Over a three-month period, from March to May 2022, I collaborated with six Scottish Borders writers and performers, collecting audio recordings of their work around the theme of resilience. A series of sound and audio-visual pieces was established, an archive from which a variety of radiophonic, installation and exhibition pieces can eventually be realised. One of the benefits for any resident artist artist is the ongoing publicity and profiling generated by the host organisation. None of this happened during the term of this particular project so I'll do my own.

​A lot of robust, conflicting and sophisticated discourse has been generated by artists, academics and commentators around the broad field of socially-engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory, interventionist, research-based, conversational or collaborative art (take your pick).

One argument has it that all of these approaches privilege exchange and dialogue over 'a single instantaneous shock of insight, precipitated by an image or object' (Grant Kester). The work is considered to be durational rather than immediate. Any evaluative framework should be centred not on any object or outcome but on the condition and character of the exchanges themselves (I paraphrase Grant Kester here). Another view sees problems in practices which unwittingly push us back towards a platonic regime where art is valued for its truthfulness and educational efficacy—not for inviting us to confront the more complicated considerations of our predicament (here I paraphrase Clare Bishop) . I like to think that I  navigated such rough waters as the project took shape.

Words on Resilience is a work of engagement with people who write and read their works in public. Ostensibly the outcome or outcomes were directed towards an installation in a virtual gallery. The writers and I provided audio material - spoken work, music,  images and short video loops. As I write the virtual gallery is under construction so I'll report on the details when they come to light. 

For me however, under the hood so to speak, the real work took place in the assumptions, conditions and limitations of the project, in the close conversations and other engagements with my collaborating colleagues and also with the host organisation whose interest converges, quite reasonably of course, on realising specific products. Throughout the project many interesting and often challenging and even difficult circumstances were placed before me. As I learn to distance myself from these challenges, to keep myself out of the way, I'll be able to report later on their significance. I do wonder though if this is the real reason that some artists choose to develop a socially-engaged practice, to put themselves in the middle of an institutionally mediated petri dish in order to experience the tensions and releases, the evolutionary mutations and (hopefully) the creative rewards of a collaborative activity.  Not to mention the financial incentive.

I'm grateful to have worked with writers Susan Allen, Carol Byers, Hayley  Emberey, Jane Houston-Green, Rhys Pearce and Barbara Usher. They selflessly offered their time and creative energy over a three-month period and fully embraced the aims of the project. I was privileged to have been offered insights into their working practices, the sources of their inspiration and the challenges they faced not only throughout life in general but in particular throughout the dark days of lockdown. The complexities and nuances (nuisances) of resilience were brought to light in both conversation and the spoken word.

I'll leave you with one of those happenings that nobody could have predicted and which makes these projects priceless. Barbara offers refuge to farmyard animals and an important element of her practice involves reading her poetry to the animals, all of whom have individual names (and of course characters) I'm still trying to compute the metaphorical implications of what happened below.

If it looks good it is good. I was told this by a former academic at a riverside meeting in a well-appointed fishing bothy by the river Tweed. I think he'd been a long time outside of academia because he'd obviously lost the capacity for independent thinking. What he was trying to tell me was that if a landscape looks good, for example one of the well manicured estates of say a very wealthy Borders landowner, then all is well with the management of farm and land. Which of course is utter nonsense and merely serves to embed specific types and patterns of land management into the social consciousness. All of which brings me to a new photographic project.

After several years of hard work, research and experimentation, I found my way gradually into an emerging photographic practice which I think I can sustain and develop with some value in the outcomes. That's as far as it goes for now.  More than five years research and a good intention at the end of it. Obviously I don't live in the fast lane when it comes to creative work. Furthermore I don't have the time or the inclination to jump around more than absolutely necessary. With music, which I consider to be my established practice, I spent and wasted a lot of time poking my nose into corners that were best left unpoked.

If we want to put things into boxes I've been working photographically with still life and landscape, both of which carry the potential for complex understandings of ourselves, our deep history and our attitude to the natural environment. Let's leave still life aside because I still have some work to do there. With landscape I had very quickly rejected the idea of making a one-off fantastic competition winning shot (not that I ever seemed able to produce such a thing) and instead delved into a research-based approach to establishing different series of images, made and remade over reasonably long periods. Something verging on the long-term and large-scale, which is how I work with music. I gradually folded this down into a radius of a few miles from where I live simply because this is the most accessible landscape I can find. And a rich seam it has proved to be.

