Category Archives: writing sound

Spheric resonances / eggflutes

Last September, when social contact was still a desert landscape, Ecka Mordecai cycled to my home to present me with a gift of eggflutes. To describe them (only) as musical instruments would be to reduce them to a functionality that … Continue reading

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The universal veil that hangs together like a skin

A rising creature spreads its shadow over hushed land. In the moment of folding its wings, all air leaves the world. All things now operate by friction, stridulation, rough surfaces in contact with abrasion, materials unlike silk or plastic, the … Continue reading

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In the Cave of Sound

“To him who is a cave in which my shout echoes.” Victor Segalen, from Stèles (1912). How was it, and when was it, that I encountered Victor Segalen’s peculiar little novel, Dans Un Monde Sonore, published in 1907? Probably when … Continue reading

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head peelers

Extracts from a collaborative text written by David Toop and Marie Roux, published in Marie Roux’s photobook, The Head Peelers, published in an edition of 40, 2021. A wandering adventure was my starting point. This is what I find exciting. … Continue reading

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gone to earth

Maybe a coincidence but during our Sharpen Your Needles event last night (28.09.17) Evan Parker played “Music for Mbale (Ndokpa)”, from The Photographs of Charles Duvelle: Disques Ocora and Collection Prophet, a sumptuous book and two CDs published by Sublime … Continue reading

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and so it was the blues falling upon us

and so it was the blues falling upon us . . . like a lot of other people, my head was burning and turning from the reality of an American president in 2017 unwilling after Charlottesville to fully distance himself … Continue reading

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Acetylene snares

“Raygun gothic,” William Gibson called it in The Gernsback Continuum, his term for the ‘tomorrow that never was’ and still the most vivid description of a certain style of retro-futurist, space age classicism exemplified by Frank R. Paul’s 1920s artwork … Continue reading

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that lead beneath brambles to the bodies and minds of others

The book jacket is designed by Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Her drawing for the front of the jacket is of trees and grasses, many black pen lines pulling and curling in vortical movement, little differentiation made between figure … Continue reading

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Who will go mad with me

We were on Dartmoor, Brent Fore Hill at Ball Gate to be exact. The date was the 29th July, 1971, though there was little evidence of summer to be heard in the howling wind. During the same year I was … Continue reading

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A falling fourth or fifth

Bitterly cold this morning in Queens Wood but not too cold to hear the woman calling her dogs with a fluting falling call – ooh oooh – that reminded me of the similar calls my mother would sound out over … Continue reading

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