new year's eve

... or Pomona Strand in winter I guess.

Nine minutes of unprocessed field recording. Traffic noise, bird song, fireworks, trams. Traffic noise is present pretty much everywhere outside when you record in Manchester.

And this? I'm not too sure. Two trees lashed together. Maybe that loop of rope is a swing. Or perhaps they're the basis of some sort of shelter.

The top...

...and the loop of rope.

Walking around was difficult today. A lot of the small trees and bushes at the edge over the water had been cut down and left to lie where they were. Effectively blocking the path unless I walked on the outside of the fence. But it was damp and slippery and I didn't want to spend the whole time there.

But in a lot of places coming away from the edge was no easier since it was thick with blackberry bushes. Both old and newer growth.

Although I adjusted the white balance everything in these photos looks a lot redder, a lot less blue than it appeared to me.

I had no plan as to where I was going or what I'd do. I just wanted to get some pictures and start making field recordings again. Just as writing's been difficult for a time I also haven't been that enthusiastic about making sound recently. Mainly because I'm becoming aware how limited my skills are. Although that said I'm enjoying listening to Canal from August 2009 and may make it freely available here at some point.

Gates. No really, they are.

This would appear to be looking at tram tracks. I didn't shin up to have a check though.

Then I gradually started to make for home. There are always things you haven't seen before. Or that you haven't seen before from that side.

This morning I signed up for a partly online TEFL course. I'm finally able to start my preparations for China. I'm also starting to take steps to learn Mandarin although I don't expect to make much progress. But with a few residency applications sent off and beginning to solidify my itinerary with the aid of a well known travel guidebook it feels like things are beginning to happen.

Tonight I'll be out at Islington Mill. I'm not back in work until Tuesday.

My time at work is limited. The intention in any case was to quit this spring/summer and go travelling. But with lease breaks coming up at the Preston and Manchester offices the decision has been taken to relocate both in a crown estate building in Bootle. For admin staff like me this means that we will have to leave.

The civil service is obliged to try and find us alternative employment within a more reasonable travelling distance. The chances of this being possible at present with government departments downsizing is quite remote.

But there is a quite strong chance that Manchester's relocation will be later than I want to leave meaning that I'll miss out on the voluntary early release payment. Which is irritating for me but good for the other staff who will get a higher payment because of the later date.

Oh look! More gates.

bank holiday notes

After sitting in the bath writing I put my notebook and pen on the toilet seat pulled the plug grabbed my towel and stood up. I don't know how long I blacked out. Not for long because there was still water in the bath. I felt light almost but not quite sick and dizzy. Then I was crouching with my towel trailing in the water.

A man carrying a saw walked across the frozen canal to the field on one side. A large wet fallen black tree trunk lay behind a tree. After circling the tree trunk a couple of times he started to saw through it.

Bypassing Manchester en-route to Macclesfield the motorway was almost static in either direction for the last two junctions before the Trafford Centre.

I decided to take some deliberately mundane photographs in the flat to accompany this post. It felt necessary to break up the text but as I left my camera here over Christmas I had nothing from Lancaster to use. I set a white balance. The exposure time was so long I had to use a tripod.

A pleasant surprise speaking to a friend on my mobile phone as my fingers froze. At one stage a moorhen flew off the towpath ahead and landed on the ice at the other side of the canal sliding into the bank with an audible impact.

At home and finally back online I was sad to see that Jayaben Desai who stood up to the management of Grunwick's film processing plant had died. She and other mainly immigrant mainly female workers at the plant went on strike for improved conditions in a dispute that ran from August 1976 to June 1978.

Near Stockport a plane flying low with its wheels descended reminded me how much I enjoy flying.

A heron stood on the frozen canal. One foot curled. Not from injury so far as I could tell but for stability on the ice. When bread was thrown the heron lunged over the heads of the mallards to grab it.

Walking home from Manchester Piccadilly I was glad that despite the day's gloom and the wetness underfoot it wasn't raining.

That morning in Lancaster every bud that's likely to be leaves next year had a water drop. Everything solid being turned into the mist.

