A ruined dwelling on North Rona
I also wanted to share this - a Radio 3 feature with the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie on the remote, and now abandoned, Scottish island of North Rona. The stars of the piece are the Leach's petrels that nest on the island and fill the air with their soft bubbling laughter, and Jamie's exact language and warm lilting tone.
Quail
A couple of Radio 4 programmes to look for this weekend - at 10.30 on Saturday morning Martin Noble from British Sea Power goes to Shetland with Marc Riley looking for the Quail (yes, that does sound a little Chris Morris doesn't it?); then on Sunday afternoon at 4, Robert Macfarlane is on the Book Club discussing his all round masterwork The Wild Places.
Yes, we have been a little quiet of late. A combination of summer lassitude, eye-ache from sleep deprivation and the density of all the cricket that's around at the moment: it gets in under the door... Normal business should return once we've adjusted ourselves. We have another 6 weeks of it so we'd better adjust fast.
Speechification have been a little quiet themselves recently, but over the last couple of weeks there has been a whole host of great stuff posted. Follow the links below.
The Percy Edwards Showdown is almost too twee to contemplate yet somehow listening to a man imitate a jay and have Bill Oddie and Mark Cocker trying to guess if it's real or artificial is a thing to behold. Plus David Attenborough chairing. (MP3)
A whole series of Night Walks - from John Walsh in London to Nicholas Shakespeare in Tasmania.
Ever since being mesmerised by Richard Preston's The Wild Trees, a book that manages to make Californian Redwood's alluring and terrifying, I've been wanting to climb trees. This brilliant programme follows the exploits of James Aldred as he climbs one of Britain's biggest Redwoods - Goliath. (MP3) Some photos here too.
A London Ear special on Will Oldham. (MP3) Yes, of course it's brilliant.
Two cracking programmes on Borges - one featuring his old reader and all round polymath Alberto Manguel (MP3), and another that follows Peter White on a trip to Argentina to view a project that is making Borges work available in Braille (MP3).
Lastly, not listened to these myself, but two programmes on Larkin: both featuring Paul Farley who traces Larkin's journey during The Whitsun Weddings (MP3) and then discovers a box of tapes of Larkin reading his own poetry (MP3).
You can also follow Speechification on Twitter, and yes me if you want to.
Coltrane, Adderley, Miles, Evans
An Mp3 from the splendid Speechification of a documentary on Radio 4's Soul Music covering the basic history of the recording of So What, the lead track on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Some of the commentary grates a little as it tends to slip into the mawkish at times but there are some great insights. I especially like the idea that this was Miles trying to recreate a childhood memory of the sound of a lone gospel singer he stumbled across in a battered church in the woods outside St Louis. Kind of Blue has an odd status - at times it seems so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible. No matter this is well worth a listen.
There's also a great show over at NPR about the making of Kind of Blue. The download of it is on the left hand side.
This video recording is dated to April 2nd 1959 and features Wynton Kelley on piano in place of Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb on drums; Julian Adderley was sick and wasn't at the session. There's something in the way the others stand around so relaxed as Coltrane goes off on one of his runs, a sense somewhere between too cool and reverence. There's a weight already about Coltrane, perhaps the gravity of all that was to come. But his future size is there as well, in those immense shoulders and ghosted into the bulbs of his eyes.
The New York Library has put a vast section of its public author events online as videos and audio files. There's a archive stretching back to 2005 and plenty to keep you busy from Werner Herzog to a symposium on Freud.
Goldfinch
Eliot was wrong: August is the cruellest month. Everything is hung, unused - the very air in a kind of dull stasis. There is odd patches of colour in the patchwork-brown of certain fields and a few trees, responding to the shortening days have begun to prepare for autumn's small death; but the field margins have lost their colour and the hedgerows have lost their lustre, the umbellifers drooping over their hardened stems.
