Chronicles of night and Northern Light

The fifth of seven Hallucinatory soundscapes on Mining for Gold, Friday night 22nd May from 11.30pm until 12.30am. A dialogue co-written and jointly performed by Timothy Abbott (coloured sections) and Mark Read (black sections). Presented by Jonny Brown on Resonance 104.4fm. Soundscape by Jonny Brown, Inga Tillere and Jonny Mugwump

Both the words and the subsequent performance are dedicated to Renata de Oliveira. I think and hope she will know why.

These are the Chronicles of Timothy Abbott because of a conscious effort to avoid the pitfalls and pigeon-holes of public perception of my art. To take my degree at face value, I am a bachelor of this art. And any art should not be dismissed on the basis of specific experience. Which adult would never go to the cinema again after watching a film they didn't like? You might not like the director, but you'll see another film.

A man, trapped in his own body, listening to the sound of his blood, streaming round his body in a frantic attempt to bring energy and repair to his battered state.

Much of the battering is of his own making, maybe all of it. For all the street fights and cat fights he has had with others, he has also spent most of his life bringing devastation to his own body, he reckons he got a good return on this investment though.

And who am I to tell anyone else what to do and not to do, I am no-one. Let others speak.

The cliffs are towering above me. But they always have. I was born between these precipices. In the marshland of social acceptability. It may look easy to stand here but it's quite hard to travel through. We stand on a river bank, and yet if I stand by the waters where am I? The river constantly moves so, if I am on the river then I am on a journey, not in a set place.

A temple, he said, and the shadows thrown by the temple, dreamfield, painbag, lovescene, hatestage, miracle jungle under the skin.

her pain birthing you and me, the slow transfiguration of pain into knowing what it means to be.

What exists within that you cannot see? Speech destined to remain unheard but playing out eternally within the cage of physiological or psychological inability but crystal clear to its originator. Even though the glass doesn't shake all the time, it is always resonant. Resonance is a process of searching, finding, destruction and creation. Of looking for and finding the spark. Of mining for gold in the dark. Can you hear it? Sometimes the quietest shockwaves cause the most destruction.

Where beginning and end combine to make a picture, compose a sound reminding you that love is a singing wound.

I see shadows of words, word shadows flicker and sway, stop as if startled, then flow.

This place is before the first word is born, anxious and puzzled, alone, pleadingly simple, tense on the threshold of saying

In the land of no language I beg understanding of shadows, I look, listen, wait to be born in a word on the tip of the tongue, where I wander forever, a guest of the feast of silence, scarred and still.

Loneliness is a special kind of company, it’ll go anywhere with me, I don’t have to ask it, I can feel it close to my heart, snuggling in there, feathery, not rough, but with a kind of cold tenderness I find nowhere else.

I turn from the hill of blood and talk to the mushrooms. So what if I ever reached it.

I’ve been drifting for years, mushrooms at my side, whispering, I’m listening.

Where am I from, where did I learn to drift like this, I’m the sea’s child, so sleep, sleep in the sea, starting to relax where I drift, broken and free.

Resonance. Cadence. Comfort but not the abuse of familiarity. Language makes a place. Languages die without people, and harnessed by people they can invigorate a place and entice new interest. Living, they change and mutate in use, words extracted, destroyed or neglected and recreated.

The underground portion of the mushroom is by far the largest part. This is mainly composed of fibrous strand like material called Mycelia. Some are tiny and so small you cannot see them; others are considered some of the largest single organisms on the planet. One Mycelia found in eastern Oregon was measured at around 2,400 acres and had been living there for about 2,200 years. When logging began in this area the Mycelia was cut through and destroyed.

Nutrients from the minerals and organic material in the soil are broken down by the Mycelia. Many plants form direct links to these Mycelia and through these nutrients are fed to each plant increasing their ability to draw from the soil ecosystem. Carbon from made by the plant is taken up by the Mycelia. It could be said the most of the plant growth on the planet is managed and governed by the relationship between plant and fungi. A continuous exchange of resources that sustains and supports both plant and fungi. An interdependency.

The creative destruction of ecology has always fascinated me, competing species laying down their bases and infrastructure only to be decimated, destroyed or melded in the most unexpected way like the Welsh of Patagonia or the German-dialectual speakers of Santa Catarina's European Valley. Or like the vegetation which covers a surface before a river meanders through and erodes a path.

Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune as if it were a flute,
the fragrance from your mango-groves makes me wild with joy-

Ah, what a thrill!

in the full-blossomed paddy fields,

What a quilt have you spread at the feet of banyan trees and along the banks of rivers!
words from your lips are like Nectar to my ears!

The first person we meet here is a man of science, he tells us what they do in this place.

In this Yaksha town all our treasure is of gold, the secret treasure of the dust. But the gold which is you, the beautiful one, is not of the dust. Sunlight gleaming through the forest surprises no one, but the light that breaks through a cracked wall is quite a different thing.

To see a whole city thrusting its head underground, groping with both hands in the dark. You dig tunnels in the underworld and come out with the dead wealth that the earth has kept buried for ages past.

The jinn of that dead wealth we invoke. If we can enslave him the whole world lies at our feet.

No, you will only drag your life's treasure down amongst the dead wealth of ours.

All creatures fear an eclipse, not the full sun. Yaksha Town is a place under the eclipse. The Shadow Demon, who lives in the gold caves, has eaten into it.

It is not whole itself, neither does it allow anyone else to remain whole. Listen to me, don’t stay here. Go and live happily where people in their drunken fury don’t tear the earth’s veil to pieces.

He was right, that man of science, we had to go, the living heart of the earth gives itself up in love and life and beauty, but when you rend it’s bosom and disturb the dead, you bring up with your booty the curse of its dark demon, blind and hard, cruel and envious. I see now that everyone here in Yaksha Town is either angry, or suspicious, or afraid.

Water courses, natural barriers between clans and nations, driving the human race to the imperative of rejoining as one in the Oresund or over the Tyne. The Liffey and the Irwell, much maligned and rediscovered , uncovered to cities with new energies to explore.

So off we drift, to the land of wine and good food, stylish teens and stroppy footballers, the home of the prince of the holy Roman church.

It is Friday 12^th March 1954. The Bar Aurora. Today is pools coupon day. In Bologna, especially in the centre, there are some bars where you turn up, pick up your pools coupon, sit down at a table off to the side and start filling it in. You can’t do that in our bar, it’s something only outsiders do, because in our place everyone gets involved, it’s a communal ceremony, and to do it well, you need the good luck of many and the experience of a few.

Luck as you know is something you either have or you don’t, but there are things that can help, like the people who have been wearing the same tie to the ground ever since Bologna beat Inter. And if you point out that two easy goals slipped past them at the last home game, they’ll tell you that without the tie we’d have let in at least twice that number, and there's no way you’ll get them to think differently.

Ah yes you’re a poet. Pretty words but I didn’t go to the square for my homeland, strange though it seems. I’m an internationalist. I don’t believe in homelands.

If there is a challenge to police violence I have to get involved. What I am trying to say is, whatever happens in the end we all have to fight our own bosses. I reject all racial and patriotic claims. We’ve had enough of that kind of nonsense, dangerous rubbish about blood and soil, before and during the war.

Fools fought the enemies of today by bankrolling those of tomorrow. They talked of freedom and democracy in OUR country as they devoured the fruits of riots and looting. They were defending the faked image of a planet.

The most frequent genetic ancestor to the people of the UK was from a gap in the frozen world of the ice age in the Basque Country. That gap is called the Iberian Refuge. And most frequently we are diaspora of those refugees. But cause and effect are inverted and historians now argue from where we were displaced, rather than to where we have sought refuge.

It was a realisation that the right balance between comfort and discomfort is what makes somewhere. Whether that somewhere is a physical space or this - the reverberations within your ear drum and the electrical pattern which you interpret as Resonance 104.4fm's Mining for Gold. Some people flee in search of a refuge and end their days still seeking to replace the displaced spirit. Some find refuge in their inner peace. And in those moments, home can be anywhere with the right person, resonating with each other.

