Brillant , trip, stumble & hop down memory lane , beefheart the Fall, television, slits, 😃

Spectral Vectors was created for 'Come Hell Or High Water', a monthly series of live events on the Thames foreshore at Poplar, organised by Anne Bean, Hayley Newman, Harriet Latham and others. It takes as its starting point the idea of ghosts of the Thames; river revenants in the form of lost sounds of previous times from the river's busier industrial past, such as ship's horns, tugboat horns, foghorns and other industrial sounds. 

Expanding on this theme, the idea of things lost/buried/hidden/removed came to mind. Documentary radio footage relating to sunken unexploded WWII ordnance and tragic drowning was combined with recent field recordings of mine made with contact mics attached to cabling beneath Millenium Bridge at St. Paul's, amplifying sounds hidden to the naked ear, when the bridge is animated by foot traffic, wind coursing through it and sun warming it. 

Hydrophone recordings also capture hidden sounds – various vessels passing, sounding thin and insubstantial as wind-up bath toys from a submarine perspective. Delving deeper, recordings made inside Greenwich foot tunnel feature; resonant metallic sounds buried beneath the river itself echo along the tunnel's length.

Municipal greed and acts of resistance also form part of the documentary material with Bob Hoskins enlightening Barry Norman in 1982 about various development scams along the river, Malcolm MacLaren talking about the Sex Pistols' 1977 riverboat gig, and riverboat men going on strike. This footage is animated by the addition of lost ship's horns, populating the river with a lively, boisterous presence.

My first forays into field recording began whilst on summer work in the 1980s, when I bought a secondhand recording walkman, and my first recordings were made on the Thames at Vauxhall, capturing, amongst many things on a busy summer river, the sound of a speedboat whizzing past, dopplering downriver. This can be heard later in the piece, just after Hoskins says, “...regenerating the river.. bringing it back to life..making it a playground for the wealthy.”

The piece ends with recordings I made on a visit to Rainham Marshes in Essex in 2017, as the pace slows down and distant perspectives come into view. Sounds from the far shore can be heard, lending a widescreen feel, with the low hum of industrial barges drifting languidly past. Larks enter the frame, endlessly improvising metres above me as I sit on landfill overlooking the Thames estuary, while pigeons flap busily around the concrete barges, sounding like distant handclaps. 

These concrete barges were the site of a particularly memorable TV appearance by Bow Gamelan (on Channel 4's Alter Image in 1986), playing on and in the barges and in advancing tides (up to their necks at one point). Invoking the spirits of Paul Burwell and z'ev, whose ashes are scattered in the Thames, I improvised on a large cylindrical metal item on site near the barges. An extract from this enters low in the mix, panning back and forth across the stereo field, before quietly exiting. 

The main intention of my trip to the barges was to record myself improvising inside them. Traveling out from Battersea, I timed my visit at low tide. Despite this however, the exposed ground around the barges was way too treacherous to negotiate; I would've sunk up to my knees in squelchy sand. So near and yet so far... 

The piece opens with a pitch-shifted combination of older ship's horns and foghorns, which hove into view, as though summoned from the depths. These reappear to close out the piece, very low in the mix, as though already departing and quite distant; sinking back into the depths.

In memoriam: 

Paul Burwell 1949 – 2007

z'ev 1951 – 2017

Many thanks to Ian Rawes (www.soundsurvey.org.uk) for directing me towards freely available and immensely valuable BBC archive recordings.

The piece is freely downloadable for transfer to other listening media.

Spectral Vectors

This stereo sound collage is a tribute to the spirit of late 70s/early 80s independent music, a period latterly referred to as post-punk. It sews together edits made from the albums of about 30 different bands. It is an entirely personal selection and not in any way representative of the time, just my experience of it, and some of my favourite moments. 

It should be listened to via a decent amp and speaker set up or good headphones - not computer speakers or smartphone, as much detail and subtlety will be lost. The piece is freely downloadable to transfer to suitable listening media.

Many of the fragments are merely a second or two long, but the identity that runs through the music, like the colour through a stick of Brighton Rock, is indelibly strong and is an immediate memory trigger, re-firing those synaptic leaps, bringing you back to the original context. The time travel element is strong, but great strength of this music is that it travels so well across time - it is both of its time and beyond it; still sounding fresh and vital. 

This was a time, in the wake of punk’s short-lived initial burst and eventual burn out, when bands were being more exploratory within conventional musical forms, breaking the format down and re-assembling it, often healthily cross-fertilizing genres such as funk, jazz, dub reggae, disco, krautrock, improvisation and non-Western musics. Forty years on, I continue to draw considerable satisfaction from it. Its currency remains strong.

It was music untethered to conventional musical skills, where only the most rudimentary understanding of musical structures was sufficient to make music. Now it was approached laterally, with intelligence and imagination in place of ‘chops’. That said, certain musicians from this time had considerable chops, but the spirit of the time was about stretching the form. Even if you didn’t have traditional instruments, you could find sonically rich material in scrapyards and docklands in the death throes of their associated industries. And you didn’t need a state-of-the-art recording studio.

This music was both a response to prevailing conditions as well as something facilitated by them, in the sense that, unlike now, people had more time on their hands by subsisting on the dole, living in squats and being in receipt of local authority third level grants. The conditions, though difficult on many levels, were ripe for experimentation.

I was a teenager at this time and this music made a huge and lasting impression on me. The DIY ethos was incredibly refreshing and the sense of possibility felt wide open. The music was rich and atmospheric, often like film soundtracks. Whole worlds opened up that you could lose yourself in. It created a fertile head space for making art. Some of the lyric writing drew from other parts of the culture: literature, film, art, and formed a gateway to further exploration. 

Unlike now, access to information was scarce - there were music weeklies such as the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and (in Ireland) Hot Press. Then there was the proliferation of cheap home made fanzines thanks to the photocopier - Vox being a particularly good Irish example. John Peel’s radio programme was a complete anomaly for the BBC at the time, and a vital conduit into the scene which Peel was hugely supportive of. 

The tribute title, taken from the Gang Of Four’s song Ether, was chosen for its critique of consumerism’s empty promises at a time when the future it proposed was slowly being dismantled and we were being sold short. Now there is the hauntological dimension of this disinterring of musical history, and the idea of ‘cancelled futures’ - a lively area of study in recent years thanks to the work of Mark Fisher and others, drawing from the original ideas of Jacques Derrida.

Dirt Behind The Daydream

https://www.roomtemperature.org/p/biography.html

Dirt Behind The Daydream

Fergus Kelly

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Fergus Kelly

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