| SUMMARY... |
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| Format : Compact
Disc |
| Catalogue Number
: META58CD |
| Label : Metamatic
Records |
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| Release Date :
30
March 2015 |
| Country : United
Kingdom |
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For over thirty
years I've been writing about, filming, photographing and exploring
a city. Assembling a travelogue of an invisible place that may
be found across any street.
Even though we may live in the same physical space, we all carry
our own vastly different maps of it - from personal routes and
shortcuts to all the embedded connections of accumulated memories,
associations and experiences. Our own maps of our own city.
Over time, these form other, subtler forms of architecture -
constructions of time and memory, the materials made up of millions
of tiny moments of recollection accumulated by passing through
the same streets for years, through seasons, weather, and all
the personal and universal events that may have taken place there.
Millions of places existing simultaneously, a revolving nebula
of moments. Gradually, these become interleaved with all the
avenues and rooms and corridors, altering the places we often
visit, the places we find ourselves wandering through.
This is how the city becomes overgrown. We do it to make ourselves
more comfortable, and in doing this we invest our lives into
the fabric of the city. The stones and concrete and glass are
eventually overlaid with millions of tiny personal events, like
leaves and their shadows, connecting everything together. Branches
and roots go along every corridor, through every room.
As I made this music, I was experimenting with layering of reverberations
and long echoes. I'd been entranced by the almost mystical sensations
of merging and dispersal encountered by singing in church architecture
when I was a boy in the school choir. These time-displacing buildings
enabled us to harmonise with our own voices returning from the
walls. I was struck by the glimpses of vastness and depth that
I experienced at times, and the sensations of personal dispersal
and merging with something much bigger than myself. Through these
experiences I also discovered how ancient prehistoric, even pre-human,
chants evolved through negotiating the reverberant architecture
of oceans, then caves, then cathedrals and churches. It was all
truly architectural music.
Later, I was able to make a studio in Shoreditch, London and
experiment with new technological devices capable of making a
notional architecture of almost infinite dimensions, creating
incredibly long echoes and reverberations - a completely new
ecology of sound. I also discovered the trance like states one
can enter when working with rhythms as slow as two beats per
minute and how ghostly melodies, notes and spectral harmonics
can appear out of the miasma. I felt I was making my own version
of architectural music, but this time using a new electronic
architecture. Somehow it all chimed with the evocations of ancient
architecture and the past. Modernism often seems to feel obliged
to destroy connections with the past - as if that is some vital
qualification for its own existence. I simply wanted to form
a continuity with the past, using modern electronic equipment
and instruments, and to investigate these new possibilities in
an evolutionary - not a revolutionary way.
Negotiating all this productively required a sort of letting
go - allowing the architecture to affect whatever you put into
it. You come to feel like a sort of ghost exploring a vast city.
I also happened to be writing about the Quiet Man at the time
- a character living in an abandoned overgrown London. The mode
and moods of the music seemed appropriate to this, as if the
ruined and overgrown architecture had generated these pieces
spontaneously, as time and the wind and weather moved along the
streets and squares.
Some other connections:- This theme of an overgrown city recurs
constantly in art and writing and imagery - from the 18th century
art of Capriccio, to modern newsreels, to present-day science
fiction films. Piranesi's etchings are no less effective, moving,
and thought-provoking than that archetypal image of a massive,
half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet Of The Apes.
I think that my own deep interest in this theme probably began
by living through a series of coincidental social and historical
transformations.
As a small child I remember watching Quatermass - the Nigel Kneale
science fiction serial - on television. This used actual footage
of the London Blitz at its climax. Around the same time I also
saw the terrifying newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
very moving films of a silent city of Dresden. Since I was too
young to understand the events, or the differences between them,
I assumed all these to be part of the same film, and all equally
real.
