Ravenser Odd Psychogeographical Society

The Ravenser Odd Psychogeographical Society

1

This album / collection / fanzine / pamphlet is a selection of non-academic creative-ish writings done in the past five years. I don’t find the protracted and painful sparring with the self, involved in ‘professional’ writing easy. The electricity in those written words derives from a magnetic field of knowledge and obscurantism disturbed by a powerfully spinning rotor of self-loathing.

However in the past I have been a prolific fanzine writer and blogger, with this type of writing coming much more readily to me. Phrases and whole chunks of verbiage come to me when I’m looking for a lost fork in the draining soapsuds of the washing up. When I write easily, I write speedily and don’t tend to edit very much, precisely the opposite of art writing, those neatly manicured spaces compared to this brownfield wasteground of faulty memories, rusty facts and abandoned shopping trolleys.

These writings stretch back to the period before the coronavirus pandemic and have been updated / altered to reflect these altered realities. For those locked away and lucky enough to be able to work from home during 2020/21, there was a chance to reflect and re-engage with the imagination a little, in a way that had seemed impossible before the enforced societal pause. As ghost planes flew overhead and ghost trains ran with only mechanical screeching and litter as passengers, we were obliged to take imaginary journeys in our mind, our social lives stuck in isolation the fast-setting resin of lockdown life.

In some ways it was a very distant sonar ping of the childlike imagination, lost in dark silt beneath a slow-moving river of lived experience. It meandered in different ways; imagining journeys you were unable to make, or continuing to find out about places and people who you’d begun to discover, and continuing those inquiries remotely.

The very few people who know me well know that I am just as passionate about peripheries, edgelands and psychogeography as I am about historical and contemporary art. Psychogeography can produce quick molehills on the lawns of the most well-ordered mind. In some ways moles, the near-blind soft furry critturs with massive diggy hands, that tunnel desperately on a daily basis whilst consuming half their body weight in grubs and worms to stay alive, are like our post digital selves; ever more immersed in digging deeper into algorithmically shaped interests as a means of surviving Real Life™, and knowing even less about it.

Of course, there’s no such thing as the Ravenser Odd Psychogeographical Society, and indeed Ravenser Odd, the pirate port whose remains are now at the bottom of the River Humber, was last on a map six hundred and thirty years ago.

2

But the fate of Ravenser Odd and it’s butterfly existence built on shifting sandbanks, as explained below, are quite an apt metaphor for the shaky environmental, political and social reality we all currently have to inhabit. Trying intensely to respond to a place that no longer exists in the playful research of psychogeography may quite closely resemble our various individual and collective attempts to re-construct another reality that no longer exists; the one before covid.

As well as the hauntological, the psychogeographical, there’s writing here about steel, rivers, listening, football, places you’ve never heard of and will probably never visit.

Almost certainly, none of it matters. But what is creativity other than luxuriating in the opulent position of being able to do nothing that matters?

Jon Blackwood October 2023

Cover Image : Marie-Chantal Hamrock, Ravenser Odd, 2023

Thank You: I have been joined in this endeavour by Marie- Chantal Hamrock, whose drawing of Ravenser Odd adorns the front cover- you’ll find another of Marie’s drawings, specially produced for this fanzine, inside, and I thank her very much for taking part in this. I am very grateful as always to Maja Zećo for her help with designing this, and for everything else besides.

3

Cuttings from the Edge of Oblivion “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks) Uppies and Downies Every Easter weekend, in the old port and steel town of Workington in North West Cumbria, there’s a three-day game of football. The heavy ball is of dun leather and inscribed in an old Victorian font. Only victory is defined, the manner of victory is not; should the Uppie men of the east side of town hail the ball three times at the capstan in Workington harbour; or the downies, from the west side, perform that feat at the gates of Curwen Hall Parklands, a goal is scored, and the game is over.

It’s a great marauding scrum predating an industrial past that’s now largely been forgotten. The game often involves up to five hundred participants a side and there are no rules at all. Police warn visitors to the town centre that they may be caught up and hurt in the fast-moving brawl.

The ancient game swept even Tesco away; a planning application for one of their new twenty-four hour non-places, beamed down from outer space onto on a critical stretch of land, was rejected after a long and bitter arm-wrestle with locals.

The new Tesco, in a key battleground between generations of Uppies and Downies, would have brought the whole ritual to an end, and councillors daren’t have signed that off. It was one of the few goals scored by local “downies” against the “uppies” of global capital. Their goal stands, for now.

Surveillance Geographies These days, the UK resembles a giant game of Uppies and Downies; a territorial war of all against all, with no rules, no goals, not even a ball. The veneer of the old is becoming thinner by the week and barely masking the emergence of something new, which no one can yet define.

We are living in a state of permanent upheaval in late capitalism; as the system begins to destroy the very supporting structures that maintained it. Pessimists are already reading our time as an actually existing dystopia, but we haven’t seen anything yet.

George Soros speaks of a coming era of “radical disequilibrium”; the inadvertent undermining of old democratic structures by new technology, the gaming of an analogue system by digital natives, for profit and influence. Leading American investor, Warren Buffett, has stated that “There’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making the war, and we’re winning.”

The neoliberal subject- self-focused, defined by geographies of consumption, myopically mobile- remains indifferent. The maintenance of surveillance capitalism depends on individuals collectively choosing indifference to the other.

