Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics
00’00 One of the places I went this month was Sir Penfro and one of the things I did there was to finally get the aircon fixed on the car, and one of the things I heard from the forecourt of the garej was the clamour and clank and baaa of a sheep auction! So I went right over there and got pressed up against the throng, all poker-faces and low chatter, nodding and shifting steadily along the pens. The auctioneer an unstoppable force “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 over ‘ere, I sell ‘em, boys, I sell ‘em”. And now I have a favourite sheep type, ‘welsh mountain sheep’ – great horns, very neat, very fluffy, very low to the ground – and now when I go to buy my sheep, I’ll know where to find them.
Etheral sounds coming from the Yamaha CS60 and a spring reverb with a shimmer effect. Just noodling around, making whispers then glimmers then hushes, shusshes and shunts. If I blur and squint my ears I can make out fragments, the warp and weft of songs that aren’t there.
06’57 Yorkshire. I sleep two nights at the top of very steep hill a few hundred yards from Sylvia Plath’s grave. I find I like the sound of my room keys turning over in my hand.
08’42 It is deathly silent there at dusk. A church with no roof, bare stone, open sky. A little too late in the day for birds. I chance across this wonderful tuxedo cat emerging from a mass of dark waxy periwinkle foliage, peeking through iron railings. But it doesn’t miaow. As I turn back, I pass a door, black paint peeling, fastened shut by cobwebs. A handwritten sign wrapped in a plastic sheath reads “unsafe, do not enter” and opposite this door is a huge green-painted metal shed from which emanates the low and persistent thrum of electricity.
September approaching … I want rainy days, lanterns and a hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing yet inside my head.
– Syliva Plath in a letter to her mother, Aurelia Plath.
14’12 The hill is so vertiginous that vehicles have to absolutely gun it to get up into the little street outside my window, tyres scrobbling across the cobbles.
14’27 I arrive in Yorkshire to Storm Lilian. I am to do a presentation and a DJ set at an annual gathering known as ‘Wuthering Bytes’. There is much talk of the aptness of the name this year as gales and rain beseige the morning’s events. By lunchtime the weather lifts and I take a break and head into the hills, along narrow paths winding past cottages and terraced gardens, banks of newly-arrived sycamores, stone walls, a tiny humpback bridge and a waterfall in amongst it all. Glimpses of succulent views across the valley. The odd Victorian chimney, industry defanged. Machine clatter, belching smoke and factory bells morphed into interiors and wholefoods and holidays and walking tours. Later, someone at the table remembers how quickly a layer of coal dust would settle on the snow in winter, how it would turn the whole valley from white to black overnight.
15’01 Oyster, taken from my first solo album ysmysmysm. The opulent over-bubbling of broken and strained electronics through a textural granular processer. I remember altering the pitches and filters by learning to move my hands very deliberately around one of those Doepfer theremin controllers.
18’29 I travel with my family by sea to Ireland. Just after dawn and it’s windy as hell up a hill in Kilkenny. Climbing over a metal stile. A robin, a goldcrest and a wren. A visit to relatives. I try to catch the swallows swooping in and out of the barn but it’s mainly white noise, rustling leaves.
20’27 Chopping a lazy break. I tried to use that Amigo plug-in that everyone’s raving about now but it was easier to do it by hand in the end. I always feel all at sea with VSTs really – not sure why I ever think I can just pick something up?
20’40 I dangle my phone over the side of a moving boat on the river Barrow, my head resting on the prow, gazing down at the rushing water. All around me, verdant hills rise up to meet the sun.
22’04 Back in West Wales, there’s excitement as a beautiful wooden sailing ship, a Baltic trader more than a century old, docks at the end of the quay of an old Norse fishing village. At night I can hear its mooring lines give and take with the swell of the tide; taut lines grinding between cleat and bollard. The crew and their captain walk down to the tiny local pub (open thurs-sun, cash only) and I take my chance to record. The next day the ship is gone.