This imaginary film also connected with the events in my own
life. The place I lived in - Lancashire - was changing. I grew
up through the dissolution of the factories. As cotton mills
and other workplaces closed, my playgrounds gradually became
the overgrown and half-ruined factory buildings. I remember an
office where brambles grew from piles of rotting accounts books,
all beautifully hand written in Stephen's blue-black ink, a lifetime's
work in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Nearby was
an upper floor where a birch tree had taken root in the rotting
floor and grown out of a huge window opening, toward the sunlight.
Another playground was the overgrown estate belonging to Lord
Leverhulme at Rivington. This was long abandoned and its systems
of lakes, waterfalls and half-ruined pagodas were gloriously
overgrown, covering an entire hillside. In town, I watched films
in the huge Deco cinemas - the Odeon, Pavilion and Empire - until
they also began to close down and became derelict and empty,
as television altered the economic balance.
As an art student, I encountered the etchings of Piranesi, Daumier's
vision of a future tourist sketching the empty ruins of Thameside
London, the art of Capriccio, Gandy's paintings of Soane's Bank
of England as a ruin, and Debussy's Engulfed Cathedral. Around
the same time, I went to the first hippy 14 Hour Technicolour
Dream at an almost derelict Alexandra Palace in London, watched
Resnais' Last Year At Marienbad and Cocteau's Beauty And The
Beast. All these fragments seemed to connect, forming an emerging
and recognizable theme.
Later, I lived in squats in abandoned houses in the capital.
Found photographs of the ruins of Angkor Wat and Petra. Played
music in the gorgeous empty Royal property around Regents Park.
Found Turner's Interiors at Petworth series. I made a recording
studio in Shoreditch and lived in Spitalfields when they were
both virtually abandoned. A tree grew out of the upper windows
at Holywell Lane when we moved into the building. Streets nearby,
and the abandoned rail line across the road, were overgrown.
In summer, the seeds of purple loosestrife would blow across
Shoreditch High Street, illuminated by the evening sun.
I went regularly into Highgate Cemetery, when it was closed and
wildly overgrown. Discovered Bomarzo and Tivoli Gardens just
outside Rome, Rievaulx Abbey and Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.
I found the romantic overgrown gardens of Scotney Castle in Kent.
All the time exploring abandoned buildings of all kinds around
London, often at night. I began to collect movies, mostly sci-fi
films, containing scenes of abandoned and overgrown cities. When
digital technology allowed it, I began to put these scenes together,
in an attempt to make a documentary of My Lost City, the City
As Memory.
Along the way, I came to understand something of the themes I
was attempting to distill. Some of them formed a continuity with
the 18th century Romantic Movement that gave rise to the concept
of contemplative ruins, including deliberately constructed or
maintained ruins or follies. The poem Ozymandias by Shelley provides
another element of this. Other aspects are provided by Italo
Calvino's Invisible Cities, sections of the novels of JG Ballard,
William Burroughs and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
I was intrigued by this device of the ruin as a means of seeing
the present in the wider perspective, against the power of Nature
and inexorable time, as well as my own elusive ideas of the City
As Memory, The Lost City and The City as personal and connective
topography.
Another annex of all this is a strong desire to present a proposal
for an actual city - for instance, a plan for London as a beautiful
new overgrown city. Perhaps this might be initiated gradually,
by obtaining permission to allow a street or two to become overgrown.
If this works out, it may come to be seen as a way of greening
London and London might then become the first Post-Carbon city.
Let's practice vertical gardening over buildings everywhere.
Create the Hanging Gardens of Shoreditch, The Glades of Soho.
Let's have floating overgrown islands moored on the Thames -
they can make bridges and movable, modular, floating landscapes.
Let's open up the pavements and glass them over so we can see
all Londons hundred rivers flowing under our feet. These can
be planted with fern mosses and lichen and illuminated at night
to make spectacular walkways.
Let's resurrect Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Allow Hyde Park to
spread through Soho to the river. Encourage Hampstead Heath to
meet Richmond Park at its borders, via all the squares and gardens
and rooftops, right across London. Let's make London into a truly
green city... |
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