The Domestic Soundscape

Today when I switched on my computer I noticed that Google is using this image of a ewe and a lamb for Mothering Sunday.

This reminded me that last week on Lambing Live I learned that the Swaledale Sheep breed is renowned for the good maternal skills of its ewes. Swaledales, it turns out, are good mothers. I think this means that they do not lose their lambs easily, that they do a good job of protecting and guarding them, and that they produce plenty of milk. Young Swaledale lambs need this kind of protection, because they are often born in the exposed and high-lying environments of the North Yorkshire moors.

Having knit with pure Swaledale I can say that as a fibre, it reminds me very strongly of the places where the breed originated, and I think there are few yarns more suitable for the purpose of making hill-walking socks. Prick Your Finger’s DK Swaledale is from young sheep, so it is not as rough as it might be, but it retains a robust hardiness which I personally like in a good walking sock. Slim strands of kemp somehow prevent the socks from felting too much, creating resistance and strength in the fabric, which is perfect for the work of walking up steep hills where a sure and solid surface is necessary for the feet to work against. I also love the colour of the pure Swaledale; many shades of white inhabit the yarn so that it resembles stone or earth, with heathery, non-flat colours and a certain roughness that catches the light. In behaviour, Swaledale yarn is supple, slim and hardy – just like the sheep that it comes from. Knitting with the Swaledale yarn reminds me of crunchy snow and difficult landscapes.

There is a beautiful bit of footage in Andy Goldsworthy’s film River and Tides where one can see both the maternal power of the Swaledale, and the mountainous context which has produced this unique breed. Andy Goldsworthy is an artist from the North of England who works with natural materials – ice, snow, thorns, twigs, leaves etc. – to produce ephemeral works which exist briefly in the landscape before being consumed by the same elemental processes that produced them. Most of Goldsworthy’s work is impermanent, but he has thought a lot about sheep in his practice, because they have been so central in shaping the places where he has lived and worked, and in recent years has produced a work entitled ‘Enclosures’ in which he restored many permanent stone shelters, for sheep. There is an interesting review of the book detailing this project here – and when Mark and I visited the Lake District back in Autumn 2008, we saw some of the restored enclosures for ourselves.

In the DVD about Goldsworthy’s work – Rivers and Tides – there is an amazing moment where a Swaledale gives birth while Goldsworthy talks about sheep and what they mean to him. I especially liked the unsentimental approach that the video-directors took here; the birth is bloody and visceral, and the shepherd helps the mother to know her lamb by rubbing her face in it. There is no cosy barn or straw, just grey stones, white air, thin grass, and the mucky lamb being cleaned by its mother and trembling on its just-born legs. One can sense the brittle beauty and cold hardness of the landscape from the light.

The reason this landscape looks as it is – with no trees – is because of the sheep. So the sheep have had this very deep impact on the land… and so I do feel this need to work with the sheep and yet our perception of sheep is so different to the reality of the sheep. It makes it (an) incredibly difficult thing to work with because we perceive it as being ‘a woolly animal’ and to get through that woolliness to the essence of the sheep is very, very hard… sheep are incredibly powerful animals in their own way.

They have been responsible for social and political upheavals; the Highland Clearances when people where people were put off the land… the landlords put sheep on the land and moved the people away. And they’ve left their story behind them; it’s written in the place, in the landscape. There is an absence in the landscape because of the effects of sheep.

People lived, worked and died here and I can feel their presence in the places where I work. And I am the next layer upon those things that have happened already.

- Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides

So in the context of Mothering Sunday I am thinking a lot about the Swaledale Sheep, the awesome forces in the Earth itself, and the raw energy and blood that mothering – in my observations at least – really entails. It seems to me that mothering is a thing which, like the much cutefied sheep, is often depicted in sentimental and softening terms which defy its power and its strength. Like the soft Merino wool with all the kemp bred out of it, gentle mothering is more fashionable than the Swaledale school of love, which is robust and hearty and born of rocks and places where the wind is wild and free.