Workington Uppies & Downies Ball

4

The mushrooming of cameras, data mining, our inability to set aside convenience and speed, our embrace of Alexa and Google Home, our collective shoulder-shrugging when confronted with the consequences of surveillance capitalism, to those who have to get dirty making its instruments, in nappy-wearing zero-hours gulags from Dunfermline to Longhua; being marshalled down the never ending mirrored corridors of identity politics and single issue hashtag campaigns; clapping along at industrial-scale intellectual property theft by AI; the claws of surveillance capitalism tear deeply our old sea-charts of empathy and solidarity.

5

Imagining A World without Growth Where will the indifferent neoliberal subject go when economic growth is over?

Bizarrely we insist on trying jump-start the flat batteries of “entrepreneurialism” and “career” just as all the dreams of a home owning share owning middle class future evaporate as though they never existed. We are in the last stages of capitalism; the part where Marx predicted that capitalism would begin to east away at the structures that supported it.

We are moving to a world after carbon, if there is to be a future world at all. Given the dependence of capitalism and economic growth on abundant, cheap energy, this also means that we are moving to a world after growth; a world without growth is a world without business as we know it, entrepreneurs, stock markets. It’s a world where the current art market we all try to make a living in will be swept away, a little-noticed casualty.

The coming automated revolution inevitably means that many more people will have much more time on their hands as old occupations are scattered and made obsolete.

The ending of a very dark quarter century may well depend on how people use this time, and with what consequences; whether they will be able to use this time through something like Universal Basic Income, or whether (pessimistic version) the war of all against all will intensify, with an ever-narrowing subset of “winners” fighting ever harder to keep closed their gated communities from everybody else.

Self-evidently radical populism, fashioned by moneyed elites in the name of the people, will not answer the messy problems of an unravelling globalisation.

The bloody end of neoliberal capitalism coupled with the climate emergency means that commonly authored solutions to urgent social and political problems, at local level, will not be a radical political demand; simply they will be an unavoidable response to profoundly changed intellectual, physical and political geographies.

How future solutions are commonly authored, by whom and to what plan will shape the future we (may) have. Whilst artists won’t be in the lead in these seismic political shifts, in the period after capital, they will be innovative, valuable interlocutors. Artists in this emerging ecology will still have time to dream and to make. What’s far less certain is if anyone other than fellow artists will be listening.

It follows on logically that in such an altered political ecosystem, the role of the artist will change fundamentally as will the support structures that sustain their work. There won’t be a self-branding “practice” anymore; art will simply be work, again.

The most challenging work of the future will be based on deeply human responses to the needs of communities by artists embedded in them, and shaped and refined by the dialogue that results. “Elite” art- should it still exist as a category- empty objects on super-rich walls, applied with a soothing poultice of honeyed words whispered by dishonest intellects- will be made by algorithms. Those who insist on ploughing such individual furrows will be paid, deservedly, in indifference.

Workington & Scunthorpe Rails “Workington Rails hold the world together”.

Optimistically, future geographies will be commonly shaped and commonly owned.

The real threat to our physical geography- climate change- can only meaningfully be solved at a global level. This can be paralleled, on an intellectual level, by returning to the so-called peripheries, the local, moving away from the heavily-surveilled urban centres, and beginning to re-discover the values of local control and local democracy away from an atrophying political centre.

Moving beyond the notion of “career”, using technology only when absolutely necessary, and trying, wherever possible, to re-establish meaningful relationships between ourselves, and other species. The technology-driven loss of human empathy and consequent atrophy of the emotional register is as big a danger to our collective future as the melting of the polar ice caps.

6

7 Scunthorpe Rails

If you’d been alive and on a train any time until quite recently, it’s very likely that your carriage would have been screeching along rails made in Workington. In the industrial age, it was the one product the town was famous for. Hard blue ore from Ennerdale Water, and around West Cumbria, found their way into the steelworks’ Bessemer Furnaces. The specification saw these rails snake all over the world, the iron filaments of commerce, made in a town few had heard of, let alone could find on a map. Even although the steelworks was demolished a dozen years ago, Workington rails continue to be made today, albeit in Scunthorpe. It’s said that the Scunthorpe steelworkers made a complete pig’s ear of trying to make rails initially, and had to be advised by a tut-tutting delegation of soon to be unemployed master railmakers from the NorthWest. So, now Scunthorpe rails hold a much smaller British world together.

In late capitalism towns such as these have been forgotten, even sneered at, in metropolitan centres. Our ignorance of the peripheries and their discontents have resulted in some of the political convulsions of the last decade. In the future, as

the metropolitan centres become ever more unaffordable, as actions become ever more watched over and we self-censor without realising it, it is in the peripheries where we will find the most potential to re-engage on a human level and re-imagine what creativity could and should be, in response to the needs and thoughts of those around us.

In the 2020s, the map that has guided artists and their successors emerging from art schools since the early 1990s is being shredded, as capitalism slowly claws its own face off. The tragic events in Ukraine since 24 February 2022, the ongoing sporadic conflict in Nagorno Karabakh, the awful, intractable tragedy in Gaza, heating tensions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and echoing threats from banks of powerful speakers across the waters from Taiwan, are the morbid symptoms of this present era.

Set against the backdrop of an increasingly hot and angry climate, a new collective imaginary, away from the metropolitan centres, a recognition that the past obsessive focus on individual aspiration and responsibility is making our current symptoms worse not better, is a crucial step.

