The Engineer by Mortality Tables

In 2012, writer and Mortality Tables founder Mat Smith (Electronic Sound, Clash, Further.) wrote a short story, ‘The Engineer’. A work of fiction, the story was loosely based on his father, Jim Smith, a skilled mechanical engineer who had spent most of his adult life working in a factory in Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘The Engineer’ represented Mat’s thoughts, feelings and fears about his father’s retirement.

The story was later narrated by author, producer, playwright and poet Barney Ashton-Bullock. 29 artists, working in the fields of sound art, electronic, experimental and contemporary jazz music, were then approached to provide a sound response to a thirty-second extract of Barney’s narration. The order in which they agreed to be involved determined which section of narration they would be asked to respond to.

The collated 29 responses were curated and recorded over the next two-and-a-half years and assembled into a single, 14-minute collage by James Edward Armstrong. Its sprawling, disjointed presentation of short, rapidly-replaced ideas is intended to evoke the devastating confusion of Alzheimer’s, which Mat's father was diagnosed with in 2018.

The sleeve image depicts a teenage Jim Smith on Margate’s Promenade in the 1950s.

The copyright in this project is retained by the contributing artists.

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Est. Bloomsbury, 2019

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