A salt-water taffy stretch of a month with some sun; some wasted afternoons, park light gold and green, memory dappled like so much impress can you picture it, the wax press of light on the mind. Cherish this. Treasure, bittersweet conversations with no trajectory maybe the manner of space cadets like every direction plucked from some passing ethereal breeze. Too weird the feeling. Procrastination at its various extremes. Opening a page at random, waking up to construction groans, sleeping to evil seagulls. Surreal dreams, too much sense of the early; the precinct to late where we walk hand in hand in a daydream dazed, like looking in windows, like looking for light. Play truant for a day or two. Wine/whisky. Disappear into this fantasy space. I imagine a hallway, a series of doors. Your number etched on each one, till code or eye colour. I’ve remembered. Not much is that easy. I suspect he’s heftily medicated, some metallic blood-borne balm of the soul. There are light tunnels, there are patches of cirrus pulled apart by the bad breath of godly machinery. My stomach haunted by absent coffee. Terrible brew, extra blend. Gold and blue. The little coffee shop with the warm fire in winter. Let’s pretend that it’s summer. But even in summer this has been such a terrible grey. It’s heartbreaking to think of the seasons so out of joint, the failed slot of transcendent system, of coiled and invisible process. Like, imagine someone splitting the world’s greatest crystal of quartz, its milky opaline smoke spilling across what should be galaxy or sky or absent, beautiful blue or whatever. No clouds, just atmosphere. Hoary, gloomy, frost-mottled, dreary. My sombre face with the lines beneath the eyes, great shadows of stolen time. No sleep. We stay up all night with dawn our best friend floating by open windows; smoke drifting out in sinuous, snaking curls. I love it, love watching the smoke. It’s like the dramatisation of something opening, the stop-motion voyeur of a yawning flower. This serenity, the silky pieces of petals and sepals. All of them white, glistening eye whites. Egg whites. Fluffy matter. Solidifying objects. The turning secrecy of energy within. My body continues. It chemicals, processes, chemicals. The bitter taste with its sharp promise, O shard of six hours, shrapnel matter remembering freedom. Soft mulching Irn Bru gums. That forgetting, release. The June roses bloom so fat and sad; I wish them happy diets. Dripping rain, more rain. Slow-falling, luxurious rain. Green-sheen. The rain we can’t quite touch. Access. Restricted perception, reception. Notches on wood. The mole on my side like a miniature insect, sweat-glistening. Rain. We walk home in a daze for more chemicals. Gin. Feeling. Looking in windows. I know these streets more than the capillaries within me. Layering synths, familiar chords. Oh god the half-key octave twist, the little flicker of generous melody. Rain and rain. Return to Twin Peaks.
🌧
Johnny Jewel – Stardust
The Cactus Blossoms – Mississippi
Sufjan Stevens, James McAlister, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner – Jupiter
N A R C O P A S T O R A L
(written between 1-4am, in the mood of Gilded Dirt)
‘No shepherd, no pastoral’ — Leo Marx
Let us begin at the dawn of the internet. A story of packet networking, government departments, protocol suites and business decisions made in the cloaked, air-conditioned hum of boardrooms. No, this is boring. Let us fall three stories through the hyperlinked portals of a Tumblr archive, our minds caught in the dopamine rush; nothing comparable. These colours, the bronzed flesh of beautiful strangers (who aren’t even models!)! A doubling of exclamation, a doubling of desire. I have crushed many harmless cartons of Ribena while thinking of your sweetly dripping smile. Talk to me O Web, nobody else will; I see only a shrouded reality, the silken flickers of a screen-bleached veil. Who leads the flock of the blind and hungry teenagers? What possible elaboration of data could draw them to utopias lost like that early neutrality of the net? Innocence perhaps is always (already?) fallen.
Why haven’t you replied to my text?
Derrida says everything is text. There is no outside-text. Look around you.
You know what I fucking mean.
All interaction is destined for a meme. History is full of them. Literature is interaction; the inevitable touching of finger and ink, perception and paper. Barthes says: ‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ I wish I’d written it on a postcard, instead of an internet bulletin. My god as if they even still called it that. Nothing one has to say earns the vital status of ‘bulletin’. It is all just discourse, levelled out, dank reality. Everything feels intimate and yet completely odd, alien, pointless. What was it Barthes found so sexy about language? A literal ache that feels like love, drawn to some other’s inward beam, the first brush against them, the leaf-like trembling. I’m writing crazy amounts and what brings me back to that electric surface is perhaps realising that everything underneath, every word I type, is basically at the core just binary. Night and day, will he notice me? Night and day, the rhythm passing through me, oozing.
