​My eldest son Leon is an adventurer, explorer, journalist and author. His partner Emily is a photojournalist, Leica Ambassador and storyteller. They get around, most recently travelling the length of the Tigris from mouth to source largely on the river itself. Emily has documented the trip in photography and Leon has written a book on the adventure which I’m helping to proof-read right now.

Leon began adventuring by cycling across and around the USA, South East Asia and southern China. Then he took to walking for months on end in very remote places - Mongolia, The Empty Quarter, all peppered in between by short adventures here and there, funded largely by speaking engagements, modelling and whatever else it takes to make ends meet in an unstable profession. This burst of youthful activity eventually settled down into a much more mature and focussed engagement with place and people, converging on the countries of the Near and Middle East. He worked on The Abraham Path Initiative and more recently has had contracts to open up trails in China, Tajikistan and Kurdistan, where he and Emily now live.

My understanding of Leon’s and Emily’s wider aim is that they want to help Westerners open their eyes to the stories and lives of people, in other words to foreground their basic humanity, in a region often scorned because of assumed connections with undesirable religious or political affiliations. Emily in particular has succeeded in getting behind ‘the veil', working with women and domestic life in societies where Western men cannot do such things. 

I’m not going to give away details of the Tigris project before the book’s published but I will say that following Leon and Emily from afar on this gruelling trip through seriously contested territory has led me to fresh understandings - of travelling through this world of ours, the environmental and physical challenges, of Mesopotamia’s deep history. All this eventually led me to the journeys of very early travellers, not only those who went from West to East, like Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent, but also Arabic such as Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Battuta (whom Leon described as ‘making Marco Polo look like a recluse’).

I was drawn especially to the ancient history of Mesopotamia, more accurately a large region stretching across modern day Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq. I’ve slowly been unpicking the timeline and politics of the Assyrians, Sumerians and Hittites and have now established a growing depository of names, possible historical facts, untruths and legends that I can plunder in the name of art when it comes to ‘branding’ some of my musical output. 

But above all this I love flowers and I absolutely adore botanical illustration so I want to make a short film about how flowers and plants found their way from East to West, not a documentary as such, something less literal, with some of the colour and eroticism of plant life. I confess my ignorance in failing to realise until recently that many of the flowers we see and love in our gardens and parks were taken to Europe by travellers such as Ogier from the near and middle east (and originally from the lower Himalayas in some cases). Then of course the Dutch fell in love with tulips and on it goes. Tulips from Amsterdam by way of a few thousand miles.

I’ve been reflecting on all this as a benevolent form of colonial appropriation. Suleyman the Magnificent and other powerful Eastern leaders loved their flower gardens and were often eager to share specimens and knowledge with Western botanists. From what I can gather there was little plunder and theft as such, the sort of activity you find with the removal and relocation of physical artefacts from the tombs of the Pharaohs for example. A lot of the work seems to have been done in the spirit of care and attention to the flowers and plants themselves. In many cases illustrators and painters travelled with the botanists to do their work on location. We have a debt of gratitude not only to the kings, sultans and others (whatever we think of their methods of governance) who generously and willingly provided specimens, but also to the travellers who made the journeys to seek out these flowers and plants which have become so fixed and so important in our daily lives.

So certainly not a straightforward documentary (because I don’t have the skills or resources) A more dreamlike and fabulous investigation, a journey into botanical colour and form, with a story. Exotic places, exotic people, exotic flowers.

Leon: https://www.leonmccarron.com
​Emily: https://www.emilygarthwaite.com/overview

I'm reading this by way of 'sideways' research into the uncanny in English landscape

(some reflections)

I am almost literally blown away by the hurricane force of her writing

the sense of desire is almost palpable

I struggle with three or more character and she introduces about a dozen in the first few pages then leaves you to figure them out as she goes along

why did nobody tell me about this?

read it

As a landscape artist, amongst other things, I'm obviously fascinated by landscape and all its ramifications but am also drawn to scenery which is usually one's first impression of a landscape. I spend a lot of time finding locations and 'designing' walks from which to view landscapes. In this way I’ve come to understand more about Scottish landscapes, most importantly from their social, economic and political perspectives.

