Klara du Plessis / Dead Air
3m54


_{Klara du Plessis, photographed
by Francis Leduc, © 2024.}



‘Dead Air’ is a sonic representation of a crown of sonnets published in Post-Mortem of the Event (Palimpsest Press, 2024). A crown is a form that includes 15 sonnets of which the final line of the first becomes the first line of the second poem, and so on, with the culminating poem sewing all the final lines together. The soundwork version mobilises the acts of leaning back and stretching forward, inherent to the sonnet sequence, to generate a fugal soundscape of interconnection, resisting isolated strands of meaning.

 _{SEE HERE} 

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James Lowne / Small Rooms / Rough Crush / Excerpt.


 


But yeah ah yeah
this is gonna be called—Nothingness
no it’s called Small Rooms
what’s the difference between fantasy & reality—
I dunno I mean OK what is it? It’s like idea—I dunno—
how are they different?
What is fantasy?
This is what I always come back to—the talk thought
head block
            vocal like
speaking different to thinking
OK what—you could say—fantasy’s an image—
reality is like
            some sort of material
pressure
shit happening in your life
buildings—concrete—institutions
I don’t wanna get into a whole conversation about materialism
it’s all about dreams at the end of the day 
for example if you play a computer game all day & then
that image it gets kind of burnt into your mind
I wrote down this story once
where I imagined if like the image
of your actual world out of your eye kind of froze & like
as you moved your head it moved with you its kinda
stuck

Let me go back let me say dreams are also
they come out of our life
they’re to do with our lives
in my head—there’s some people in everyone’s head—some people
              say this
they say
I can’t do it—I can’t do it—they say—I can’t walk around
              talking
OK this is going back to the freestyle
ah what is it—is it a routine?
Sometimes it’s just a new path just mapping a territory
              slightly differently
do you remember when, um—do you remember that?
yeah—so—and then—I remember a …
I like to do that just tiny little maps

Here’re my walks

                                    Long Sainsbury
                                    Tesco crescendo
                                    Wickham reverse

I forget them all now

I just suddenly had a thought about a—
state—state of mind
that’s the other thing about routine right
I always follow the same path
there’s nothing wrong—that’s good
same thing same time same road
I think I have to move—so I get the body moving
then you can like all the words can come out I just thought
I dunno
basically—is—?
How many people walk around
with loads of shit stuck in their heads?
Think of all the talking you’ve ever done
but then I think
what’s the point?

Oh so a friend went on a silent retreat
cos head is turmoil head holds all the turmoil doesn’t it
yeah—so—also like
you can get kinda silent through repetitive action as well

I just thought to myself—what did I do
                did I do enough work this morning?
yeah I did I just thought to myself
I blasted off a few talk pieces
& then I was left with this kind of weird silence
I said its just fucking madness basically
                & then I looked up and I saw a poster
& it said—madness—can you believe that?
It was obviously—it was talking about the band
                & then I just thought about
coincidental—it happens all the time—& there’s more recordings
signs 
ancient—or early humans—more like
people congregating around certain areas—yeah
or finding sort of magical points and their like pre …

Did they
like I just had
think something & then see it
?

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Night Tapes / Sára Ivanyi & Derek van Beelen / anti~time

10m36

Transcript                    A spiral is like the bastard child of a straight line and a circle. It is a curved line created by a point that travels in a circular pattern, bound to orbit its point of origin without ever returning to it. There is something cursed about it. Where the straight line is adventurous in its determination of moving forward in potentially any direction, and the circle is mystical in not having a beginning or an end, spirals have a whimsical aimlessness operating on a surplus of drive and a lack of destination. It is also a way to fit a lot into a small space. Looking at the analogue wall clock hanging in the rec room of ward 81—the women’s security ward of the Oregon State Mental Institution in a 1979 photograph by Mary Ellen Mark—with patients dancing underneath it, I don't see a flat circle of increments that represent a measured out cycle of duration that starts over at the same point every twenty-four hours. I see an invisible spiral uncoiling an expanding past, gathering riches in a bottomless pit of memory continuously sliced from an uncalibrated future or ‘thereness.’ Music sits atop this unfolding scene like weather. It is an agent of time that resists measuring it. The way we move affects what we think and how we feel and music can change how we move from the inside out. The music we listen to is like a clock we choose to feel time rather than keep it. Just turning our bodies to the right makes us feel different than turning to the left. I wonder whether the experience of being is a form of anti~time because when we think about death there is nothing but time. The body as a temporary medium to experience it is gone and time becomes crushingly endless. In time then, music and death are opposites, bound together like the points at either end of a spiral.