🕊
Hell, I’m a millennial with minimum job security; whatever a quotidian rhythm is I’ve long since lost it with the bleed of light that steals through my blinds as I make my way into sleep. Too much coffee. The room an indigo blue of burst-through dawn. The birds are all around me, a whole garden full of them. One last time, checking twitter…
The little voices clutter the fields. Nobody is there to guide them; we are bound instead by characters, algorithms. You can’t write about pastoral unless the text in question deals with shepherds. Who are the shepherds of the internet? Perhaps we are, perhaps it is the panoptic site where we all gather, Pagan-like, earnest embrace of all illusory interfaces. Are we blind, clad in white, always in the service of our sheep? Endlessly tempting…We play lyres and sing earnestly of our unrequited love; we do it in the hallowed gardens of YouTube, where Blake would write of our purest impulses. We used to play quite happily among the shallow folds, so sweet in our greenness, uploading silly videos; we used to play before everything was just fucking advertising: ‘binding with briars, my joys & desires’. An ad for perfume, a woman’s throat in a chain-link choker. Advert for absinthe. Poison ivy crawls all over us and language just feels like a virus; I guess it’s because I’m well-acquainted with the dark work of coding. Underneath every word is the binary bleep, and I can’t help but think of sheep lost out in the cold. Life/death; the trajectories of rebirth. White and black; white on black, little white bodies in the black of the night. She will have a lamb and call it Microsoft.
What?
You know what I…mean. (?)
🌒
Our generation are all lost sheep. How many times have the fences broken in the fields of the internet? What we crave isn’t freedom exactly—O how passé the frontier motif!—but some sort of comfort, a shelter from the barbed experience of the IRL everyday. Unstable jobs, cackling media, unrealistic body image etc etc. I made a list but every time the words compressed into et al, like I no longer needed the details. I wanted to draw back into something simpler; the garden of Eden being this nostalgic collection of nineties net art and noughties graphics, the kind of vibrant geometries you might find plastered over somebody’s Geocities. I gave up thinking my shepherd was Julian Assange, or some other white-faced genius set to wreck the world with his erasable visions of freedom.
We are in need of soothing. Gosh, Laura Marling even wrote a song about it. My God is brooding. I have lost the God. He or she is in a sulk. I retreat into a rhombus, the equilateral remembrance of shadow. My identity was never clear but soon I let it divulge further the strange truths of illusory discourse; let it slip into the sinkholes of forums and chatrooms, all these virtual spaces whose presence filtered through my everyday life. The whole experience overwhelming, of course. The amounting of so many avatars, each one a horcrux scattered beyond the bounds of thought. Becoming monstrous, evolving from beyond consciousness.
We continue to smoke, in defiance of death. How we study with interest the gore that plasters each anonymous cigarette packet: the foetus made of fag ashes, the man curled in cancerous agony upon a hospital bed, the baby absorbing its secondhand pathogens. We campaign for action on climate change yet continue to smoke. We are in this oscillating space; a recognised irony, the metallic taste of hypocrisy stinging our tongues even as we try to move beyond it.
There is a willing naivety in our longing for certain environments. What lush oasis amid the din of our dull city living? What ancient standing stone circle, what temple or gorgeous cathedral? The Hollywood canyons, the plastic palms of a Lana Del Rey video?
There must be also a willing imbibing of the polluted dream. Recognition that this is the Anthropocene; that the world is ending already and we are playing out the last vestiges of our human, our species’ mortality. Living with a kind of negative capability, accepting the state of corrupted beauty. What about the atmospheric acids that streak the sky with alluring tints? How we immortalise, fetishise that pink and orange, even as it signals our climate’s destruction? The damage to the earth moves slow, sinks through the soil, evolves with distorted DNA coding. The trick is to slow down with it, to ease into so many starry, imitation futures.
✨
We must deliver empathy for other beings. We are both shepherd and sheep, guiding the world but also being guided by it; thrown awry at every turn by some new storm or war, some side effect of our reckless living. Consumerism secretly blasts the binary of subject/object, self/environment; quite literally, we become what we eat. I am an ice lolly, melting cherryade on the concrete heat of this too-warm city; my sticky residue is the sexless blood of the starved teenager, the catwalk model, the fearsome and damned. And yet sometimes I stand and smoke and think it means nothing. Saint Jimmy, O endearing memory of Green Day. The photographs on the packet do not remind me of death, but some abstraction of the body at its limits; an art exhibit poised to lift daily habit into the realm of the transmundane. I have waited at so many bus stops, cash points, queued in supermarkets for this.
Every time you snort cocaine I watch the blood burst in tiny wires, the inward capillaries. Somewhere someone is spraying pesticides on a field of coca plants in Mexico. How many times have I helped you with your goddamn nosebleeds?
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour
of my foolish youth, face in the window without name
without name. What was it Wordsworth said
about humanity? That still sad music is the soundtrack
to each brittle burst in the star of my heart. God knows
even in forests and rivers I miss you. Not even wine
is what it once was. Every sunset the colour of salsa,
and each night my tongue burns on the memory of chilli
while you are out there, susurrations of grass
and all the smashed glass you shoved in your fists
was silver petals and the edges crushed with the sap
of my love and I wanted to stick them together again.
Instead, I think about the stomachs of young boys, knotted with wire–iron and barbed. There are too many hormones in the milk they drink. Nobody bothered to nourish the cows. They were too busy caught up in period cramps. Pointless cycles of (un)reproduction.
