective - Written In Stone
2.The Hardy Tree - Chuffy
3.The Heartwood Institute - Taskerlands
4.The Night Monitor - It's In The Computer 02:57
5. Mike Dickinson - Brock's Prayer
6. SWLLWS - There Are Words
7. The Lost Past Society - We're Getting Data All The Time
8. Charles Vaughan - The Summoning
9. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Comparing The Properties Of Stone, Brick And Concrete 03:52
10. Drew Mulholland - The Strange Beyond
11. E.L. Heath - Whiston
12. The Soulless Party - Vigilamus
13. The Metamorph - The Uncertainty Principle
14. The Toy Library - Lethbridge
15. Nicholas Bullen - When They Return
16. The Twelve Hour Foundation - Time's Patina
Now one doesn't want to be a wet blanket - but isn't this kind of thing a teensy bit on the late side?
Still, perhaps to expect hauntology to be timely, or to evolve, is to misunderstand the genre... ... it wouldn't shuffle off the scene punctually... it would malinger on, fixated on the same totems and talismans...
This appears to be Hidden Britain's first audio release - they are a company that sells "handmade signs and print from British Folk Horror and unsettling TV. Film and literature" [sic]. Again, can't help wondering, looking over their product range, how such a settled canon could still unsettle...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
One of the contributors to The Stone Tape - Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - had a new record out last month, Building a New Town, on Castles in Space.
Release rationale:
"Recently found during the closure of New Town House, Warrington, these tapes formed part of the advertising by the Development Corporation in the early 1970s. Showcasing a more pastoral, rural idyll than the architecture might imply, this represented an opportunity for people from smoke grimed cities to escape into a greener, healthier setting."
The new towns claimed the perfect suburban life in a green paradise with spacious parks and tree-lined boulevards. This chimed with post-hippy ideals of returning to nature and living The Good Life. The music filters through period inspirations such as Pentangle, Mike Oldfield and early Tangerine Dream."
A last minute addition to the newsletter - the announcement of Vol. 2 of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology! It's out on October 6th.
Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 2 – Raidió na hEorpa
This is the second volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, which is a music compilation anthology attempting to preserve the fictional history of a small composer community based in rural Ireland existing from the late 60’s until the late 80’s. The project is written by the Irish composer and artist Neil Quigley.
This second volume in the series is released as a compact disc and an accompanying 50-page booklet contextualising the organisation and each of the selected tracks in probably too much detail. It is released on the record label Miúin.
Volume 2 of the anthology was influenced by a variety of Irish news stories and cultural ephemera, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Garry Shandling, and post-war electronic music of the U.S., U.K and Europe.
No videos as yet for the new compilation but here's some reminders of Vol. 1
Like other BBC Radiophonic Workshop fiends, I first came across the name Rosemary Tonks in connection with "Sono-Montage": a 1965 collaboration between the experimental poet and Delia Derbyshire + otherWorkshoppers. The program tantalizes in large part because it's not easy to hear - you'd have to visit the British Library to order it up. Some say it can be found on the internet, if you really dig around - but I've had no luck.
"Sono-Montage" is discussed, but not played, in this Lunar Poetry podcast, also available in transcript form here. Host David Turner says, paraphrasing Tonks's introduction to the program: :
"Sono-Montage is an experiment to combine poetry with electronic sound. Its aim is to put a dramatic edge on poetry read aloud and that edge is sound. What you hear in the recordings are sound collages or sound illuminations."
Sound illuminations!
Here at the unofficial BBC archive Genome is what theRadio Times said about "Sono-Montage" the week of its eventual broadcast on June 21st 1966:
A experiment in combining spoken poetry with electronically produced sounds
Arranged, directed, and introduced by Rosemary Tonks in conjunction with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The programme is based on the following nine poems:
Speechhouse and Steeple-jock by Michael Baldwin
Mediterranean and A Silent Man by Peter Redgrove
Midsummer Thames and Fisherman of Alaedras by Paul Roche
Poet as Gambler, Badly-chosen Lover and Orpheus in Soho by Rosemary Tonks
Produced by George MacBeth
The original effects on which the orchestrations in this programme were based were recorded by 'Stagesound' for a public performance of sono-montage in Hampstead followed by an interlude at 18.50.
