DYCP Application Thoughts

I’m planning on applying for Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund. Recommended to me by my mentor, this funding would act as a support for this “Wasted Time” research I’m doing as well as help accelerate it. And it would accelerate me as an artist, as well.

I have struggled to see where I fit in in the world of art. I make pop music. I write poetry. I want to make audio programmes. I love academia and researching. I want to help educate. I want to tackle big ideas. I want to make something rich and mysterious and layered. But I also want to make things which are catchy, easy, joyful. How can I do all of that?

The Tiny Songs Project has helped me re-brand myself as an artist almost. I went from gloomy, self-centred songwriter to happy, weird, music-maker and image creator. It’s also changed the way I dress myself, too. I wear a lot more colour now, or am drawn to it at least (don’t really have the budget for a wardrobe overhaul at the moment). See the above photos for the difference.

The DYCP application requires me to plan out what I would do with the fund, who I would get in touch with, what milestones I would aim to reach and how I would measure my progress. I’m not sure at the moment what any of that would exactly entail, but I have some ideas. Here they are in note form:

MY MAIN QUESTIONS

• How can we make the idea of "lost time" less negative?

• How can our planet help our perspective of time?

• Can pop music & the culture surrounding it be a vehicle for solutions to these questions?

AREAS OF INTEREST

I would like to network with people, organisations and places in these areas

• the arctic

• the ocean

• geology

• astrophysics

• indie pop and punk music

• audio-making (like Transom for example)

• Norse/Celtic myth and folklore

MEDIUMS TO WORK WITH

• music — writing an album or an EP

• podcasting/audio

• written blog

• visual diary/sketchbook

• diagrams or maps

• performance

• workshops/teaching

• animation

ACTIVITIES TO DO

• geological exploration of a place

• stay somewhere remote up North

• collect oral histories around nature and myth of a place

• create a series of deep time event reconstructions

• create a podcast from the information I research or an enriched audio piece by including the songs I write

• pop album pop concert zine for geological events, merch for geological events or areas so we can care about them like we care about our favourite band

The Slow Curve Back To Björk

In 2015 my interest in Björk finally blossomed. Up until then there was a vague awareness & appreciation. She was on the edge of some large mystery and I wasn’t entirely ready to go there yet, dark weirdness. When the spark finally hit, I was in love: merging sex, death and science with instrumentation that both pulls from imagined futures and romantic pasts. I mean, she dresses like a galactic moth and her music videos are robots fucking. It seemed on a totally different level from any other artist I listened to. I sat in bed one day and watched the entirety of her concert at the Royal Opera House in 2001.

Musically, I was in the middle of searching for an identity. Identities are always flowing and ever-changing, but I felt like I hadn’t even found the essence with which I was flowing. I hung on to Björk and studied her melody lines and the intricacy of her arrangements. I wanted to sound futuristic, like her. But only in terms of sound. My song content was still deeply entrenched in my life, my experiences, my immediate longings. Stories of me.

After a few attempts to get some sort of electronic pop sound going, I walked away and a few years later, picked up my acoustic guitar again. A producer came along and said “hey, your acoustic songs are so good, I want to help you make them,” and I took that as a clue towards my sound. I left my dreams of becoming some incarnation of Björk on the shelf.

In my research for “Wasted Time” (or should I call it Lost Time? I think a name will emerge the more thinking I do), I came across the work of Timothy Morton. I stumbled on him through the Caitlin DeSilvey essay on Rewilding Time, and happily found that there was correspondence between Morton and Björk made public.

I’ve only just started to dip my toe into Morton’s Dark Ecology, so I can’t fully talk about all the ideas yet, cause I’m still trying to understand them. I think the conversation with Björk is helping, though. Also, they say some interesting things about pop music & songwriting:

What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness— from remembering not forgetting . . . The song as entity is a physical being in its own right

And then Morton goes on to talk about how art helps the “almost-now” eco society to “rediscover enchantment”—

our mission maybe is to allow people to feel this and think this with full crystal clarity, not departing from reason for one second, yet allowing the inner space to sparkle madly

Allowing the inner space to sparkle madly. I love that and I feel like songwriting fits in there, rewilding time fits in there, transforming ways of looking at lost time fits in there, moments of quiet and wilderness fit in there.

Look at this beautiful tiny sparkling void, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s beautiful

And they bring up the North!! Talking about it as a realm of enchantment. As a place where society can maybe learn about the sparkling, magical unknown:

there is part of me that just wanted to talk about elves and sprites. . . you can feel these entities coming out of the rocks up here in the north of england, the pools and fountains. whether you like it or not, believe it or not. irish woman i heard once: “sure i don’t believe in them, but they’re there all the same…” bang on… somehow the further north you go the more vivid it becomes. i expect it’s super vivid in iceland?

Also on the table is the idea that thinking the world is separate and evil actually makes you the evil thing. You are the world and to think evil of it is to make evil of yourself! View time the same way! Lost time? Stuck in a sparkling void? Hate the void and you are the hate! Starting to care for the world begins with being caring — caring for yourself. Love yourself = love your neighbour = love the planet. Narcissism and nihilism and finger-pointing break that down.

