No Danger

Trust me, there's really nothing to worry about.

Mean Streets

Just another routine day out with the camera, getting randomly sworn at by complete strangers and challenged by security guards.  You'd think I was out strangling kittens the way some people carry on.

Think about it.  If I was planning a crime I wouldn't be out here in broad daylight openly pointing a big SLR camera at your building, now would I?

'...As Valiant A Man As Ever Left Home'

Seeking escape from the madness of the world outside, I’ve had several of John Martyn’s early records on heavy rotation this week.  Two songs strike a particular chord, namely ‘Walk To The Water’ and his version of the traditional ‘Spencer The Rover’. Both break my heart and soothe my mind simultaneously each time I put them on repeat.  I’m also relishing his 1980 album ‘Grace And Danger’.  It might mark one step towards the mainstream and the end of his period of sonic experimentalism, but is full of stylish Jazz Rock and no little personal drama.

Ironically, it's no secret Martyn wasn't the most peaceful man himself but lots of great art has come from some fairly defective personalities.  Anyway, he's gone now and we can only remember him by his work.

Also Listening To:

‘World Music’, Goat

‘Three EPs’, Shackleton

‘Music For The Quiet Hour’ / ‘The Drawbar Organ EPs’, Shackleton

‘Guitar Loops’, J. Spaceman

‘Voices From The Lake’, Voices From The Lake (Donato Dozzy & Neel)

‘Brass Band Classics’, Grimethorpe Colliery Band

'Horizontal Structures', Moritz Von Oswald Trio

Empire Daze

The sun set long ago.  The roseate domains have shrunk back behind coastal ramparts leaving only tiny, remnant scraps in distant oceans.  Years pass, as Little Islanders strive to shore up their crumbling dreams.

Stumble out for a jubilee or funeral then retreat behind the door again - unnerved by the darkness of alien streets.  Endlessly recycle the usual lies and pathological distrust, as red crosses hang limp and work dries up.  Knock back miniatures in a car park and wonder where the regulars went as, one by one, shutters go up and the old battle cruisers fall into disrepair.

Karl Hyde: 'Edgeland' & 'The Outer Edges'

Context:

This would always be a no brainer for me.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the music of Underworld, the band of which Karl Hyde is a long-standing mainstay.  Furthermore, the focus of his debut solo album on the psychogeography of his Essex homeland and more generally, on the idea of ‘The Edgelands’ made it doubly intriguing.  The artistic investigation of the transitional zones at the edge of large conurbations is a very current concern and something I’ve alluded to myself several times in reference to Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts’ book ‘Edgelands’ [1.]; Robert Smithson’s investigations of New Jersey’s industrial suburbia [2.]; the ‘Stolen Car’ paintings of Shaun Morris or the writings of Iain Sinclair and J.G. Ballard [3].  I’m not one for ‘pre ordering’ but did snap up the album as soon as it was released.

Karl Hyde, Pillar Of The Underworld

Over the years Underworld have been lauded for a literate brand of stadium dance music but with much attention being paid to their general ‘bigness’ and willingness to ‘‘ave it large’ to a chorus of “lager, lager, lager, lager” [4].  Certainly, that’s often been a load of fun but the more solemn or reflective aspects of their music have always been just as engaging and show it to be artistically and emotionally more multi-dimensional.  It’s definitely the latter sensibility that Hyde has emphasized most with ‘Edgeland’.  It seems worth mentioning 2007’s ‘Oblivion With Bells’, - an album with moments of real atmospheric beauty, (most notably in the lush, ambient interlude ‘To Heal’).  It also included, in ‘Beautiful Burnout’, an emotive internal meditation on a train journey and, in ‘Ring Road’, a captivating exercise in human observation linked to location, (unfortunately compromised by some dodgy half-rapping).  I suspect the signposts to Hyde’s solo record have been around for a while.