I'm always looking at the work of other photographers, far more so than I do with other musicians. Robert Adams had a substantial impact when I was quite young as did the work of several English landscape photographers, both historical and contemporary. But it was the work of the English landscape photographer Jem Southam who paved the way to an understanding of how I might proceed. Southam works in terms of decades, visiting and revisiting his chosen sites in and around a part of South Devon where he lives, refining his vision and understanding of place. At first I thought his pictures were very good, of course, but then the penny dropped and I began to see the layers of meaning - cultural, poetic, social, historical and so forth, all wrapped up in photographs that are unspectacular from one perspective but undeniably brilliant from another. Pictures which accrue interest the more you look at them and read or listen to his ideas.

I'm currently foraging around the length of the Jed Water, the small river that flows through Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. I recently followed it upstream to its source and discovered a massive tree felling operation in the forest around the upper reaches of the river, just short of the border uplands at Carter Bar. These ugly sitka spruce matchsticks, underneath which nothing grows, are simply a commodity. The forest, the Dykeraw plantation, is owned by Tillhill Forestry. Some of the documentation on the forest and its management are edifying, especially when they talk about environmental impact. Sitka is ugly when it grows and even uglier when the plantations are clear-felled to leave a scene that resembles a Paul Nash painting of the aftermath of trench warfare. Absolutely no redeeming features. Whatever happened to 'if it looks good it is good'? On entering Scotland from the A68 you see huge tracts of land torn out of the hillsides. Public amenity destroyed for some kind of profit, perhaps subsidised by the public purse (though correct me if I'm wrong). My vision for Borders forestry is based around a 100 year plan by the way but that's for another time. 

Nonetheless this is what I have to work with. An intriguing gentle river that starts its journey near the border then courses through the felled forests, gaining some small majesty along its course through wide plains and tight valleys, flanked at times by eroding sandstone scars (including James Hutton's Unconformity no less, just five hundred metres from my house), till it bends around Jedburgh Abbey, past two rugby grounds, finding its way at last into the Teviot and from there to the Tweed and the sea. There's an enormously complex bundle of human and natural history in there. I've had it on my doorstep for two decades and regret that I'm only now beginning to see it as a relevant photographic project.

This is my pitch. To the artists, creative professionals, funders, socially engaged institutions and community groups in the Borders.

For over a decade now I've seen the need for a physical space, a building in the Borders which would serve as a hub from which a programme of Creative Placemaking can be developed. The Stove in Dumfries and Galloway is an excellent example of what can be achieved. Have a look in particular at  'What we do'. It's almost overwhelming. There's no good reason that such a project cannot be successfully implemented in the Borders. I have to say that I've attended dozens of meetings, forums and workshops from which very little if anything emerges in terms of sustainability. I've listened to the jargon shift and change as different buzzwords rise and fall. Jargon is reductive, stultifying and often weaponised by bureaucrats on order to avoid talking about real issues facing real people. None of it means anything unless we're prepared to act. 

Please hold in mind the words 'Creative Placemaking' as we proceed because it's a very important and relevant concept. Creative Placemaking isn't jargon. It used to be when people were fumbling around trying to find words to describe sustainable models for creative engagement with communities. Now it is a sophisticated concept, tried and tested, yet sadly beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of civic functionaries. A place is different from a space. It is one of the fundamentals of architecture, an anthropological reality. A place can be anything. Think of a blanket on the beach. In the olden days councils used to employ town planners whose job it was, in theory, to create nice places out of streets, buildings and public amenities. I knew one very well, a family member from an older generation. He was an artist, an illustrator. He applied his creative skills to the job. Obviously the whole cadre of town planners has been abolished. I say obviously because no self-respecting town planner would run an A-road through a town centre. 

The Borders is a mix of urban, semi-rural and rural environments. The urban environments, in particular Galashiels and Hawick, suffer from serious poverty, poor housing, unemployment and so forth. If ever creative placemaking was needed there we have it. One understanding of creative placemaking, as I suggested earlier, is as a process whereby creative minds apply their skills to solving social, community, wellbeing and similar problems in order to establish a sense of place for the benefit of citizens and communities (that's actually a definition I made up put of several others but you get the gist). If we drill down though, there are two fundamental aspects to creative placemaking, the ethical and the aesthetic. The ethical, broadly speaking, tackles social and wellbeing. It deals with 'real people' defined by Claire Bishop as 'people who are neither the artist's friends or family or other artists' (I paraphrase). The aesthetic tackles how to do so elegantly and with grace, in addition to the very important work of providing beautiful works of art for citizens. It doesn't matter whether an artist sustains a practice of producing objects for detached contemplation or whether the artist is socially-engaged. It's the mindset common to both that is of value in creative placemaking. A Venn diagram of the various identities that artists 'practice' in their life - family member, partner, parent/guardian, employee, employer - will have a large space in the diagram common to all artists, ie the 'art' bit, the bit that characterises our way of thinking.