We just need to give this time. I’m not sure we have it, but there’s no other way. (first appeared in HAAR, 2018, edited and update for 2023)

Scunthorpe, Shoplifting, Squatting, Steel (2023) “Places are different: Subtopia is the annihilation of the difference by attempting to make one type of scenery standard for town, suburb, countryside and wild. So, what has to be done is to maintain and intensify the difference between places. This is the basic principle of visual planning. It is also the end to which all the other branches of planning- sociology, traffic circulation, industry, housing hygiene- are means.

So wrote the architectural critic Ian Nairn in a special issue of Architectural Review entitled Outrage! In June 1955. There’s much in this fascinating short essay that is really resonant still today. Nairn’s problem was the increasing standardisation of towns across the UK into endless, dreary, featureless suburbs, illustrated in his essay by pictures of the roads into Southampton and Carlisle, 400 miles apart at either end of England. The photographs- a largely empty road, telegraph poles, and rows of redbrick two up two down houses- were seen by Nairn as a symptom of indifference to our surroundings and loss of awareness of what made the places where we live, special. “Subtopias” were the flattening of difference, the concreting over of the individual, the loss of the intangible in a series of commodified simulacra of the authentic.

8 Borough Park, Workington AFC

9

South of the Humber, subtopia isn’t experienced until the outskirts of Scunthorpe which could come directly from Iain Nairn’s essay. North Lincolnshire, south of the Humber, appears at first glance to give little reason to detain anyone overlong. It’s a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else; from the always-grinding superport at Immingham, north of Victorian Grimsby’s friendly-psychotic seaside bear-hug; to the former coalfields of Yorkshire. North of the Humber, the M62 forms a similar function, linking two post-industrial parallels; the great port of Hull with the former Cottonopolis, canal criss-crossed Manchester.

Surrounding Scunthorpe are many overwritten place names from past times that don’t have any purchase in the present, beyond folk memory, micro-identity, myth and a niche appeal to niche tourism. One such is the fearsome sounding but gently peaty Isle of Axholme, which isn’t an Island at all. The Humber Estuary is full of similar place names that pull at the threads of a blood-filled, complex past; Thorngumbald, Barrow Haven, Dragonby, Swinefleet.

We like to think of our surroundings as fairly permanent and long outlasting us. We, our communities, our towns, our histories are just epehemera. We’re grains of sand.

5,000 years ago, the Humber area was a glacial lake; gradually, the water receded and dense oak forests grew on the land. Then the water returned, a bog was formed and the Isle of Axholme, a small geographical area with a few villages in between presentday Gainsborough and Scunthorpe, emerged. The land was a spectacular peaty wetland, nourished by the Humber, with rich fertile commons that locals had access to. A nice bucolic story, at least until the mid seventeenth century.

Enter the floridly named Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch water engineer who had already made a name building a sea wall in Dagenham and reclaiming enough from the Thames to form the present-day Canvey Island (there is a school named after him there). His reputation on the Isle was less of Axholme was less well irrigated.

10

King Charles I held significant land rights in the area, and granted a permit to Vermuyden to drain the wetlands and expand the area of cultivatable land.Vermuyden set about the work with gusto, bringing in engineers and water experts from Holland and Flanders, in the teeth of local outrage and opposition. The opposition was to the loss by the local people of their right to common pasture and the threatening of the peat that they burnt for fuel. Vermuyden’s work was only partially successful and left a different wetland legacy. Tpday, the Isle is managed by a water drainage board, which keeps an eye on potential flooding and also maintains both natural and Vermuyden-influenced water courses. The landscape is full of bubbling weirs, low-hum pumping stations and sluices; this continues a few miles to the North West, where the River Ouse joins the great Humber at Goole. There spooky lighthouses that double as Dr.Who-style monsters from 1960s nightmare mark the merging of the rivers; a strange still industrial landscape of unusual verticals and landmarks.

Iain Nairn Subtopia Illustration, Architectural Review, 1955

11

The “Isle” is now a small patch of land bounded by four rivers- Trent, Don, Idle and Torne- and bisected into northern and southern halves by the motorway. Ancient traditions live on, such as the bizarre game of the “Haxey Hood”- a version of the Workington Uppies and Downies, played with a hood instead of a ball. Conducted by a Fool and “The Boggins”, the aim seems to be to try and drop a hood into one of four pubs in Haxey, that gives the island its name. It’s all good-humoured and perhaps a little bit less roid-headed than Uppies and Downies in the North West, but a patina of the past that gives a lustre to an otherwise unremarkable rural present. East of the Isle if the glowing night time skies of Scunthorpe.

How to solve a problem like Scunthorpe? In the early days of the internet residents of the town became exasperated when their searches were blocked by false positive obscenity filters (the internet was a serious business back then, and there was more time to nurse an irritation to keep it warm).

The issue of course was the presence of what many consider to be the Worst Word In The English Language in the town’s name- an unfortunate mutation, perhaps, from its origins in the old Norse Skumasþorp (Skuma’s homestead). Apocryphal past tales abounded of a prudish group of local Tories and Justices of the Peace calling for the town to be re-named Shorpe to address the difficulty, raucously opposed by a grassroots campaign rather baldly entitled Keep the Cunt in Scunthorpe.

Scunthorpe’s a steel town of about 80,000 people, which came into existence in the middle of the nineteenth century to exploit iron ore that had been found in the area.

