J.-K. Huysmans Against Nature

A new translation of Á Rebours by Roger Baldick

This translation first published 1959

Found inside the book between pages 105 and 106: a London Transport bus ticket number 0573, route 105, stage boarded 09 – fare paid: seven pence.

Edison Speaks from Beyond the Grave

And other marvels of the mechanical age:

In 2008 a BBC radio announcer made a personal apology to the family of deceased Hollywood screenwriter Abby Mann after dissolving into uncontrollable laughter while relaying details of his death on a morning news bulletin. The inappropriate hilarity had been provoked by the item immediately before it: a recording of a human voice made in 1860 had just been successfully reconstructed in a California sound laboratory, making it the earliest in human history. Registered by French typesetter Edouard Léon Scott de Martinville on a device of his own invention called a ‘phonautograph’, it had existed for almost 150 years as little more than the representation of a sound wave etched onto a sheet of soot-covered paper. Played back digitally in the twenty-first century using a ‘virtual stylus’, what had originally been picked up by the phonautograph as a rendition of the French folk song ‘Claire de Lune’ sounded in a BBC radio studio more like ‘a bee buzzing in a bottle’, sending the announcer into a barely-suppressed fit of the giggles. A spectral set of associations hold such moments together. The barely discernable voice retrieved from a smoky deposit with its accumulated cloud of a song; the dead writer’s obituary and a sense of time passed; even the historical overlay of different media upon each other, from script to the mechanical sound recording, cinema and broadcast radio: all work together to provoke precisely this kind of hysterical response. Ghosts can’t help themselves: they are always where they have to be, not where they want to be, calling out to us from somewhere beyond our own senses. To laugh, under these circumstances, is a useful means of expressing incomprehension – which, in itself, covers for a reluctance to believe.

The Wire writes: "Revisiting his family farm with Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Michael Esposito captured the sounds of his ancestors for their wax cylinder project, The Ghosts of Effingham. Ken Hollings spools back to the days of Thomas Edison to investigate how obsolete recording devices and the dead voices captured on them have changed our perceptions of the material world."

Buy it. Read it. Believe it.

Pictured above: the Ghosts of Effingham wax cylinder from Ash International; the cover for The Wire #323, January 2011

The New Year Comes...

And nobody is home...

I have been working over most of the Christmas holidays, catching up on deadlines and finishing another chapter for my new book, The Bright Labyrinth. Regular posts should start appearing on this blog again very soon. In the meantime this is to wish you all a very happy 2011.

Pictured above: Vienna pension, April 2010

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

A Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera

Revised collectively by the ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ Group of the Peking Opera Troup of Shanghai (July 1970 Script)

FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS

PEKING 1971

‘Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution.’

- Mao Tsetung

Reproduced above: front cover of the published script, complete with songs and production, plus Scene One, ‘Advancing in Victory’ – wishing a very happy Christmas indeed to all my readers.

Resonance 104.4fm Wins Radio Academy Award

I have just been informed that Resonance 104.4fm, home from home to the ‘Hollingsville’ and ‘Welcome to Mars’ radio series, won the Radio Academy’s Nations & Regions Award for London last night – and for the second year running. The judges said: ‘We agree that the winner should be Resonance FM. The judges felt this was the type of radio to be admired and applauded. Experimental and unique with a clear focus and raison d’être. Anyone who thinks UK radio has become bland and homogenised should listen to Resonance FM. It revels in its eclecticism, champions creativity, experiments with sound, dares to take risks, celebrates London’s vast cultural diversity and brings true meaning to the word “variety,” because you genuinely have no idea what’s coming next. It offers a service not available anywhere else and London would be a poorer place without it.’

My congratulations to everyone involved.

Pictured above: KH at the microphone in the Resonance 104.4fm studio just seconds before TX, courtesy of roving shutterbug Kitty Keen

Found 0bjects Podcast Available Again

When the first Found 0jects podcast was posted a couple of weeks ago, the demand for downloads swiftly exceeded bandwidth, which resulted in its unavailability for a while. It is now being hosted elsewhere and is available once again by clicking here. Many thanks to Dolly Dolly for setting up these new arrangements. This has been a public service announcement.

Pictured above: scenes from the podcast recording session (click on the honeycomb to activate); cover design for the 1964 Panther edition of The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier: ‘Is the secret society destined to be the form of future government?’ – from the back-cover copy.

‘Hollingsville’ Christmas Lecture at CSM

This Wednesday December 8 I am giving a special ‘Hollingsville’ presentation at Central St Martins for students on the MA Communication Design Course. An overview of the main themes and historical context of my recent book Welcome to Mars, ‘Lounge: Welcome to Disturbia’ looks at how space and sensory experience were profoundly altered with the rapid expansion of the Suburbs after World War II. Ranged in precise grids, connected to its own set of local amenities, suburbia became an isolated colony, a behavioural laboratory in which individuals were to be studied by a growing professional elite of social scientists. What they found was subsequently labelled by one psychiatrist as ‘Disturbia’: a place where audiovisual technology had invaded the already overheated environment of the modern home. Get ready for strange drugs, the even stranger tribal rites of the middle classes, flying saucers, radioactive mutants and teenagers from outer space! The lecture will take place in the MACD Main Studio on the Back Hill campus and starts at 10.00 am – admission is free.


Suggested reading:
Thomas Hine, Populuxe, Bloomsbury Press, 1989
Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music, A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong, Quartet Books, 1995
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, MIT Press, 2007
Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation, Duke University Press, 2008

Pictured above: The 1956 Motorama ‘Kitchen of Tomorrow’