_{Dr clave, CC BY-SA 3.0, ℅ Wikimedia Commons}



Derek                             Bala fo, to say, speak, play an instrument. The balafon came to me on a mountain. I bought it from someone who thought it was a children’s bed. The first thing I did was play it for my grandparents. A buzz in the sound gives the wooden tone a warm hug. So special. The small holes in the gourds are sealed with a thin film of plastic. Instead of cobwebs ... Ancient distortion. Old memories.

Sára                                 When a friend asked me to write about spirals, three points of orientation emerged: 'Anti time' is an anagram of ‘intimate.’ A photograph by Mary Ellen Mark taken in the rec room of ward 81. The appearance of a keyhole projection of the sky on the wall of the room I was staying in at the time.

The night after I finished writing, Derek sent me an improvisation on the balafon. The sound had soft edges, and I noticed how the piece as a whole seemed to float without a clear beginning or end. He recorded it in one take, and it was an instant match for the text.





The clock on the wall makes me wonder about time within and outside of those walls. And about music, what they were listening to. This unlikely keyhole-projection appeared on the bedroom wall, casting an image of the view from the window in the room nextdoor. 


 

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Taylor Beidler
& Aliayta Foon-Dancoes /
Shadows are Just Shapes





‘In the new room, shadows are just shapes’


There’s a woman, he said,
cradling my temples.
Hovering around you
short, with spiky hair
grey, maybe, almost white.

Thinking little of it until months later
when my partner and I wake.
Strange,
the way you got up and stood
in the corner.
Except that wasn’t me.

Me neither.

Took me so long to leave, some days
this incredible exhaustion
at the thought of leaving the room.
like I was wearing one too many layers
strip one and stay awhile.

The next time, I’m alone—

Asleep, down down, swell
pulling, open nice, big heat
open eyes, huh huh, there you are
white hair, sh sh,  above me
big light, everything white now
sitting up, awake, static-like …

The room has never been more alive.

She knows I’m going.
Day I hand my passport to the
new place,
a woman dies on the platform
in front of me.

Young boy passes, rolls eyes,
police tape, not again, chest puffed
holding big man’s hand.
White hair, almost grey,
down down, too covered for glimpses.

Last time, it’s just him who sees
small woman standing
foot of the bed
not me, I’m rolling over
back to her now, too late
melts down down into the kitchen below.

All packed up, just me
in the kitchen now, I say goodbye
to you up there, up …
turned to go
microwave beeps
and won’t stop
electric tears
until it’s thrown out.

Stop by, sometime—
dark inside, new people
and there’s you
pulling me off the street
warmer now, I keep moving.

T.B.

---

Paul Sims
& Seth Guy /
Baby Steps to Enlightenment 

WHY HAIKU?

Paul                                 Haiku, as a concise form, acts as a good discipline for focus; that the strict structure demands a stripping back of excess, elaboration, and embellishment to leave—if done correctly, a clear, precise, and even a pithy poetic statement. More particularly, this collection—‘Baby Steps to Enlightenment’ (the first release from Kertecz Press), uses haiku to express moments of realisation; that haiku often gives expression to the precise point when meditations on existence reveals fundamental truths, and the book is about such realisations. Personally, this was also a means of presenting my basic obsessions in a short and accessible format and, in doing so, certain overall themes were suggested: the sense of humanity against nature, including the animal characters and a confrontation with self: that in exploring the world, one also explores oneself. A traditional structuring device came in the form of the seasons, with a loose narrative arc: of an emerging from despondency and moving through various epiphanies to part acceptance. The title of the book was meant ironically; that it is not wisdom presented but precisely one person’s blundering attempt to understand. Further, the haiku, in its brevity, works well with music, like lyrics. The selection scored by Seth Guy are the final ten haiku, which forms the darker or more melancholic section of the book, matched by the bleak tones of Seth’s electronic compositions. If I had to sum up what this selection conveys, it would be the realisation of death and the thought of what will eventually outlast us. Though, in contrast, there is a light note at the end; mocking my attempts to achieve immortality through writing as a cat regards my work as little more than convenient bedding. Haiku then, is concise, its form expresses content and hopefully works unobtrusively in collaboration.  