But I’m intrigued and somewhat obsessed by certain aspects of English landscapes, initially by their unique beauty (I don't know if that's a very 'arty' things to do, to talk about beauty - perhaps I'm becoming sentimental). Through explorations of English landscapes I've experienced delicious moments, hours and days in some of the softest, almost perfect, rural settings one could imagine, particularly in the home counties and East Anglia. But it’s that near-perfection which causes all the problems and thereby lends great value to artistic investigations. I’ve come to understand the extreme pressures on the specifically English landscape and am particularly struck by a notion, articulated very clearly by writers such as Robert McFarlane, Joe Kennedy and Adam Scovell. If you don't know of their work I recommend having a good dig around for interviews, books and blogs and the inevitable trail of links. Here I've picked up on the idea that some of the most probing English landscape art - writing, film, photography - has an essentially unsettling, eerie, uncanny quality and that this might stem in part from the historical shock or trauma of a landscape brutalised by industrialisation and exploitative development policies. We therefore have one reading which assumes an Edenic utopia smashed to pieces by amoral greedy ruthless profiteers and equally that of a landscape sitting on a powerful and resilient substrate of uncanny social history. I'm following both threads with equal fascination. At the moment I’d like to know more about how the industrial revolution in particular comes into play or lies at the roots of this tension.

In the Scottish Borders where I live, dwell, wander and roam, the landscapes would at first blush seem to combine features of both Scottish and English landscapes in their blend of typical or stereotypical pictorial attributes, at times rugged, at times soft. But above and beyond this first impression this is a unique landscape, one that carries heavy baggage of its own, something I look forward to unpacking in my Landowner project.

With my new moving image project, The Landowner, I'm gathering together the last few years' worth of research and experimentation under one canopy. And not before time. This is the first iteration of a landscape project built around a character, a persona if you like, someone you'll find almost anywhere in the Borders, town and country. Landowning in the Borders is a feisty topic. We have two hereditary dukes who own most of Southern Scotland and a raft of smaller toffs, wealthy farmers and other 'private' individuals who carve up the rest. If you live here you'll meet them eventually. Some are wonderful people, some not so much, as you'll find anywhere in any social setting. Above and beyond the individuals what interest me is the established system (and here it is very much established) along with the traditions, assumptions, behaviours and attitudes that humans adopt vis á vis land use, land ownership and of course landscape itself, the wider field of artistic investigation.

In all of this it's important for me to avoid a literal approach to any of the concepts, themes or topics that I want to investigate around landscape. My first short Landowner film therefore leans heavily on ambiguity, uncertainty, disruption, allusion, connotation and non-linear narrative, alluding to some of the tropes and clichés of the eerie, the unsettled and the genre of folk-horror. It's through these different lenses that I've come to understand the disputed, contested and often inexplicable landscapes surrounding me.

​I've taken great care with the sound design, resulting from my tried and tested experimental methodology. I'm fascinated by the chemistry between image and sound, between film-sound theory and practice. Future iterations will likely make do with less and less material until I get right down to the bone, the core of what it is I'm trying to do.

When I was looking at an outfit for the role at a very posh country gents shop in Kelso, a well-to-do hunting/shooting/fishing chap burst in dressed exactly the way I wanted. There's a specific 'look' to be acquired. To be honest some of the kit is of high quality, comfortable and functional for long days in the field. I did however pass on the £350 wellies.

Since composing Charivari, which by the way still needs a companion piece to make a publication, I've been sidetracked by lens-based activities. I really do find photography and experimental film-making compelling but have struggled to gather align these emerging practices with the ideas that drive my musical work. But eventually you find a way, an interest in form, environments, ecosystems, evolutionary complexity, layers of sound, layers of meaning, a properly scientific experimental mindset underpinned by a research-driven methodology. 