It’s still perceived as a troubled monotown, dependent on the ailing fortunes of British Steel, whose sprawling works dominate the skyline to the east of the town centre.

After Victorian ironmaster & Tory parliamentarian Rowland Winn discovered iron ore in North Lincolnshire in the 1850s, the town, previously a rural hamlet like so many south of the Humber, sprung up very rapidly. Pig iron making and early steel making were very dangerous and hot, and workers poorly paid. The successive furnaces and chimneys of the North Lincolnshire Iron Company, in the late nineteenth century, spelt rapid technological development paid for in mens’ lives and breakneck extractivism, and the settling of a crust of convention on the molten development of a new industry. Those crusts today still exist but are somewhat stale. Traces of institutions founded at the turn of the nineteenth century- the co-op, the working mens’ institute- exist only as signs today on decaying brick walls.

12

Marie-Chantal Hamrock Haxey Hood and the Blast Furnace 2023

The four blast furnaces of the present works haven’t been in use together for some time, but they are all functional, and known as the “four queens of ironmaking”; Queen Mary and Bess were put up by the Appleby-Frodingham Iron Company in 1938, with the newly publicly owned British Steel building Queens Anne and Vicky in 1954.Vicky claimed the lives of eleven men in 1975, in a horrifying accident involving an explosion of molten metal. Steelmaking, in keeping with all heavy

13

extractive industry, is hot, dangerous, deafening, relentless, and exhausting. It can also be beautiful; livid bars of molten iron on the rollers like shimmering synchronised swimmers; symmetrical glowing orange arcs emerging in an endless pattern from a burning hot metal whale mouth.

and public ownership of important industry a fairy story, the name lives on as a corporate zombie-brand, currently owned by a Chinese steelmaker after years of being on life support and run by government appointed “special commissioners”. The UK government hasn’t had an industrial strategy worthy of the name for decades, so Scunthorpe can be seen as a neglected war veteran waiting for orders from a long dead commander, unaware that the war’s over.

The Four Queens of Ironmaking, Scunthorpe But in the UK the industry is all but extinguished, with only Scunthorpe and Port Talbot in Wales left producing steel. Blochairn, Coatbridge, Consett, Corby, Ebbw Vale, Gartcosh, Hartlepool, Merthyr Tydfil, Middlesbrough, Motherwell (Ravenscraig), Newport (Llanwern), Pontlottyn, Redcar, and Workington, amongst many others, are all now post-industrial “ex steel towns”, grey retail boxes and edgeland warehouses, ringed in sodium lights and razor wire fences, replacing the once dominant mills. In some of these locations nothing has come to replace the demolished steelworks, leaving a darkened scar of heavily contaminated land, scars that no “enterprise zone” lotions can soften..

Heavy energy costs, a global glut of steel production, the high costs of environmental mitigation for heavy industry, are all blamed. With the old British Steel long gone,

14

15 Ray Lonsdale, Steelworkers Sculpture, 2018

Ray Lonsdale’s Steelworkers sculpture in the town centre, showing a woman on a bicycle putting her hand on a smoking flat capped man’s shoulder, speaks of a “debt that can never be repaid” to the generations of steelworkers. Both Scunthorpe and Port Talbot are wraith-like towns, post-industrial industrial cities, expecting the worst but somehow hoping for the best.

Since the Chinese took over, the dwindling workforce- now 4,300 as compared to nearly 20,000 in the 1960s- has been fearful of “being next”. Some told me that they bailed out in the late seventies, not being able to stand the “death by a thousand cuts” that gathered pace under Thatcher. Brexit was strongly supported

by Scunthorpe in 2016, two to one voting in favour of leaving. The future of steel was a big factor; a proposed rationalisation of steel production across the Eurozone, envisaged in a gigantic co-operation between Germany’s ThyssenKrupp and India’s Tata, would have seen the end of steelmaking in the UK, had Britain remained part of the European Union.

Alongside this map of loss, there’s another, less visible map of presence. Workington rails don’t connect the world now, Britain’s rather smaller contemporary world runs on Scunthorpe rails. Scunthorpe steel is the skeleton of the Shard in London, the shaping of the Olympic stadium, and in thousands of less noteworthy building projects Europe-wide. Scunthorpe steel built the football club’s main stands at the Old Show Ground, and the new Glanford Park at the outskirts of town in the late 1980s.

Scunthorpe steel, however invisible and hidden beneath breezeblock or threading the filigree line in glass palaces of commerce, is everywhere, but visible nowhere.

But no town, even a monotown, is defined just by one thing. Scunthorpe has a real subcultural undercurrent that few are aware of. The canonical British gangster movie, Get Carter, was made in 1970/71 and famously set against a backdrop of a shipbuilding Newcastle and Gateshead that simply doesn’t exist, fifty years on. But the film was based on a best selling crime novel entitled Jack’s Return Home, written by Ted Lewis, and was set in Scunthorpe.

The steelworks and the seedier side of working class culture is ever present in the novel; Jack Carter “does the tyres on the Jag” in the car park of Scunthorpe United’s Old Show Ground- now a supermarket; his foe “Thorpey” falls to his death on the slippery stairs of Scunthorpe baths; Carter himself meets his single gunshot end not on a coal-slag beach further up the coast, but by the banks of the River Humber.

Interestingly, Scunthorpe is never actually named in the novel, which made it easier for director Mike Hodges to move the film adaption north to Tyneside.

