NOTES TO SELF

THE ART OF SELF HELP

In search of The Beat of Place. (Settling the score)

"In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there.” Felix Mendelssohn wrote to his sister Fanny on the back of a postcard after visiting Fingal's cave penning the opening phrase of his Hebrides overture across the top.

What I wanted, what I needed to do was get out of the house. A new orientation. I was too close to home. These were my first world problems. I needed new immersive experiences to invigorate my mind, to jolt and inspire me out of my fug. Perspective. In preceding years I had begun to feel an erosion of confidence and a welling up of frustration of a type that only sensory loss can bring. My world had shrunk dramatically at the age of 20 and was still shrinking now aged 50-ish. I knew I had to go off on my own to somewhere where I had to rely on my own wits and rebuild my self esteem. A long distance walk through a distant wild landscape ought to do the trick?

While planning my journey a vague idea began to form, that maybe my state of mind could be a creative resource or starting point that I could utilise as a kind of art-self-help-kick-up-the-back side that would shove me onto a more meaningful path, out of my apparent life-stasis and get a clear view of my own personal cerebral landscape. Looking from without to see what was within. Distance.

I had other issues to address too that were impacting on my frame of mind. My experiences of life are very much like being in a silent film but without subtitles. But what if I could write a new soundtrack? I have a severe high frequency hearing loss, I no longer have a sense of smell and as a result diminished sense of taste. Though these losses are common I had begun to consider their combined effects on how this is affecting my brain … basically I worry that there's not enough info going in to keep those neural pathways open. I wanted to address the state of my depleting senses and how it impacts on my life and consider how this might affect me in the future. Dementia is more common with people who have sensory impairments, particularly deafness. Having a severe hearing loss means I miss out on a lot of information. This absence is profoundly raw when I visit natural environments. No bird song is the saddest of these omissions. Also not being able to smell is another experiential impoverishment. Simple things like seaweed or wetted dust on tarmac after it’s rained or Hawthorn blossom on a warm spring breeze or the smell of the earth, even the unsavoury things too. You begin to not miss them and sadly even forget them. That you never knew them. That's dangerous to me. Disconnected.

So now I had the materials and my objectives, what platform could I use to explore this? I decided to create an audio and written archive that would act like a touchstone for the memories I would accrue and the emotions my journey might provoke. As a starting point it would revolve and evolve around the composing of songs while exploring a new landscape. My hope was that this memory bank of aural narratives would enrich and compensate my memory in an attempt to fill the void created by my sensory losses.

I headed for Steòrnabhagh, crossing from Ullapool to walk the Hebridean way North to South pulling a walking trailer for my equipment behind me in late August 2018. Stamping down on tarmac, on the first section of the way to Acha Mòr, I began to compose the first of a number of songs in response to my experiences of the landscape and the elements as I walked across moor, down road, up hill, cliff, croft, machair and beach in all weathers. (I did this on a free app on my phone using off the shelf samples) Composing music as I walked helped me through each day. It felt like picking berries of a bush as you walk by, motivating and nourishing me as I worked my way down through the islands. When I stopped for rest or got holed up in a hostel or my tent I stitched together another song, or built on or revised the previous one. Once the next train of thought was in motion I got up and went walking with it. I would also write for a while in short bursts – word sketching - in an attempt to deepen and expand the colour of the memories of my journey. This came to resemble, at the end, a journal of abstract thoughts, a brief reminder of things that stood out but also the mundane. A skeletal impression of the day. My journey came to an end when I got to Tobha Mor, Uibhist a Deas when time, resources and circumstance beckoned my return.

When I left the islands it took me a while to sift through the material endeavours of my creative research. After some rudimentary editing and titling of my walking songs I managed to herd them into a series of albums that would be that personal reminder of my experiences that I was looking for, effectively a musical memory enhancing filing system. Job done or so I thought. When I played them back, while they stood up as records of my time in the Outer Hebrides, evoking the trials, tribulations and joys of my time spent journeying there, it felt that elements of that time remained unrepresented due in part I would think, that my compositions were comprised of commonly available low cost electronica samples on a freely downloadable app. They were useful in that they helped me put down aural markers in a memory timeline but they weren't of the place. I felt my efforts demanded or needed another dimension. It seemed a nonsense now, sat back at home to not have thought to record my own samples of the landscape whilst I travelled through it. But by necessity the project I needed had to be fluid and untrammelled and it grew slowly (on me) like lichen over rock. Unprescripted.

