This week’s session was an off-site visit to the headquarters/home of SM-LL, whom I didn’t know I was aware of until we arrived, and I was surprised to see it was Lucia H Chung, whom I have seen play numerous times before in different settings (gigs for Sound Art, Noise, etc), and I would like to say I am a fan of! We learnt mostly about their history of record labels, mostly from Martin, who had quite a history within underground Techno-oriented scenes and was still actively putting out those kinds of materials, and it was very reinvigorating to just talk about music for an extended period of time with people so passionate about it. Martin seems to have a similar ethic that I do regarding art in encouraging this kind of messy/”outsider” approach and working around the blockade of self-imposed “quality” restrictions, encouraging music creation as an activity. One of his labels just called “the label” I liked it as it falls in line with some of the Netlabels my friends and I are/have been doing, encouraging this kind of ego-less, curation-less expression through anonymity, through this label being records cut without any information, just black label records, which I guess is a logical step for anonymous music.

Present in this visit was the persistence needed to make experimental music into a living, as well as to live by a strict political foundation that acknowledges where action can end, as everything around the label/group was non-conformist from an anarchist outlook, but they still kept day jobs to keep the lights on, as is obvious but still important to note, that art is not sustainable but that is because that is not the point, it is excercising a personal need, it is something that we feel like we have to be doing and work facilitates us being able to do that, making a living from this work is something that needs to be thoughtfully approached and somewhat “gamed”. Lucia, whom I would deem one of the bigger names in the London experimental scene, mentioned how long it took for her to start to get paid for gigs, which was quite surprising…

I was also made aware this week of the deadline for applications to the Iklektik show, which I have now applied to play at as a way to trial my set I have been working on based on “ostranenie“. I am pretty excited that it will be at Iklektic, since I have been to the old one and not to this new one, but they are having pretty wild gigs on in the coming months, so this feels like a good “in” of sorts and a good opportunity to blast my stuff, as well as to get to hear what everyone else is up to. My set is like really overwhelmingly pretty heavy ambient stuff sourced from a Fleetwood Mac song as a way to prove this hypothesis of obfuscation being further purification and therefore enhancement of its inherent qualities, which kind of ties together all of my work but adapts it to this chosen theme of defamiliarisation. Everything I’ve been doing this year in University has been this kind of Musical Purity Spiral, and it’s really allowed me to figure out that that is an overarching theme in everything I’ve ever done, and my view of Noise being entropy worship and my dissertation being related to the purest form of Noise being this state of absolute zero kind of abstracts it so that this stagnant state can be clawed at from anything, and I guess here I’m doing it with Fleetwood Mac since it feels right, and I’m excited to get the performance done to demonstrate this.

I’m also expecting the documentation for the performance to be far better than the performance I’m doing in Manchester, since the one in Manchester is far less professional and put on by just myself and my friend, so I mostly just want to get an audio recording since that’s what I like, so having a more “proper” video recording in Iklektik would be great to include in my portfolio, especially when the deadline for the portfolio site is one day after the set in Manchester, I doubt I will have it ready for display by that date but would like to be displaying something.

The off-site visit got me thinking about malleability as well, as far as sound as a career goes, and what I really would like to be doing after this course. I have spoken to friends and some family about using my technical skills to get experience through interning in radio back home in Liverpool, as London has given me a better appreciation for the art form through the Radio module in my second year and really what I am doing with the Noise “soundscape” kind of work is applicable all over, sound is sound regardless. I also am quite tight with a newer venue back home called Commune that I feel like would be open to having me helping with the Sound there, since often it is pretty rough as it is a DIY space. The overarching idea, though, is that my interests can be applied in these situations without needing to compromise; it still embodies what I am interested in without being that thing, and it also makes apparent that my main aspirations lie in expanding the music scene in Liverpool. I don’t think London is the place for me, it has felt like inserting myself into something already established, it doesn’t feel right, even though the community is much more there.