Photography led me (back) to landscape practice on the one hand and the world of objects and human culture on the other. Landscape practice, which in my case fundamentally involves a lot of time walking around local forests, rivers and moorlands, led me to a fresh appreciation of a strand of film-making, story telling and mood-setting that had always appealed to me but which I'd never pursued seriously. This being the eerie, the unsettled, the genre of folk horror, the tales of M.R. James and Nigel Kneale, old BBC ghost stories, the wyrd, deeper understandings of the complexities of the English landscape and rural culture in film and literature. I find contemporary understandings of English landscape fascinating and I'd love to share my reflections sometime on the perspectives of a new generation of film-makers. Closer to home, here in the Borders, I'm caught up in the tangled web of 'difficult' landscapes, the weight of human history, the historical ballads, patterns of land ownership and uses.  

It took me several years, ever-emerging, to understand the grammar(s) of film-making and of the kind of films I wanted to make. Throughout that time I rarely worked on sound design, arguably my strongest suite. I couldn't put imagery and sound together successfully (according to my definition) until I'd grasped the difficulties of shooting and editing moving imagery. Shooting films in forests on your own for example can be a messy business and there's no easy or logical way to establish a workflow (a useless word used mainly on YouTube instructional videos). I do have some background in understanding film sound, partly through a strand of my doctoral research where, broadly speaking, I examined possible parallels between film sound, photography and field recording. So here I am again working with recorded sound in both field and studio. The microphones and headphones are dusted off and it's almost time to start composing again. It would of course be wonderful to actually perform some music, but there is currently no local or regional platform for experimental music where I live and trying to break into the numerous cliques, cults and gatekeepers of the new music scene  is a thankless task. That needs some work.

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.

As I wrote earlier, I'm developing the proposition that the processes of audio recording (and film and photography to different extents) along with the social context around these processes share fundamental features with magic, sympathetic magic and more specifically the chain of contagion as discussed my Marcel Mauss.

Before I dive into the work of Mauss I find it helpful, in terms of putting flesh on the bones, to pay heed to the ideas of Allen S. Weiss in Phantasmic Radio who speaks of radiophony's history and current forms in terms of transmission, disarticulation, metamorphosis and mutation rather than communication and closure.  For historical perspective I would also bear in mind Edison's radiophonic moment of 6 December 1887 when voice and sound became disembodied, heralding the dance and play of sympathetic magic that I'm attempting to understand and explain.

'If the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions. they cannot be magical' (p23). Try telling someone who's weeping that 'it's only a film' or that a recording of a musical performance is simply air being moved by loudspeakers or that a photograph of a deceased loved one is ink on paper. We believe and it's this belief that invites the comparison with sympathetic magic. This has nothing to do with the artist being a magician, though some artists would love to be considered as such by setting themselves apart and shrouding their activities in mystery. Artistic skill and techniques - these are matters of cause and effect.

I am about to embark on a period of sound recording, primarily in the outdoors. Final destination as yet unknown.  Before I do so I want to to explain my ideas on what I believe takes place when we make recordings and play them back in a manner that might be considered as ‘faithful’ to the original. This isn’t a discussion about technology as such, microphones and speakers for example, though the use and development of recording technology obviously have a place in the wider discourse. Nor is it the unfolding of a subjective or personal aesthetic, a clever cosmogony or even an ontology, designed to set me apart from everyone else, though fundamentally there are elements of subjectivity in my very choice of ideas to adopt and develop. This is very much a discussion that converges on specific topics of anthropological interest and on social matters more generally. I've always believed that the social sciences offer more satisfactory explanations of artistic processes than purely technical, aesthetic or other philosophical descriptions and understandings. What I'll be explaining is what I actually believe takes place when we record and play back sound (and I might add when we make certain kinds of movies and photographs) and how these are socially received.

We now have an established and blossoming field of academic sound studies which sits, uncomfortably at times, alongside a vast range of personal and small collective belief systems on the agents, actions, contexts and results of the processes involved in audio recording. Thankfully not all of this is technical and a lot of it is helpful and well thought out. Academic research has strengths and weaknesses driven as it is by the need to publish which carries with it the need to recycle the thoughts and writings of canonic individuals groups and institutions. Much of it overlaps with what others are saying which results in progress by very tiny increments to the overall mass, at times of great value it must be said. Some of the research is contrived and perhaps even insincere in that the writers don’t really adhere to what they’re writing or have worked practically to establish the truth of what they claim. I find it difficult to take seriously ideas that refuse any grounding in the world of production and the body, making and listening for example.

