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Study for Pylons, Electromagnetism & Abandoned Piano
No full textCelebrating its 3 year anniversary, Difficult Art and Music presents a double-album of forward-thinking experimental composition. Inspired equally by the classical composers of the Avant-Garde – the likes of Ligeti, Kagel, Young and Cage – alongside the more expressive end of contemporary electronic music, DAAM has spent the last 3 years championing the awkward, the academic, and the overlooked. Founded by the audio-visual artist Distant Animals (who has released work on labels such as Hallow Ground, Cruel Nature, and Waxing Crescent), the labels anniversary compilation brings together material drawn from their back catalogue, including rarities from limited releases and the sub club. Alongside this, an album of brand new materials showcases the diverse work of the artists affiliated with the label.
Featuring the like of Asynchronous Drone Orchestra founder Chelidon Frame, the punk-ambient artist Nobuka, and Johny Lamb (the experimental alter-ego of the Cornish folk musician Thirty Pounds of Bone), ‘I Only Like Difficult Art (and Music)’ offers a rare glimpse into a network of international, conceptual artists working outside the normal confines of genre. From textural-manipulations of traditional Cornish folk music to studies of electromagnetism in abandoned pianos, minimal modular techno to sonic reimaginings of Satre and M. R. James via algorithmic ensembles, DAAM proudly fly’s the flag for the more unusual end of modern composition.
Featuring nearly 2 hours of music across two discs, the album juxtaposes nuanced long-form drone and ambient works against irreverent collage, classical minimalism and aggressive modular synthesis. With a history of not only releasing music but also books, sculptures, scores and art pieces, the label specialises in work that is wilfully academic and inter-disciplinary. ‘I Only Like Difficult Art (and Music)’ demonstrates this approach with aplomb: an album that arrives complete with a fold-out poster and a label manifesto / thesis alongside the music
Gans’n Dhama Wedhen
No full text'Gans’n Dhama Wedhen' (trnsl. ‘In the Company of the Mother Tree’) is a short 360° fulldome film–composition that invites audiences into the affective essence of Cabilla Cornwall’s ancient Atlantic temperate rainforest. The work combines 360° cinematography, macro textures, a bilingual vocal layer in English and Kernewek (Cornish), and an ambisonic (19.1) spatial soundscape to foreground more-than-human presences (e.g. the “Mother Tree,” lichens, mosses, mycelium, river…) so that listening becomes a primary mode of encounter rather than an adjunct to the image.
The project’s compositional approach is grounded in eco-philosophical and practice-based research. Drawing on Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and Ferrett’s dark sound ecology, the piece cultivates an ethical, relational mode of attention that embraces both enchantment and complexity: affective listening, field recording and ambisonic spatialisation are used to decentre human perspective and to transduce site-specific sonic agencies into a shared immersive experience. Rather than offering “pure sensorial spectacle,” the work engages audiences analytically and somatically, seeking to transform viewers from passive observers into active co-present participants in a collective dome environment. In doing so, it explores how fulldome media can counter hyper-individualised media bubbles by fostering common worlds and environmentally responsible imaginaries.
'Gans’n Dhama Wedhen' was written, directed and filmed by Dr Adam Laity; the original score and spatial audio were composed and produced by Dr Antti Sakari Saario (Falmouth University), with field recording by Saario and Dr D Ferrett (Falmouth University); Ferrett also provided the tree voices and narrative consultancy. The film was produced in partnership with o-region, Black Cat Films, Screen Cornwall, the Thousand Year Trust, Falmouth University/AMATA and Real Immersive. Together, the collaboration demonstrates a research-led model of immersive nature filmmaking and soundscape composition in which spatial sound and bilingual voicework guide attention, deepen ecological understanding and invite audiences to listen with, rather than merely look at, temperate rainforest life
The Folk Horror and Crime Fiction Hybrid in 'Heart of Darkness'
Full text linkThis article explores hybridization and generic experiments within the crossovers and intersections between crime fiction and folk horror in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Published in 1899, this novella is a beautiful, grimly bleak look at colonialism. Chinua Achebe identifies Heart of Darkness racism and scathingly calls it “‘permanent’ literature,” which is, he explains, “read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics” (15). This article applies genre fiction to this revered canonical novella, retrospectively identifying it as a folk horror text. Heart of Darkness has been categorized as a crime/detective narrative before (see Brooks 238–63), but I will argue that examining Heart of Darkness as a hybrid of crime fiction and folk horror allows us to look askance at a text that has engendered so much scholarship and criticism. Mapping the narrative trajectory through, in particular, a folk horror lens, can deepen our understanding of the nuances and contradictions present in the text
Developing a Scale Measuring Perceptions of ‘Liveness’ During ICT Augmented Performances Designed to Increase Accessibility On-site at Music Festivals.
