Three brief journeys

FIRST JOURNEY 

The first journey is the literal journey. My walk after finishing work. Like last week, this week every work day has been from home. That's important for two reasons. First I get to start and finish work earlier than if I'm in the office, in this case at 15:30 when there's just over half an hour until sunset. Second, I normally work from home two days a week. After work on Monday I take a walk through Trafford Park before doing my grocery shopping for the week. On Tuesday I walk out to Wythenshawe Park and back.

This week, I had four days working from home, and wanted to avoid repeating any walk. So on Wednesday, New Year's Eve, I walked out to Eccles and back. Then on Friday, today at time of writing, I walked through Alexandra Park, Platt Fields Park, and Birchfields Park while there was still sufficient light, then through Longsight and Ardwick, and across town before returning home. 

It was cold, at least for Manchester. According to the Met Office app 3 °C at the start dropping to 1 °C by the end. But throughout the walk the pavements, paths through parks, and bits of some roads were icy and slippery, particularly as you got further from the city centre.

In winter I want to suspend the light, hold it in one place indefinitely so I can walk as long as I like in the cold. But of course I can't, so my walks are limited.

SECOND JOURNEY 

It being Friday, my latest longer-form vocal sound improvisation, Early Ground, premiered at 21:30. Like most of my current improvisations, recorded outside during a walk. But before that, during the evening's walk, instead of recording I was listening to podcasts. The one I'm interested in was an unlocked Patreon episode of We're Not So Different, a  podcast about medieval history. The discussion was about the difference between medieval and contemporary conceptions of irony.

My possibly erroneous understanding of one of the arguments was that one difference between the historic and contemporary, or at least post modern conceptions of irony is that the former are rooted in belief. There are ironic punishments in texts, and they work because the sin being punished is understood to be bad. On the other hand, post modern irony is a mechanism of distance. It claims that nothing much matters, and irony is a way to indicate that you're in the know.

But of course, as the hosts acknowledge, we live inside both sincerity and irony. And that's where I started to reflect on my own relationship to irony. It is slightly absurd to consider largely wordless improvisations, collections of nonverbal vocalisations, as expressive of either sincerity or irony, but I think it is conceivable. Making those sounds in the first place, especially making them publicly available, indicates sincerity on the part of the artist. The artist then can undermine their own sincerity by use of absurd, silly, scatalogical sounds. 

THIRD JOURNEY 

This brings me back to a constant question, or set of questions I have about my own art: Is it serious? What, if anything does it attempt to express? Does it come close to expressing that?

And there are other questions, such as can an improvisation created in response to a particular location at a particular time be truly legible to a dispersed audience watching via YouTube? How do the various layers interact? The improvisation, the setting, the fact it's recorded and not live, its recording as a solitary act without audience, and so forth. 

Beyond that, despite what I said previously about sincerity being discernible and irony functioning to undermine it, is it that obvious? More, can intent or its absence be detected and does that matter? Does it matter both in terms of the accurate identification of intent or not, of sincerity or not, and of the presence or absence of sincerity/irony in the first place. When all most people hear is weird, alienating, abstract mouth noise, surely the idea of irony being encoded there is absurd. In that case the mere existence of the improvisation is in itself a joke, the act of listening to it an ironic or ironisible action. The content of the improvisation under this understanding is therefore irrelevant. 

And so, having argued myself to a standstill, and with I'm sure many errors along the way, it's time for me to tap out. Have a great weekend. 

But finally, here's something tangible, Early Ground, my latest longform vocal sound improvisation.