We are what we say on the tin, Resonance. Seeking the sounds which spark a reaction. Because in the end, if a place does not resonate with you, you wouldn't be there.

To me I took refuge from the heavy smoking, heavy drinking, insularity of expected English male behaviour into the chronicles of others and of myself. Took a step back from being expected to fit those stereotypes of Englishness and just allowed others to do what they wanted as long as there was reciprocity. I almost said I'm a romantic but that is too narrow, I believe in love of all kinds. That every question has an answer. Every pot has a top. And every language a translation. I believe in the importance of relationships, and it is what has got me here. With my friend Jonny, his girlfriend Inga, his friend Mark and Jonny Mugwump - does that make us friends? I don't know.

At some point, there is more negative energy generated by the running than positive from the being away. Like a shattered marathon runner with a lactic acid debt.

As the conversation drifts so do we to a room upstairs but it could be anywhere on this faked image.

A substance that relaxes the heart and the sphincter, a nectar that eases rebellion in the muscles, fairy tales told to bones and joints. The bitter fruit of papaver somniferum. The hand of a Turk, A Laotian, a Burmese. Firm thumb, sharp blade, latex that touches the air and clots. Brown mush that sticks to the fingers.

Loaves that fill boxes that fill trucks that meet waiting planes or ships. Compliant customs men, blind eyes turned by states and armies, investments passing from bank to bank.

Anyone who thinks that globalisation is a recent development should take a look at the origin of their drugs, both legal and illegal. All that has changed is that the trade is made easier when all sides in between are also friends.

Everyone has their monsters, myths of society which bind people together like Emmanuel Goldstein through a shared sense of fear, fear of the unknown – the original xenophobia – or the deeper unspoken fears of the mind and body, or of its malfunctions.

A kilo of opium becomes 100 grams of morphine, which becomes 25 grams of heroin, which is mixed with talcum powder, plaster of Paris and who knows what else.

Goods that every trader dreams of, the additive that every circulation system yearns for.

Interesting routes. From Turkey to Sicily via Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. From Sicily to Marseilles. From Indo-China to Marseilles on the ships of the foreign legion. From Marseilles to Sicily.

Society renders a mining process of extraction, of destruction to uncover the core, but war? War rips at the heart of the rockface, shatters the strata of order and dissipates the energy flow. Those who create war look at it also as creative destruction, knocking down an old order. But a blank sheet of paper has no writing, and the future cannot be foretold. Everything has meaning, post-war societies simply stand at the dawn of a new structure, surrounded by the ruins of the previous efforts.

The most valuable resources we draw from the earth are gold and drugs and oil. Not in terms of true value, but in terms of what they can be sold for. We travel around the world looking for something. Where ever we go we will find what we chose to see. We take with us our preconceptions and we compare them to the preconceptions of others.

Were all our journeys preconceived? If not, how do we break free of the fate that ties us to always get what we expect?

I am a passionate believer in the power of the media, but that comes with an awareness that people make this 'place', the present-day morass of multiple media. An environment shapes potential perhaps more even than it shapes delivery and it is often commendable that the Robert Fisk and John Pilgers of this world are employed, paid by and frequently syndicated by very definite 'mainstream media'. Working within a corporate canvas often restricts the capacity for expression. The mistake in much media criticism is often to broad-brush all journalism regardless of the actual content.

(and excuse me if I get a little bit pissed, off, by suggestions that we are all the same)

After all, we are on the air, on the pages and on the screens of billions of people around the world.

We are the Resonance of stories untold. Scrabbling through the water, mining for gold.

We drift from an upstairs room above an Italian bar to a smart fifties style office in California. From the Mediterranean to America.

Cary hardly remembers anything. He wakes up. He feels good. Colours are vivid. His movements are fluid, his bones light.

Very Veeerrryy interesting, Monsieur Grant, but anam nesis would be over hasty. I shall administer LSD to you again. Are you available next Tuesday at the same time?

