ANGUS CARLYLE
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Into the Wild: Climate Action and the Curriculum

2/23/2021

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 With Mark Peter Wright, I presented our "Decoys" project as part of CRiSAP's contribution to the "Into The Wild" event. It was great to revisit this work and get a sense that there is so much more still to explore. I'd completely forgotten this description of the project that captures succinctly what we were excited by:
We wanted to create a work that would somehow propel the immediate and futurological aspects of life on a damaged planet. There is a sense of environmental toxicity, debris, heat and movements of the human or more-than-human.

“Every sound was produced through experimental Foley (post-production) techniques, which seemed apt given the post-natural context we were working within; we were questioning notions of authenticity and the real within the framing and capturing of place.
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Everything Is Permitted

2/11/2021

 
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A track played on Luke Fowler's "Everything Is Permissible" show on Clyde Built Radio. Listen back here. The track was a recording of plastic bags drying on a washing line, a sound I'd come to associate with lockdown heard in a place I'd come to associate with lockdown, our back yard. Different COVID-related sounds mentioned in a post from last year.
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"Night Blooms" Review

2/3/2021

 
"Everything Looks Different in the Dark" is a pretty amazing review by Anneka French of Fleur Olby's "Velvet Black" and my "Night Blooms" from a recent issue of Photomonitor. I've loved "Photomonitor" for the ten years of so since I first came across it so this is a real treat.
Fleur Olby’s ‘Velvet Black’ (2018) and Angus Carlyle’s ‘Night Blooms’ (2020) contain photographs of flowers and other natural phenomena in darkness. The two small publications share mutual interests in the beauty and escapism that nature often provides, something that is especially critical at times of crisis. Indeed, Camden Art Centre’s current high-profile online exhibition ‘The Botanical Mind’ and recent articles in Apollo and Elephant magazines have highlighted this need, offering screen-based botanical experiences from home. ‘Night Blooms’ and ‘Velvet Black’ draw out other facets of this relationship with nature, one that is complicated as we continue to interfere, ever struggling to get to grips with nature’s rhythms and its chaos. Explored explicitly in Carlyle’s book through photographs taken in fleeting snatches on solitary runs, this relationship is more subtly alluded to in Olby’s via staged floral still-lives.

Olby’s photographs are contemplative and intimate. Roughly life-sized and centrally positioned on the page, her photographs are shot dramatically on black ‘velvet’ backgrounds that emphasise the strange perfection of the specimens selected – iris, columbine, rhododendron, meadow grass, auricular, aquilegia – all removed from their usual wild or garden context. She highlights the fragile transparency of petals, intricacies of structure and form, and wide variety of colour. Scent is almost palpable. The photographs are motionless, quiet, painterly. Several of the photographs are barely there – flowers subsumed by their velvet and by differently coloured surrounds that frame each one. The surrounds shift across lilac, sage, dark brown, dark grey and bruised purple, building a vocabulary of colour that informs the reading of the photographs. They have something of an emotionally charged atmosphere though it is hard to pinpoint exactly which emotion we ought to feel. Something is off. The surrounds feed our reading of the specimens like a secret code, as the black text beneath them, denoting Latin or common names, becomes increasingly illegible as we turn the darkest pages.

The photographs printed in ‘Night Blooms’ likewise offer poppies, buttercups, thistles, bluebells and other botanical specimens as the title suggests. But spread across its pages are also tarpaulins, mattresses and other detritus, barbed wire fencing, a dead fox, a telegraph pole and rainbow-clouded smoke. Two images depict streaks of light that might be vehicle headlights or lampposts. The camera’s flash lights the dark photographs, often leaving visible vignette halos. The miscellaneous items of the world are open to (mis)interpretation.