Hyde & His Band Road Test The Edgelands In Japan, 2013

The other important thing about ‘Edgeland’ is that it’s really a multi-media project.  At the risk of doing Hyde’s marketing for him, anyone considering engaging with it really needs to seek out the ‘Deluxe’ (ugh!) version.  That way you get the accompanying film ‘The Outer Edges’, made in collaboration with Kieran Evans [5.], and much more than a mere bonus extra. Both the film and the music album are fully resolved artworks in their own right but each informs the other, finding correspondences to create a whole far greater than a sum of its parts.  In a recent radio interview Hyde spoke about his synesthetic abilities to find the audible and visual worlds interchangeable [6.] and it’s worth noting his long term involvement with the visual arts.  This has included artwork and video for Underworld releases; numerous design projects with the Tomato design agency and some rather accomplished paintings. 

Karl Hyde,  'Jump Through The Sky Hole', Medium Unknown, 2010.
  - "Shoulda..."

Response:

The most obvious feature of this music is that it largely abandons Underworld’s customary Techno aesthetic, concentrating on more conventional song structures, working in close collaboration with Brian Eno acolyte - Leo Abrahams.  Hyde has also moved away from his familiar cut-and-paste approach to lyric writing in favour of something more through-written, although highly poetic, within each piece.  My initial reaction was, if not disappointment, at least surprise.  An expansive, formally abstract, environmental musical approach might, superficially, have seemed very appropriate to the project.  Likewise, the streams of consciousness engendered by his past juxtaposition of collaged phrases often chime evocatively with my own thought processes in Psychogeographical situations.

Essex Boy

This is not to deride Hyde’s songs though.  The lyrics are intriguing and emotive and it quickly becomes evident that they are sensitively performed and augmented by beautiful, nuanced arrangements and production.  Hyde hasn’t abandoned the impeccable Underworld production values and appreciation of layered sounds, just adapted them to rather different ends.  This becomes obvious from the opening of the first song, ‘The Night Slips Us Smiling Underneath Its Dress’.  Here, a nominally ‘big’ stomping beat is distanced to become something more textural behind a sumptuous mélange of slightly glitchy electronics, tinkling piano, heavily treated acoustic guitar and atmospheric ‘strings’.  Hyde sings seductively over the top and even inserts a surprising folk-like refrain into the song’s bridge.

Shadow Boy

This general approach prevails as the album unfolds.  If the overall mood might be described as one of elegant melancholy, Hyde actually summons a variety of emotions, adapting his vocal performances to recall both David Sylvian and fellow East Londoner, Billy Bragg at times, whilst always applying his own individual stamp to the songs.  ‘Shoulda Been A Painter’ achieves a kind of fuzzy, guitar-driven bustle whilst ‘Shadow Boy’ opens with a low-key shimmer but grows slowly into a grand, elegiac anthem.  Even more surprising is ‘Dancing On The Graves Of La Courbusier’s Dreams’.  It’s positively on its toes and shackles an 80s dance-pop sensibility to an intriguing lyric combining declarations of love with nostalgia for Modernism’s failed Utopias.

The film, ‘The Outer Edges’ documents a journey along the course of the River Roding and on to the Thames and the towns and estuary mouth beyond.  It adheres to the proven Psychogeographical procedures of seeking alternative routes, (or the reverse side of official routes); pausing, wherever possible, to assimilate the normally overlooked features of a given location; and projecting oneself vertically through layers of history, meaning and significance as well as horizontally through the landscape.

Still From 'The Outer Edges', Dir: Kieran Evans, 2013

Hyde and Evans have placed themselves firmly in the tradition of flâneurism, and subjective exploration to produce a genuinely resonant and lyrical artifact.  It relates to Sinclair, Ballard and Patrick Kieller, amongst many others and, indeed, is very close to my own habitual modes of relating to the environment. It’s certainly full of the kind of static-camera references to transport systems, elevated roadways, more or less active industrial development, housing estates, river/banks, pylons, signage and graffiti that crowd my own hard-drive.  My only fear would be that by this stage we may all be in danger of resorting to a kind of over-familiar Pyschogeog.-by-numbers but I won’t pretend I don’t still love this stuff.  The film is narrated by Hyde and sound-tracked by his music, in the more instrumental/abstract form one might have expected all along.