Why am I going on about all this? First, my view is that we need to act more urgently, with more focus, in order to better represent ourselves as creative professionals and to work more strategically with communities. Second, because I believe that councils and similar agencies are hobbled for various political and structural reasons. They simply cannot do what needs to be done nor can they adequately represent and support artists, similar professionals and their engagement with communities, held down as they are by the need to reproduce themselves and their mechanisms from day to day. This is where the creative community has an opening which would be of benefit to both the creative practitioners and the communities around them. It is of course being done by some excellent individuals and small businesses, truly gifted and dedicated people, but I would argue that we need more, hence this proposal.

By the way, this has nothing to do with turning artists into social workers. We've gone way beyond that type of counter-propaganda promoted by High Modernists. Even out of sheer self-interest a hub makes sense as a point to where structural and other funding can be directed for the benefit of artists.

I propose therefore the following: to sit down (round the kitchen table or in the pub) with at least three other people willing to put some time and energy first into establishing a ground from which to proceed and thereafter towards developing a plan which will lead to the establishment of a physical space/building/hub. I refer again to The Stove.

My first suggestion would be that we answer the question: 'What is the purpose and/or function of such a hub?' because that's what everyone will want to know. If this is done well I can almost guarantee that the result will be a whisker away from a fully workable and sustainable statement of the aims and vision of the project. Alongside this I propose that we approach potential partners - funders, the Council, other creative businesses and organisations. I've begun this process and have had a positive response.

The next step would be to establish a Social Enterprise, most likely a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO). Advice on this is easy to find. I've even done it myself in the past. Simultaneously, more detailed discussions will be had with funders in particular. For my part I don't worry about funding because without it nothing happens. All I can say is that there is money out there alongside government policies and guidance on how to carry forward initiatives of creative placemaking. Others in a similar situation to us have accessed those funds.

But what about x, y and z? The answer is I don't know. What I do know is that artists as a species, within the social ecosystem, have unique properties and occupy a specialised niche. Nobody else can or will do what they do. Many artists are very clever, well-educated, provocative and resistant to complacency. They do research and solve problems. They project their ideas into the material world then produce and provide things, often ex nihilo - objects, processes, concepts, complex ideas, social contexts. I can't speak for anyone else but I start every day with nothing and end up with something.

So this hub idea is a long-term large-scale project. There will be detractors and naysayers. This is the way of things. I refer you to bullet point seven (or thereabouts) of 'problems to bear in mind when trying to do placemaking' (this is an actual thing and I've seen it twice online - apologies for not providing the link). There will ALWAYS be naysayers. Some people are just wired up that way and are best ignored. Others simply don't know what to do - it's outside of their experience. Nonetheless people can always be brought on board once the objectives are clear. In my experience the doubters can often turn out in the end to be the hardest working partners. Most people like to do the right thing.

That's it. Thanks for reading. I'm here if you want to reach out.

Charivari (30:00) [2021/22] is a new composition as yet unpublished. Get in touch if it resonates with your label's aesthetic.

​You can listen to an excerpt here on Bandcamp.

If you want to dig a little deeper into the meaning and history of charivari I'd recommend the Wikipedia page which is well researched and accurate from what I can tell. But I want to write a little about the word and its meaning and why I chose it as a title for the composition so I'll draw freely from the Wikipedia article. Charivari took me about nine months to compose which is quite unusual, maybe even dreadful, in an era where many experimental musicians are turning out new work every other week. The piece began as one thing then became another. I unravelled an initial composition and started again. Such is the experimental method where you work patiently and without reward until the work grows a tiny leg, then an arm, then a head and so forth. I'm very pleased with the work and it represents where I'm at in my research and practice if I can put it like that.

Charivari was a European and North American folk custom in which a mock parade accompanied by raucous music barged its way through a community. Because the crowd aimed to make as much noise as possible using anything that came to hand these parades were often referred to as 'rough music'. There are many socio-political dimensions to these events which show interesting geographical variation .

The origin of the word charivari is likely from the Vulgar Latin caribaria, plural of caribarium, already referring to the custom of rattling kitchenware with an iron rod, itself probably from the Greek καρηβαρία (karēbara), literally "heaviness in the head" but also used to mean "headache", from κάρα "head" and βαρύς "heavy". You get the idea.

