Listen to the October mixtape

27th September 2024

Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics

00’00 Rainfall in glorious stereo. Untitled #16A. Playing chicken with the encoder, altering notes in the time it takes for the sequence to cycle back round.

Amongst rolling news of fire and floods, misogyny and war, I can’t be alone in being so angry I can hardly function. But function we must.

06’20 A trip to the tip. Bumps and bangs as items are hoofed and dropped into the containers. The persistent hum of traffic on the A14. The good-natured chatter of decent citizens doing the right thing, which we are, to an extent. To the extent we’re not dumping what we’ve brought by the side of the road anyway.

Last time I saw a box of pristine glassware in one of the skips, helping myself to a mixing bowl and some tumblers before it all got smashed under the weight of the next load. This time we’re bringing a seats-down-saloon full of scrap wood.

But it’s all a mirage. You can’t throw things away. There is no away.

08’08 My partner of 19 years and I go out for breakfast. This is what we say to each other, or rather I say to him. He knows I’m recording. We know there’s going to be an audience which is why we’re both laughing so much.

08’10 Untitled #17. Our conversation flows in and out over the music, a simple looping chord progression under some melodic lines supplied by ornament+crime’s quantermain.

Loula: Okay. We just went to the tip and we got rid of a door. It was quite an old door.

Dave: A horrible door to the spider farm. That’s how I know the door.

Loula: So it was the door to the lean-to at the back of our house that we replaced so that I could have a studio and an entrance to the house.

That’s irrelevant, though. What do I feel about the door? I’m really uncomfortable with having thrown the door into the tip.

Dave: Why didn’t we keep the door?

Loula: Well, so I did keep the door! But it turns out that there’s no use for the door and therefore it just gets in the way. But it was very old and it had obviously been —

Dave: I don’t think it was that old.

Loula: It was! It would’ve been at least 150 years old, that door.

Dave: 1930s, I reckon. A hundred years old.

Loula: It was so, so solid.

Dave: I have cameras that are older than that door.

Loula: It was so solid. The craftsmanship. Apart from the fact that it was rotten at the bottom.

Dave: It was So Solid it had its own Crew … of spiders that lived in it

Loula: It had beautiful pat-ee-na or pat-in-uh, whatever they call it. The different paints ––

Dave: It had flathead screws, which are the worst.

Loula: It was really heavy. It was really difficult getting it up those stairs. We picked it up wrong. I was struggling there.

Dave: It was deeply unpleasant to move it.

Loula: It was for a person who is only about 4’6 to walk through. So that was one of its big problems. It was even too small for me, a woman of five foot four and three quarters, five foot five and three quarters. I can’t remember how tall I am now, I used to know it really specifically …

The point is neither of us could get through that door. It was made for people of a different build from a different point in history. That’s why I think it was old.

Dave: It was for hobbits. I reckon it was made to replace the old medieval door, if it was medieval, it would have had like all those medieval pins.

Loula: It’s true. The screws were a bit too new. It wasn’t held together with nails, was it? It was held together with screws. They were very beautiful screws, but they were screws. They were flathead screws, which I don’t think existed in medieval times. No, it wasn’t hammered together with nails. Anyway, it was very heavy. It was very beautiful. I feel really, really guilty about —

Dave: It wasn’t really beautiful though, was it, the bottom of it was rotten and it had been really badly repaired by some people. Possibly could have been us.

Loula: Possibly. I, yeah. I think it was just, we just, we just screwed a piece of wood across the bottom. But anyway, it was useless.

Can I just say what I’m trying to say? Which is that our whole society and economy is symbolized by that door and my guilt over having tossed it into a skip.

I didn’t even take it to a reclamation yard. I did think about it and then I was like, it’s so short. Who’s gonna, the thing is it’s too short for people to walk through. So what you gonna do?

Dave: The bakelite handle —

Loula: It wasn’t bakelite, no, it wasn’t. It was metal. No, you’re thinking of a different, a different handle. I kept all the bakelite ones.

Dave: We could have just bought it here —

[we are in the cafe at the Museum of East Anglian Life]

Loula: We could have brought it here. This is what I’m saying. We didn’t, we didn’t just, I tossed it in the skip and now —

Dave: I have no ill feeling about that. Okay. I’m fine with it.

Loula: But I’m like really not fine with it. Like I feel so bad about having done that.

Dave: You threw away all my nails once.

13’00 A robin is singing in morning rush hour.

13’54 I am hoovering the upstairs landing.

We’ve had the same vacuum cleaner for 14 years. I’ve only ever used this one re-usable hoover bag made out of felt that you unzip and empty out and wash occasionally.

I think of myself as being a good person when I make choices like these. In those delusional moments of calm between the fires and the floods, the misogyny and the war.

14’20 Untitled #18. A single pointillistic sequence voiced by many oscillators slowly shifting, swooping and gliding, layered with a looping delay. An illusion of reverberating space created by my gentle giant, a BlueSky pedal.

16’50 The hoover makes this really impressive noise when it powers down.

18’29 I set up a patch whereby the rise and fall of an LFO affects the ‘run/stop’ command on a clock. This awkward drum sequence is the result.

Listen to the October mixtape

20’25 Dave came home after a job with a double cassette deck with autoreverse and pitch-shifting. Its operating sounds are delightful, cumbrous. I use my handheld stereo recorder to capture the sounds of the piece you are hearing now.

We come across one tape at Dave’s parents’ house labelled Essex County Council Commercial Services, and another in a cupboard at home that has Emily Davison and the Tigerforce Demo 2010 scrawled on it in Sharpie. There is unexpected joy in the juxtapositions of the words and sounds that are revealed as the tape is turned over, fast-forwarded or rewound and played at random. The voices are all speaking English. The vibe is very sincere, very dry. I seem to be listening to a radio program about teaching reading comprehension followed by a children’s story. A reference to ‘the internet and CD-ROMs’ dates it to the late 1990s. The first tape opens with late 60s hit The Israelites by Desmond Dekker & The Aces then cuts to what was recorded beneath. On the second tape, I hear breakbeats and slam-poetry. Proof that I must have ripped Suheir Hammad reading Break Word off YouTube way back when.

25’36 The man reading the children’s story says “I nearly slipped and fell off those rocks. What happened to you?”

25’40 Untitled #16B. I set that same odd timing patch loose on an iteration of the sequence from Untitled #16A. The sounds are curling round and coiling up.

29’21 Tension released.

31’10 The robin is still singing through the window.

32’00 Untitled #003 from my album LDOLS. Still wonky after all these years.

35’20 You remember a few months back I was on the hunt for electricity pylon noise? Well, I found it.

36’10 In our house we have an accepted state of being known as ‘cat-locked’. If a cat comes and sits on you, then you are considered cat-locked and you can’t be expected to do anything at all for yourself or anyone else until the cat has moved. This only works with older children. And if your household is not in the throes of a fire or a flood. I imagine that the concept is still broadly compatible with misogyny and war because life is expected to go on under those circumstances.

36’43 Untitled #16C. Finally stopped fucking around and played it straight. It’s a little boring but I had to do it.

40’07 End

stray links

Suheir Hammad reads Break Word on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, 2008