Posting here the programme note I wrote for Forced Entertainment’s Void Story.

*

A man and a woman stand at the window to their apartment and look out at the night. Something happens. They flee. The night is bad and threatens to take them deep down to the centre of its dead heart of cartoon darkness.

*

Hack-saw pictures, spilling digital noise.

Someone’s snapshot of the sky grabbed off of Google, cut, shifted to black and white, flipped horizontal then more or less buried with the stretched midnight clouds from another picture. In the foreground a fence from Sheffield, a wall from London, the whole scene backed by random Flickr trees. A face – the eyes of one man, backwards and brutalised, the nose and the mouth of another set off with an image of a wig, its texture depleted, the colour drained. Skin distorted, then mixed with the texture of stone. My brother’s hands, cut off and stuffed in the sleeves. That makes a bad guy by the road.

Stupid perspectives. Self-evident nonsenses of geography, biology, architecture. Spaces with bad physics. Crude repetitions of elements. A dream view from a window that dissolves as soon as you look closely. A world that flaunts, in short, its own cut and paste construction and its own hybridity.

In the sound department it’s a similar kind of jumble. Snatched sound effects overlap and collide with recordings, echoes, layered distortions. Half the world makes no sound but the rest of it is somehow jacked-up high to compensate. Doors. Drinks. Gunshots and killer bees. All too loud on hung-over ears. The voices tremble, echo and pitch shifts perspective further out of whack. A hallucination in the aural zone, someone’s talking in the darkness but soon you figure out that it’s not the person you thought.

*

In performance terms with this project we have come to a compelling and strange place that we’d never exactly anticipated. With a nod to the unstable worlds and dark comedy of my work in fiction (Endland Stories, and the recent novel The Broken World) Void Story is a narrative of sorts, operating in performance as a dynamic kind of hybrid cinema/animation meets radio play, or as a graphic novel come to life.

Perhaps it’s the narrative part that’s the strangest for us. After all, we’ve spent a long time in our work as a performance group more or less dismantling narrative, especially of late it seems, through processes of shattering and splintering it – fragments of story, figures adrift from context, cast out and in collision. In works from 12am: Awake & Looking Down to Bloody Mess and Spectacular, we’ve been perhaps not so much interested in ‘a story’ as in the plurality of possible stories that might emerge from any collection of material, fascinated by incompletion, and by the meeting of different things over time and in stage space (characters, images, music tracks, texts, textures), in the ways that stories appear to fly out like sparks from the meeting of disparate elements.

‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins…’ we might have said if we were looking for mates from the big time, quoting Shakespeare via Eliot.

There are other methods of course and Void Story with its brutal urban picaresque of a story, told at high speed, without the sop of psychology might be one of them. On a stage split between projected images and live voices/sound, and with a vivid set of events that do not happen but which somehow do find a way to happen, Void Story also pursues our obsession with breaking and remaking the apparatus of performance – a kind of simultaneous denial and remaking of theatre, as if it were might be something else. We hope you enjoy the work.

The home phone is missing, presumed dead. Last seen a month or two ago, there’s little doubt that it’s here somewhere, beneath one of the many piles of papers, electrical cables, books, dvds and other detritus stacked here and there. The house phone has always been an object at risk, since once the two maybe three places in which it sometimes resides have been searched and found wanting it descends (or ascends) immediately to the category of ‘anywhere’,  the category of potential oblivion. In the months since it was first thought or reported lost I’ve hardly been here anyway – coming and going with a suitcase and a laptop, in the usual semi-frenzy of this and that. Now even the archaeology of the piles in the house is slightly mysterious to me, their layerings of past doings and undoings too complex to decipher, and the usual trick for locating the house phone – call it from the mobile and follow the trail of the sound – is completely useless as the battery on the abandoned handset has long since run down. The house phone at this point is an inert object, a dead plastic, no longer a tool of communication. There is, from time to time, a mournful ringing from the pretentiously named base station (itself hidden behind pies of books)  – tho it’s really only telemarketers that are fool enough to ever call that number. In some ways it’s reassuring to think of the software in some automated call centre system patching calls of human or synthesised/recorded voices selling this or that, offering this or that offer, deal or opportunity to a dead object buried somewhere in the junk of my house – a recorded voice answering, the recording stored and databased in some other computerised stack – a machine loop in which I play no necessary part. Perhaps I was hasty – the phone is not dead at all – it simply lives its life without me now, in privacy, darkness and dust, plugged into its own networks, in silence for eternity.

*

That Night Follows Day is finally heading for performance in London – two gigs at Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the lovely Spill Festival, next Tuesday and Wednesday 6 and 7 April at 7.45pm.

*

Two weeks later (from Tuesday 21- Saturday 25 April) the new piece from Forced Entertainment Void Story premieres at Soho Theatre, again as part of Spill Festival. Use Void Story tag to find various images and writing fragments related to the project here in the notebook.

*

My videos So Small and Erasure feature in the show Roll it to me at Collective, 22-28 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1NY nearby Waverley railway station.The show runs 14.03.09-09.05.09 and also features work from Pil and Galia Kollectiv and TeamPingPong.

*

I was there in the blitz and it’s come to me, relatively recently, that my love for abstract sounds [came from] the air-raid sirens: that’s a sound you hear and you don’t know the source of as a young child… then the sound of the “all clear” – that was electronic music. I mentioned the Catholic bit: I was taken to benediction as a child and it was all in Latin -plain song hymns in an abstract language. After the worst blitz I was shifted to Preston, where my parents came from. It’s only today that I’ve realised that the sound of clogs on cobbles must have been such a big influence on me – that percussive sound of all the mill workers going to work at six o’clock in the morning.

