9.00 am. A little postgraduate admin and, then, a lurch towards the studio for a day of sound manipulations, while connecting my ailing Apogee Duet A/D interface to my study’s iMac. The ‘send’ MacBook in the studio presented a output failure for no apparent reason that, as mysteriously, self-rectified. I’ve no idea why this happened, either way. This is unsatisfactory. A problem that can’t be understood, can’t be resolved even if it has been fixed. I began working with Handboard 1, and the sound of the engraving derived from the King James Version of the Second Commandment. 10.30 am. The production menu: to create sonic modulations that are, variously:

1. gritty, dirty, lo-fi, fractured, barely holding together, nasty, and unpleasant to the ear;
2. heavily punctuated, with vocal timbre, phased, and reminiscent of Morse code, expressive speech, and the noise of a 12-inch file on hard metal;
3. low pitched, dark, resonant, a little unnerving, fluctuating like the flutter of a candle flame blown by the wind, with distant somewhat musical but almost inaudible sounds;
4. low pitched, very resonant, and muffled (as though heard from underwater);
5. ringing, scratchy, anxious, and with few bass frequencies.

While the tracks (each of 20-minutes duration) were being processed, I reflected upon one of the roots of my interest in sound art — the aural diary. This is ‘a document of experience, sensation, place, and people made using audio recording’ which I’ve kept intermittently since 1985. I used a cassette-tape recorder (and, latterly, a digital recorder) like a camera, in order to make field recordings of my own life:

Street sounds, Chinatown, Grant Ave., San Francisco (1.25 pm, Thurs. 4 July 2013)

The motivation was threefold. To:

1. acknowledge and tokenly preserve some of the transient phenomena associated with living: the voices of family and friends, sad and celebratory occasions, the ambient sounds of a place and travel, and mundane conversations and events;
2. explore the potential of sound to evoke a recollection and the mental image of the thing recorded;
3. create, over time, a body of material that might form the basis of artworks in the future.

1.30 pm. After lunch, I completed the fifth modulation.

The same source sound was, then, filtered through Handboard 1. This board produces mellower and more organic sonorities than Handboard 1, due to the analogue nature of the Moog filters. A further four modulations were captured. There might be something from today’ work that is useable. I simply don’t/can’t know. Moreover, I’ve still no idea what shape the overall composition will take, or of what elements it’ll be comprised. And that is a best place to be for the moment: without presupposition.

7.30 pm. I returned to ‘stocktaking’ after dinner. I’m trying to understand a strand of related concerns that have emerged in both my art practice and art historical writing since the late 1990s: