8.45 am. I cleared my virtual desk, and then broadcast tutorial and module reminders for the week ahead before booting up the sound studio for the day’s work. 9.15 am. The samples created at the ‘Image and Inscription ‘event at the Drwm, recently, now needed to be scrutinised, and their most useable parts extracted in order to provide collagable elements for the finished composition. In the background to my listening, I sourced materials which will allow me to press on with the My Heart is Broken in Three sound work (an aural décollage of sorts), and responded to an inquiry regarding aniconism. In some and subtle ways, two subjects aren’t so far apart:

I’ve written about the theological rationale for aniconism in the Judaeo-Christian and, specifically, the Protestant Reformation traditions. My focus was on image prohibition, iconoclasm, the absenting of images from religious contexts, and the adaptation of non-religious imagery (Protestant emblems) to signify biblical concepts. My Image of the Invisible: The Visualisation of Religion in the Welsh Nonconformist Tradition embodies the core of that discussion, and references to other works on the same and related topics. 

Aniconism, and my endeavour to realise its negative potential, has been at the core of my interests since the mid 1980s, in practice-based and art historical research.

My volumes of the Scourby Bible records sit on the shelf awaiting my attention:

I won’t address these until the current project is complete. This set of 16 2/3-rpm vinyls (a total of 72 hours of spoken Bible readings) were purchased on eBay from an American seller. The boxes included (unintentionally, I suspect) two handwritten lists (made by the previous owner, I assume). The first details the page numbers of certain Old Testament books and their correspondence to the recordings of the same, along with the dates on which, and the places where, they were read/auditioned in the period from October to December 1994:

A second is a list of the days, in the period between July and November 1996, when specific sides of the Old Testament discs were listened to:

 ‘Am I missing a trick here?, I asked myself. The lists represent, quite apart from their intended purpose, a set of divisions, portions, strictures, and co-ordinations that have the potential to be adapted as systems that could govern the process and outcome of one version of the proposed sound artwork. This is a gift!

1.40 pm. After lunch, I completed the taxonomy of the various sounds captured at the ‘Image and Inscription’ event. Thereafter, I apportioned them to different folders according to their type. This is akin to the visual collagist’s practice of separating the components of a proposed work in respect to their colour, size, surface, and so forth, before assembly. (Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell worked in this manner.):

6.30 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. I completed extracting sub-samples from some of the larger tracks before engaging the School’s propaganda machine in anticipation of tomorrow’s Open Day:

For the remainder of the evening, I focussed on what had emerged as the most recognisable (and, for this reason, problematic) vocal set of samples from the Drwm event. They’ve a vaguely operatic air to them; intrinsically interesting, but perhaps too upbeat for the likely mood of the composition overall. Nevertheless, I’ll press on with their organisation at the prompting of my instinct.