Considering process, Olby notes: “my light reapproaches daylight, particularly as it fades to black”. Her comment is ambiguous. It is unclear if these are shot at night, outdoors or in, or if velvet fabric backdrops are used. Mystery here affords intrigue in these measured studies. Carlyle, meanwhile, is clear on process. The body of work was made on night runs through woodlands and public spaces distorted by darkness. His perspective feels more familiar, quite similar to my own. These are multiple pieced-together experiences of a world in a rush. For him, the ‘bloom’ is more than a flower. It is an umbrella term for a host of significant things discovered by Carlyle as he transgresses night time landscapes – a bloom of something from the darkness that calls to him, bringing forth brief encounters with plants, animals, structures, sometimes even people, as the writing that fills the first half of the book attests. The bloom, too, is the camera flash itself – the very means of discovering and capturing the images.

The two publications use text in distinctively different ways. While Olby’s ‘Velvet Black’ is introduced with a brief poetic phrase and contains the names of its specimens, seventeen pages of ‘Night Blooms’ are devoted to poems written by Carlyle that illuminate the journeys made and the photographs presented. Carlyle’s book details human activity and presence in the landscape through his poems as well as photographs; in Olby’s, this takes place sub-surface. Lines by Carlyle including “a sudden pungent waft of a soap that is not mine” hint toward live encounters with others in these disconcerting places; “Three blue faces at the bus stop talk while looking at screens. A dog makes a diagonal of its leash, front paws clawing air …” makes clear that the lines between nature’s spaces and ours are blurred indeed.

Olby’s book feels fragile, not only in its content, but in its lightweight paper stock, French folds and stitched binding. It can’t be fully opened flat, as if to imply that the book should be handled with extreme care. We have to peek into its pages as if we shouldn’t be there. Carlyle’s publication, by contrast, feels much more robust – it’s staple binding is looped, seeming to suggest that parts two and three might join ‘Night Blooms’ at some later date. While Olby’s design is formally consistent, with photographs centralised singly per page, Carlyle’s is much more experimental and in keeping with its exploratory content. ‘Night Blooms’ contains full-bleed single and near seamless double-page spreads, grids, formal centralised photographs, some of which are out of focus, and a number of partially layered images that seem to skip across the paper’s coated surfaces on clean white grounds. The layered pages, in particular, befit the publication’s assertion as a place where “territory, trails and terrain overlap and collide”, offering clues to deeper motivations for the project.

‘Velvet Black’ brings with it the weight of historical and art historical contexts. The rich histories of Dutch flower painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Victorian collection and exhibition motivations readily spring to mind. These contexts carry with them problematic yet fascinating socio-political, economic and environmental burdens at odds with the beauty of Olby’s blooms. There are present day concerns imbedded too – intensive flower farming for global markets, for instance – but it is in ‘Night Blooms’ where the contemporary is truly foregrounded. Carlyle’s photographic encounters are clear evidence that wild nature is rare and seldom untouched by our presence.

Nature can be a source of comfort and delight but it never stands still and it always fights back. Flowers don’t always bloom as we hope; everything looks different in the dark.

Dropping Down Low

2/3/2021

 
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My chapter "Dropping Down Low: Online Soundmaps, Critique, Genealogies, Alternatives" has been published in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, edited by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen. Here are the concluding paragraphs:
Less homogenous is the genealogy of the soundmap, a family history in which scientific culture’s noise maps and audiospectrograms form one branch, textual ear witnessing another, diverse diagrammatic innovations a third, and the various alternative approaches a fourth. The three alternative approaches I provided could each have been deepened to draw in more exemplars, just as they could have been broadened to incorporate other cartophonic categories: the transmission works of Dawn Scarfe or Jiyeon Kim suggest the possibility of a live soundmap, the reverberation of interior or external spaces in projects by artists as different as Viv Corringham and Davide Tidoni imply a performative soundmap, and a potential classification of storied soundmaps arises out of the separate creative research endeavours of Isobel Anderson and Ultra-Red.

​It is not that the alternative approaches have somehow evaded technological apparatuses and perspectival frames: they are still soundmaps after all, each with an invoked territory and an impelled listening position. Rather, the alternative approaches agitate the apparatuses and frames to critical motion, hazard counter-mappings, lower themselves from the aerial, admit the porous, and slip from the cartographic into the cartophonic.

