Hey this is Dan. Here's a moodboard of some of the stuff I've been thinking about and working on whilst at the garage this week. Have fun exploring!
Background image credit: Nielsan Bohl
Glorious Technicolor casts a dreamlike spell over Gloucestershire's Stroud valleys in this rather gorgeous short film. Author Laurie Lee, whose 1960 book Cider with Rosie drew on childhood memories of the area, contributes the script for a narration which accompanies painterly images of evergreen scenery, people and industry. At heart a Board of Trade promo for Gloucestershire cloth-making, it's a deliberately soft sell, wrapped up in a gentle, romantic, small 'c' conservative vision of rural idyll.
Beautifully relaxing, this film is also a fascinating study in the branding of UK plc: it was intended especially for overseas distribution, but was also shown in some cinemas at home. Greenpark Productions, who made the film for the Central Office of Information, led the market in 'prestige' sponsored films with slightly arty pretensions. A higher than average budget enabled shooting in Technicolor to show off not just painterly landscape compositions but also richly-coloured cloth. Lee responds accordingly, dyeing his prose a deep purple.
Taken from https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-west-of-england-1951-online
Not far from London, there is a village.
This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present.
It belongs to families dead for generations, and to those who have only recently moved here, such as the boy Lanny, and his mum and dad.
But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, who has woken from his slumber in the woods. Dead Papa Toothwort, who is listening to them all.
My friend Amber recommended this book to me, describing it over text as being "poetic and alive and eerie and sad and tender".
Abandoned car covered by weeds.
Stroud, Summer 2019
Here's an extract from a soundscape I've been working on whilst at the garage. I designed it on ableton so that it's generative and could just keep playing for as long as I kept the programme open, but here's an excerpt of one iteration of it.
I've been thinking a lot about the idealised, postcard-like version of Stroud that ends up in the media. This seems like a good example of it.
Ingrid Pollard, Pastoral Interlude, 1987
'and what part of Africa do you come from?' inquired the walker...' The show I participated in entitled D MAX (1987) was a turning point for me. It was when I first started working on constructed pieces. Pastoral Interlude was made specially for that exhibition. The work is a comment on race, representation, and the British landscape. Pastoral Interlude seems to have a lot of resonance for many people. It began as a way of articulating some of the experiences I had in England. It is really a metaphor, a skeleton on which I explored ideas about place, and where we all fit in.
Taken from https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O107865/pastoral-interludeits-as-if-the-photograph-pollard-ingrid/
Tried some ideas out using a monitor that Jake from Caraboo Projects very kindly lent me for the week, here's a part of something I'm working on at the moment.
Password is 'garage'
"The sampler is the universal instrument, the instrument that makes all other instruments... It's an anachronizer that derealizes time."
Kowdo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun
Shoutout to my cousin Reuben for putting me onto this!
"I didn't know that you were lonely
If you'd have just told me, I'd be home with you
I didn't know that you were lonely
If you'd have just told me, I'd be running down the hills to you"
FKA twigs, home with you