Drypoint with chine-collé.

The chine-collé got a bit smudgy but the happy accident is that it lends some dynamism to the objects and figures.

At Georgie Fay's wonderful print club I've been experimenting, watching, asking questions and learning slowly to find out what I can do and what I want to do with printmaking. It started off as an offshoot of some ideogram line drawings and linocuts that I'd done with the idea of making zines. I like the diy subversive element in zinemaking and wanted to get tore into some of the slimy political goings on in these little backward towns but I couldn't get any collaborators so it's unlikely I'll get that kind of thing going here. Fortunately there's a world beyond the Borders of Scotland.

Then I slowly began to appreciate the beauty of printmaking in its own right, the processes, the layers - not unlike some aspects of musical composition. It's not painting and as you can see you don't need to be a particularly good illustrator. I often see the world through a child's eyes or as some kind of cartoon, more like the notions of Lila and Maya than absurdism or nihilism if you want to get philosophical about things. I already knew about the art brut of Dubuffet (and indeed have made such music with drookitarlùp (2020)) then I discovered the brilliant work of Gary Goodman and Chang Uc-Shin and delved into books about animals, architecture and typography as well as the colour plates in a lovely book I have on Indian miniature painting. I copy and adapt motifs from those artists and eras - people, especially women and their adornments, simple, exotic and unusual or even impossible buildings, animals, especially pets (my dogs end up looking like piggies), trees, plants and flowers, how these artists set out simple landscapes and render features like mountains with a simple triangular or lumpy blob of colour. Always the sun and moon. 

The social dimension of music weaves itself in and out of conversations. Worlds are turned inside out and upside down. Soiled hand-me-downs are offered as new garments. Purposes turn to nostalgia. In another world long extended dialogues are sustained, aspects of science scrutinised. Models of evolutionary biology are pulled apart to reveal analogues of specialised practices of contemporary music. Consider speciation for example. From a particular perspective the complex behaviours of living beings under evolutionary or environmental pressures can help us understand or indeed create certain types of music. Literature, utopian worlds, worlds turned inside out, the weather here and the weather there, rarely politics, analogies drawn from linguistics, the art world, which comes out of most discussions smelling badly, the general stupidity of people, often artists as it happens and yes, ourselves. 

If I must be thrawn let it be about the scientific method, its history and its successful adoption by so many great minds. I choose to respect it, all the more so in a world where the louder you talk nonsense the more people listen to you and eventually believe you. Or a world where commercial pressures demand fast content in regular doses. This includes the world of art and artists, which comprises of course music and the sonic arts.

Ernst Mayr had a spat with some American scientists over their claims about Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence based on unscientific principles. He also acknowledges that 'the scientific method is a powerful tool for understanding the natural world, but it requires adaptation and interpretation when applied to different fields of science, particularly historical sciences like evolution.’ From time to time the study of music also benefits from a change of lens.

And finally in the interest of equipoise let’s not forget how Kafka would be rolling about the floor laughing so hard while reading The Trial aloud “that at times he was unable to continue reading”.

I can’t properly enumerate or describe all the topics that we’ve covered in our conversations but I can give the reader an idea. These have ranged from deep explorations of music, what it is, what it could or even should be and isn’t, theories of music personal and historical, to our own compositional practices and the work of other composers, anthropology and paleoanthropology including human origins to social pressures on music and the practices resulting from trends, fashions and commercial or industrial forces. Cacology, dendrology, ethnoichthyology, gelotology, glottology, heterology, ktenology, ludology, mastology, morology, ideological morphology, pantology. Fears localised and general burrowed into our composerly conference, both Italian and Scottish. Who wants to smell bad or spend money? Including:-

Anemophobia
Anthrophobia
Anthropophobia
Arachibutyrophobia
Astrophobia
Ataxophobia
Atychiphobia
Automatonophobia
Bromidrophobia
Cacophobia
Chrometophobia
Chronomentrophobia
Decidophobia
Dendrophobia
Dentophobia
Genuphobia
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
Lockiophobia
Papyrophobia
Phobophobia
Pyrophobia
Scoptophobia
Zuigerphobia

Lesser known topics fell upon us in the depths of hard winters when the birds fell out of the sky: historical vexillology, the study of knocker-uppers, codicology, the multidisciplinary analysis of medieval flamethrowers, all the timer avoiding and critically banishing the idolatry of cats, lizards and beetles. We have touched frequently on technological matters, though never setting out a stall under the banner of fetishists of the new, or the old, taking a somewhat principled though obvious stance to the effect that what we have will suffice, unless something truly better comes along. I confess to having flights of fancy at times, enthusing about things when I should know better (and spending money needlessly), at times merely to irritate people who fetishise technology, at times because of the 84,000 neurotic states of mind the totality of which is unpractised by me as of this date, with 84,000 solutions but of more relevance the 21,000 rooted in attachment or having the character of attachment.