Ted Lewis died far too early, killed by alcohol and tobacco. When he was a small boy, growing up in nearby Barton-on-Humber, Scunthorpe had another claim to fame just as unlikely as the novel he was later to write.

16

Ted Childs Jack’s Return Home, 1970

Just after the end of the second world war, as a result of the number of returning services personnel and a chronic shortage of public housing, a national squatters’ movement was born in the town. A cinema projectionist, Mr James Fielding, who had been sleeping in the cinema where he worked, turned in desperation to occupying a hut in an abandoned anti-aircraft base. Within a month over 2,000 people had occupied the camp, which was run by a council / central committee, in a state of “orderly unlawfulness”.

17

James Fielding, 1946 Squatters’ movements quickly made common cause with the Scunthorpe pioneers in Sheffield, Glasgow, and particularly London, where the lack of available housing stock and profiteering, amoral landlords were blamed- conditions that resonate very strongly with the early 2020s. By late 1946 over 30,000 people had occupied 920 former military sites and empty luxury housing around the UK, in a remarkable spirit of solidarity and simply taking what they felt was theirs by right. James Fielding was interviewed for a sympathetic Pathé News clip; Fielding and the Scunthorpe Squatters’ action was the first in a bitter struggle for quick solutions to the problems of affordable working-class housing in a war damaged country struggling to turn quickly to the conditions of peace.

Ghost Sign, Scunthorpe, 2018 Issues of housing scarcity, poor living conditions, government inaction and the desire to take collective action in response resonates very strongly with our time. There’s an echo of that sentiment in present day Scunthorpe. A few years back, when I was first spending a bit of time on Humberside, someone had stencilled up in strategic points all over the town centre, the legend SCUNTHORPE WELCOMES CAREFUL SHOPLIFTERS. Five years later, the local authorities have hit back with “rules” of their own for the town’s High Street: NO HANGING ABOUT OR DODGY DEALING #lovescunthorpe.

Best we were moving along, then.

Solutions were eventually found in putting up quick prefabricated housing and in the longer term building the New Towns of the late forties and early fifties. Several “tin houses” designed by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd (best know for Liverpool’s “Wigwam” cathedral) and made by the British Iron & Steel Federation still stand around Scunthorpe today, most now in private ownership. They’re still popular, and have lasted a lot longer than their envisaged sixty year lifespan.

18

19

Listening to Rivers (2020-23) An hour and a quarter of intense listening is quite a dislocating experience; a strange fusion of sounds normally met with indifference. What became immediately obvious is how much motor engines dull and flatten sound palettes. Thirty years ago motor engines used to sound very different (you could tell a guttural Volvo apart from a reedy Fiat by the difference in exhaust note). Now with engines standardised to meet environmental regulations, a city centre noise in daytime is an intrusive fuming monotone; the barely perceptible hum of the electric motor is noticeable now, but not yet the dominant note.

Rivers form natural borders; are markers of historical time; lend their names to culture and sports; facilitate industry and leisure; and are sites of psycho-geographical imagination, as well as providing habitat for thousands of species and a workplace for those who make their living extracting from, and trading through, the sea.

During lockdown’s approved one hour of exercise a day, we were reminded of what life was like before cars and what it will be like soon enough, without internal combustion engines. Walking in the times of COVID became filled with the very noises that working infrastructure over-writes; bird song, bells, murmured conversation, footsteps, the ghostly pips of underemployed road-crossings, the strange awareness of your physical self-walking in a public space. The absence of the car engine in those times was tangible; the kind of urban atmosphere normally only experienced during a city walk on Christmas Day. The re-emergence of pre-lockdown sounds in recent times has, like so much else, been troubling and unsettling.

Sound-walking in Aberdeen makes me think about urban rivers and how much we are indifferent to them. Two generations ago it would have been hard to have lived in Aberdeen, to say nothing of the Shire, without knowing at least someone who made their living directly or indirectly from the river or the harbour. To know a river is to read the palm of the people that inhabit the land that is nourished by it. Trace the River Ugie from its mouth at the North Sea in Peterhead inland to its origins at Ugie Water north-west of Longside and you’ll have a densely knotted story of land ownership, exclusive wealthy hamlets, staggering wealth disparity, agriculture, fishing, extraction, delicate interspecies dependency, unique wetlands at Rora Moss, high end tourism, the hinterland to the biggest white fish port in Europe. It’s a disorientating landscape of huge skies on a good day- the sorts that are normally only seen down in Thanet or at Morecambe Bay- and an unsettling procession of buildings from tumbledown farm cottages and outbuildings to the inscrutable infrastructures of oil, gas, mobile phone networks, and waste disposal.

But in the post-industrial, digital, socially distanced present, rivers are the backdrop to an outdoor chat, the location of a nice pub lunch, lurking unfocused in the background of an instagram-bound photo burst. We rarely stop to consider how rivers and waterways actually live and make lives possible. Sound walking is one way of beginning to think this through.

20

The River Humber looking towards the North Sea, July 2018 I remember two summers ago standing by the vast River Humber at Barton, located on it’s south bank. The river was dank brown on a misty morning, heavy with the agricultural run off from the River Ouse to the North and Trent to the south; these two great rivers become the Humber just east of industrial Goole’s quirky little harbour, about thirty miles west. The soundscape was dominated distantly, by motor noise from the giant Humber Bridge, vanishing into the mist before invisible Hull on the river’s opposite bank; a distant ship’s horn sounded, ululating over the crunching footsteps of fellow walkers. The great river, sepia-toned in brown and grey, yawned as it met the mist, with the last marker of land, Spurn Point, also shrouded beyond sight.