But I know which school of love I come from and I am grateful for the strength of that place. Merino socks wear through quickly, but the deep hearty powers of Swaledale take us up mountains and back down again. Hurrah for good mothers, for uncute sheep, for mountains and hills, and for strong socks that last the distance. Hurrah for love and sheep and Happy Mother’s Day, Bam.

Rough Fell, a horned sheep related somewhere back in sheep history to the Swaledale.

I have somehow managed to find an unsecured wi-fi network that is giving me The Internet in my very own home. I do not know how long this lucky bit of joy will last, so will keep this post brief. My posts are going to be quite intermittent until I figure out an affordable way of piping many zigabytes of Internet bandwidth into the new place… I am thinking of writing a revision on Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, updated for contemporary times and entitled ‘Broadband of one’s own.’

In the meantime, let us focus on Zinefest and on the essay by Sophie Peck that I picked up in Pickle Grief therein. The essay concerns Sex And The City: The Movie and expresses many of the concerns that I voiced myself after watching the film, plus some additional criticisms. Where my review tiptoes diplomatically around some of the issues I took with the film, Peck’s essay is more directly defamatory about All That Is Pernicious And Evil In SATC: The Movie. I have been enjoying reading (and re-reading) her intelligent dismantling of the film’s subtexts, along with the artfully arranged words of Anna-Marie and Phoebe in Pamflet.

I hope that Pickle Grief and Pamflet comprise the beginning of a decent Zine collection. I have been extremely energised and inspired by properly reading these two publications. The central thing that leapt out at me at Zinefest was the vitality of confident, shameless writing. I love the lack of apology exhibited by the Zines I checked out at Zinefest and the fearless style of many Zines that I perused; it was inspiring. I don’t think it’s inspiring when people just yaw off about any old thing that is on their mind, but there is a certain way of concisely and specifically making a point – in an unorthodox way – that can be very energising to read. I found a lot of this at Zinefest and it made me want to make loads of cartoons about Monkl and loads of ranty little articles about various this and that things that I haven’t found the guts to write about yet.

Tomorrow, I start work on my repairs basket. It is a good time to mend things.

I am having some big problems with my ISP and cannot upload the composition I have finished today and wanted to share here. But I do have this exciting glitterphones photo which is one of the images created in the process of designing the web-stuff for the Sonic Advent Calendar, and I can tell you that the composition is a lot of fun being based around fireworks, popping mouth candy, bonfires, popcorn, champagne and fizzy drinks, rockets and roman candles. You shall have it as an mp3 the second I can get the Internet to be my friend again.

I haven’t consciously put together what I would call a ‘composition’ before in my life, although I certainly have written a lot of music and done a lot of stuff that involves organising sound. I generally am more comfortable framing these activities in my mind as being ‘making sound art’ rather than ‘composing’ because I am very old fashioned in my ideas about composition. I used to sit at the piano in a very proper way writing Very Deep Songs (a la Tori Amos) on manuscript paper until I got frustrated with trying to translate the rhythm onto the stave, and I still on some level feel that any other kind of activity is automatically not ‘proper’ composing. This is very silly and is philosophically similar to someone going to Fine Art college and finding that all the contemporary ‘nonsense’ taking place therein is simply not ‘real Art’ because it is not watercolours, nudes or landscapes.

So I am getting an education in the world of contemporary composition because if I am to pursue the idea of presenting everyday sounds to audiences then I have to deal with the context of the concert, the recital and the performance. These situations are important to make work in and consider because the majority of people go to these places to hear things, rather than to galleries.

So I found it interesting to philosophically frame my composition as such and to write my ‘composer’s biography’ and submit my composition to the organisers of a conference. It is a very small composition; just 3 minutes and 34 seconds long. But I enjoyed immensely all the listening to and recording and arrangeing of the sounds that resulted in it coming together, and the whole philosophical exercise involved in considering this kind of activity to be ‘composing.’