And so a second trip. This time south to north from Barra to Bheàrnaraigh in May/June 2019. I actually considered starting at Staffa island setting out as Felix Mendelssohn did during his European tour. However bad weather put paid to that idea and replicating the tortuous journey he had experienced wasn't on my bucket list and would have ended up, most likely, with my head lolling in a bucket instead. I didn't want to follow in Mendelssohn's footsteps as such, re enacting a retread of someone else's shoes. It was more a simple symbolic gesture or nod to someone who had set out to discover his own music derived from the landscape through direct physical interaction and personal experience. There was also a world of difference between a grand European tour and a whistle stop tour in a one man tent. I blew in and blew out of the islands in time to the tide of my waning cash and time resources over the course of 3 seasonal visits spring, summer and autumn. I make no claims of comparison or quality here with old Felix, just to make that clear, but I had by chance found someone who like me, had a like minded goal of engaging with the landscape for the purposes of some kind of musical interpretation and I drew comfort from that. (I think he spent 2 years in Scotland as a whole). A romantic interpretation wasn't on the cards either. My journey had more of a practical bent. It just so happened that we both chose to explore it through music. And, to use a rock 'n' roll expression, to find my mojo: Just where the hell had it gone?

I had returned to collect short bursts and scraps of sound as I travelled from Barra up to Bheàrnaraigh. I set out again in Sept/October 2019 on my third journey starting where the second ended and finishing finally at the Port of Ness. These field recordings captured for example the long, solid, steady, rasping performance of a corncrake on Barra, the sound of a cuckoo at midsummer at Cille Bhrìghde ferry traffic at Loch nam Madadh and strong lumpy wind at the Calanais stones at autumn equinox. These audio snapshots of the landscape of the Outer Hebrides became a vital and surprising addition to the final stages of the archive that I proposed at the outset of the project. Back at Land's End I began re-mixing the new field recordings into a number of the compositions from the previous field trip and these now form the basis of 4 albums of music. Other field recordings were of the often dramatic, often unpredictable chaotic weather patterns, the actions of the sea, wind swept lochs and burns. The choices for these field recordings were guided by my interests in the land based culture of the islands - its agriculture, geology and flora and fauna of the place, the physical evidence of past and the contemporary human and animal interaction that occurs across the islands.

The Gunnery Beats Ensemble

Near the end of my research I found myself on Bheàrnaraigh yet again. I had been drawn as one might expect to the numerous derelict croft houses and barns across the islands in the hope of collecting a usable recording. On Bheàrnaraigh one interesting building (and the oldest) is the 16th century Gunnery. I had tried in vain to capture any kind of interesting recording out of the ambient spaces of these buildings through the weeks of travel. I had so far only captured, of course, the steady boom and rumble of the wind. Rain never seemed to be available when you actually wanted it. But as I chased a passing bumble bee for a sound bite across the croft on which the Gunnery guards, an intense rain shower headed towards it. The rain hit the holed tin roof and immediately began to drip heavily on the debris on the floor of the barn. Plastic drums, defunct fridge, metal pail and others. The drum and bass are often the building blocks on which songs are built. Right then all the past weeks recording endeavours tied together in that moment in that impromptu performance of rain drops on the discarded remnants on the barn floor. I walked back to the dunes in hope of re-finding the elusive bumble bee of moments before while listening to the recording of the found sound Gunnery drum ensemble I had just captured. The recording of the deluge dripping from the rusted corrugated iron roof became the platform on which all the compositions on the Gunnery Beats Ensemble album are based. All supplementary samples that feature on the album are made entirely from on site recordings taken in the field from July 2018 to November 2019 across the Outer Hebrides.

Vilhelm Nein Freunde, January 2020.