🍒
Narcotic. Narco. That which has a tranquillising effect. Lorde on her new album singing in that sugary octave leap: the rush at the beginning. None of us can sleep without pills, without sex, without ASMR videos. These soothing colours and shapes; the ambient drag of background music, distorting our sense of imploding foreground, dissipating those ugly memories of time and space. All is levelled, all is darkness. We crave oblivion. Sometimes stranger, sometimes easy. We flirt with the past, have this mild addiction to nostalgia. We’re just looking for things to transcend with.
There are times when what is to be said looks out of the past at you—looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along. Past hours, past acts, take on an uncanny isolation; between them and you who look back on them now there is no continuity.
So begins Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954). Trocchi was a heroin-addict. He knew the all-consuming tranquility of drugs, knew how writing could perform that strange inner split of self. When we write in the mode of the narco pastoral we are being chased by some older version, the 1.0 to our 2.0 dreams. When these memories hover, the girl that floats is never quite yourself. There is the sudden realisation of distinction. How far you have come, how low you plummeted. I am guided by the soporific waltz of a nineties video game. With its labyrinthine pathways I reach for the future–
😈
Here, there’s this new podcast. Follow me. What follows:
Recipe for vapourwave: add the reverb, the transparent semiotics of the checkerboard floor (I fall four stories just to join you in bed), the swaying gif of exotic indoor aloes, the unfinished loop. Resounding, distorting. Casino glitches. Skin-cleansing, refreshing. Try out your luck. Cooper could run for a hundred jackpots. Pick a colour and follow a moodboard of sounds and slowly flowering samples. Imagine the Black Lodge. Watch disembodied relics from the eighties melt on the vinyl floor, down the plexiglass walls, the long-drowning faces superimposed on posters of pop-punk club nights and every neon a symbol for rave’s revival. The first time I listened to Aphex Twin was a bourbon-soaked kiss and somebody had burst glowsticks and flicked the liquid all over my bedroom, so when the lights went out it looked like so many pink and green stars. O holy dibutyl phthlalate, flurophore with your brilliant emission. The clicks and bleeps lived on in the pale yellow stains and in the morning I was suffering.
Early soundtrack of our forebears: Eels – Novacaine for the Soul. Oh my darling / Will you be here? Presentness is in deferral. We wait for each other, always aroused as the constant shivering upsets our nervous system. We crave things that ease the switched on quality, things that split apart the binary, leave us to the oblivion of off, if only temporarily. At least half of us are insomniac, up late waiting for the object of desire to make itself present. When red goes green.
Always online and yet never replies. Everything is text. I read his stream of thought in the run of my bath tap, calculating the relative water wastage in comparison to a daily shower. I wash my hair less and less. Mysterious pains pulse and twist in my ovaries like radio signals struggling to push out to the ether. There will be no fertility here. No flesh or grease. You gave me a pear wrapped in brown paper; but it soured on the window, grew a layer of fairy fur and I offered it to the shrine in my father’s garden—which already I have forgotten. I miss you, it’s clear. Not the grass, not the fine rich taste of its loam. Once I wore daisies in my hair, a long ago dream of a girl from something written by Laurie Lee. The girls then, they were clean and apple-sweet.
🌿
Solastalgia: ‘the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive, solace connected to the present state of one’s home environment’ (Glenn Albrecht). I am home, I am centred. My mother’s chair, or whatever. Yet nothing makes sense. I feel this network already filled up with death; I know every moment to be painfully imminent, displaced, the always-already. Even the mice in the piano, the jackdaws cawing in the chimney. Why can I not experience the present? My own soul feels washed up from the future; sometimes I glimpse a world underwater. I glaze over the orbital space of Google Maps, zoom up my street, see a light sabre left in the front garden. Someone flew over before me. The tree is gone; there are brambles sprawled in the driveway, the squashed pampas grass. I know this to be home.
We will move through twelve states to get there again. Hence, 12th World. This was concocted at the age of seven, under the influence of various toxic E numbers and a book of amateur spells. If you press the white keys of my keyboard, your fingers will burn a bright acid green. This isn’t my beautiful house, my beautiful room, my beautiful toys. Man, how I’ve missed you. The last time I cried in the garden it was May and so sunny, under the lilac tree I wept for my childhood clutching a miniature bottle of whisky.
How can one have pastoral when even home—even one’s roots—feel displaced, already lost, slipping away beneath one’s feet? Pastoral was never present. Pastoral was always the idealised space, the green and gold of a romanticised past or a future vision. To reach it you had to call on the Muses.