Seth                              For several years I’ve been using so-called ‘short form’ electronics; brief compositions in which I’ve focused on either a single looped hook or a specific moment in a juxtaposition of one or two recordings. Resisting effects or the urge to process these, I’ve found working with the bones of a composition for a limited duration a means to resist a musicality that invites an ambiguity of narrative lending itself to collaboration. Following an investigation of the body and mortality precipitated by my surviving sepsis in 2023, this methodology found fruition as a series of thirty sound sketches with voice entitled ‘I Cried When…’ (2024). Given the similarities between these works, the concise form of haiku, and the mood apparent in Paul’s work, I leapt at the opportunity to perform with Paul. I wanted to add an additional layer though, unique to our work together, and as his haiku contain many references to animals, I therefore created loops from field recordings of animals from the British Isles which I then combined with electronics using a digital synth as I had before. I then mixed these live during Paul’s readings each between a minute or two in length.

 _{SEE HERE} 

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Annelyse Gelman
& Eli Winter / Vexations / Excerpt






Even the grass was coming up positive
Soles beading little match tips of blood
A reticular glitch made me saccade like crazy
Clouds like anemones, electric fortresses
A dandelion fluff might fly in your mouth
As you ate a hamburger, the last hamburger

That was the year the hurricanes began
I hardly swelled but felt her features forming
There were airs, waters, places, daughters
I pressed my eyes dry like flowers-in-book
A tree couldn’t move without tearing its roots
There was no other world to bring a child into

Crowds coagulated to watch falling bodies
Daughter depicted them on my uterine walls
We were firm believers in teleology, at first
Night crews came like sexton beetles
Men with bird masks and wheelbarrows
After a while there were too many to clean up

Just the ginkgos, a parent might say, regarding the smell
Sometimes a crater held the imprint of a face
The dominant metaphor for the brain was the computer
Subterranean romance, romance of alterity
Who notices the horse becomes the horse,
            went the saying
I was terrified, of course, I had noticed the mane

I lay down in the flower bed, fresh in the dirt
She pushed out of me, they cut her in cold water
From a rubber hose, red daughter, red birth
The timbre of an infant’s cry foreshadowed its destiny
If there is no pain, you may not be injured, went the saying
Or you may have severed the nerve

It was around that time I started taking the pills
The jingle went, Elsewhere, Elsewhere,
            that was the only lyric
They made my skin glossy like it was about to cry
The body became basically a repository of data
A craving was fungible, you could want pretty much anything
A body was fungible, you could be pretty much anyone

Moths, lots, swarmed the lighthouse lamps
Ships crashed into cliffs, one after another,
            elements emerged
Between our legs like coiled appendages of jellyfish
It was around that time I started taking the pills
Cultivars rolled out each season like new hemlines
I carried the procedures within me, dormant like viruses

The environment updated itself at regular intervals
Sometimes a new species of tree frog,
            sometimes a lethal infection
People played chess across unfathomable expanses
Studies said fetuses preferred wasps to orchids
Exquisitely dependent, a scientist might say,
            regarding a spiderweb
We lost everything, a clown might say, regarding the quake



_{Annelyse Gelman, from Vexations
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2023)}

 _{SEE HERE} 

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Pablo’s Eye featuring Noor-e-Sehar Ali /
The Dog Days are Long Gone



 

 _{SEE HERE} 

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Aidan Baker /
Where Noone Could Possibly Be
(The Sound of Voices) / Excerpt.

31m18

An extract from ongoing project to assemble
a psycho-geographical audio calendar.

