To celebrate the release of Chronosis, Keith Tilford and Reza Negarestani join Robin Mackay to talk about their collaboration and the ideas that fuelled the time-twisting plot of the comic. Creative tension and backchannel bickering, cat monks, Boltzmann brains, cosmic body horror, Bertrand Russell the armchair stoner, the Harold Lloyd theory of time-reversal, psychopaths, AGI monkeys, and <em>The Mortiloquist</em> all make an appearance. 

Music: ‘Dionysus’, by Herman Polsus aka <a href="https://soundcloud.com/drew-flieder">Drew Flieder</a>, and ‘Timeshift’ by Eschaton (<a href="https://soundcloud.com/omnimusicuk">Omni Music</a>)


<a href="https://www.urbanomic.com/book/chronosis/">Get your hands on a copy of <em>Chronosis</em> now!</a>

A Serial Killer of Memories

From "Some Memories of Bamboo" (Gruenrekorder)https://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=658

The liner notes for this track read:

"I had been told that the monks at the Jyoujyuji Temple greeted the dawn with a gongyo - daily devotional exercise - of drums and bells. The temple stood 30 metres from the upper floor of a friend's house where I was sleeping separated by a small yard, a hedge and the temple gardens. I laid out my recording equipment in preparation and set the alarm clock for 3 a.m.

On the evidence of the audio file that remains, I must have woken, climbed out of bed, switched on the equipment and promptly fallen asleep where I stood, snoring in gentle rhythmic rasps. Perhaps woken by a soft breeze of cool air, I came to, pulling the window fully open. I held the microphone out at arm's length in time to hear the first chimes, beats and chants, muffled by remoteness, the intervening foliage and the batteries fading on the microphone.

Eisuke once told me that what he was interested in were the sounds he heard after he pressed stop. I like that and I like the murky quality of "4 A.M. Jyoujyuji," the result of the recording having been dredged up from the depths of failing technology and having some of the noisy sludge digitally sluiced off. It is as if an acoustic fog has descended to blur outlines and make distance unfathomable, a cloudiness that shadows the fortunes of meaning and memory".

4 A.M. Jyoujyuji (2009)

Narugashima, Hyogo, Japan, September 2014.
dpa 4060 (with wind jammer) , pcm-m10, aeolian harp

aeolian harp #2

This piece is part of a larger ongoing project (http://hebrides-suite.co.uk)  that attempts to both explore and communicate something about&nbsp; history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides&nbsp;&nbsp;as well as material from existing oral history archives.&nbsp;
This section is loosely woven&nbsp;around &nbsp;aspects of&nbsp; the crofting lifestyle past and present. It starts on the machair (a Gaelic word that describes an extensive low-lying fertile plain which is one of the rarest habitat types in Europe.&nbsp;Almost half of all Scottish machair occurs in the Outer Hebrides) and in particular the machair around Sollas a small crofting township in North Uist.&nbsp;There are references to&nbsp; the importance of the machair to supporting crofting lifestyles in terms of the plants, crops, animals and birds that can be found there (including&nbsp; a recording made one night in 2004 of a corncrake with sheep and an accordian player at a party on the beach far in the background). It refers to the kelp industry&nbsp; which,&nbsp;along with the herring industry,&nbsp; supported a population of &nbsp;93,000 in 1841 (present population is around 26,000, about half the size of the seaside town of Hove).&nbsp; It then moves on to sheep&nbsp;which largely replaced people on the machair after the clearances&nbsp;when thousands of families emigrated to Canada, New Zealand and Australia&nbsp;in the nineteenth century&nbsp;due to a mixture of&nbsp;force&nbsp;famine, crop failure and the demise of the&nbsp; kelp industry.&nbsp;Part of the recording here is of a&nbsp;mobile&nbsp; sheep sale which travels around the islands visiting small townships.&nbsp;&nbsp;
In 1849&nbsp;&nbsp;33 constables were sent from Oban to Sollas to stand by as a population of 603 were forcibly evicted.&nbsp; A plaque on the Sollas machair commemorates this and celebrates how the existing 10 crofts except one have been occupied by the same families for the last century&nbsp;
" around us the Sollas landscape provides a heritage of ruined houses and fallen dykes, a poignant and permanent reminder of nineteenth century feudal oppression, clearance and emigration".&nbsp;
The voices are those of&nbsp; Donald MacSween of Ness, Harris, John and Mary Maclean from Berneray&nbsp; recorded by Cathy Lane and Lachlan MacQueen of North Uist who is talking about the clearances around Sollas in Gaelic.&nbsp; &nbsp;Lachlan was recorded by D.R. MacDonald in 1974 for the oral history archive at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.
A paper about this work can be accessed at ww.shimajournal.org/issues/v5n1/h.%20Lane%20Shima%20v5n1%20114-127.pdf


On The Machair

One last blast from the COVID bunker before the second wave hits. Tunes from DJK Huysmans, chat from around around the world, and T-shirt advertorials (get your PlaguePod T-Shirt here: https://www.urbanomic.com/event/conceptwear-2/)

4 A.M. Jyoujyuji (2009)

Angus Carlyle

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