💉
In the Anthropocene: corrupted pastoral. A druggy, chemical haze of the paradise garden. Everything spoiled, but the spoiling starting to manifest its long-term effect. Rocks made of plastic, all that washed-up sea glass replacing the ocean’s organic silt. Sand turned to glass and back to sand again, smoother wash of eternal form. For Terry Gifford, the pastoral is ‘an ancient cultural tool’; a form of ‘textual mediation’ which transmits something of our relationship to the world. Quite grandiosely he claims: ‘Today the very survival of our species depends upon, not just this debate itself, but our ability to find the right images to represent our way of living with, and within, what we variously characterise as “nature,” “earth,” “land,” “place,” “our global environment”’. Yes, it’s quite possible the pH levels of our souls are out of whack. But it isn’t as if we’ve lost the primal ability to connect with the nonhuman. Throw me out into the Lake District and I’ll melt quicker than my teenage self listening to her first Fionn Regan song; throw me in the Hollywood canyons and I’ll be that sparkle on a dust track highway to dreamland. Oh, is that Lana, tossing back her hair? I close my eyes (hello, Arthur Russell, I’m listening) and I see little dolphins leap through those huge silver hoops.
Somebody once said dub is spiritual music. Somewhere the Nirvana-drenched dreamlands of the fin de siecle found themselves washed up, an acid-tinged pastel they called seapunk. Parma Violets, the lilac flesh. A yin yang is sucked into a whirlpool; this an accurate portrayal of my heart’s trajectory when I think of you on a summer evening and the smell of garlic and violets and rollup cigarettes…Sun crisping the deep horizon. You can’t, I mean. There are chemicals in the water, poisoned sushi. Hormones. Her blue lips don’t signify illness, but something alien. There are pyramids on all the cassette tape covers, each one symbolising the ancient. Deep time, deep horizons, deep hot lust. Nobody has a deck on which to play them. This is all very beautiful, very visual; but we lack the machinery. The correct array of objects, severed from context on the transparent grid. The slow, elusive pulse of electronic beats. Tropocalypse, barnacle-studded skin. Lilac flesh, lilac rhinestones. Follow the arrows to the tender disco, smash out your tastebuds on packets of clean white chalk.
🌅
It’s Missingno, somewhere afloat on a stillborn ocean. I kept every one of those 99 Rare Candies. I thought maybe I’d see you one day, have the chance to catch you.
Hologram memory: swooooooon.
It was all fun until someone famous put our iconography in their music video. That’s the problem with narco pastoral; it’s pretty damn close to pop. There’s already enough sugar in the diet. Stuff you can’t just flush out with salt. It’s always on the radio.
Someone had a face cream made out of mussels. The inward silk cream, lightly scented with brine. It was nice, it kept everything smooth; it made the person smell very much like a wet sea rock. But none of this is much to do with shepherds. What is the dream? What keeps it pastoral?
Temptation of animals. Lana in her garden of Tropico, writhing around in repurposed imagery of Eden. Ginsberg richly lisping sin on her lips. I saw the best minds of my generation. Well pal I saw the best minds of my generation serving tables to rich octogenarians with straight faces and genuine kindness in their eyes. They drank and they tried to describe the ontological shift that characterised their seaborne being. The misty look. Here, have some Talisker whisky. As if something was always missing, the way they would look across the room, straight through every single one of those tables. Slight shaft of light, golden beam. Sundown. Everything always setting. Someone messing with their settings. I made every element turn black.
🐑
The sheep crossed my path and each one spotted the rubies that studded the rings of my eyes. Had I been crying, purging? For what were they searching, with their dead dark stares? Some expelling of matter on a vacuous Sunday morning. The summer wind bristled the broken pores of my skin. I was all that insignificant, even the farmer laughed at me. Pale-clothed, a red bracelet slipped from my wrist. I thought of myself as pure metonymy, this endless series of objects and how I hated the need to consume them. Every act of consuming was like eating an ending except there was never a divinity to the outside, the afterward. Just that sick lump in the stomach, the recalcitrance of matter unfortunate in its obstinate return. Why am I always reminded of what I have eaten? What is this rubbish that haunts me? The nastiness, the chewing and mulching? The burning?
Narco pastoral is friendly with trash. What is the wasted hour after the morphine hits? What smoulder…Forgotten hour destined to be unremembered, to lie suspended in the space between two moments. Consciousness as stream, severed or diverted. Lonesome tributaries. How this sunset will look purer because I’m certain to forget it. Sheep cannot cross water, not properly. There’s a tendency to sink. We linger in the shallows, swap vague cuds of data. Italo Calvino deems it ‘our dark cornucopia’, these leftovers we throw out, that vital gesture of abjection that allows me to divide one day from the next. But everything has already collapsed into one, become mulch. Will you lift me? I fear I have lost my name to a certain ceremony.
