Zuihitsu - 随筆 by The Erratic

Every aspect of life is severely diminished when you have Long Covid, including the ability to be creative. Since October 2022, when I first contracted Covid19, my life has more or less ground to a halt. I cannot work. I have not strayed more than a few miles from my home in over two and a half years. I can barely walk for more than ten minutes without having to lie down for two hours. I cannot focus on any cognitive task for more than half an hour at a time. I cannot spend more than an hour or so in the company of another before again I am overwhelmed with exhaustion. In order to be able to do any of these things I must ensure I rest adequately both before and after. Resting adequately in this instance means lying down with little or no stimulation beyond perhaps listening to some quiet, gentle, minimal music, alone.

Making an album under such circumstances is a challenge. This is one of the reasons I compiled the Archive Series last year - partly to celebrate ten years of releasing music as The Erratic, but also because I was struggling to produce any new music. I knew I wanted to make new music, to satisfy the need to be creative in however small a way I could, and so, sporadically, over the last two years or so, when I could spare some of my limited energy, I would experiment with simple ideas. Many of these have been abandoned, as I did not have the focus to finish them to my satisfaction, but several of them were completed in a series of short bursts. As they were being created I always hoped they could become part of an album and I held that goal in my mind as I was making them, but, as a result of the sporadic and disjointed nature of their creation, I thought they lacked the coherence such a project required. It came as a pleasant surprise then, when I realised that I had enough successful pieces to arrange as an album, and that, even though they display a wide variety of techniques and styles, reflecting the many things I had been reading and thinking about music and art (again in short bursts), they hang together remarkably well (in my humble opinion).

Every project is shaped by circumstance, but perhaps this album more than most. The physical and cognitive limitations of my illness have resulted in me relying more on samples and sounds found online than previously, as it is less tiring to dick about on a laptop than it is to set up and record instruments. By the time I have mic’d up and tuned the instrument, set up the audio interface and found the recording level, I am ready for another lie down. The exceptions to this are Follow The Brush 1 and Follow The Brush 2, which were the first recordings of some new electronic kit I had treated myself to. In order to create these tracks I had to set everything up on my kitchen table and leave it there, cooking and eating around it for about a week or so, recording improvisations when I had the energy, and then chopping up the results and mixing it at a later date. I envisage a future, in a post-Long Covid version of The Erratic, where I will use these synth modules more and, hopefully, in more sophisticated ways, the aim being that they will make up a substantial part of a live version of The Erratic.

A couple of the pieces on this album are contributions to online collaborative projects, which in one instance uses old field recordings of my own (As a Process of Line Making), or in another, a new field recording donated by another sound artist (Untitled (No.5, Bruge Bells)). These were attempts to feel I was still connected to a community, even though I cannot physically be a part of one. And I thank Stuart and Daniel for enabling these collaborations.

The album is named after a Japanese literary form dating back at least 1,000 years. Zuihitsu translates approximately as ‘follow the brush’ and is made up of numerous short vignettes, which at first glance seem unrelated, and yet common themes and ideas emerge through accumulation. It is a form I have used previously in writing and I thought it summed up quite succinctly my (enforced) approach to this album. Perhaps the most well-known example of Zuihitsu is The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, written by a lady in the court of Empress Consort Teishi at the turn of the 10th and 11th Centuries in Heian-period Japan. A European modernist example would be The Book of Disquiet by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Both these books are favourites of mine. A similar concept from the world of visual art (again, European modernist) might be Paul Klee’s idea of ‘taking a line for a walk.’

Genre-less Experimental Music.

The answer to the question: what happens when a visual artist steeped in 20th Century avant-garde aleatory & indeterminate techniques dicks about with sound?

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