21

paintings of racehorses or the awkward portraits of retired football players in club boardrooms.

Rivers also give birth to words. In French, the word bérézina is used for catastrophe.

The origins of the word are in a river in present-day Belarus. It was here in November 1812 that Napoleon Bonaparte’s retreating Grand Armée was trapped, by Russian forces under Kutuzov and Wittgenstein. Napoleon had planned to cross the Berezina river, which according to calculations should have been frozen solid by this time in the winter. Unfortunately, the river was not at all frozen, and was too wide and deep to cross. The river was a natural barrier that spelt terrible danger for the French.

Thomas Girtin The White House at Chelsea 1800 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/ N04728 Painting from nineteenth century realism to the modernism of the early twentieth century also leaned heavily on the river as a motif. From 1800, when Thomas Girtin painted the White House at Chelsea (Tate), to Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver : The Cremorne Lights in 1872, the river was presented as an urban scene of quiet night time reflection, wonder and lurking danger. Whistler’s series at Wapping focused on a now vanished industrial hinterland associated with the Thames, a theme picked by the Glasgow Boy painter George Henry in his moonlit depiction of the River Clyde, stilled industry and smoking chimneys harshly exposed in a steely midnight light.

Jack B Yeats’ picture The Liffey Swim, painted just after the last global pandemic was fading from memory, in 1923, shows a river at it’s most sociable and sporting. The tidal river Liffey runs through Dublin; the annual swim event takes place between July and August every year over a set course, with hundreds of male and female participants. The first swim took place one hundred years ago this month, and takes place at high tide, to minimise the exposure of the swimmers to pollution.

Yeats’ painting invited the viewer in to join an excited crowd as the race reaches it’s climax. In a claustrophobic, shouting crowd that makes us feel a little tense in our times, we strain with our peers from 100 years ago to see who is likely to win.

Thinking of sport, this artwork, strangely, was the recipient of newly independent Ireland’s first Olympic medal- a silver. Sporting Art was an Olympic category between 1912 and 1948, although nowadays, it’s more of a term of disdain for bad

22

The River Berezina, Belarus

23

The battle laid as heavily on the European imagination as Waterloo did for the British, even if it was far from decisive. Napoleon lost over 20,000 men killed or wounded, being saved only by the ingenuity of Dutch engineers and the sacrifice of a Swiss division at the rear of his lines. It was written about by Tolstoy in War and Peace (rather dismissively, as he didn’t think the battle was anything like as decisive as historians liked to present it) and from the point of view of an ordinary French soldier by Honoré de Balzac in The Country Doctor, as well as in innumerable nineteenth century history paintings.

Today this wonderful river is a listed UNESCO biosphere, abundant with fish, beavers and wildlife, lazily winding it’s way through central Belarus to a merger with the industrial Dneiper, and eventually through Ukraine to the Black Sea. These past stories of military disaster, the hot iron and oil metallic stink of weaponry, the screams of the wounded and dying, have a tragic echo in the events of today, where petroauthoritarianism and the incurable virus of human hubris have visited another entirely deluded, sociopathic and amoral slaughter on the territory of Ukraine. The Berezina and the lovely countryside of Belarus is inaccessible currently, the present illegitimate dictatorship there welded to Russia for reasons of self-preservation. Rivers and seas endure beyond conflict, although often wounded and altered by them, as we saw with the destruction of the Nova Kakhova dam, an arid act of ecocide.

Rivers also inform our sense of local identity and belonging, even if we don’t notice it.

We live in a city bounded by rivers to the North and the South, and the North Sea; we negotiate these barriers daily, unseeing. Rivers give their names to cafes, dance halls, companies; football fans across Europe, from itinerant Clyde in Glasgow to Vardar in Skopje to Isloch in Minsk, chant the names of their favourite team forgetting that they are chanting the name of a river. The unique characteristics of a river can afford local people some pride in their uniqueness. The Bosnian river Neretva, that cuts through the Herzegovinian capital Mostar is the most extraordinary emerald green colour, a visual intensity that makes even the most indifferent stop for a moment to lose themselves in it.

In the last days of the before times, in February 2020, I was able to take a walk along the river Vardar, that runs through the centre of the North Macedonian capital, Skopje. If the early sun setting of a winter Saturday, I walked by its side for about four kilometres, from the ASNOM boulevard through the city centre, up until the point where it merged with the Debar Maalo district where I was staying. The Vardar, a mountain river, is sadly heavily polluted, frequently with a chemical smell attached to it; slow, sluggish and shallow in the heat of high summer, barely a metre deep in the city centre. It’s a river that has briefly given it’s name to a region ( Vardarska) and which has a contempt for the difficult border between North Macedonia and Greece, entering the Aegean by Thessaloniki. It’s a river that defines one country, exits to the sea in another, and haunts the folk music of a third, Turkey, from the times of the

24

Skopje’s River Vardar at sunset, February 2020 Ottoman Empire. The sadness of the river in Skopje is in its abandonment, a postindustrial, unkempt afterthought, left only to occasional walkers and forlorn fishermen desperately hoping to catch something alive.