Here's a not entirely swayed review of "Sono-Montage" from The Listener.
And here's a photo of Tonks with Alexander Trocchi working on "Sono-Montage"
Along with the experimental poetry, Tonks had a sideline in writing novels. She saw them as her more commercial front of operation and they were reviewed at the time as comic fiction, satires of Sixties London. In recent years, a coterie of Tonks-converts have been agitating for these long out of print, incredibly hard-to-find-secondhand / prohibitively-expensive-if-you-do novels as lost classics of the decade. You can hear two of these enthusiasts - Jennifer Hodgson and Stewart Lee - enthusing on this podcastBacklisted.
Where at approximately 56 minutes in you can in fact hear a small snippet of Radiophonic Tonks.
Another small portion of it can be heard here - go down to the Steve Cleary segment.
The campaign seems to have led, directly or indirectly, to the reissue of The Bloater - originally published by The Bodley Head in 1968 - earlier this year as a Vintage Classic. Hodgson's review forNew Left Review got me intrigued enough to pick up the mauve paperback while in London last month. I read most of it while holed up in our Islington AirB'n'B while recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning, while the beautiful weather streamed through the huge windows. That seemed appropriate as The Bloater is a London novel that takes place in the summer. My gastric distress fit the unsettled feeling of the prose, with its heightened sensitivity to all things bodily and gastronomic. The title of the book comes from a cured herring with a pungent odour - but is also the main character's nickname for one of her would-be paramours, whose strong aroma lingers after his visits.
Part of the interest of The Bloater for the Radiophonic fiend is that there's a character based on Delia Derbyshire in it. Jenny is a colleague and a confidante to the protagonist, a musician / radio producer called Min. A couple of scenes take place in "The Electronic Sound Workshop".
Those nine and a half pages are not really reason enough to buy the book, though. What is?
Well, at first, I really wasn't sure. It took me a while to get on with Tonks's style, to get the hang of it. The writing initially feels frightfully mannered. "Brittle" is a word that reviewers often use. "Arch" also fits. The prose feels like - or even smells like - an emanation of the personality of Min, who's magnetic but not exactly likeable. Every interaction with an Other has a kind of pettish, catty quality, a flip flirtatiousness that feels (with her various male love interests) mildly sadistic. The writing also has a elliptical quality that reminds me a little of Wyndham Lewis's disjointed modernism but suffused with the personality of Oscar Wilde or a Wilde character (same difference). It can often feel like bits of information that would make a smoother read have been rubbed out with a capricious eraser. I kept trying to think who and what it reminded me of and suddenly it hit me: Morrissey and Autobiography. That quippy tone, wilful indirection, and contorted syntax. There's the same (very Wildean) inversion of seriousness: tiny defects in others, trivial inconveniences or setbacks, are monstrously inflated and absurdly bemoaned; the actual tragic is danced past blithely. Min is not unlike the demanding, impossible, amuse-me-NOW heroine in that early Smiths B-side "Wonderful Woman."
The book's demented gaiety eventually becomes compelling, though. You also begin to sense that the determined superficiality might be papering over damage deep below the surface. Apart from the BBC scenes, the milieu is posh - fancy restaurants, nights at the opera. But even though it doesn't overtly reference much that is specific to the decade, the mood is "British Sixties" in a way that vaguely reminds me of films like Accident, The Servant, and Blow-Up. The old standards and inhibitions are eroding, but archetypally English qualities of detachment and clipped coldness carry through into the new less-repressed era.
Tonks's life story is fascinating - and oddly parallels Derbyshire's. There's the burst of creativity (six novels between 1963 and 1972), the trendiness and immersion in the adventure of the Sixties... then retreat, the drying up of productivity, and disappearance. In Tonks's case, her withdrawal was into extreme conservatism. She became a fundamentalist Christian, renouncing all things worldly, and a recluse. She is believed to have gone round the country taking her books out of libraries and destroying them. She went by the name Rosemary Lightband - but amazingly this wasn't some born-again invention, just a reversion to using the name of her former husband.