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Middex / Lived I 

32m19

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Sally O’Reilly
& Kit Downes / 
Estée Lauder Factory

37m06

This is an attempt to reconstruct a factory line. In 1988 Sally processed and packaged untold hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of a perfume with a stupid name. For eight hours a day she and her colleagues were set tens of metres apart in a mire of machinery noise and Radio One while they filled and labelled bottles, tapped in stoppers, tricked up the product in sheeny, spangled boxes and crated it, ready for shipping to awaiting pulse points. To retrieve something of the strenuous mindlessness of these shifts, the track’s vocals were recorded whilst planking.

 _{SEE HERE} 

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Paul Beaudoin
& Jon Rollins / would it make you feel better
if we talked about it?

40m36

As artists, we often grapple with the tension between intention and unpredictability. For Jon Rollins, the act of creating is an ongoing negotiation with materials, memory, and the unknown. In his approach, leftover scraps—sketches, notes, failed experiments, and even forgotten paintings—become vital parts of a larger conversation. This resonates deeply with my creative process as both a painter and composer, where materials, memories, and fragments often guide me through moments of uncertainty and discovery.

Rollins describes his studio as filled with ‘artifacts of my past’—remnants of ideas and efforts unresolved. He views his use of scrap materials—’paint rags, old tape, table coverings, and abandoned paintings’—as open-ended resources for new work. As a painter, I, too, accumulate old drawings, discarded colour tests, and forgotten canvases. These materials are not simply remnants; they are the ‘not yet’—unfinished, uncertain, and full of possibilities. This idea of scraps as raw material for new work is something I identify with in my visual practice, where what seems like a failure often becomes the seed for something fresh.

Similarly, in my musical compositions, I often work with fragments of sound—improvised chords, half-formed structures, or field recordings—that may seem ambiguous at first. In a way, this process mirrors my visual work: pieces of sound and music, like bits of paint or torn paper, build upon one another to create something new. In my composition ‘would it make you feel better if we talked about it?’—a piece that explores emotional intimacy and vulnerability—I investigate the tension between language (text) and sound, chaos and structure, in much the same way I approach my visual practice. The title reflects an ongoing dialogue—both personal and artistic—intimate and uncertain, much like the scattered, unfinished elements in my studio.

Rollins embraces the idea that creativity thrives in messy, unorganised spaces. I often allow my materials—whether a forgotten sketchbook page or a discarded painting surface—to sit and accumulate. The odd pairings, the forgotten colour combinations, the textures that don't quite fit together—these spark new ways of seeing or hearing. Rollins describes this dynamic perfectly ... ‘The scraps are like friends. They invite me, maybe even coax me into a painting.’ I find the same to be true in my work, where materials seem to call me into the process, offering a way to bypass the blank canvas or empty score.

Yet, there’s also a balance between chaos and control. Rollins compares his process to a game—where structure is important, but the outcome is uncertain. ‘I can never allow myself to know too much during the painting process,’ he says, explaining that unpredictability is key to his work. This resonates with me, as I constantly strive for a balance: a sense of structure that allows the work to evolve, while leaving room for spontaneity and risk. Sometimes, I’ll overwork a surface or rework a musical phrase, only to realize the process has reached a point of change, where drastic measures—whether cutting through the paint or editing a section of music—become necessary. As Rollins puts it, ‘Risk becomes the only way out.’

Ultimately, my creative work is not just resolutions of past ideas but explorations of what happens when we let materials—visual or auditory—take on a life of their own. The unpredictability, the ‘dead ends,’ the ‘accidental’ marks—these all play a vital role in shaping the final piece. Like Rollins, I am reminded that there are no real dead ends in art—just doing, doing, and the results of that doing. 

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Maria Howard / Siting / Citing
44m57



From an ongoing series entitled ‘striations’—combining site writing with sounds of fluting, fissures, ripples, strings and fragments of protest songs that respond to the discordant loops of imperial architectural styles and social reproduction found in Glasgow, ‘second city of the empire.’ The work is part of ongoing research into the column as both an organic and a structural form, and the relationship between colonialism and the climate crisis.



Featuring ...








Transcript                    Sites are encountered daily, by accident, passed through on the way to the station, thestudio, the archive, the library, quickly, at leisure. She only visits them occasionally but never fails to notice them in passing. The writing emerges from fragments of notes that intersect with day jobs, familial relations, social interactions, as encountered in the city, forming a kind of topographical intimacy.

