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.

Spring made a spectacular appearance over the weekend. Cool and misty in the early mornings giving way to clear blue skies and the much anticipated warmth of the sun. All graced by the silvery light of Lent. 

To make my art work for the Fallow Land project I've settled on two proper fallow fields. One of these, set aside for stubble that the birds can enjoy, is to be ploughed sometime in the spring so I got in quick and made the basic audio recordings I need. If they spare the field for a few more weeks I'll do some more recordings then hopefully get the pictures I want using long lenses and getting my eyes down to ground level which will involve lying down in the stubble in the early morning or evening. Dry weather would help. These are some pictures taken by me and others on the walks. You have to be here in person to appreciate the quality of the amazing light at this latitude but hopefully the photos give you a feel for what it's like.

I have a new release, alkaline, over on Bandcamp. These are fairly raw sounds from experimental processes carried out using small electric motors and other generators, resonating and containing vessels and different microphones. These materials will form the core of live electroacoustic performances. But above and beyond these small sounds which are more a documentation of processes than fully fledged compositions I'm more interested in the performance side of this, how to move around inside a space, relate to the sound, objects and people in it.

For the artwork I tried something new and made some prints at Georgie Fay's excellent Print Club in the Hub. Georgie guided the group through the different stages of mono printing and collagraph then left us to it. There are several beautiful aspects to printing that I'd never appreciated apart from the lush sensation of holding a print in your hands. You don't need to be an illustrator, you can keep overprinting and making small adjustments ie. you can be as experimental as you like, and best of all you never know how things are going to turn out. I'm delighted to now have a small bundle of prints that I can scan and transform in the digital domain to make artwork for albums and posters. 

As you might know I'll be hosting Jedburgh's participation in the Fallow Land Project for the next five months. As part of  that  I’d like to invite writers to contribute to the art works around the project by writing one or more haiku. A haiku is a short Japanese poem consisting of three phrases composed of seventeen syllables, in a five-seven-five pattern. Quite often there’s a seasonal reference.

The primary theme is fallow which can be understood literally, usually agriculturally, or metaphorically, for example relating to spiritual growth. Other related themes are land use and ownership, soil, the food environment and sustainability.

The Fallow Land Artwalks are under way on the last Sunday of each month. The themes from February to April are word, light and sound respectively so I'll be encouraging the walkers in February to contribute their own haiku.

You can submit as many as you like on as many relevant topics as you wish. If contributors wish I’ll then figure out a way of presenting everyone’s haiku(s) in small publications using folded card and paper as well as putting them on my website where I'll be updating progress regularly. It would be wonderful if you were able to participate and of course if you want to write something more substantial please do!

Please email me your poems (as word docs preferably):-[email protected]

Provisional deadline: Friday 21 February 

There’s a very good Wikipedia entry if you want to dig deeper:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

And here’s a link to the Fallow Land project:-https://www.artwalkporty.co.uk/project/fallow-land/ 

As part of the Fallow Land project I've made a good start to the the year with my plans to host a series of four artworks in and around Jedburgh between January and April. I had the idea from the excellent work done by Artwork Porty over the years. The idea is to invite people to walk and reflect upon the environments encountered during the walk. Walks can be medium specific, for example a soundwalk, or more general, for example to make connections between creative people.

The first walk is fully signed up and we'll be doing a four mile circuit along the back roads and woodlands above Jedburgh to the south-east. In preparation for this I'm learning from local farmers, informing myself about what goes on in the fields. This is an important part of the project, investigating the patterns of activity in the managed landscape, from land ownership to land use to food growing, from which some kind of art work will emerge.

My hope is that we'll get talking and learning about not only about the land and landscape but also about how we might make art in and around the topics and themes that arise. This occupies me regularly on my walks and I'm always relish the opportunity to listen to ideas from other artists. 

For the next three walks, at the end of the month from February to April, I want the groups to consider particular art forms, especially sound, lens-based media and  writing though I imagine these will all fuse together over time.

I had to get two projects finished recently. These were the kind of ideas that open the door, live in your head and won't go away. So I did them. The first is a sound piece on Doric Scots, my mother tongue, almost incomprehensible to non Scots speakers, and often to me, especially the agricultural variety.

I've taken two phrases in which the speaker doesn't understand what the indeterminate other speaker is saying, in this case disnimakonysins, 'it doesn't make any sense' and  cannamakootfityersayin, 'I can't make out what you're saying' (both tracks linked in grey). The Scots speaker is saying, in Scots, what the non-Scots speaker is thinking, in English. 

​I love this stuff. It's a fight back against the onward march of linguicide, the death of a language, and believe it or not Scots indisputably is a language.

The second project is a simple field recording of me making a fire. Moving a grumpy dog, raking out the ashes, fetching the kindling, wood and anthracite and so on. No big deal, just interesting to my ears so I've shared it. It's called make a fire.

Today I had the rare pleasure of sitting down in the studio with Scots poet Craig Aitcheson to record his magnificent tribute to one of the most iconic rivers, entitled simply Tweed. Craig will be publishing this new piece with art work from Rosemary  Everett.

​We also talked about the best way to begin representing Scots and Scots literature, spoken word and other forms. The starting point, we agreed, is quite straightforward. We make art works in or about the Scots language and invite others to join us.

Maks sinse.

Some day soon I'll perform alongside these objects which are inanimate and animate simultaneously.

When I get to rehearsing my first steps will be to find initial boundaries, main ingredients and remember the continual interchange between making, listening and observing. 

This is my orchestra just now
a small collection of
battery powered motors
phone vibrators
small speakers
dictaphones
contact microphones
a hand-made bowed psaltery (under the desk)

Analogue synth-maker and tape machine hacker James Pearson will join me soon for sonic experiments in speciation and heterosis.

​His synths..