Artist Dan Howard-Birt discusses his show 'I'ts Beginning To And Back Again' with Patrick Jones, artist and director of Project 78

It's Beginning To And Back Again - In Conversation

"Part documentary, part soundscape, part dream" – The Brooklyn Rail 

Audible Heat is an extended documentary, a fitful academic essay, a mass-media probe, an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing, a densely illustrated sound-art montage, and a deep dive into man’s complex relations with the seemingly eternal sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ in human consciousness.

Featuring original music and field recordings, and spoken contributions by writer and translator Cristina Viti and filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Audible Heat ranges across continents, embracing Greek tongue twisters, the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock, Plato’s Phaedrus, cicadas on the film sets of Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ the body language of Clint Eastwood, the apocalyptic premonitions of the Wampanoag, Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy, and botanist Donald C. Peattie’s terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality.

Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Audible Heat was written, read, recorded, produced & scored by Milo Thesiger-Meacham. It was first commissioned and broadcast as a work for radio by Radiophrenia, September 2023.

As a manuscript Audible Heat was shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, and was published as a book by Tenement Press (https://tenementpress.com/Audible-Heat), February 2025. Its radiophonic counterpart was released on CD by World Service (https://world-service.bandcamp.com/album/audible-heat), March 2025.

“A wonderful bringing together of natural and cultural histories.”

– Tom McCarthy, author The Remainder & Man Booker Prize nominee

“A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.”

– Elizabeth Price, artist & 2012 Turner Prize winner

"Almost Borgesian in the levity by which it seems effortlessly to embody encylopaedic multitudes ... we understand – and appreciate the – the intricate assembly of fragments, quotations and images that factor in distance, as much as intimacy, as an engine to the work ... Audible Heat balances both the warmth of genuine passion for its material with a controlled and 'cool' gaze that makes for a singular outcome."

– Gareth Evans, writer, editor, film & event producer

"... nibbling at the edges of philosophy, entomology, anthropology, poetry, music, film and diverse technologies ... like a latter-day Langland, the author “wente wide in this world wondres to here” only to find in a sound at once familiar and uncanny, eternal and pregnant with anticipation and dread, a hall of mirrors for the restless human soul. Like the sun, the cicada looms like likeness itself and we are led down garden paths that form a maze of amazing information, suggestion and nuance ... It also speaks of the limits of species entrainment, of our faltering efforts at empathic behaviour, and tells us a lot about how we act in relation to other creatures, how culture sits with nature. Perhaps more important is how it subtly suggests how we should or might act."

– Ed Baxter, writer, sound-artist, co-founder Resonance, co-editor Works of Thomas De Quincey

“Beautifully written.”

– Bhanu Kapil, poet & Windham-Campbell Literature Prize winner

Audible Heat

Lark - Decorate
Emma Richardson of The Pixies on Bass.
Mastered by Paul Galpin.
Artwork by Christina Niederberger
Film by Al Jackson.
Written, Recorded and Mixed by Karl Bielik at LBR Studios, London.
Released 13.11.24.

Lyrics
Shiny leather
Are you afraid to bend
She’ll decorate the hate
With wallpaper of men
Shiny leather
Are you afraid to bend
She’ll decorate the hate
With wallpaper of men
Abandoned funfair ride
A recipe of lies
Abandoned funfair ride
A recipe of lies
There sits a mountain
A bag of felt tip pens
There was a mother
And a father and a friend
Shiny leather
Are you afraid to bend
She’ll decorate the hate
With wallpaper of men
You’re no longer me
And I’m no longer them
Sins of the father
Tattooed on children
Shiny leather
Are you afraid to mend
We’ll decorate the hate
With wallpaper of men
There sits a mountain
A bag of felt tip pens
A bag of felt
Shiny leather men
A bag of felt
Shiny leather men

Lark - Be Still
All Songs Written, Recorded and Mixed by Karl Bielik at LBR Studios, London.
Mastered by Paul Galpin.
Released 31.01.25.
Ava Bielik - Backing Vox and Heartbeat on She Breaks,
Paul Burke - Guitar on Be Still, Blind, Powders, She Breaks and The Underpass.
Rayna Ferner - Violin on The Ink House.
Robert Hall and Lorna Milburn - Backing Vox on The Ink House.
Emma Richardson - Bass on Decorate.
Joe Ryan - Drums on Blind, Powders and She Breaks.
Tarn Willers - Bass on Powders.
Goodbye Man - Courtesy of Care in the Community Recordings.

