The Domestic Soundscape

Happy Halloween! I know that technically it’s tomorrow, but there is to be a small party over at Ruth’s tonight and since I love Autumn more than any other season – and Halloween more than any other holiday – I thought I’d make a whole weekend of it, starting today.

Celebrations require music, so I made a seasonal Imix which can be viewed and purchased from the iTunes store here. I also made a Spotify mix which is slightly different, since iTunes and Spotify don’t have all the same tunes in their database. Both mixes contain many tunes that I consider to be especially witchy and magical because it’s that time of year.

I am especially enjoying the topical ‘Autumn Sweater’ by Yo La Tengo, and the very rustic ‘Bundles’ by Mariee Sioux. Mariee Sioux is one of my favourite female vocalists; I love the slightly unhinged banshee quality of her voice and the lyrics with their evocations of plant medicine and magic. At this time of year when the berries are all over the bushes in such an abundance, songs containing references to fruits seem all the more topical. Bundles reminds me slightly of Yoko Ono and ‘Yes, I’m a witch,’ which I love as a feminist title for an album. My favourite track on that album is the very atmospheric and reflective ‘Death of Samantha.’ I am reading a book about Yoko Ono at the moment and loving her very material use of sounds. Consider ‘Secret piece,’ which is a score. It reads like this:

Secret Piece

Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment:

The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.

- Yoko Ono

I love this material use of the soundscape of the forest; this idea that in the same way that you can decide to use a piano as an instrument in a piece of music, you can use the soundscape of the forest. To me this is a sort of transformational magic, to turn the woods into an instrument. I have been slow to embrace Ono in my studies but when I was working on the Cut & Splice podcast series for Sound and Music I came across some of her early recordings and realised that her work represents a crucial link between feminism and the ideas of John Cage – two key ideas for me in my PhD. I love that she made a whole recording of herself coughing and a recording of her toilet flushing, and that she took these recordings of very everyday things into the (almost entirely male-dominated) world of experimental art and insisted on the importance of looking at domestic spaces and our bodies, in culture. I love her bravery and the risks she takes in Art. I think she works with sound in a really playful way, taking the whole soundscape as a material and making works that explore and celebrate our relationship to it.

Speaking of the woods and the soundscape, I am loving the crunchy walking on leaves everywhere and the dramatic scatterings of leaves that currently lie in drifts all over town.

I found a secret of my own today, walking home from Mark’s house; a narrow road lined on either side by houses made of the good red bricks that are so characteristic of Reading’s architecture.

I love the red bricks of Reading; like bread and wool, they evoke a sense of solidity, certainty, material comfort and shelter.

Finally in my Autumn Blisses post, I want to share the joy of the True Food Co-op which I have recently discovered. My bedsit is miniscule with very little cupboard space, so the ability to take all my little store jars and fill them with the exact ammount of stuff that my cupboards can hold is something of a blessing. I present goodness in jars, which fits in my cupboards perfectly and involves no packaging waste at all.

There is something most satisfying about taking a load of empty jars along to the Co-op of a Thursday evening and filling them up with pulses and grains and as I write this I am enjoying the earthy smell of haricot beans cooking on the stove. I love the little ticking sound the little electric cooker makes, too; it is a staple sound of days spent indoors.

Yesterday I also purchased peppers and green tomatoes to go in this evening’s soup. As well as enjoying this culinary combination later tonight I shall also be finally finishing off the previously frogged Mansweater. Wool, Soup, Bricks, Crunchy Leaves, Pumpkins and Beans.

I hope your Autumn is also full of such good, strong things. x

We made sloe gin. After harvesting the sloes I can quite see how Colleen’s son mistook them for Blueberries as they are a superb shade of blue and the bloom on them is quite similar.

We used this recipe and I especially enjoyed pouring the sugar in through a makeshift paper funnel. The sound of this task was fantastic, as was the murky white light display in the glass bottle.

