Wednesday, February 13, 2013

There are times I wish I was still living in the U.K.... 

Mark Fisher and Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land - now open and running till March 30th  at  The Showroom63 Penfold Street, London NW8

related events:

March 7 - Performances by John Foxx and Raime (Thursday March 7, 7pm)

March 16  -- discussion with Fisher, Barton, The Otolith Collective, John  Foxx, Frances Morgan + Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin).  (Saturday 16 March, 3pm - free, no booking required).

tickets and schedule

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The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present On Vanishing Land, a new work by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.

On Vanishing Land (2013, 45m) is a magisterial audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2005, from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. Fisher and Barton have conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast. The work includes commissions from digital musicians, interviews and the reflections of the artists. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates this landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story in M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad (1904) and the atmospheric engineering of  Brian Eno’s album On Land (1982). “Themes of incursion - by unnameable forces, geological sentience or temporal anomaly - recur throughout.” (Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Collective, Curator,  On Vanishing Land)

On Vanishing Land integrates new compositions by digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman, Raime and Skjolbrot. For the
installation at The Showroom it will be accompanied by an untitled  sequence of a wide range of visual references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English Heretic).



Events accompanying the exhibition include a performance on 7 March by John Foxx and Raime of compositions from the project.

On  16 March, Fisher and Barton, with The Otolith Collective, John  Foxx, Frances Morgan (Deputy Editor, The Wire) and Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin), will explore the contemporary cultural
fascination with the illogics of the Eerie.

Finally, a  conversation at the Boathouse café on the River Deben, Suffolk  between the artists and Andy Sharp (English Heretic) will discuss the reimagining of MR James’ ghost stories by television directors Jonathan Miller and Lawrence Gordon Clark since the late 1960s.

more information


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talking of wishing you still lived in the U.K....  there's an argument for On Land as the proto-hauntological work...  the homesick conjuration of the East Suffolk of his childhood by Englishman-in-New-York Eno 

(then again On Land was itself shaped by an earlier memory-work with an uncommonly spacious soundscape - Miles Davis's Duke Ellington elegy "He Loved Him Madly" [that was Ellington's sign-off to audiences - "we love you madly"]  )



("a very haunting tune" says the YouTube poster of "The Lost Day")

someone affixes their own landscape-of-memory images to the tune here 


                                                              (that's Cork, if you're wondering)

i have elegaic memories of my own attached to On Land , but they relate to the first time I ever heard the album ... it was in  Paul Oldfield's room with-a-view at St John's...  several stories up in a tall and narrow, modern-style concrete block of student accommodation... the rooms had floor to ceiling windows, which meant from outside and below you looked like your were kind of onstage  ...  that particular day the others had gone to see Eno's video art at MOMA in Oxford, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan...  not sure why I hadn't accompanied them...  naturally kick myself about it now...  at any rate Paul had picked up the LP

i remember the grey wintry light streaming through the window... that glinting bell tone texture on "The Lost Day," like something fluttering in the distance that keeps catching the sun...  the sound and the vision of that moment are indelibly linked in my mind

it's an unusually vivid memory, that lost afternoon in early 1983...  maybe even a thursday one....  it had inertial feeling that Eno loved to write songs about...   yes the LP and "Lost Day" especially made quite an impression....  yet, despite loving Remain In Light and Bush of Ghosts, I never taped On Land for some reason...  probably my metabolism wasn't sufficiently placid in those days to make much room for ambient music