Still From 'The Outer Edges', Dir: Kieran Evans, 2013

However, it’s here that the logic of Hyde’s song based approach also becomes clear.  The film is intercut with the spoken, autobiographical accounts of various Essex folk encountered on the journey.  If some, like the members of a boxing gym or The Dagenham Girl Pipers, seem initially like traditional human interest ‘types’, their words actually prove to be highly personal evidence of individual lives lived in a landscape.  Most touching, for me, are the dignified independence of a bereaved allotment holder and the Utopian nostalgia of a couple who still live on the slightly remote model estate built for employees of the defunct Bata shoe company.  The latters’ fond memories of highly structured but well catered-for younger lives speak of a very different era of employer/worker relations and feed into the lyric of ‘Dancing On The Graves of Le Corbusier’s Dreams’.  The abandoned modernist edifice of the factory itself makes for a stunning image of industrial and societal decline but the voices lend a much more human slant to the whole project.

Still From 'The Outer Edges', Dir: Kieran Evans, 2013.   Urban Text,
Graffiti, Mundane Architecture & A Fox, - What's Not To Like?

Thus, we realize that many of the songs are actually written from the implied viewpoint of characters such as those encountered in the film.  Elsewhere, as in ‘Shoulda Been A Painter’ and ‘Angel Café’, we gain insights into Hyde’s own life and understand that he too is an Essex boy (albeit of Welsh heritage), and has been inescapably shaped by the territory he contemplates and depicts.  Repeat viewings and listens reveal just how well, and with what attention to detail, music and film have been integrated as two sides of the same coin.  One such example would be the startling, possibly unplanned, passage of a silhouetted BMX rider across a shot of the estuary.  This brief moment is enough to title an entire song, (‘Shadow Boy’), and feed the line, “Shadow boy rides a bike like a missile, Life erupts all around us.” [7.]

Should any doubts about Hyde’s real intentions remain, Hyde concludes his narration with the words,

“I started this journey under a motorway, a road that runs along the edge of a city I love.  I followed a course set by nature - not by man, along a path that has taken me to a place beyond the outer edges.  Now, I realize its not about the geographic route you take, - it’s about the people who show you the way.” [8.]

Can't Think Of Any More Undeworld Gags...

Conclusion:

Karl Hyde (with Kieran Evans), has produced a project so close to some of my own current artistic concerns that I suppose I could feel deflated that, yet again, someone else got there first. Indeed, whilst researching this post I discovered that Hyde’s own website journal is peppered with photographs I might easily have taken myself, even down to the details of tattered posters and rust leaching through painted graffiti.  It would be churlish to feel too envious though.  Actually, it feels like yet one more encouraging validation of a particular, admittedly Romantic, way of relating to the contemporary world that means so much to myself and many others.

Taken as a whole, I think ‘Edgeland’/’The Outer Edges’ constitutes an affecting, well resolved Psychogeographical statement and one that injects an important element of humanism sometimes missing from what can easily become a rather detached idiom.  I really like the music too.

[1.]:  Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Edgelands, Journeys Into England’s True Wilderness’, London, Jonathan Cape, 2011

[2.]:  Robert Smithson, ‘The Crystal Land’, 1966 and ‘A Tour Of The Monuments Of Passaic, New Jersey’, 1967, in: Robert Smithson, Jack Flam (Ed.), ‘Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings’, Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996

[3.]:  In a video interview featured on his website, Hyde name-checks both Sinclair and Ballard’s ‘Concrete Island’ as specific influences.

[4.]:  Underworld, ‘Born Slippy’, Junior Boys Own, 1996

[5.]:  Evans has form with this kind of collaboration, having previously made ‘Finisterre’ - an impressionistic film portrait of London, with the pop-dance act Saint Etienne.

[6.]:  Karl Hyde (In Interview), ‘Front Row’, BBC Radio 4, 10 May 2013

[7.]:  Karl Hyde, ‘Shadow Boy’, Universal, 2013

[8.]:  Karl Hyde & Kieran Evans, ‘The Outer Edges (Edgeland Version)’, Universal, 2013

Do You Remember...

... Where We Used To Sit?