A common usage of the word today is in relation to circus performances, where a charivari opens the show with noise, tumbling clowns and other performers entering into the playing space. 

I'll write more on this in relation to the writings of Rabelais and Mikhail Bhaktin's Rabelais and his World, two authors who provided an important strand of my research.

I've started working as digital sound artist in residence at the Heart of Hawick, under the auspices of Live Borders here in the Scottish Borders. The most immediate benefit here is that I won't have to fly and burn up fossil fuels at a time when the planet is turning to shit.

The brief is to work with non-professional local writers and performers, taking inspiration from stories, poetry and reflections. Audio recordings of their work will be collected towards the production of sound pieces linked to the theme of resilience. These audio pieces are to be hosted in a virtual gallery of which I know little right now but will report on soon. I'm told that something is happening at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) in May of this year. I don't know much about this either but you'll be the first to know. In fact I don't know much about anything yet and I'm already three weeks in. Maybe it's a conceptual residency where you have to guess what happens next. Never mind - the meter's running.

My aim is to create a series of environmental portraits rather than simply create some kind of documentary. I suspect the virtual gallery will determine the shape of some of the work. I'm also interested in recursive methods of exploring the theme, for example by having participants comment on their own readings. This technique brings out deep emotional and psychological layers.

I’m curious about how people manifest resilience in difficult times. We've all had to suffer the consequences of a pandemic over the last two years. I’m also curious about the reasons why people choose to practice forms of art or creativity, whether they wish to express themselves, respond to internally or externally driven challenges, unfold a method of working, reach the culmination of a period of research. Resilience manifests itself across all of these activities. Sound is a somewhat austere medium yet the rewards are unique. Responding to human situations by means of sound alone can allow facets and nuances of human experience to emerge that cannot be rendered in the visual domain. I want to continue to develop my interest in what I’d call the anthropology of radiophonic practice, that is to make sound works that examine and investigate challenging human contexts by means of the human voice, human activities and environmental sound. This extends into the anthropology of work and workplaces and into the complex relationships between an individual and wider society. ​

Cyclops is a work for radio using voice and the sounds of industrial machinery. The work touches on noise, capitalism and the worker, presented through the lens of Karl Marx's Capital.

In the noisy world of the cities, streets and workplaces I often think of the relentless stress caused by machinery on our sensory apparatus, particularly on our ears and thereby on our mental and physical health. During the industrial revolution, and still in many countries to this day, workers suffer the double oppression of capitalist exploitation and the excesses of machine noise. Perhaps the noise of these 'machines of cyclopean dimensions' stands as a fitting metaphor for capitalism at large. Capitalism as social and political noise.

Both Cyclops and Jericho are flexible enough to work as performance pieces.

Recordings were carried out in the Scottish Borders and Southern Estonia. You can listen on Bandcamp. The audio file is 24bit/48kHz and the download includes a 12 page pdf catalogue.

Mixed and mastered at Faraway Studio, Jedburgh..

I recently published Jericho as a digital download and before that I wrote three short articles on recorded sound and sympathetic magic.  I'm currently at the R&D phase of a new project for radio called Contagion. This will combine my interests in electroacoustic composition and photography, taking account of the ideas developed across the three Marcel Mauss articles in the form of spoken word layered with different sounds. 

The pandemic has forced many of us to dig deep in our respective practices. Some good work in different media is emerging from engagements with the domestic and other immediate environments. In Contagion I want to look at and listen to those objects in the domestic and personal environment which carry sympathetic resonance of the kind discussed in my articles on Mauss and magic. Listening will involve activating and energising objects of interest, paying attention to interior and exterior spaces and using recording technologies to reveal sounds beyond the everyday experience. This will be followed by a deep consideration of the musical potential of such sounds though this won't be a musical composition as such. Looking will require taking stock of the hundreds of possessions accumulated over years that we insist on hoarding for sentimental or even irrational reasons, then figuring out how to represent these as photographs, whether as still lifes or as elements in a documentary investigation. An (anarchic?) archive.
​

I’m curious about how we try to understand sound, its mechanics and manifestations, its social and political contexts, in short the anthropology of sound.

Jericho is an audio work for voice and environmental sound which examines scientific and historical understandings of sound. It's published on Bandcamp. The publication includes a twelve page pdf catalogue.

All recordings were taken in and around the Scottish Borders town of Jedburgh, both day and night, in January 2022 using a matched pair of Audio Technica 3032 omnidirectional microphones in a head-spaced barrier array.

​Mixed and mastered at Faraway Studio, Jedburgh.