Thinking through rivers visually, culturally and historically often means thinking about past battles, stories read and told, industries been and gone, visuals seen, a favourite photograph or song. This short essay is an image heavy collage, and deliberately so.

Our experience of sound is the same; a five minute walk round the block will expose you to a messy jumble of sounds seen and unseen, entangled in a ball of sonic wool.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this, try to do so again, this time thinking past the visuals and trying to use your imagination to think through the linked seductiveness of sound. The experience of sound-walking either in support of Maja or on my own, has encouraged me personally to listen much more in the presence of rivers and the creatures that live there. In these times of permanent crises, of algorithmic echo-chamber shouting, pandemics and looming ecocide, this need to listen, carefully, has never been a more urgent task.

25

The Ghost of Ravenser Odd and Spurn Writing (2023)

A Tristram Hillier landscape never painted.

A golden tooth in the Humber’s mouth.

A stitch of sand threaded tight to the land A dangling mandible Delicate filigree of sand traced on shifting browns and greys Sword and ploughshare synthesised in sand A loose claw scratching at the silt A sandpaper tongue dipping in the wetlands.

26

Spurn Point is a sandy stitch in the Humber’s gums. It’s a three and a half mile arabesque line that stretches into the estuary’s mouth, the last finger of land clinging onto the sea. Today it is a nature reserve for walkers and cyclists, but sometime centuries ago it was the location of the lost pirate town, Ravenser Odd.

Ravenser Odd was a flourishing market town built on the Spurn’s shifting sandbanks, and for a while fought a bitter battle with Grimsby, on the opposite bank of the great river, for maritime trade at the beginning of the fourteenth century, using piracy.

Boatmen from Ravenser Odd would intercept cargo and “persuade” the crews to berth in Ravenser Odd, in return for staying afloat and alive. Grimsby- today Scunthorpe’s local rival on the south bank of the Humber- was very concerned for its future during the peak of Ravenser Odd’s success.

The town even sent two MPs to Westminster, grew to over one hundred houses and had a significant church. But events in the fledgling port took an apocalyptic turn by the middle of the 1300s; great tidal surges and high sea levels in the North Sea inundated Ravenser in the thirteen forties, destroying houses, emptying bodies from coffins in the churchyard, and leading a terrified populace to flee; the last abandoned traces of the place were obliterated in the Grote Mandereke (Great drowning of Men) storm and flood that devastated North West Europe and England, in January

27

1362. Ravenser Odd is these days the kind of river legend, the lost locus of a psychogeographical imaginary, it’s material forms scattered and layered, inaccessible in brown estuary silt. The closest we have in this part of the world is the lost fishing village of Rattray, north of Peterhead, with the decimated frame of what was once the village’s St. Mary’s Chapel being the only marker of a whole fishing settlement inundated and swept away by the North Sea at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

panting in mid-thirties temperatures. A scaldingly angry thunderstorm, magicking up standing water on B roads like popcorn in a microwave, cleared the heavy air a little, just past Scunthorpe. Later on, as we headed for the extraordinary Humber Bridge, spanning the great river’s lazy brown swipe in the land, the sky mutated into a queasy acid pink and hallucinogenic double rainbows, as thunder continued to rumble in the distance, sounding like a ghostly unending naval battle.

Past fast re-building Hull, all new flatpack retail spaces and Travelodges, the landscape on the twisting B-road from Withernsea to the end of the road is extraordinary, a science fiction of renewable energy infrastructure, telephone masts and modernist decay, the last loaded green and brown brushstroke of the canvas. An ill-advisedly driven electric blue Corsa, nearly new, had met it’s end on a tight hedgerow hairpin, carapace crushed by a clumsy or pissed driver; it was swaddled in POLICE AWARE tape, awaiting being retrieved, crushed and re-purposed.

Spurn’s like a Tristram Hillier landscape, broken concrete, rattling spray-paint-tin yellows and empty paths that become ever sketchier as the end of this narrow curving arabesque of sand is neared. Even full of birdwatchers there for some sort of binocular and notebook-wielding convention, with the car park full, it’s always big enough to feel very empty there.

Recently, academics at the University of Hull started a research project to find the material remains of the port, and there was quite a bit of interest from the media.

For a few days it looked as though significant remains had been found of “Britain’s Atlantis”. And then…nothing. Whatever may be left of medieval Ravenser Odd isn’t being given up that easily, certainly not in the life of a research grant.

Having been fascinated by this story for a long time, I finally got to visit Spurn Point at the beginning of September.You need time to visit- it’s remote and half an hour from the nearest village along some tight unclassified roads with passing places. Despite having spent a lot of time in this part of the world, the day or so needed to visit just hadn’t made itself available.

The weekend had been excruciatingly hot, amidst the unseasonably enjoyable but also frightening loosing of the climate from its moorings, Lincolnshire beery, red faced and

28

29

Spurn is three miles long and a dynamic sandbank. If you don’t time your walk properly, you can be cut off by the tide, and obliged to shelter in a little hut for twelve hours until it recedes. It’s also strange to be walking out on such fragile land in between a river and a sea, at the point where the two meet. Here there are no barriers, customs points or entry visas, just a ceaseless motion between river and sea that will last long beyond any trace of humanity, and it’s absurd pretensions of being in control.

Novy Mir (no. 27)

There’s a real sense here of the interconnectedness of life, and also of it’s fragility.