Move On

River, Road & Rail

Elevated Road & Riverside Building, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

In a gap between completing my most recent painting, (‘Belgrave Gate: Yours 1’), and starting work on a series of small studies which may culminate in the next one, I found myself out with the camera in glorious Bank Holiday sunshine recently.  This post features some of the photographs taken on what was the nicest day of the year so far, climatically speaking.

Elevated Road, Weir & Branch Line Railway Bridge, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Foot Bridge, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

My chosen location was a stretch of the River Trent just beyond the edge of the Nottinghamshire town of Newark, - a spot I drive past regularly on its elevated by-pass.  I always gaze down with interest at this zone where river, canal, footpaths and, unusually, two crossing railway lines all meet in a complex of bridges, lock gates, gantries, signals and a weir as the road flies overhead.  An adjacent sewage treatment works and nearby sugar processing plant add to the sense of utilitarianism resulting from so much infrastructure being concentrated into this relatively compact area around a bend in the river.

Branch Line Railway Bridge & Sugar Processing Plant, Newark,
Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Sewage Works, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

I soon discovered it’s pretty easy to access the area by walking out of the back of a modern retail park, past light industrial units and the impressive edifices of Newark’s Victorian maltings, and onto part of the river bank which has been redeveloped for leisure use in recent years.  In fact, the coming together of dilapidated industrial archaeology and contemporary retail, industrial, leisure and residential development are a major factor in what makes this whole area so resonant.  I have a family connection with the maltings themselves as my Great, Great Grandfather worked there when it served Newark’s burgeoning brewing industry back in the day.  The main part of the complex has been redeveloped as stylish apartments but, inevitably, it was the partially derelict remains nearer the river that interested me most.

Elevated Road & River Bank, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Main Line Railway Bridge, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Main Line Railway Bridge, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Trusting the derelict remains of my own knees rather more than they’ve merited of late, I walked the few hundred metres to my chosen destination, passing under the bypass and through the waterways junction to the dramatic curved railway bridge that marks the far edge of this knot of transport routes.  Once again, I was struck by the juxtaposition of charmingly renovated lock gates with the dilapidation of a neighbouring building in which some ad-hoc enterprise was being pursued.  Nearby, scrap metal and discarded tyres were being reclaimed alongside new housing under construction.  Vans were parked up in a compound beneath the road and discarded broken furniture lay abandoned in the open as regular main line and local trains passed by.  As so often before, I became acutely aware of the massive transitions surrounding me.

Electrified Main Line, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Ironically, the beautiful conditions and verdant new vegetation all around created a rather more idyllic mood than one might normally associate with the general subject matter.  I do plan to revisit the site to see how it looks and feels in different conditions but am also aware that the most genuine response to a subject is to register how it actually appears on a given day, rather than how one thinks it should look in some stereotypical sense.

Electrified Main Line, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

For now, these photographs stand as relatively self-contained images.  However, along with January’s images of Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction they do point towards a possible theme for future work that I’ve been contemplating for a while.  Both locations could be classified as more typically ‘Edgeland’ subjects than my more normal, inner urban sources.  However, I think that my specific focus within that general, somewhat romantic sensibility, is actually on the transport channels, connected infrastructure and systems of movement and control which shape our lives.  That is something that could be examined just as easily at the heart of a conurbation as at its fringes.  Clearly, in our economic, industrial and post-industrial context, it’s effectively impossible to exist beyond such networks and thus, they must be acknowledged.  It may, however, also be possible to linger for a while in the unintentionally activated gaps between them or to drill down through their tangled layers to examine how they interconnect through historical time as well as physical space.

Branch Line Railway Bridge, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

Electrified Main Line, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013

It’s too early to tell as yet, but I have a sense that this may all coalesce into a discrete third major work stream, alongside the ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces and ‘Belgrave Gate Project’ on which I’m already engaged.  Whilst clear connections exist between them, there does seem to be some logic in categorising them into distinct groups and setting some clear parameters within which to progress.  Where I’ll actually find time to attend to it all is another matter, of course.  On Bank Holiday Monday it felt mostly like just dropping down to ground level and watching at leisure as others hammered along the beaten tracks.

Elevated Road, Newark, Nottinghamshire, May 2013