This is what I wrote about it on the submission form:

Taste Sensation explores the idea of similitude and context in sound. Built entirely from unprocessed recordings of a family firework display, a morning’s walk beside a river and a range of different culinary activities, the piece has been created through the repetition and layering of sounds which – while having disparate sources – share similar aural qualities.

Juxtaposing recordings of firework explosions and family days out with sounds from the world of food and drink, Taste Sensation aims to be a very physical piece drawing on the suggestive potential of sound and offering an imaginative, bodily listening experience. The sounds are loosely organised according to the sequence of sounds one may experience at a firework display.

The origins of the sounds employed in developing Taste Sensation have deliberately been preserved in the piece because the imaginative associations conjured by the listener’s knowledge of the sounds are as important in shaping their experience of the piece as the formal qualities of the sounds themselves.

This is a piece for your ears and mouth.

We shall see in January how the organisers of the conference like it, and in the meantime I shall endeavour to put it here for your discerning ears.

Pop Pop.

I have but one and a half of our delicious squashkins left, for I just grated the other half into a squash/ginger cake for tonight’s workshop attendees. I have also loaded all the wool assembled so far into a very large suitcase. Nobody is going to be short of any desired colour, that’s for sure… and hopefully my little mass of knitted vegetables will provide ample inspiration and examples.

Mmmmmm… oranges…

I’ve also been brushing up on my spherical object maths and perfecting my own set of ideas about how the sphere can be adapted for the stress-free improvisation of most knitted vegetables. Preparing for the workshop has clarified for me the difference between knowing a thing and knowing how to show what you know to others. It has also fired up in me a great desire to knit up an unrivalled collection of vegetables that will truly communicate the way that I feel about things that grow. I mean I just find vegetables and fruits – their form, their colours, their surfaces, their tactile qualities – mind-blowingly amazing. I love the everyday wonderment of vegetables and fruits; every fact of their growth and development, and every element of their design. I love that using fruits and vegetables is a daily activity, and one that is full of visual and olfactory interest; the stickiness, the smells, the tactile qualities. I love that I can experience fruits and vegetables on a daily basis and continually find them extraordinary.

It was no surprise to me, therefore, to find out in art college that Still Life paintings are often painted with a high degree of symbolism. There are dozens of art textbooks that will tell you about the importance of the humble fruit and vegetable as painted by Fra Juan Sánchez Cotán, for instance, like this beauty:

In the legacy of this great tradition within Western Art History, nobody would find it remotely crazy or amusing if I decided to set up a Still Life oil-painting workshop. But the notion of ‘knitted vegetables’ strikes everyone as sort of bonkers. Having painted many bits of fruit and bunches of flowers in the past, I can testify that the imaginative process of observing and recreating a thing from one medium into another, remains the same. There are many bad painters of fruit and vegetables; there are many naff patterns for fruit and vegetables. But it is also possible to obtain or create incredible renditions of fruit and veg in either paint or yarn, and why is it more insane to place lovely recreations of the things that inspire you most into your fruit/veg bowl and onto your kitchen shelf, than onto one’s walls?

I don’t wish here to ‘elevate’ my knitted vegetables to the level of genius recreation achieved in, say, the painting cited above. But it is curious to notice the ways in which knitting still isn’t free from a certain amount of functional utility which prevents the world at large from imagining it to be as limitless, as creative, as endless and as exciting as painting. In plain English, it is still seen as some kind of crime to invest yarn in ‘useless’ projects like fruit and veg when one could be making ‘useful’ clothes. Whereas I think it is safe to say that the value of Still Life painting remains somewhat unquestioned and even the most ardent knitters of ‘Useful’ things will most likely have some inspiring reproductions on their walls. So as I pack for the workshop, I’m wondering when we will start recognising that Art is as useful, and necessary, as jumpers, and I’m excited to see what all the wool in my large suitcase will become, this evening.