8.45 am. I’m waking feeling more tired than when I went to bed. The lassitude, tingling, and aching persist. Concentration is sporadic. These are familiar symptoms (old adversaries in the war with ME). One must just get on with it. The spirit is still willing. 9.30 am. Back at the bedroom workstation, under the sky, I ruminated further on the concept of a sonorous industrial landscape:
My Belmont Loose Leaf File notes:
Significant concepts arising from yesterday’s reflection: the ruins of sounds; sonic archaeology / an impulse to make something, again, about/from/for South Wales / taking account of the current political and social context / what makes this the right time? / what makes me the right person? / the relationship of the industrial landscape to religion and the supernatural (?) / the ghosts of sound / apparitional sounds / can sounds haunt? / stone tape theory / to extract a sound from an old photograph / how could one re-present the memory of a sound? / c/w thoughtography / to hear once more, after the fact / audible memories / sonic resurrection / the use of extant sound recordings made in SW as the fabric of a reconstruction / a restoration without fragments / the sound of the post-industrial landscape / historic visual representations of SW industry – a noisy subject rendered silent / only textual descriptions at the time could record the clamour / recording the present (those things which are taking place at the moment of recording) / recording the past (those things which have preceded the act of recording) / recording the past as though it was the present / recording the present as though it was the past / reconsider the significance of my aural diary /
1.30 pm. In the course of looking for digital traces of my old school friends, I discovered one who had recently passed away – Lyndon Budd. (Doubtless, a number of others no longer walk the earth.) His father, Martin, was a music teacher at my secondary school, and someone to whom I owe a great deal. He instilled in some of us a love of classical music, and allowed me to join the school orchestra, even though I was, for all practical intents and purposes, a non-musician. Martin valued a student’s enthusiasm and aspiration above that of their ability and experience. Lyndon wasn’t a close friend; but to those for whom he was, the sense of his absence will be acute. In the middle years of life, one’s peers fall from the tree like ripe apples:
Lyndon Budd, Abertillery Grammar Technical School 1971
After lunch, I continued note making until the waters ran dry. Extracts:
to what extent is my memory of industrial sounds idiosyncratic? / what can other people bring to and take from this experience? / the human desire to return to the past; to hear again / sounds recall kindred sounds /sounds summon associations with objects, places, events, feelings, and states of mind (sound and memory) / vestigial sounds / a broken or incomplete sound / recording the silence where once there was sound / subterranean sounds / supernatural noises associated with coalmining (18th-early 20th century) before mechanisation (noisy machines) / sound as a descriptor of place, space, position, action / sounds of industry recorded in TV and radio documentaries on SW mining / oral history interviews with miners.
7.30 pm. On the February 5, 1989, I interviewed my grandfather, Oliver Rees, while he was a patient at Nantyglo Hospital (where I’d been born). We discussed his life as a collier. This source may be as good as any with which begin a practical engagement with the concept. The cassette recording needs, first, to be converted into an uncompressed digital sound file. Mercifully, I have held onto my Denon D-100 cassette deck for this purpose. The certainly don’t make them like this anymore; if they make them at all, that is.