) th good /old w~ay 109-114

Since I was offline from around midday Christmas Eve until a little after 6 yesterday evening I didn't realise the latest batch had been posted to Andrew Taylor's tumblr.

Andrew very generously says,

Having lived with these poems for a few days before posting this, I realise how much an honour it is to have 'worked' (posting) on this project with Matt. This has been some of the best mail that I've ever received. Thanks (so far) Matt.

I have to say it's actually an honour that this sequence has been so well received and that Andrew has actually wanted to help document the process.

As usual the images from this batch are at Andrew's flickr. The full sequence of images from the first batch onwards start here.

A while back here and elsewhere in the blog I wrote about influences that have fed into the creation of the poem. One that I forgot was an unsuccessful experiment I tried early on when I started submitting poetry. These were 5 minute poems. I'd put a page in a typewriter set an alarm for five minutes and type until I was cut off. No preparation allowed.

Although they take a little longer, with the exception of around eleven stanzas/pages/cards close to the beginning all the cards have been created on the stamp. The only forward planning is the recording of text not used on a particular stamp because I want to split a sentence or sequence of thoughts across two or more stamps. I may scan and post the pages where I've written these future fragments at a later date.

finding beauty

Three themes which might all be the same theme. Nostalgia and how to avoid it. Beauty and where to find it. My ambivalence about writing.

Walking along the coast yesterday between Lancaster and Sunderland Point I passed The Golden Ball a pub locally known as Snatchems. Just past it despite the rain and thaw the road was covered in a sheet of ice around four centimetres thick for perhaps thirty metres.

The ice was special. Just by being there. The surface was slippery and my feet were already wet. I was trying to follow a trail to Heysham. At this stage not quite an hour out of Lancaster I could have turned back. The coastal road here can be be prone to flooding and I couldn't tell whether the tide was turning and causing the river to rise. If I went on and couldn't find the path I might have to turn back. Having to cross ice with water rising over the road would be dangerous.

But the ice was special. Beautiful. I crossed carefully. A car passed slowly the opposite way. Neither of us were fully in control of our movements on the ice.

As a child I found it strange that accepted ideas of beauty didn't seem to include things that I found fascinating like rust stains or broken bricks. I was also aware that things I found unbearable like the sound of a metal dustpan scraping clinker from a fire grate could have an attraction for others. My motivation for sometimes setting the fire in the morning before I set out for school was not to take responsibility but to confront my distaste for the sound.

There have been times when I've felt sad for good things that have happened in the past. Almost a retrospective jealousy of myself. Certainly a regret that whatever experience it is has passed and can't be repeated or returned to. This hasn't happened for a long time. Your definition may vary but this is what I understand by nostalgia.

Living in the countryside there were many unlikely sources of beauty. Dead sheep. The sound of rocks thrown in fresh cow shit. Limestone turned from white to dark grey by rain. Soot burning just where the fire back curved into the chimney. Half-eaten voles left by the cat.

It's probably no surprise to regular readers of santiago's dead wasp that I have an ambivalence about writing in general and literature in particular. I find it a very static form. There is also something about text on a page that feels less physically present here and now, more connected to the past. I've tried to overcome these static, insubstantial, backward-looking qualities with very little success for a long time. More recently sound and visual work and performance have felt like they come closer to what I want to achieve.

But there's an ambivalence here too. This is an ambivalence about recording work, creating any kind of documentation. My favourite medium is performance. Particularly improvising soundworks. Here there is no finished work. The piece is always in the process of becoming and has a particularly strong relationship to the space, the time and the people there. Moments that work well can be magical.

But because those moments are so particular to the circumstances of their creation they can't be repeated. I prefer the intensity of present moments that matter now but might be indefinable or inert if they are defined. The documentation of such moments - an audio recording of a performance, a photograph, a series of words that can't be improved set down on paper - will only be a documentation of part of the experience. Work that can survive in isolation is of course a wonderful and important thing. But it will always be lacking something.

Unknown to me the route to Heysham was for cyclists rather than walkers. Shortly after the ice sheet I came to a narrow road with no pavement or verge. Left turned out to be the direction I would have taken by cycle if I'd known where I was going. Right took me to a main road leading to Heysham or back to Lancaster but again with nowhere for walkers to go. I decided to turn round.

