Outsidergrad at The Battleground

Back in May The Battleground published a collaborative record of field recordings by myself and their editor in chief Joel Schalit who also very kindly sorted out mastering the recordings. The collection takes as its subject the London borough of Hounslow and the acoustic ecology of this part of the city which sits beneath the Heathrow Airport flight path. 

The record is available in digital format here: 

The Battleground also very kindly organised a a joint launch and discussion event along with my good friend Josh White whose latest book Tories are Dead was published this Spring. 

For the release I wrote an essay of reflections on the recording process and the practice of field recordings more generally. Writing this was something of a cathartic experience for me, since making the recordings in the last summer and Autumn of 2023 was one of the last creative things I did while living in that area of West London. In November I moved out to Fleet in Hampshire and then two years later to Ash Vale just over the border into Surrey. 

Plans are in the works to finally make available the collection of field recordings I made in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea over two days in August 2017 as a response to the Grenfell fire and which were the focus of this blog entry a year later lamenting the fact I'd done nothing with them. Well, almost nothing. I did use a small selection of them to produce this track from an EP I released in 2022. The title Twinkle@Street Piano (For Grenfell) refences the source of the recordings and two nuggets of urban acoustic ecology encountered during those two longs days nine years ago. 

The Things we Leave Behind

 

I don't know if this is a habit peculiar to me, but I occasionally read though older entries in my journal, and I’m surprised sometimes by the things I find. Odd fixations that I’ve since expunged from my memory; semi drunken musings on banal encounters. Anyway, I found this one today from just over a year ago at the time when my soon-to-be wife and I were going through our belongings in preparation for a house move which in fact wouldn’t happen for another seven months.

“I found an eggcup with legs in one of my boxes, broken and repaired. Why? Why was it repaired and why have I carried it with me for so long? Was it special to me as a child? And despite having no memory of ever having used it, I’ve carried it with me from childhood through my whole adult life. I’m sure there’s nothing to it really, but I do wonder whether I’ve just committed some awful sin against myself by tossing it into the bin. I have many objects like this”.

Can one be held hostage by objects one has no memory of? It’s an odd set up, one which Borges might have made something of in a characteristically surreal short story. In truth I think it’s an all-too-common habit of people to lug vast quantities of possessions from place to place with little understanding of what things are for or how they came to be owned. I frequently, not without some injustice, pull my wife up on random knick-knacks cluttering up our house, which may on occasion have been kept on account of some permanently deferred use value, or more often than not because it was “cute”. No matter, I’m not innocent in these things myself and have recently embarked on a campaign of selling various holdings of mine which have outlived their time. CDs! – worthless you say – and I agree but you’d be surprised what people will pay for said digitised sound on plastic if it’s wrapped in a handmade cardboard sleeve folded in a natty way. Throw in a bit of over-exposed arty urban photography printed on premium card and you’ve got yourself a collector’s item. I’ve just sent two of these things to Germany after owning them for over two decades. £65 in the bank. A significant profit as far as I can discern. The text I included for the Ebay auction read “selling because I have always found the music boring”.