Listening Across Disciplines II

11/12/2020

 
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A while ago, I was interviewed for the "Listening Across Disciplines II" project that is funded by the AHRC and has Dr. Salomé Voegelin, Professor of Sound (UAL) as its the principal investigator and Dr. Anna Barney, Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering (University of Southampton) as a co-investigator. The interview was conducted by Mark Peter Wright and edited with other interviewees, Syma Tariq, Matt Parker and Ximena Alarcon. The interview took place in a challenging acoustic environment and, as with the "Uncanny Landscapes" podcast, this seemed to connect to what was being discussed. I spent a while talking about what was for a long time my favourite recording "NR_CROW.aiff."

Uncanny Landscapes

11/12/2020

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It was very enjoyable to be interviewed by Justin Hopper for the "Uncanny Landscapes" podcast. I was mainly talking about the trilogy of books that relate to my on foot explorations of the local area: A Downland Index, Night Blooms and the forthcoming Mirrors. The technical glitches ghosting our Skype conversation seemed to add their own voice to the themes of health, marking life through technology, and the intimacies of distance / the remoteness of the near. The podcast is available on a number of platforms, including podbean, which you can listen to here.
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Wind Under Whitethorn, Wind Through Wire

7/9/2020

 
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When asked by the Outposted Project to respond to the OS map for Brighton and Hove, there was only one place this invitation would take me: my favourite dew pond on the ridge of the South Downs near Ditchling Beacon. I carried some microphones and a camera the five miles from my home to a relative sheltered spot between some gorse bushes in what was one of the windiest days of the year. Originally, I thought I would just record the sound and make an ambient portrait of the hawthorn and the pool of water with its reflection, but things took a different shape: deciding first to write a text and then finding that the process of writing and listening back took me very far away from the runners and dog walkers on the Downs. You can read the text and watch the short film here.
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Night Blooms

7/8/2020

 
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Really pleased to have worked with Makina Books on the publication of "Night Blooms," a combination of photographs of wood and wayside flowers caught in the glare of my head torch and short texts about nocturnal wanderings in the two local woodland. The editing and sequencing of the photographs was in collaboration with Robin Silas Christian and the design was by Patrick Fisher at Frontwards Design. Some of the photographs can be seen here and some of the texts here at Hotel. The publication date was back in May but I forgot to post the news ...

Live and Indirect

6/17/2020

 
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A couple of live readings. One was for Reveil - the 24 hour broadcast organised by Soundcamp - and involved me giving an audio commentary while running before reading a section of "Night Blooms" that had originally been written in place where I was retracing my steps (an area of scrub- and woodland close to my home). The other was the launch event for "Night Blooms," this time a more sedentary affair on Instagram Live where I read other sections from the book as dusk crows settled to roost above me.
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"How are you in these strange times..."

6/8/2020

 
Uncharacteristic of me to respond to something unfolding in the historical present like the COVID pandemic and the responses to it but I found myself: using my phone to record the fluttering of security tape in a supermarket car park repurposed as a distant queuing area; hanging microphones out of the first floor window for the first and last NHS Claps in my suburban street; holding an induction coil against a Playstation 4 to document the shifts in electro-magnetic flux as I booted up a game to play (gaming being a surprise activity I found myself turning to in Lockdown). Three of these were on Kate Carr's Interiorities show on RTM radio (episodes 1, 3 and 8), one was on the Parallel State podcast and one on Gabriele de Seta's Noise Reduction, a "multi-sited field study". I also submitted a potential contribution to Drew Daniel's crowd-sourced "Quarantine Supercut" but this wasn't used (!).
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  • Home
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    • Some Memories of Bamboo
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    • 51 | 32 ' 6.954" N / 0 | 00 ' 47.0808" W
    • Viso Come Territorio
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