london belongs to me

One day, he climbs in through the window to find nothing there, everything cleared by the council, everything gone.

A later visit to Chris's Crackers;, a junkyard, brings back to him the same sense that he will never create a greater work of art than this lifetime's slow accretion - discarded sofas, exhaust pipes, tangled-up bits of wire, coconut shells, holey saucepans, all decaying gently together (The incredible thing, says Hirst, is how Chris knows about every single object, where it came from, and how much he wants for it)

Hirst picks up on something powerful here: a collection of material possessions, assembled as a bird assembles its nest, become in their relationship to each other and to the whole, a part of what constitutes a person or character. A distribution according to no conscious plan but precisely expressing the rhythms and patterns of a life: I remember after my Dad's death having to go through his flat and possessions and feeling that they would have preferred to have stayed in place indefinitely, bedded in, entwined and holding fast to each other, and preserving a part of his being, even down to the half-empty margarine cartons in the fridge - this must be why bereaved parents leave their child's room exactly as it was on the day they 'lost' them. The strands have to be disassembled though, painstakingly and painfully picked apart. Like merciless bailiffs we continued as each piece was taken from its proper place, pieces of a person jarred loose. He existed less and less.

Nowadays I sense that only the exceptionally eccentric accrete these significant towers of stuff around them over long periods. The rule is to clear; knock down the walls, get rid of the old furniture, nice bright open space. Shiny new commodities.

Music is becoming the same. Rather than bringing depth and resonance, samples are too cleaned up and glossy. It's all too clean and new, a sonic Manhattan loft.

I'm dreaming of a revitalized sampladelia. Every so often a crowd of unrelated free-ranging tropes coalesce into an idea. At the moment I'm relishing the idea of a new musical genre which can never exist.

I love mechanical fairground organs, especially the sinister wooden figures which remain totally still for the first two minutes of a tune, and then like an victorian chocolate-box premonition of The Exorcist, suddenly make an unnatural rotation of the entire upper portion of their bodies to clang a bell. The relentless militaristic cheer of the fairground-organ commands the attention to such an extent that some find its cheery outpourings an intolerable sonic persecution, an equal evil to car alarms and bagpipes. With their endless trumpeting and clanging they seem continually to herald the arrival of some great dignitary who never ceases to fail to appear. In many cases their original purpose was in fact to draw attention to the gaudily-tented attractions of the fair: freakshows, bioscopes, variety shows, bearded ladies.

Watching their seemingly perpetual motion (although there is nothing more deathly than when the last cymbal crash dies and the garish rococo contraption falls quiet), one can't help imagining the feverish melodies continuing long after all human life is extinct. There's something innate about them that invites a post-apocalyptic scenario. With every note they announce their independence. Every cymbal crash is a brash display of their comtempt for the small amount of human intervention required to bring them to life. (I found the aeonic scope of Spielberg's AI moving on this point - the machines dormant on the seabed for centuries. ).

Mechanical music cannot help but express the fundamental uncanniness of the mechanical itself, of the strange unlife that working machines have - especially machines which reproduce cherished human activities (cf AI again. The beautifully portrayed teddy-bear-android with its programmed love and positivity).

(footnote. There's a historically twisted but genealogically indubitable connection between the fairground organ and contemporary electronica, most evident in the happy hardcore/early rave repertoire. When I got the opportunity to step inside a fairground organ I realised just how direct the technical connection is: the tunes for a mechanical organ are supplied as concertina'd lengths of cardboard, divided lengthwise into thin strips relating to each instrument (around 100 on the larger organs). The cardboard is impelled through mangle-like rollers (most properly by steam power. On my favorite steam-organ record each tune is prefaced by the chuffing and whirring of the power source, as much part of the performance as the music itself). In the inner workings multiple pins push against the cardboard, small holes signifying when a given instrument should play, allowing the pin to strike home and set in motion valves, gears, levers.

Anyone familiar with sequencing software such as Cubase would immediately recognise its hardware ancestor. At the dawn of rave not much had changed: the cardboard strip and its holes now appeared on a screen, and instead of triggering valves and levers, triggered a sampler. In the last decade we have seen the rise of HD recording technologies, breaking this lineage by making sound much more flexible and manipulable: although still fundamentally based on the same time-based triggering mechanisms, at the user interface level rather than a selection of pre-chosen sounds being triggered one now manipulates and alters any subsection of sound directly, effectively dealing with an almost indefinitely fine-grained sonic matter rather than a distribution of atomic lumps of sound. Even despite the possibilities this technology brings, we see a constant return to and revival of the clunkiness of the earlier methods; which limitations, after all, in their struggle with human creativity, defined multiple genres of sequenced electronica.)

