Beauty, Terror and the Sublime

The Sublime is not strictly speaking something which is proven or demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel.Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux The passion caused by the great and Sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its…

Text-based Research May 2019

To go along with my image collection I usually create mind maps examining certain themes and ideas within the work. I wrote a statement that I think sums up much of what goes on in the work: Communication of otherworldly experience requires a symbolic language due to the ephemeral and unexplainable nature of the phenomena….

Geometry under the rug

Just when I was getting into finding out about the contemporary Western relationship to esotericism and the occult, a friend sends me a selection of facebook screenshots he thought I might enjoy. I did enjoy it immensely, not just because peoples reactions are so great, but because it provided a nice little insight into exactly…

Hauntology: Part 2, What the Spectre Articulates

“To haunt does not mean to be present…”.Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge, P161 I have a selection of quotes and thoughts around hauntology that didn’t quite fit in with the musical theme of my last post but which interest me…

Hauntology; experienced through Burial’s ‘Untrue’

A sense of loss for a future that never was Lately I’ve been revisiting some musical projects I enjoy and discovered that they fit into the genre of ‘hauntological music’. I’d previously been aware of hauntology existing as a cultural idea, but hadn’t thought about applying it to music, which is a bit remiss of…

New Dark Age – James Bridle

Although my work hasn’t focussed on modern socio-political currents in any obvious way, these topics are something I read and think about a great deal on a day to day basis. I suppose in some way my rejection of the ‘everyday’ in my practice might be a reaction to the amount of time I spend…