🌵
Narco pastoral: craving that soothing, that tranquillising return to what brightens the mood in the manner of childhood. If I roll over, mull around in the canyons of junk. They call this awe, they call this an uplift of personality. I think about the cactuses photographed for episodes of Breaking Bad and it makes me thirsty, all that aloe vera. The luxuriant dust of the desert, rising slowly at dawn when the wind lifts and something hangs in the air, about to happen. When I played SimCity2, my neighbourhoods got hit with brutal whirlpools. I guess that was Gaia. Gorgeous or vengeful, vixen of the frenzied, hurting Earth. I guess I’m always cheating and eventually the universe finds out. Decadence of the Edenic is irrevocably alien. You see I have spent so much time lying on my bedroom floor it has started to feel like a hay bale or a barn or a hillside or something. Needles hidden. I can almost smell the breeze, hear the unimpressed mews of sheep. I’m heartsick for farmer land, for a world I do not quite understand. You begged me to watch Glue because there was a murder and a slightly attractive character. I longed to plunge in a pool of grains and be sucked so slowly away. You are, you are…
When Lana trills I sing the body electric and somewhere in time Whitman is loafing under a willow tree. There’s Ben in Lerner’s 10:04, ‘already falling out of time’, reading an ‘American edition of Whitman, its paper so thin you could use it to roll cigarettes’. Trace textuality, turn to ashes. When Isobella Rossellini is beaten to an inch of her life and still looks beautiful and that’s the tragedy. All my moods hued in blue. When the rasping sounds come from beyond the door, when all my lust for you feels useless and primitive, remnants of text message severed by missed connections. I move down the hill, steadfast as any rare sheep. The dawn is my shepherd. It’s 4am, past that even, and still I’m up writing. I’m winding my way through the hours already. This is summer and the very melding of day and night is a process narcotic. I wouldn’t be all that sad if you pressed me from bed and made every patch of me bright as your favourite rubbish. It isn’t all that. It isn’t. You could have a future. I’ll melt for you; I’ll shed for you. There’s something you just follow. The shepherd’s trajectories. He drips glitter and sings Grimes songs and knows the value of decent female production. It’s that easy. Soft qualities.
💧
He cut his tongue on the teeth of a selkie and calls it seapunk; there’s a gap where the whistle would be. The blue aroma, the blue chord, the melancholy blue of my body. When someone smashes a car in Vice City a frown forms on the underbelly of the sun. This is an old polaroid, the light leak very alien indeed. This is my collage of all that has been and will be. Blue skies, green grass, white sheep. I suppose it’s a good enough time now as any to reveal that I’m rainbow. I look like something a kid would vomit at a sleepover; this disgusting array of E numbers. Upshot: no stranger to the internet. The starry pixellation which on second thought could perhaps be freckles. How I loved him more for that, the warm skin feels soft on the back of the neck (net). Narco pastoral is soft porn, Hegelian dialectics, a fistful of dreams, a bump of mandy. You just want that ecodelic happiness, pure joy in the spin of your dusty shoes. If you drop all the drugs, consider me clean in the light I will love you. I’ve never been certain of anything. I just follow.
:: : the toxic lush pastoral
:: : the physiognomic, urban transcendental
:: : the stop-dust of carbon
:: : the fluid quotidian
:: : the endless chain of what once was (N)ature
/ World of Awe, A Stopped Ontography. / 🗑
It is important, according to Timothy Morton (2007), to harness the powers of kitsch.
I am with you, I am plastic-wrapped
and still just breathing…
…
..
.
O rain you are too long you are
slender droplets there in the
weird blackness of sun, Theresa
running in wheat fields I guess
she has stolen Lawrence’s golden
pastoral have I longed for God
have I prayed in dark chapels
for golden thoughts, the boughs
of yews over graveyards in all
their berries of blood. Nobody
remembered my name in the room
but they smiled when I spoke
or spat my madness. He was a
Kantian explanation, the rain
brought fear to the sockets; I
nourished my milk, I felt the
amoeba glow of imminent illness.
In the surgery, in the white room
peeling the scabs from his skin
I could feel that whisky that silt
on his tongue and I wanted the
whole of him dark within me;
one brood of the shadowy hour
we’d be, just that nicked with
millions of cuts. To be wild
is to shed that plastic, that film;
like a wine-dark pool I was always
absorbed, marble glass that
shone from without, within.
He wrote a tune that shivered
and the real rain in my head
retreated, the cool of it slow
beneath my heart where the
malady slicked and parted.
I voted and drank in the bar
where everything bristled;
here, what austerity of the
fruit machine, what horn
of Tennents, of peanut plenty.
Lonely,
I gave birth to a
hundred wilted roses.
My labour
of love for the sickness
quickens then sings it.
I love this article. It crystallises a lot of thoughts I’ve had over the years about academia’s elitism and the effect this has on HOW we write, access information and interact with emergent thought. It also sets out the hopeful possibilities of new forms of ‘doing’ academia, from blogging to open-access publishing. I think OOO/SR are really exciting discourses for understanding our experience of the Anthropocene but also their reception within the academy and beyond is interesting in itself for what it says about how technology alters and accelerates the exchange of ideas in a manner that’s intellectually invigorating, always self-challenging, but also problematic. Worth a read!