Demonstrating the ambivalent qualities of mechanical music, in The Elephant Man - a film about a man who is himself a fairground exhibit - David Lynch employs fairground-style music in two key scenes (I think I'm right in saying this, but I couldn't be bothered to go and check); upon Merrick's triumphant and emotional night at the theatre, where after being hailed as a noble celebrity he is utterly transported by the magical world. A beautiful scene which brings tears to my eyes on every viewing. Here Lynch celebrates not only the pathos of Merrick's open-eyed joy at the beautiful illusion of a simple pantomime, but the very magic of performance, of art and illusion itself. The artificial rush of the fairground music fits the endless delight and novelty of the weird creatures, stylised animals leaping and receding into darkness, undecidably human actors on a stage or automata, two- or three-dimensional, real or created.

Then in the chilling scene where the porter brings his paying customers into Merrick's quarters, returning Merrick to his status of freak, ogled and manhandled object. The whirling of the fairground music is here bitterly detached - The merciless turning of the wheel of fate, the gnashing of teeth, the rattle of bones, a feverish st vitus dance. Inhuman in its jolly insistence, it gives voice to the mechanical, inhuman nature of commercial exploitation and the amoral biological reflexes of pleasure and cruelty.

The mechanical uncanny, and this ambivalence of the fairground, site of engines of pleasure, mystery and desire, is one of the elements I imagine bringing together in imagined music. Because every time I listen to 'For the Benefit of Mr Kite' I want to stay in the world it miraculously conjures up, for just a moment longer, to hear more. This is greatness in music, as in other art forms: to create the impression that the work itself is just a small part of a whole occulted alternate cosmos. Of course it may be pure hubris to attempt to re-create that parallel universe, or even one in the same neighborhood. But I can't help it.

Scratchy LPs of 'badly'-recorded folk music from a period where gentleman-enthusiast collectors, recognising the imminent demise of indigenous folk culture in the age of radio and motorcar, travelled out into rural areas with their manuscript paper and tape recorders to preserve music that, even at that time, persisted only through the efforts of a few survivors, old men scratching away at fiddles, pummelling wheezy squeezeboxes and recalling scores of vintage songs at village pub get-togethers. Some of these recordings have a marvelous far-away quality. One can savour the richness of this terminal state, the paradoxical nature of the recordings being that the very instruments (human and mechanical) of preservation are also the herald of extinction. It's not so much a nostalgia as in a longing to return, as an enjoyment of the texture of loss, decay, and imperfect preservation - the crackle of the needle, the distortion of the magnetic tape, the unselfconsciousness of reedy, distant voices.

I started thinking of an audioscape made up of these elements whilst listening to St Etienne, imagining it as an antique counterpart to Fox Base Alpha. St Etienne's greatest, a proper long-player in the old piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn sense (short, crafted, and perfectly paced, unlike todays overstuffed miscellanies). Anglophile dub, endlessly expanding cotton mists of reverb suddenly blossoming into starchy medleys of peculiar pop. Recited inventories of tube stops, BBC-accented voices echoing through sooty underground tunnels. There's something special in this album that I never found with any of their later material, not only in its appealing enthusiastic-amateur sonic constructions but also the sense of the group's groping, in a bleary haze of PG Tips, woodbines and wednesday afternoon TV black and whites, to articulate the half-imagined lost world, merrie england manqué.

The final element in what, if realised, would probably be a hideous mess or a work of sonic genius, is a preference for beatlessness. Not beatless in the sense of floaty new age muzak, but pulsed rather than punctual, sharply articulated rhythm; often achieved by Gavin Bryars in works where he manages to create a rhythm without locking in to any pop/rock tradition. I'm not swearing off beats, but I sense an imminent Zone of Fruitless Intensification ( ©Blissblog ) apropos of beatz-culture in general, and a soft pulsing is more fittingly somnambulous. Every so often you're woken up by spoken samples emerging from the fog: Snippets of Ealing Comedy; Cryptic, Lugubrious Alec Guiness in TV Le Carre adaptations.

There are three of them, and Alleline;

Overriding atmosphere: a pea souper. simultaneous accretion and decay, richness, layering.

I've no doubt the idea of this music is more fascinating to me than any actualisation will be, in fact the result would be something else entirely. Now if only I could think of a name for it...