Ghostly voices

I first heard of this album in connection with Brian Eno -  this 1971 LP was one of only a few recordings he took with him on a vacation to Thailand in the late '70s. It got Eno interested in the musical properties of speech, the "redundant information" it contained, especially when regionally accented or dialect - a non-signifying surplus that supplied character and rhythm. That led ultimately to My Life In the Bush of Ghosts.

Fancied having this for quite a long while before finally splashing out a few years ago (although it wasn't particularly pricey and nowadays seems to be cheaper). But then as you do, only just got around to listening to it.

Listening to the record now, there is a poignant overlay that would not have been present when Eno heard the record only seven or eight years after its release. It's a document of localized speech patterns, idioms and sometimes words that must have largely disappeared by this point. Almost all of the speakers - seemingly middle aged or elderly at the time of recording - will surely have passed away by now too.


Side One 
1 Birmingham
2 Black Country
3 Buckinghamshire
4 Cornwall
5 Cotswolds
6 Cumberland
7 Devonshire
8 Geordie (Durham)
9 Newcastle
10 Hampshire
11 Lancashire
12 Liverpool
13 Manchester
14 Leicestershire

Side Two
1 London (Cockney)
2 Norfolk
3 Somerset
4 Bristol
5 Suffolk
6 Sussex
7 Wiltshire
8 Worcestershire
9 Yorkshire
10 Isle Of Man
11 Ireland: (Ulster / Eire)
12 Scotland: (Edinburgh / Glasgow / Inverness)
13 Wales: (North / South)

wish I could be in England for this:

Mark Fisher and Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land
6 February – 30 March 2013
The Showroom,  63 Penfold Street, London NW8

Performances by John Foxx and Raime: Thursday 7 March, 7pm

Discussion with Mark Fisher, Justin Barton, The Otolith Collective, John Foxx, Frances Morgan, Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin): Saturday 16 March, 3pm (free, no booking required).

The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present On Vanishing Land, a new work by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.

On Vanishing Land (2013, 45m) is a magisterial audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2005, from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. Fisher and Barton have conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast. The work includes commissions from digital musicians, interviews and the reflections of the artists. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates this landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story in M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad (1904) and the atmospheric engineering of  Brian Eno’s album On Land (1982). “Themes of incursion - by unnameable forces, geological sentience or temporal anomaly - recur throughout.” (Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Collective, Curator,  On Vanishing Land)

On Vanishing Land integrates new compositions by digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman, Raime and Skjolbrot. For the
installation at The Showroom it will be accompanied by an untitled  sequence of a wide range of visual references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English Heretic).

Events accompanying the exhibition include a performance on 7 March by John Foxx and Raime of compositions from the project.

On  16 March, Fisher and Barton, with The Otolith Collective, John  Foxx, Frances Morgan (Deputy Editor, The Wire) and Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin), will explore the contemporary cultural
fascination with the illogics of the Eerie. Finally, a  conversation at the Boathouse café on the River Deben, Suffolk  between the artists and Andy Sharp (English Heretic) will discuss the reimagining of MR James’ ghost stories by television directors Jonathan Miller and Lawrence Gordon Clark since the late 1960s.

more information

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."-- Brian Eno, The Guardian, January 17 2010


Not surprised to see Eno subscribe to "inevitabilism"... as discussed in this review I did of A Year With Swollen Appendices, politically he does seem aligned with "a socially progressive, 'kinder' capitalism (long-term planning, improved design) insofar as he participates in the Global Business Network, a future-scenarios development group founded by Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz." Inevitalism (a.k.a "sorry mate -- history's moving along") accords with the ethos of flexibility that Eno adheres to: he's a pioneer of "creative" as non-specialised, transdiciplinary career designation, always keeping your options open, staying mobile, evading commitment.  Adapt or die, because History is an unfolding catastrophe and there's no point in swimming against the current.

Still, that doesn't mean you need to be smugly fatalistic about the vagabond-isation of an entire of class of artists who once made a modest livelihood off the selling of recordings, along with the small companies and small stores who produced and sold those recordings...  Especially if you happen to be someone whose rise owed a huge amount to that recordings-based system...  a system that, in addition to subsidising or otherwise enabling him to to make a shitload of  not-obviously-commercial records of his own using expensive studios  and expensive musicians, but also provided a great number of lucrative production jobs (that in turn probably subsidised a lot of the more esoteric and experimental projects).  Where would Eno be now without the recordings-based industry? Probably somewhere pretty cool and fairly prosperous, given his multi-talents. But the equivalents of the pre-Roxy Eno today, what are their prospects?  Probably about as good as today's equivalents to the pre-signed-to-Island U2....