I’ve been astonished to see SR/OOO suddenly all over the place. It’s appeared at art conferences, medieval studies conferences, rhetoric conferences, in anthropology, sociology, among design theorists, in media studies, among landscape design theorists, and a host of other places. Why has it proliferated so quickly in the span of just a few years? Tim Richardson– who is neither a speculative realist, nor an object-0riented ontologist –and I were discussing this last night in the context of some grumbling from some new materialists about OOO that he reported to me. We were described as macho, ape-like chest thumpers; a description that I think, fails to take into account what participation online is like and the sort of interactions we have with others on a daily basis or how people tend to treat you online (it’s a pretty raw and demoralizing place, these internets, requiring you to have an extremely thick…
Forgetting the crinkled skin, it was enough to sip coffee outside on a windy morning and pretend that the cocoa on one’s cappuccino was sufficient medicine to glut a lifetime of unpaid mortgages and debts to friends. The seductive dust formed its fine layer upon his lips and the next person to kiss him, god forbid, would taste that faint dark chocolate. The cravings sometimes were all-consuming.
“What a beautiful girl you are,” he said, to the waitress who came to collect the empty cup. “Straight out of Connemara.”
Of course, she would not know where even Galway was. She scowled and clucked her tongue like the rest of them. But he liked her freckles. That was it: you could pick out a story from every one.
We will also be selling copies in person at our Edinburgh launch a little over a week from now! It’s from 6PM-7PM on Tuesday, May 9th at the National Library of Scotland. You can reserve your (free) ticket here. Some of our performers will include Alan Bissett, Carly Brown, Martin Cathcart Froden, and Peter McCune.
Lastly, we’d like to say a big thank you to all who attended the Glasgow launch party and made it such a fantastic night. We had 11 speakers and a huge turnout of over 40 people. Here are just a few pictures from the party:
April… the practically non-existent month in general temporal terms (I wrote the last one of these yesterday it seems) and yet so rich you were, plump with blossoms: like only this evening I stood in a snow swirl of pale pink flakes which felt like Paris or Japan, trace imagery of semiotic foreignness whirling around us as if weather had been borrowed from another place, a lovelier time. Love blossoms. I love April. April rain; it’s sweet and very quiet almost like a rustle, the silk crease in your jacket, how I imagine the pillow of the sky clouds to crease or maybe they fold like lightning and it’s more of a shattering, a bit like sheets of ice cracking with the sound all resonant rich in pain. Stay up late to cheat time or find hours abandoned in the first flashes of daylight which alleviate their airy orange through a bright red sieve or am I getting mixed up with sunsets? I have followed the resonant crescendos of synths until every loop is a transference of frequency through various slot machine ratios which fall on the clinking chance of ice in my glass my mouth all misted clearness of vision dissipating vision upon vision, red lights and the cherries glister with money & abstract value which is nice O so nice. ( ( ekphrastic reveries mould quicker in memory) ) You can hesitate on an omen, I spent weeks writing astrological reports in attempted reflection on a bitterer future which needed a sugar cube of lumpen conversation or hours as proletariat spent plate-washing tray-carrying performance of eloquent emotional labour for strangers. His wide eyes, asking about plaits in my hair and clogs. The schmoozes gathered at funerals as I served dark liquid in watery transference of mass into white cups made for the purpose. Wishing for the red room effect where the stuff hardens to strong viscosity then elasticates its way back to fluid to spill on the carpet burn the bourgeois toes through the patent shoes. (my crush on dale cooper lives still uncured). Mine had holes, grazed through by contact with broken glass. I love
April rain. Tree rustles. It’s funny, leaves again; just being leaves. Green in the park and a gilded quality of the light on bark. I listen to music which quickens the senses. Clarity shattering synthetic beats. Very eclectic moments of hovering wanting confusing mixing the feelings which feeling makes feeling a feeling again not quite feeling but experience, touch, brief encounter with the liquid mirror of l-l-l trapped tongue on the moment can’t quite control or a button of the air to switch there’s a second you can stare through the window through viscid glassy matter or wishing for tears or the sound of pavement heels to cut through soft mulching rain you can’t see how the nightclub crashed with fire or how I lost a trail in the night to a newer location. creeps coming out of the grasses. thin leafy pages of choice discourse. Fallen have I in hexagon aromas of steamed vegetables, steamed cigarettes, the little vanish of an innocence, the widening eyes. April, pear-smelling nostalgia for autumn gone to the fresher ecstasies of the air and the sadness of wisping daffodil haircuts or the cloyingly poisoned imminent deadline. (we are not in May already) maybe.
The Cure – ‘The Top’
Anna Meredith – ‘Nautilus’
Joni Mitchell – ‘Amelia’
Belle & Sebastian – ‘Marx and Engels’
Eels – ‘Love of the Loveless’
Bob Dylan – ‘Up to Me’
Nirvana – ‘Dumb’
Radiohead – ‘Lucky’
Melody’s Echo Chamber – ‘I Follow You’
Mooncreatures – ‘Guilt Chills’
Hazel English – ‘More Like You’
Beck – ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’
Fazerdaze – ‘Jennifer’
Slow Dive – Star Roving
Bonobo, Rhye – Break Apart
Father John Misty – ‘So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain’
~ [ [ a dust quota / no amount of cetirizine will fix ] ] ~ we swapped sunflowers in august
& now it’s April, the cruelest month
for those open to snow storms,
cold promises for buried blood
& the vagueness of a blue sky,
a shipping forecast
etched in the stamp press
of a letter, the year’s first
daisy crushed
between two words
like that, like that
the time.
