Touch Newsletter #305
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #305. This Friday, 3 November, The Tapeworm and Through The Looking Glasses present the third instalment of “Memorex” – an evening of music, memories and magnetic reels, at London’s The Horse Hospital. This edition will be a seasonal sonic seance ghosted by Travis Elborough and featuring spirited conversation with Ruth Beyer and Caroline Wise, eerie acoustics by Kemper Norton and spooled spookiness from The Howling. Further info below. Tickets available from thehorsehospital.com
Jon Wozencroft’s Soundseminar returns to Iklectik on Wednesday 29 November. This edition will feature a live performance from Bruce Gilbert. Further details and ticket links below.
Ash International announce a new album from Switzerland’s strom|morts titled “Malville Superphénix: The Most Dangerous Machine in the World”. Using modular synthesizers, field recordings and a bit of guitar, strom|morts take you on an aural tour of the plant in full operation. Discover the nuclear site room by room. From the control room to the reactor, the twelve drone pieces that make up the tour will give you an intense experience.
Claire M Singer’s new album, “Saor”, is out now. On Saturday 11 November, a concert celebrating its release will take place at Orgelpark, Amsterdam – tickets are now on sale.
Soundseminar
Iklectik, London
29 November 2023
The Answer is Gold
Sound Seminar by Jon Wozencroft, 29 November 2023, Iklectik Art Lab
Live performance: Bruce Gilbert
“If speaking is silver, then listening is gold”. Turkish proverb.
In a financial context, gold is synonymous with reliability and security. Culturally, gold is the standard of fame and success. The latter is not the same as the former. Number 1 records are not iconic as they once were, and PR/TV/streaming and social media promotion is rarely matched by physical sales and attention to the music.
In the UK, Gold is one of the nation’s biggest exports; a contradictory situation considering Britain has no gold-mining industry and scant gold reserves remain – (the main holdings in South Africa were sacrificed in 1940 at the front of World War 2 in order to pay for much-needed weaponry and the Lend Lease Act with the USA [1]). Britain prevailed nonetheless. The 2008 banking crash depleted matters further. More recently, Brexit brazenly traded 1940-style rhetoric and was said to be key to maintaining Britain as a financial centre. Current analysis suggests this is not going to plan.
Gold isn’t merely about manufacturing nor having and holding, it’s about shadow trading and occluded communication between those who keep no loose change in their pockets, and the ones who move the argent. Electronic. Oblique. Offshore. Gold prices and currency transactions move faster than the blink of an eye.
Just as well, given that political Net Zero climate ambitions and international ‘commitments’ are achieving next to nothing. To be mined, gold needs cyanide, lead and mercury. For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces), 5000 tonnes of earth need to be extracted and to create a wedding ring, between 4 and 20 tonnes of rock need to be processed. The ore is left by the roadside, simply collateral pollution [2]. Gold is essential to the jewellery business, but more significantly to telephony and electronics. No gold, no phones.
Gold is still glamour. How many cultural and musical moments celebrate the glory of gold, from antiquity to Spandau Ballet? Glamour, ‘gramerye’ in middle English, means an excellence in grammar and a talent for communication.
This is perhaps a way of understanding gold in its context of alchemy – the process of turning base metals into gold by using the ‘philosopher’s stone’: transforming blackness into shining metal and its lustrous energy. In mediaeval times, artists who would not call themselves artists and adepts who were in defiance of the church, set out a template and an intention which we can now view as more of a metaphor and beacon of hope, yet we know little of the details of their process, their ingredients and their instruments [3]. We can only imagine.
1. 1940, Clive Ponting, Hamish Hamilton 1990
2. Material World, Ed Conway, WH Allen 2023
3. The Golden Game, Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Thames and Hudson 1988
Bruce Gilbert is best known as a founding member of Wire. Since Wire, he has made solo interventions in spoken word; as co-creator of the Dome project; production and instrumentation for AC Marias; to soundtracks for Michael Clark. His collaborations one couldn’t begin to list. He has released solo material on Mute, Editions Mego and Touch amongst many others.