23’36 Book Club. An unreleased track made from the recordings of a livestream performance I made on 19th June 2020 for Ruaridh TVO’s lockdown series ‘Further_In’. I used my old Innalog modular, a TR-09 drum machine and a 90s Pioneer DJ fx unit. The track was pieced together later in a DAW by Dave Stitch, my partner. The title refers to an article written by Tre Johnson that appeared earlier that week in the Washington Post, and the voices you can vaguely make out are those of Anglea Saini and Myriam Francois – links to both the article and the podcast are below, though it’s a massive swerve in topic from the rest of these liner notes (ie anti-racist protests and actions in the wake of the death of George Floyd). I pulled this track to close my set at the Wuthering Bytes social. It was made for a modular label that never quite got off the ground, but I’ve kept it safe in case life is ever breathed back into the project.
30’23 Driving up the metal ramp into the steely bowels of the night ferry. The mood is electric. I have asked everyone in the car to be silent while I stick the recorder out of the window. The air temperature is still in the high teens, which is unusual for Wales at one thirty in the morning.
31’20 A drowsy late summer night back in Suffolk, the garden is ringing with the chirruping of crickets gearing up for the season’s end. I am walking back and forth carrying things into the house, unpacking the car after a 7-hour drive. You can hear a few light splats of rain but it never really comes to much.
33’49 High noon at Waun Mawn, the site of the Talfarn y Bwlch stone complex: a collection of four stones, one upright and three prostrate, scattered around what could be a 100m circle dating back to 3,000 BC. A recent scientific paper claims that one of the stones found at Stonehenge (stone 62) is similar in shape and dimensions to the imprint in stonehole 91 at Waun Mawn. The theory goes that Stonehenge is made out another, older stone circle; perhaps this one, high up in the windswept Preselis with its distant view of the Irish Sea. Over on the Megalithic Portal not everyone is convinced.
You can hear an insect buzzing right up against the phone and my voice saying “Yay!” because I’d left my phone face up on the ground “near a clump of heather” to record and then wandered off round the circle imagining it would be easy enough to find again, which even an 8 year-old could tell you was a stupid idea. When I came across it after 20 minutes of slow methodical searching in one fairly small area I was pretty relieved.
34’28 Back at the Norse fishing village-slash-international ferry terminal, an incredible clamour emerges from the dusk as thousands of jackdaws (interspersed with a few crows and rooks) return back to the tree-lined hillsides surrounding the bay to find their roosts. Crossing and re-crossing the water in huge swelling and diverging murmurations, their calls reverberating around the basin.
36’14 A welcome and generous gift from Laura Cannell greeted me on my return to the flatlands!
“A fiddle improv for you. Felt a bit hot to play too many notes, so I was just enjoying the acoustic and some repetition. This is instead of our usual chats or phonecall in August as you were away and I was busy. I hope you can mash it up and do something fun with it. It was recorded in an isolated church on the grounds of a Norfolk country estate. The only way in was through a field of cows. love Laura”
I finish this month with my modular and my mixing desk both back in action. The first thing I do with it is use Laura’s beautiful improvisation as a jumping-off point to make what you’re hearing now. Violin processed through a granular synth, with layers of complementary dark and velvety drone and the hint of a descending bass part. I did indeed ‘mash it up and do something fun’.
40’50 End
stray links
Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegarde Reimagined Exposed and raw, Laura Cannell’s latest album is an offering of contemporary minimalism to a 12th century composer, a thank you to a lost uncle, and a way to process an anxiety disorder.
Noreen Masud – A Flat Place I’ve just finished reading this incredible book! I live in a flat place and I’m a fan of nature writing so I knew this volume would hold interest but but this is Next Level. Hard Recommend.
When black people are in pain, white people just join bookclubs article by Tre Johnson, published 11 June 2020. This is behind a paywall, I’ve looked for an un-paywalled version without success. I remember the title of the article leaping out at me because I was literally a white person who had just joined an anti-racism reading group in response to everything I was seeing online at the time.
We Need To Talk About Whiteness podcast hosted by Myriam François recorded in late 2019. Her guest for this episode is the writer Angela Saini. Using Saini’s book Superior as a jumping-off point, they discuss the disturbing return of ‘race science’ in alt-right discourse. Snippets of their conversation appear in the track Book Club.
Waun Mawn on the Megalithic Portal A community-led forum discussion on neolithic sites. Could one or more of these missing menhirs be a part of Stonehenge? Was this site even a stone circle at all?
Loula Yorke 