In my multitudinous conversations with Anselm of Canterbury, countless Scholastics greater and lesser, notably Radulfus Ardens, Berthold of Moosburg and of course Hugh of Newcastle whose fair skin and blue eyes prevent him from taking the sun, I have suffered ongoing bun fights, in which, to his disgrace if I’m honest, my erstwhile colleague René Descartes has chosen to participate. I am often chastised for the perceived fault of indecision that I, a mere composer, find to be virtuous in its application to solving problems. We may all well disagree but at my behest we continue to debate the matter. I often hesitate before writing, not knowing where to start, so I start at the beginning yet some would have it that even this defies logical precision and dialectical reasoning. Happily my friend and fellow composer Giancarlo Toniutti and I have corresponded by email for over a decade. We have also met in person and indeed worked together on musical projects small and large, great and good. But the bulk of our engagement has been by letter, he in Italy, me in Scotland. The outcome? Love them as I do, I have less need of medieval thinkers.

Working with electroacoustic music requires that I adopt a completely different approach to working with the acoustic guitar in terms of research and formulating a theoretical background to how and even why I work (an amplified electric guitar with pedals offers something else entirely, maybe something in-between, and I’ll come to that in due course). Although the electroacoustic music that I compose is non-academic, meaning it probably wouldn’t get played at an academic concert, it requires and benefits from the same depth of research that underpins the more academic music. I’m fortunate in having a PhD in electroacoustic composition because I can apply the same depth of research to my work, as appropriate, and enrich it as a result.

For those new to electroacoustic music I work at a very basic level with microphones and loudspeakers. Recorded sounds from different sources are processed, in my case using only basic editing along with equalisation/ filtering and time stretching/pitch-shifting. It's much more compoluacted than that as I'm sure you appreciate but that's it in a nutshell. Then I take a long time (often more than necessary) working with the sounds I’ve selected to create music, typically works of between thirty minutes and one hour. 

 In case you’re wondering this is leading up to personal theories of music.
​
Someone asked me recently how or why I work with two seemingly unrelated kinds of music-making, electroacoustic composition and playing guitars. The simple answer is that I don’t want to waste all those hours I spent as a child and youth learning and practising classical guitar music in my bedroom. But that’s by the way. 

​Another way round this is to consider that different kinds of music require different kinds of research. Some of course require none, in the sense of academic research. You just play, though there will undoubtedly have been a wider social dimension to that playing which implies some sort of  knowledge base or layered background. On an instrument that I’ve played for most of my life I can play from memory, from a score, improvise from a few ideas or improvise freely. Many musicians can do this quite easily, it’s no big deal. There’s not too much in the way of different sounds to be drawn out of an acoustic guitar, unless we get into amplification, effects and preparations which aren’t typical of the instrument. Any research tends to focus playing and listening or on the histories and traditions of the instrument and its players, a rewarding field of study in its own right. 

It's evident to me that many musicians, especially composers, require a working theory or even a simple hypothesis of what music is in order to proceed with some measure of artistic or even personal integrity. I’m one of those musicians. More specifically however it depends on what musical activity I’m involved with. If the main concern is to explore sound, generally speaking, meaning the extraction or coaxing of sounds and their sonic particularities from various generators in order to investigate these and compose or perform using them, then I’ve found it essential to think and act in a certain manner, one that requires support. Over time therefore I’ve benefited from adopting a theoretical perspective, meaning an evolving process rather than a fixed standpoint. 

Here are some stills from the moving image material I've made as part of my Landowner performances/actions/movements in Wester Muir, a large fallow field above Jedburgh. The idea behind this aspect of the project is to play (and dress) the part of a Borders Landowner, then carry out various performative actions in the environment that relate to a relationship with the land. For example, measuring, examining, assessing, recording, witnessing, embracing, being swallowed up by, destroying (pretending to of course) and so on.

These actions ask questions of what it is to own land. Does owning land confer the right to destroy it, isolate it, let it go to waste, forbid others from passing through? Usus, Fructus, and Abusus​. Those who fret over our legal systems still get their knickers in a twist over all this stuff and it fascinates me that there's still a landed gentry in Scotland, two hereditary Dukes no less, meaning unelected, who seem to own half the country between them. Not to mention a crew of minor toffs who own the rest. I love unpicking the detail behind these anomalies or injustices, call them what you will. I like to recall these details every time someone starts rabbiting on about a what a progressive and modern society we have in Scotland.

This was a great day out in spite of a rather dull cloud cover. Nonetheless the light on days like that is often perfect for photography because the cloud acts as a giant diffuser. With a smaller group, six of us this time, everything changes substantially in terms of our relationships with the landscape and with each other.

We followed a route from the road above Hunthill, down to the Scraesburgh back road then cut up through the woods to the fields and track above Coalpits. Plenty stops for photographs, chat about landscape, light and art and a silent chi kung exercise with eyes closed which was very revealing. Back at the ranch (Kenmore Hall) we had refreshments and I rolled out a length of paper for everyone to write and draw their words and sketches. Pictures below.

Look out for details of the next walk on 27 April where we'll be exploring sound.

Here are some pictures from a recent show at The Lubber Fiend in Newcastle with Craig Stewart Johnson. Thanks to Thomas Carroll for the photos.