Last Thursday I went for my first proper walk in what felt like ages. It was late evening and it was the first time I'd sensed autumn on the air. It was possible, walking in the patches of slanting light between the shadows of overarching oaks, to feel the air change shape, from the denser air thickened by the calorific weight of the sun to the sharper colder patches in the shade. At one point, beneath a lone maple I stopped a moment and was surprised to hear the unmistakeable piping of a chiff chaff and realised I hadn't heard any birdsong in an age. The biggest absence in August for me is birdsong. And each year it's a surprise, of sorts - such is the cacophony of March to (roughly) the middle of July that as the birds one by one give up their territorial claims it's impossible not to miss their calls scissoring the air. Even the blackbirds this year gave up early...
Thankfully Radio 4 have filled the void and are re-broadcasting Chris Waton's Guide to Garden Birds; you can also hear this dawn chorus recording Watson made in Holystone Forest.
Corridors of sound
A bunch of great dubstep and dubstep-related mixes and podcasts I've come across of late and thought I would share. If you know of any other good mixes etc then leave them in the comments or get in touch. Cheers.
The blogariddims series in general is well worth a listen and you can subscribe through iTunes or google reader or whatever. This recent mash-up by Zhao (he of different waters among others) is cracking, and mixes Skream, Appleblim and the like with Indonesian Gamelan and ragga inflected stuff.
Loads of great mixes and posts at grievousangel. There's a collected page of mixes here - dubstep sufferah vol3, is a belter. There's also a great 2007 scene-scoping interview about this volume at Blackdownsoundboy.
A bunch of podcasts: Hospital Records; Electronic Explorations; and Xlr8r (the recent dusk + blackdown mix is great) - the first two cover various sounds but tend to focus on grime, dubstep and drum n bass; the latter is a little more scattershot.
Keeping up with all this stuff...: Dubstep Forum (there's enough here to make your ears bleed black); Blackdownsoundboy; gutterbreakz; Pitchfork's Grime and Dusbtep Column (check out their link to this YDOT mix); Rinse FM.
And finally a bunch of Kode9 sounds: this Maida Vale session (partly with Spaceape) was broadcast on the 24th July; there's his mix of the recent London Zoo album by The Bug; and this radio show he did with DJ Rupture - and the rest of Rupture's WFMU shows.
Edit: Just after I put this together, Mary Anne Hobbs reprised her seminal 2006 Breezeblock Dubstep Warz session (there's an MP3 of the show here) in which 7 DJs (Mala, Skream, Kode9, Vex'd, Hatcha, Loefa, Distance) took over her Radio 1 show and notionally 'broke' Dubstep. This time those 7 DJs chose 7 more to reflect the state of the scene: Silkie & Quest, Kulture, Joker & MC Nomad, Starkey, Chef, Oneman and Cyrus. You can hear the results on listen again for the next few days (this option boosts the listening figures) or there are various MP3s of the show doing the rounds.
Thomas de Quincey
In the Sinclair/Will Self talk at the V&A we linked to a couple of weeks back, Sinclair gives an explicit nod to Thomas De Quincey - essaysist, sometime muse/albatross of the Wordsworth's and legendary opium addict - as the father of the art of psychogeography:
I think the whole tradition goes back to De Quincey and one particular phrase that he uses: the ‘north-west passage’ [see chapter 3, Confessions of an English Opium Eater -ed][2]. He describes, in the English Opium Eater, finding himself within the labyrinth of the mind, within the labyrinth of London. There is a concept called the ‘north-west passage' -- which is like the thread in the maze, like Ariadne's thread -- which could lead you out of London if you contact it. And he makes reference to Frobisher's voyages, the idea of actually navigating a passage through the ice to find a way out, to find a way between the Atlantic and the Pacific. And of course people attempting this disappear, they fall prey to cannibalism or scurvy or whatever.
De Quincey is the one who sees that this is a metaphor that applies perfectly to London, and that notion he floats is then taken up by later romantics like Arthur Machen and Edgar Allan Poe. They they sift it and test it.