It’s not just the Ravenser Odd legend, the medieval example of hubris and nemesis, it’s not just the world war two infrastructure- pillboxes and now formless concrete blocks being slowly washed away with the very last remnants of the generation that actually lived at that time; it’s the otherworldliness of walking on a misty day towards the blurry outline of Spurn Point lighthouse not knowing if you’ll make it, or if you’ll have to sit through a high tide on the way back. There’s a danger in this calmness which is thrilling and pacifying at the same time. Amidst the chirruping hedgerows and the lucid bright yellow and purples of the sandbank flowers, there’s a cutting edge not far away. Sometimes it is nice to feel it near you.

The next trick is Spurn on a cold November day, if those prove still to be available.

Rue de la Yougoslavie, Marrakech, Morocco

30

Novy Mir, my podcast / badly mixed collage of electronic music, began in 2016, around the time when a then generation of students and some staff were nurdling about with the idea of a “Gray’s Radio”. There were some podcast-type shows uploaded to soundcloud, and the first-ever Novy Mir was one of them. Of much greater significance was the fusion between our directionless wobbling towards sound output and a crossover between Gray’s students and Aberdeen Student Radio between 2017 and 2019, that led to various experiments on and offline; the techno nights curated at d2, in the basement of Drummond’s, by Jack Murray Brown, Abby Quick and others between 2019 and 2020; various Two Day radio events around Aberdeen hosted variously by ASR and Look Again; and, finally, the online radio station Aerial Community Radio, where Jack & Abby worked with then undergraduate (now London superstar DJ Zema) Molly Black to create a selection of folk who had a practice as DJs, or who just enjoyed playing strange music or fiddling together collages of weird audio clips from youtube and the BBC archives.

This stretched electro-archipelago included a number of great new collaborations

31

with folk beyond the campsues, like with Jill of Fierce Collective; Jill nurtured many of our emerging DJs in. their earliest days, and it showed. There was also Tam Emslie, the eponymous T_A_M, whose gig at the Anatomy Rooms in spring 2022 turned out to be the last big gig of this group of folk.

It was possible to hear some really unusual stuff on Aerial, which made connections around Scotland; the highwater mark being a guest take-over of Glasgow’s Subcity Radio sometime in early 2021. Aerial was an absolute godsend during lockdown; having the deadline of a monthly show put together and listening to the work of others was a vital point of connection within Aberdeen’s DJ /electronica community, but also gave one a reason not to let the bandcamp or beatport account fall into disuse. Many familiar names featured, from Fair Play Crew to the folk behind the current Fine Times events at Spin on Littlejohn Street; spin offs that featured first on Aerial and have continued include Subterra and fellow-travellers Lamium, who of course runs the current Easterly Archive occasional series of experimental music events.

Aerial itself stopped in early 2022, a mixture of tiredness, burn out and the moving away from our city of the core group holding the gig together. So it’s always been in Aberdeen. There’s some desire to bring aerial back to life, but it’s not clear there’s time, as the perpetual present accelerates screeching on a noxious cloud of adrenaline, caffeine, shortening deadlines, distance-challenged friendships, never-offline precarious, nicotine, over-work, short tempers, and fucked-clutch dust.

Indifference to the suffering of others and a determination to press on regardless with your nice life, disengaged and uninvolved, is one of the most chilling features of the present era.

Since Novy Mir-19 we have focused mostly on music from Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Belarus. Many musicians from these territories are now abroad, having fled in the chaotic first days of the invasion. There’s a strong presence of Ukrainians, Belarusians in exile, Armenians, Georgians underpinned by the more familiar metronomic tempos of German, Belgian and French technos. There’s also new music from Cholly, a singer from Swindon who’s somehow ended up on the lively and interesting Werra Foxma label based in Armadale. There’s always a sprinkling of Scottish ambient music, ranging from T_A_M to the Silver Dollar Club to, more historical staples of the genre- Chris Carter, Aphex Twin, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Norway’s Biosphere, Novy Mir mixes usually are fairly ambient for the first half hour or so, and usually pick up for the final part when most people, confronted with the 160bpm stuff from Nine Nines or OMON Breaker, sensibly mutter “Turn that shite aff”.

This one, number 27, is two hours long, and may be the last. I’m not sure with lockdown life fading and the infrastructure that incubated Novy Mir having fallen away, that there’s much point keeping it going. But I am sentimental, so we’ll see.

Download

**

https://shorturl.at/tuLQS

The real “Novy Mir” was a Russian literary magazine which first published Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, a literary revelation of the inhuman misery of the Soviet gulag and the people condemned to try- and often fail- and survive in them. Novy Mir literally means “new world” in Russian, and I chose it to refer to the changed circumstances of our time but also the revelation of “new worlds” through new music. Much of the show’s earlier editions featured electro, techno from around Russia, but the show shifted fundamentally after the events of 24 February 2022.

It’s been painful to see many of the musicians and artists either remain silent about Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, creeping annexation of Belarus, destabilisation of Moldova and malign tinkering in Georgia and Kazakhstan, and sitting on its hands during the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. Somehow it’s simply not possible to foreground or profile the work of such artists, anymore. So it’s hard to see the likes of Nina Kraviz, her Trip label,Vladimir “unfortunately I don’t have the President’s number so I can’t do anything” Dubyshkin, Kedr Livansky, Soft Blade- all staples of the early shows- ever featuring again.

32

33

34