//
There is a struggle, the suspension of hoar frost crusts time itself as it trickles over the sea. At first light we watch for an opening. Even in attics and city bedsits, the sea remains in our blood. We feel it cold as ice at the illness times: how darkly we sink into the sheets, hoping the pain in our skins will dissolve back to lucent matter, the night wisps of somebody else’s aura.
A voice enters soft and lo-fi, filling the interludes that swirl around haunted piano arpeggios, the silver streaks that spill on the ocean’s tides. I am afloat in muted clicks that keep me close to the surface, where the sound echoes in drips, as in a swimming pool. I listen for his voice as it mists the glass of the window. I inhabit that glass in the silence, waiting for some melody to sparkle with any dissonance sufficient to crack my crystal prison. Percussion is slightly hard, a clack, clacking. Crackle. Predictive appearance, seductive. “I’m under your spell / and I’m under under”. Subaquatic passion, staring at the world from beneath, behind, the film of its surface. See how everything shimmers. It’s quantum physics. You can’t peel off the surface of reality, its candy sprinkles, its gilt, to see what darkness and delight lies beneath; you’re already deep under, withdrawing, closing.
There’s the haunted aesthetic we find in Burial. Something more organic, elusive; the rural alternative to Burial’s empty midnight metropolis. On ‘Raindrops’ the muted sound of gulls weaves in and out of a DJ Shadow, Entroducing…..-era riff and the shimmering playful jazz of a brighter piano, a celeste of some sort…the sound of wind chimes through the minuscule ears of insects, so very high-pitched, so very sweet. You can imagine the tinkle of glass as you toast your favourite jellyfish, spirit animal that sucks its seven temporalities tentacular around it, moving them in sweeping undulations that rupture the cyclical moon-time of the waves. You open your flesh to the ocean, every salt crystal forming a bead in your pores. Desire is the fulfilling of absent substance, the spacing of the gap between lack and attainment. The passage of sailing, not knowing what darkness, what deep blue, you are setting off into, heart curved sharp by the cut of a crescent moon.
If Burial is, as Mark Fisher puts it, ‘London after the rave’, The Long Ocean is the abandoned nightclub pavilion, the sea’s dull roar mingling with those shadowy echoes of ecstasy. The slowed-down groans of a former generation’s momentary joy. Angels caught in the sand of an hour glass, being tipped, a largo mode of clock-ticking, grains of time slipping endlessly over the rasp of voices. I set this album to cassette tape, allowing the crackles to augment and mingle. I could be in the murmuring belly of a ship, hearing the rasps of a radio mix with this transcendent, nowhere music. It’s the sound of twilight set to reflections of quartz made bright momentarily by deepwater bioluminescence. What is that whine, that eerie peal? The sound of lost dolphins, the painful song of a lonesome whale? The whale is a heart’s darkness, a shadow-side of waking reality. You can lose yourself inside it, feel dreams close over you, prised from the wax, the oil-black skin.
Four Tet at his most otherworldly. Hypnotic loops, the soft distortion, the natural ambience. I am walking down an abandoned street, where weird green plants sprawl through the smashed-in windows of Brutalist buildings. Night birds chirp the tart remnants of forgotten songs. I am hooked on the wave-like rhythmic pulse of his words. My footsteps echo, down the street, down the passage, down the shallows to the deep where tarmac melts into oil-black sea.
There’s a sense of dark, spreading space, interpenetrated by twinkling scintillations; not unlike the plaza-like ambience of mallsoft and certain variations of vapourwave. Think: diamonds in the tarry pavement, stars reflected on the ebony surface of the midnight sea. A more crystalline James Ferraro, Marble Surf; The Long Ocean swaps those choir-like, ice-cream van speaker crackles for a more precise intricacy of lattice parameters, cross-rhythms of tinkling percussion and soaring, yet always subtle, beats. Think also of something like GOLDEN LIVING ROOM’s New Nostalgia, its eerie shimmers of late night lo-fi mixed with the bright sound files of near-future cyberspace, everything sounding slightly subterranean, that tinniness of dissonance. On The Long Ocean, however, instead of the glitch effects of hardware, the sounds chosen here are derived from natural materials and technics. The hollow click of driftwood, billows of cooling wind, cave-like echoes, the clinking of a necklace of shells with every percussive sprinkle (‘The Crest’). There’s a collector’s sense of amassed trinkets, effortlessly slinking along intricately simple bass-lines, hardened by industrial beats which burn in the weird space between background and foreground. What this music shares with vapourwave is a sense of slow, careful build towards the internal coherence of a detailed and evocative theme. The sadness and the beauty leaves its ghost stains on your brain, tugs at the blood which is full of the sea, makes you want to walk forever, or forever dream—rhythmic, contorted, returning serene.