In a sense to return you to your childhood, Monsieur Grant, without the inhibitions of adulthood, beyond the reality principle. You came out with some interesting things, I have to ask you about them, but not now. We’ll meet again next Tuesday.

Cary has discovered how to keep depression at bay. See and Listen. A few drops and every thread in the fabric of the world appears before you.

Ah, the bliss of light bones. I could lie on the floor outstretched in the bliss of nothing, a peak experience just to feel my body unburdened by the weight of the world. Floating on a spirit or suspended within a frame. If you close your eyes, you can still hear Resonance. You can't close your ears. Move easily. Breathe deeply. Everything is deep but your sense of responsibility. Everyone has their monsters, sometimes you need a chemical way out.

What makes a person than an endless process of creative destruction, chipping away or planting the charges that strip back layers of misunderstanding and ignorance to be replaced by new avenues of exploration and understandings of oneself.

Because I believe that every question has an answer, I am still looking for the answer to the question 'where is home?'.

And in 2009, Lancashire, Brixton and Europe are landscapes of the mind: each defined by internal recollections of times past or subjective notions of geography.

Brixton grew up as a suburb, far from the cities of London and Westminster and more attached to the county of Surrey whose prison it hosted. But London expanded down past our studios here in the first area south of the river to be London, Borough, and eventually subsumed the Surrey suburbs. The town has a centre, but the outer-edges are frayed by local politics. Two postcode areas fight for supremacy over the 'place', several council wards and a myriad different subdivisions named of transport links or housing estates take precedence over a sense of Brixton.

Europe's psychological landscape is the most tangled. It has no centre. It has no definitive outer borders and its identity has been almost entirely subsumed by either the econo-political structures of the European Union or the sporting boundaries of UEFA. Geographers will argue that the edges lie with the Bospherous and the Ural Mountains, although they are less clear about the Western extremities. Governmental politics excludes Switzerland, Norway and most notably Russia from the definition of Europe. Despite the long history of all in European pursuits. Sport includes nations such as Israel and Kazakhstan who no observer I have met would consider European, although it also brings those three internally displaced nations back to the table. And the middle ground is ploughed by the Council of Europe, the earliest integrator.

Although there is a detectable difference between north and southern Europe, there is a strong shared history which persists when people are displaced. In the book I just finished, the author concludes by pointing out that everyone in these isles shares some genes with a place outside of these shores. In short, to quote from a recent pro-immigration campaign in Australia, we are all boat people.

Without the voluminous support of people, the European diaspora has reach Singapore and Brasil with barely a comment beyond a further division of the children of the continent into externally constructed groups like Latino/Hispanic or Nordic. As for me, my friends come from both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the equator but are still mostly born or diasporic Europeans. Why do Europeans fail to have an innate sense of brotherhood that expresses itself forcefully through the diaspora, the way Africa's does? Maybe the rise of the Asia's giants will threaten enough to engender a European solidarity.

Every person and every place holds for me a voice or a face that's special. A memory engraved in metal, not sketched and thrown away. Peculiarities make a place. What clothes they wear, what drinks fill their cocktail or pint glasses or their mugs. I believe food has been largely commodified and globalised but drink remains a province of the province. A reminder of which region you are in or at the very least which continent. Or maybe it's the name.

Bacardi once got in trouble for using the historical name for what I would call a rum and coke is apparently a Cuba libre in the Latin world. Bars filled with newcy brown ale or Boddingtons would be greeted with confusion outside of these isles but both are owned by multinational brewers. My own name has led to confusion in Brasil. Despite a mobile network with the same name, I am tcheem.

When I first arrived in London. I was fascinated by the role that the river plays in the psychology of the city. I have enjoyed many a moment on a bridge in London looking up and down the river.

London by the river 2005

London is a city of borders, from the river Thames - which winds its way from West to East creating a pseudo-barrier between 'North' and 'South' in districts of varying socio-economics and geography - to the two cities whose ancient borders straddle the area ostensibly referred to 'central London'.