I enjoyed rather less the task of pricking all the sloes individually with a pin, but – if memory serves me correctly – it does help the juices to seep flavoursomely into the gin!

In other happy news, the kitchen is now filled with the gentle glug-glug sound of Cider fermenting contentedly over in the warm corner.

…and the rhubarb gin we made last year turned into something so drinkable that between socialising last night and sending Emmylou home with a small bottle of the stuff, we have drunk it all.

It is not as good as sloe gin and tastes better if left for about a year, but it has a nice, fragrant flavour and tastes best with a little tonic water.

I am hoping that all the joyous Cider fermentation in the corner will have a positive effect on my somewhat lagging sourdough starter. I confess I was a slatternly mother to this small puddle of yeasty life as I failed to feed it every single week. It appears to be lacklustre in its leavening powers and somewhat fatigued. A warm corner, plus some extra special flour and the effervescent presence of the Cider will – I hope – restore its former mojo and give it the Vavavoom it had back in the glory days. I’m sure the cold doesn’t help.

Finally, Mark has harvested all his beans and we are saving them to plant again next year. They are a Berkshire-specific variety of runnerbean. Scooping the pleasingly hard little beans out of the silky, dried husks provided a very happy half an hour’s amusement and those bean pods sound fantastic.

I have put them in a jar, saved to plant next year.

I hope you too are all having a lovely weekend.

During the weekend I made my own baked beans. I used borlotti beans rather than haricot. I love borlotti beans; they are meaty and nutty and large and succulent and delicious, and they feel decadent. My method was simple and imprecise:

1. Soak beans and boil in unsalted water until soft and buttery. Put by in colander.

2. Sterilise jars.

3. In a pan mix the following ingredients to taste: tomato puree, water, salt, bay leaves, cinammon, apple balsamic vinegar, honey, paprika, cumin, chilli and onion.

4. Add the beans to the sauce and boil together until the onions in the mix have all turned clear.

5. Spoon the mix into the jars and close them.

6. Tidy up the kitchen carnage and wait for the sucking POP noise as the jars cool, and a little vacuum is created in each one.

7. Eat whatever is left in the pan and marvel at the deliciousness.

I also made bread. This recipe is infallible, but I do think the fresh yeast makes a difference. I am experimenting now with yeast; I have put by a small ammount with some flour, water and honey and I will use this as the starter for my next loaf. I will always put by a ball of dough from each loaf, mix in some flour, water and sugar and in this way – hopefully – keep my own little yeast supply alive.

While beans and bread were taking shape, I blocked my 2 new hats. You can see them on the radiator here, along with my beloved green Headigan which got severely re-blocked too.

One humbug-mint-style Headigan in the leftover yarn from mine and Emmylou’s Hourglass Sweaters, and one large, red Felicity – from Knitology – made as a stashbuster, using up random balls of red yarn I had lying around.

Felicity Hat ravelled here.

This phase in my life is all about the quick, easily assembled, instantly gratifying knits. I want to cultivate simple pleasures and try out many new styles. A restless period of reinvention is afoot, underpinned by the sanity-giving principles of grains and pulses and walking. I am in danger of spending my whole life at home, so it is good that I got out on Sunday to enjoy London and to delight in the wearing of my new accessory.

I did enjoy wearing my new red hat in London on Sunday, eating salt-beef bagels on Brick Lane in it and marvelling at the ridiculously OTT marketing campaign of new frozen yogurt bar in Soho: SNOG.

Mmm… salt-beef bagel.

SNOG in Soho. (Frozen Yogurt bar; amazing lighting.)

Although the low-calorie joy of SNOG was quite tasty and delicious, very few things compare to the loveliness of a scribble-cake (my name) AKA Mont Blanc taken with tea at the inimitable Maison Bertaux.

On the other hand, I did start pinging off the walls with happiness when I called in to the lovely Rachael and the sight of her delectable little pencil; perhaps it was the memory of this that prompted me to desire the ‘scribble’ cake…

I hope you all get lots of Real Pleasures this week.