The non-academic discourse, including reviews and opinion pieces in independent sound journals and online platforms, is a separate study. What I like about some of this is that we occasionally find examples of ongoing long-term and large-scale research, field work and production that leads to or is driven by a theory or a methodology which the artist sticks to it or modifies as required by conditions, producing interesting work along the way. I like that a lot even if I don’t agree with the theories or appreciate the results. It’s what drives the collective practice 

In the early to mid-2000s I found myself doing a lot of work with sound recordings, investigating problems of representation, documentary and ethnographic forms and as a result questioning many of the accepted theories, hypotheses and beliefs on what was becoming a quasi-musical genre, that of field recording. Because of the added levels of complexity brought about by techniques of abstraction, the discussion around how electroacoustic music fits into the picture should be for another day. I began theorising what I was doing along the lines of a chain of several different modes of activity, behaviour and attention, differentiating between the one who simply listens as they walk with no particular goal to the one who listens attentively or with intention and even adopting specific strategies, to the recordist who listens selectively through headphones with quite clear intentions, to the artist or engineer who listens to the work-in-progress and finally to the listeners, the audience, of the final work. Though worthy of consideration and elaboration this is all very obvious. But within this I discovered another important thread, brought to light by the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss and clarified by further reading and understanding of the problem of representation, especially in the realm of photography. This was my first practical understanding of what Mauss calls the chain of contagion, in the context of sympathetic magic.

I’ll call this my hypothesis or theory and by this I mean something I believe to be true (so far), something useful in understanding the mechanics of what I do, what I can do in the future and perhaps even why I do it. This understanding of how the recording process operates, from listening in the field to listening through loudspeakers, has served me well. It’s based on a close reading of A General Theory of Magic by Marcel Mauss and is quite simple. Before you log off let me stress that this isn’t a trivial or light-hearted humorous theory. It’s as scientific as can be, a working hypothesis that replaces all the others I’ve worked with and which waits to be superseded by a better one. I’m not interested in talking about pulling rabbits out of hats or calling upon demonic or celestial forces, rites in other words, and neither was Marcel Mauss (though I can and will discuss later some correspondences between artists and magicians). If you read the prologue you’ll find that Mauss is not interested in the plan or composition of the magical rite but in the nature of magic’s working methods, the beliefs, feelings and agents involved. As he says, ‘In magic we have officers, actions and representations..’ (p23) 

This then is a theory based on the social conditions around field recording and how these resemble point-by point those of sympathetic magic in particular. The process of sympathetic magic is best explained by J.G Frazer, as quoted by Mauss. There are two laws of sympathetic magic, the law of similarity and law of contiguity. '‘Like produces like: objects which have been in contact, but since ceased to be so, continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed'. One might add as a corollary ‘The part is to the whole as the image is to the representation.’' p15. What does this mean? I take it to mean that the contact, the massive complexity of that contact, between the recording device(s) and the real world, once broken, distanced from the source, appropriated and reproduced, continues to produce its effects (more or less), even into the realm of emotion and sentiments. Someone records a few minutes of wind in the trees and plays it back. I believe I'm listening to the forest itself. I can't help myself - its there, clear as day, even if I'm tucked up in bed with the headphones on. There is something profoundly contagious at work.

For sure it could be argued that all I’ve done is to go through Mauss’s text and make correspondences between the various aspects of magic that he discusses and aspects of the recording process. However the points of similarity are too strong for me to ignore and it’s in the following blog posts that I’ll explain why.

Finally none of this relegates or denigrates in any way those idiosyncratic statements or working hypotheses of other individual artists who will have put in every bit as much (if not more) effort into figuring out what they do and why as I have. Indeed it’s the accumulation of knowledge produced by dedicated research, field work and production that drives my ongoing enthusiasm for audio art.