Tickets: dice.fm
Memorex – Bonfire of the BASF
The Horse Hospital, London
3 November 2023
Remember, remember the 3rd of November… A seasonal sonic seance ghosted by Travis Elborough and featuring spirited conversation with Ruth Bayer and Caroline Wise, eerie acoustics by Kemper Norton and spooled spookiness from The Howling. Illustration by SavX, of course. Further info and tickets: thehorsehospital.com
Caroline Wise has a life-long interest in the strange phenomena. A former owner of The Atlantis Bookshop and editor in the 1990s of The Occult Observer, she specialises in researching ancient goddesses, the mythology of London and spirit of place. Her books include The Secret Lore of London and most recently Here Comes the Candle: A Photographic Summoning of London Ghosts, a collaboration with the photographer Ruth Beyer.
Austrian-born photographer Ruth Bayer has work featured in many music and occult publications. Her photography books include Skipping to Armageddon - Current 93 and Friends, and Coil - Camera, Light, Oblivion (both Strange Attractor Press). For the book Here Comes The Candle - A Photographic Summoning of London Ghosts, Ruth re-imagined reported sightings of ghosts in various London locations and created images to accompany the accounts written by Caroline Wise. Ruth lives in London where she runs a long-established Gardnerian Wicca coven.
The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and Trash Aesthetics. An intense collision of spoken word and analogue tape effects, The Howling will perform tracks from their just-released second album, Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway. Its lead single ‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ soundtracked Loewe’s SS24 Paris runway show, incredibly…
Praised by The Wire for ‘creating something moving, eerie and somewhat chilling out of almost nothing‘, Kemper Norton is a Brighton-based Cornwall-born musician who uses digital and analogue hardware and software, acoustic instruments, field recordings and traditional song to explore neglected or original areas of landscape and folklore. Recurring themes include the processes and narratives surrounding industrial and post-industrial Cornwall, and in particular the china clay pits of St Austell.
Described by The Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’, Travis Elborough is an award-winning author, whose books include Atlas of Vanishing Places and The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary ‘When Albums Ruled the World’, in which he also appeared.
Further info and tickets: thehorsehospital.com
strom|morts
“Malville Superphénix:
The Most Dangerous Machine in the World”
Ash 14.8
CD and digital – 12 tracks. Buy “Malville Superphénix: The Most Dangerous Machine in the World” on Bandcamp. Mixed by Randall Dunn at Circular Ruins Studio, Brooklyn NYC. Mastered by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering Service, Chicago. Illustrations: Helge Reumann. Design: Philip Marshall.
1. Discovering Site
2. General Store
3. Assembly Shop
4. Boilers Sodium
5. Demineralisation Plant
6. Station Transformers
7. Control Room
8. Steam Generators
9. Reactor Dome
10. Turbine Hall
11. Unchartered Basement
12. Leaving Site view
Superphénix is an industrial prototype for high-power sodium-cooled fast neutron reactors. It is located on the Creys-Malville site in France, close to the Swiss border. It is the largest fast neutron reactor in the world. It is also the world's largest reactor currently being dismantled. Commissioned in 1985 and definitively shut down in 1998, the plant operated for just 53 months. Numerous incidents, lengthy technical shutdowns, costs, protests and the dangerous nature of the facility led to the nuclear power station being decomissioned. What was presented at the time as the flagship of French nuclear power turned out to be the most dangerous machine in the world.
Using modular synthesizers, field recordings and some guitar, strom|morts take you on an aural tour of the plant in full operation. Discover the nuclear site room by room. From the control room to the reactor, the 12 drone pieces that make up the tour will give you an intense experience.
Buy on Bandcamp
Guerrilla Audio
Guerrilla Audio is a series of audio raids by Simon Fisher Turner.
guer·ril·la
ɡəˈrilə/
noun
noun: guerilla
a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces.
Each audio edit will be posted for 14 days and then removed from the site, although the information about each guerrilla activity will be archived, but without the audio. There will be two postings per month with the first (also featuring Klara Lewis & Rainier Lericolais) on 1st August 2015, so please check in regularly to listen to the latest offering. We are well into the fifth year and have just posted episode 198…
Guerrilla Audio
Long Wave
“Suspending time and immersing the listener in a widescreen of sound.”
Long Wave has now moved to the second Tuesday of the month from 8am-10pm PST.
You can catch up with the dublab archive on dublab.com, and for the entire Long Wave history (12 series so far for dublab and resonancefm) visit mscharding.net
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