Back at the ice sheet I found I could walk on the grass on the river side of the road - my right. A shape like a plastic bag or a large rock ahead of me turned out to be a swan. It lay on its front with its neck and head stretched out. It was dead. But again there was a beauty to it. I should say there were more than two dozen live swans grazing in the area.

For me all this ties together. I think that the reason I haven't felt nostalgic for a long time is that I've been too busy either experiencing new things or learning to find and appreciate small moments of beauty when they happen. And that I've learned not to try and hold on to those moments. If the present is rich and beautiful then the past can't overshadow it.

I'm aware that writing is more than a frozen moment. I'm aware that good writing or good art of any kind can exist outside of the circumstances of its creation. My ambivalence is to do with how I read and how I write rather than some universal law.

But at present for me the state of mind that prevents nostalgia and finds beauty everywhere is also the state of mind that finds the written word stilted and flat.

Earlier in the walk there was a sudden impact in a tree ahead and something on the edge of vision. A squirrel that had evidently jumped around a metre or more across the path from the branches of one tree to another ran through the tree into another and for a short while followed me along in the trees and bushes. I laughed with the sheer joy of it.

wait, what just happened?

This has been a weird year. 2009 was hectic and strange enough at times. And some of what happened in the early part of this year was actually organised in 2009.

So the work for North published by Alec Newman's (formerly Richard Barrett's) Knives, Forks and Spoons press, the recording for Tom Jenks' (Object 003 - Walksongs), and the decisions and scans for the issue of Ekleksographia edited by Phil Davenport were already complete.

In December 2009 I also had a small installation in the new Kraak gallery. It was the first time I'd exhibited work in a gallery and an indication of things to come.

2010 started relatively quietly. I was working to complete my dissertation equivalent portfolio of work for my MA in Creative Writing. I took a break from sound poetry having spent the previous year creating a CD each month.

My intention was to concentrate on developing my writing. Since I finally found the innovative poetry I'd been looking for at the start of 2008 (via Caroline Bergvall, UbuWeb, Openned and The Other Room) I struggled to write anything I felt worked. I still don't feel I've managed it three years on.

found

direct late afternoon light on the side of a tower block clad in red brick. parcel to collect. a projection and simplification. orange and mango juice. record around three minutes of the sound of warehouse and loading bays being dismantled. walk as far as barton bridge before heading back towards town. see following page. short dark video clip of sound performance. relaxed atmosphere. rehearsal studios in ancoats. light rain. stand on middle railing to lean over water to take a photo. cooked rice with tumeric thrown under a tree for pigeons. found unused bullet from second world war in garden. part of towpath slippery in rain. deflated cartoon ghost helium balloon in canal at the water's edge. a number of car tyres sinking in mud. swan climbing out onto bank. sides of steps painted red. small sounds greatly amplified. misread 'dunican's bar' as 'duncan's bar'. pass territorial army base. paper jammed in fax machine. 'turn snib to open'. contemplating an illegal 1.4GB download of sound poetry. lambs gathered on square of slate in centre of field. left leg cramps painfully. low flying aircraft. limes. venetian blind no longer works properly. dog shakes chew toy. ordsall. sound of microphone dragged across stone.

[Penultimate poem in Manchester sequence, December 2009]

I was fairly soon distracted though. Early in the year I was one of more than two dozen people approached by Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke to participate in menu for murmur a group sound installation at Salford University's Chapman Gallery. I also undertook a workshop in sound poetry at Kraak as part of their Lost Language exhibition, and started to put together a paper on the relationship of sound poetry and noise music for Bigger Than Words Wider Than Pictures a conference in the summer at Salford University.

On top of which I had an idea for a series of events combining ideas stolen from The Other Room and the soon-to-end Salford Concerts series. The intention was to combine poets with sound artists and other artists working with text or sound. With Richard Barrett and Gary Fisher onboard as organisers and a name suggested by Richard Counting Backwards was able to launch in June.

From late spring/early summer things got really busy. It probably starts when I started going to studio crit sessions most weeks with my friends Lou, Graham, Gary, Helen and Jen. Mostly I was still working with visual poems and text.