More on Rosemary Tonks and the Radiophonic Workshop in this blogpost at Superintendent Idle Tiger
And more about her poetry, novels and life in this long piece at The Paris Review by Lucy Scholes.
"Sono-Montage, a critical intervention into sound and poetry was not unrecognised at the time, but apart from a single repeat on the BBC hasn’t been heard in public in nearly 50 years. A few segments – Rosemary’s own poems – were played at a recent event at Flat Time House, Peckham, due to the curator, Lucy Reynolds, being Rosemary’s great niece. She has also been able to give me some insight into Rosemary’s character and background, and her complex relationship with feminism. She was fun, but John Horder recalled, she ‘spoke with an intensity bordering on active aggression’. This opinion of her may have been mistaken for assertiveness; Tonks achieved so much in her short career that others could not.
"I managed to listen to Sono-Montage several times at the British Library, as well as being able to access her novels, after their forty-eight hour transit from the deepest darkest vaults of literature. I decided it was worth excavating; it is an interesting, and important, critical intervention in radio, coming quite early in terms of broadcast experiments into poetry and sound, alongside more famous broadcasts by Bob Cobbing & Barry Bermange. Accessing information about Sono-Montage was difficult, even Neil Astley hadn’t heard it, so to excavate it now, one year after her death, seems like a fitting tribute to her not inconsiderable efforts to make this thirty-minute recording. There are many links between the programme, her writing (both poetry and prose), and criticism, but also many contradictions: in style and attitude, if not tone. An unusual artefact, Sono-Montage is the invisible peak of Tonks’s personal epoch."
x
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
The New Sound of Music, 1979 TV doc on history of electronic instruments
hark, what's this then? another speck of lost radiphonic treasure on YouTube -- an early BBC radio piece involving Daphne Oram - Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957)
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
"a hauntological last hurrah"--The Quietusreports on The Ghosts of Bush House, a project in which a fellow who works as a studio manager tat he BBC World Service, which is being decimated by huge cuts, went around its soon-to-be-closed HQ at Bush House on the Strand and recorded nocturnal atmospheres and reverberationa, which he then wove them into a H-ological mood-piece. He also worked in elements taken from "the World Service’s ancient reel-to-reels", an echo perhaps of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This chap usually goes by the moniker Robin the Fog but the artist name he's going by for this project is The Fog Signals.
"I was working a lot of nightshifts... and as a result would often have the place largely to myself during the
small hours of the morning. On my journeys around Bush House... I used to love
listening to all the sounds around me: the creaks and rumbles of the old
building echoed up and down the stairwells and through the corridors,
even the most mundane of noises suddenly taking on a new significance in
the half-light. Like so many historic buildings around London, Bush House is
constructed of Portland Stone, which is a wonderfully resonant material
to work with... the stone construction of the
walls coupled with the high ceilings gave you this extraordinary reverb.
I would whistle to myself on the landings and then listen as the
whistle fluttered round the space for what seemed like an eternity,
transforming as it did so into something much stranger, as if the
building was adding a few tones of its own. I liked to think these were
the sounds Bush House made when it thought nobody was listening!
"No artificial echo or electronic effects were used in the making of
the album... These are genuinely the sounds of the space."
Ghosts of Bush's chimes with the H-ological preoccupation with the Public Sphere as something that's faded away, something to mourn... but also to celebrate/cherish/protect as per Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony.
"I’m an ardent believer in the World Service and in public service
broadcasting in general. It’s an incredible ambassador for British
affairs and is renowned for its integrity and trusted the world over."
"The nicest compliments of all have been those who compared it to the
produce of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an organization which has been a
huge influence on my work and which I always used to fantasize about
joining, despite its closing almost a decade before I joined the BBC."
You can listen to and name-your-price purchase The Ghosts of Bush Househere. "All proceeds will be donated to BBC Media Action (formerly The World
Service Trust), helping in their mission to 'harness the power of media
and communication to help reduce poverty and assist women, children and
men to claim their rights'."
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