Weir
July 5, 2020
Most of these tracks are based on a single sound that has been chopped, looped, distorted and layered in various ways. While it was not a conscious motivation at the time, I later realised the preoccupation driving these productions was the idea of changing in place, or frenzied stasis—a kind of stationary motion that has always gripped me in music.
In Cormac McCarthy’s anti-spiritual journey novel Suttree, the return to the river acts as a stable anchor in the otherwise chaotic unfolding of Suttree’s life, holding in loose equilibrium a bundle of scattered narrative fragments. The river is what binds Suttree’s life into a unity, somehow without curating or defining it.
The constancy of the canal in the frenetic temporal and social dislocation of modern London touches something similar, and I like to think of this music as intimately bound up with that. The essence of the canal lies in its crustiness, a crossing point between the human sphere and its outside, where the decay of the artificial is revitalised in its reclamation by organic life.
Photos by Kallie Ennever.