Some of these tracks are totally devourable jams, the minimal intrusion of sampling giving way to those lusciously percussive beats, twists of lo-fi brass, crooning sexily over the building peal of mysterious beats (‘Gold Dust’). I’m reminded of a video game casino, an interlude space suspended in a three-dimensional, virtual world, where the colours and lights are all for our ersatz pleasure. On an island over an ocean we are sharing expensive littoral whiskies, toasting the way our skin glitters in its vitrics. Soon every vein will resurface, a curious craquelure marking time on the skin. Here we are, vacant, absent, deliciously distant.
Sometimes a roar of white noise, of wind rushing through a tunnel, subtly infiltrates a track (see the end of ‘The Crest’), reminding us that the space we’re inhabiting here is adorned by darkness and distance, is always deferring from itself. There’s definitely that Boards of Canada minimalism, the seamless weaving of samples in a way that seems hazy, reflective, a little haunted. A childlike naivety, a curious innocence; shadowed by the weight of a trembling void.
But there’s also a certain romance, even magic, to this record that I can’t quite pin to anything else. Not in the same way. Maybe it’s something to do with the celestial resonance of much of the track names, from ‘Star Light’ to ‘Gold Dust’ to closing beauty, ‘Stella Maris’. Latin for Star of the Sea, ‘Stella Maris’ is the feminine spirit, a protector who guides the soul at sea. This song is the album’s North Star, guiding us back through the waft and heft of its silvery, elusive currents. It sounds somehow out of time, built around the melancholy minimalism of a piano, sustaining its slow and careful path over the abyss of crackle, the tremors of the underworld, the ocean’s darkest depths. In the ‘Desecration Phrasebook’, a glossary collecting Anthropocene-related words, there’s a word, ‘shadow-time’, for ‘the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously, an acknowledgement of the multiple out-of-jointnesses provoked by Anthropocene awareness’ (The Bureau of Linguistical Reality). We have to accept we are already living in the end of the world; it’s just that our sense of its time-scale is far beyond human comprehension. The fluid, amniotic ambience of ‘Stella Maris’, coupled with its fin-de-siecle, 1990s-style exploratory piano (think: Aphex Twin, DJ Shadow), creates this haunted sense of dual temporality, of always being on the cusp of something to-come at the same time as being homesick, nostalgic for a dreamland that came before but perhaps never was at all.
There’s something in the way this album romanticises the sea that suggests Glenn Albrecht’s word solastalgia: a form of existential distress caused by environmental change, global warming being the obvious example, as well as coastal erosion and the weather manifestations of climate change. Solastalgia derives from both ‘nostalgia’ and ‘solace’. Whereas nostalgia denotes a feeling of homesickness for a place and time we are no longer present in, solastalgia evokes that sense of distress caused by our home changing as we inhabit it, the affective impact of huge global shifts upon our individual, local experiences of landscape. The Long Ocean doesn’t leave us washed up at the end of the world, but suspended in the glittery salvation of its dark and strange and shimmering beauties. We come close to the weird and the terrifying, the dissonant samples of unrecognisable times, of creatures whose tremors rise up from the deep. Think of the pleasure and slight terror of binaural beats, the sublime understanding of our human insignificance as we gaze at the stars.
The beauty of an ecological thought is that it doesn’t have to be clogged with guilt, it can create something even lovelier before in its collective, technological and temporal possibilities. What would happen if you filled every room with solar panels, invited the creatures in, suspended your desire forever in those flickering, dancing refractions of light and sound and colour and life?
April… the practically non-existent month in general temporal terms (I wrote the last one of these yesterday it seems) and yet so rich you were, plump with blossoms: like only this evening I stood in a snow swirl of pale pink flakes which felt like Paris or Japan, trace imagery of semiotic foreignness whirling around us as if weather had been borrowed from another place, a lovelier time. Love blossoms. I love April. April rain; it’s sweet and very quiet almost like a rustle, the silk crease in your jacket, how I imagine the pillow of the sky clouds to crease or maybe they fold like lightning and it’s more of a shattering, a bit like sheets of ice cracking with the sound all resonant rich in pain. Stay up late to cheat time or find hours abandoned in the first flashes of daylight which alleviate their airy orange through a bright red sieve or am I getting mixed up with sunsets? I have followed the resonant crescendos of synths until every loop is a transference of frequency through various slot machine ratios which fall on the clinking chance of ice in my glass my mouth all misted clearness of vision dissipating vision upon vision, red lights and the cherries glister with money & abstract value which is nice O so nice. ( ( ekphrastic reveries mould quicker in memory) ) You can hesitate on an omen, I spent weeks writing astrological reports in attempted reflection on a bitterer future which needed a sugar cube of lumpen conversation or hours as proletariat spent plate-washing tray-carrying performance of eloquent emotional labour for strangers. His wide eyes, asking about plaits in my hair and clogs. The schmoozes gathered at funerals as I served dark liquid in watery transference of mass into white cups made for the purpose. Wishing for the red room effect where the stuff hardens to strong viscosity then elasticates its way back to fluid to spill on the carpet burn the bourgeois toes through the patent shoes. (my crush on dale cooper lives still uncured). Mine had holes, grazed through by contact with broken glass. I love