I had recently started working on some visual poem boxes. These were card boxes 6cm x 6cm or 3cm x 3cm with visual poem forms cut from one face. At this stage they were another thing to keep me occupied while I didn't have much direction.

At the end of May although I didn't participate except as a volunteer I attended Mill24 http://mill24.blogspot.com/. I stayed up for the whole period and took one photo and one minute of audio every hour. The whole series of audio recordings have yet to posted here.

Shortly after that Counting Backwards launched and has so far been well received. It has featured Mick Beck, Blood Stereo, Becky Cremin, Me and Gary Fisher improvising with a recording of Richard Barrett reading his own The Hard Shoulder, Graham Dunning, Stephen Emmerson, Dominic Lash, the duo of Jennifer McDonald and Louise Woodcock, Richard Parker, Holly Pester, Sonic Pleasure, THF Drenching, and The Wyrding Module.

On the day of the launch event I also went up to Islington Mill to have a look at what subsequently became my studio. Initially I was slow to occupy the space preferring to concentrate on my visual poems and visual poem boxes.

After a couple of weeks I realised that most of the space was going unused. I took out my street cutlery and started arranging it on the floor in different configurations trying to find ways I might present it. A visit to the rock cut graves at Heysham and a fascination with archeology led me to create what was to be a mock drawn plan/topographical model of an invented site complete with cutlery inhumations. While I was happy with the piece it looked shit with cutlery in the graves.

But the real significance is that I was now making large-scale pieces with no connection to text. I started to think of what my next project might be. The ballad Long Lankin has had a longstanding fascination for me. It seemed natural to try and create a sculptural piece that might capture some of the sense of dread and unease the song contains. The large piece I created from wire and twigs which dominated my studio for months was liked by people but was not what I was looking for and was eventually burned.

The Long Lankin was the start of a series of ideas still being explored that drew on childhood memories. One of the major sources of those memories - and especially of images that continue to haunt me - was a series of books from the late 1960s/early 1970s owned by my parents when I was growing up. Over the years they have been damaged and lost. But I managed with the help of my mother to get hold of the three Voices and four Junior Voices poetry anthologies.

Among the images in the Voices books was a photograph by Don McCullin of the Asaro Mudmen of New Guinea. It was this half-remembered image and my attempts to track it down online that led to me buying the books. The motivation for locating the image was a desire to create masks of my own based on the models in the photo. At present only one mask has been completed and a second attempt will have to be broken up and reworked in the new year.

Alongside this my friends have continued to be inspirational and supportive. It was therefore exciting when Graham undertook a three month residency at the Rea Garden in Digbeth. The image below is from the flyer for his show at the end of the residency.

As well as encouraging me to submit proposals for exhibitions and residencies my friends have encouraged me in starting to travel. Jen currently undertaking a six week residency at the Gowry Art Institute and still early in a five-month visit to India has been especially influential in this respect. Without her suggestions I might not have travelled to America in the autumn or started planning to visit China next year. The photo below is from Jen's blog. I'm using it simply because I like the light in it.

At first the process of applying for exhibitions and residencies was painfully slow. But gradually I've got my artist's CV, artist's statement, portfolio of work, and record of previous application in place. The work is now a lot faster and allows me more time to concentrate on actually creating new pieces. Such as the installation Dinner below created and photographed for an unsuccessful application.

Illustrated with a comically small image ) TH GOOD /OLD W~AY is a partial return to text. In it I treat text as material, as sculptural matter more than words. I use an ink stamp with moveable rubber type to create five line stanzas on plain postcards which are then gathered in batches of six. Andrew Taylor has been documenting the creation of the poem on his flickr. Only two copies of each stanza are made one of which is sent to Andrew. There will eventually be 180 cards. At present 114 have been completed since September.

In September and October David Berridge used my visual poem boxes in exhibitions he curated in London and New York. I'll come to these shortly. At around the same time I was one of several artists invited by Association to submit work for their collaborative group show at Castlefield Gallery. Somehow I managed to come up with an instant response that I was both able to execute and be happy with.