Been following various links about Delia Derbyshire who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the ’60s producing electronic music and sound effects for TV shows (Dr Who theme, for example).  Here’s a short interview from which the quote above is taken. Maths and music at Cambridge. Quite some more digging to do too – want to have a proper look around this site for another BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer Daphne Oram.

*

“Mr. Beck presents himself as a revivalist in a troubled land. He preaches against politicians, hosts regular segments titled “Constitution Under Attack” and “Economic Apocalypse,” and occasionally breaks into tears.”

This New York Times article about Glenn Beck, Fox News’ highly theatrical and increasingly popular news anchor had me searching out clips of Peter Finch in the movie Network (1976) which I haven’t seen in ages.
Quoted in the NYT piece conservative writer David Frum says Beck’s success “is a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

Scary.

*

More here on the Conficker virus/botnet we love to read about.

I've been working on a lecture presentation with Hugo and Adrian, titled Intangibles and concerning presence and other hard-to-quantify aspects of performance. Seeing as how I'm in Brussels most of the time these days my contribution was a series of video fragments which Hugo and I recorded on various early mornings in Essen, Vienna and London, usually in the space between breakfast and a taxi to an airport. So I was doubly absent I guess. I also wrote a letter to Hugo and Adrian, which they read in Exeter last week, as a part of the presentation. An excerpt:

What you know already (but i hope you dont feel it too much in the moment) is that some of these words [in this letter] which seem to form a flow, a coherence, a more or less solid Tim that is speaking/writing, some of these words, in this flow, were rather written as insertions, not part of any flow at alland in fact not even written in the scene i described – my sat on the bed – but written much later instead perhaps added whilst I was in transit to brussels (airport, plane) or added (still later) in Brussels itself (in the apartment there)insertions – a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph or two in some other place – which are by now indistinguishable from the rest of the fabric of this writing.

There so many insertions and rewritings in fact that its probably wrong to think of what's written here as anything other than a layered accumulation of tracesnot so much a single thing as an unruly concoction, an assemblage of voices, the pressed and gathered sum of many moments, somehow tricked into one place.

I had to that same idea about that watching the dancer Fumiyo Ikeda in rehearsals today
she was dancing something connected to the word 'forgetting' (we're working from words somehow)
and she was doing this thing where (she said afterwards) "all the corners of the room were calling" to her
like she was trying to be (somehow) in relation to all directions
her body contradicting itself, if you can imagine that
limbs stuttering, arms heading one way, head another, legs dipping and turning
not especially forceful or angst ridden this, just a body flickering, layering its own intentionalities, belying its own impulses
even in short bursts all this was exhausting to watch…
a kind of muliplication of presences produced by one body, a strange quantum maths.

I even had a simillar feeling weeks before even when she stopped dancing during one rehearsal
and in silence simply re-walked, re-traced her journey in the room – marking its ups and downs, walking and silently pointing the twists and turns of her progress
before stepping back up and into dance again –
i said afterwards "like there were two Fumiyo's" – once dancing, the other following behind….  some tricky maths again.

Sheffield. Late in the night/early two mornings ago, woken by a drunk bloke yelling to his mate in the street.

I tell you what John Man (or maybe John John) you are a fucking legend. You are an absolute fucking total legend. You are a fucking legend.

He speaks with that special quality of the voice reserved for drunks and the guys who voiceover movie trailers – where the emphasis falls on every single word equally and with great force and enthusiasm never once not even for one single moment letting the constant patina of vigour or animation drop – only in this case, that of the voice that pulls me out of sleep, all hideously slurred.

*

In another city two girls are sitting on a bench in the railway station. As your train pulls away you see that one holds her mobile out to the other, and sat together there on the bench in the sunshine, they watch the tiny screen, on which it seems from their gestures, that a picture is moving. They discuss what's in the image, the one whose phone it is explaining something, laughing, smiling at the other, then the fingers of her hand touch the screen for a moment, a kind of contact with this person that is absent, the gesture soft and practical at the same time, its intimacy to the surface of the screen maybe connected to love, or to desire.

*

In a dream I'm watching the start of a horror movie. Teenagers are entering a high school. From the haircuts it's 60's and the film quality (analog, rich in browns and yellow, half chemical, half autumnal, backs that up). The clip plays in slow motion. Not sure if that's part of the film or part of the context – we're watching the movie in some kind of film studies class. There is discussion of this opening sequence. We're watching it again and again. One shot down the corridor, a second shot at an angle, kids rising from a stairwell, turning right towards the camera, some of them turning away. Watching this you don't know yet which of them will be the protagonists, which of them will enter whatever tangled web of terror and entrapment the movie will bring.

Re ghosts.

Back in Belgrade after the thing they now call the balkans conflict. A friend who himself had been transplanted from an area of lush green beauty by the sea and a family home and farm where the life was dictated by the seasons stared up at his new home of smoke and concrete, a tower block of proportions and disorder that is only known in eastern europe. His family had all had to move with threats of certain death from a place to this. Mother was dead, but father grandfather and grandmother all hung on as shadows and ghosts in this new place which affronted their very existence. Undead. Granmother and grandfather used to climb down the stairs from the summit daily to sit on a bench on a green verge by a main road. The lift had long since begun a new life as a home for rubbish excrement and dogs. The verge beneath their bench was now the farm, a stick digging a furrow amongst the litter. Hushed tones as they talked of the planting, the season, the crops that they should be harvesting. A daily event, the rain of Belgrade to them was a good thing for the seeds they had planted, too wet for a harvest. The sun was good for the plumbs in the orchard, September a time for slivovic and jam.Conversations and love of a time and place, now gone for ever in real life, but that was all they had now. Darkness would begin to come and they would help each other from the bench to begin the ascent, after their day on the soil. Two tiny pieces of something precious stranded in the mess of blackness and unnatural disorder.