Full text linkPotential audience members who are d/Deaf, disabled, or neurodiverse (‘AMDDN’) face difficulties accessing music festivals, where live music performances are increasingly augmented with ICT, challenging perceptions of “classic liveness”. Building on previous research relating to augmented formats and viewpoints more generally (Bossey, 2023a), this paper proposes a liveness scale to measure audience perceptions of performances at music festivals which have been augmented to increase accessibility at music festivals for AMDDN. A Likert scale was developed, tested and refined utilising an adapted version of Gehlbach & Brinkworth’s six-step process to specifically address on-site accessible augmentations. Overall, 282 responses were collected across four iterations of primary research from six music festivals. Discussions with the population of interest and expert validation preceded cognitive pre and pilot testing. Potential for on-going use of the resultant scale on-site at music festivals was recognised and opportunities identified for further scale development to explore AMDDN perceptions off-site
Twangs for the Memory
Full text linkReview of three CD compilations: Middle Earth: The Soundtrack of London’s Legendary Psychedelic Club 1967-69 (3CD, Cherry Red); Jingle Jangle Morning: The 1960s Folk Rock Explosion (3CD, Cherry Red); Motor City is Burning: A Michigan Anthology 1965-1972 (3CD, Cherry Red
Remembering Jennie Moore
Full text linkThis chapter explores the methodological challenges and concerns connected to researching the story of Jennie Moore, who lived as a trans woman in the North East of England in the early twentieth century. We consider and address questions and challenges around how we can talk about Jennie’s life and gender non-conformity without using language that is anachronistic, or imposes contemporary ideas of identity on the past, yet still enables us to talk about her as a trans ancestor in ways that are relevant to trans lives in the present. As a research project that emerged as a collaboration with performance artist Tom Marshman, we consider the contributions of taking multidisciplinary approaches to remembrance and storytelling. We examine the ways in which language is used to construct narratives about historic gender non-conforming lives, particularly when Jennie’s voice is absent, and the only sources that are available about her life are transphobic and transmisogynistic newspaper reports or criminal records. We look at the ways these sources embody Jennie, and attempt to identify and disentangle her agency from within the materials available. We assert the importance of this necessarily messy work. We argue that we can learn from the continuities and discontinuities of trans experiences of incarceration in present struggles to dismantle harmful carceral structures
Ritual Invocations of Elemental Beings: Listening Beyond Productive Fertility alongside Ithell Colquhoun
No full textRitual Invocations of Elemental Beings: Listening Beyond Productive Fertility alongside Ithell Colquhoun explores the intersections of sound, voice, and (non)motherhood, extending into questions of ecology, occult practice, and feminist critique. Building on earlier research into dark sound and the ways misogyny is inscribed in cultural discourse about sound and the female voice, the project considers how the binary of fertility and barrenness underpin gendered violence, biopower and colonial capitalist extractivist attitudes toward the planet.
Through a pre-recorded sound essay, the project draws on the work of surrealist and occultist painter Ithell Colquhoun, whose automatic techniques correspond with elemental forces. These techniques are translated into sound improvisation by four musicians prompted by a ritual invocation which sought to invite and manifest elemental forces—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—as agencies other than the human. These improvisations were framed and informed by Pauline Oliveros’s practices of deep and quantum listening, in dialogue with Colquhoun’s techniques and painting; the ritual invocation transformed the studio into an organic “alcove” of encounter with non-human energies.
Colquhoun’s techniques reveal what she referred to as the “mantic stain,” where elemental force and divine knowledge is revealed through material process. In the ritual improvisation, this gave rise to a “mantic melody” which was, in turn, carried into a Beltane ritual performed in Cornwall on the dawn of May Day morning 2025. Set within the context of climate crisis, the project uses sound, listening and ritual to question dominant value systems tied to productivity and fertility, and to imagine alternative futures and interspecies relations that resist extractive and binary logics
‘Torches aloft’ to Glastonbury
Full text linkCultural heritage in Cornwall, UK – as with the other case study contexts and many other regions in Europe – sits in a sometimes uneasy relationship with the national majority culture. Romanticised idylls of ‘picture postcard’ beaches and fishing villages abound in tourism narratives, and the authorised heritage discourse functions to shape much of the way that Cornwall’s distinctive heritage is voiced – or, just as often, is not. Building on the understanding that the way heritage is talked about has a ‘material consequence that matters’, in this chapter Hodsdon and Moenandar analyse how public discourse of media and tourism and hospitality websites mediates two events in Cornwall (Penzance’s Golowan and Padstow May Day). They find a lack of consistency in narratives that range from erasure to othering, and present a model of heritage mediation that describes the range of positionalities on offer, and which can also potentially be used as a tool by discursive actors seeking to describe minority ICH appropriately
Coziness in Games: Second Homes, Audiences and Esthetics
Full text linkThe “Cozy” game has gained traction as a concept in contemporary game culture as a set of formal generic features. While we examine the way that Cozy Games are often now defined as a genre, we demonstrate that “coziness in games” has widespread formal and engagement functions and can be experienced in a whole range of games, not simply those defined by the Cozy genre. In focusing on the player–text relationship, and in using a literary model, we seek to widen the discourse and range of meanings of coziness in, as well as of, games. This approach enables us to think about our own lived experience of playing games in terms of the generation of affect, as well as opening the way for renewed analysis of representation, ideology, and cognition
Uncertain Futures
Full text linkA fragmented story featuring Micah Moorcock's open-source character Jerry Corneliu