There is usually a path to follow on these encounters—she is trying to get from A to B as efficiently as possible. It takes effort to trouble the logic of logistics, of productivity, the regulatory force imposed by the spaces and forms of a city rooted in capital. But when she pauses for a moment to look closer, a language of striation and stratification starts to form.

Taking note of the stony foliage, of the flutes and volutes of aspirational ancient styles, her path defies straight lines, branches out, doubles back on itself. Her body becomes a moving tree of gestures as it tries to make sense of the nostalgia wrapped up in these anachronisms.


| | |


On days like this the city bears down on her. The sky a frosted window that lets through light but obscures the bright blue that throws colonial red and blonde sand stone into relief.

On days like this the endless feedback loop of nostalgia becomes too much to bear, the lithic city weighs heavy.

On days like this she thinks of visits to other places where this legacy is just as strong but at least citizens are allowed to pull up the paving stones in front of their home and use that piece of earth as a planting bed. Where hollyhocks and sunflowers grow tall up south facing walls. Not the beach under the cobbles but the soil.

On days like this the root ball brought to the surface of Sauchiehall Street, only five years after it was planted, its trunk long gone, brings her down.

The continuum of extraction couldn’t be clearer, the meadow of the willows replaced with a forest of buddleia that spills over the hoarding of an empty lot.

On days like this it does not matter that she cannot name all the plants that grow at the edges of things, it is more useful to note where grey meets green and a border gives way.



Citings

Topographical intimacy
                    Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local:
                    Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society
                    (New York, NY: The New Press, 1997)

                      SEE HERE 

The regulatory force
                    Moten and Harney, All Incomplete
                    (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2021)

                     SEE HERE 

A moving tree of gestures
                    Rilke, as cited in Michel De Certeau, Walking in the City,
                    in L'invention du quotidien / The Practice of Everyday Life (1974)

                     SEE HERE  

Feedback loop of nostalgia
                    Nam June Paik, ‘Nostalgia is An Extended Feedback,’
                    in We Are in Open Circuits: Writings
                    (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019) 

                     SEE HERE 

Lithic city
                   Erratic Drift—An ongoing project initiated by Minty Donald and Nick Millar. It hinges around an evolving collection of Fluxus-inspired performance scores: prompts to enact or imagine playful and ‘pointless’ actions with rocks, stones, concrete, silt, and other lithic materials. The actions are intended as an invitation to attend to the lithic-urban environment: intersections between architecture and geology, the timescales of cities, rocks, and people; and their movement, settlement, and transformation.
                    

                        SEE HERE 

Other places
                    Such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
                    et cetera.

The meadow of the willows
                 A translation of the Scots ‘Sauchiehall.’
Sauchiehall Street runs east to west through the centre of Glasgow, and is known for its shops and bars. Like many UK high streets, it has suffered from a number of closures in the last few years and is now part of the £115 million ‘Avenues’ project which aims to ‘regenerate’ the area. Forty new trees are promised.

The continuum of extraction
                    Imani Jacqueline Brown, ‘Ecological Witnessing,’
                    in (eds.) Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, Sam, & Polly Stanton,
                    Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2022)

                    SEE HERE 

 

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Shanzhai Lyric / Incomplete Poem / Excerpt.
47m21




_{A parrot on Canal Street,
Shanzhai Lyric © 2024.}



To parrot means to imitate, mimic, copy. Parrots mock the sound of human language irregardless of intended meaning—or the consequences their utterances might produce. Across Europe and the USA, feral communities of green parrots abound, punctuating the landscape with their bright plumage. Often characterised as ‘invasive’ or ‘alien,’ they have lived outside their native habitat for decades. The same attitudes of fear and mistrust that characterise perceptions of non-native species resemble the anti-immigrant sentiment that foments prejudice against counterfeit goods and their purveyors. Restrictions around both birds and bootlegs rely on controlling ideas of authenticity, ownership, and borders in order to control the biggest fake of all ... property.





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TheBraveandHoly TheBraveandHoly TheBraveandHoly TheBraveandHoly TheBraveandHoly TheBraveandHoly  

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Michael O’Mahony / Memorial Chase
54m44