What about merging with the void? Merging with care & eroticism towards the wilderness of stale, dormant time? Merging with the unknown, merging and caring about the stillness, the staring out to sea from an unmoving chair by the window?

Also, the song Isobel. Leaving it here for later:

The lyrics also relate to sparkling voids / dark forests / being alone:

in a forest pitch dark / glowed the tiniest spark / it burst into flame / like me / like me / my name isobel / married to myself / my love isobel / living by herself

Is Isobel a character of Björk’s personal mythology?

Finally finally finally, I am still figuring out what Object Oriented Ontology truly means in dumb, pop music terms, but here is a definition of it which I think makes it easy to grasp? Maybe?

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is Graham Harman’s variant of the Speculative Realism movement. As an enquiry into the existence of objects it gives objects the same importance as humans. In doing so, humans are not all powerful over objects: we co-existing on planet Earth.

That’s from an essay by Joshua Speer. My understanding of OOO (apart from the fact that I love the roundness of three Os together) is that things exist, and without human interest/understanding/gaze, things still exist and have power, timelines, lives. Everything is an object, even concepts and massive things like climate change or Jupiter. Objects are also created from disparate things which can get lumped together — the human species is an object, with its own interactions with the planet which might seem separate from any individual human who is a part of the species. For example, I’m a human writing on my computer, drinking a cup of tea. But as part of the object “human species”, I’m currently devouring the planet’s resources and wearing away the Earth’s climate. This interpretation of OOO might not be perfect, and will probably develop the more I read about it. Currently reading Morton’s Dark Ecology which is helping with that.

So. Back to the Björk. Morton mentions a coral reef in his final email in the chain:

i think of OOO as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemomes with tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant, could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds of things that don’t add up to it

When I thought of the dark coral reef, I felt it as a place which was deep and secret, which people couldn’t even visit. When we are lonely and within the lake of lost time, we might feel like we’re at a similar place. Not a sparkling coral reef perhaps, but something like it. Something which is unseen by other people, which feels very far away, like the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but at the same time there is something magical and sparkling about it.

I am calling this The Sparkling Dark.

Does being in lost time, the sparkling dark, allow us to access a realm of the magical? Or the mythical? What mundane experiences would back these claims up?

I have got several interviews with people I know coming up, mostly about chronic illness, but also about psychology, unemployment, creativity and recovery. I wonder what we will discover about the sparkling dark then.

To put a very long, rambling story short… from all of this, I realised that Björk is still a huge inspiration to me. She can be an influence even if I’m not emulating her sound. I’m taking a different view now — ecology made pop, art made mainstream, academia in emails about coral reefs and sparkling Nordic landscapes. Philosophy and weirdness and dreaming all whipped up and put on a stage for people to sing and dance along to. That’s what I want to do with this Wasted Time project (which I am now leaning towards calling “Lost Time” instead of Wasted…. ‘wasted’ implies more blame than ‘lost’).

Making the sparkling dark a place to dance in.

Rewilding Time

I’ve started to think about how the quietest places in the world are the most precious. When I say quiet, I mean places that don’t have a lot of residents, that aren’t built up with cities. Wild places.

Think about the Arctic or the Antarctic, or the ocean. Actually, it was this campaign to help protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in America which first got me thinking about this.

These places are precious because they’re filled with wilderness. Because the creatures and geography within them are becoming endangered. Because they run within their own time, yet the changes within them are a reflection of humanity’s time on this planet. Surely if the size of these places shrink, then the number of years before climate catastrophe shrinks, too.

WILDERNESS X SLOWNESS X TIME X HUMANITY X QUIETNESS

And what is it like to live in places either nearby or which have a similar wildness to them. Does it feel slower? Does being closer to nature make you more accepting of life’s seasons? I wonder what it’s like to live in an area like the Arctic Circle. Are people happier there?

And what about in Scotland — a country with many rural communities, such as those on the Hebrides. What is it like to live out there, or move out there from an urban area. How do we measure time with nature in Scotland? How is nature a measure of our own lives, and our time?

These questions of time and conservations have got me thinking of the phrase, “Rewilding Time.” So far I’ve found one academic article by an Associate Professor of Geography at Exeter University, Caitlin DeSilvey. I’m yet to complete reading the article but through her I also discovered a project called “Heritage Futures,” which focussed on heritage and related fields, and the ideas of conservations, uncertainty and transformation.

There was one quote on a post concerning rewilding which made me think about the question of nature, time and humanity being reflected in their quietest landscapes:

“to let go of nature would be to let go of the self that is projected everywhere around it.”

Letting go of nature is allowing it to run its course on its own terms. To stop trying to control it. To let go of time is the same thing — allowing it to run its course. This involves letting go of a projected self, too.

I’m starting to think that there is a parallel between time and nature and the way the human ego interacts with it.