Front cover art - Ben Walker.
Back cover art - Donna Mclean.
Label art - James F Johnston.
Photography - Lydia Whitmore.
Art & Design - Ciaran O'Shea.
www.karlbielik.com
LARK007LP.
All rights Standard Lamp Records 2025.

A Side
Be Still
Blind
Decorate
Goodbye Man
She Breaks
Shimmy

B Side
The Underpass
Answer
Sixpence
The Ink House
Powders

Decorate

Offshore

Off Peak (Lark Remix)

Lark - The Operation
Written, played and produced by Karl Bielik at Terrace Studios, London.
Mastered by Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse Studios, London.
Cover Photograph by Lorna Milburn.
Released 12/12/2016. All rights Standard Lamp Records 2016.

The Operation

Lark - The Operation

Lark remixes by In Flagranti, Scritti Politti, The Bees, Brendan Lynch, Andrew Weatherall and more.

29.06.18 Can I colour in your hair - Andrew Weatherall mix

Lark remixes by Andrew Weatherall, Brendan Lynch,  In Flagranti, Scritti Politti and The Bees.

Lark - 'Tardis' - The Brendan Lynch remix

Subjects include the similarities and the differences between painting and mosaics, the confines of the grid, working collaboratively in the studio, decoration and visual restlessness, Genesis, James Tissot's painting 'The Last Evening' and coping with the art world. 

Intro & Outro Music: www.hooksounds.com

9. Your Eyes Shall Be Opened: Biggs & Collings

Lark carve a grimy, gritty groove, the atmosphere chilled, the mood cracked. 
A blend of heavy basslines, raucous sounds and turbulent lyricism, paint a volatile picture of the landscape the band inhabits.
Lark is an independent London based band founded by Karl Bielik, a nonconformist and often idiosyncratic songwriter, frontman and artist. 
Romantic, dissonant, feverish and alive, Lark is an unsound sound. 

Lark have been remixed by Andrew Weatherall, Brendan Lynch, The Bees, Erol Alkan and Green Gartside.  

Selected Press
Uncut - ‘The wonky unsettling world it creates is very much Bielik's own’
Mojo - 'A dark subcurrent of industrial noise runs under raspy vocals punctuated by driving basslines that fuel this idiosyncratic album'
Q - ‘Verbal darts over brutal guitar shards and cheap synthetic beats’
The Quietus - ‘That rare breed of band that creates and inhibits an environment entirely of their own making’
Louder than War - 'One of the albums of the year... one of the most exciting albums around'
Rough Trade - ‘Fantastic, sounds like a drunken, dense and dark take on a stooges riff mixed with the repetition of The Fall’
Loud and Quiet - ‘Jerky beats, repetition, strangely cryptic lyrics, wiry guitars and manic psycho-bluesy vocals’
Vive le Rock - 'Swathe upon swathe of FX-laden sonic attack, as Bielik tears out his tortured soul'
Time Out - ‘Another dose of uber-anxious lurching and lo-fi post punk’
Metro - 'The menace lurking just beneath the surface is as contemporary as it is compellingly groovy.'
Norman Records - 'Between the ramshackle party punk of The Cramps and the more eccentric skronk of Beefheart'
Gigslutz - 'An ode to the dysfunctional; brimming with guilty, gritty, passive aggressive tracks.'
Penny Black Music - 'Bielik's songs are gorgeous... funny? No. Worth the agony, most certainly, yes.'
Whisperin' & Hollerin' - ‘Lark carve a grimy, gritty groove... the atmosphere is vaguely chilling, the mood cracked’
Clash - ‘breaks boundaries and connects the dots… rich in invention and fresh ideas’
Artrocker - ‘Full of Magnetic Fields style charm’
Joyzine - ‘Explores the depths of the human condition’
Punk Online - 'It's what makes punk music what it is and Lark are just another dimension’
Music Emissions - ’Stunning in its range of ideas and raw poetic power’
Americana - ‘Rawness, urgency and a sense of claustrophobia by the truckload’
Foxy Digitalis - ‘The vocal tirade is what makes this whole thing’
Alternative Ulster - ‘A sonic masterpiece of instantly recognisable singularity’
Big Distraction - ’A Grimy dark rock 'n' roll beast of a record... ideas simply buzz out of the speakers’
Blaue-rosen - ‘a sonic space which is enveloped in a dark, static melancholy’

Decorate

(Lark)

Related tracks