Whilst Westminster sprawls across much of the 'West End' of London, the name remains synonymous for those outside purely with politics and the Palace and Abbey named after it.

At the other end of the centre is 'the City' - a nickname which itself can seem confusingly paradoxical in an area where regional government is known as "London". At its inception, the City of London was a square mile. This point is marked on the map by Mile End, an area which is not now actually in the City. And then it was the financial centre of London. But then the old London docks were redeveloped and the peculiarly sterile Docklands, through which the DLR light rail trains rattle - suspended on improbable tracks with carriages which look like toys, became a competitor for the title.

There is a socially constructed "Inner" and "outer" London, whose boundaries are almost entirely arbitrary and unusually straddle the Thames, bringing together North and South London into one 'united' city.

Because 'the City' is the foundation stone of London, anything which is away from it is thus degraded to some extent. Hense the area immediately south of the City, just across the river in London Bridge, Bankside and Borough, is referred to as "South London" despite being 15 minutes walk from the business heart of the UK. The development across the Bankside, South Bank, of the Thames is referred to exclusively as "the South Bank", despite no-one ever calling its opposite the "North Bank", where the Palace of Westminster sits.

It is also strange that, mainly due to the historical existence of Surrey and Kent, there is no reference to 'south central London' but only to 'South East' and 'South West', putting Brixton in South West London - even though it is pretty much central.

Switzerland

We walked by the shore of Lac Leman, between Lausanne-Ouchy metro station and the Olympic Museum on the Quay Belgie. Next to the shore was the Route de Lausanne, a fairly major main road and on the other side of the road is a hillside with greenery dotted with models of athletes and water features. At the top of the slope is the entrance to the Olympic Museum. Visitors walk through a representation of the records to high jump. The lobby area felt more reflective of the building's status as IOC's headquarters than it did of the museum.

The Science Museum in Château de Prangins . A beautiful setting in the Mon Repos Park, an area known colloquially as The Pearl of the Lake. And from the balcony, looking out across the lake towards the Alps, it is easy to understand why. The museum itself was a mixture of antiquity instruments of science and a second floor dominated by the displaced exhibitions of the Horology museum displaced by a fire. The exhibition "From Time To Time" is the source of the sound recording.

The third sound clip is an insight into the dramatically hilly "old town" of the Vaudois capital Lausanne. Even the Metro stations were sloping and the trains were almost funicular.

Back in the Republique de Geneve, two soundshots of the city and one of the southwestern Commune, Carouge.

Micro Clear Spot on Resonance FM, Musique de l'Escalade

The musical soundtrack to the Course de l'Escalade, provided by the Guggenmusik band Sevenart from Grand-Sacconex in Geneva and a percussion group known as Tambour de Vetroux. The recordings were made during the Marmite Race, full details of which are below.

This programme was produced by me, with the research assistance of Mme. Ariane Beldi. It was broadcast between 6pm and 6.30pm on Resonance 104.4fm in London, and around the world on http://www.resonancefm.com

The Marmite Race (pronounced "Mar-meet") is the climax of a weekend where the Calvinist city of Geneva relaxes in celebration of a civic effort to repell invasion by the troops of Savoy in 1602, who wanted to claim the city as their capital north of the Alps.

In the dark, thousands of Genevoise line up in the Park de la Bastions and make several circuits of the city streets in fancy dress.

More details on the festival and its serious counterpart are available on -

http://www.escalade.ch and http://www.compagniede1602.ch/

This programme was produced by Timothy Abbott, with the research assistance of Mme. Ariane Beldi.

The elite races take place during the day but the night-time is taken up by the Race of the Cooking Pot, where the people of the city/canton/Republic come out and celebrate being Genevoise by dressing stupidly and running through the streets.

The sounds of the Marmite Race were broadcast in the Clear Spot broadcast on 14th January 2009. Resonance 104.4fm, across Central London on FM and online at www.resonancefm.com. Their assistance in providing an a home to these broadcasts is appreciated.

And in the near future a chance to hear the words of Jasmina Tesanovic's Diary of a Political Idiot.