Jim Colquhoun and Jamie McNeill have been walking out into denuded landscapes and talking shite for over twenty years now. Usually a camera is turned on accidentally in someones pocket and their cod-psychogeographical  drivel is captured through sheer incompetence. The fractured, purposeless and ill-considered invective is frankly embarrassing and putting some kind of awful didgeridoo-a-like pan pipes over the top was/is a risible idea which nevertheless has a certain rough charm! They share a passion for landscapes that others might consider marginal at best and have a predilection for a certain kind of open-ended poetics carried out in situ using whatever broken bits of language or technology come to hand. Join them as they mutter over mushrooms, talk to the animals, fondle the stones, take luncheon amidst a bog, howl in a tunnel, lose themselves then find themselves again and take stock of the changing nature of landscape in places that quite literally repel your average rambler. So, a collage of inane chatter, warped soundscapes, weather, squelchy field recordings and Moor ore.

THE INLAND CASTAWAYS (2021)

ATOM presents: 
BLACK POWDER
 Delineating the Blasted Peninsula. 
On the trail of Alfred Nobel. 
A work of docufiction.

BLACK POWDER

ATOM presents:
THREEPWOOD. 
The Redacted Stones.
A docufiction in eight fragments.

THREEPWOOD

ATOM presents:
THE BURIED CATHEDRAL.
A dauner along the spiral vortex.
A short work of docufiction. 



the pagan gods are not so long dead

THE BURIED CATHEDRAL

Produced as part of a co-commissioning residency exchange with Radiophrenia, Glasgow and WORM, Rotterdam. Recorded at Worm Sound Studios and a bungalow in Wielewaal, June 2023. 

Colquhoun & McNeill found themselves locked in an airless cellar in Rotterdam for what seemed like an eternity. Surrounded by a bewildering array of vintage synths that neither artist had any idea how to switch on never mind play and as their incessant bickering lurched ever closer to the daily fistfight Colquhoun babbled gibberish into a broken cassette recorder whilst McNeill attempted to electrolyse his frontal lobe and not for the last time. 

The trick seemed to be to record everything all the time as every five hours or so a dying synthesiser would vomit a few seconds of barely salvageable audio, its circuits fried by a decrepit power cable or the overzealous application of some Space Echo. From these fragments they were able to construct a gnostic grammar from which to mimic the machines they consistently tried to destroy. Colquhoun had become particularly skilled in apeing the high end screech of a badly patched ARP 2600. 

A guitar lead coils itself slowly into a gordian knot like a snake that can’t quite stomach eating its own head, the calcified circuit board reroutes itself as self-immolating electro-pictograms and in the over-defined flicker and glare of the studio lighting Colquhoun mistakes a toaster for a vintage mic spending yet another wasted afternoon whispering enochian incantations into the heating element.

Benjamin Furly's Library

Colquhoun & McNeill’s practice has developed over nearly 20 years of collaboration, in which time it has embraced a variety of tactics and methodologies including: drawing, writing, video, performance and audio works. Most importantly, their work is informed and enriched by a shared obsession and engagement with the peripheral and marginal spaces of landscape. Accordingly, their walks within these spaces are amongst the most important, if not key, strategies they employ in terms of the experiential research and learning that informs their shared practice. The walks themselves are performative in that they are both movements through landscape and an attempt to engage with how and why they choose to do so. These spaces are often what can be described as ‘heterotopia’, places that are variously marginalised through where they are, or how they have been used in the past and in the present. They might be old industrial sites, railway land, scrubland, moorland, defunct business parks or bogland. These landscapes could be described as uncertain either/or sorts of places, undefined, shifting, uncontainable, even dangerous. Often they might be described as dull or boring and for that reason can remain opaque to the eyes of passersby. These places do not offer the usual menu of attractiveness such as charming country scenes, bucolic vistas, meandering paths or the epic sweep of mountain and valley. They are the obverse of a designated ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’ (AONB) and the cultural and political assumptions that underscore such places they are, if you will, the anti-sublime, the bastardised picturesque.

COLQUHOUN & MCNEILL

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