At the beginning of October I visited Writing/Exhibition/Publication the exhibition organised by David Berridge in London's Pigeon Wing gallery. On the final Sunday I performed two semi-improvised soundworks. An hour long intervention in the gallery space while the exhibition was open, and a shorter more focused piece in the evening as part of a series of performances and readings.

A couple of weeks later I went to New York for five days. This was a holiday, my first flight, my first trip overseas, and an opportunity to see The Department of Micro-Poetics. This was the New York exhibition curated for David Berridge by the AC Institute which included my smaller visual poem boxes. It was also an opportunity to do another performance. Thankfully both David and the Institute were happy for me to do so and I created an entirely improvised sound work across around an hour without the aid of mics, loop pedal, or noise-makers. It marked the first appearance of song in my sound practice.

The trip to New York was an intense and transformative experience in many ways. I kept a journal the whole time, most of which was posted to this blog. It made me determined that I must travel again. As I have some savings I will travel in China next year from June until some time in October.

My residency applications have since then all been sent to Chinese studios. Once Christmas is out of the way then the real preparations can finally get underway and I will be a lot happier. I will try to keep you updated with how things are going.

There have been a number of events, performances, gigs that I've enjoyed. Some of which I've reviewed on this blog. The image below is from the promotional materials for Philip Davenport and Nicola Smith's Ghosts Move About Me Patched With Histories at the Chinese Arts Centre.

I've tried to complete this review as quickly as possible. I will add in some further links and insert mention of other exhibitions/events etc that I've enjoyed this year at a later time - probably 28/29 December.

latest from ) th good /old w~ay

Two batches just arrived for Andrew Taylor through the snow.

Sets 97-102 and 103-108 at his flickr here.

Probably the last set dispatched before Christmas, 109-114 was sent this morning.

The next batch 115-120 will see the sequence two thirds complete.

some recent sketches

Recently I seem to have developed an ability to either piss people off or come across as impatient and uninterested (or even belligerent) in my writing and more generally. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First I'm attempting to be more honest and critical when I review things. Clearly where I feel I have a better idea of what's happening I feel more able to articulate specific criticisms. Personally I think it's more respectful than not tackling things I have a strong view on.

Second I'm less patient. I don't want to explain what I do. If I could explain it I wouldn't need to do it in the first place.

Which I suppose brings us to sketches made since late October this year. I think the first page may already have been posted. It's a series of sketches towards my Long Lankin project. None have come to anything yet although this page shows an early (possibly the first) iteration of the plaintive branch that's become an independent idea of it its own.

The next page shows quick sketches from memory of Eduardo Paolozzi's Frog Eating Lizard and Elisabeth Frink's Bird as featured in the Voices books written about elsewhere. They relate to the plaintive branch which I would like to cast in metal.

The next page shows more sketches towards Long Lankin. The top sketch illustrates the kind of texture I want. It's taken (rather badly) from a First World War photo. I've seen many photos from WWI of dead soldiers who appear to be growing into or out of the soil - almost composed of roots.

The other sketches try out particular poses. I'm still not sure whether this idea is for a sculptural form for an installation or a performance. Or just another dead-end.

This was certainly moving toward the idea of performance.

The next page consists of sketches just for the sake of sketching. Clockwise from top left:

A drawing from a photo of one of Eye Idols of Tell Brak. These idols fascinate me and will make their way into my work.

A pretty inaccurate sketch of one of my bowls.

My mobile phone.

A glass, a pack of pencils and a mug with teaspoon in it.

This is a sketch toward a performance idea. And yes that's a man in a dress.

The rest of the images are sketches toward new visual poem forms. The two on this page are copied from a page in my diary. The first form took five attempts to arrive at. The second took three attempts. It can take a lot longer.

The first two forms on the page below are also from my diary and took two and seven attempts respectively.

The next five sketches develop one idea while the final sketch is developed and changed on the next page.

In fact without the final sketch on the previous page it might be unclear what the first sketch here and the finalised eleventh sketch have to do with each other.

The final two sketches are tossing ideas around developed further on the next page.

Those ideas are thrown around further here for a while. I then do some scribbling. Out of the scribbles and my initial ideas something finally emerges