This Radio 4 show from back in May whilst never explicitly about De Quincey's link to the genesis of psychogeography, is very much about his love of walking and his phenomenal stamina. (The urge to walk became psychopathological later in his life and fired by his laudanum addiction he was driven to walk incredible distances - when he lived in Edinburgh he apparently measured out his back garden and walked over a 1000 miles in a 90-day period).
The programme is presented by James Crowden who inherited De Quincey's walking stick which had been in the Crowden family since De Quincey's last landlady had presented it to Samuel Crowden back in the 1870s. The programme traces Crowden's last walk with the stick as he returns and donates it to its spiritual home, Dove Cottage - home to William and Dorothy Wordsworth and where De Quincey lived after they had left.
Download (from the marvellous Speechification): Thomas De Quincey - Walking A Stick Back Home
Rook, silhouette (photo from catb)
What with all these nature pieces soon I'll be growing a beard and sleeping in ditches. Hang on...
Living World, Radio 4's 'gentle weekend natural history programme' recently went to the Norfolk coast to witness the raucous spectacle of 80,000 rooks roosting in a ancient woodland. A great little program full of simple joy and knowledge. Thanks to Speechification for pointing it out. And for hosting an Mp3 of the show!
And there is also this from Roger Deakin's posthumously published book, Wildwood, a book about man's relationship with wood, and woods. The chapter on rooks is a fantastic evocation of a night spent camping beneath a rookery in another Norfolk woodland, this time a little further inland. As Deakin sets camp in his bivouac tent at the foot of a huge stand of Ash trees he notices that 'the sky can seem very pale in summer once you've grown accustomed to the darkness. I could make out the silhouettes of trees, but the rooks and their nests melted into the general blackness. In the wood, complete silence but for the occasional minor rustling further off. Starlight filtered down, strained through the black leaves...As I began to drift in and out of sleep, drugged by bluebells, I felt doubly submerged, a long way beneath the surface on the sea floor of the wood. Once I was woken with a jolt by a sudden mad commotion in the rookery caused, I suppose, by a bad bird dream: a pouncing fox in the skull of a rook that sent a wave of alarm through the canopy.'
He wakes at dawn to the glorious cacophony of the rookery
Hours later, while the sun was still in the horizon I drifted back into consciousness to the most raucous of dawn choruses...Settling my head back into the mossy pillow, I exulted in the luxury of waking in a rookery in full cry.
By the time I swam into full consciousness, most of the young rooks were out of their nests, perched among the topmost twigs. They basked in the first rays of sun that turned the green to gold around them, their black feathers gleaming blue, green, purple and bronze, absorbing the warmth. The parent birds soared off in sallies of flight accompanied by crescendos of cawing, returning with breakfast for the fledglings who expressed their satisfaction in half-choked high-pitched mewling. Each time they landed, the rooks fanned their tails in greeting: gesture is an important part of their language. A good deal of the rooks' circling, gliding flight seemed to be nothing other than joyful orisons with no apparent destinations in the fields. In February I had watched them here, flinging themselves into a strong wind and somersaulting wildly upward, then diving straight down again towards the wood like bungee jumpers, checking their swoop just in time with the tilt of a wing to glide far away across the valley towards the church on the far hill...The more they flew, the more noise the rooks made. Whether you can call it melody is the question I lay pondering...I think of their utterings as conversation, or the roughest of folksong. Rooks speak in the strongest of country burrs. They are rasping, leathery, parched, raucous, hoarse, strangled, deep-throated, brawling, plaintive, never reticent, and like all good yokels, incomprehensible...Intruding on the privacy of rooks from a small tent on the wood floor was never meant to be at all scientific, but it was plain to me from where I lay that they had quite a rich language. I sometimes heard a private, muted, muttering note, uttered into the depths of the nest behind net curtains, strictly for the ears of the family. Also pitched in a lowered voice was a kind of squeaking that sounded like contentment. The rooks didn't seem to mind my presence at all. It even occurred to me that having roosted all night under the same ash-leaf roof, I had somehow been accepted into their company by some ancient law of hospitality. Rooks are, after all, the most sociable of birds...