Sunday, August 18, 2019

WHEN MATES MAKE SOUNDSCAPES

                                                  

Late mate Mark Fisher's audio-essay On Vanishing Land - a collaboration with Justin Barton - has been given enduring material form by Hyperdub as a vinyl release through its new imprint Flatlines, which is dedicated to spoken word and text-sound projects.

You can find out more about the original release (ir)rationale for this project, and its makers, over here.  Here's  a snippet:

"OVL evokes a walk along the Suffolk coastline in 2006, from Felixstowe container port... to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. A walk under immense skies, through zones of deep time and within sunlit, liminal terrains, into the eerie. Everywhere there are charged atmospheres, shadowy incursions, enigmatic departures. A derelict radar base, coastal heathland, drifting thistledown, towers of overgrown shipping containers - music haunted by wider levels of reality, narrations about rarely visited zones and potentials, voices of dreams and stories. Newly composed tracks by John Foxx, Gazelle Twin, Baron Mordant, Raime, Pete Wiseman, Farmers of Vega, Skjolbrot, Eerie Anglia, Ekoplekz and Dolly Dolly; and, alongside these, views toward M.R. James’s Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (1904), Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), and Brian Eno’s On Land (1982). Beyond the surface of the day something becomes visible, a way forward, an escape-path from capitalist reality. On Vanishing Land is about following the lines of terrains and dreams. It is about a micropolitics of escape, of disappearance."

2013 interview with Justin Barton about the project.

Frieze's Charlie Fox reviews it.

A blog - largely photography based - about On Vanishing Land done at the time of its making.

And Mark & Justin's first collaboration, LondonunderLondon